SEMYONOVKA, Ukraine — A young policeman knocked
on Ivan M. Papchenko’s front door one recent afternoon, brandishing a complaint
from the National Memory Institute of Ukraine and demanding to know why this village had
resurrected Lenin.
Semyonovka stood accused of being a
“de-communization” scofflaw.
Mr. Papchenko, the local Communist Party chief,
refused to concede that anything was remotely amiss. The Lenin statue, he said,
was long gone from the town’s Red Square. The expanse of naked asphalt, even
more dreary without the statue, does not exactly conjure up the grand Moscow
version.
Instead, Semyonovka’s 12-foot, silver-colored
Lenin with his right arm extended had been propped back up on a plinth tucked
away in a leafy park. “We want to preserve this small corner of Soviet
history,” said Mr. Papchenko, 67, a stout former school principal whose
multiple gold molars attested to his own life in the U.S.S.R. “If they destroy
all signs of the past whenever the ideology changes, what will be left?”
Ukraine has embarked on a quest for a new
identity, a fallout from the hybrid war that President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia unleashed in early 2014. The country is
trying to separate itself from the long historical baggage of the Russian and
Soviet empires.
Vladimir Vyatrovich, 38, a historian and the
head of Ukraine’s National Memory Institute, predicted somewhat rashly that if
the effort succeeded in Ukraine, it would cause fateful reverberations next
door.
Russia’s modern identity basically started with
the 17th-century invasion of what is now Ukraine, Mr. Vyatrovich said. “So the
moment when Ukraine finally manages to become a totally independent state will
also be the moment when Russia’s imperialistic identity ends.”
Mr. Vyatrovich helped push four “memory laws”
through Parliament last spring.
The laws dumped the Soviet traditions for
commemorating World War II, opened up what K.G.B. secret police archives remained in Ukraine
and sought to rehabilitate certain Ukrainian independence fighters whom Moscow
had long pilloried as Nazi collaborators.
The fourth law, the one with arguably the most
tangible effect nationally, required the removal of all names and symbols
linked to the Communist or Nazi past.
A fight has emerged over the Communist symbols,
however, not unlike that between supporters and opponents of the Confederate
battle flag in the southern United States.
For opponents, the Lenin statues might as well
be Russian agents.
“A concentration of Lenin statues is a sign of
danger where ‘polite people’ might appear,” Mr. Vyatrovich said in an interview.
Polite people is the Russian euphemism for the anonymous Russian Special Forces
troops who seized Crimea.
His allies argue that the statues clash with the
democratic values that Ukrainians want to instill in the next generation.
Fans of the Communist-era symbols tend to be
older Ukrainians who still long for the Soviet era. They and others argue that
Ukraine faces far more severe problems, like an economic nose dive, that should
take precedence, and furthermore that the state should not mandate historical
interpretation.
“They
behave like Bolsheviks: ‘We have to wipe out the past!’ ” said Georgiy V.
Kasyanov, a historian and education reform activist. “They think the Soviet
legacy can be destroyed by destroying statues of Lenin or by renaming streets,
which is false. They are wrestling with ghosts.”
Critics call destroying the symbols a sop to the
small but vocal right-wing movement. The main font of a new identity, they
argue, should be a definition of citizenship that incorporates Tatars, Jews,
Poles and others ostracized for centuries.
Lenin statues and Lenin streets used to be
ubiquitous. “This was Leninland,” Mr. Vyatrovich said, with 5,500 statues in
Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
By the time of the Maidan uprising in Kiev that
toppled the pro-Russian government in February 2014, Ukraine was down to about
1,300 Lenins, he said. Five hundred more have come crashing down since.
Many towns hit on the idea of selling the
statues — often bronze — for scrap and paying wage arrears or buying new
streetlights or even, occasionally, armored cars for volunteer fighters.
Some efforts proved more successful than others.
One of the largest Lenin statues in Ukraine, in the city of Kharkiv, was
dismembered.
Activists hoping to pay for military equipment
for volunteers fighting separatists in eastern Ukraine tried to auction it off
piecemeal online, including an ear that weighed nearly 80 pounds. The sellers
rue the day they rejected a $2,000 offer for the ear as too low — they never
got another bid, according to one organizer.
Apart from the statues, 910 cities and towns
need new names, as do tens of thousands of streets.
Some places have balked at rebranding.
Dnipropetrovsk, for example, Ukraine’s third-largest city, was named in 1926 in
honor of Grigory Petrovsky, a now forgotten leader of the Russian Revolution.
It became famous as the Soviet Union’s “rocket city” with that name and wants
to keep it.
Each City Hall has until Nov. 21 to make the
changes. If they do not, Parliament will do it for them by Feb. 21. Many towns
established websites where residents can vote on new names.
In Kiev, a television comedy show suggested the
modern landmark Moscow Bridge be renamed the Not Moscow Bridge.
City Hall in Kiev said it would pull down about
100 statues.
In the southern port of Odessa, one sizable
Lenin statue was recast as Darth Vader, complete with a Wi-Fi router in his
headgear.
In Semyonovka, in northeastern Ukraine some 10
miles from the Russian border, about 20 street names need changing. They have
not gotten very far. One proposal would rename Collective Farm Street after
Maxim Grachov, a 29-year-old who died fighting the separatists.
In some ways, Semyonovka is a typical Ukrainian
town that time forgot. Farmers clop along on horse-drawn carts. Dozens of
little log cabins grace the unpaved side streets. The toilet for the squat
apartment block that houses the Communist Party office is in an outhouse.
Semyonovka’s Lenin statue survived its initial
removal intact, lifted by a crane and carted off Red Square.
“I wept,”
said Ivan Kovalenko, 69, a retired engineer. “The West said it could not defeat
us with weapons, so it decided to destroy us from within with prostitution and
democracy.”
An outcry ensued, at least among older people
who remember when Semyonovka had 15 thriving factories and 15,000 people. Most
of the factories are shuttered, and the population has shrunk to around 9,000.
Did bringing down Lenin suddenly make their
lives better, statue lovers have asked bitterly. City Hall initially quieted
the debate in April 2014 by erecting Lenin in the secluded spot. Then the issue
came roaring back to life along with the memory laws.
Members of the committee assigned to deal with
the Communist symbols started hearing from anonymous phone callers who growled
that if the committee did not remove the statue, someone else would.
Still they resisted.
And continue to. A woman wearing a navy blue
bathrobe, hearing why foreigners were visiting recently, came bowling over,
shaking her fist.
“You think Lenin’s statue is the biggest problem
we have?” she yelled. “Try living on a pension of $40 a month. How much do you
live on? At least Lenin organized the electrification of this country. Pretty
soon we will be back to the conditions that existed before Lenin.”
Young residents shrug off the statue’s fate. The
stalwarts, however, plotted to save it. They hit on the idea of historical
value, declaring their silvery Lenin part of a small local history museum.
The National Memory Institute will not have it,
Mr. Vyatrovich said. “If it is in a public place, it is still totalitarian
propaganda.”
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