ANALYSIS: Ukraine begins to deal seriously with Soviet past (03/09/03)

ANALYSIS

Ukraine begins to deal seriously with Soviet past

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

On February 12-13, Ukraine for the first time held parliamentary hearings on the question of the famine of 1932-1933 that led to the deaths of 7 million people. The hearings were held in accordance with a resolution passed by the Verkhovna Rada on November 28, 2002.

President Leonid Kuchma first suggested at the annual convention of the Federation of Trade Unions on October 21, 1997, that the annual anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, November 7, be transformed into a day of understanding and reconciliation. Such a step, he suggested, should be undertaken by the Verkhovna Rada. The legislature, then headed by Oleksander Moroz, with the largest faction being Communist, turned down the draft law establishing November 28 as an annual day of understanding and reconciliation.

Left-wing factions were removed from control of Parliament only in early 2000 when the center and national democrats united for the first and only time. At this time, Communist symbols on the Verkhovna Rada were finally removed, though a statue of Vladimir Lenin still stands in Kyiv - one of 500 still standing primarily outside Western Ukraine.

Ukraine has long held an ambivalent attitude toward its Soviet past. Until now, only a small monument to the famine has existed in Kyiv next to the rebuilt Mykhailivskyi Sobor. A presidential decree dated November 28, 2002, supported the call by the Ukrainian diaspora to build a far bigger monument to the famine in central Kyiv on the 70th anniversary of the famine this year. The new monument will be part of a Famine memorial complex housing a museum and research center.

Ukraine's attitude toward the Soviet past rests upon the three-way division of political forces in Ukraine. National democrats have long held negative views of the Soviet past and what they call its crimes against humanity, such as the Famine and Stalinist terror. National democrats, whose primary base is in western-central Ukraine, hold analogous views to their counterparts in the Baltic states that Soviet rule was an occupation by foreign, i.e. Russian, forces. According to the national democrats, Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, is guilty of Soviet crimes. During Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Ukraine in January to attend the CIS summit and to begin the Year of Russia in Ukraine, he and Russian Ambassador Viktor Chernomyrdin were asked by journalists if Russia would pay compensation to the famine victims along the lines undertaken by Germany after World War II. The Russian leaders refused to consider the matter.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) acknowledged only as late as 1990 that a famine had even taken place. At that time, Social Democratic Party-United (SDPU) parliamentary faction leader and former President Leonid Kravchuk was in charge of Communist ideology and propaganda. Many of today's "political scientists," such as Vice Prime Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk, lectured on Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet era and wrote articles condemning the diaspora for raising events such as the 1932-1933 famine.

The CPU was banned in August 1991 and then a new CPU was allowed to register in October 1993. During the Verkhovna Rada hearings on the famine, CPU leader Petro Symonenko denied that the famine was artificial and blamed it on disastrous weather conditions, low harvests in 1931-1932, the pre-Soviet agricultural heritage and local mismanagement.

Socialist Party Chairman Moroz argued that Soviet Ukraine reunited Ukrainian territories and, in contrast to the tsarist regime, it at least recognized Ukrainians as a separate ethnic group. The Socialists blame Stalinism for crimes committed in Ukraine, not Soviet rule as such. This view is similar to that espoused by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

What has most held up Ukraine's investigation of Soviet crimes against humanity has been the centrist camp, which hails from the top levels of the pre-1991 CPU. In 1990-1991 the Communist Party began to split into "sovereign-national communists" and "imperial communists." In the 1990s sovereign-national communists evolved into centrist oligarchs who first appeared as political parties in the 1998 elections.

The attitude of centrists is the most confusing, as they, unlike national democrats, refuse to condemn the Soviet regime as a whole, perhaps understandably, as they are themselves a product of that regime. Since Mr. Kuchma faced Mr. Symonenko in the 1999 presidential elections and used the "Red Scare" to encourage Ukrainians to vote for him in order to thwart a Communist comeback, centrists have been comfortable attacking Soviet crimes against humanity. In this, they hold similar views as the national democrats that the famine was a "genocide" on par with the Nazi Holocaust. During the Verkhovna Rada hearings, centrist and former Rada Chairman Ivan Pliusch blamed the "cruel and godless Bolshevik regime" for the famine.

At the same time, the center disagrees with the national democrats over whom to blame for Soviet crimes. Centrists blame Marxist-Leninist ideology and Stalinism - not Russians - for crimes, including the Famine. Both centrists and national democrats see the Famine as directed against Ukrainians.

The timing of the Verkhovna Rada hearings remains suspicious. On the one hand, President Kuchma undoubtedly wanted to deal with the issue early in the year, as it may cause difficulties with the Year of Russia in Ukraine. National democrats have already complained that the Year of Russia in Ukraine should not be held in the same year as the 70th anniversary of the Great Famine.

The hearings also took place a month before planned opposition protests. In his November 2002 decree, President Kuchma sought to inflame the already difficult relations between Our Ukraine and the Communist Party by putting them to yet another test. Our Ukraine has refused to join any joint opposition platform with the CPU and has only agreed to cooperate with the Socialists and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc.

A final factor is next year's presidential elections. With stable popularity ratings over the last three years of 25 to 30 percent, Mr. Yushchenko will inevitably advance to a second round. If he faces Mr. Symonenko, Ukraine would have a rerun of the 1999 elections, but this time pro-Kuchma centrists would be forced to rally behind a national democrat like Mr. Yushchenko. If Mr. Yushchenko faces a pro-Kuchma centrist, the CPU will back the centrist oligarch and thereby repeat its tactics of April 2001 when its members voted with the centrists to remove the Yushchenko government.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto.

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