Stalin vs. Bandera

Not everyone in Zaporizhzhia was happy with the installation of the monument to Stalin or accepted the notion that anyone showing respect for veterans of World War II had to put up with the monument.

Half an hour before midnight on 31 December 2010, a blast shook the environs of the communist headquarters. It was the time of night when people were opening bottles of champagne and setting off fireworks, but the sound that came from the com­pound had nothing to do with New Year’s celebrations. It accom­panied a blast that destroyed the Stalin bust hastily repaired only a few days earlier. Although the base survived, the bust itself was blown to bits. The largest fragment was that of the generalissimo’s left hand, holding a marshal’s epaulette. The glass was blown out of the windows, and the hammer and sickle above the entrance to the building hung at a crazy angle. Who had blown up the monument? The opinions of readers of the Internet publication Ukrainska pravda, known for its liberal nationalist views, were divided. It could either have been the nationalists finishing the job or the authorities themselves, pursuing their own political agenda. “Whatever it is, it’s a delight all the same! Happy New Year, gentlemen!” remarked a reader in the discussion column.⁹

As had been the case a few days earlier, there was an or­ganization prepared to claim responsibility for the attack.

Although the statement used some of the language employed by nationalists, its calls for terrorist acts and anti-Semitism had no parallels in recent Ukrainian history. The authorities termed the demolition of the Stalin monument an act of terrorism. The search for the perpetrators began. It did not take very long to find the members of Tryzub who had claimed responsibility for de­capitating the monument—they were soon arrested, interrogated, and put behind bars—but it was much more difficult to pick up the trail of those who had blown up the monument a few days later and issued a statement calling for violence and ethnic hatred. Many in the nationalist and liberal camps believed that the task was impossible, as the authorities themselves were behind the act. Suspicions of that nature intensified as the authorities arrested leaders of the largest nationalist party, Svoboda (Liberty), which had its power base in western Ukraine but was gaining strength in the center and east of the country. A regional governor declared that the organization’s leaders were preparing a coup d’etat and planning to shoot down President V iktor Yanukovych’s airplane.

Whoever was behind the explosion that destroyed the Stalin monument in Zaporizhzhia, the fact that responsibility for its previous decapitation was claimed by an organization named after Stepan Bandera immediately placed the event into the context of Ukrainian memory wars, which, ever since the Orange Rev­olution, had pitted Red Army veterans against veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a World War II partisan formation led by members of the OUN. The statement of the “Movement of ³ January” highlighted the issue of anti-Semitism and violence as a common feature of nationalist thinking and actions. The two competing narratives of World War II—the Soviet-era myth of the Great Patriotic War versus that of the Ukrainian nationalist underground’s heroic resistance to both communists and Na- zis—again came crashing into the Ukrainian public sphere. By no coincidence whatever, the first narrative was embodied by the figure of Stalin, the second by that of Bandera.

According to a poll taken in the fall of 2010, Bandera was the second least popular figure in Ukraine after Stalin. If Stalin was viewed negatively by 64 percent of those polled, Bandera scored 51 percent. Supporters of both historical figures were equal in num­ber—28 percent of those polled. As in the case of Stalin, Bandera’s supporters and opponents were divided along geographic lines. While Bandera was favored by 58 percent in the west, his support reached only 9 percent in the east of the country.¹²

The division of Ukrainian historical memory of World War II along the Stalin-Bandera line found its most vivid representation in two developments that took place in January 2010, the last full month of President Viktor Yushchenko’s tenure. On 13 January, a Kyiv court declared Stalin and other leading members of the communist regime in Russia and Ukraine guilty of the crime of genocide, as they had created conditions for the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33.

The Zaporizhzhia monument to Stalin was in many ways a response to the erection of numerous monuments to Bandera in the western regions of the country during the previous decade. The largest of them, in the city of Lviv, was unveiled in 2007. After Yanukovych’s victory, the communists believed that they could get away with a monument to their anti-Bandera, Stalin. They were not entirely alone in their desire to do so. Asked about the monument to Stalin, Vasyl Khara, a member of parliament from the ruling Party of Regions, called Bandera and the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych, “enemies of our people, scoundrels and traitors who destroyed the people.” He then asked a rhetorical question: “So why could they put up monuments to those scoundrels, but there can be no monument to Stalin?”¹⁴

The destruction of the Stalin monument on New Year’s Eve ãîþ led to a new escalation of memory wars in Ukraine and the partition of Ukrainian memory space along the Stalin-Bandera line. Petro Symonenko, the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, called on his cadres to “show solidarity and unite for struggle against neo-Nazi nationalist evil and oligarchs who sponsor fascist organizations and parties.” He also called on Pres­ident Yanukovych to revoke the awards bestowed on the war-era nationalist leaders by his predecessor.

Symonenko was not the only communist to counterpose a good Stalin to an evil Bandera. Quite a few of the communists who wrote their comments in the book at the Stalin monument in Zaporizhzhia did likewise. One of them claimed in the summer of ãîþ that Stalin was a true leader, not like Yushchenko, Tymo­shenko, and Yatseniuk, then Ukraine’s political leaders, who had allegedly betrayed their people as Bandera, Shukhevych, and the eighteenth-century Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa, who raised a revolt against Peter I, had done before them. The communist demands were eventually heard in Kyiv. The blast created the right political atmosphere for taking the award of Hero of Ukraine away from the nationalist leader. Eleven days after the destruction of the Stalin monument, the Yanukovych administration declared that the title of Hero of Ukraine awarded to Bandera had been officially rescinded. The Ukrainian courts did so on a technical­ity—by law, the award could not be given to a noncitizen of Ukraine, and Bandera, who was killed on KGB orders in October 1959 while in exile in West Germany, had been a citizen of Poland but never of Ukraine.¹⁶