T he first thing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich did after
his February 25 inauguration was delete the link to the
Holodomor on the president’s official Web site. Yanukovich’s
predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, had made the Holodomor—the
famine of 1932–33 produced by Joseph Stalin and responsible for
the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants—into a national
issue, promoting what Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously
called “the struggle of memory over forgetting” as part of his
attempt to move the country toward democracy. That Yanukovich
turned his back so dramatically on this movement to rehabilitate
Ukraine’s tragic past indicated the extent to which the recent
election was as much about identity as it was about politics.
This was no accident. Thanks to the 2004 Orange Revolution,
Ukrainian national identity has become synonymous with democracy
and the West. And thanks to Vladimir Putin’s construction of a
newly assertive Russian state, Russian identity has
unfortunately become associated, as in Sovi