The contentious laws feed into a wider battle for identity and survival as government troops fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region, where a ceasefire is disintegrating.
Mr Shukhevych, an MP with the nationalist Radical Party since October, drafted the law on freedom fighters. He says his father and comrades resisted Moscow’s dominance and as a result were subjected to a Soviet – and now Russian - smear campaign.
“Let the Russians not tell us who are our heroes,” he says. Fighting together with the Germans against Soviet forces during the war was a temporary and pragmatic move for Ukrainian nationalists, Mr Shukhevych adds, and they did not sympathise with Nazi ideas.
“This is all Russian propaganda,” he says. “The Ukrainian people were denied their right to independence. How can this be? This is the legal right of every nation. We know of many nations that have fought for their independence, including in Europe. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland. Serbia against Bulgaria; Poland fought in the 19th century. Byron fought for the independence of Greece. So to deny the legitimacy of Ukraine’s struggle is illegal.”
Introducing the new legislation protecting the UPA drew a predictably frothing response from Russia, where Ukraine’s government is derided as a “fascist junta”. But it has also
provoked disquiet in the West.
Ethnic cleansing
A group of 70 scholars on Ukraine
appealed to Mr Poroshenko to call off the “history laws”, saying they would stifle debate and make it “a crime to question the legitimacy of an organisation (UPA) that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine”.
The UPA was established as a guerrilla group in 1942. The previous year, Roman Shukhevych and other Ukrainian nationalists had formed the Nachtigall and Roland battalions under German command to support the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Roman Shukhevych (seated, second from left) wearing German uniform in the Nachtigall Battalion (Simon Kruse)
Members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and UPA, its military wing, massacred between 60,000 and 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and Galicia, and also helped kill Jews, according to historians.
While the Communists were its main enemy, the UPA later turned on the Nazis too after Adolf Hitler failed to support the establishment of a Ukrainian state. The partisans continued to fight Soviet rule for several years after the war had ended.
A place of pilgrimage
Mr Shukhevych met the Telegraph in the former safe-house where his fugitive father hid and was finally assassinated in 1950 by agents of the MGB, predecessor of the KGB.
The house, on the edge of Lviv in western Ukraine, a nationalist stronghold, is now a museum and a place of pilgrimage. It was set up after the Soviet collapse in 1991 and funded by the descendants of UPA members who had fled to the US after the war.
Visitors come to see Roman Shukhevych’s wartime uniforms and a mock-up of a partisans’ forest bunker. In one wall of the house is a bullet-hole; left, it is said, when the UPA leader fired a final shot from his revolver as he was struck down by an MGB machine-gun volley. The shot was to warn his assistant to swallow a cyanide capsule.
A bust of Roman Shukhevych at the museum dedicated to him in Lviv, Ukraine (Simon Kruse)
“We get a lot of men from the army and the volunteer battalions visiting before they go off to fight in Donbas,” says Volodymyr Karanda, the museum’s director, referring to the war against Moscow-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, which has claimed more than 6,400 lives since April last year. “For them it’s an example of how to fight for one’s motherland even against uneven odds, an inspiration.”
Mr Karanda does not deny that the UPA murdered civilians in the 1940s, but he questions the scale of the killings and says they took place at the time of a ruthless, internecine conflict.
Mr Shukhevych, sitting at a table a few steps from where his father was shot, adds: “I don’t justify everything that was done. But we can also talk of tragedies.” The Poles killed many Ukrainians and destroyed churches, he said, while the Soviets slaughtered, deported and imprisoned millions.
'Lenin is a man with blood on his hands'
Besides giving status to the UPA, Mr Poroshenko’s new “history laws” make it a crime to deny the "criminal nature" of both the Nazi regime and the "communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991 in Ukraine". Using their symbols is also banned – meaning that over the next year communist monuments will be pulled down, street names changed and souvenirs prohibited.
The aim is to “tear up the link with our Soviet past” says Mr Shukhevych, who spent more than 30 years in Soviet prisons and penal colonies because of his father. “We must understand that Lenin is a man with blood on his hands, a symbol of an anti-human system. He can be left in a museum but not on our streets.”
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (Reuters)
In Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, many see the new laws as part of an existential struggle in the face of Russian aggression.
Oleg Sinyakevich serves in the OUN Battalion, a volunteer unit which adopted its name from the wartime nationalist group. Last year he fought against Moscow-backed separatists around Donetsk airport.
UPA veterans are unfairly maligned as Hitler supporters, he says. During the Second World War, they “did not go to fight in Poland, or in Russia, or in Belarus. We did not go anywhere, we were in our own land. The fascists invaded, then the communists, then the fascists again. We fought the aggressor.
“It’s just the same now. Russia attacked us. Russia kills people, burns them alive, tells horror tales about us and then calls us fascists. Where’s the logic?”
Some say the laws make hero-worship compulsory
The “de-communisation law” was drafted by Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory, headed by Volodymyr Vyatrovych. He believes the uprising in Kiev last year which led to the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych, the president, was an “anti-Soviet” one.
“It is extremely important for Ukraine to have given a legal evaluation to the crimes of the communist period and to move away from that totalitarian past.”
