Staunton, April 10 – “The mental gap
between Ukraine and Russia is growing, and the trajectories of the two country
are ever more strongly diverging,” according to Maksim Artemyev in an
assessment of new Ukrainian laws opening Soviet-era secret police archives,
de-Sovietizing the country’s toponymy, and revising key judgments about the
past.
In a comment on RBC.ru, Artemyev
says that “public access to the archives of the special services is an
important decision intended to ensure the past will not be repeated. Now
Ukraine wants to go along this path,” but “in Russia in contrast, hopes for
such a decision were forgotten and buried long ago” (daily.rbc.ru/opinions/politics/10/04/2015/55277f0e9a794780247e5977).
Yesterday, the Verkhovna Rada passed
on first reading a law intended to simplify the access of citizens to the
archives of Soviet force structures, including the KGB. Such public access is “an
important decision,” one that Ukraine joins the countries of Eastern Europe in
making but on that in Russia hopes for something similar were “long ago
forgotten and buried.”
That step, along with others that
redefine the 1939-1945 conflict in Europe as World War II rather than “the
Great Fatherland War,” celebrate the end of the war in Europe on May 8 rather
than May 9, end the condemnation of the anti-Moscow resistanc, and call for the
elimination of all Soviet place names move Ukraine ever further from “a common
past” with Russia.
At the end of the 1980s and in the
early 1990s, many Russian liberals hoped for something similar with regard to
the archives and place names, but “there was not a broad social demand for this”
and the powers that be soon were able to block access to the archives and limit
name changes.
As a result, Russia but not now
Ukraine “decided to turn away from its own history or more precisely did not
want to say farewell to its accustomed picture.” As a result, Artemyev says, “Russia
in many respects remains a Soviet state with a corresponding ideology and
system of values.”
Also yesterday, he continues, the
Ukrainian parliament adopted several other “important pieces of legislation,” including
one law that bans the use of symbols from the communist and national socialist
past, the taking down of monuments to all communist leaders, and the
elimination of all place names linked to the Soviet and communist leadership.
Implementing all these pieces of
legislation is not going to be easy. “Taking down monuments [to Lenin] is one
thing; renaming thousands of streets, squares and allies” is another. It will
be expensive and for some longtime residents inconvenient, and there will be
resistance as well as questions about what names should be employed instead.
But in all these cases, whatever the
problems there may be, Ukraine has shown that it plans to follow the European
path rather the Russian one, the historian says. “In Russia, in 1990-1992, there
were attempts to change place names. But like with many other reforms, the move
stopped not having gone even half way.”
Leningrad was renamed St.
Petersburg, and Sverdlovsk was renamed Yekaterinburg, but the oblasts around
them remained what they were: Leningrad and Sverdlovsk. And while some streets
in some cities have been renamed, most Russians continue to “live on Lenin
Prospects, and the centers of their cities are decorated with statues of Lenin.”
The continuing presence of Lenin’s
mausoleum on Red Square, Artemyev says, is “one of the most visible
testimonials of the piddling nature of real changes after 1991.” Putin today is
so popular that “if he decided to carry out the mummy and close that
institution, no mass protests would take place.”
And the fact that he has not done so and
that his regime continues “to support the relics of Sovietism,” the Russian
historian says, “likely shows that “they are important and dear to [the
leadership] in and of themselves and not because [any move against them] would
generate social tensions.”
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