in the campaign “Suppression of UPA Resistance and Operation "Vistula" (1944–1951)”
The creation of an atmosphere of total fear through the bloody provocations of NKVD special groups operating in the guise of the UPA: People's Commissar Strokach "initiated the formation of special groups of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR from former partisans for the struggle against the UPA" and "personally interrogated the captured leaders of the OUN networks of Western Ukraine"[1]. The terror was also demonstrative: "one of the forms of struggle was the policy of intimidating OUN and UPA members and the local population: open trials and executions, putting the bodies of the dead on public display, and destroying insurgent graves"[2].