Donbas rewrite Ukrainian history books

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Ukrainian areas held by separatists, Donestsk and Lunhansk  now feature school curricula with a softened historical image of the Soviet Union's dealings with Ukraine.
At the heart of it is the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine, which killed at least three million people, by a conservative estimate. Historians, and sympathetic Ukrainians, have long contended the famine was caused by the export of grain to finance industrialization in the Soviet Union's Stalin era, with Ukraine receiving the brunt of the burden, reports UPI.
The anecdotal evidence includes desperate acts of cannibalism among the population.
The Ukrainian Parliament has praised Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era independence figure and leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), who Russia has depicted as a Nazi collaborator. After the current head of the Security service of Ukraine suggested the agency should base its work on that of the UPA, Eduard Dolinsky of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee was critical of the idea, calling the UPA a militia responsible, in the 1940s, for the deaths of Jews and Poles.
Newly-installed separatist governments in eastern Ukraine now provide history textbooks suggesting the famine was an unavoidable circumstance which affected all of the Soviet Union. It is an indication the bloody and tangled relationship between Russia and Ukraine is as important as territory in the current conflict.
Earlier in April, Ukraine passed legislation banning Soviet symbolism and iconography, an attempt to erase hammer-and-sickle displays, statues of Vladimir Lenin and other suggestions Ukraine was once part of the USSR. The textbooks, which have arrived in eastern Ukraine in the middle of a school semester, demonstrate revisionist history in action; "Fatherland History," which attempts to concentrate on ties between eastern Ukraine's Donestsk region and Russia, contrasts sharply with what 10th-grade students learned about Ukrainian history earlier in the school year.
Only two study units, of 52, even mention the dramatic depopulation of the country by famine.
The Soviet Union's attitude toward Ukraine during the famine is used as evidence Russia has no moral right to involvement in Ukrainian matters. The new textbooks are further clouding the issue.

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