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Memory Wars in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1991–2010)
Abstract
Analysts of the post-Soviet memory wars in Ukraine have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the ways in which Ukrainian memory is shaped by regional differences. The regional dimension is certainly important here, but approaching Ukrainian memory exclusively through this lens can serve to obscure other aspects of the landscape. In this chapter, I aim to shift the perspective, with a view to emancipating the rich social reality of Ukrainian memory from the pressures of normative and essentializing schemas and one-sided reductive assessments. Focusing on the changing politics of memory during the presidencies of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2004) and Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), I will show that this politics, far from having been structured and predetermined by rigid and entrenched regional fault lines, has in fact been deeply contingent and deeply contradictory. The search for a strategy that would legitimize the new independent Ukraine and its post-Soviet elite without provoking national, linguistic, and/or religious conflict, while all the time with an eye to Russia, was all about improvisation.
... Many studies refer to decommunisation as a neutral practice of overcoming or reconstructing the communist past or undoing its legacy (Tarifa & Weinstein 1995;Pomorski 1996;Welsh 1996). Others have employed military and war metaphors, such as defeating, purging, 'memory wars' and the 'war of monuments' (Portnov 2013). The head of Ukraine's Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Natsionalnoi Pamiati), Volodymyr Vyatrovych, has defined decommunisation as a process of 'defeating the totalitarian communist legacy, destroying its role in history, and ensuring that it does not recur or have any influence on the present' (Vyatrovych et al. 2017, p. 101). ...
... Measures of transitional justice that could have happened in Ukraine at this time but did not are lustration, court trials, investigative commissions, the opening of secret archives, the demolition of monuments and the renaming of streets. Limited measures of transitional justice were introduced at the local and regional level, when city officials in western Ukraine took measures to break away from the Soviet past (Portnov 2013). However, no nationallevel measures of transitional justice involving the recent wrongdoings of the previous regime were introduced. ...
... As a result, early attempts to decommunise public spaces left these regions with very few communist streets by the time of the 2015 decommunisation laws. 11 It was not until 2004, after the Orange Revolution, that Ukraine undertook its first national efforts of truth and justice reforms (Portnov 2013). 12 The implementation of symbolic measures of truth and justice were more successful than institutional measures, such as lustration. ...
This article examines the politics of renaming streets as a symbolic form of decommunisation in Ukraine. The evidence suggests that political factors, or ‘politics of the present’, rather than structural factors, or ‘politics of the past’, explain the opposition to decommunisation since 2015. More specifically, two mutually necessary factors—the interaction among subnational veto players and the efforts of toponymic commissions—explain the opposition to the renaming of streets. Regions with a high number of subnational veto players and low engagement by toponymic commissions have shown a higher degree of resistance to the renaming of streets.
... The debate around the Soviet past, its perceptions and evaluations were at the heart of these tensions and memory politics in both countries. However, it was not before the Euromaidan protests overthrew the Victor Yanukovych regime that the "memory war" (Portnov, 2013) in Ukraine turned into a real undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine. This shift, however, has not stopped memory of the Soviet past from being used as an important mobilization resource and justification of actions of the opposing sides during the initial and later stages of the conflict. ...
... According to Andriy Portnov (2013), the development of competing national narratives in different regions of Ukraine or a "memory war" before the crisis should not be treated as solely negative phenomenon. This development, however, requires a more detailed discussion. ...
... The victory of Euromaidan and the de-Communization processes that followed also signify the collapse of regionalized commemorative practices that existed before (Portnov 2013). This was perceived as unjust and unacceptable not only by online commentators, but also by all interviewees. ...
This paper focuses on the use of Soviet-era symbols, myths, and narratives within groups on VKontakte social media site over the initial stage of the Ukraine crisis (2014–2015). The study is based on qualitative content analysis of online discussions, visual materials, and entries by group administrators and commentators. It also applies link-analysis in order to see how groups on social media are interrelated and positioned online. It reveals that these online groups are driven primarily by neo-Soviet myths and hopes for a new version of the USSR to emerge. Over time, the main memory work in these groups shifted from Soviet nostalgia and “pragmatic” discourse to the use of re-constructed World War II memories in order to justify Russian aggression and to undermine national belonging in Ukraine. Reliance on the wartime mythology allowed for the labelling of Euromaidan supporters as “fascists” that should be eliminated “once again.” This powerful swirl of re-created Soviet memories allowed effective mobilization on the ground and further escalation of the conflict from street protests to the armed struggle.
... This dynamic run hand in hand with a more obviously problematic development, especially relevant for Eastern Europe recently: the frequent use (and abuse) of history as a means to political ends (Assmann 20016, 2013;Erll 2008;Bell 2006;Blacker & Etkind 2013;Jilge 2006;Nijakowski 2008;Portnov 2009Portnov , 2013. The practices of memory politics in the region are sadly all too often infested with nationalism and extreme instrumentalization, or even weaponization, of history. ...
... A lot of research has been done on memory in this region. Scholars analyzed memory discussing it in the context of political discourses, international politics, literature, and monuments (Karlsson, Petersson, and Törnquist-Plewa 1998;Törnquist-Plewa 1992Shevel 2016;Mälksöö 2010;Lewis 2018;Etkind and Blacker 2013;Zhurzhenko 2013;Portnov 2009Portnov , 2013Yurchuk 2014). Scholars also have written on media and their role in cultural memory construction (Erll and Rigny 2008;Erll and Nunning 2008). ...
“The glut of media is also a glut of memory: past is everywhere”
wrote Andrew Hoskins (2014: 662) to emphasize the close link between
media and perception of the past. This is especially perceptible
in Eastern Europe, where so much public debate, from media
polemic to trolling on Facebook, is rooted in historical problematic.
