Canada sets up court in eastern Ukraine to gather war crimes testimony

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

SELYDOVE, Ukraine - There is little visible evidence in this coal-mining town of 7,000 inhabitants about 30 kilometers from Donetsk that 55 years ago the Nazis killed hundreds of local Jews, as well as suspected Communists, as its war machine battered its way to its Armageddon at Stalingrad.

Little is left of those times: three crumbling white-washed walls of the post office behind which Nazis shot the condemned; the German headquarters across the street, which is boarded up.

The mine shaft on the other side of town, where still others were shot, has been leveled and covered. On its place stand the figure of a soldier and another one of a bereaved mother - a memorial to the horror and the courage of the times.

What does remain in vivid detail are the memories of the surviving elderly townspeople who witnessed the atrocities as children.

Maria Kryvonos, 67, was a 12-year-old rummaging through the attic of her mother's house with friends when they saw a flurry of activity at the entrance to the shaft of the coal mine about 100 yards away. "They brought kids and older people to the mine shaft and shot them one by one in the head. They fell into the hole," she recalled. After the executioners had left, she and her friends raced to the mine, where they discovered freshly turned earth, but no bodies.

Recollections like these are what drove the Canadian Ministry of Justice to set up court in Selydove from May 26 to June 2 to gather testimony about one of Selydove's own, who the Canadian government says lied about his wartime activities to obtain entry into Canada, where he eventually gained citizenship. It is investigating charges that Vasily Bogutin, an 88-year-old retired Canadian construction worker who is half Jewish, was a member of the Selydove auxiliary police set up by the Nazis after they occupied the town and actively participated in round-ups of Jews, beatings and the execution of at least one Jewish family.

However, Mr. Bogutin, who lives in Toronto, was not here to defend himself. His age, advanced emphysema and a heart condition do not allow him to travel.

But then the Canadian government was not here to determine Mr. Bogutin's guilt, only to find out if he in fact was a member of the auxiliary police, which would give them grounds to revoke his citizenship and begin deportation proceedings.

The proceedings in Selydove were open to the public and held in accordance with Canadian court procedure. Among the news media covering the story were the Associated Press, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., a local television outlet and this correspondent, who was present during the hearing held on June 2. The case received very little play in the local newspaper.

Mr. Bogutin's attorney, Orest Rudzik, said he believes the Canadian government must show more. "I surmise that for the government to kick out an 88-year-old man there must be a certain amount of public opprobrium. He must be shown to have participated. The question is how did he participate, if at all. There must be some degree of criminality, or quasi-criminality," explained Mr. Rudzik.

Mr. Bogutin's case is part of a renewed effort by the Canadian government, begun in 1985 with the appointment of the Deschenes Commission, to ferret out Nazis and those who collaborated with them, and who later slipped into Canada illegally. In four previous trials the government failed to prove its case that defendants committed war crimes. This time it is using a different tactic: administrative hearings to determine whether alleged Nazis collaborators lied on their entry applications as to their wartime dealings. One advantage this gives the authorities is that the standard of proof is reduced, as in the United States.

Mr. Bogutin admits that on his application to enter Canada in 1951 he wrote he was from Romania, where he did in fact end up as the Nazis retreated after the war. He has told the court that he feared if he had stated he was from the Soviet Union he would have been returned there. The Soviets had an agreement with the other Allied countries for the repatriation of its citizens displaced by the war, which often occurred against the will of the individual.

But it is not clear whether Mr. Bogutin ran with the Germans because of his actions in Selydove, whether they forcefully took him, or whether he was fleeing the return of the Soviets.

If the government can prove that Mr. Bogutin covered up his wartime collaboration with the Nazis as an active member of the auxiliary police, it will then strip him of his citizenship and begin deportation proceedings.

Mr. Bogutin's lawyer is not denying that his client worked for the police, but he says he was only a passive member who carried out orders of the higher ups. He explained that three tiers existed in the Nazi police structures: the local auxiliary police, which carried out orders from above and mostly were responsible for civil order; the gendarmerie, which was made up of Germans who investigated major crimes; and the komandatura, which was feared most and had wide authority, including the right to shoot on sight.

According to Mr. Rudzik, Mr. Bogutin says that he worked in an auxiliary police unit in a warehouse carrying out menial tasks.

Crown attorney Christopher Amerisinghe believes otherwise. He claims Mr. Bogutin was a member of an investigative unit of the auxiliary police that retained the right to give orders. "We needed to show that Mr. Bogutin was in a position of authority, because he claims that he was merely a warehouse worker," he explained.

One government witness, himself a former member of the police unit, testified that Mr. Bogutin was one of four higher-ranking investigators who had some authority to issue orders.

Other witnesses said that, although Mr. Bogutin was a police officer, they did not recall him persecuting anybody.

