But even these seemingly progressive voices who call for more moderate and better designed decommunisation, even those who are worried about the Institute of National Memory’s monopoly on historical truth, or encourage it to seek the approval of local communities’ over any renaming, share the belief in one very questionable claim: that decommunisation actually makes any sense. That it could change anything. [...]
Members of nationalist parties like saying that nothing will change in Ukraine until former Communist apparatchiks die out or are completely removed from the government. They say that the blame for all the problems of the Ukrainian state lies on the Soviet government and the “Soviet mentality,” which, supposedly, is completely lacking in the heads of the young generation. And anything that reminds us of the Soviet government only reproduces totalitarian discourse and prevents the country from developing. Therefore, the omnipresent Soviet symbols and toponyms hold the Ukrainian people in the trap of collectivisation and “communism,” which we, of course, have already seen before. This discourse seems to lead logically to the ‘wrong flag’ theory, according to which Ukraine will remain miserable until the yellow and the blue in its flag are swapped. [...]
But is that actually possible? The Communist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine and other parties which, due to some weird misunderstanding, are habitually called “the left wing” of Ukrainian politics, have catered to the needs of the parties of big capital for most of Ukraine’s independent history, giving them extra votes in the parliament or nominating a convenient candidate for the presidential election. Meanwhile, in the ideological dimension, they became infinitely remote not only from Marxist ideas, but even from the Soviet experience, which they have always used as the nostalgic cornerstone of their rhetoric. These parties have finally turned into strongholds of conservatism and Orthodox Christianity without any realistic claims or prospects. And the events of recent years have demonstrated this clearly.
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