As we have demonstrated, the countries in the region, including
Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, have all witnessed
an increasing transfusion between fields of academic history and
media/entertainment. Not only the media are intervening in history,
setting the agenda and creating prosthetic memory artefacts,
but also historians are actively pursuing the path of being visible,
vocal and viral in both traditional and social media. Historikerstreit
is happening on Facebook and in professional web forums as much
as in peer-reviewed journals, sometimes even more intensively in
the new and social media. Ever more often historians also create
media product, ranging from popular articles for glossy magazines
to popular books to YouTube videos to full-length films. The very habitus of historian is changed; no longer confined to a narrow
problem or a cabinet hermit, the present-day historian in Eastern
Europe—now more often than previously female—is in ever more
cases a social media persona, skillful at using new media, and maintains
a permanent media visibility.
Such situation creates opportunities for both hegemonic manipulation
of history and counter-efforts to it. As demonstrated in
the article, mediatized history opens up for memory wars around
contested issues of shared, entangled histories, and suits well to
propagating nationalist versions of those histories. Yet mediatization
of history also creates space for counterefforts striving to set
the historical record right and debunk myths and conspiracy theories
wherever it is possible. It is only logical that the media, where
much manipulation takes place, becomes also a space contested by
historians willing to mitigate the consequences of the “use and
abuse of history for life”, to use the title of the famous essay by Nietzsche.
Perhaps, mediatization of history is as much of a blessing as
it is a curse—not unlike Platonian “pharmakon” in Derrida’s reading;
both poison and medicine for the region shattered by mutual
attacks on the shared history. Whether this proposition is true remains
to be seen, and most certainly invites further research.
... This dynamic runs hand in hand with a more obviously problematic development, especially relevant for Eastern Europe recently: the frequent use (and abuse) of history as a means to political ends (Assmann, Aleida 2016Erll 2008;Bell 2006;Blacker and Etkind 2013;Jilge 2006;Nijakowski 2008;Portnov 2009Portnov , 2013. The practices of memory politics in the region are sadly all too often infested with nationalism and extreme instrumentalisation, or even weaponisation, of history. ...
... A lot of research has been done on memory in this region. Scholars analysed memory discussing it in the context of political discourses, international politics, literature, and monuments (Karlsson, Petersson, and Törnquist-Plewa 1998;Törnquist-Plewa 1992, 2001Shevel 2016;Mälksöö 2010;Lewis 2018;Etkind and Blacker 2013;Zhurzhenko 2013;Portnov 2009Portnov , 2013Yurchuk 2014). Scholars also have written on media and their role in cultural memory construction (Erll and Rigny 2008;Erll and Nunning 2008). ...
The article focuses on the increasing adoption of media logic and the corresponding change of habitus in the field of academic history in Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Ukraine. Departing from both mediatisation theory and memory studies, authors consider a range of relevant phenomena from across the region, before considering in more depth the case of LikBez, a grassroot initiative of Ukrainian historians, aimed at debunking historical myths spread both inside and outside Ukraine. The amalgamation of historical knowledge and multiple media platforms to convey it, it is argued, ushers in the era of mediatisation of history.
... The cities in the Eastern Ukraine are typical examples of geopolitically fault-line cities, where conflict centres on issues are located at a different scale, specifically on geopolitical alignment, foreign policy direction, and on the overall character of government, while relevant disputes are largely scripted elsewhere, adding a substantial measure of volatility (Gentile, 2017(Gentile, , 2019. Consequently, national memory policy in the country until 2014 was contingent and contradictory, and the search for a strategy that would legitimize the new independent Ukraine and its post-Soviet elite without provoking national, linguistic and/or religious conflict, while all the time with an eye to Russia, was all about improvisation (Portnov, 2013) and oscillation between competing ideologically charged narratives of the past (Shevel, 2011). Not surprisingly, recent decommunizaton of Ukrainian urban toponymy reveals various strategies used by local and regional authorities in order to impose own version of national memory, albeit with an eye to central government policy (Gnatiuk, 2018). ...
... That is why critical toponymy studies of divided cities (in particular geopolitically fault-line cities like the cities from the East and South of Ukraine) (Gentile, 2017(Gentile, , 2019, where ideological and political division, inscribed in the "palimpsest" of the city-text (Parkhurst-Ferguson, 1988), is sensitive to centre-peripheral axiological relations of places, require holistic approach embracing the city in its integrity. National and regional specifics of historical memory policy in Ukraine in view of the findings New data have confirmed the preservation of more or less pronounced geopolitical faultlines within the country and the coexistence of different regional models of historical memory policy (Katchanovski, 2006;Osipian & Osipian, 2012;Portnov, 2013;Gnatiuk, 2018). Moreover, they somewhat clarify the previous assumptions about these models. ...
Naming and renaming of urban space often is sensitive in terms of the street location and status and implies categorization of streets according to the perceived importance of a street name. Thus, different locations in the city have different symbolic significance, and the urban toponymy could be read as a spatial projection of the societal axiological system. This article represents an attempt to study the importance of location (centrality vs. peripherality) and status (significance) of the urban public spaces in the 36 largest Ukrainian cities in terms of symbolical value and memory policy. The findings indicate that both investigated factors constitute an important tool of identity shaping and historical memory policy, but their influence and manifestation may vary considerably depending on specific historical, cultural and (geo)political conditions. Therefore, although the central parts of cities and the main urban arteries have tangibly larger symbolic significance, the toponymy of less presentable urban areas may be no less eloquent in the critical toponymy studies.
... It is under the mandate of Ukrainian president Leonid Kravčuk (1991-1994 in the newly formed Ukrainian state that the first official commemoration day for the great famine was organized in 1993 as a symbol of independent Ukraine, primarily from an anti-Russian perspective. Under the presidency of his successor, Leonid Koučma (1994Koučma ( -2005, the famine was commemorated without anti-Russian or anti-Soviet feelings and without fear of celebrating apparently incompatible anniversaries (Jilge, 2004;Portnov, 2013). It was during this period that the interpretation made by some Ukrainian historians, that of a criminal famine deliberately organized by Moscow against the Ukrainian nation, made its way into school textbooks (Jilge, 2007). ...
