Читать книгу Between Lenin and Bandera - Anna Kutkina - Страница 7

Pardon me, —the stranger responded gently, —but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years, but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?

—Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Statistics in the USSR ‘knew’ everything. It recorded the number of sewing machines, ballerinas, yard keepers, doctors and filmmakers. According to Ilf and Petrov, the only thing that was not known for sure was the number of chairs in the country. However, there was one more sphere outside the statistical control—monuments of Lenin. Gigantic and small, sitting and standing, made of granite and bronze, thousands of Lenin statues penetrated every corner of the vast Soviet land. Basic extrapolation and analysis of the photos of Lenin statues in Russia prior to 1991 indicate that there were a minimum of 7000 monuments and busts of the ‘great leader.’ At least visually, long-time-gone Lenin continued to ‘govern.’

Compared to Russia, where overall there was no in-depth data on cultural objects of the regions, the record of Lenin monuments in Ukraine was conducted more thoroughly. In 1987 the Institute of History of the Academy of Science of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic published a study— “Monuments of History and Culture of the Ukrainian SSR.” This work provided data on all monuments of the republic’s regions, both the pre-revolutionary and Soviet. It was stated in the foreword of the manual that there were over 4000 Lenin monuments in the republic. Out of almost 500 Ukrainian regional centres there has never been an official monument of Lenin installed in three western oblasts of Ukraine—Irshave, Volyn, and Shymske. In total, up until 1991 Ukraine has been the country with the highest concentration of communist symbols—over 5500 monuments of Lenin were raised in the cities, towns and villages. Of all Soviet republics, this makes Ukraine the host of the largest number of the ‘great leader.’ In his analysis of promulgation of communist statues in the USSR, Kudinov (2015) explains high concentration of Lenin monuments in Ukraine by the geopolitical and cultural particularity of the region—its geographical proximity to Europe and the re-occurring attempts of dissociation from the Russian Empire. Another popular explanation of the density of the communist symbols in Ukraine is grounded on the idea that the Soviet authorities implanted Lenin statues as means of ideological control—both physical and discursive reminders of the immortality and omnipresence of the communist rule (Michalsky 1998).

In Ukraine, the figure of Lenin has been a trigger of ambiguous sentiments since the early stages of Sovietization. Himself the symbol of the revolution and struggle against imperialism, Lenin embraces the coloniser, the Soviet Empire or the ‘other’—the discursive and ideological formation that obtained particular relevance within the socio-political context of (post)Euromaidan Ukraine. Cleared from his biographical or political ideas, Lenin is nothing but a monument. With the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula and an outbreak of war in Donbas in 2014, however, the narratives on the imperial ambition of the Russian Federation became particularly acute, and with that the figure of Lenin. Popular media and state discourses of the Russian Federation on the necessity of ‘restoration of the Slavic brotherhood’ and intervention of Russia into domestic affairs of Ukraine propelled the desire for eradication of any form of Russian presence within the socio-political and cultural space of Ukraine. The transformation of the Soviet heritage, thereby, obtained both regional and national scale.

On April 9 2015 the Ukrainian parliament adopted a bill that became known as the “decommunization laws.” The law ‘On condemning the Communist and National-Socialist totalitarian regimes and prohibiting the use of their symbols’ made provision for the removal of all communist monuments and symbols that “glorify functionaries of [the] Soviet totalitarian regime” (Gobert 2016). Inclined to be implemented within six months, the ‘Leninfall’ took over three years, and was marked by creative modes of adaptation of the statues and their pedestals to regional particularities of ‘decolonization.’ According to the authors of Looking for Lenin (2017), Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert, “there has been no consistency in handling [the statues]; they have been variously toppled and left unclaimed; stored away by the authorities; broken up or tampered with beyond recognition; or repossessed by hopeful locals.” Further questions that arise from this process are on how the communist monuments, as well as empty plinths of the dismantled statues, become canvases for articulation of personal, grassroots messages of both similar and opposing nature, and how the physical space of the statues could be used to address the government, fellow citizens, the Russian aggressor and even Lenin ‘himself.’

But before we proceed with further investigation, let us start from the very ‘beginning.’ The monuments to the leader of the world proletariat were installed as early as during his life, but it is his death that paved the way for “people’s” Leniniana—systemic emergence of peculiar and unusual monuments. On January 27 1924—the day of Lenin’s burial, the Second Congress of the Union of SSR published the resolution on the monuments of the leader. Besides the popular slogans on the ‘eternal life of Ilych in the minds and hearts of the fellow men and the generations to come,’ and ‘the heroic fight of the working class over the victory of socialism across the globe,’ the resolution required Central Electoral Committee of the USSR to develop and certify projects to the monuments of Lenin in Moscow, Kharkov, Tiflis, Minsk, Leningrad and Tashkent, and set the deadline for their erection (Kudinov 2015). This document provided the foundation for an official, monumental Leniniana that would grow into thousands of stone-bronze Ilych-s sprouting for over 60 years to come.

In the late 1960s, the newspaper “The Soviet Culture” published a note—the pioneers of the Ukrainian SSR discovered a photo that captured the unveiling of the Lenin monument in Zhytomyr on November 7 1922. The photo was delivered with the following text: “Look closely at this image, the reader. What you see is the first-time monumental sculpture of the founding father of the Communist party of the Soviet state.” The bust was presented next to the Palace of Labour to honor the fifth anniversary of the revolution. Made of bronze that was received from the soldiers of Nikolai Shchors’s squad who donated their collets and old weapons for the matter, the monument was announced to be the first statue of Lenin in Ukraine.

