PERSPECTIVES: What's with the flag-waving? (12/06/98)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

What's with the flag-waving?

Imagine it's November 1952 in Bonn, a little more than seven years after the fall of Berlin and 29 years to the day from Hitler's Beerhouse Putsch. The Bundestag is in session when, suddenly, one of its members begins waving the Nazi flag in honor of the Führer and the Third Reich.

I said imagine ... nothing like that ever occurred and would not be tolerated by German or world opinion if it were to happen today.

Yet something very similar happened on the floor of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada on November 6 when a Communist member of the legislature waved the Soviet flag in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution. Come to think of it, what's a Communist doing in the Rada, anyway?

You wouldn't see a member of the Nazi Party serving in the Bundestag in 1952, or today for that matter. Not only are Germans prohibited by law from running for public office as Nazis, they're also proscribed from doing so by common sense and decency. No one in his right mind claims to be a Nazi or wants to be associated with the Nazis' legacy of Holocaust, terror, aggression and shame.

Wouldn't you think Ukrainian Communists - indeed Communists everywhere - would be equally ashamed to run for office under the banner that evokes memories of Lenin, Stalin and other brutes, people who left a legacy of forced Famine, mass murder, totalitarianism and abject failure? Yet they feel no shame, offer no apology and get enough votes in free elections to win close to a quarter of the seats in the Verkhovna Rada. What gives?

Let's look at the record first. No one familiar with the facts would dispute that the record of Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union are comparable.

The Nazis had concentration camps; so did the Soviets. In fact, Lenin invented this malevolent 20th century institution when in August 1918 he ordered Bolsheviks to "Secure the Soviet republic against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps." Mass murder? Hitler killed Jews, Gypsies, gays, Slavs and various other "Untermenschen." Stalin killed Ukrainians, Poles, Chechens, Russians, Jews, Tatars and anyone else who offended him or stood in his way.

Slave labor? Take your pick: Hitler's use of "Ostarbeiter," Ukrainians and others who worked the factories and fields of the Third Reich while German men ran the war; or Stalin who built his dams, factories and mining industry with the same methods the pharaohs used to build the pyramids.

Political repression? Hitler burned books. So did the Soviets, while perfecting the art of censorship with an Iron Curtain that kept people in and ideas out.

If the two systems were so similar, why is Nazism vilified while Communists continue to vie for power in Ukraine, Russia, Poland and other places where the Soviets held sway? It all relates to the way the two systems ended.

Nazi Germany was defeated unconditionally in 1945. Immediately after the Allies liberated the concentration camps, photographers, filmmakers, print journalists and criminal investigators went in to document the horror. Starting in November 1945 and lasting 10 months, the War Crimes Tribunal at Nürenberg exposed the Nazi record for the world to see, laying out details about the death camps, the slave labor program, the barbaric medical experiments. At the end of the process, 10 Nazi leaders were hanged and ever since then only lunatics display swastikas. (Conveniently overlooked at Nürenberg was the fact that the Soviet Union was one of the prosecuting countries, but that's another story.)

The Soviet Union continued for 36 years after the fall of Nazi Germany. During that time the Communists commanded a vast propaganda industry that glorified Lenin, the Soviet victory over fascism, the party chief and the Soviet state in general. Starting in 1956, Stalin was assigned exclusive blame for the terror and mass murders of the 1930s and '40s. Meanwhile, the state went right on repressing its citizens. Stalin's crimes became the "Personality Cult" and that ended it. A vast police network made sure that any description of his crimes and those of his accomplices would be forever suppressed. The state could do no wrong.

Denied access to their own history or information about the rest of the world, people lacked the arguments, even the basic vocabulary to dispute the party line about the Soviet Union as the "Workers' Paradise." Seven million Ukrainians might have been deliberately starved to death in 1932-1933, but it took a concerted campaign on the part of diaspora Ukrainians - culminating with the Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine in 1983 - to resurrect the memory of the victims.

Unlike Nazi Germany, which ended with a bang, the Soviet Union ended with a whimper, a comedy of drunken Politburo members and a handful of generals meekly surrendering, then fading into oblivion. From the Soviet Union to independent Ukraine, Russia, Kazakstan or Georgia, the transition was smooth and virtually seamless. Many of the same people ended up running the new system as ran the old.

In Ukraine the man who had led the fight against nationalism and for purity of the Soviet message became the first president of the newly independent country and the architect of the Ukrainian army. As for the last leader of the Soviet Union, he now does pizza commercials. There was no "de-Communization," no show trials anywhere. Lazar Kaganovich, a mass murderer whose name evokes the same horror for Ukrainians that Adolph Eichmann's does for Jews, lived well into his 90s in peaceful retirement in Moscow.

Today in Ukraine, former Communists are everywhere, holding positions of responsibility, heading up ministries, running village councils, teaching children. People, of course, know the Communist record; that's why three-quarters vote against them, but the fact that so many people were associated with communism in one way or another makes it awkward to call anyone to account. Life just goes on. The same ministries, the same collective farms, the same state-controlled enterprises are still run more or less the same way. Just take down the hammer and sickle and hang the Tryzub on the same nail.

There is no widespread debate, as far as I can tell, about the Communist legacy. As a result, Communists are free to compare the old Soviet system against the grim reality of today's economic depression, not against the record of cruelty and murder that most Ukrainians know but seldom ponder. With the major criminals like Lenin, Stalin, Kaganovich, Vyshynsky, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Shcherbytsky and an army of others now dead and buried, the opportunity for sensational show trials is long gone.

What the nation needs instead is a long period of introspection led by artists from every field to examine Ukraine's past, personalize it, popularize it, to help people remember and come to terms with their past. When that happens, when the truth begins to come out in all its horrible detail, you will no longer see members of the Verkhovna Rada waving the Soviet flag. Their faces will be too red from shame to want to have their names associated with communism and its evil legacy.

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