... It was during this period that the interpretation made by some Ukrainian historians, that of a criminal famine deliberately organized by Moscow against the Ukrainian nation, made its way into school textbooks (Jilge, 2007). The identity exploitation of the great famine reached a peak following the Orange revolution, under Viktor Juščenko's presidency between 2005 and 2010, with the establishment in 2006 of a national commemorative day (Jilge, 2007;Portnov, 2013). It is in this context that the memorial in the eastern village was erected during the 75th anniversary of the great famine in 2008. ...
Our contribution, rooted in cultural geography, examines the highly topical issue of Ukraine’s internal divisions. Journalists, scholars, and political players readily divide Ukraine into various cultural regions whose boundaries often recycle/retrace former imperial or national borders. These interpretations/readings/decisions/play off the similarity between certain electoral, linguistic, and politic maps. By studying the symbols and monuments in two villages on opposite sides of a historical border in western Ukraine, we question these univocal interpretations and shed light on the ambivalence of spaces of identification and the ties these village communities entertain with history.
... It is under the mandate of Ukrainian president Leonid Kravčuk (1991-1994 in the newly formed Ukrainian state that the first official commemoration day for the great famine was organized in 1993 as a symbol of independent Ukraine, primarily from an anti-Russian perspective. Under the presidency of his successor, Leonid Koučma (1994Koučma ( -2005, the famine was commemorated without anti-Russian or anti-Soviet feelings and without fear of celebrating apparently incompatible anniversaries (Jilge, 2004;Portnov, 2013). It was during this period that the interpretation made by some Ukrainian historians, that of a criminal famine deliberately organized by Moscow against the Ukrainian nation, made its way into school textbooks (Jilge, 2007). ...
... It was during this period that the interpretation made by some Ukrainian historians, that of a criminal famine deliberately organized by Moscow against the Ukrainian nation, made its way into school textbooks (Jilge, 2007). The identity exploitation of the great famine reached a peak following the Orange revolution, under Viktor Juščenko's presidency between 2005 and 2010, with the establishment in 2006 of a national commemorative day (Jilge, 2007;Portnov, 2013). It is in this context that the memorial in the eastern village was erected during the 75th anniversary of the great famine in 2008. ...
Our contribution, rooted in cultural geography, examines the highly topical issue of Ukraine's internal divisions. Journalists, scholars, and political players readily divide Ukraine into various cultural regions whose boundaries often recycle/retrace former imperial or national borders. These interpretations/readings/ decisions/play off the similarity between certain electoral, linguistic, and politic maps. By studying the symbols and monuments in two villages on opposite sides of a historical border in western Ukraine, we question these univocal interpretations and shed light on the ambivalence of spaces of identification and the ties these village communities entertain with history
... Nevertheless, recent scholarship in cultural geography and political sociology, stimulated by social movements for racial, gender and postcolonial justice such as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, has shown that monuments are also sites _ of memorial unrest (Forest and Johnson 2019;Simko, Cunningham and Fox 2022). In times of social strife, monuments become focal points of political contestation, emerge as symbolic battlegrounds upon which memory wars are fought, and are turned into places of intense identity struggle (Portnov 2013). ...
A study of the ethnopolitics of the public space in an Eastern European (former) Capital of Culture.
... First, Stalin is a highly salient historical political actor and Ukrainians are aware of the dual contested legacy of oppression and liberation during his rule. Symbolic commemoration of both struggle and suffering are apparent across the Ukrainian landscape to serve as reminders of what Etkind (2004) calls memorial hardware (see also Etkind 2017;Ignatieff 1984;Portnov 2013;Snyder 2011). 4 Ukrainians also retain vivid direct and intergenerational memories (memorial software) of Stalin and violence during his rule as evidenced from prior survey research by Lupu and Peisakhin (2017). ...
Our research considers the relationship between historical memory and political evaluations of the past and present. We first examine how historical reflection on the Soviet Union under Stalin is influenced by memories of familial suffering during World War II and victimization under the widespread Soviet gulag prison system. Based on a 2019 representative survey of Ukraine, we show that respondents who recall family members being injured or killed fighting during World War II and those who recount families being imprisoned in Soviet gulags have increased positive and negative appraisals of the Soviet Union under Stalin respectively. However, we also find that favorable opinions of Stalin are strongly predicted by approval of Vladimir Putin, who has actively promoted rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy to bolster personalist rule at home and justify revisionist agendas abroad, including in Ukraine. Our results underscore interactions between the present and past in shaping historical memory such that what appears as enduring legacies of the past could also be a function of present political circumstances.
... The pantheon of Soviet heroes was never roundly discarded but Ukrainian heroes were gradually added to it (Zhurzhenko 2014, 252). As part of these intermediate solutions some streets were renamed while others retained their Soviet names and some Lenin statues were pulled down while others stayed (Portnov 2013). ...
This article examines practices of tour guiding in Kyiv in the context of an ideologically disciplined commemorative culture. Responding to calls for more critical engagement with changing place names, we show how tour guides use them to walk the fine line between entertaining their guests and positioning themselves in memory debates.
... The post-war Soviet years also remain contested because although they brought relative stability and prosperity, they also saw a Russification of Ukraine and the near absorption of the Ukrainian intelligentsia into a Russianspeaking society (Delwaide 2014). Finally, Ukraine's gradual detachment from its Soviet past and its Russian neighbour is a process that comes with its own grievances over commemorative holidays, street names and monuments (Portnov 2013), over the status of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, Ukraine's geopolitical alignment and the establishment of an independent church hierarchy. ...
