cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10430184
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After winning independence in 1991, Ukraine removed large numbers of Soviet-era statues and renamed streets as part of “decommunisation”. The process sped up in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and fighting began in the Donbas, and moved even faster after Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion that aimed to scrub Ukraine from Europe’s map.
Nataliia Kryvda, a professor of the history of culture at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, said Ukraine was going through an unfinished period of decolonisation. “The USSR absorbed national cultures. It tried to make a single nation of Soviet citizens. Russia today looks at Ukraine and says we are one people. It isn’t true. We have our own mindset, historical destiny, beliefs and dreams. Our identity is a dynamic process,” she said.
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Calling Lenin an enemy of humanity is a wild take.
So is holding up the Cossacks lol, if they wanted someone ukranian with actually cool values Nestor Makhno is right there.
Nestor Makhno identified as a Zaporozhian Cossack. The legacy of the Cossacks in modern Ukraine has been significant to both the left and right wing movements in the region with ultra-nationalists placing emphasis solely on the aesthetics of the self governing military nomads, and anarchists placing an emphasis on the governance structures innovated by Cossack groups, particularly surrounding the settlement of Lviv and the Bug river basin where Cossack identity was divorced from ethnic heritage and instead placed into notions of mutual aid through fraternal orders and community defense. Given the events that followed in The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after the crushing of both the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Makhnovshchina i can sympathize with the people there having a distrust of the man who sponsored the Red Cossacks to do that crushing. I can also understand the warriness of uplifting Cossack identity since the ultra-nationalists place such a heavy emphasis on the aesthetics of those groups and their concerted efforts to erase, in particular, the Galitzyen Cossacks and the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ legacies
I think he was a Cossack in the way that American’s are Irish. He was a peasant, not a nomadic warrior military dude. Although he definitely emulated that and used the mythology of the Cossacks during the struggle for freedom.