OPINION: If Other Nations Get to Choose Their Heroes, Why Not Ukraine?

Ukraine’s plan to build a National Pantheon has drawn sharp criticism abroad. Some argue that certain individuals and national liberation movements – figures like Col. Yevhen Konovalets, a founder and the first leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) – should never receive official recognition. Fair enough – legitimate debate isn’t precluded. But an obvious question follows: do those making these arguments apply the same standard to their own countries?

Rarely.

Collective memory is never neutral. Every nation constructs a historical narrative rooted in its own experience rather than any universal consensus. And outsiders seldom interrogate their own traditions; more often they object to someone else’s.

Britain celebrates Oliver Cromwell as a defender of parliamentary government, though in Ireland he is associated with massacres and dispossession. France celebrates Napoleon as a state-builder and architect of its modern institutions, despite wars that caused millions of deaths across Europe. Poland reveres Józef Piłsudski as the restorer of its independence, even though Ukrainians associate him with the brutal 1930 “Pacification” campaign in occupied western Ukraine.

Israel commemorates Menachem Begin as a pivotal figure in the creation of the Jewish state, even though the Irgun, the underground organization he led and which the British classified as a terrorist group, carried out the 1947 kidnapping and gruesome hanging of two British sergeants, one of Jewish heritage. Yet no one seriously demands that Britain erase Cromwell, France renounce Napoleon, Poland abandon Piłsudski or Israel banish Begin.

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Ukraine’s case follows the same logic. Kyiv plans to repatriate Col. Konovalets’ remains, which have rested in Rotterdam since 1938, where Pavel Sudoplatov assassinated him on Stalin’s orders. In July 2022, after occupying Melitopol, Russian forces raised a monument to the hitman. Later, Moscow named a battalion fighting against Ukraine after him. The irony is striking: Russia celebrates the assassin while objecting to the reburial of his victim. And it is Konovalets who is portrayed as being beyond the pale.

The same double standard appears elsewhere. In 1926, Symon Petliura, respected by many Ukrainians as a great leader, was murdered in Paris by Sholom Schwartzbard. The slayer’s remains were reinterred in Israel in 1967, in a cemetery established by Jewish Legion veterans, portrayed as a “Jewish hero.” More than a few Ukrainians would disagree, another reminder that one nation’s hero may be another nation’s villain.

Poland is not exempt from similar complexities. Warsaw proudly commemorates the Home Army (AK) as a symbol of Polish resistance against Nazi Germany and Soviet domination. Yet historians have documented violence by some AK units against Ukrainian civilians in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. The Polish Jewish historian Jan Grabowski has further examined the role of Poles who served in the German-controlled Blue Police and participated in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust – episodes that have generated scholarly debate but are less prominent in Poland’s dominant public memory. Nevertheless, the AK remains largely beyond reproach in Poland’s official historical narrative. Like every country’s historical tradition – including Ukraine’s – Poland’s contains chapters that remain deeply troubling.

Critics may respond that scale matters – that rehabilitating a mass murderer differs from commemorating a flawed statesman. That is a fair distinction. But it ultimately undermines rather than supports their argument. Consider Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin: tyrants whose actions caused the deaths of tens of millions through famine, terror, and deportation. Both remain publicly venerated by the governments that rule China and Russia today. Mao’s embalmed corpse is displayed in a crystal sarcophagus in Tiananmen Square, while Stalin’s ashes are enshrined in the Kremlin Wall behind Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square. Much of the criticism directed at Ukraine has less to do with morality than with whose history is being remembered and by whom.

None of this makes these figures morally equivalent or places them beyond scrutiny. Serious scholarship demands difficult questions and honest debate. But it also requires consistency – something largely absent from much of the censure directed at Ukraine of late.

The issue is not whether every individual included in Ukraine’s National Pantheon was flawless. Almost none of any nation’s national heroes ever were. The question is whether Ukraine should be denied the same freedom that every other country claims: the right to interpret its past according to its own metric.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned repeatedly that Russia seeks “to erase our history, to erase our statehood, our identity, to deny our existence as such.” When introducing the Pantheon legislation, he outlined its guiding principle plainly: “No one will ever dictate… which heroes we should honor.”

Neither Moscow, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, nor London has any role in determining how Ukrainians interpret their past. They chose their own heroes. Ukraine will do the same.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.