ABSTRACT
The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook is both a scholarly undertaking and a personal quest. While we hope to fill an important lacuna in the literature on Soviet mass killings in Ukraine, we have in part been motivated to do so by the fact that both of us had relatives who were murdered in what we call the Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941. Although their tragic deaths may not endow us with perspicacity, they do endow an otherwise academic project with a clear moral dimension. The point of remembering Soviet atrocities, like the point of remembering all atrocities committed by criminal regimes, is not to dwell on the past, but to honor the dead and to hope that a better understanding of the mechanisms of mass murder will reduce the likelihood of its future occurrence. The horrible deaths experienced by our relatives, Father Ivan Kiebuz and Bohdan Hevko, are a reminder that all totalitarian regimes regard human life as expendable material in their fanatical pursuit of ideologically defined revolutionary goals.
