Communist Party supporters carry a portrait honoring Josef Stalin during Victory Day celebrations in Kyiv on May, 9, 2009. If the Communist Party wing in Zaporizhya gets its way, a monument will be erected to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin before Victory Day on May 9. Just as alarming, some government officials have no plans to stop them. Even stranger, some human rights activists agree. “It’s not the state’s business to interfere,” wrote a colleague from the Kharkiv Group for Human Rights. “What can the government do if it does not go against the law?”

But is erecting a statue in honor of Stalin on private land really private business?

Imagine if someone in Germany or Poland decided they want to erect a monument to Adolf Hitler on private land? In this case, the Stalin fans are representatives of the ruling parliamentary coalition, to which the Communist Party belongs.

If neo-Nazis in Germany or Poland suggested a similar initiative, what would the reaction be in Ukraine or Russia? What about other European states? Fortunately, it’s impossible, since laws in these nations clearly ban any manifestations of Nazi ideology. The punishment for this sort of initiative could be prison, not just a fine.

In Poland, which suffered from both Nazism and Communism, both types of symbols are banned, as well as those of Communist or fascist groups. Unfortunately in Ukraine, which suffered no less – or possibly even more – there is no such clear legislation.

Earlier this year, the Appeals Court of Kyiv tried a case investigated by the State Security Service (SBU) and ruled that Stalin and other Soviet leaders are guilty of genocide against the Ukrainian people, though organizing the Holodomor, or man-made hunger, of 1932-1933. In these circumstances, glorifying the tyrant is truly against the law, as was clearly stated by Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych.

Morally, such a statue is indefensible. The proponents of allowing people to glorify whoever they want include Deputy Prime Minister on Humanitarian Issues Volodymyr Semynozhenko. They think that people in eastern Ukraine should be allowed to honor Stalin just as people in western Ukraine honor Stepan Bandera.

This is absurd. Bandera fought two wars at once, trying in impossible circumstances to stand up for Ukraine’s independence against two totalitarian monsters, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

His Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, was doomed to suffer not only the defeat of its cause, but the destruction of the memory of the army itself, thanks to Soviet propaganda. For the greater part of the six decades after World War II, the subject could not even be discussed. This lack of openness is why everything surrounding Bandera and UPA cause such heated arguments and misunderstandings.

Stalin’s historical role is nothing like Bandera’s. Like Hitler, he’s one of the greatest tyrants of human history. No further proof is required. Ever since Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, countless historical documents offer irrefutable proof of the dictator’s murderous brutality.

Stalin’s admirers like to trumpet the fact that, under his leadership, we won the war and destroyed Hitler. But we also know that it was because of Stalin that the Soviet people suffered a far greater number of deaths than the defeated enemy. It’s one-sided to just celebrate the Victory Day with Stalin’s name on victorious flags.

As far as Ukraine goes, just about every family has some memory of the Holodomor and the war that took the lives of so many Ukrainians. To erect a monument to Stalin in Ukraine is to rape its history.

One of the major mistakes of ex-President Viktor Yushchenko’s administration was not to ban the Communist Party, as has been done in other Eastern European states. It is the current generation that often ends up paying for historical mistakes. What we have now is a large party of oligarchs teaming with the Communists, who have no intention to denounce their historical past, and are actually proud of it.

Attitude to history is a good indicator of the capabilities and aspirations of the ruling elite. It rings especially true in Ukraine, which has none of the usual ideological reference points that allow the voters to make a distinction between the left, the right and the centrists.

We have to judge our politicians by their attitude to language, history and European values. If the rhetoric of the current government is of any significance, the near future holds nothing that would move us closer to a true Ukrainian state.


Inna Sukhorukova is deputy chief editor of Human Rights Bulletin, a publication of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, www.khpg.org. She can be reached at bulletin@khpg.org.