Defense Attorney Rudzik explained that the final witness, who is from Oleksandria, Kirovohrad Oblast, and was to testify after the proceedings in Selydove were completed, had implicated Mr. Bogutin as part of the police detachment that brought a Jewish family by the name of Kobalevsky to a ditch and then shot them. Mr. Rudzik questioned the man's credibility. "He was in trouble with the law several times, once for allegedly shooting a police officer." Mr. Bogutin is alleged to have beaten that man after he was locked up following the incident, said Mr. Rudzik.

Mr. Bogutin's 66-year-old daughter, Liuba Antonova, who along with his granddaughter, Natalia Shabanova, 44, testified on his behalf, said he became a policeman to avoid persecution. Mrs. Antonova explained that Mr. Bogutin's mother got her son a job in the police unit through her acquaintance with the chief of police. His mother wanted to protect him from the Nazis because she feared they would discover that he was half Jewish and kill him. Mr. Bogutin's father, Abraham Bogutinsky, was a Jew who moved to the Donetsk area from Smolensk, Russia, not long before the Revolution. He was looking for work at a time when the coal mining industry was booming here.

The Bogutin affair, one of 12 new cases being developed by Canada's Ministry of Justice, began with the investigation of Johann Dueck, a Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) who lived in Selydove during the war. In 1993 an investigative team traveled to Selydove to put together the case against Mr. Dueck. They analyzed KGB files from the immediate post-war years, when the Soviet secret service carried out its own investigations, and took depositions from locals. The name of Vasily Bogutin kept popping up, said his lawyer, Mr. Rudzik. "It seems to be clear that he came to the attention of Canadian officials through Dueck."

Originally Mr. Bogutin's name had been mentioned in 1980 in an article in the Soviet-backed Ukrainian diaspora newspaper, Visti z Ukrainy. The paper listed people it said had worked for the Nazis and were now living "comfortably in Canada," Mr. Rudzik explained.

In 1996 Canadian officials returned to Selydove specifically to take videotaped depositions from the townspeople on Mr. Bogutin's actions during the German occupation. When that evidence was ruled inadmissible by Canada's courts because there was no ability to cross-examine witnesses, the court decided to move part and parcel to Selydove for that portion of the hearing.

During the hearing, held in the Selydove mayor's office, where an old Communist slogan coined by Lenin still hangs on the wall, the prosecution called seven witnesses. Mr. Rudzik, the defense attorney, called two: Mrs. Antonova and Mrs. Shabanova.

Mr. Rudzik's defense was badly damaged when the court would not allow Mrs. Shabanova to testify. The presiding judge, Justice William McKeown, ruled that the testimony was not admissible because it was based on hearsay and conjecture.

Mrs. Shabanova had explained outside the mayor's building before she was to testify that she had carried out her own investigation into her grandfather's complicity in the events after investigators from Canada began snooping around in 1993. People told her that her grandfather had in fact saved a man from persecution and possible execution by allowing him to escape from police headquarters at a moment when the Germans had left the man unattended.

Mrs. Shabanova, whose first husband was a Red Army officer stationed with an advanced rocket division in East Germany in the 1970s, also said she believes that if her grandfather had been implicated as a Nazi collaborator during extensive KGB investigations after the war, she would never have been allowed to marry the military officer or live in East Germany. "My father may have cooperated with the Germans, but he did not do anything violent," she said.

The degree of Mr. Bogutin's cooperation and the underlying motivation will most likely decide whether Mr. Bogutin will lose his Canadian citizenship and ultimately be deported, probably to Ukraine. But survivors' memories are weak and are blurred by a five-decade-long time lapse, and that worries Mr. Rudzik. "I am concerned that the people here are recollecting what occurred, as opposed to what he did," said the defense lawyer.

The elderly Mrs. Kryvonos, who witnessed the slaughter at the coal shaft from a distance of about 100 yards, affirms that local auxiliary police did the shooting. "No it was not the Germans, it was our own," she assuredly told two reporters who knocked on her door. She said she had also witnessed a local policeman take a baby from her mother, toss the child into the air and shoot it.

However, her neighbor Pavlo Prokhorovich, 74, said that identifying who gave the orders to execute was not that cut and dried. "The Germans were a different type, they were ruthless and arrogant. They did not give the locals much authority," he said.

He said that he, too, had witnessed the shooting of a baby and then her mother, but that he could not say for certain who did the shooting. He explained that people were rarely allowed to get closer than 100 to 200 meters to an execution.

Although there are differing versions of what happened during those nightmarish years and why, few would disagree that fear was an undercurrent that influenced their everyday decisions. A teacher, now retired, who lives several houses from where the executioner's wall at the rear of the post office still stands, explained the terror that ruled them: "We lived in fear of our lives. We were afraid to leave the house. We did not want to see anything."

Mr. Bogutin's hearing will resume in September in Canada with a decision expected by the end of the year.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 15, 1997, No. 24, Vol. LXV

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