While the tourism industry is oriented towards creating attractive images of destinations, histories of violence and suffering have increasingly been incorporated into tourism offers and are often actively promoted by states and tourism organisations. A growing body of scholarship has focused on how difficult pasts have been represented and have analysed the driving factors behind the rise of such heritage. Commercial tourism offers such as guided city tours have however largely been overlooked as arenas for communicating difficult pasts. This article provides an in-depth examination of memory work of commercial guides, focusing on the example of Russian-language tour guiding in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. Drawing on participant observations of 20 guided city tours and interviews with 18 tour guides, the article identifies a wide range of narrative strategies that guides adopt to navigate pasts that have been subject to memory conflicts. During tours, guides adjust how much they say, what evidence they provide, what aspects of the past they present as relevant as well as their manner of speaking. These conflict avoidance strategies are part of a pragmatic approach to memory that deserves greater attention in the study of difficult pasts.
... The debates concerning the treatment of Babi Yar were particularly prominent in the Ukrainian Wikipedia. The reasons for it can be related to the special significance of Second World War memory for national identity-building in Ukraine (Portnov 2013). Even while the article denied the involvement of Ukrainians in the Babi Yar massacres, the discussion page included a number of comments criticising editors for referring to this involvement in the first place. ...
The article explores how a notorious case of Second World War atrocities in Ukraine-the Babi Yar massacres of 1941-1943-is represented and interpreted on Wikipedia. Using qualitative content analysis, it examines what frames and content features are used in different language versions of Wikipedia to transcribe the traumatic narrative of Babi Yar as an online encyclopedia entry. It also investigates how these frames are constructed by scrutinizing the process of collaborative frame-building on discussion pages of Wikipedia and investigating how Wikipedia users employ different power play strategies to promote their vision of the events at Babi Yar.
... z.B. Portnov 2011Portnov , 2013; Liebich u. Myshlovska 2014). ...
The contribution deals with the currently often discussed
separation of Ukraine and its investigation from the perspective
of culture-centred spatial research. Media, science and
politics divide Ukraine into various regions whose boundaries
are often the former borders of empires or nations. This also
suggests certain territorially conspicuous phenomena such as
election results. In the context of this study these phenomena
are called phantom borders. With the help of symbols and
monuments in villages on the river Zbruč in western Ukraine,
which is also often regarded as a potential cultural dividing
line between cultural regions in Ukraine, light is shed on
ambivalent identification areas and how history is dealt with.
It shows that on the basis of national politics of remembrance,
a spatial cultural difference is created, which is reproduced by
the inhabitants and with which they also identify. However, it
also demonstrates that culture-centred regional research to
understand such phenomena must also look at the specific
local conditions of the events being symbolised in order not to
reproduce the apparently static-essentialist perceptions of
regions.
... For more information on internal memory wars in Ukraine see Nikiporets-Takigawa (2013),Portnov (2010Portnov ( , 2014 andZhurzhenko (2014). ...
I examine how social media and historical memory were used for the social construction of security issues during the Euromaidan protests in January–February 2014 and the conflict in eastern Ukraine in May–June 2014. Using a large sample of multi-lingual data, I investigate how securitizing speech-acts were produced on Twitter, what their audience was at different stages of the Ukraine crisis, and in which ways historical memories were employed by pro- and anti-Maidan groups for framing the events in Ukraine as a matter of existential threat. My findings suggest that historical memory, in particular of World War II, served as a facilitating condition for the securitization of the Ukraine crisis and contributed to its discursive escalation.
This chapter outlines the specific transnational context in which memory-making in Russian tourism unfolds, based on the idea of the post-Soviet space as a ‘post-imperial space’. The notion of a post-imperial space is used for several reasons. First, it centres the attention on Russia’s historical status as an empire and its relation to its former territories, allowing a close examination of the role of the past in the present. Second, the notion of a post-imperial space is based on a longue durée perspective that includes the history of the Russian empire alongside the Soviet Union, a past that is significant for Russian tourism. Finally, the idea of a post-imperial space allows for comparison with other post-imperial spaces and mobilities and enables us to see similarities and differences. After an introduction of the idea of post-imperial space, the chapter provides an overview of Russia’s history as an empire and the relation between empire and tourism. It subsequently discusses variations in (post-)imperial relations and the development of tourism industries, focusing on Estonia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, that is, the three countries that form the case studies examined in the book.
This chapter examines how the ongoing Ukrainian disentanglement from its past provokes the Russian obsession not only with Ukraine’s territory but also the minds and souls of the Ukrainian people. In this Russian pursuit of the unachievable, the war represents a notorious case of “self-colonization,” in which Russia has emotionally aligned itself with a cultural and geographical space to which it has no right. The term was explored by literary scholar Alexander Kiossev and originally described a power hierarchy in which one country follows another by means of symbolic domination of the latter, and not as a consequence of actual conquest. Russia’s obsession with Ukraine is an example of such self-subjugation to the imaginary power of the neighboring country and pursuing self-destructive actions through military escalation. In the case of Ukraine, the anachronistic necessity of anti-colonial resistance emerged as a reactive response to the Russian attempts at the neocolonial revival based on misinterpretations and propaganda-led manipulations of the common imperial past. The cultural production in Ukraine reflected this shift in decolonial dynamics with more direct and radical works of art and literature aimed at opposing the intentions of cultural domination by Russia.
This self-colonization is a logical consequence of Russia’s imperial “double consciousness,” pointed out by Madina Tlostanova: when Russia, as a “second-rate empire,” was historically forced to look at both more powerful Western empires and its subordinated territories. The culmination of this process came three decades after the dismantling of the political mechanisms that supported this subordination in the Soviet Union and remained in a purely symbolic field—which Russia intended and ultimately failed to actualize through its unfolding military action. This resulted in Russia’s notorious self-colonization through the “Ukrainian question.” This chapter discusses the core notions of “anti-colonial resistance” and “self-colonization” through selected examples from literature, contemporary art, and mass media.
This chapter focuses on the initial turn from the ambiguous notion of ethnic identity to the notion of political identity, and its subsequent subversion by the notion of agency, which forms the basis for both resilience and the decolonial spirit in current-day Ukraine. This chapter focuses on culture to interpret the relationship between protests and identity construction. Here, I explore the role of previous protest movements in both Ukraine and Russia through the lens of the transition from the postcolonial condition to the decolonial situation.
