Editorial illustration for The Kyiv Independent for the article about The Executed Renaissance which is refer to a generation of Ukrainian poets, writers, and artists in the 1920s and 1930s who were brutally repressed, imprisoned, and executed by the Soviet regime.
The Sandarmokh forest in Karelia, Russia, is the primary burial site for the "Executed Renaissance," where Soviet NKVD agents shot over 1,000 prisoners, including roughly 100+ prominent Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, and artists, between October 27 and November 4, 1937. This site, along with others like Sandarmokh, represents the brutal peak of Stalin’s Great Terror, aiming to eradicate Ukrainian cultural identity.