The politics of national memory always means very delicate, often painful and always important national issues. The history of territories and people living on them is often full of conflicts. The task of each state is to preserve own history for the next generations and to show it through the prism of human values, instead of short-term political interests, Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Feldman is convinced.
Ukrainian Institute of National Memory has recently developed a bill, after which the petition appeared on the website of the President with the request to close down the Institute. It should be noted at once that I don’t support this radical approach, as the Institute of National Memory must function in Ukraine. But now, it is clearly used for political purposes.
The matter is in the bill “On National Holidays,” which states that March 8, May 1 and May 9 are not holidays anymore. As for me, the arguments of the director of the Institute Volodumyr Viatovych about the “Soviet legacy” are weak. The same could be said about the statement that “February 23 is not celebrated in Ukraine anymore,” as it is too naïve and detached from reality.
Holidays are the part of national culture, tradition, which can change through generations, not momentarily because of the adoption of new laws. I don’t understand what is so “totalitarian” and “Soviet” in the holiday, which initially was celebrated as the day of struggle for the rights of working women.
The solidarity and equality marches take place worldwide on March 8, as the rights of women are still not guaranteed properly. For our country, the issue of equal rights is definitely urgent, especially in the context of European integration. According to the statistics, men have 26% higher salaries than women in Ukraine. Women are less represented in authorities. For example, the proportion of men to women in the Parliament is 89% to 11%.
And the matter is even not in laws and declarations. Unfortunately, many our fellow citizens, at a mental level, still have medieval ideas about the rights and roles of women. The real equality of the rights of women and men is a real “European reform,” which is important for the future of the country as much as those reforms we are listening every day about.
In short, the struggle against March 8 is a strange initiative demonstrating the priorities of the state policy. I am sure that Ukrainian Institute of National Memory must unite society, instead of provoking conflicts, like it happens now.
By the way, I am not surprised with the activity of Volodumyr Viatovych in the field of “history revision.” In May 2016, the American magazine Foreign Policy published the article by Josh Cohen devoted to the falsifications of historical documents and “cleaning” the history of OUN-UPA by Viatovych. As far back as 2006, when a 28-year-old Viatovych issued the monograph “OUN’s treatment of Jews: position building on the background of catastrophe,” western historians considered him as a manipulating ideologist rather than a scientists.
I hope that the Parliament will be wise enough not to follow a person, who still mentally fights somewhere in the forests against Soviet army, and considers that the International Women’s Day is the root of all evil in Ukraine.
