![]() Yanukovych did not stop there: bowing to Russian pressure, he refused to refer to the Holodomor as an act of genocide despite an earlier decision of the Ukrainian parliament on that issue. ![]() The decision aroused numerous protests in Ukraine and abroad, and the new president, Viktor Yanukovych, allowed a Donetsk regional court to rescind the award. The same month, before stepping down as president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko posthumously bestowed the highest state award, the star of Hero of Ukraine, on Stepan Bandera, a radical nationalist leader of the first half of the twentieth century, who was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959. In January 2010, a Ukrainian court ruled on the criminal responsibility of the Soviet leadership for the Holodomor, the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, and found Joseph Stalin and his associates in Moscow and Kharkiv guilty of causing the death of close to four million Ukrainian citizens. The use and abuse of history in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict of 2014-15 has been well documented, but the rise of history to prominence in Ukrainian politics began earlier. In fact, battles over history have become part of a very real, not virtual, war. ![]() DURING THE LAST FEW YEARS, history has taken center stage in Ukrainian political debates and spilled over to the East European scene. ![]()
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