The article considers the history of the Kyiv Hydromelioration Institute in the period from the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union to the occupation of Kyiv. The source base of the study is, first of all, the documents of the State Archives of Rivne region and the Museum of History of the National University of Water and Environmental Engineering. The institute continued to operate at the end of June and in the first half of July 1941. Students undertook an internship in various parts of Ukraine, and some of them performed the tasks of the military department. At the same time there was a mobilization of employees and 2nd and 3rd year students to the Red Army, and the senior students who were not subject to mobilization, tried to get there in any way. As the enemy approached Kyiv, students took part in the construction of defensive fortifications, and later became soldiers of the battalion of the People's Militia under the leadership of the director of the institute Yevdokym Horetskyi. Most of them were surrounded and died or ended up in POW camps.

The repression by the Soviet punitive authorities, which was widespread in the 1930s, continued after the German attack on the USSR. Arrests were made on the basis of pre-prepared lists. Many of them were shot in the Bykivnia forest. Teachers and students of the hydromelioration institute arrested by the NKVD included a well-known scientist, a student of Yevhen Oppokov, Anatolii Ohiievskyi.

Archival documents refute claims of Soviet historians about the evacuation of the institute to Alma-Ata. After all, the vast majority of teachers and many students remained in Kyiv until the arrival of the Nazis. Material and technical resources of the institute were also saved. In order to survive and keep the institute under occupation, the teachers first worked on scientific topics approved by the representatives of Germany, and later resumed the education of students.

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