“Waiting for the Germans to Come”: Persecution of Kyivans by Soviet Special Services in the First Months of the Nazi Invasion (22 June — 18 September 1941)

Abstract

The article analyses the functioning of the Stalinist punitive and repressive system during the period of extreme violence, formally caused by the war, and repression against the residents of the capital of the Ukrainian SSR. The research objectives are to reveal the organisational and procedural peculiarities of repression in areas where a special legal regime, martial law, was declared; to analyse punitive practices, identifying each link in the chain of extrajudicial killings; and to elucidate the unprecedented persecution and extermination of people based solely on the directives and orders of heads of the Soviet special services. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the application of a comprehensive approach to studying political terror, combining an analysis of legal acts with empirical data on the repressed. This makes it possible to go beyond the general concept of political terror and to reconstruct a detailed picture of its manifestations in a totalitarian regime, demonstrating a departure from generally accepted legal norms. It is proved that the Soviet state, built on violence and disregard for human rights, actively used special courts as well as an extrajudicial body — the Special Board of the NKVD — in the massacre of Kyiv residents who were identified as ‘unstable’ and ‘socially dangerous’. The pinnacle of legal nihilism was the fact that even the aforementioned instruments of terror were ignored by the perpetrators of the repression. Some Kyiv residents — representatives of the creative and scientific intelligentsia — were deprived of their freedom and lives without even being convicted. The Soviet power, using martial law as a pretext, resorted to employing the laws and the web of sub-legal regulations formed in the pre-war years exclusively to serve the totalitarian regime and the evil it generated. Repressions were imposed on wide sections of townspeople accused of anti-Soviet and pro-German sentiments.