One of those sentenced—Maria Skypyan-Basylevych, a party bureaucrat who spent ten years in the Gulag—declared, thirty years later, that “absolutely innocent people had suffered, honest and principled communists.”15 But in 1933 the Orikhiv arrests sent out a strong message: party members themselves were not immune from prosecution. Anybody, however apparently loyal, however good a communist, could now become a scapegoat if he or she dared to disagree with the authorities.
