Distillation of What Ukraine Is Now

The story below has been carefully collected and archived by Alexander Dyukov, Russian historian, author and human rights defender, founder of the Historical Memory Foundation. My part was just to translate and post it here. Well, and to add the last line.

You just have to see it with your own eyes.

These are the former armed insurgents of the so called "Maidan Self-Defense Forces", nowadays the "Kiev-2" battalion of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine.

They seized a man; made him undress; beat him; tied his hands and threw him into dirt.

It's Autumn; and it's not that warm round there.

They pose with their beaten and bleeding victim lying in the foreground.

On Freedom of Speech

In my opinion, it's a pure fun and a brilliant, exemplary sample of hypocrisy of some politicians of the post-Soviet political scene.

Inese Vaidere, a member of the European Parliament for Latvia, has written a letter to Martin Schulz, the President of the EP requesting to prohibit entry to all the EU countries to Alexander Dyukov, a Russian historian.

Yes, Dyukov expresses viewpoints that the current political beau-monde of the Baltic countries and now Ukraine generally dislike. He digs deep into the bloody cooperation of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Nazis and volunteers with Hitler Nazis during the WW2. He does so good that in Latvian media they always call him 'a pseudo historian', and the Latvian foreign ministry announced him a persona non grata. What a nice and logic way of a scientific dispute with someone with an unwelcome point of view, isn't it?

Recently he presented to the European Parliament his book devoted to human rights violations in Ukraine since February, 22 to May 22, 2014, that is during the events that were hypocritically called the 'Revolution of Dignity'. So Mrs Vaidere, being — quite traditionally for new political elites of Baltic countries — ultra-patriotic and russophobic, raged upon the fact that such a person was permitted to the EP.

Freedom of speech, you say? Do you know what that is? It's not only about your possibility to say how bad the USSR (or Russia, or Putin for that matter) is; it is also about the very same possibility for us to openly say things, some of which you definitely might dislike. Yet none of us lives in paradise, and there can be lots of criticism in all directions. But any argument or dispute should be logic to be positive.

And now back to the funny side of the story.

Alexander Dyukov was born in 1978. A year after Inese Vaidere, an economist, became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Isn't it hilarious?

In fact, in all post-Soviet countries many people whose current wealth is based upon a firm Soviet background are now acting as if willing to be more Catholic than the Pope. Sometimes it means to be more anti-Soviet than, say, Sir Winston Chirchill, and more russophobic than Adolf Hitler.

To be trendy.