As Verkhovna Rada deputies were heatedly discussing the political reform bill on April 8, they did not care much about the words they spoke, slinging mud at and trying to insult their opponents with such phrases as “Our Nazi Ukrainians,” “ungodly bunch,” and “gentlemen bandits.” Prof. Petro Tolochko said the debate “took on an indecent shape.” What was being debated upon was often very far from both the Constitutional amendments and the current issues.
Some deputies’ excursuses into history were like a bull in a china closet. A Communist deputy threw a fit of hysterics, crying out, “Bandera’s thugs are marching across Ukraine today, only under different colors!” Meanwhile, Communist deputies showed up in parliament, carrying flags and wearing badges of the totalitarian USSR, and for some reason this is not considered any breach of the law. Perhaps for want of fresh ideas for or against the reform, deputies began to put forward “narrow specialist” arguments. For instance, they took to toponymy. They literally said, “It is an outrage for Our Ukraine that there is a street in Ternopil named after the SS Halychyna Division.” I wonder why the same deputies did not recall Postyshev Street in downtown Donetsk, which glorifies the butcher of the Ukrainian people and Communist fascism in general. The central district of the coal miners’ capital bears the name of Voroshylov, one of Stalin’s top lieutenants. Moreover, a Donetsk City Council session made its own contribution to the city’s toponymy by renaming Andzhiyevsky Street as Zviahilsky Street. At first, the city fathers wanted to rename the street named after the well-known Ukrainian film director Ihor Savchenko. After the regional branch of Prosvita lodged a protest, it was decided to perpetuate the name of Zviahilsky in what was claimed as an unnamed street. Under the totalitarian Stalinist regime, the names of top and local-level Communist Party functionaries were often perpetuated during their lifetime in toponymy. For example, Kabakov, head of the Urals Oblast Communist Party Committee, could feast his eyes on the skyline of a city named Kabakovsk.
Tired of toponymy, the deputies took up monumental art. Thank goodness, things did not go as far as suggesting that a monument be erected to some of the current deputies. It should be recalled, though, that last year a monument to Russian State Duma deputy Yosif Kobzon was unveiled in Donetsk.
Communist leader Petro Symonenko began his political reform speech with saying that “an obelisk in honor of the villagers killed during the Great Patriotic War was barbarously torn down” in the village Shevchenkove, Dolyn district, Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. Mr. Symonenko put the blame for this act of vandalism on the Our Ukraine political bloc, his former allies in the struggle against the “anti-people regime.” So the deputies used this act of vandalism as a ploy in the political struggle at the session, which many experts believed was supposed to decide about Ukraine’s further way forward. It was a very cynical ploy indeed. This was not the first time that the Communists try to persuade the public that monuments are being defiled in Western Ukraine alone, thus provoking division and discord. Desecration of monuments, no matter where it occurs, produces the same disastrous effect and is called vandalism. It is perhaps when the Communist leader was hurling accusations from the Verkhovna Rada rostrum that unknown wrongdoers in Mariupol were hammering off the head of a statue, thus mutilating a monument to the soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War (see photo). The monument stands in the township Gorky, where Comrade Symonenko worked as secretary for ideology of the City Communist Party Committee. What conclusion can be made from all this? The only conclusion is that in every concrete instance of vandalism the blame should be put on nobody but those who committed this crime.
