As Americans pull down statues of Confederate politicians and generals, Ukrainians surely recognize the echoes of their own post-Maidan Leninopad, when communist-era monuments came down around the country and cities and streets were renamed to erase the memory of Soviet leaders.
William Faulkner, a keen observer of America’s Jim Crow South, long ago summarized what is happening in America today: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”
When I first came to the United States in the mid-1970s, I was impressed with Confederate monuments erected not just in the former rebel states but in Washington, the nation’s capital, as well.
Coming from the Soviet Union, where all opponents of Lenin’s Bolsheviks continued to be maligned many decades after the end of Russia’s own civil war, I saw that as a model of reconciliation after a fratricidal conflict. What I didn’t realize was that the reconciliation with the white South had been achieved on the backs of those same slaves whom the North had liberated. Those monuments were erected not after the end of the war but during the Jim Crow era and as such they were monuments to racial segregation.
When the U.S. federal government abolished Southern Jim Crow laws in 1965, signs barring “the colored” from hotels, restaurants, pools, and drinking fountains came down. The monuments remained standing.
As per Faulkner, the past is still very much with us. Segregation may be illegal, but it persists de facto. And so does racism—the most brutal manifestation of which is the killings of unarmed African Americans by the police and mass incarceration of Black men.
Schools where African Americans begin their education are starved of resources and failing; many educated persons of African descent working in the United States come from Africa and the Caribbean, not the African American community. After 400 years of Black presence in North America, African-Caucasian couples remain almost as rare here as Martians — at least outside the LGBTQ community. In the U.K., meanwhile, a mere half-century since Black people started to come to the former colonial power, such marriages — and mixed-race children — have become commonplace.
Had the past been truly behind us and African Americans truly integrated into the American mainstream, those bronze horsemen could have even been left standing as some quaint reminder of the country’s ugly history. At least they wouldn’t have become the object of such passionate hatred.
But as things stand, they are very much part of the here-and-now–and even more so than at any time since the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Today, Trump’s dog-whistling, rhetoric, and policies have emboldened white supremacists, neo-nazis, and other racists. Attacks on “political correctness” opened the door wide to hate speech, while the Republican Party abandoned all pretense at representative democracy by gutting the Voting Rights Act and engaging in the outright suppression of the Black vote.
The COVID-19 pandemic came as a final blow, devastating both the health and the economic well-being of African Americas in communities that had already been reeling from cuts in the social safety net.
The revolution which we are now witnessing in the United States is not aiming to abolish history. It is an effort to acknowledge the country’s racist legacy and, in a way, commence from a clean sheet. It is a process not unlike denazification in West Germany after World War II and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa.
For nearly quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine continued to live in the post-Soviet reality.
Communism was gone but the country remained in the Russian orbit not only economically but mentally, as well. In fact, for a long while, Ukraine resembled so many postcolonial countries in Africa — its borders drawn by the colonial power, in many ways arbitrarily, reflecting foreign contests by the Empire while some of Ukraine’s original territory had been copped off. It was ruled by Soviet-era elites, corruption and kleptocracy were pervasive and, most importantly, Ukrainians were still hostage to the colonial mentality, playing the Slavic “little brother” to Great Russia.
Things began to change with the Orange Revolution in 2004, which put Viktor Yushchenko in power, but one very small step forward was then followed by two steps back, to use Lenin’s expression. So, when Ukrainians went down into the streets in late 2013, the country’s colonial past was no past at all but very much the present. To make room for a different future, Lenin’s statues needed to come down.
Black Americans pulling down Confederate monuments are mostly young. They certainly didn’t live under slavery and most didn’t know Jim Crow at first hand. Yet, they are striking at their personal experience of fear and humiliation. For the young whites who have joined them in large numbers the story is different. There’s a danger that by trying to expunge the past they could push the responsibility for racism onto the evil men of history and absolve themselves of the responsibility for the present.
Likewise, Unkainians getting rid of communist symbols run the risk of denying Ukraine’s responsibility for the crimes of communism and putting all the blame on the Russian oppressors. That would be a mistake, for those who refuse to reckon with the past are condemned to keep living in it.
After World War II, the victorious powers decided to declare Austria, quite arbitrarily, the first victim of Hitler’s Germany rather than its enthusiastic ally. As a result, Austria never experienced true denazification or acknowledge its complicity in nazism. It has subsequently emerged as a country where right-wing nationalist parties traditionally garner most support.
And one more thing. Americans may want to look at the Ukrainian Leninopad for a valuable lesson: pulling down monuments is not enough to build a future — or even to get rid of the past. After all that Ukraine has gone through, more than two-thirds of Ukrainian voters still plumped for a television illusion modeled on Soviet-era fairy tales rather than for a normal effective democratic government.
