ZAPORIZHIA — The Dnipropetrovsk NGO “Hrad” is intently watching the developments around the destroyed monument to Stalin in Zaporizhia. In particular, they were the first to publish the declaration of the first secretary of the Zaporizhia Oblast Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, MP Oleksii Baburin. It is dated December 28, 2010 (it means that it was written just after Stalin’s head had been sawn off). The document reads that the leader of the Zaporizhia communists asks the police “not to bring a legal action and not to carry out an investigation since they have no complaints.” Nine months have passed. A legal action has been brought, the people involved have spent three months in the pre-trial prison and the judicial proceeding is in progress. New people have been recently arrested in Crimea. However, they are witnesses in the case about explosion of the abovementioned monument. The other day Hrad sent the letters to the MEPs with the information that “not those who installed the bust of Stalin without any corresponding permission but the patriots who actually performed the government’s functions by dismantling the object that had been illegally installed are being prosecuted.” The MEPs are asked to examine “the question of the threat of the Stalinism rehabilitation and resumption of the totalitarian rule in Ukraine.” When the article was being edited one of the MEPs
Milan Zver (of Slovenia) answered Hrad by e-mail where he expressed his support and promised to inform the other MEPs about the initiative of the Dnipropet-rovsk inhabitants.
We remind our readers that back in 2009 the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly announced August 23 the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Sta-linism and Nazism. The same year the OSCE Committee on Democracy adopted the Vilnius Declaration reading, in particular, that: “…in the 20th century European countries experienced two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The OSCE Parliamentary Declaration “requests governments and parliaments of participating States to ensure that any governmental structures and patterns of behaviour that resist full democratization or perpetuate, or embellish, or seek a return to, or extend into the future, totalitarian rule are fully dismantled.”
COMMENTARY
Volodymyr VIATROVYCH, Ph.D. in History, the former director of the Ukrainian Security Service Archive (2008-10):
“Unfortunately, with the government’s assistance this neostalinism, adapted to the modern conditions, might gradually resume. Actually, it is happening along with blocking the access to the information and the archives that discover the real criminal essence of the Sta-linism. It is manifested in making the Soviet time heroic, hiding the crimes of the then go-vernment and presenting Stalin as an efficient manager. This is currently happening in Russia and is, unfortunately, being exported to Ukraine with the assistance of the Ukrainian authorities. I am speaking about the work of the Minister of
Education, Science, Youth and Sports Dmytro Tabachnyk who is actually censoring the history by cutting off the events of the Ukrainian history that impede the resumption of the Soviet vision. Respectively, the history of the Ukrainian liberation movement, the activity of the OUN-UPA [The Ukrainian Nationalists’ Organization and The Ukrainian Insurgent Army. – Ed.] and the dissidents were eliminated the first. In fact, owing to Dmytro Tabachnyk’s ‘diligence’ the Stalinist cliche “Great Patriotic War” replaced the term “World War II” in the history books. And, finally, the developments around the Zaporizhia monument, ignored by the government until it was blown up. Now the people charged with dismantling the monument are being persecuted. It seems to me that the attempts to rehabilitate the Stalinism and everything Soviet are being exported to Ukraine. Actually, the government supports these attempts in the person of the officials heading the humanities.
