“Few people want to remember the past,” the Ukrainian mathematician and Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch wrote in History’s Carnival, his 1979 reflection on life in the Soviet Union after Khrushchev. What Plyushch meant was not simple forgetfulness. He was describing an active resistance to memory — a fear of naming, of assigning responsibility, of admitting complicity. In the Brezhnev years of the 1960s and ’70s, ideology had decayed into ritual. People no longer believed in the Communist Party, but belief was no longer required. Silence was enough. Silence meant safety or even privilege.
Speaking, on the other hand, meant exile, imprisonment or psychiatric torture — the fate Plyushch endured when the KGB declared dissent a mental illness. The system relied not only on violence but on the quiet cooperation of millions who understood its rottenness and chose to live with it. Plyushch called the most zealous of them “the butchers”: those who directly persecuted dissidents or otherwise served the machine, justified its crimes and celebrated its lies.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the truth about those crimes slowly emerged. Archives cracked open. The world learned about mass deportations, executions and the systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture. People started talking openly about, for instance, the Holodomor — the murder of at least 3 million Ukrainians through a manmade famine, orchestrated by Stalin in the 1930s, the same decade when he ordered the executions of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals. Yet justice never followed knowledge. The persecutors were not punished. The persecuted were expected to move on. This moral imbalance became one of the founding paradoxes of independent Ukraine.
For three decades after the country achieved its independence in 1991, Ukraine lived under what could be called an informal amnesty. Unlike postwar Germany or postcommunist Czechoslovakia, it never carried out full lustration — an official, public scrutiny of the activities of former Soviet officials and collaborators. Instead, former Communist Party officials became ministers and governors. Former Soviet security officers rebranded themselves as businessmen, political consultants or media owners. University rectors and cultural gatekeepers who had enforced ideological conformity kept their posts. Even in journalism and academia, Soviet-era collaboration was quietly absorbed into the new democratic order.
Memory politics remained cautious, fragmented and often cynical. Independence fighters whose names had been erased or demonized by Soviet propaganda were no longer hidden from the public, but while their names reappeared in the history books to an extent, they were rarely studied seriously. Streets still bore the names of Red Army commanders and Bolshevik functionaries. Monuments to Lenin dominated central squares well into the 2010s.
The past was past. Uninteresting in its true self — because digging deeper into what actually happened in Ukraine risked deepening divisions in a country whose identity was still fragile after decades of totalitarian silence. It was safer not to talk about those things. After all, a hero could turn out to be a KGB informant; a beloved grandfather was, in fact, a Soviet torturer; a nice apartment inherited from one’s parents might be revealed to have been a thank-you gift for writing denunciations against neighbors.
This moral amnesia was not unique to Ukraine. Across Central and Eastern Europe, the 1990s produced a fragile consensus: Do not ask too many questions about who did what to whom during the Soviet era — or why. Stability required forgetting. As Plyushch warned, however, this forgetting came at a cost. In one of his most piercing observations, he wrote that the worst danger, worse than the comfort that forgetting gave to perpetrators, was the moral rehabilitation of their participation in the “first circle” of crimes — a rehabilitation that made future crimes easier.
That warning now reads as prophecy.
In Ukraine today, the past is no longer past. It is being unearthed, renamed and judged in real time. As cities rebuild from the damage of a war that continues, monuments come down. Russia’s full-scale invasion has accelerated something long delayed: a reckoning with history.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in 2022, Ukrainian memory has become a matter of survival. Streets once named after Soviet generals responsible for repression now bear the names of Ukrainian writers killed by the Kremlin or soldiers who died defending their towns.
This transformation is not merely symbolic. Ukrainian archives, including KGB files, have become sites of public engagement. Historians and journalists are reconstructing the biographies of Soviet-era elites and revealing how deeply repression was woven into everyday life. Families are confronting uncomfortable truths: that a respected factory director signed denunciations; that a beloved professor cooperated with state security; that cultural figures who spoke of “humanism” remained silent as colleagues were destroyed.
In universities, students are asking difficult questions. Who benefited from this silence? What does it mean to inherit both victimhood and complicity? The children and grandchildren of Soviet officials now reflect upon the moral weight of their inheritance — not always condemning their relatives but refusing the lie that everyone was equally powerless.
