Deputies to Immortalize Memory of Ministers and Believers Killed Under Communists

KYIV - Deputy Lev Biriuk of the Yulia Tymoshenko's Motherland Faction, on July 14 registered in the Supreme Council a draft resolution On Immortalizing the Memory of Ministers and Believers Innocently Killed under the Communist Regime in Ukraine. In the explanatory note, the deputy reminds that from the early 1930s about 40 out of 100 thousand representatives of the clergy of the Russian Empire were left alive.

"In autumn, 1937 alone, NKVD officers arrested 646 church people in the Poltava region. After WWII, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which was banned in 1946, became a victim of the Lenin-Stalin party," reads the document.

To honor the victims' memory on the state level, Biriuk proposes to set up a committee on organizing the construction of a monument to the victims. In addition, the document recommends the State Committee of TV and Radio ensures broad coverage in mass media of the events connected with the destruction of ministers and believers under the communists.

According to kommersant.ua, representatives of the Communist Party voiced a negative response to the initiative. Deputy Leonid Hrach said that "the erection of such a monument will provoke conflict in the society."