The de-sovietization debate Leading Ukraine experts discuss new laws designed to distance country from totalitarian past Ukraine has recently introduced a series of laws which collectively attempt to draw a line under the ambiguous attitudes towards the Communist era which have lingered for the past 24 years in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. Supporters of this de-sovietization process have hailed the laws as a long overdue step in the right direction, while critics have warned that the legislation risks dividing Ukrainians at a time when national unity means national survival. Business Ukraine magazine invited Ukraine experts Taras Kuzio, Alexander Motyl and Bohdan Vitvitsky to address some of the key issues raised by Ukraine’s new de-sovietization laws. QUESTION 1. Will Ukraine’s new de-sovietization laws serve to further unite or divide Ukrainian society? TARAS KUZIO: Re-writing history and changing identities are always contested in every country, whether Irish-UK reconciliation under Prime Minister Tony Blair or in South Africa after the collapse of apartheid, when not all Boers supported the move to majority rule and an end to racism. I am sure many older Germans and especially Japanese and Austrians did not want to de-Nazify or debunk the old imperial Japanese imperialism - but this was all necessary. The USSR was a totalitarian empire that murdered millions of Ukrainians and steps that work towards removing the vestiges of that criminal empire should be applauded. As President Petro Poroshenko said to those who are against the new laws, they should have joined him on Sunday, 17 May, in the commemorations of the over 100,000 murdered in the Bykivnya forest near Kyiv. Some conwill divide Ukrainian society to a greater degree than hitherto existed. ALEXANDER MOTYL: This is the wrong question. The right question is: will the laws promote truth, justice, and freedom. The answer is a resounding yes. As we know from history, all such efforts to expand the
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whether they were from Kharkiv, Poltava, Kyiv or Lviv, thought that the time for such laws had come. QUESTION 2: Are attempts to remove all public symbols of the Soviet era in Ukraine practical? TARAS KUZIO: Would we argue that Nazi monuments and street names should remain in place in Germany and Austria? Of course not. Then why should Soviet monuments and place names remain in Ukraine? After all, monument was removed in Kyiv, followed by 550 others in central, eastern and southern Ukraine, including the largest in Ukraine, which was toppled last September in Kharkiv. The Euromaidan movement was many things, one of which was an anti-Soviet revolution, because the Viktor Yanukovych administration was seen as neo-Soviet in its identity. Meanwhile, the proRussian separatist counter-revolutionaries are Soviet in their identity.
good meet with resistance from entrenched forces. Yet no one would suggest that civil rights legislation in America or laws forbidding discrimination of women and gays not be passed because they would be
ALEXANDER MOTYL: Immediately, no - but, given the ineffectiveness of Ukraine’s government apparatus, there’s little chance of that taking place anyway. Over time, yes. If the Germans could succeed in removing Nazi
- as indeed they were - divisive. Indeed, if divisiveness were the prime criterion for judging a law’s utility, then Ukraine should not be reform-
symbols, surely Ukraine can succeed in removing Communist symbols.
ing its economy and imposing high costs on a resistant society. Stasis and stagnation would then be the only option for any country. Besides, Ukraine is a revolutionary society that is attempting to move toward the
BOHDAN VITVITSKY: As with most things, if good will and common sense are applied in the law’s implementation, the answer is that it should be possible to remove all or the overwhelming majority of such symbols.
West as rapidly as possible. Everything the government does will elicit support and criticism.
QUESTION 3. What are the international consequences of laws crim-
BOHDAN VITVITSKY: That will depend, as the introduction of any new
inalizing criticism of Ukrainian nationalist forces accused of complicity in Nazi atrocities?
policy in any country depends, on how skillful a job the Ukrainian government does in explaining and providing a rationale for the four laws.
TARAS KUZIO: This was the weakest section of the laws and no criminal-
But in Ukraine this is even more important given that Russia and its various agents continue to conduct an information war against Ukraine. Be that as it may, based on my informal survey of friends and acquaintances
ization of criticism will ever take place. Let us recall that the 2006 law on the Holodomor (which was not supported by the Party of Regions or the Ukrainian Communist Party) also had a section on criminalization of those
in Ukraine when I happened to have been there for a week and a half between the time the bills were passed and their being signed into law
who rejected it had taken place or was a genocide. And yet, the Party of Regions and Communists from 2006-2014, and President Yanukovych in
by President Poroshenko, almost all of the people with whom I spoke,
2010-2014, did just that. www.bunews.com.ua