Since April 2015, the Ukrainian authorities have renamed more than 51,000 place names, including 1,000 cities and towns, 26 districts, 75 academic institutions, 30 railway stations and several ports, replacing Soviet-imposed names with Ukrainian ones, Anton Drobovych, head of the Kyiv Institute of National Memory, says.
And as part of this same effort, officials have removed about 2,500 Soviet-era statues from public places. Just over half of these are statues of Vladimir Lenin; and at the present time, there are only three statues to the founder of the Bolshevik state remaining in Ukraine. All three are in Odesa Oblast, whose officials pledge to remove them and 19 other Soviet symbols soon.
Obviously, many Ukrainians view this as a necessary step to get out from under the totalitarian past and to put them on a course independent from Moscow. But a new survey conducted by the Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology finds the Ukrainian nation is still divided about them.
The poll shows that for Ukraine as a whole, just under half of the population opposes this program, while a third supports it and efforts Kyiv has made to realize it, and a fifth are indifferent to this program (dif.org.ua/article/shostiy-rik-dekomunizatsii-stavlennya-naselennya-do-zaboroni-simvoliv-totalitarnogo-minulogo and imhoclub.lv/ru/material/pochti_polovina_ukraincev_vistupaet_protiv_dekommunizacii_ i_pereimenovanija_ulic_i_gorodov).
As one might expect from earlier surveys, Kyiv’s decommunization program has the greatest support in western Ukraine, where 45 percent back it, but significantly less in the eastern and southern portions of the country, where support stands at 22 percent and 24 percent, respectively. Younger people are more supportive of these changes than older ones.
Other findings of this survey, however, suggest that the views Ukrainians have about renaming streets and towns and removing statues should not be overly generalized and that far more support both Ukrainian national heroes and Ukraine’s integration with the European Union than the toponomy and statue numbers might suggest.
Almost half – 48 percent – of those surveyed support giving public recognition to figures from the Ukrainian National Republic, with only 16 percent opposed. Only 31 percent of Ukrainians don’t view the USSR as “a universal evil,” and only 32 percent prefer a union with Russia as against one with the European Union.
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).