The first law recognizes fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by the Ukrainian acronym UPA, as veterans of World War II, and confers certain recognition to some other groups of that period.
The second law prohibits “propaganda of Nazi and Communist symbols.”
The third law takes a swipe at “falsification of history.”
And the fourth authorizes opening of secret Soviet archives to the public.
Two reflections quickly come to mind even before looking at the details of legislation. One is that it could be done the right way or, more easily, the wrong way.
Actually, critique of the first three laws is already overflowing.
The second reflection is that, even if done fabulously perfect, there would certainly be hue and cry over “controversial” nature of the subject matter.
This is so because in Ukraine anything that rubs Moscow the wrong way becomes automatically assaulted, and not only from entrenched pro-Russian outlets.
Consciousness of many young people in Ukraine under the Soviet regime had been shaped in the protoplasm of presumed commonality between Ukrainian and Russian aspirations and in textbooks made out of flagrant historic distortions.
Not surprisingly, the Soviet past left its strongest imprint in Ukraine’s eastern regions.
Legitimacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is unthinkable in the minds of people brought up that way. But it would be a mistake to accede to their norms and postpone what Ukraine needs to get done now, if not yesterday.
Ironically, some monuments glorifying the Soviet past that could be removed are still standing.
And not only the Nikolai Vatutin statue that starkly reminds of direct confrontation between that Soviet hero and the UPA, and brings questions which some would prefer to water down.
There is also the statue of Nikolai Shchors standing at Taras Shevchenko Boulevard. Who was Shchors?
If reminding is needed, he was commander of a brigade consisting of two Soviet army regiments, among other units that fought against the forces of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1918 – 20.
General Vatutin was well known from World War II, but Colonel Shchors was made legendary hero in Soviet propaganda literature in Ukraine in the 1930s, when Holodomor was raging in villages across the land.
There is also a well known book on library shelves in Ukraine, “How steel was tempered” (“Kak zakalialasia stall” by Nikolay Ostrovsky, first published in Russian in 1932) which glorified the Bolshevik fighters against Ukrainian national forces.
The content is mostly fantasy, but the impression it could make on young minds for lifetime was noxious.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the World War II and afterwards had no logistics or state apparatus to embroider its story. To fight and survive for years as an insurgency against the two most powerful regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets, it had to be made and was made of something stronger than ordinary mix.
The most vulgar tool employed by Russia against the UPA in the last 60 years is smear of its legacy.
It is much easier done than pushing accusations against the world’s leading powers. All of them (bar none) have a glaring record of deliberate mass terrorism against civilian population in war time.
It by far exceeds the unintended consequences or “the collateral damage.”
The guilty eminencies could be fingered on all sides, but they usually enjoy state protection — when they have own state.
Smear against the UPA is usually connected with vilification of Stepan Bandera, leader of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) that shaped the UPA into a significant force by 1943. Bandera himself was imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Saksenhausen since the summer 1941, when he openly defied Nazi occupation authorities in Ukraine.
His colleagues of imprisonment Kurt Schuschnigg, anti-Nazi chancellor of Austria and the French Jewish prime minister Leon Blum praised Bandera as a decent person in their memoirs. Why many in Ukraine today see Bandera’s legacy as “controversial” cannot be explained by dislike of the authoritarian structure of the wartime OUN.
Those who are liberal-minded usually have room for disagreeing without disparaging. The anti-Bandera and anti-UPA knee-jerking can only be explained by vicious Soviet propaganda that disfigured normal minds.
Not surprisingly, Bandera’s three brothers were killed by the Gestapo, two of them in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the third in Kherson.
Ukraine’s Parliament today needs to complete the enactment of legislation concerning the UPA in a sensible format that can be signed by President Petro Poroshenko. The subject matter should not be diluted by issues that could be addressed separately.
The importance of getting it done without delay is illustrated by a recently increasing nervousness in Moscow, evidenced by attempts to stymie it with a most bizarre slanderous linkage of UPA name itself to the ongoing mystery of assassinations and alleged suicides of several former Party of Regions functionaries connected to Ukraine’s oligarchs (“Mysterious group stakes claims for high-profile murders,” Kyiv Post, April 17).
