By Maksym Vikhrov
On the 8th of May, the majority of western-European nations commemorate the memories of the dead in the Second World War, as well as the victory over Nazism in Europe. Ukraine joined this tradition in 2015, by introducing the 8th of May as the day of the defeat of Nazism. Besides this commemoration, Ukraine also commemorates 9th of May, as the Victory day that was left from its Soviet past. In 2015, according to the laws of decommunization laws, this holiday was officially renamed to the Day of the Victory over Nazism in the Second World War. But this year, President Volodymyr Zelensky abolished this holiday. From now on, on May 9, Ukraine will celebrate Europe Day. This decision was not spontaneous. Calls to cancel the Soviet Victory Day have been heard in Ukraine for many years. It is necessary to explain why there is a strong demand in Ukrainian society for a break with the Soviet memorial tradition.
Political Memory Games
I myself remember very well as to how Victory Day was celebrated during my childhood – in the 1990’s in Luhansk. On the morning of the 9th of May, I went to my great-grandmother Tetiana, who in her youth, lived through the horrors of the Second World War. We drank tea, listened to the radio and she she took out of the box The Order of the Red Star and the medal «For Combat Merit» – the awards of her late husband, my great-great-grandfather Dmуtrо. He died when I was too young and hence I learned about his military career in the ranks of the Red Army from other relatives.
The center of Luhansk was bustling with festive activities. Local authorities paid their respects by laying flowers at the Pylon of Glory, while old Soviet war songs reverberated through the loudspeakers. The main focus was on the veterans who were showered with attention and respect on this day. People strolled around the squares and parks and savored the warmth of the spring and their well-deserved day off. Some people celebrated Victory Day at home with their families, gathering around the table for a festive meal. In essence, the day was spent in an atmosphere of tranquil joy and relaxation as each year, the horrors of the war were pushed back further into the past.
Everything began to change in the second half of the 2000s. Here we need to take a brief look at the political history of Ukraine. In 2004, one of the most crucial events in our country’s history occurred – the Orange Revolution. President Leonid Kuchma refused to run for a third term and planned to transit power to Viktor Yanukovych, who, along with the Party of Regions, represented the interests of the oligarchic elites of the south-east of Ukraine. The political stronghold of the Party of Regions was Donbas (Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts), where Viktor Yanukovych himself came from, and where most of the key figures of the above mentioned business-political clan originated.
The Orange revolution of 2004 became a lengthy and dramatic confrontation. The government tried to falsify the results in favor of Viktor Yanukovych, however the mass protests in favor of Viktor Yushchenko, his opponent, nullified these attempts. The Party of Regions also made tremendous efforts to mobilize its supporters, primarily concentrated in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine. It should also be noted that there was a deep ideological antagonism between the two camps at the time. Yanukovych embodied a pro-Russian vector – the return of Ukraine to the sphere of political, economic, and cultural influence of Russia. Meanwhile, Viktor Yushchenko represented the national-democratic camp and ran for election under the slogans of rapprochement with the European Union and the cultural decolonization of Ukraine.
Overall, it could have been an internal discussion in a young, up and coming democratic country. However, when it became evident that victory was slipping out of the hands of Yanukovych, the Party of Regions resorted to brutal political blackmail. In November of 2004, in the city of Severodonetsk in the Luhansk oblast, the infamous meeting of deputies of the Party of Regions from eastern and southern regions took place.
To prevent Viktor Yushchenko from winning, the delegates began to threaten Kyiv with separatism -– through a proposed declaration of the South-Eastern Autonomous Republic. By the way, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, was present at that congress and expressed support for the participants and praised them for their «courage».
