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.

The Soviet regime has been especially inhumane toward Ukraine and Ukrainians – a fact that concerns us as human beings, as scholars, and as persons of Ukrainian descent. According to a study published by the Moscow-based Institute of Demography, Ukraine suffered close to 15 million ‘excess deaths’ between 1914 and 1948. Of that number, about 7.5 million were attributable to Soviet policies and 6.5 million to Nazi policies. According to Nicolas Werth, meanwhile, the Stalinist regime killed some 12 million of its people. When we consider that over half of them were Ukrainian (far in excess of Ukrainians’ share of the total Soviet population), it is hard not to register outrage at this monstrous system's hostility to its people in general and Ukrainians in particular.

The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre's victims were about 70 percent Ukrainian, 20 percent Polish, and 10 percent others (including Jews). It would be disingenuous, and dishonest, to claim that the Massacre was not a tragedy for Ukrainians above all or that it was a tragedy of equal importance for Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews.