KimmageSoviet legacy was deemed bad. This scheme could make the political
dynamics of the post-Soviet world unnecessarily obscure. In 2014, for
example, when Ukraine descended into crisis, some of the on-the-
ground disputes among Ukrainian citizens proved baffling to Americans.
After a popular uprising in the capital city had toppled the Russian-
leaning government, the clearest source of contention was political and
geopolitical—between those who favored a new government with closer
ties to Europe and those still attached to the old, Russian-leaning gov-
ernment. Another source was linguistic, between Ukrainian speakers
and Russian speakers. But yet another was the battle over monuments—
especially over statues of Lenin whose state, by 2014, had been gone
for some twenty-three years.
A vague and blurry line ran across Ukraine. Lenin, of course,
was peripheral to the situation, but some Ukrainians flocked to his
statues, which represented the recollection of a Soviet past that had
value. In the western parts of the country, the narrative was about
Ukraine escaping Moscow’s clutches. In the east, however, some
counterprotests clearly remembered that it was the Red Army that
had liberated Ukraine from the Germans in 1944 and 1945, having
saved Ukraine from Europe, as it were. It was a matter of dueling,
irreconcilable narratives. Russia fueled these disputes from the outside
and intervened militarily for the sake of perpetuating them, but the
disputes were not in and of themselves artificial; they were legitimately
internal debates about the future of Ukrainian politics.
The foreign policy establishment in Washington, D.C., however,
expressed its complete support for one side of the argument in Ukraine
and was reluctant to acknowledge the other. One side appeared
good, and this was the side that considered anything Soviet evil.
The other side was not necessarily evil, but it was less good, in part
because it appeared to be mired in the Soviet past; it had not moved