Decommunization, Memory Laws, and “Builders of Ukraine in the 20th Century”

This paper provides a critical overview of the Decommunization campaign in Ukraine up to the spring of 2017, which marked two years since the beginning of the program introduced by the four Memory Laws ratified by Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko in May 2015. In reality, the process of removing Soviet statues and memorabilia began well before Euromaidan, especially in Western Ukraine where Lenin monuments and others of the Soviet period were swiftly removed from the late 1980s into the early years of independence. But I address the formal campaign headed by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (hereafter referred to as INR), which began in the spring of 2015. I provide an analysis of the program and its results, the results of opinion polls, some critiques and also the reasons why it remains controversial, particularly outside Ukraine.