The revolution of political identity and its evolution into agency in Ukraine have passed two important stages following its independence in 1991: the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014. Art activism played an important role in the formation of participatory democracy and reflected the creation of new horizontal relations in civic society. The chapter takes an in-depth look at how Euromaidan constituted the role of Ukrainian culture and society not only as a center of new, liberated epistemic production—but as its epicenter. It also proposes that while the ambicoloniality faced its dissolution with the Euromaidan Revolution, as a profound impulse for detachment from affective ties with Russia and the subversion of the formative power of ambivalence behind it, Russia, upon suppressing any potentiality for its own revolution, remained trapped in postcolonial ambivalence. The chapter includes an analysis of works that highlight the decolonial reinterpretation of belonging and identity, turning instead to the notion of “agency.” It also traces the underlying change in the understanding of the notions of solidarity and consolidation, and discusses how art and activism reflected postcolonial and eventually decolonial developments in postrevolutionary Ukrainian society. I discuss how a decolonial turn brings in syncretic polarization that makes profound changes to the hybridity of colonial expression, as well as aims at dismantling postcolonial ambivalence.
This paper seeks to enhance memory studies' conceptual toolkit by reconsidering established perspectives on “memory politics.” The paper theorizes various modes of temporal connectivity cultivated through politicized references to a shared past. Our empirical case is focused on a collection of roughly 5.000 recent articles about the war in Ukraine from major Russian state-aligned news outlets. We analyze and typologize the narrative and rhetorical gestures by which these articles make the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” and the post-Soviet “special military operation” speak to one another, both prior to and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates that even in contemporary Russia's tightly controlled, propagandistic mass media ecology, politicized uses of memory foster diverse temporal structures within the propaganda narratives. We present a typology of these relations, mapping the distinct modes and intensities of connections between past and present. At one end of the spectrum, we identify a mode of temporal organization that presents past events and figures as fully detached from the present, available solely for historiographic reflection. At the other end, we find narratives that entirely collapse historical distance, addressing contemporary audiences as participants in a timeless war drama, with stakes that transcend any specific historical period. We propose that the presented typology may be applicable beyond our specific case. As a tool for analyzing the hitherto understudied organization of time in politicized articulations of memory, it could be employed in various cultural and political contexts. Furthermore, our approach can serve as a foundation for future research into the actual persuasive and affective impact that specific temporal modalities may have on their target audiences.
This chapter analyzes how Ukrainian artists engage with landscape, starting from the Soviet colonial landscape and concluding with the contemporary Ukrainian one. In 1994, William John Thomas Mitchell called for the abandonment of landscape art, arguing that it was a thoroughly colonial and European genre. However, even if we accept the colonial nature of the genre, there is a space for rethinking and reinventing it, which can lead to the emergence of a new environment, landscape, and identity. In Ukrainian art, these processes occur in parallel and sometimes influence one another. For instance, the denaturalization of the official Soviet landscape becomes a central theme in the artistic practices of Lada Nakonechna and Nikita Kadan. At the same time, the hybrid phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which started in 2014, and the subsequent full-scale Russian invasion, beginning on February 24, 2022, have triggered a strong interest in landscape, as evidenced by numerous artworks created during the war. The author examines the works of Alevtina Kakhidze, Kateryna Aliinyk, and Kateryna Buchatska to track changes in the landscape following Russia’s full-scale invasion. The depletion of the earth’s resources, the ideological construction of environmental topography, and landscape’s role as both a participant in the war and its battleground have become prominent motifs in the artworks, which I will address in my contribution.
In the context of increasing conflicts over material heritage around the world, this article examines the role digital media play in battles over monuments. The rise of digital media brought significant changes to the cultural dynamics of heritage conflicts, which have not been adequately addressed in existing literature. Bringing together work on monuments, (digital) memory conflicts, and digital activism, we identify three key dimensions of monument battles in which the impact of digital media is most clearly visible: (a) participation, democratization, and deterritorialization; (b) reframing and contestation; and (c) mobilization and the online-offline movement of heritage battles. We illustrate these arguments drawing on a critical discourse analysis of monument battles on the messaging application Telegram in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, using a sample of 940 posts from both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian channels. We demonstrate that despite potentially providing space for alternative memory interpretations, online memory contestations over heritage contributed to the construction of polarized and mutually exclusive worlds.
The article investigates changing attitudes to memory politics in Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. In February 2022, with the outbreak of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war, this geopolitical fault-line city became a frontline city with significant potential outcomes for urban identity and local geopolitical preferences, including attitudes to the national memory politics. The research is based on the comparative analysis of the two surveys among residents of Kharkiv, conducted in spring-summer 2018 and in autumn 2022 – before and after the full-scale war. The results of the surveys are analysed by means of descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression. Additionally, two focus groups were held in order to receive additional justification when interpreting the results of the survey. The research shows that the attitudes to Ukrainian nation-centric memory narrative, including both decommunisation and decolonisation, have significantly improved. Nevertheless, public attitudes to the memory politics in the frontline city are highly reflexive in nature and deeply embedded in the context of the ongoing war. The geopolitical divide, which existed before the war, has largely transformed into a cultural one, namely heterogeneity of attitudes to the Russian cultural heritage in the city. This softened albeit still existing divide has, to some extent, materialised in physical space and runs between the ardent supporters of decommunisation and decolonisation that massively fled from the atrocities of the war and their opponents who at most choose (or were obliged) to stay in the front-line city. The study reveals that military conflicts may either activate hidden geopolitical divides in geopolitical fault-line cities or contribute to their transformation or even disappearance.
