Stockholm, Friday.
This year it has been 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, three decades later, decommunication is still going on.
This means, among other things, that all names of streets, cities, villages and squares that bear the slightest trace of a Soviet past are given new names, or old ones – from the time before the Soviet Union existed.
The other day, on the spot in Kiev, I met the Generalization Officer himself, at the Institute of National Remembrance, who proudly announced that around 10,000 Soviet-sounding names had been replaced so far.
Thus, countless Lenin, Kirov, Gorky, and Red Army villages and streets have been renamed.
It has not been without controversy. Because at the same time as trying to erase the legacy of Lenin, they have taken on names from other historical personalities that many Ukrainians see as freedom fighters but who others remember for their anti-Semitism and association with the Nazis. Therefore, the government now says, new names should be as neutral and harmless as possible.
So it is in Ukraine.
In neighboring Belarus, very little has happened in 30 years and no wonder with a president whose career began as a kolkhoz chairman and who regularly announces new five-year plans.
In the Russian capital Moscow, where the Soviet Union practically died in those August days in 1991, a vote was launched yesterday on the website Aktivnyj grazjdanin, Active Citizen, about who should once again stand statue on Lubyan Square, outside the security police FSB, former KGB, headquarters.
In August this year, 30 years ago, the people tore down the then statue, over the father of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, commonly known as Iron Feliks.
The people of Moscow who go to the Active Citizen website have two men of history to choose from: Either Alexander Nevsky, the 13th-century warrior hero, or – yes, just that – Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Iron-Felix.
So it may be that the man who was involved in creating one of the most repressive systems of the 20th century saw, after 30 years, can believe there again on Lubyan Square in Moscow.
When I mentioned this to the Generalization General in Kiev, he shook his head and said with almost excessive compassion in his voice that he felt sorry for his fellow human beings in Russia and Belarus who had not gone further than that. Or, even worse, which is even heading back in time.
Then he said that after all, there is a lot of work left to do in Ukraine as well. Because it is not enough to change the names of streets and squares. The most difficult thing, he said, is to take out of the people the Soviet ideas that were rubbed in so carefully that 30 years is not enough.
Especially not if you start building the same kind of system again, or, for that matter, start reclaiming old heroes as controversial as the ones you removed.
Source: ICELAND NEWS