Ukraine needs its own history, not one invented in Moscow

It is necessary to abandon the history written in Moscow for Ukrainians, especially those publications that were created by authors (historians) of the Soviet period with distorted propaganda and ideological coverage of historical facts. Even in such well-known Russian authors of different historical eras as V. Klyuchevsky and S. Solovyov, the chauvinistic approach in the coverage of the history of Ukraine can be clearly seen.

The older generation of Ukrainians studied history permeated with communist ideology and propaganda based on the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism and internationalism. The Bolshevik terror, repression, famine, and physical destruction of tens of millions of innocent Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Belarusians, Latvians, Moldovans, Tatars, Lithuanians, Estonians, and other peoples of the Soviet Union were either kept silent, or covered selectively and sparingly. The Soviet-Bolshevik propaganda of the not-so-distant times, like the current propaganda of the Russian Federation, simply bombarded people and continues to bombard people. Some of my peers, as well as those who are a little younger, managed to get rid of or not succumb to the propaganda poison, and some spent their whole lives in the unreal world created by propaganda.

As you know, the commission of the Zaporizhzhia city council on toponymy, after an active discussion in which representatives of many public organizations participated, agreed on the position regarding the future fate of the monuments to Lenin and Dzerzhynsky located on the territory of the city. The participants of the discussion and the members of the commission came to an agreed solution, which basically boils down to the need to dismantle the monuments to the leaders of the totalitarian era and move them to another place accessible to those who continue to worship them. The issue of changing the names of streets, avenues, industrial and other objects of Zaporizhzhia, which bear the names of leaders of the Bolshevik period, was also discussed.

In accordance with the decision of the commission, the meeting of which was chaired by its chairman S.M. Gladchenko, deputy mayor, the further fate of the monuments, as well as the issue of changing the names of avenues, streets and other objects, must be decided by the session of the city council.

The public agreed to a civilized solution to the problems that concern society. There were also proposals from the participants of the commission meeting about the need to conduct a survey among the city’s residents, to find out their opinion about the future fate of the monuments of totalitarianism. I was among the participants in the discussion and speakers.

My position coincides with the decision made by the Toponymy Commission. I am convinced that the dismantling of monuments to the leaders of the Soviet era, as well as the changing of the names of avenues, streets, and settlements named after people who contributed to the destruction of Ukrainian statehood, carried out repression, starved the population of Ukraine, banned the Ukrainian language, culture, religion, and destroyed churches, should have been done earlier. The problem has matured, and it must be solved in a civilized manner.

Perhaps I would not have had the desire to appeal to the Zaporizhzhia community, deputies, and city council once again, through the newspaper, if I had not heard and seen a television program in which the decision of the city council commission on toponymy was discussed, a survey conducted by journalists of the MTM city council TV channel, and the statements of individual people’s deputies of Ukraine from previous convocations were presented.

There is a feeling of insecurity among the leaders of some of the deputy factions of the city council regarding the content of the decisions that will be made at one of the sessions of the city council.

I will say frankly, the position of uncertainty and lack of political will on the part of the leadership of the city council and its assets, as well as the leadership of the region, in the implementation of the decisions of the commission of the city council on toponymy, the meeting of public representatives, which took place in BC «Orbita», can create a tense situation among the residents of the city, lead to the confrontation of certain political forces.

You should communicate with the urban community on a professional level, and not in the language of emotions. As a citizen of Ukraine, a resident of Zaporizhzhia, a former member of the CPSU, the first secretary of the Tokmok City Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, elected to this position at the age of 36, a deputy and first deputy chairman of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Executive Committee in 1981-1992, a People’s Deputy of Ukraine of the first convocation, and later in 1994-2002 a deputy of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Council – the head of the budget commission, to a person who really did a lot (I am not ashamed to say this) for the region and the city of Zaporizhzhia, I would like to publicly, from the pages of the newspaper «Zaporizhka Sich», inform the Zaporizhzhia community about my position expressed at the meeting of the toponymy commission regarding the dismantling of monuments to the executioners of the Ukrainian people, people who, as leaders of the Bolshevik Party in 1917-1921, destroyed the sprouts of Ukrainian statehood, started an experiment on the genocide of Ukrainian residents, organizing in the south of Ukraine, including in the Zaporizhzhia province (at that time Zaporizhzhia region was called that) famine, from which hundreds of thousands of residents of the region died.