The war has stripped away the last illusions about neutrality in the face of Russian domination and oppression. Russia’s invasion is both military and historical. It is fought with tanks and missiles — and with myths about “brotherly nations,” about the Red Army as liberator, about the “Soviet paradise.” The contemporary Russian army proudly believes in these Soviet myths. For most Russians, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was synonymous with “homeland,” while for other oppressed peoples, it was “the prison of nations.” This Soviet nostalgia and propaganda never left Russia: It has only grown stronger in recent years, while independent Ukraine chose to break free from these myths — slowly and uncertainly at first, then by opening archives and resisting the Russian war, thereby clarifying its own story. This resistance requires long postponed moral distinctions.
The wartime “moral mobilization” raises questions that extend far beyond Ukraine. Across the democratic world, societies are struggling with how to remember — and whom to forgive. In the United States, debates over Confederate statues expose unresolved legacies of slavery and segregation. In Germany, discussions about colonial crimes in Africa challenge the limits of post-Holocaust memory culture. In Latin America, human rights defenders have documented atrocities, yet many perpetrators continue to live freely among their victims without ever facing real punishments, as was the case with the dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose crimes never landed him in jail in Chile or in the democratic West.
Ukraine’s experience complicates these debates. Unlike countries dealing with distant or concluded violence, Ukraine is confronting its past while fighting for its present. No clean distinction separates memory from survival. One danger of this circumstance is that memory becomes punitive, simplified or weaponized — that reckoning turns into revenge without any hope for a reconciliation. But the greater danger, as Plyushch understood, is moral amnesia.
“Do not forgive them even here, on earth,” he wrote, “because it will make their lives too easy, dulling the reproaches of their own conscience.”
His is not a call for collective guilt or endless punishment. It is a demand for moral clarity. What Plyushch condemned was false reconciliation — reconciliation without truth, forgiveness without acknowledgment. It is telling that, as he observed, almost none of the Soviet “engineers of human souls” publicly repented for their participation in state crimes. Silence was the safest option.
Ukraine is now refusing their silence. Memory has become an instrument of defense and, paradoxically, a path toward genuine reconciliation within Ukrainian society. Only by naming perpetrators may victims be fully recognized. Only by admitting complicity can society prevent any repetition. Then the next generation — the one not complicit in the crimes of the past — may finally reflect on what was done by or to their grandparents, and then start the conversation, even if the start is not easy.
The reckoning is uncomfortable. It creates new tensions between generations, regions and identities. It risks reopening wounds that never healed. Yet it also offers something rare: an example of how a society under existential threat can insist on moral accountability rather than continuing to postpone it.
The past keeps interrupting because it was never resolved. Ukraine’s struggle suggests that democracy cannot be built on inherited silence. History does not stay buried. It waits.
And when it returns, it rarely does so politely.
I first felt this not through the opening of an archive or the removal of a monument but through a pause in conversation. Someone older than me — educated, respected, not cruel — was speaking about the Soviet years with a kind of weary nostalgia: the predictability, the stability, the sense that life then followed known rules. Then, almost as an afterthought, this person added: “Of course, some people disappeared. But that was politics.”
The sentence landed heavily. Politics in this formulation was a natural disaster — impersonal, regrettable and beyond responsibility. It also revealed how the problem delved beyond mere denial into moral distancing.
For a long time, Ukrainian society allowed this distancing to persist. Even after the archives opened, even after historians began publishing meticulous accounts of repression, even after survivors spoke publicly, the emotional economy of the post-Soviet period rewarded restraint. One could acknowledge crimes abstractly while avoiding their proximity. The victims remained tragic figures of history; the perpetrators remained neighbors, colleagues, sometimes relatives.
The war has collapsed that distance.
When Russian missiles destroy apartment buildings in cities described as “pro-Russian” or “Russian-speaking,” the old categories lose meaning. When occupation authorities compile lists, conduct interrogations and demand loyalty, the methods of the 20th century reappear almost unchanged. The past does not return as memory; it returns as death, physical destruction, administrative structure. This is why Ukrainians now speak less about memory and more about responsibility.
A well-known historian, Yaroslav Hrytsak, has argued that Ukrainian history cannot be understood through heroic myths alone, because myths flatten moral complexity. He describes Ukraine as a society shaped by overlapping catastrophes — oppressive imperial rule and then the bloody collapse of the old systems; the loss of the national revolution due to the Soviet invasion, communist terror and Stalin’s repressions. Add to that the Nazi occupation, then the post-World War II repression when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were murdered, jailed, sent to Siberia, or deported from their homes to other parts of the Soviet empire. None of these terrifying events was ever fully addressed before the next one arrived. The result, Hrytsak suggests, is an amnesia born from exhaustion rather than ignorance, a culture trained to survive rather than to reflect and process the past.