However, among ordinary supporters of the Party of Regions, separatist slogans did not have broad support. Slogans of a different sort were needed to mobilize more supporters of Yanukovych. And here, the political strategists of the Party of Regions decided to play with the society’s memory of the World War II. An aggressive propaganda campaign was launched in the southeastern regions, which went far beyond common sense. Viktor Yushchenko was called a fascist (in the post-Soviet political lexicon, «fascism» and «nazism» are synonyms), and the Orange Revolution was called the «brown plague» (this is how fascism/nazism was often called during the Soviet era).
Of course, all of this was absurd. Yushchenko’s father was a veteran of the Second World War and a prisoner of Auschwitz, and the Orange Revolution was focused on counteracting the falsification of the elections and a step towards integration with the European Union. But that was the exact moment when a new political fusion of ideas came to play in Ukrainian politics: the memory of the Second World War mixed with pro-Russian and separatist slogans and ideas. Even when Viktor Yanukovych took revenge and became president in 2010, the Party of Regions never stopped labeling its opponents as fascists.
From The Celebration Of Peace To The Rehearsal Of War
This disastrous political game had a significant impact on memorial practices. I witnessed how Victory Day gradually transformed from a celebration of peace into an annual rehearsal of war. By the end of the 2000s, during the ceremonies on 9th of May, the focus shifted from veterans, to the so-called “reconstructors”. They were members of historical societies and youth organizations affiliated with the Party of Regions, dressed as Soviet soldiers from the Second World War era. Rows of men marched through the city streets in full combat gear, with mock weapons and old army vehicles. At times, it felt as if some strange military training was taking place in the city, but for some reason, everything took place under the flags of the Party of Regions and with the direct participation of its officials.
Eventually, militarization had taken over all of the memorial days associated with the Second World War. The trend reached its peak just before the Russian invasion in 2013. In February, on the anniversary of the liberation of Luhansk in 1943, the military parade was held in the city. In April, a large-scale reconstruction of the battles for the liberation of Luhansk took place with hundreds of “soldiers”, dozens of armored vehicles, pyrotechnical shooting and explosions. The spectacle, spectated by 40,000 people, looked like the shooting of some sort of historical movie or a type of military training. Later, In May, on Victory Day, another parade of “reconstuctors” took place. And in September 2013, on the anniversary of the liberation of Luhansk Oblast, a Soviet T-34 tank, previously a monument, standing on a pedestal for four decades, was rolling through the city streets. At the same time, a tram styled as an armored train would be running through the city as well.
Henceforth, Victory Day became a rather gloomy and aggressive event. It seemed that its participants gathered not to honor the memory of the fallen and express gratitude to the veterans for peace, but to demonstrate their own readiness to start a battle with a new enemy. The Party of Regions persistently explained who the enemy was to their supporters, claiming year after year that “fascism is raising its head again” and that “descendants of Hitler’s occupiers” are threatening the Donbas. They were not talking about marginal far-right groups that never influenced Ukraine’s political or social life. They declared all political opponents of Viktor Yanukovych and his party as “fascists” or “descendants of fascists.”
It is also important to note that the political instrumentalization of Second World War commemoration was not the original invention of the Party of Regions. The political strategists of Yanukovych’s camp were copying the tactics of their counterparts in the Kremlin. It was actually the Kremlin that transformed the national memory of the Second World War into a militaristic cult: the naive slogan “Thank you grandad for victory!” was replaced by the grim promise “We can do it again”. All in all, this was a handy way to mobilize Russian society under the persona of Vladimir Putin, who was turning to authoritarian leader. In other post-Soviet countries, the 9th of May was the day when local pro-Russian fractions manifested their loyalty to Moscow.
A Russian game
For a long time, this “creative synergy” was used by the Party of Regions, which adhered to a strict pro-Russian vector. The role model for Viktor Yanukovych was Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who traded the sovereignty of his country for unlimited political and economic support from Moscow. Hence, when the Revolution of Dignity began in Ukraine in late 2013 and the Yanukovych regime was endangered, the Party of Regions once again, resorted to Russian political technologies. When the first protesters gathered on the Maidan square in Kyiv, carrying Ukrainian and EU flags, the Party of Regions declared them fascists. Such rhetoric had echoed through every possible channel that the Party of Regions could possibly use. The “Anti-Maidan” movement, which the Party of Regions created in opposition to the Revolution of Dignity, stood under the slogans of anti-fascism, combining them with the increasingly radical pro-Russian sentiments.