Political controversies concerning the memory of historical events have adapted to the digital specificity of Twitter and are currently growing in significance. This study investigates the sentiment bias of a memory war between two major Polish political parties, the currently ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and Civic Platform (PO), the main opposition party, concerning Polish-Jewish relations, and especially the Holocaust. Totally, 23699 PO Tweets and 29,441 PiS Tweets from 2015 to 2019 were collected, out of which, 241 concerning memory war were sampled with a lexicon-based approach. Sentiment was analysed using tweet-based consensual coding with an ordinal five-point scale and automated word-based coding with a three-point scale. PiS tweets had more positive sentiment regarding the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish legacy in Poland. The final hermeneutical analysis showed that the rulling party narratives were aimed appropriation of collective memory and “Polonizing” the Holocaust, and that the positive sentiment was a function of ‘positive anti-Semitism’.
UKRAINIAN HISTORICAL MEMORY AFTER 1991: A RESEARCH RECONNAISSANCE This article attempts to systematise the strategies of constructing Ukrainian historical memory during the 30 years of independent Ukraine. The focus is not only on the official policy of remembrance (or lack thereof ), but also on how the memory of historical events reaches the wider public through the media or culture and literature. The research describes the role of (micro)narratives of witnesses to history and subsequent generations growing up in the shadow of the post-colonial and post-totalitarian legacy in the formation of the national memory in post-1991 Ukraine.
The memorialization of mass atrocities such as war crimes and genocides facilitates the remembrance of past suffering, honors those who resisted the perpetrators, and helps prevent the distortion of historical facts. Digital technologies have transformed memorialization practices by enabling less top-down and more creative approaches to remember mass atrocities. At the same time, they may also facilitate the spread of denialism and distortion, attempt to justify past crimes and attack the dignity of victims. The emergence of generative forms of artificial intelligence (AI), which produce textual and visual content, has the potential to revolutionize the field of memorialization even further. AI can identify patterns in training data to create new narratives for representing and interpreting mass atrocities—and do so in a fraction of the time it takes for humans. The use of generative AI in this context raises numerous questions: For example, can the paucity of training data on mass atrocities distort how AI interprets some atrocity-related inquiries? How important is the ability to differentiate between human- and AI-made content concerning mass atrocities? Can AI-made content be used to promote false information concerning atrocities? This article addresses these and other questions by examining the opportunities and risks associated with using generative AIs for memorializing mass atrocities. It also discusses recommendations for AIs integration in memorialization practices to steer the use of these technologies toward a more ethical and sustainable direction.
In this article, we examine individual attitudes towards fake news in the extreme conditions of a propaganda war, taking into account the complex regional social and historical conditions. For this purpose, within the mobile boundary zone during frozen war in Ukraine, we conducted qualitative research among representatives of generations X and Z (high school teachers and students). Being accustomed to fake news turned out to be common for our interlocutors, whereas the main generational differences regarded the perception of the primary sources of fake news and trust in the media, and, first and foremost, the ways of verifying information, where we demonstrated unique strategies of behavior, such as ignoring fake news (1) and relying on official websites (2), which were accompanied by the common for "normal" conditions checking information in other Internet sources (3) and the verification information from other users (4).
The article analyses how the terms “memory wars” / “memorial wars” are applied in the contemporary research papers on conflicts of collective perceptions of the past. The author shows that in the late 1990s and early 2000s the concept was not yet associated exclusively with the political sphere, within which different social groups were producing historical narratives, but in the 2000s and 2010s modern understanding of the phrase “memory wars” was already established and since then it has become common in contemporary studies of collective memory to reveal its conflicting nature. It is noted that in the studies of clashes of historical narratives an active attention is paid to the content of the processes under the study, against which the attempts to give a strict definition to the term “memory wars” are noticeably rarer. The use of the “memory wars” concept shows that it has not yet received proper understanding as an element of categorical apparatus of memory studies and the issue of its relevance to the objectives of the contemporary research deserves special attention.
Collective memories of different events often interact. There are multiple possible modes of such interaction. This article explores the interrelation of two memories in the Russian memory landscape: memories of Stalin’s repressions and the first post-Soviet decade, the 1990s. It shows that in museum exhibitions about the repressions, the 1990s are invoked in different modes. The interaction of the two memories has varying outcomes, including “silencing” through cacophonous commemoration and a “magnifying” effect of multidirectional memories. The article aims to open up the discussion of the complexity of the interrelation of the two memories.
Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article examines Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets as postmemorial fiction, which articulates the trauma of Soviet political repressions in the post–World War II period and in the 1970s via the perception of the second and third generation. The affiliative postmemory about World War II in Ukraine from the viewpoint of Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans is emplotted via an original generic combination of contemporary Holocaust fiction and romances of the archive. Postmemory is used in the novel to shape a mythologised alternative historical narrative that reconceptualises the country’s difficult past as a story of heroic resistance.
Since its independence, Ukraine has continuously tried to separate itself from its Soviet cultural inheritance and dominance, introducing different policies that tried to achieve such independence, and at the same time constructing for itself a unique national identity. This process has not always been simple and quick, and at times it was even reversed depending on who was in power of the country. Indeed, to this day, policies of national and identity character are hardly unchallenged. As a consequence, the country appears divided between two contrasting blocks who pull the country apart, stalling its process of democratic development. This thesis, relying on modernist and ethno-symbolist studies of nationalism, aims to analyze the various nationalistic policies introduced in the country since 1991, and tries to construct a different picture as to the effects of such policies. While acknowledging that the country has internal differences, at the same time this dissertation tries to refute the common understanding that Ukraine is a divided country, claiming that such division is not the product of internal differences but rather an effect of identity politics. Indeed, past events and opinion survey reveal that the majority of the population is indifferent and even against such an ethnic form of nationalism, preferring its civic counterpart. Therefore, if Ukraine is really committed to address the actual demands of its citizens, it should become a prerogative for any Ukrainian leader to focus on strengthening the country’s state system and recognize that the country’s multiculturalism is here to stay.
