Ukraine / Russia / Holodomor

Yanukovych, Stalin and the Ukrainian Famine
By Taras Kuzio
KyivPost.com, May 6, 2010
"On May 5, the Communist Party unveiled a bust of Soviet leader and war criminal Josef Stalin in Zaporizhya. A second Stalin bust is rumored to be ready for Odesa. Billboards of Stalin have already gone up in Luhansk. What is going on in Ukraine? This is par for the course, to some degree. After all, Kyiv still has a statue to Vladimir Lenin, who created the Soviet secret police and established the gulag long before Stalin. Ukraine still has a Communist Party that is part of the ruling majority with the dominant Party of Regions, which stands for oligarchic capitalists, theoretically the opposite of what the Communists stand for. But the unveiling of the Zaporizhya bust of Stalin and President Viktor Yanukovych's disregard for public sentiment shows reactionary policies at work. The gradual rehabilitation of Stalin, under way in Russia and Belarus, is now creeping into Ukraine, the former Soviet republic that has done the most to denounce Stalin and his crimes.
Yanukovych has moved away from the admittedly controversial view of the famine as genocide. But he also seeks to downplay the famine. On the day of his Feb. 25 inauguration, the famine section on www.president.gov.ua was removed. State Security Service head Valeriy Khoroshovsky closed the agency's archives, which had released documents from the Soviet KGB and its predecessors outlining totalitarian crimes against Ukrainians. A 1+1 journalist has also complained about the famine becoming a taboo subject on commercial channels owned by pro-presidential oligarchs. He claimed that new directives that resemble Kuchma era temnyky are being give to television stations. Stalin's rehabilitation in Ukraine has not gone unnoticed in the West. It will be another nail in the coffin of Ukraine’s hopes of being seen as European. [...]"