There is an opinion that the problem of symbols is artificial and out of place, that it is not the time to argue about symbols when this country is in crisis and we have seek compromises here, too. I cannot agree.
The luxuriant combinations of billboards, garlands, flags, five- pointed stars. hammers and sickles, which adorned the front walls of state and Communist Party offices, enciphered something that those who were raised and grew old under Soviet power long ago ceased to think about. Today, when we bid farewell to this heraldry, it is worth remembering what it all used to mean.
The tasteless extravaganza that blossomed in Stalin’s times overshadowed the long-forgotten austere values proclaimed by the October Revolution. First of all, national flags were replaced by the revolutionary red flag. It should be noted thet revolutionary France counterpoised its national tricolor primarily to the Bourbon colors. In imperial Russia, dynastic symbols, not the tricolor, were used as the official national flag. The adoption of national flags after overthrowing monarchy always meant that the charisma of power proceeded from the nation and the people rather than from the anointed sovereign monarch.
The red flag negated precisely this principle. It set the proletarian revolution on all the five continents, the final bloody war against the world bourgeoisie and the national organization of society. This apocalypse was in fact forgotten around 1930. Stalin’s empire chose, more often than not, the name of Russia, which became gradually symbolized in the form of golden epaulets, officers’ and generals’ insignia, etc. Ideological anointing was accomplished by means of the pictures of Lenin (sometimes Lenin and Stalin), which in fact became the symbol of the charisma of power.
The hammer and sickle once meant that power would belong to the people engaged in manual labor, supposedly the only entity capable of producing value. The slogan of the power of the working people was transformed into the demagogic rhetoric of the Party and state bureaucracy. As to the five-pointed star, it is now impossible to find out who precisely introduced that symbol and why. We can only note that the mentality of the final decisive battle dates back to the Apocalypse, and Doomsday sentiments were very widespread in Russian society in those revolutionary years (suffice it to recall Aleksandr Blok’s “You, star, menace us with the final hour from blue eternity”). The romanticism of world revolution and the last hour of capitalism lapsed into the past during the Five Year Plans. Those ultra-revolutionary descendants of noble and capitalist families, who, filled of inspiration, created the anti-intellectual and atheistic symbols of communism after October 1917 and dreamt of the prompt end of exploitation and of the state itself, were executed by the Stalinist regime and can tell us nothing.
Communist utopias have been trampled upon by totalitarian statehood for a very long time, and their restoration presents no danger of heraldic duality. But when some People’s Deputies wear the dead symbols of a long-dead state on their lapels, this amounts to a challenge to the foundations of the social system.
Democratic independent Ukraine emerged on the political and legal basis of the Ukrainian SSR and long lived under the constitution of the latter. But there can be no coexistence of two state traditions, two constitutions and two sets of symbols. Supporting the archaic communist system of signs as symbols of state means that its defenders tacitly imply they oppose Ukrainian independence and democracy but favor not so much the forgotten slogans of world revolution as the lost Great State, the successor to the Great Empire. The little red flag on one’s lapel means the source of his mandate to wield power is faith in the eternal truth of Marxism-Leninism rather than the sovereignty of the people’s freedom expressed in the free democratic procedures of voting.
A red state is a state which builds all its spiritual and economic life on the red ideology.
The incompatibility between these foundations and those of democracy is obvious. Here no compromise is possible.
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*It will be recalled that the parliamentary majority decided at its session in Ukraine House on January 21 that all Soviet symbols on the Verkhovna Rada building on Hrushevsky Street be replaced with Ukrainian ones, which caused heated and continuing debates.
The Day asked some people prominent in Ukraine to express their opinions
Yuri MAZHUHA, People’s Artist of the USSR:
“I view with calm the turmoil over the replacement of old symbols on the Verkhovna Rada building. Indeed, we live in a different country and need our own insignia of statehood. Still, we have mountains of urgent problems that need to be solved as top priorities. But for the most part our Deputies merely feign feverish activity. What the people expect from them is not the escapades of Right and Left but specific laws to improve the life of this country as a whole. I am certain that Ukraine’s ordinary citizen is more worried about paying off wage, salary, and pension arrears and changes in the tax laws than what symbols adorn Parliament’s facade. I once saw in the press the figures for what the replacement of totalitarian symbols will cost us, about 120,000 hryvnias. It seems to me an unaffordable luxury to spend that much money today. I belong to no party or movement and do not accept extreme methods. So the Communist pickets outside Verkhovna Rada ‘to avert vandalism’ and the initiative of the Rukh work group ‘to come with hammers in hand and strike the hammers and sickles off the facade’ do neither side credit. We have already passed the historical period when old things were razed to the ground. We seem to have learned nothing. The Deputies must have forgotten in the frenzy of patriotism that no Great Seal of Ukraine has been approved since 1996. Only versions are discussed. The trident printed today on official decorations, money and seals is referred to in the Constitutions as only the small seal. I think that first the relevant decision should be made and only then should they ‘repair’ the Verkhovna Rada facade.”
Les TANIUK, Chairman, Committee for Culture and Spirituality, Verkhovna Rada:
“It was my project to remove communist symbols from the Verkhovna Rada building. The committee I have headed for many years has repeatedly initiated this point, and now the matter seems to have been set in motion. We have to remove these symbols. It is the purpose of symbols to symbolize the condition of the state and society. Could you imagine for a second the following situation: the Germans wake up and see the statues of Hitler, GЪring, etc., on the central squares of their cities. They would immediately decide that those horrible old times were back. There have been hundreds of publications confirming what kind of things the Party did under all these sickles, hammers, and stars. It is considered normal in this country, for some reason, that, contrary to the relevant presidential decree, there are still 8,000 idols of Ulianov-Lenin in Ukraine’s cities. And it is the fact that the Parliament walls still bear this stigma of the past that kept the President from taking his oath on the Bible. In general, let us call a spade a spade: we are still surrounded by the symbols of a fascist antihuman state. The replacement of symbols is of paramount importance. Freedom under the old names is impossible.
Serhiy MASLOBOISHCHYKOV, artist and film director:
“My attitude toward this is simple. It is not worth changing things wherever there is a piece of art. In fact, Kyiv has no buildings where this style would be a piece of art. For example, the Ukrainian SSR emblem on the former Party Central Committee building next to St. Michael’s Cathedral was in line with the building’s overall monumental Stalinist style, and so it was self-sufficient. Then it was removed and replaced by a gigantic trident. This was done in a completely tasteless and dilettantish way, resulting in God knows what. I repeat, my attitude is absolutely esthetic. If the new symbols do not impair the building’s general view, they are acceptable. The point is that the buildings themselves, built in the communist epoch, are usually crude, uninteresting, and architecturally bland, and I feel no pity if something is changed with them; but we should not do this if the change breaks the architectural concept.”
