Halya Coynash
                                             When tanks stood still...
     20 years ago, on 5 June 1989, one man stopped a tank. He will be
remembered this week in many countries, that young man without a name,
without a past or future. For millions of television viewers there
were only those moments when he refused to let the tanks pass (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ). For people from the Soviet Union
and its satellites there were numerous associations, all of them
painful. It was, after all, in their countries that a totalitarian
regime used tanks to mow down those unwilling to submit.
     And a young man stopped them in their tracks. Surely a pure gift
for Hollywood, only reality stubbornly slips out of those glossy
frames. The tanks were coming from the bloody crushing of student
protest on Tiananmen Square. Each of us must decide for ourselves why
the young man did not back off. He was finally dragged away and nobody
really knows what happened to him.  Deepest respect to him.
     There is little triumphant fanfare for another reason. The young
man is remembered in many countries, only not in China where for 20
years the regime has tried to say as little as it can about the
carnage on Tiananmen Square. Key search machines have obliged, helping
China block the Internet. The national media are mute, inconvenient
subjects are avoided in schools and, as it turns out, the Internet can
be kept under lock and key.
     Where there’s the will to do so, of course, however the
authorities generally demonstrate such a will, and if they encounter
little annoying opposition at home or abroad, why restrain
themselves?  The attention of the international community was, shall
we say, distracted by China’s burgeoning economy, nuclear weapons and
permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
     I assume the same was true of Russia for a long time after Putin
came to power. There’s nothing new in this. The rose-tinted glasses
worn by some and cold calculation of others had made it possible to
not notice the “inconvenient” for decades.
     No attempt here to attribute blame. Who is not attracted by
glossy packaging and fine words, especially when they assure everybody
that the past is well and truly gone?  No mechanisms were introduced
either in Ukraine, or in Russia, however for a long time the words
were just fine. Freedom, democracy, rule of law - what more could you
ask?
     In Russia they first dealt with the television channels, though
newspapers were not forgotten. By the time of the attack on the school
in Beslan it was easy to brazenly lie, and this they did. Since 2007
the lies have been systematically turned into a component part of the
school curriculum, while now they’re branching out into history and
all the humanities.
     It is worth recalling Putin’s words back in 2007 regarding
“positive moves” in the treatment of history in new textbooks. Put
most concisely, the more that’s positive the better, while even the
negative – i.e. Stalin, the Terror and millions of victims, can be
presented in a positive light, even “understood”.
     These positive strides are continuing and indeed it is only
marches of “positive thinkers” that are not broken up these days in
Russia. There are, admittedly, difficulties for many in the
interpretation of “positive”. Entirely immediate problems could also
arise if the State Duma passes the new draft law imposing criminal
liability for denying the Kremlin-endorsed single correct and positive
version of the Soviet Union’s role in the Second World War.
     Information about the new “History Commission” aimed at
countering “efforts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia”
sped around the world. Commendable vigilance from journalists,
perhaps, but the extraordinary speed makes one wonder whether we are
seeing the same motivation that prompts skinheads to seek any
publicity, however negative. We’ll make them tremble!  And what can
you say about a commission “on countering falsification of history”
which is made up not of historians, but of representatives of the
President’s Administration, the Federal Security Service [FSB], other
enforcement agencies, etc?  The task is clear.
     I don’t know whether certain psychotic behaviour is contagious,
or whether the problem lies solely in the lack of mechanisms to
prevent regression, however certain trends in Ukraine, including the
calls for more “positive notes” in the media, arouse concern.
     We could begin with the draft “Doctrine of Ukraine’s Information
Security” which the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine
effectively copied from a similar document from the analogous body of
the neighbouring Russian Federation. The document fairly teems with
dangerously woolly terms which specialists from the Council of Europe
back in 2007 suggested Ukraine shed once and for all, as well as the
normal mass of fine-sounding and meaningless phrases. The authors (or
translators from Russian?) of this “Ukrainian” version of a doctrine
on information security clearly prefer to communicate only in what we
will loosely term post-Soviet language.   A great shame since they
have created a document which can present only insurmountable
difficulties for translators into any European language, and strain
the intellectual capacity of all those accustomed to dealing with the
fundamental concepts of a law-based democracy.
