Disappointment keeps Soviet nostalgia alive

Recently the city council in Donetsk, a mining city in eastern Ukraine, flatly refused to get rid of a multitude of totalitarian symbols and signs in the streets. The removal was decreed by President Victor Yushchenko, who meant to get rid of the statues of Lenin and other communist activists, as well as communist street names.

This move would be logical because it was Lenin and his party who started concentration camps and murders of political opponents, which later multiplied immensely in scale during successor Josef Stalin’s reign. Preserving monuments to the authors of the insatiable communist regime would be similar to keeping Hitler monuments in Germany.

Generally, Donetsk Mayor Oleksandr Lukianchenko spoke against street renaming for purely financial reasons. Apart from changing street signs, it requires changes in many official forms, as well as new registration stamps for their residents. The cost may go way over a few million hryvnias since the streets of Donetsk are full of communism.

There is a “50 Years of U.S.S.R.” street and a “60 Years of U.S.S.R.” street. Each Communist Party congress became a toponym and so did various communist leaders. There are some comical examples: there is a Lenin street and an Illich street named after the same person. Lenin was the Soviet leader's pseudonym, and Illich – his patronymic.

But other people in Donetsk have spiritual motives rather than financial. The inspiration for the movement to stop the removal of totalitarian symbols was a curious secretary of the city council, Mykola Levchenko, who drives a car with a personalized number plate that says “CCCP,” the U.S.S.R. acronym in Russian. He misses the U.S.S.R. greatly. He said: “Our city has historical names that some people link with totalitarianism. I link it to the fact that we were all born in that country.”

Not only does the Donetsk city council refuse to ruin Soviet symbols, it creates new ones: one of the new streets in the city was called “Novaya Sovetskaya,” or New Soviet street.

It’s a paradox, but Ukrainians, of whom 91 percent voted at a referendum in December 1991 to exit the U.S.S.R., now have strong nostalgic sentiments toward it. They are not dominating, but are very serious, even though 17 years ago people had an ironic attitude towards the communist empire.

Here are some examples. In the old Soviet times there was a lot of propagandist emphasis on Lenin’s participation in the worker’s "subotniks," or unpaid voluntary work on weekends. On Saturdays, the citizens came out to clean communal spaces for free or do similar things. History textbooks contained a story of Lenin carrying logs with common workers. In other words, there was a whole cult built around the leader of the proletariat called Lenin. In the last years of the U.S.S.R.'s existence, the citizens laughed at it. They said ironically that the longer Lenin participated in the tradition of subotniks, the greater became the number of people wanting to carry logs with him, or be close to power. They also joked that the log was inflatable rather than real.

Not all of them continue to laugh. Recently, I got talking to a lady about 40 years old. She lived a part of her life in the Soviet Union and knows too well what it was like.

One thing after another, we got to talking about the past. That’s when she surprised me. She reminisced that, in communist times, shops were full of pretty much everything we have now. She talked about how citizens could travel abroad as much as they wished, how fair the Soviet system of justice was, only punishing people if they deserved it.

These are obvious falsehoods. Soviet shops had one or two types of milk, bread and sausages, and only in the morning. If you came in the afternoon, all you could find was maybe jars of mayonnaise. There were queues for anything of quality, be it food or consumer goods. Simple mortal folks could not travel to the so-called capitalist countries. You had to be an athlete or a statesman to receive that privilege. Other citizens could only go touring the countries under Soviet control. But your wish was not enough to get you there. Potential tourists had to get recommendations from their workers’ collective, as well as a positive assessment from the party or Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party organization. And prisons awaited not just criminals, but government critics, too.

The Soviet people lived badly. So, why does my friend and so many others like her twist the obvious facts?

When Ukrainians said farewell to communism in their country, they hoped to create a state that lived up to Western standards. But the dream has not come true. Although we have some fundamental basics of a democratic society – like freedom of speech – we have not yet learned to make good use of the opportunities that democracy has given us.

So far, we have built the kind of capitalism that was depicted by Soviet propaganda when it spoke of the West.

Yes, our shops are full, you can travel freely as long as other countries let you in, and you can criticize anyone, anytime. But the difference between the incomes of the rich and the poor are thousands-fold.Some people’s incomes are so low they can only buy a minimum of food. There is no justice in courts. So, psychologically, people need to feel that there is an alternative. They turn to their past, painting it rosy colors in their memory. In practice, it manifests itself in an aggressive defense of Soviet symbols.

However, not everyone defends them so. Sometimes, the media report that someone, somewhere has urinated on a monument of Lenin.

Yuriy Lukanov is a freelance journalist and writer in Kyiv.