Donetsk, Ukraine: Pigeons pick for what they can on the meticulously maintained concrete of Lenin Square here. Towering over the open and empty public plaza is a 20-metre statue of revolutionary Communist founder of the Soviet Union, and taped to its base plinth are coloured photocopies of staff pictures of 11 dead policemen.
“They were killed by the terrorists in Kiev last month,” explains Julia Slitznova through a translator. She is a fully paid up card-carrying member of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). And for her, the separatists who have taken over government buildings and another city centre plaza and declared an independent republic of Don Bass, are simply too soft in their demands.
“We need to return Ukraine to a new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” she says. For her fellow party members, they don’t want a new Cold War with the West — they want a return to the old Cold War, where workers thrived in utopian Soviet satellite republics and everyone was theoretically equal.
She wants the clock turned back with Belarussia, the Baltic Republics, Kazakhstan and every other piece of the Soviet Union put back together — with Ukraine there as well.
“What happened in Kiev was terrorism sponsored by Nato and the US,” she says. And the 11 officers who died are heroes to Ukraine — the other 70 or so civilians who died agitators and terrorists.
A red plastic shelter carries the hammer and sickle logo and on a picnic table, weighed down with stones are tabloid copies of Pravda and broadsheet copies of Commusat — the party’s newspapers.
At the nearby university, a delegation of students has just arrived from western Ukraine. They’re carry boxes of printed messages of support from other students, telling them to stay strong in the face of the separatist threat.
“We have collected tens of thousands of messages of support on Facebook,” explains Tatyanna Dernova in near-perfect English. “The Crimea referendum was illegal and you cannot carve up Ukraine by deciding to have an illegal referendum.”
On Twitter, the Ukrainian hashtag #StayStrong has thousands of followers. The students are also using Pinterest, Instagram and web pages to keep the anti-separatist message front and centre, Dernova explains.
“Social media is critical for us,” she says. “We don’t have to rely on traditional media to be heard.”
Back in Lenin Square, an elderly couple stop by for a chat with Communist comrade Slitznova — a chat that seems more social in nature than socialist. They move on with out picking up Pravda or Commusat — it seems a tough sell to get the party’s message out.
Some days — as the cold stone figure of Lenin knows only too well — some days, you’re the statue, some days you’re the pigeon.
