Two men in Donetsk, reportedly miners, burn the Soviet hammer-and-sickle and Nazi swastika flags on June 22, 2011, the anniversary of Hitler’s attack on Stalin (Hitler attacked after a a nearly two year lovefest known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact when Stalin let the Nazis conquer most of Western Europe).
Meanwhile, Lviv city council commissioned four billboards to mark the same anniversary. They show Nazi and Soviet atrocities in that western Ukrainian city.
"Communism = Nazism" read the bold, red letters. The caption under the image of victims executed by the Soviets (left) reads "Lonsky Street Prison, Lviv, June 30, 1941." Victims of the Nazis (right) with caption: "Square in front of the Opera Theatre, Lviv, March 1942."
Bridging the east-west divide that’s been artificially imposed on the people of Ukraine, local governments and individual citizens agree: standards bearing Hitler’s swastika and Stalin’s sickle were essentially cut from the same cloth.
Stepan Bandera is a reporter and a former Kyiv Post journalist. You can read his blog entries at http://kyivscoop.blogspot.com/
