Ukraine sheds Soviet past on 25th year of independence

Ukraine marks the 25th anniversary of its freedom from Kremlin rule Wednesday with moves to sweep away its totalitarian past and embrace a European future while grappling with its tense relations with Russia. A nation that once served as a geopolitical bridge between Moscow and the West is now the source of a deep and dangerous rift. Wednesday's commemorations take place against a backdrop of bitter recrimination and warnings only last week by President Petro Poroshenko that the country could face a "full-scale" Russian invasion. More than 9,500 people have been killed and some two million forced from their homes in fighting between government forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. And Ukraine's south has lost its strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea -- annexed by Russia on the orders of President Vladimir Putin. The flare points are a legacy of a 2014 popular uprising that ousted Ukraine's Moscow-backed leader and left Putin incensed at losing the country he had hoped to enlist in his own Kremlin-led bloc. Russia's reprisals prompted Ukraine to adopt a decommunisation law that banned Soviet symbols and condemned "totalitarian regimes" -- a measure to burnish its pro-Western credentials and take a symbolic shot at Moscow. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance chief Volodymyr Vyatrovych said Wednesday's Independence Day holiday will commemorate most people's desire "to get rid of the totalitarian past." Polling figures suggest overall resentment toward Russia is growing. The Kiev-based Democratic Initiatives Foundation research institute published data showing that 61 percent of Ukrainians think "healthy nationalism is what the country needs" -- up from 48 percent the year the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Only 11 percent still think they could not survive without Russia -- down drastically from the 40-percent figure recorded when Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych was in power in 2011. But changes are much harder to accept for those in eastern regions -- where sympathy for Moscow is greater and dating back many generations -- than those in the pro-European and more nationalist west. Many in the east are disconcerted to see their cities and streets lose their Russian names and monuments to once-revered Soviet leaders toppled. The city of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region is close to the war's front line and was called Artemivsk for more than 90 years. It was originally named after a Communist revolutionary who bore the nickname Artyom and whose statue stood in the central square until it was demolished in July 2015 and the city's name changed this year. "People are very unhappy," Bakhmut city council member Artur Radkovskiy told AFP. "If only the demolition of monuments made life any better," he said. "But they (the government) only mutilated the city." A 24-year-old lawyer who agreed to be identified only as Maria said that Kiev "needed to explain who those people in honour of whom the streets were named were, and what they did wrong." "People in the east think that their world is collapsing and the demolition of monuments adds to this sense of fear and instability," said cultural expert Olesya Ostrovska, director of Kiev's Mystetskiy Arsenal modern art museum. "This loss of visual references can bring a lot of extra stress, much more pain," she added. - Switching to Ukrainian - Popular national showman Antin Mukharskiy is one of those self-proclaimed patriots who used to speak Russian but switched to Ukrainian to distance himself from the country's Soviet past. He criticises "sovok" -- a colloquialism meaning a Soviet mentality -- as an entrenched reflex that has to be swept away. "To change sovok is like pulling teeth," he said. "There are steps that the country has to take as a matter of emergency to survive -- just to survive." But cultural expert Ostrovska-Lyuta argued for a more gradual and inclusive change of course. "This is the only way we will be able to survive the changes and accept them. On the other hand, a rapid process can have an opposite effect," she warned.