Lest We Forget

The ban on "Communist" and "pro-Soviet" organisations and material in Ukraine is in fact a ban on organisations that identify with, and on material that takes the side of, the Allied fighters against Nazi Germany and its collaborators, whose images and paraphernalia are much in evidence in and around the new Ukrainian regime.

It is a generation since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the statues of Lenin and so forth came down then. Those which are still standing are in fact war memorials. That is precisely why they are now being torn down.

There are streets in Britain named after Stalin, as there are monuments to all manner of foreign and domestic monsters who happened to be our monsters, or at least monsters who were allied to us. Are they all to be renamed, or demolished, or what have you? The naming of streets has always been a local government function, a matter for the council.

As much as anything else, "Why is there a Stalin Avenue in Chatham? (unchanged by the Tory Council) and "Why is there a Stalin Road in Colchester?" (unchanged either during the long decades of Conservative control of by the present Lib Dem-led administration) are ways into important conversations.

Like the Stalin Avenue in Brussels, the former Stalin Lane in Amsterdam, and the former Stalin Square in Vienna. The second and third of those were changed in 1956. "Why in 1956?" Again, an important conversation is initiated.

As it is by why there used to be a Stalin Street, a Roosevelt Street and a Churchill Street in Tehran, but they were all changed in 1979.

And as it is by why such alterations, many a great deal more than mere changes of street names, are being made in Ukraine today rather than in the early 1990s, and why certain political parties and types of publication are being stamped out there now rather than then.