FASCIST STAMPS published in a celebration of nationalist Ukrainian groups in exile during the Soviet-era in the Guardian and Observer at the weekend show that these newspapers have “sunk to a new low,” Britain’s communists said today.

“Artists and exiles around the world would use stamps to communicate the horrors of Soviet oppression,” the article states.

However some of the stamps celebrate the foundation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1942.

“This organisation actively participated in the mass extermination of Jews and Poles during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in World War II,” said Communist Party of Britain general secretary Rob Griffiths.

“There are no words of praise for those Ukrainian partisans who fought the horrors of Nazi oppression and against the UPA which helped staff the death camps and carried out its own round-ups and massacres of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews and minority Poles.

“Other stamps in the article accuse the Soviet Union of murdering 70 million people — a figure which can only include all the military and civilian victims of Nazi aggression — and of inflicting the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown on the people of Ukraine as a deliberate act of policy.

“This is a shocking betrayal of all who fought fascism in World War II and who campaign against racism and fascism today. 

“That the Observer and the Guardian should join Ukrainian nationalists and fascists — and the EU Parliament — in this rewriting of history is a measure of how far these papers have departed from the progressive ideals which they once claimed to represent. 

“Their anti-socialism is leading them into the swamp alongside the kind of fascists and racists they once opposed.”

The Guardian has been contacted for comment.