It would seem that the established literary cliché about the danger of unlearned lessons of history echoes sharply today during another war of the Ukrainian people for their own freedom and the right to live in an independent Ukrainian state.
106 years ago, Ukrainians of various ethnic and social origins and religious confessions directly encountered the undisguised manifestation of Evil – the Russian Bolshevik forces, which sought to destroy the very idea of Ukrainian statehood together with its bearers. Then, as now, those for whom Freedom and Independence were not just words, but first of all – an inner need, a desire that prompts action, came to the defense of their Motherland.
On January 29–30, 1918, near the Kruty station in the Chernihiv region (now Nizhynsky district of the Chernihiv region), units of the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, namely, soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian cadet school named after Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, Student's Kuren, detachments of the Free Cossacks, as well as railway guards engaged in battle with units of Russian Bolsheviks. Despite a significant numerical advantage, the enemy unsuccessfully stormed a small railway station on the way to the Ukrainian capital for ten hours. Only in the evening of January 30, after the departure of the Ukrainian soldiers, the Bolsheviks managed to capture Kruty. As now, the Russian army disregarded the customs of war and, after torture, executed captured Ukrainian soldiers.
Thanks to the courage of the Kruty defenders, it was possible to slow down the advance of Russian troops and allow units of the UNR army to suppress the pro-Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv itself.
One hundred years later, the Defense Forces of Ukraine again defended the country against the heirs of Bolshevik totalitarianism and stopped the barbarian invasion that sought to capture the Ukrainian capital. During February 28 – March 1, 2022, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, territorial defense caused losses to Russian troops and forced the aggressor to pay a high price for the desire to destroy Freedom.
Among those young men who defended our independence near Kruty in January 1918, only one person saw the restoration of the independent Ukrainian state. Matvii Danylyuk (1892–1994), in 1918 a cadet of the 1st Ukrainian cadet school named after Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, was a witness to almost all the stormy events that befell our country in the 20th century. His three sons fought against Nazism during World War II, and his great-grandson, Volodymyr Ishchuk, volunteered in 2014 to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine during the Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine. On August 26 of the same year, he died during the battles for the city of Ilovais'k.
The feat of the Kruty defenders is a symbolic reminder of what the current war for Ukrainian Independence is and at the same time a warning against forgetting the painful lessons of history.
Yehor Vradii