WHEN Pastor Martin Niemoller wrote his "First they came..." poem, he led with the Communists, followed by incurables and Jews, because that was the order in which Hitler's Nazis incarcerated their professed enemies.

At times the often varied poem featured trade unionists, Christians and social democrats. It should  have included Gypsies, Freemasons, homosexuals and many others.

But the pastor's decision to begin with the Communists is both historically correct - their party was banned and they were locked up in 1933 - and reflects the obsession of all far-right regimes. 

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is not today's Hitler. His government is neither intent nor capable of putting Europe to the sword as the German despot did.

However, Poroshenko's decision to authorise "de-communisation" laws drawn up last month by the Verkhovna Rada parliament puts his government on the wrong side of history.

Ukraine's history as a multinational state has seen its transition within a century from part of the tsarist empire to a Soviet Union republic, with a brief period during the civil war in Russia as an independent state, before asserting its independence once again in 1991.

Its borders have varied over decades, resulting in a large Russian national minority, together with Belarussians, Poles, Moldovansm Tatars, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Jews and others.

Far-right groups, notably Stepan Bandera's Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), posed supposedly "pure" Ukrainians against other nationalities.

Anti-Russian prejudice translated into the OUN allying itself with the Nazi invaders against the Soviet Red Army, while massacring Jews, Poles and other minorities.

The fascist paramilitary groups that involved themselves in the Euromaidan demonstrations against the Yanukovych government, transforming protests into a coup d'etat 15 months ago, proclaimed themselves Banderists and successfully demanded the nationalist war criminal's rehabilitation. 

The corollary of lauding the likes of Bandera outlawing the role of the Red Army that liberated Ukraine and persecuting the Communist Party that always provided the stiffest resistance to fascism.

Banning the Ukrainian Communist Party, expelling its 32 MPs from the Verkhovna Rada, pulling down statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders, banning the hammer and sickle, the red star and revolutionary anthems and even making it illegal to suggest that the Soviet Union was anything but "criminal" offers a one-sided, pro-fascist history of Ukraine.

It effectively criminalises the wartime liberators of Ukraine's people from oppression, betraying a preference for the Nazi predators.

Poroshenko's claim that the legislation is even-handed, equating communism and fascism, is clearly a lie.

Even had it been true, it would have been scandalous to accord the same value to the inhuman racist creed that enslaved most of Europe and to its nemesis. 

Ukraine's Communists will doubtless appeal to the European Court of Human Rights over the state assault against their democratic rights, which has included its banning in some localities, the destruction of its offices, murder of its members and an attempted assassination of its leader Petro Symonenko. 

However, there is also an onus on the European Union and its member states to make clear to Kiev that there can be no rewriting of histroy to reverse the result of the Second World War.

Britain's trade unions and progressive movement should affiliate to Solidarity with Anti-fascist Resistance in Ukraine.

In making clear their opposition to Kiev's criminalisation of communism, they must ensure that, with Niemoller, no-one else is lined up behind the Communists so that "when they came for me, there was no-one left to speak for me."