In 1921-1922, tens of thousands of people died of starvation in Berdyansk region alone, including many of my compatriots and members of my family. The larger and more tragic for Ukraine the Holodomor of 1932-1933 overshadowed the events of 1921-1922, which were initiated in Ukraine by the leader of Bolshevik Russia, Lenin and his entourage.

Researchers of those distant years claim that the south of Ukraine lost 1.5-2 million of its inhabitants to starvation in 1921-1922. The leader of Bolshevik Russia died in 1924, but his associates continued the will and policy of the leaders of the October Revolution. The heavy power roller of totalitarianism rolled over millions of Ukrainian families, physically and morally destroying active, disobedient ones, «relocating» them to Gulag camps (the main management of the camps).

I would like to ask those who are nostalgic for Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, were there not among your relatives, fellow villagers, compatriots, and friends those whom the Bolshevik government destroyed by hunger, shot, tortured by the hands of Chekists and Enkavedists? My great-grandfather Ivan Stepanovych, the parish clerk, parish foreman, had 5 sons, whom he gave education and profession. They could become farmers, soldiers, employees. This is how they would have lived their lives, if not for the events of 1917-1921. How did their fate develop after the October coup?

Tragic! One of the brothers of my grandfather Oleksiy Ivanovich, a non-commissioned officer, Ivan Ivanovich, a participant in the First World War, an officer, was «lost» during the civil war together with his wife. His fate is unknown to the family. During the Civil War, Volosny sergeants Nikifor (in 1918) and Fedir (in 1919), my grandfather’s younger brothers, received the status of «counter-revolutionaries» from the Soviet authorities, whose fate was clearly determined by the authorities. The first, disarmed, expelled with his family from the village, by the decision of the so-called «three», was shot in Dnipropetrovsk on September 7, 1937, and the second, having been in the hands of the Chekists in 1921, in 1945 received 10 years in the camps and 5 years of deprivation of rights.

What is the rehabilitation that was massively carried out by the Soviet authorities in 1988-1990 for their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren? My grandfather and his older brother Vasyl died in April of the famine year of 1933, and my grandmother died the day before in 1932. My great-grandfather’s sons did not accept Soviet power and paid the price with their lives.

My mother’s family suffered the fate of millions of peasants who did not accept collectivization. Ivan Pylypovich Kovbasa’s dispossessed grandfather, having taken away his children’s house, agricultural equipment, horses, and a cow, was driven out of the village together with the children with what was on them. Grandfather died abroad. The house was returned to the grandmother, who lived in her daughters’ families, in 1941, where she lived until September 1943. Retreating, the Germans burned the entire village and the grandmother’s house as well.

In 1947, famine came to my village again. My grandmother, like many fellow villagers, among whom were four of my classmates, was gone, died of starvation.

While working in the archives, researching the life of my compatriots in the 19th century up to and including 1921 according to the metric books of the village church, I did not meet in the death reports that anyone died due to hunger, not a single record. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were droughts and crop failures in the Tavrian steppes, but the villagers survived these years with the support of the community and the tsarist authorities. During the years of Soviet-Bolshevik rule, there were three famines that claimed the lives of millions, including and children.

Recently, one of the TV channels announced that over 80 years, including 1913, in tsarist Russia, over 5,000 citizens were killed for various violations of existing legislation. Quite a few! But…

Is it possible to compare the figures of the destroyed inhabitants on the territory of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, the Zaporizhzhia region and even the village of Andriyivka in the Berdyansk district with the above data for the Russian Empire? Of course not!

In one of the telephone conversations, a well-known person in our region conveyed to me the dissatisfaction of some of our mutual acquaintances with my position regarding the fate of the monuments to Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, the renaming of streets, avenues, etc. And the interlocutor himself asked: «Well, how can you? You lived and grew up in those years!». To which I gave him the same answer as many others. It is impossible to stay in the past without its analysis and relevant conclusions. Ukraine did not rationally use 23 years of independence. Almost nothing has been done to revive it as a state with its own history. Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Gryaznov and others are not her heroes. I am not ashamed of my biography, because I lived and worked in the interests of my country, the Zaporizhzhia region. Mine, like other generations born in Ukraine during the Soviet period, had no other choice. We lived, studied, worked as best we could. That is not the question. I cannot forgive those who left me, my brothers and sisters, my peers the opportunity to communicate with grandparents, parents, many of whom were taken away not only by the Second World War, but also by the Bolshevik famines, terror, to adopt and receive from them their warmth, affection and life experience.

