On April 22, 1945, U.S. Army troops blew up the huge stone swastika that loomed over Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg where the Nazis had staged their massive rallies. A week later, Adolph Hitler committed suicide in Berlin and a few days after that, World War II in Europe ended. Today, there’s not a single public statue to Hitler and the only swastikas are on lunatic websites or tattooed onto the chests of racist losers.
Symbols are important. That’s why Germany has laws forbidding celebration of its Nazi past. It’s also why President Petro Poroshenko signed a package of bills in April banning Soviet and Nazi symbols and propaganda, opening the Soviet archives and recognizing those who struggled for Ukraine’s independence in the 20th century. Respecting the sacrifice of Ukrainians who helped defeat Nazi Germany, the law does not apply to cemeteries or Soviet-era military and civil awards. It also permits and indeed, by opening hitherto forbidden archives, facilitates the free exercise of scholarship.
Good for Ukraine, yes? Well, according to some, no. The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry denounced the law as “totalitarian” and “attacking freedom of the press, opinion or conscience”– not because it bans Nazi symbols, but because it equates Soviet communism with Hitler’s fascism. Which prompts me to look back to 1966 when I was a college freshman and had to write a 1,000-word paper every week demonstrating a different essay genre. For the “argument” I wrote that Nazis and Soviets were essentially the same. My professor gave me a decent grade, but chided me for writing something so obvious it didn’t merit argument: next time pick something where there’s disagreement.
Well, that was then. Vladimir Putin today is not the only one questioning the laws Mr. Poroshenko signed. Respected publications like The Washington Post and The Guardian (London) called them “controversial” and, echoing Moscow, “a possible violation of free speech.” Even a number of Western academics signed an open letter urging Mr. Poroshenko to veto the bills, which “filled them with deepest foreboding” because “the measures would provide comfort and support to those who seek to enfeeble and divide Ukraine.”
Is Ukraine wrong to prohibit Nazi and Soviet symbols and propaganda? I don’t think so. You could just as easily ask whether Germany, France, Lithuania, Israel and a dozen other countries are mistaken for also banning swastikas and criminalizing Holocaust denial.
Re-evaluating national history is not unique to Ukraine. Americans, horrified by the murder of African Americans in a South Carolina church in July, are taking a closer, more critical look at the Civil War and removing the Confederate battle flag from state capitals, as well as statues to Jefferson Davis, Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest and others. And it’s not just about the legacy of slavery and Confederate insurrection – at Amherst College in Massachusetts, students and faculty voted to remove the unofficial school mascot, “Lord Jeff” named after British colonial governor Jeffrey Amherst, after it was revealed he had given Native Americans smallpox-infected blankets in a 1763 version of biological warfare.
For me, it’s a healthy development that Ukraine, after 75 years of Soviet rule with its Orwellian distortion of history, is addressing its horrific legacy, even if by legislative fiat, or perhaps because of that.
Over the past two years, hundreds of Lenin statues have been spontaneously toppled, although many still stand, a lingering symbol of evil. They should all go. Consider: when Osama bin Laden was taken out by U.S. Navy Seals, he was buried at sea to deny Al Qaeda a gravesite shrine to terrorism. Too bad Lenin didn’t suffer the same fate. Instead, his mummy is still worshipped at Moscow’s Red Square. Arguably history’s most successful terrorist, he hijacked the 1917 Russian Revolution (which included Ukraine’s independence campaign) by ordering a handful of activists to stage a coup d’état in Petrograd, turning a marginal party, the Bolsheviks, into a vast empire established and sustained by terror.
What? Lenin a terrorist? Well yes: read his directive from December 1917, a month after the coup: “…organize a strengthened guard of reliable persons to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards.” The foremost among those “reliable persons” was Felix Dzerzhinsky, father of the Cheka, the party police which dealt in “organized terror,” a mission its successors – the GPU, OGPU, NKVD and eventually the KGB – religiously followed. Today, Mr. Putin proudly claims to be a “Chekist.” Dzerzhinsky’s organization and those that followed were responsible for the murder of tens of millions of innocents over the course of 75 years. To honor him, Stalin in 1936 decreed that the river city Kamiansk be renamed Dnipro-dzerzhynsk. Does that belong on the map of free and independent Ukraine? Does Kirovohrad, named after Sergey Kirov, another of Lenin’s “reliables,” a thuggish operative who headed the “Red Terror” in the North Caucasus in 1918-1920 and eventually became a member of Stalin’s Politburo where he supported Collectivization and the Holodomor in Ukraine?
In 2016, we celebrate 25 years of Ukraine’s independence. To get to this point, the nation underwent three revolutions, the most recent the Revolution of Dignity. Each was a rejection of the past and the bitter history of totalitarianism, privilege and, to be blunt, catastrophic orientation on Moscow. Young leaders like Volodymyr Viatrovych, director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory and principal author of the bills, know that Ukraine has to establish its own identity, oriented on the Western values and freedoms that motivated millions to take to the streets.
Enraged by Ukraine’s independent course, Russia slanders the democracy movement there as “neo-Nazi” – this from a country that passed a law in 2014 making it a crime to mention that the Soviet Union and Germany were allies from 1939 to 1941. One of the major collaborators was Gen. Nikolai Vatutin, who planned the invasion of Poland in September 1939 with his Nazi partners and then took part in a joint victory parade in Brest-Litovsk. His statue stands next to Ukraine’s Parliament. Ukraine should get rid of that one too. In the spirit of the new law, it would simultaneously remove a Soviet and Nazi symbol. Maybe Kyiv should send it to Moscow, where it belongs.