To kill a songbird- the Soviet Genocide of Ukrainian literature

This article was adapted from material previously published on Euromaidan Press and in Modern Poetry in Translation

In the 1960s, the poet Vasyl Symonenko was walking in Bykivnia forest near Kyiv when he saw some boys playing football with a human skull. The graves of a vast number of Ukrainians, who had been murdered by the Soviets, were concealed among…