This article examines how commemoration - as a performance located in a singular place – shapes a dominant spatial order, reflecting and reproducing relations of power, and to what extent this order can be contested. It is based on a participant observation of the World War II commemorations in the Soviet cemetery of Noyers-Saint-Martin (Oise, France), supplemented by interviews with various people involved in the ceremony, the analysis of archive and other textual documents. The article shows that, during the 2000’s, Russian actors have succeeded in creating in Noyers-Saint-Martin a spatial order based on the preeminence of Russia over the other post-soviet republics and the diffusion of the Great Patriotic War myth, which is part of a “memorial soft power” strategy directed abroad by Russian authorities. However, since 2014, the moment of the ceremony is being used by Ukrainian actors to challenge this spatial order at the micro-local scale, to promote alternative memories of the Second World War and, further, to unveil the current destabilization of Ukraine by Russia in Donbass and Crimea. Nevertheless, the significance of this contestation is limited, because in the larger French political and commemorative space, Russian actors have more resources and dominant positions than Ukrainian ones. Unlike all-encompassing approaches, often assimilating commemoration and politics of memory, the article argues for an ethnographic approach of commemoration, giving weight to a detailed analysis of the spatiality of bodies and artifacts at the time of the ceremony.
After the war in 1999, Kosovska Mitrovica located in the north of Kosovo, became a part of the group of politically and ethnically divided cities. The process of division began in June 1999 when Serbs from the parts located south of the Ibar River were forced to flee. In the following years, antagonism between local Albanians and Serbs intensified. Since 2000, the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica and later the whole municipality has been developing rapidly, becoming an administrative, educational and cultural centre for the Serbian community in Kosovo. In accordance with arrangements of the Brussels Agreement (2013), two municipalities and two settlements emerged: North Mitrovica with Serb majority and South Mitrovica with Albanian majority. The Ibar River is a natural boundary of the two cities. This study deals with the causes and the consequences of the splitting of Kosovska Mitrovica, which has been developing into two separate (parallel) cities since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Spatial divisions of post-war development of the Kosovska Mitrovica’s urban space are discussed in their symbolic, ethno-demographic and institutional dimensions.
This chapter justifies the topicality and relevance of spatial conflicts and divisions in cities from the viewpoint of human geography and other branches of science dealing with spatial facets of urban development such as sociology, political science, and economics. Based on the analysis of publications regarding post-socialist cities, the author outlines the main themes in this well-developed interdisciplinary discourse. The author also stresses that despite its high research potential, we lack a separate domain that generates knowledge about conflicts in cities of East-Central Europe. Particular attention is paid to the global discourse of knowledge on contested and divided cities and the variety of currents and problems raised by scholars. The merits of the current book and its contribution to the process of maturing from conflicts and divisions in post-socialist cities as a prospective direction of future research are highlighted. Issues with high research potential include geopolitically- and ethnonationally-motivated conflicts and divisions, as well as topics related to current disputes about the heritage of multicultural cities, conflicts caused by competing interests in spatial planning under conditions of post-socialist transformation, globalisation, and European integration. Conflicts and divisions caused by post-socialist transformation and its long-lasting socio-spatial consequences make the missing link between post-socialist urban change and global discourses on contested and divided cities.
The chapter focuses on the city of Vinnytsia, representative of the central, “pro-European” part of Ukraine, which is unique and specific at the same time. On the one hand, it is a regular second-order Ukrainian city, but on the other—one of the most economically affluent Ukrainian cities, experiencing rapid changes of urban landscape, being an economic and political domain of key Ukrainian power holders immediately after the Euromaidan Revolution. In order to demonstrate hybrid and ambiguous axiology of transforming urban space, both intangible changes (renaming of streets) and attempts to revisit urban materiality on the examples of most striking instances are discussed. The Euromaidan Revolution broke the trend to focus solely on the city’s “Golden Age” and induced a revision of the city’s role in national history as well as revealed often problematical coexistence of different ideological symbols and values in the urban space. The possibility of making purely compromise decisions has its limitations, which leads to contemporary ongoing re-evaluation of the urban space. By accumulating new, incompatible symbols, urban space is challenging the modern and future generations to make increasingly complex decisions about its perceptible use.
This article attempts to measure the multilayered, diverse historical memories of contemporary Ukrainians, drawing on a cluster analysis of nationwide survey data collected after the Euromaidan. A significant minority of Ukrainian citizens still gravitate toward Soviet–Russian narratives. These are not merely copies of those embraced in Russia, however; they include ambivalent ‘hybrid’ feelings of nostalgia for the Soviet Union while supporting Ukraine's independence. This article argues that historical memories of Ukrainians in the southern and eastern regions are amorphous and heterogeneous, and that the architects of the Novorossiya project failed to distinguish Soviet nostalgia from Ukrainophobia and separatist grievances.
Revisiting the Regional Factor in Post-Maidan Ukraine:Quantitative Analysis of the Nationwide Survey Data
on Historical Memory
Are there any experts who successfully predicted how the Ukrainian crisis would unfold after the Euromaidan revolution? On the one hand, the “Russian spring” project obviously failed: Vladimir Putin’s call for consolidating “Novorussia” did not catch the hearts of people beyond the limited part of Donbass. For example, after the launch of anti-terrorist operations in spring 2014, even such a Russified eastern city as Dnipropetrovsk turned blue-and-yellow, full with volunteer citizens supporting the government forces, thereby exhibiting the rise of Ukrainian patriotism. However, that was not the end of the story. During the national parliament elections in October, 2014 in the same Dnipropetrovsk Oblast the Opposition Bloc consisting of former Party-of-Regions members that did not endorse the Euromaidan surpassed the president’s party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc. Other eastern regions such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia mirrored Dnipropetrovsk in their electoral behavior. These snapshot observations speak for themselves: the social and political dynamics in Ukraine is much more complicated than is routinely described with the popular “east-west divide” discourse.