When at the end of February 2014 it became clear that Yanukovych’s regime was crumbling, the Party of Regions, as they did 10 years before, started to blackmail the nation with separatism. Due to the disorganization of party structures, the statements that were being delivered across various regions did not really correspond to one another. One of the most radical statements was made by the Luhansk Regional Council, which was under the complete control of the Party of Regions. Luhansk deputies declared that they “reserve the right to seek help from the brotherly people of the Russian Federation.” In many cities in the South and East of the country, self-defense groups initiated by the Party of Regions were already operating, assembled from the opponents of the new interim government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Olexandr Turchinov.
For a certain amount of time, it seemed that things would end the way they did back in 2004 – when the remnants of Yanukovych’s clan would receive certain political guarantees from the new government and would stop their blackmail. However, this time, Russia entered the game. The command of the self-defense groups was quickly hijacked by radical Russia-backed separatists and Russian agents such as Igor Girkin (Strelkov). Instead of defending the interests of the local oligarchic elites that stood behind the Party of Regions, they initiated Russia’s scenario of a hybrid invasion to Ukraine. Their symbol was the ribbon of Saint George, which not so long before, became the symbol of Victory Day – first in Russia, and then in Ukraine.
This was exactly the moment when the anti-fascist rhetoric and slogans appealing to the memory of the Second World War finally merged with the slogans of separatism. The coup in Donbas, which resulted in the declaration of two “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk, occurred under the slogans of “defense against fascist junta” which supposedly came to power in Kyiv. In 2014, Victory Day in Luhansk was again celebrated in the presence of armed men. Only now they were not “recontructors”, but real fighters of “people’s militia” with real weapons. Among them were both Russian citizens and local collaborators. The tragedy of the latter was that, as a result of years of propaganda, they turned their weapons not against the real ideological heirs of Hitler, but against their own fellow citizens and their own country.
By the time of these tragic events, my great-grandmother Tetiana had already passed, and was resting in peace alongside her husband Dmytro, my great-grandfather. I sincerely miss them, but I am glad that their life paths have ended in a peaceful Ukraine. I am happy that they did not witness the terrible desecration of the memory of World War II, when anti-fascist slogans were first used for dirty political games, and then to justify armed aggression against Ukraine. Last year Vladimir Putin launced a “special military operation” against our country exactly under the slogan of “denazification” of Ukraine.
A year ago, historian Timothy Snyder made a comprehensive diagnosis of this phenomenon on the front pages of The New York Times. «Soviet anti-fascism, in other words, was a politics of us and them. That is no answer to fascism. – Snyder wrote. It was not an honest response to facism». The historian noted that Soviet anti-fascism had no other purpose than to point out the enemy and label them, and this left an opportunity for fascism to return to Russia itself. According to Snyder, Putin used the same tactic. «For the president [Putin – Ed.], a “fascist” or a “Nazi” is simply someone who opposes him or his plan to destroy Ukraine. Ukrainians are “Nazis” because they do not accept that they are Russians and resist». Unfortunately, in the past, some Ukrainian elites were too cynical (and shortsighted) to apply destructive technology in their own country. The consequences of this turned out to be even more tragic than could have been imagined before.
This is why Ukraine breaks with the Soviet memorial tradition. That’s not about pushing the memories of the Second World War away from public consciousness, but to cleanse them of the toxicity of political manipulation. I will always remember and respect my great-grandfather, Dmytro Chakov, a recipient of the Red Star Order, who fought on the frontlines of the Second World War. But his battle achievements should not be a resource for separatist, Putinist, or any other type of propaganda.
