Ukraine's fallen statues of Lenin are not just a rejection of Russia

Some attack them and others guard them. Yet if Ukrainians looked at Yugoslavia, they'd see neither Russia nor the EU is the way forward

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/16/ukraine-lenin-statues-rejection-russia-eu

Srećko Horvat

Sunday 16 March 2014

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Lenin.

Back in 2011 Ukraine was preparing to host Euro 2012. The government decided to release a promotional video titled Switch On Ukraine. Among the sites shown in the video was Liberty Square in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. But something was missing. When the sun rose over the square, instead of an 8.5 metre-high statue of Lenin there was only an empty plinth. Someone had digitally erased the politically problematic icon.

In 2013 another statue of Lenin, this time in Kiev's central plaza – once known as October Revolution Square and now known as Euromaidan – was smashed by angry protesters using sledgehammers. Many have correctly identified this as the key point in Ukraine's political crisis. According to one estimate, of the nearly 1,500 Lenin memorials across Ukraine, protesters have destroyed around 100 of them, from Poltava to Chernihiv, from Zhytomyr to Khmelnytskyi.

This is nothing new of course. During the very beginning of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, I remember vividly how communist and anti-fascist monuments were torn down by nationalists who believed that democracy had finally arrived. Some urinated on them, others blew them up. In the period from 1990 to 2000 at least 3,000 monuments were torn down in Croatia alone.

Is the monument mayhem in Ukraine any different? It is: last week, residents of Kharkiv – the same town where the symbolic erasure of Lenin started in 2011 – installed barricades around the statue of Lenin after fending off an attack by Euromaidan revolutionaries. Even if the protesters weren't defending the image of Lenin so much as exhibiting their attachment to Putin this is a remarkable state of affairs.

To return to the former Yugoslavia for the moment: according to the last statistics from the World Bank, the unemployment rate among young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina is 57.9%. This ex-Yugoslav state is not yet part of the European Union, but is already approaching Greece's 60% rate. The newest member of the EU, neighbouring Croatia, is third in the union when it comes to youth unemployment, at 52%.

So this is what we got by getting rid of communism and entering the EU. Croatia and Slovenia are part of the EU, but according to the latest news, Russia's Rosneft hopes to take over Croatian oil and gas firm INA along with its Slovenian counterpart Petrol. In another ex-Yugoslav state, Serbia, Gazprom is already present and holds 56% shares of the Petroleum Industry of Serbia.

Here, an insight from Hegel's Philosophy of History might be useful. He said that "by repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence". What Hegel teaches us is the following: the first act of "erasing" Lenin in Kharkiv, in 2011, wasn't a matter of chance but an indication of thing to come – the real demolition of Kiev's Lenin in 2013. Similarly, the total failure of the "transition" of ex-Yugoslav states from communism to the "democratic" EU might well prefigure the real failure of Ukraine's "transition".

The current fight in Ukraine is not only a fight over closer ties with Russia or the EU. It's – even if the protesters don't realise it – a fight over Lenin's heritage.

Some 75 years ago, Leon Trotsky described the situation as though he was writing about today's deadlock: "Ukraine is in a state of confusion: where to turn? What to demand? This situation naturally shifts the leadership to the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques who express their 'nationalism' by seeking to sell the Ukrainian people to one imperialism or another in return for a promise of fictitious independence."

So what was his answer? A united, free and independent worker's and peasants's Ukraine.

It is for this reason the spectre of Lenin is still haunting Europe: the fallen statues all around Ukraine don't symbolise merely Putin's Russia or the failed project of communism. They demonstrate, through correspondences with fallen statues elsewhere, that neither Russia nor the EU can be the answer.