Someone recently said that where there are monuments to the leaders of totalitarianism, separatism begins to manifest itself like a contagion! I do not want my grandchildren, great-grandchildren and their children to walk on streets and avenues that have the names of the enemies of independent Ukraine, their executioners! The height of cynicism was to erect monuments, to name streets and settlements after people who destroyed your country and family.

If I had taken a different position, my relatives, who were destroyed by the Bolshevik government, my compatriots, who were shot by the hundreds, starved to death by the thousands, would not have forgiven me.

In my city of Zaporizhzhia, there are still idols of totalitarianism, we move along avenues, streets, squares with the names of people who were enemies of independent Ukraine, organized the genocide of our people, destroyed language, culture, forbade going to church, praying to God. For the sake of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we are obliged to turn over the tragic page of the history of the Soviet era, freeing up space for the history of Ukraine, which still needs to be written. It is necessary to open opportunities for our descendants to study the true history of Ukraine, to learn about its heroes.

How long they will stand depends on the city council and its deputies. Dismantling and moving monuments to another place depends on their decision.

Communism as an ideology for the post-Soviet space, of which, due to historical reasons, Ukraine is a part, is the «religion of the outgoing generation», which is now a minority. Despite this, in almost every settlement of central and southeastern Ukraine there are monuments to V. Lenin (Ulyanov), under whose leadership the Ukrainian People’s Republic and millions of Ukrainians who did not obey the Bolshevik government were destroyed. No one asked the residents of Ukraine, as well as of the Zaporizhzhia region, whether they want to see Lenin and his associates on pedestals, or whether they want to walk on the streets named by the Soviet authorities after those who destroyed their countrymen physically, drove them to camps!

Someone still doubts the necessity of dismantling the monument to Dzerzhinsky, the same «iron Felix» who created and led the Bolshevik Cheka (NK), the spiritual father of the KGB. The Cheka (NK), the NKVD, the KGB are mass executions, murders and tortures, rivers of spilled blood and millions of human lives wiped out in dust in the camps.

What are the consequences of worshiping the symbols of totalitarianism in the mass consciousness? Simple enough! The monuments to Lenin and Dzerzhynsky, as well as the streets and squares bearing their names, are direct proof that it is possible to annex territories belonging to Ukraine, even to leave it statehood, to kill, to carry out mass terror, and to bury millions of fellow citizens in camps. And everything will go unpunished.

The moment of truth comes for every person. For the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (in 1990-1991 – the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR), in which 331 of the 450 people’s deputies were members of the CPSU, the moment of truth came during the first session, when the article defining the role of the CPSU as the leading and guiding force of the Soviet Union was removed from the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, and on July 16, 1990, the Declaration was adopted on the state sovereignty of Ukraine. Communist deputies, including members of the Politburo, voted for these rather important documents. These events took place when the Soviet Union, the Central Committee of the CPSU, and the KGB still existed. A year later, on August 24, 1991, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Act on the Independence of Ukraine, using a historical moment.

The current city council is approaching the end of its term. What achievements will the deputies remember that they will leave for the community? The bridge crossings have not been built, the Palace of Sports «Yunist» is standing, as well as the sports complex BC «Orbita», destroyed, the fountain has not been reconstructed, the monument to T. Shevchenko has not been erected until the 200th anniversary of his birth. But there is still time for active and specific actions!

Using the decisions of the city council, it is possible to free up places for the heroes of Ukraine by dismantling the monuments to Lenin and Dzerzhynskyi, by changing the names of the central avenues, streets and squares of the city, by reconstructing the square with the installation of a monument to T.G. Shevchenko in the area of the theater named after Magara, finding solutions for the reconstruction and use of sports complexes, etc.

In my opinion, the moment of truth is coming for the deputies of the Zaporizhzhia City Council. The decision is up to each of you, dear compatriots!

Olexandr Bilousenko, People’s Deputy of Ukraine of the first convocation