Yet survival has limits. What was adaptive under occupation becomes corrosive in freedom. The tension is visible in today’s debates over decolonization and de-Sovietization. The removal of monuments and renaming of streets are often dismissed by critics — at home and abroad — as symbolic distractions, mere gestures that fail to address corruption, inequality or military vulnerability. But symbols are not neutral. They are instructional. They teach citizens whom to admire, whom to excuse and whom to forget.
In The Gates of Europe, historian Serhii Plokhii traces how imperial and Soviet frameworks survived not because they were convincing, but because they were familiar. What the current war has revealed, he argues, is how dangerous familiarity can be when it masks domination.
In this sense, Russia’s invasion is a continuation of history rather than an interruption — a reminder that unresolved narratives do not disappear; they metastasize.
This becomes clear in personal encounters. I know people who, until recently, insisted that politics and history were abstractions best left to specialists. After 2022, they began asking specific questions: Why was this street named after that person? Who decided this? What did they actually do? These were practical inquiries, not ideological conversions. They were born of fear and clarity.
One friend, whose family had always spoken proudly of a grandfather who “worked in the system but never hurt anyone,” decided to request his archival file. What she found was not monstrous — no executions at least — but something else disturbing: routine participation. There were his signatures. His approvals. His attendance. There he was, a “little man” of the system. The machinery of repression revealed as a network of functionaries who made violence efficient by making it normal.
She did not publish the documents. She did not denounce her family. But something she said stayed with me: “I can’t pretend this doesn’t change what I know about myself.” That sentence captures what is at stake in Ukraine’s reckoning: memory as self-knowledge.
The author Oksana Zabuzhko has argued that Ukrainian culture was systematically trained to mistrust its own voice — to see itself either through imperial contempt or through sentimental self-idealization. In essays written well before the full-scale invasion, she warned that societies that do not articulate their own traumatic histories become vulnerable to stories imposed from the outside. After 2022, she put it more bluntly: This war is about more than territory. It’s about who has the authority to name reality.
Zabuzhko notes that very few Soviet cultural elites ever publicly repented because acknowledgment would have required a different kind of courage than conformity. The lack of repentance, she argues, created a cultural continuity of evasion — a tradition of explaining oneself rather than answering hard questions truthfully.
This continuity is now breaking. Digital platforms publish scanned archival documents alongside personal testimonies, collapsing the gap between history and biography. Museums still honor heroism, but they also document fear, collaboration and moral ambiguity.
This work is slow. It produces conflict. It offends those who prefer continuity over truth. But it also creates the conditions for a different kind of reconciliation that does not require forgetting.
Ukraine’s experience suggests that democratic resilience depends upon a contested past rather than a sanitized one. Societies do not need to agree on everything, but they may grow stronger when they agree that certain things happened — and that they mattered.
I was born and raised in a newly independent Ukraine. Regaining sovereignty meant regaining histories and memories that could be acknowledged without fear. But liberation of memory brought with it another, less obvious problem. People knew so little that they did not even know how much they were missing. Entire layers of experience had been erased so thoroughly that no shared sense of absence remained.
Where do you begin to look in a newly opened archive when the information that shaped and destroyed millions of lives has been hidden from you and everyone around you? How do you recognize what matters when the very categories of importance were dictated by a regime that depended on distortion? And how do you organize what you find? How do you categorize people?
Consider a former communist and a dissident, someone who agitated for the Reds during the Soviet-Ukrainian War of 1917-21 only to be sent to the camps years later for taking a pro-Ukrainian stance: Is that a life to judge or to celebrate? To condemn? To commemorate? Is there a correct moral sequence for such biographies?
These questions are not abstract to me. They entered my life early, through family memory. I remember my grandmother walking me through Lviv. She held my hand as we made our way along narrow streets, her shoes clicking against the cobblestones. She stopped near Mytna Square and pointed to a building from the Austrian era of the 18th and 19th centuries — solid, elegant, in the way old European buildings often are. She was born there, she said, during the Second World War. Her family lived there, briefly, until that life and that apartment were taken from them.
My grandmother’s older brother remembered Lviv before the war as a vibrant, multicultural city. My grandmother was not so lucky. The Lviv she remembered was war itself. Her father joined the resistance, fighting one occupying power and then another — the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again.
When the war ended and the Soviets retook the city, her family was placed on the “undesirable” list as relatives of an “enemy of the people.” They were, by Soviet standards, very fortunate: No one was shot or deported to Siberia. Instead, their apartment was confiscated and given to a KGB officer. My grandmother’s family went to a village where they lived in poverty for years.
