President Viktor Yushchenko used this year’s annual May memorial services honouring the country’s victims of political repression to announce that he is putting the final touches to a decree which will call for the belated elimination of all totalitarian and communist symbols throughout Ukraine. Similar laws have been enacted in the Baltic states in recent years but since achieving independence in 1991 successive Ukrainian governments have sidestepped the potentially divisive issue of Soviet symbols but a confrontation over the issue is now looming which threatens to highlight the diametrically opposed attitudes towards the Soviet past which continue to divide Ukraine.
Final rejection of totalitarianism
Speaking at the site of a mass grave in Bykovnya forest outside Kyiv where the remains of over 100,000 Ukrainian victims of 1930s Stalinist repressions are interred, Mr. Yushchenko stated: “The time has come to name and publicly condemn the culprits of these repressions. There are still thousands of monuments to the organisers of political repression and other symbols of totalitarianism across the country. We need to dress Ukraine in a clean shirt and remove the symbols of the former totalitarian regime.”
Since taking office in early 2005 President Yushchenko has made a fresh and frank appraisal of the Soviet regime’s crimes against humanity one of the ideological cornerstones of his presidency. In the past three years he has demanded official recognition for pensioners who fought in the long discredited Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the 1940s and is currently pushing parliament to pass a law which would criminalise denial of the 1930s Holodomor terror famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. However, Ukraine’s large ethnic Russian population and the country’s lack of history as an independent, self-governing nation have hampered efforts to re-examine the Soviet era from a national perspective and undermined attempts to portray Ukraine as the victim of outside oppression. The President has repeatedly run into outspoken opposition among large swathes of the Ukrainian population, many of whom vehemently refuse to regard the Soviet era as a time of foreign occupation and continue to look to Moscow for their political and ideological inspiration.
A Herculean task ahead
Unlike former totalitarian societies such as post-war Germany which underwent rigorous processes to cancel out the impact of political indoctrination, independent Ukraine has never embarked on a concerted period of de-Sovietisation. There has been nothing on a par with the Nuremberg trials which exposed the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity, nor has there been any concerted effort to remove former communist party officials from positions of power. Many of Ukraine’s Soviet-era administrators and bureaucrats actually remained in office following the collapse of the USSR, reinventing themselves as nationally conscious democrats and moving to smother any calls for a wide-reaching breach with the past. This continuity of personnel helped foster an ambiguous relationship between independent Ukraine and the Soviet era, with efforts to remove Soviet symbols from public life generally localised and fraught with controversy. While Lenin statues and monuments to KGB generals were torn down across western Ukraine, they remain in place throughout eastern and southern Ukraine. Street names have followed a similar pattern, with west Ukrainian roads renamed in honour of nationalist heroes (and even, on one occasion, a Chechen rebel leader) while Soviet-era names remain intact throughout the more thoroughly russified east and south of the country. Residents of the capital city Kyiv have traditionally maintained an uneasy balance between the nation’s rival revisionist and Soviet loyalist camps, changing street names on official documentation but continuing to refer to Soviet-era addresses in conversation.
This haphazard attitude to the seemingly clear-cut issue of ties to the totalitarian past has meant that countless examples of Soviet symbolism remain in place throughout the country. Whereas the swastika has long since been illegal in Germany and Austria, the Soviet hammer and sickle emblem continues to adorn everything from railway wagons and stadium railings to government buildings and socialist monuments. The sheer number of these Soviet-era emblems means that any attempt to remove them will necessarily be a Herculean task. According to conservative estimates there are currently some 20,000 monuments to Soviet leaders still standing in Ukraine, including 2,018 monuments to Lenin, while 4,277 streets and city squares continue to bear the name of the Bolshevik leader. Statues of Stalin were removed during the Soviet period but seventeen years after the collapse of the USR thousands of other monuments honouring Soviet leaders including Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and Bolshevik secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky continue to stand. In Kyiv alone, there are thought to be 18 monuments to Lenin still on public display, as well as a dozen other monuments dedicated to other Soviet leaders.
The all-pervading Soviet presence
The sheer scale of the challenge of removing all public traces of the Soviet state may in itself prove prohibitive. As a result Mr. Yushchenko’s latest declaration is likely to go down as yet another quixotic gesture in the battle for the hearts and minds of today’s Ukraine. “I don’t know what Yushchenko means when he speaks about symbols of the Communist regime. What does it mean? Does he want to destroy the Dnipro hydroelectric power station or Donetsk Mettalurgical Plant, to raze our coal mines to the ground?” commented Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko:
Other politicians backed the President’s call, arguing that it was inappropriate for an EU aspirant country to display the imagery of authoritarian empire. Serhiy Rudyk, a Kyiv City Council lawmaker and member of Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy’s bloc, has been a long-term advocate of removing Soviet symbols on a local level and praised Yushchenko’s efforts to initiate a national campaign. “Wherever you go in Ukraine you see reminders of the totalitarian past. You won’t see monument to Hitler or Goering in Germany, nor will you find streets named after Goebbels or the Third Reich. In Poland and the Baltic countries they removed monuments to Soviet leaders long ago and have lived quietly since then as part of a united Europe.“
Rudyuk argues that Soviet-era monuments should not be destroyed but moved to what he refers to as a Soviet Theme Park. “I am sure it will be a big hit with both the elderly and the young while also attracting tourists, but most of all it will be good for Ukraine.“ Other activists have also given some thought to the practical considerations of irradicating Soviet symbols from Ukrainian public life. Nationalist groups in the country’s Khmelnitskiy Oblast have even offered to sell Soviet-era monuments at auction, with the cash raised earmarked for local improvements such as roadworks or community support.
From euphoria to nostalgia
During the heady days of summer 1991 as the Soviet Union imploded many prominent Soviet monuments across Ukraine were removed. The process of dismantling the country’s central Lenin monument on Kyiv’s October Revolution Square (today’s Independence Square, known locally as Maidan) passed off without protest or violence. Witnesses described crowds of joyful, smiling people celebrating the end of Soviet rule. However, the turbulence of the 17 intervening years has helped foster a sense of nostalgia for the certainties of the shared Soviet existence which could help fuel opposition to any belated attempts to eradicate Soviet imagery from Ukrainian public life while highlighting the continuing divisions within Ukrainian society over attitudes towards the Soviet past. Ultimately, the fact that this issue remains the subject of presidential decrees almost two decades after independence speaks volumes for the country’s inability to deal effectively with the challenge of confronting its own past.
