Horror Stories from the Left

May 17 witnessed several simultaneous actions of protest staged in front of Verkhovna Rada. Some 200 members of the All-Ukrainian Union of Workers, Communist Party, and Zubr Association gathered in the morning, demanding a ban on “profascist organizations,” including UNA-UNSO, and against Ukraine’s accession to NATO. “If NATO comes to Ukraine we’ll organize partisan units and will fight,” declared Black Sea Navy veteran Pavlo Hrabchenko. In a word, here we have a very popular election horror story; the Left are not averse to trading in fear now and then.

Later another 400 joined the rally, these from the Association of Orthodox Brotherhoods, Soviet Officers’ Union, Slavic Party, and Congress of Russian Organizations in Ukraine. They protested the Pope’s visit and Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, head of the Soviet Officers’ Union, stated that a confrontation with Russia could happen if Ukraine adopted Catholicism. It is hard to say who at these organizations conceived the bright idea of the Ukrainian population, with its age- old history of Orthodoxy, suddenly converting to Catholicism en masse, but the hysterical campaign against the papal visit, long due and necessary for Ukraine’s democratic development, is getting to becoming obscene.