As was discovered later, however, in spring of 1919 the Kievan newspaper “Bilshovyk” has published a reference to “eight busts of the leaders of the proletariat [to be] installed: the bust to Lenin and Trotsky at the Sofiivska square, the bust to Taras Shevchenko at the former Tsar’s square, the bust to Karl Marx at Dumska square, the bust to Sverdlov at Pechersk, the bust to Karl Libknekht at Teatralna square, the bust to Engels at the Vasylkivska Street, and the bust to Rosa Luxemburg at Alexandrovskaya square. However, the busts were not meant to last long. The Denikinites1 and the Petlurovites2 destroyed revolutionary art. Shortly after, the “Bilshovyk” would share: “...The revolutionary monuments were chopped with checkers.”

According to local press of the time, sculptures and busts of Vladimir Illych were installed in the early 1920s in Kyiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Chernihiv and Sumi right after the formation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Shortly after, Kharkiv newspaper “The Communist” also announced the installation of the first monument of Lenin designed by the local author Kratko. Another monument to Lenin unveiled in his lifetime was the statue in Luhansk—in 1922, it was installed by the train modellist I.P. Borunov. During the Second World War, the statue was sent to Italy to be melted down, where it was stolen and hidden by local partisans until the end of the war. In 1945, it was discovered in the National Gallery of Rome, and was presented to the citizens of Cavriago for Lenin’s ‘100 year birth anniversary.’ Back in the days, the citizens of Cavriago passed the resolution in support of “Russian Sovetists” and elected Lenin an honorary mayor of Cavriago (Kudinov 2015).

After his death, the number of Lenin-s skyrocketed—busts, statues and commemoration boards were erected at all corners of the Soviet Union. In 1969 the local newspapers published a series of articles about unique statue installed in Kremenchug:

“It happened in January 1924...The citizens were coming to Dnepr from morning till evening to see the monument of V.I.Lenin, which appeared on ice next to Fantasy island. The plinth, crafted masterly, said: “May you sleep peacefully, dear Illych. We will make your testament come true.” The monument was designed by the workers of the Kremenchug port, who collected different photos of Lenin and transformed them into an ice-bust with the help of a self-taught artist. The only problem with the postament was that spring was coming soon. And so the workers decided to commemorate Ilych by collectively joining the party.”

By the end of the 1920s-early 1930s, professional sculptors Kozlov, Korolev and Kotikhin created a number of monuments of Lenin that were recommended for mass distribution—the uncontrolled, peoples’ Leniniada faded away, launching the beginning of the all-national, involuntary communization. Together with other republics, Ukraine has entered what the historians would call “100 years of fighting for independence”—decades-long wrestling for political and cultural autonomy from Russia.

The studies of American sociologist Ronald Inglehart prove that history matters. In his comparative analysis of the post-Soviet transitioning of Russia and Ukraine, Yaroslav Hrytsak explains the countries’ shift in opposite directions by drastically different value systems—“while most Russians choose the survival values, many Ukrainians prefer values that signify self-expression.” According to Hrytsak, this difference has a historical background. As a considerable share of ethnic Ukrainian lands stood outside the Russian sphere of influence and were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukrainians paved their way to a strong tradition of self-governance. It is for this reason that, scholars argue, political patterns that brought to power figures like Stalin or Putin are impossible in Ukraine (Hrytsak 2014; Magocsi 2010; Subtelny 2009). In the same manner, the studies also show that in societies like Russia or Ukraine, the majority can often be indifferent or rather ambivalent, while the directions for development are defined by the motivated minority. In Hrytsak’s terms, “to a considerable degree, the Maidan of 2004 [for example] was the revolution of [such a minority or] the middle class” (Hrytsak 2014: 27). Should Yaroslav Hrytsak and Russian filmmaker and writer Andrei Konchalovsky ever have a discussion, there would surely be space for further reflections. In his 2014 interview to BBC News3, Andrei Konchalovsky explains what he defines as “the two mentalities of Russia and Ukraine” by what he calls “a cultural genome”—the system of priorities a person uses when getting out of bed in the morning and all the way until he or she goes to bed.” According to Konchalovsky, the middle class is “not the consumption basket, but is the bourgeoisie—the class that neither Russia nor Ukraine ever had.” In this sense, Russia’s-Ukraine’s diversity may require additional explanation.

As Russian historian Dmitri Furman wrote, “Ukraine passed, if we can say this, an exam for democracy that we [Russians] in reality failed in October of 1993.” In other words, it was a peaceful shift in power in the summer of 1994 that distinguished Ukraine from Russia, where the change of the regime arrived with fire and tanks. According to Hrytsak, this difference “played a decisive role in setting Russia and Ukraine in different paths.” Whether or not we can ‘detect’ democracy via the prism of absence or presence of active fighting or violence is yet another question. Perhaps there is more to this point that is worth leaving for a later discussion. Bottom line, the Ukrainian identity, since the time it emerged, was linked to language, culture, religion and many other aspects of one’s self-identification that were distinctly local and, to some degree, exceeded the boundaries of the political. In Konchalovsky’s terms, the battle for Ukraine is as ‘natural’ as long-last, and will continue “as long as the fight of the Latin and Greek worlds goes on, between Byzantium and Rome.” What I am particularly interested in this book is to examine the democratization of Ukraine as a domestic phenomenon. In his famous work, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, Alexander Etkind traces colonization of many peoples, including Russians, by the Russian Empire that conquered territories and domesticated its own lands. In this book I am devoted to do the opposite—to explore decommunization or self-decolonization of Ukraine as an internal phenomenon that is so complex and multilayered as to, oftentimes, remain completely local, and yet carry the potential of international, global outcomes.