20.05.2019, Kiev.
The problems of rewriting history are similar in Ukraine and Russia, said the second President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma at a meeting with the Lithuanian delegation in Kiev on May, 18, said his spokesperson Olga Olifer.
“I would like to ask the Russians: when I was at school I was told that Nicholas II was a bloody tsar who had shot people on January 9, who was to blame for Bloody Sunday. Why then have you made him a saint?” Leonid Kuchma asked rhetorically.
According to the Ukrainian ex-president, the shift from the earlier approach to history in Russia engendered the problems of contemporary Ukraine’s interpretation of history, its heroes and the difficulties in constructing a Ukrainian identity.
“All the problems lay in the fact that the history of Ukraine was written in Moscow and that Ukrainian heroes were created in Moscow,” said Leonid Kuchma. He clarified that by abandoning the history that it had in common with Russia, Ukraine embarked on searching for its own heroes, and it is natural that in different regions heroes may vary. Stepan Bandera became one of these.
Leonid Kuchma was elected president of the independent Ukraine in 1994, and he was the head of state until 2005. He is the author of the book Ukraine is not Russia, which supports the idea of Ukraine’s separate existence in the spirit of nationalist Ukrainism.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
