Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, has strongly defended controversial new "de-communisation" laws that underscore its break with Russia, amid warnings that they could stifle free speech and deepen divisions in the embattled country.
The laws ban communist symbols and denial of the “criminal nature” of the Soviet communist regime, demand the renaming of towns and streets which honour Soviet officials and throw open Ukraine’s KGB archives.
They also outlaw Nazi symbols, while prohibiting denial of the role that nationalist guerrillas played in fighting for Ukraine’s independence during the second World War. These militias sometimes fought alongside the Germans in resisting Soviet forces, and Russia denounces them as fascist collaborators.
Mass graves
“I’ve done what I had to do, and signed laws on de-communisation, on recognising the heroes of the national-liberation struggle,” Mr Poroshenko said yesterday, at a site near Kiev where Josef Stalin’s secret police buried tens of thousands of their victims in mass graves.
“The Ukrainian state has done its job – now historians must do their work, and the authorities should concern themselves with the future.”
Critics in Ukraine and the West fear the vague wording of the laws and the threat of prosecution will prevent open discussion of the country's history, which is complex, clouded by decades of Soviet propaganda and viewed very differently in different regions.
For millions in Ukraine, last year’s revolution marked a historic pivot to the West and a break with Russia and the Soviet past, and scores of statues of Lenin have already been hauled down.
But many older Ukrainians, especially in eastern areas, would vehemently deny that the Soviet Union was a "criminal" regime, and share the official Soviet and Russian view that Ukraine's wartime nationalist guerrillas were "fascists".
The Russian-backed separatists who control part of Donetsk and Luhansk regions strongly proclaim their Soviet heritage, adopting its symbols and pledging that their “people’s republics” will bring back the certainties of the Soviet period.
For its part, Moscow says the laws are anti-Russian and "totalitarian".
Time for ‘cleansing’
Speaking at the Bykovnya memorial to victims of Stalin’s repressions, Mr Poroshenko said he had no doubt about the necessity of the new laws. “I advise those who oppose de-communisation to come here to Bykovnya, and listen to what these victims of Soviet terror are crying out for,” he said. “Has the time not come to finally cleanse Ukraine of the symbols of a regime that destroyed millions of innocent people?”
