WHILE the world marked the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s defeat, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, sent his embattled compatriots a mixture of messages about the past and their identity. His words and gestures had to be carefully crafted because of his country’s role as a battleground between Nazis and Soviet forces, with Ukrainians fighting on both sides and suffering terribly. Sensitivity was running extra-high because, in today’s war between his government and separatist rebels, many combatants feel those old battles are still in progress.

So on May 8th, the date when the Western world remembers the Allied victory, he ceremonially addressed parliament and stressed the vital role of Ukrainian soldiers (albeit in Red Army uniform) in quashing Germany. The following day, the date for Soviet victory festivities, there were further official commemorations in Kiev, the capital. They included a march past the Motherland monument, which looms over the city and is communist in style: the silver maiden holds a shield emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. But the stolid statue was adorned with poppies, a Western way of remembering war.

As Mr Poroshenko told parliament, “Ukrainians were the first to feel the effects of two totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Communist.” In other words, he was rejecting attempts by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and his supporters in Ukraine’s rebellious east, to paint all patriotic Ukrainians as “fascists”, insisting instead that his nation had a place among the democracies which rejected tyranny of all kinds.

As shelling still rumbles across areas of eastern Ukraine that are held by pro-Russian rebels, Mr Poroshenko sounds a bit too hopeful when he claims that Ukraine is at last “looking at its history with its own eyes, not through the glasses of Moscow”. Nothing he can say about his land’s terrible travails in the mid-20th century will please everybody.

Ukraine is often presented as a country split by language, with Ukrainian predominant in the far west, Russian in the south and east and both tongues widely spoken in the centre. But in many ways ideological rifts over the past run even deeper—and have implications for the future.

Ever since Ukraine gained independence from a collapsing Soviet Union in 1991, it has been torn apart by contrasting memories, says Georgiy Kasianov, a professor at the Ukrainian Academy of Science. People in western cities like Lviv, which came under Soviet rule only in 1939, have accepted a “national” narrative that stresses the distinctiveness of Ukraine. Meanwhile nostalgia for the Soviet epoch lingered in the south and east. That does not mean that Ukrainians are obsessed by history; most are more concerned with earning a living. But Russia’s propaganda, portraying last year’s overthrow of an authoritarian government as a “fascist coup”, has reopened historical wounds.

And although many Ukrainians played a gallant role in the second world war, it is also a fact that the country was divided. There were nationalist fighters in western Ukraine who joined the Nazis, hoping to advance their dream of independence; they often battled countrymen in the Red Army. This led to rival mythologies, says Timothy Snyder, a Yale University professor. One side stressed the Soviet-led fight against fascism, and the other a struggle for Ukrainian independence that was sometimes careless in choosing friends.

On both sides of today’s front line, the fighting is presented as an extension of those 20th-century struggles. Ukrainian nationalist battalions, some of which have an arm’s length relationship with the government in Kiev, see their war as the latest phase of a long campaign for freedom from Russia. Meanwhile the pro-Russian separatists call their campaign a battle against resurgent neo-Nazis and fascists.

That has troubling implications for the remaking of Ukraine as a single land. In theory, the Minsk peace plan lays down that the rebel-controlled Donbas region, of which Donetsk is the capital, will remain part of Ukraine and, eventually, be reintegrated with the whole country. But in the separatist “republics” built round the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, local leaders have not only renounced Kiev’s political authority, they are also rewriting history in a way diametrically opposed to the story now told in the capital. For example, in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, teachers have been told not to term as genocide the Holodomor, the famine induced by Soviet policies in the 1930s that killed millions. The rebel republics marked May 9th in neo-Soviet style with a pompous military parade and orange and black ribbons filling the streets. Donetsk also celebrated 70 years of victory (over the Nazis) and one year of independence (from the “neo-Nazis” who supposedly dominate Kiev). In Kiev, though, the politicians who swept into office after last year’s uprising have shown two different approaches to history. Some have wisely pushed for inclusive gestures, such as celebrating both May 8th and 9th, and holding joint events with veterans from the Soviet Red Army and Ukrainian nationalist groups. But there is also a divisive faction at work. One of its successes was the passage last month of a series of “decommunisation” laws.

Two laws stand out. One officially recognises those who fought for Ukrainian independence in the 20th century, including controversial groups that are tainted in many people’s eyes with fascist links. The law describes groups like the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as “independence fighters” and makes it illegal to deny their role in battling for statehood. Another law threatens jail time for publicly denying the “criminal nature” of the Soviet regime. Soviet-era names of streets and cities would have to be changed and statues of Soviet leaders torn down.

A human impulse

In some ways, this is understandable. The impulse to destroy symbols of a hated and discredited regime is deep-seated. In Kharkiv, where activists felled the country’s largest Lenin statue last autumn, Sergei Yangolenko, a local pro-Kiev commander, says bringing down the monument “made it easier to breathe”.

Yet if Mr Poroshenko signs them, the decommunisation laws will exacerbate tensions, not unite the country. Even as support for Ukraine’s political turn to the West has consolidated, contrasting historical convictions have proved resilient. A recent poll by the the Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kiev showed that across much of the south-east, even in regions under central-government control, the Soviet collapse is perceived in a negative light.

“We can’t build a new Ukrainian nation on divisive old historical figures,” Vasyl Rasevych of the Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Lviv argues. The glorification of OUN and UPA has dismayed many Jews and Poles. By elevating these groups, Ukraine “turns Hitler’s henchmen into heroes”, says Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish Nazi-hunting group.

The irony is that the decommunisation laws remind many of the communist approach to solving problems. “They are fighting the Soviet remains with Soviet methods,” says Mr Kasianov. He has a point. In 1918 Lenin issued a decree that statues “erected in honour of the tsars and their minions” be torn down, and the “old inscriptions, emblems, names of streets” be changed to reflect the “ideas and sentiments” of the revolution.

By using laws and punishments to change people’s ideas about history, “we are repeating the mistakes of the past,” says Mikhail Minakov, a political philosopher in Kiev. As he see things, “we are fighting with a ghost” of totalitarianism. It is a battle that can only be won with openness, free argument and light.