Aggressors may carry out the targeted physical extermination of people solely on the basis of their national, cultural, or political affiliation. Mass repressions, extrajudicial executions of the intelligentsia, and systematic terror pursue a dual goal: to immediately suppress active resistance and to preemptively eliminate the social base capable of preserving and transmitting the national code into the future.
Units of the Volunteer Army (the "Whites") captured the town of Fastiv in Kyiv province on 25 August 1919 (7 September by the modern calendar) - and on the same day began robbing the inhabitants of the town's Jewish quarters. Pakhomov, the Whites' temporary commandant, having received 25,000 roubles from a Jewish delegation, promised to take measures but refused to stop the violence at once, explaining why: "since the troops are greatly embittered against the Jews." The Whites' garrison was commanded by Belogortsev. The Whites killed on a schedule: "Towards evening all the Cossacks, regulars and partisans separately, were usually assembled for roll-call. After roll-call and prayer they scattered in groups across the town 'to work.'" Those fleeing were caught on the railway: "Many were taken off trains along the way and led into the forest to be shot"[1].
When a Russian delegation came to the commandant asking him to stop the pogrom, because the Russian population had begun to suffer from it too, he asked: "And who is doing the robbing?" - and, on hearing that the Russian population was also taking part, replied: "And later they will say it was the Cossacks who robbed"[1]. On 23 September 1919 Kundo, the Whites' commandant in Fastiv, issued order No. 2 declaring everything settled: "I add that measures for the protection of order in the townlet were taken long ago, all apprehensions are entirely groundless. Of all cases of robbery, violence and requisitions I request immediate notification to the commandant's office"[2].
Rabinovich, a commissioner of the Russian Red Cross, described the result of the three days thus: "The pogrom, like a tornado, destroyed, burned and scattered the greater half of the town... From the smouldering ruins of the fires bodies of those burned in the houses were still being recovered"[3]. By 30 September 1919, 600 killed, 100 burned and 315 wounded had been counted in Fastiv - out of eight thousand Jewish inhabitants of the town, and the figure was incomplete: "there are far more killed, since to this day bodies are being found in the woods"[1].
The targeted physical annihilation of the national cultural elite. The official turn was sealed by the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the Council of People's Commissars "On Grain Procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region" of 14 December 1932, signed by Stalin and Molotov: Ukrainization was declared to have been carried out "mechanically," which, in the resolution's own words, "made it easier for bourgeois-nationalist elements, Petliurites and the like to create their legal covers, their counter-revolutionary cells and organizations"[4]. The term "Executed Renaissance" denotes precisely "the repressive policy of communist Moscow aimed at the physical destruction of the Ukrainian intellectual elite of the 1920s–30s (more broadly – of the entire nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia) and the tabooing of its creative achievements"[5].
The conduct of secret mass "national operations" of the NKVD for the physical annihilation of members of ethnic minorities[6]. The mechanism was set by the operational orders of people's commissar Yezhov: No. 00485 of 11 August 1937 opened the Polish operation - "to begin, from 20 August 1937, a broad operation aimed at the complete liquidation of the local organizations of the 'POW'" with completion "within a three-month term"[7], - and No. 00439 of 25 July 1937 the German one[8]; the Greek, Bulgarian and other operations followed their template[6]. The scale is recorded in the perpetrator's own accounting: according to the summary figures of the 1st Special Department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR dated 30 August 1938, 94,659 people were arrested in the republic under orders Nos. 00485, 00593 and others (54,011 on the Polish line, 23,036 on the German, 5,642 on the Greek), of whom 61,683 had been convicted by 1 July 1938; in all, of the 197,945 people convicted by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR over the reporting period, 122,274 were sentenced to be shot - nearly two out of every three[9]. Across all the "national lines" of the USSR, 335,513 people were convicted, and 73.66% of them were shot[10].