     The term used throughout the document “information security”
remains elusively hard to fathom with the only certainty being that it
means vastly more than what an English speaker would understand. .The
list of similar terms is long and they are used to speak of tasks
which have no relation to the duties of the State in a democratic
country. According to the draft Doctrine “the safeguarding of
Ukraine’s information security is based on the principles … of
ensuring that information is accurate, full and unbiased”. Meaningless
gobbledygook most certainly, but when it runs counter to all
principles of pluralism and the role of the State in a democratic
country, we can hardly speak of fine words.  And what we are to
understand by “prophylactic measures and neutralization of offences in
the information sphere” I leave to others to unravel.
     Who is supposed to safeguard “accurate, full and unbiased”
material on history in today’s Russia is, unfortunately, clear. And in
Ukraine?
     The SBU [Security Service] has of late been actively engaged in
the declassifying of documents about Holodomor and repression. This is
undoubtedly to be welcomed, however with regard to their decision to
initiate a criminal case on charges of genocide in Ukraine over
Holodomor 1932-1933 I have serious reservations. What is most
disturbing is the political nature of this move which will probably
have no legal consequences but will sharpen conflict and division
within the country. There is no consensus even among those who agree
that Holodomor was an act of genocide as to this particular move by
the Security Service.  I find it difficult to view with understanding
the decision to concentrate only on Holodomor, or on the murder of the
nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych, as though the Terror of 1937-1938
had never happened. Or as if the crimes of the Soviet regime ended
with the death of Stalin. Another question just won’t go away. If in
Soviet times the KGB loyally served a criminal regime, and now its
successor is serving a different regime, but just as loyally, what
will happen if the regime changes again In Ukraine?
      Nor do we even have to overly stretch our imagination. It is
quite enough to observe the increasingly inadequate behaviour of the
National Expert Commission on the Protection of Public Morality [the
Commission]. It is presently awaiting an external assessment from
various specialists, however back in March it found that the Russian
documentary film “Holodomor 1933: unlearned lessons of history”
contained propaganda of national and religious enmity”. I haven’t seen
the film but I assume it differs little from various revolting texts
I’ve read. They make me angry and sometimes I hurtle to respond – with
words, arguments, evidence, not with calls to ban the work or punish
its authors. A ban of what we find outrageous or offensives today
creates an extremely dangerous precedent. At a meeting on 28 May, one
member of this incomprehensible State body called on his colleagues to
“pay attention to the writings of Oles Buzyna in the newspaper
“Segodnya” [“Today”]. “In this newspaper they discredit outstanding
Ukrainian figures, and choose the most shameful parts of our history”,
Mr Kononenko asserted”. He clearly saw no need to become familiar with
the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights with regard to
criticism of public figures which I in turn find rather baffling since
the case law of the European Court is a source of law in Ukraine also.
With regard to Buzyna and his attacks even against the great poet
Taras Shevchenko, what can you say?  Nothing positive, that’s for
sure, however the danger from banning or restricting his writing
would, I am convinced, far outweigh any damage caused by his primitive
nonsense.  The question again refuses to be quashed: if the regime
changes then who will the new members of the Commission go for?
      Just over a year ago some staggeringly silly words spoken by
Buzyna about a notorious “Hitler doll” supposedly enjoying popularity
among Ukrainian families gained much more publicity than they
deserved. Lots of people asked indignantly why the government was
“doing nothing”. What precisely the government was supposed to do I
did not understand then, and continue to be in the dark about now.
      One should not underestimate the danger from people or forces
attempting to spread enmity or destabilize the country.  However any
measures which foist certain views or political correctness in the
interpretation of historical events contradict fundamental principles
of pluralism of views and under certain conditions can turn into a
dictatorship of “the only possible” version of history or the truth.
After decades of repression and millions of victims we should not
deceive ourselves, especially since we can observe Russia slipping
back. However fine-sounding the words may be, the result of any game,
including of a political variety, is determined by the rules we
follow. We already know all too well which rules lead to intellectual
stagnation, censorship, persecution of dissidents and tanks.
      Halya Coynash