Other former states of the USSR or Soviet bloc – like Poland or the Baltics - went through that process long ago and are now on an “irreversible” democratic path, says Mr Vyatrovych. “By contrast, in Belarus, especially in Russia and until recently in Ukraine, the failure to condemn the past has resulted in its gradual rehabilitation.”
The result, he says, was the hardline governments of Vladimir Putin and Mr Yanukovych, bringing censorship, political repression, and a fondness for calling Joseph Stalin "an effective manager" rather than a tyrant.
Yet some feel the history laws themselves veer towards intolerance.
Mikhail Pogrebinsky, a political analyst, says they are the initiative of a “party of victors” around Mr Poroshenko, who are unwilling to counter other points of view inside Ukraine, especially in the Russophone east.
“Glorifying UPA might be understandable if the country was only ‘Little Ukraine’ in the west and Kiev. But only about a third of the population supports the Russophobic, nationalistic viewpoint, and when they impose their will on the rest then I see a mass of problems ahead.”
The de-communisation law is an unnecessary “stupidity” that will only drive Donbas further away, Mr Pogrebinsky added, even as Kiev tries to claw it back from the separatists and Russia’s embrace.
Andrew Wilson, author of Ukraine Crisis, says one problem with the legislation is that it is “so prescriptive” and makes hero-worship compulsory. “The most controversial is OUN-UPA. Some people say they were heroes, some people say they were Nazis. The reality is that most of them were were locals just defending their local territories. But they did bad things, they did good things. You can’t say they were all heroes.”
Soviet lives
For many in Ukraine, Mr Wilson says, the anti-communist law jars because Lenin is less a political symbol than a reminder of lived experience, and “they don’t want that entire Soviet part of their lives dismissed”.
Inevitably, opposition to the history laws is strongest in Donbas, where the Moscow-backed rebels cherish their links to the communist past, recalling the relative prosperity of this coal-mining region. In the rebels' eyes, members of the Kiev government are “Banderovites” – a reference to Stepan Bandera, another Ukrainian nationalist who dallied with the Nazis. With a distinctly Soviet ring, the rebels call their separatist territories “People’s Republics”.
By contrast, in Ukrainian government-controlled territory demonstrators have already
torn down scores of Lenin statues, Yet hundreds more remain across the country and in many places there is deep ambivalence over the Bolshevik leader’s future. There, his likeness lives on – for now.
One such spot is the city of Zaporizhia on a bottleneck in the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine. Zaporizhia is known for its Lenin Hydroelectric Power Plant, its Lenin Avenue – one of the longest avenues in Europe – and its 66ft tall Lenin monument, erected in 1964.
At least twice since last year activists have gathered by the imposing statue to discuss his toppling. Other residents quickly surrounded Lenin to protect him. As a compromise, a crane was used to put a traditional embroidered Ukrainian shirt over his torso. It was later removed.
Oleksandr Sin, the city’s mayor, says that more than 70 per cent of townsfolk are against removing Lenin. Reluctantly, he has decided to comply with the law, and hopes to rebrand the city by replacing him with a statue of a 17th century Cossack leader. Soviet street names will also get Cossack replacements.
Denis Bushtets, 36, a Zaporozhiya resident, says he is against the plan. A former advertising manager, he now volunteers to deliver pork fat and other food supplies to Ukrainian troops at the front. “I’m a patriot but I don’t want Lenin to go,” he tells the Telegraph. “People think we’ll take him down and – ‘bang’ - we’re all Europeans and all the holes in the roads get filled. It doesn’t work like that. It’s the mentality you need to change.”
Goodbye Lenin, hello Superman
The Zaporozhia Lenin statue stands at the end of Lenin Avenue, his arm raised towards the huge sweep of the dam which he conceived and which was built not long after his death in 1924.
“I want him to stay, he’s part of our landscape, our history,” says Valentina, a hotel receptionist who works nearby. “My grandmother came here in the 1930s to help build the hydro-electric plant. I visited Lenin on trips as a Pioneer and my girlfriends all had their wedding pictures taken next to him.
“Taking him down and changing all the communist street names will cost a lot of money. The country is at war and the economy is falling apart. Let’s feed people first.”
Yury Barannik wants the city’s Lenin statue removed (Simon Kruse)
Yury Barannik does not agree. An artist, he is curator of the ironically named Lenin modern art gallery on a street corner by the statue.
“Lenin was a criminal, he wrote orders for executions,” he says. “If there was debate and people of the communist generation repented and admitted they were wrong then perhaps we could do without a law to remove all this. But they won’t.”
To ease the process of getting rid of Lenin Mr Barannik has been holding workshops where students sketch alternatives for his vacated square: a swimming pool, a concert hall, a Superman statue and a marble toilet.
At the hydro-electric plant, Viktor Kucher, its general director, is tight lipped. Inside the turbine hall, a large socialist-realist painting shows senior Bolsheviks opening the dam in 1932.
As a state enterprise, the plant would comply with the new laws and remove its Lenin nameplate and hammer and sickle emblems from the doors if ordered to do so, he says.
Leading the Telegraph on a two-hour excursion of the dam, Mr Kucher preferred to talk about the squirrels and pheasants in its 43-hectare grounds rather than the politics of the past.
“Any change means upset,” he says.
