Ukrainian Pres Calls For Removing All Soviet-Era Monuments

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko on Saturday urged his nation to remove all the monuments commemorating the totalitarian regime.

Lenin statue at the head of Taras Shevchenko Boulevard - typical Communist propaganda.
As he addressed a meeting on Kiev’s Mikhailovsky Square that had gathered in connection with 75 years since the outbreak of famine of 1932 and 1933, Yushchenko condemned the Communist era and said his country “should put on a clean shirt, removing the symbols of totalitarianism from its body.”

At the same time, he called for installing national memorials and monuments.

Saturday, Yushchenko signed a decree declared 2008 the Year of Memory of the Victims of Famine.

The reported goal of the document is to “reveal truth about the genocide of the Ukrainian people to broad public quarters in Ukraine and to the international community in connection with the 75th anniversary of the tragedy”.

The decree demands that the government analyze the steps taken in connection with the Law on Famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, as well as the legislative acts in connection with the anniversary of famine and pass the necessary decisions on financing the steps they specify.

Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and the World Congress of Ukrainians are expected to produce within a month a plan of commemorative and special events that Ukraine’s diplomatic missions will carry out abroad with the aid of Ukrainian communities living in foreign countries.

Ukrainian officials claim that the famine of 1932 and 1933, which was caused by Joseph Stalin’s police of sweeping collectivization of private farms, was a purposeful act of genocide of the Ukrainian people.

In the meantime, historians, public personalities and politicians in Russia have indicated on many occasions that the famine embraced a territory much broader than the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and had a telling impact on many other regions and ethnic groups of the former USSR, including the Russians and Kazakhs.

Source: ITAR-TASS