Another of those shot at Sandarmokh between 27 October and 4 November 1937 was Oleksiy SARVAN (1893-1937). The March 1937 Resolution from the White Sea Canal corrective-labour camps (see below) sends Sarvan for trial because of his “systematic anti-Soviet work” among his fellow prisoners.

The case was sent to the procurator’s office of the BelBalt (White Sea Canal) camp complex. Presumably, it was then forwarded to an extra-judicial tribunal or troika, set up to deliver rapid decisions in the absence of the accused or any defence.

Sarvan was one of 289 members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, shipped from Solovki, as part of the “missing” transport in late October 1937, to be shot on the mainland at a site finally discovered in early July 1997 (Sandarmokh).

***

From 1919 to 1926 Sarvan was a member of the US Communist Party.

In 1925 he emigrated to the USSR where he graduated from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Before his arrest in 1933 he taught history and was deputy director at the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine until 1939.

As contributors to the flourishing of Ukrainian culture in the 1920s, Sarvan and his fellow victims, mostly men in their 30s and 40s, are referred to as the “Executed Renaissance“.