The Warlord

The Zaporizhzhia communists officially unveiled the bust of Stalin on 5 May 2010, a few days before the 65th anniversary of VE Day. On 9 May, in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, a monument was unveiled to the victims of atrocities commit­ted by the Bandera faction of the OUN during and after World War II.

The Zaporizhzhia ceremony was attended by numerous Red Army veterans. Some of them, wearing military uniforms decorat­ed with combat awards, formed an honor guard next to the mon­ument. “We built the monument at the request of our veterans,” stated Aleksei Baburin, the first secretary of the Zaporizhzhia regional committee of the CPU and a deputy of the Ukrainian parliament. The inscription on the monument identified Stalin not only as head of the Soviet state but also as a generalissimo. The depiction of Stalin in a marshal’s uniform and epaulettes, along with the date of the ceremony, the uniforms of the honor guard, and the inscription on the monument left no doubt that the communists were seeking to legitimize the monument to a figure extremely controversial in Ukraine by linking him with the well-established Soviet narrative of the victory of the Sovi­et people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, as the Soviet- German segment of World War II became known in the USSR. The reference to Red Army veterans was a crucial element of that legitimization. “Only those who do not honor their grandfathers and fathers can get involved in a discussion of whether this is needed or not,” asserted Baburin with regard to the monument.

One of the main speakers at the event was Ivan Shekhovtsov, who donated the largest sum for the construction of the monu­ment: 50,000 hryvnias (close to US $7,000) out of the total cost of 106,000 hryvnias. Shekhovtsov, a retired Soviet-era criminal prosecutor from Kharkiv, first made a name for himself in the late 1980s when he initiated his first lawsuit in defense of the honor and dignity ofJoseph Stalin. Altogether Shekhovtsov filed close to twenty suits defending his hero’s reputation against attacks on him by such people as the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich. Even now, he continues to claim that it was the Germans, not Stalin’s NKVD, who executed the Polish officers in Katyn Forest, and that the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 had nothing to do with the policies of Stalin and his associates. His advocacy of Stalin caused a breach in his family. Shekhovtsov’s wife of many years and his two children, both lawyers, broke all relations with him, but he continued his activities after the disintegration of the USSR.

In 2004 Shekhovtsov published a four-volume study entitled Delo StaΓιna-'prestupnιka" i ego ‘‘zashchitnika' (The Case of Stalin the “Criminal” and of His “Defender”). To publish the book he turned for money to his wealthy children, but they refused to support the project. Shekhovtsov eventually found a sponsor in Russia to whom he promised to return the loan. It is not clear who the sponsor was and what happened to the loan, but in 2012 Shekhovtsov unexpectedly came up with 50,000 hryvnias for the construction of the Stalin monument. He claimed to have made the donation out of his pension. Given that the average pension in Ukraine does not exceed US $300.00, and most of that money goes for food, Shekhovtsov’s donation was nothing short of a miracle. But so was the installation of a monument to Stalin in a country that had celebrated the victory of the Orange Revolution five years earlier.⁵

Shekhovtsov welcomed those gathered at the ceremonial un­veiling as citizens of the Soviet Union.

The Soviets, for their part, turned her into a war hero. Accord­ing to the propaganda myth, before her execution Zoia allegedly exclaimed: “Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!” It was the myth of a life given in service to Stalin that captured the imagination of the young Ivan Shekhovtsov, then a private in the Red Army. Addressing the Zaporizhzhia gathering, Shekhovtsov added another important element to the old myth: Stalin, it was said, had personally visited the grave of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia. The reference to Stalin paying tribute to one of his fallen soldiers reinforced the connection between the Stalin monument and the theme of the Great Patriotic War.⁶

That theme found its reflection in the comments that the Zaporizhzhia communists began to collect in June 2010 in a spe­cial book dedicated to the Stalin monument. At first, most of the visitors who were asked to leave their comments in the book were from outside Ukraine. A certain Afinogenov, a retired major from the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, concluded his laudatory comment on the brave Zaporozhians who had dared to put up a monument to Stalin with the war-era slogan “For the Moth­erland, for Stalin!” The retired Colonel A. Lugansky from Odesa wrote that without Stalin there would have been no victory in the war. He also concluded his comments with a war-era slogan: “Victory will be ours!” Aleksandr Belenky from Israel stressed Stalin’s role in the construction of socialism and in winning the “Great Victory.” He also wrote that his grandfather, a Red Army artillery soldier, had been killed in the “Great Patriotic War.”

Eventually, as locals were also invited to leave their comments in the book, they indicated victory in the war as Stalin’s major achievement. The Reverend Vasilii, a retired archbishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, thanked the regional committee of the Communist Party for keeping alive the memory of a “great person.” He was especially moved by Stalin’s alleged order to take an icon of the Kazan Mother of God into the skies over Moscow and Lenin­grad in order to entreat divine protection of the capitals from a German takeover. Many stressed in their comments that this was a monument to Generalissimo Stalin.⁷