On December 9, 2023, municipal workers in Kiev dismantled the Soviet-era figure of General Mykola Shchors. The Ministry of Culture gave permission to take down the statue and spectators clapped when the workers finished. Heorhii Lukianchuk, a resident of Kiev, said he fled to witness this “historic moment” and that it “will be on the pages of history books.”
According to my December 9 telephone interview with Kiev academic Alex Abakumovl, this process of decommunization, while widely supported by a majority of Ukrainians, will further embitter what is in fact an unspoken “civil war”:
It may be time for the government to eradicate symbols of communism as part of the broader Russian-Ukrainian campaign, but simply destroying statues does nothing to unite the people of Ukraine. Putin knows all too well where he has his supporters and his henchmen, and these actions of toppling Red Army monuments at this particular moment only reopen old wounds. The situation in Ukraine is not as simple as Biden and others would like to make it out to be. The legacy of the Second World War is still divisive. Apart from everything else, many elderly people still live in a cloud coocoo country where the 1970s were the best time for Ukraine. They may have diminishing numerical influence and little electoral power, but their voice tenderly touches the hearts of a divided country.
Uri Manok, a Ukrainian colleague working in the capital, told me in another interview the same day:
This may seem symbolic to those who view Ukraine from a distance, but we still have a large number of old-timers who served in the Russian army, and others who are equally rosy in their memories of the Soviet past. It’s the typical, baffling cocktail of nostalgia and the feeling that the current experience is always worse than a supposedly happier time of plenty and generous pensions of the Russian military. Those old military retirees don’t need to stand up for the current barbaric campaign against Russia on multiple fronts. For those who do, and their families who have lost so many in this so-called Russian military operation, the last remnant of the Soviets cannot be wiped out fast enough. Yes, we fought on the communist side. Yes, we had several years under Moscow. But Putin’s behavior has convinced most reasonable Ukrainians that we are simply demanding our independence and every inch of our Ukrainian territory. For most Ukrainians, it wouldn’t matter if they never saw a Russian soldier again. The fall of Red Army Chief Mykola Shchors is another victory for Ukrainian democracy. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Decommunization in Ukraine began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and spread thereafter. Following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Ukrainian government passed laws banning communist symbols as well as those of Nazism as totalitarian ideologies.
On May 15, 2015, President Petro Poroshenko had authorized a six-month period for the removal of Soviet communist monuments (with the exception of the World War II obituaries) and the renaming of public places previously named after the Soviets. At the time, this meant that 22 cities and 44 villages would be renamed. Until November 21, 2015, municipal authorities had the power to implement this and if they did not do so, the oblasts had a deadline of May 21, 2016. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine could impose new designations and impose heavy penalties for non -conformity. Predictably, the laws were not implemented in the heavily Russian-oriented parts of Ukraine.
At the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the Ukrainian security service accused the Communist Party of Ukraine of supporting pro-Russian separatists and Russian proxy forces. In July 2015, the Ministry of Internal Affairs stripped the Communist Party, the Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed) and the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants of their right to participate in elections, and banned the registration of communist parties. In December 2015, these parties were declared outlaws for inciting violent overthrow of the state and supporting Russian proxy forces. Ironically, the Communist Party of Ukraine appealed the ban to the European Court of Human Rights. A contact in the fading remains of that once powerful party, Igor Gusev, told me in an interview on December 8:
They are determined to rewrite the past as if we never existed, as if we did not actually create the modern state we have today, namely Ukraine, in friendship with Mother Russia. These pretenders who say they are Ukrainians are now stamping on the dead bodies of those who liberated us and fought for our history and our brothers in Moscow. who have supported us all these years… They are now just international conspirators who want to turn Ukraine into a puppet of the West… They have a TV star president who is just a mouthpiece and does not really represent the country – he is just a spokesperson for the sham of liberal democracy in Europe and America.
In 2016, 51,493 streets and 987 towns and villages were renamed (with restoration of their historical names or new names) and 1,320 Lenin monuments and 1,069 statues to other communist figures were removed. In fact, Ukraine’s first president after the country’s 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, Leonid Kravchuk, had issued orders aimed at “de-Sovietization” in the early 1990s. Historical memorials to Soviet leaders were gradually hidden, especially in the Ukrainian-speaking western regions. It is true that there was a backlash in the industrialized (largely Russian-speaking) eastern regions. To provide some context for the ambivalence over these issues, decommunization laws were drafted in the Ukrainian parliament in 2002, 2005, 2009, 2011 and 2013, but none of these came to fruition. Clearly, there were already numerically significant numbers who thought like Igor Gusev.
Only the post-Euromaidan reforms brought solid change. In March 2014, Lenin Square in Dnipropetrovsk was renamed “Heroes of Maidan Square” in honor of those killed during Euromaidan. Two years later, in May 2016, the city was renamed Dnipro. During and after Euromaidan, starting with the fall of the Lenin statue in Kiev on December 8, 2013, several Lenin statues were removed or destroyed by protesters. In April 2014, a year before the nationwide decommunization processes in Ukraine, local authorities removed and changed communist symbols and place names, such as in Dnipropetrovsk. Once again there was ambivalence and ‘push-back’. As a resident of Dnipro, Tania Jezhiov told me in an interview on December 10:
It is all very well that the Presidency continues with decommunization, as with the removal of the statue of Marshal Shchors, but this comes at a price. It both strengthens the sense of Ukrainian identity and tortures those who look back on that era with fondness, or who are openly or secretly pro-Putin. The outside press happily thinks this is a simple war, but that is far from the case. It may seem so pro-Ukrainian in Kiev, but outside the capital there are groups of people who are ambivalent towards Putin. I don’t just mean those fighting the Ukrainian army in the Donbas – I mean the outside world seems to think this is a national struggle – the Ukrainian David versus the Russian Goliath. In fact, we are much more divided than the West would like to admit. They like to maintain a simple narrative against Moscow, but what Biden and the West are saying may be too simplistic a representation of the internal divisions in Ukraine.
On May 15, 2015, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko signed the decommunization laws that accelerated the removal of communist statues and the renaming of public places. On June 3, 2015, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory published a list of 22 cities and 44 villages that needed to be renamed. Most of these places were in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. On May 19, 2016, the Ukrainian parliament voted to rename Ukraine’s fourth largest city, Dnipropetrovsk, as “Dnipro”. On April 27, 2022 (during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine), the People’s Friendship Arch in Kiev, representing Russian-Ukrainian friendship, was removed on the orders of Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
On August 1, 2023, the Soviet emblem was removed from the Motherland Monument in Kiev. On October 24, 2023, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed Law No. 8263 to facilitate “de-Sovietization.” But already on December 18, 2015, the Venice Commission declared that Ukraine’s decommunization laws did not meet European legal standards. There was criticism of the ban on communist parties. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, many Lenin statues throughout Ukraine, which the Ukrainians had removed in the previous years, were re-erected in Russian-controlled areas.
Ukraine is more divided than the West seems to realize. A November 2016 poll found that 48% of respondents supported a ban on communist ideology in Ukraine, 36% opposed it and 16% were undecided. It also showed that 41% of respondents supported the initiative to dismantle all Lenin sculptures in the country, while 48% were against it and 11% were undecided. In December 2023, another communist symbol has fallen, but Ukraine has inherited a dark history that is less easy to remedy as a certain ambivalence remains about the ‘de-communization process’.
Read more about e-international relations