The Return of the Tyrant
The Zaporizhzhia communists felt it a matter of honor to restore the monument to Stalin. Indeed, on 7 November 2011, slightly more than ten months after the first monument was blown up by still undetermined perpetrators, they unveiled a bust of Stalin on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
This time they encountered more obstacles on the part of the civic authorities than they had with the original installation. The authorities in Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia alike were opposed to the monument, and the city council finally agreed to its installation only as an interior feature of the building that housed the local headquarters of the Communist Party.The communists placed their new bust of Stalin in a bay window of their reconstructed building. There was another change as well. Along with Stalin, in the other wing of their building, the communists installed a monument to none other than Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, the heroine of Ivan Shekhovtsov, the pensioner from Kharkiv who had donated 50,000 hryvnias to build the original monument. This time, apparently, Shekhovtsov had run out of funds but not out of ideas. He was not mentioned among the major donors to the reconstruction, but Kosmodemianskaia featured as prominently in the Zaporizhzhia pantheon as Stalin. The dictator’s association with the history of the world war and the legitimization of his cult by means of Great Patriotic War mythology were strengthened in the new version of the monument.20
With the perpetrators who had blown up the original monument still at large (the authorities had to release the leaders of the nationalist Svoboda Party after it proved impossible to link them to the blast), and the Tryzub members who had cut off Stalin’s head a few days previously behind bars, no one seemed willing to launch another assault on the monument. The new attack on it came from unexpected sources and was carried out in an unusual manner.
Local journalists got together to produce and display on a downtown billboard a poster challenging the legitimacy of the Stalin monument in the context of the same historical mythology that legitimized it—the mythology of World War II. The poster, which went on display in December 2011, depicted the figure of Adolf Hitler, his hands spread in apparent disappointment. The text read: “What makes me any worse than Stalin? Give me a monument as well.” A line in smaller print at the bottom of the poster explained the reason for the action: “Let’s rid the city of its shame!” The reference was of course to the Stalin monument.21The communists challenged the display of the poster on legal grounds. Ukraine has a law against fascist propaganda, and the portrait of Hitler was interpreted as such. The Hitler poster was soon removed, but a new one, sponsored by the same group of journalists, took its place. It bore an image of Stalin (Ukraine did not, at that time, have a law against the propaganda of Stalinism). The text of the new poster read: “I killed millions of Ukrainians, and what have you done to deserve a monument?” The line at the bottom in smaller print remained unchanged: “Let’s rid the city of its shame!” This time the installation of the monument to Stalin was challenged on the basis of a different historical myth—that of the Great Famine of 1932-33.22
While the heroization of Bandera left the Ukrainian nationalliberal intellectuals divided and disoriented, attempts to glorify Stalin by building him a monument in Zaporizhzhia offered grounds for solidarity across national-liberal lines. Comparing Stalin to Hitler and presenting him as a criminal responsible for the death of millions of Ukrainians during the Great Famine were two main themes on which liberals and nationalists agreed with one another. In November 2011, as a district court in Zaporizhzhia was deciding the fate ofTryzub members accused of decapitating the Stalin monument, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the new leader of Viktor Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, was reported in the media to have “reminded both representatives of the procuracy and judges deciding the case that by decision of the Kyiv Appellate Court of 13 January 2010, Stalin and his henchmen were found guilty of organizing the famine-genocide of the Ukrainian people.” Nalyvaichenko, himself a native of Zaporizhzhia, stated: “I remind all officials who tolerated the erection of a monument to Stalin in Zaporizhzhia that the criminality of the Stalin regime has been acknowledged by the parliamentary assemblies of the CSCE and the Council of Europe, and that their resolutions should be carried out by our state.”23
On 12 December 2011, a court in Zaporizhzhia sentenced nine members of the Tryzub organization, most of them young men from eastern Ukraine, to prison terms ranging from one to three years.
The implementation of the sentence was postponed, meaning that those sentenced were released from prison after the court ruling. They were ordered to compensate the Communist Party for 106,000 hryvnias spent on the construction of the monument, 50,000 of them donated by Ivan Shekhovtsov. Those sentenced appealed the court’s decision, but in June 2012 the regional court of appeal left the sentence without change. The same court ruled that the erection of the Stalin monument was an illegal act.The Tryzub members were tried and sentenced for causing damage to property that happened to belong to the Communist Party. In an interview given to media outlets after the court proceedings, the perpetrators showed no remorse for what they had done. They declared that, with the Yanukovych administration’s assumption of office, Ukraine had come under foreign occupation, and the installation of the monument to Stalin was an insult to the Ukrainian nation. To the disappointment of many liberals, there was no trace of liberal ideology in the statements of those who had toppled the symbol of the liberals’ main embodiment of evil—Joseph Stalin.24