Decades later, she wanted to show me the old apartment — the sunny, spacious rooms she barely remembered. We climbed the building’s cracked stone steps and knocked on a heavy wooden door. A middle-aged woman opened it — an unfriendly face. She listened to my grandmother’s explanation with visible irritation. She had no interest in nostalgia, no patience for strangers, no intention of letting this woman and her grandchild into her apartment. She closed the door firmly.
“Well, why should she let us in?” my grandmother said softly, almost apologetically. “It was a silly idea.”
At the time, I was too young to understand the moment. Now I return to it often. Was that woman the daughter of the KGB officer who had received the apartment after its owners were dispossessed? Or simply someone who bought the apartment years later without asking questions? Both possibilities are plausible. But the notion that a KGB officer could freely sell or pass on property taken by force — and that this transfer could endure unquestioned into an independent Ukraine — tells me a great deal about justice, memory, reconciliation and reckoning in the post-Soviet world.
Numerous Soviet-era dissidents — men and women now in their 70s and 80s — lived on minimal pensions in independent Ukraine, while their persecutors, the “butchers” in Leonid Plyushch’s term, carried on as respected citizens, recipients of generous state pensions, owners of property accumulated through privilege and coercion. History had been exposed, but its consequences had not been set right.
Recently, I was approached by a data scientist who was collecting information on Russians and Ukrainians serving as “governors” and “officials” in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. He said it was relatively easy to compile such a database and pass it on to Western governments so these officials might one day be sanctioned or prosecuted. Ukrainians who collaborated with the occupation authorities would no longer be able to move freely in Ukraine-controlled territory. There would, at least in theory, be consequences.
“Maybe a teacher or a school principal isn’t the most important case,” he said. “But a mayor, someone higher up — that matters.” These people can be named, their actions documented. They may no longer rely on the old expectation that time will blur responsibility, that silence will once again assure amnesty.
Ukraine has not finished reckoning with Soviet crimes, and now it must contend with this new wave of violence, collaboration and betrayal. How many layers of unresolved history can a society process at once? How do you demand accountability in the present while the injustices of the past remain?
I was thinking about this not long ago as I walked down Andriivskyi Descent in Kyiv, not far from the former site of a statue of Mikhail Bulgakov, a Kyiv-born Russian author and reputed Ukrainophobe. For years, his monument in the heart of the capital of independent Ukraine had provoked polarized reactions. Some defended it in the name of “culture,” others saw it as a symbol of imperial contempt. In June, the city administration finally dismantled it, citing Bulgakov’s hostility toward Ukraine, a decision supported by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
I never liked Bulgakov. “Good riddance,” I thought.
Leonid Plyushch spent nearly three years in a psychiatric hospital where he was injected with powerful drugs that slowly destroyed his mind. His doctors took part in the sadistic punishment of “political” patients, using medicine to erase dissent. Plyushch later described the experience as “gas chambers for the mind” — torture methodically administered by people in white coats.
Needless to say, when the Soviet Union collapsed, these torturers — doctors, nurses, orderlies, police officers and administrators — were not punished. They were not senior party officials or famous ideologues. They were ordinary functionaries of repression. And perhaps for that reason, they disappeared most easily into the new order. When independence came, they — along with hundreds of thousands of others with compromised or criminal pasts — were simply absorbed into the newly democratic society.
In the Soviet Union, Plyushch wrote, everything was anonymous: “crime, trial, butchers — only the victims are real.” Responsibility dissolved into institutions, signatures and procedures. Violence was bureaucratized; guilt was diffused. In independent Ukraine, knowledge replaced secrecy, but justice failed to follow. You could know about crimes and perpetrators and still see no trial.
What did it mean for victims to live in that reality? To walk the streets with neighbors who had destroyed their lives, once protected by terror and now by indifference?
Today, fear no longer compels silence. We can speak. Archives are open. Names can be written down. Truth is no longer forbidden. But truth alone is not justice.
Truth is uncomfortable, destabilizing, often divisive. It disrupts families, reputations and inherited certainties. And yet the question is unavoidable: Will truth, by itself, ever be enough? Or does justice require more than memory — something harder, riskier and still unfinished? As someone who lives amid the Russian invasion of my country, I tend to agree with the latter. Truth, memory and justice are too fragile to be left to survive on their own.
Anna Romandash is an award-winning Ukrainian journalist and author. She wrote Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond (2023) and Stories of Resilience (2024), which focused on the 2022 Russian invasion of her home country.