Quantitative research on the mass attitudes in Ukraine often opts for versatile “regions” to explain the social and political cleavages. Most of them, however, treat regions as proxy for historical and cultural attributes common to localities, ignoring the heterogeneous distribution of personal historical memories in a given geographical space. This study tests the explanatory power of individual acceptance of national history in shaping the attitudes toward the Euromaidan, utilizing ordered logit model on nationwide survey data collected from December 2014 to January 2015.
The author ran principal component analysis on the responses to the seven major historical events in Ukraine, and identified anti-Ukraine historical component, which denies the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as well as the collapse of the USSR and the country’s independence. In the ordered logit estimation with these principal component scores, the effect of the regional factor was mediated by historical memory in all eastern regions including Donbass, Sloboda, Lower Dniepr and Black Sea. However, explanatory power of the regional variable persists in Podolia and Left bank. This finding suggests the further need for studying interaction terms between historical memory and regions.
Furthermore, two-stage least square estimation with instrumental variable was conducted to verify the effect of historical memory on the attitudes to the Euromaidan, which rejected the above hypothesis at a five-percent significance level. This implies that causal arrows run reciprocally between these two variables.
The analysis also discovered the carriers of ambivalent “hybrid” memory, who miss the Soviet Union but welcome the independence simultaneously. These findings provide valuable insights into the amorphous nature of the eastern regions that embrace multilayered historical memories, and highlight key challenges for post-Maidan national (re)integration.
This volume analyzes crises in International Relations (IR) in an innovative way. Rather than conceptualizing a crisis as something unexpected that has to be managed, the contributors argue that a crisis needs to be analyzed within a wider context of change: when new discourses are formed, communities are (re)built, and new identities emerge. Focusing on Ukraine, the book explore various questions related to crisis and change, including: How are crises culturally and socially constructed? How do issues of agency and structure come into play in Ukraine? Which subjectivities were brought into existence by Ukraine crisis discourses? Chapters explore the participation of women in Euromaidan, identity shifts in the Crimean Tatar community and diaspora politics, discourses related to corruption, anti-Soviet partisan warfare, and the annexation of Crimea, as well as long distance impacts of the crisis.
Erica Resende is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Superior War College, Brazil, and Affiliate Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, USA.
Dovilė Budrytė is Professor of Political Science at Georgia Gwinnett College, USA.
Didem Buhari-Gulmez is Associate Professor in International Relations at Izmir University of Economics, Turkey.
Current Ukrainian gender order was reflected in the modes of men’s and women’s participation in Euromaidan protests that took place in November 2013–February 2014. Despite presence of both men and women, gendered aspects of their participation have been visible in division of labor and functions performed by women and men during the protests. The modes of women engagement into the protests varied significantly during different stages of the protests—from peaceful demonstrations to violent clashes. Taking into account the existing controversy in the perception of women’s role into the protests, we will argue that there were different gender role scenarios of women’s participation into the protests according to functions they performed and the way they represented themselves.
A classic definition of crisis within IR refers to crisis in terms of something that happens—an unexpected event—and has to be dealt with, managed, to be put managed and put under control. Perhaps, this is why the word “crisis” is simultaneously employed to designate momentary emergencies as well as opportunities, for they are moments in which interventions are possible. The aim of this chapter is to suggest a dialogue with concept of the “Event”—which Gilles Deleuze characterizes as “pure,” “true” events in relation to ordinary, superficial, historical events, while Alain Badiou claims it a rupture in being—to help us to navigate a sea of crisis discourses. I will argue that Deleuze’s use of the imagery of scars and wounds clarifies how he differentiates event from Event, which will lead us to a better understanding of the ontology of crisis and change. Based on 2013/2014 events in Ukraine, I will reflect upon the currently unfolding dynamics in post-Soviet space to, finally, characterize the end of the Ages of Empire in global politics as the Event.
This chapter analyzes the interaction of discourses associated with World War II and its aftermath and the formation of related cultural, social, and political practices in Ukraine in comparison with Lithuania. The focus is on what can be considered a hegemonic war memory in the two countries—discourses about the anti-Soviet partisans and their memorialization. Political developments described as “revolutions” (Sąjūdis in Lithuania, the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan in Ukraine) have coincided with major discursive changes regarding memory politics. It is during those times that narratives extolling the virtues of anti-Soviet partisans and dwelling on losses associated with national tragedies, described as genocides, have attracted more supporters willing to “defend history” in both countries.
In Ukraine, having arrived at a critical stage of its history, three areas can be highlighted at the level of legislation during the struggle for the way forward since the end of 2013: the language issue, the constitutional process, and the efforts to eliminate the Soviet legacy. The subject of our analysis is the four laws belonging to the 2015 legislative package on decommunization, with an outlook to the broader context, as well. The four laws in question decide about who are heroes and who are enemies in history; what Ukraine’s relationship is with World War II, as well as with the Communist and Nazi regimes. The laws point out firmly and excluding any further debate the primacy of the country’s independence over all else, and the protection of the ideal of independence by any means concerning both the past and the present. The laws prescribe impeachment as a sanction for denying their contents. This story – hot memory influenced by politics – will be summarized for the period of 2015–2016.
Festivals and celebrations have special significance for the foundation of community and collective memory. They are part of social practice and, at the same, also reveal much about current and historical social structures, traditions and rituals. Festivals contrast with everyday life, taking participants away from it; celebrations, conversely, celebrate and reinforce social hierarchies, the role of individuals in the community and the characteristics of the community. This is clearly demonstrated in this contribution on the example of the festivities of two western Ukrainian village communities celebrating 520 years of existence. The communities’ notable peculiarity lies in the fact that they were founded as a single village. Due the partitioning of Poland along the Zbruč River, however, the two sides were situated in Austria-Hungary and Russia, respectively. In the interwar period, they were located in Poland and the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Second World War, they were part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Although they did not have borders for the first time in 150 years, they nevertheless continued to exist as independent villages. Given this starting point, a celebration of the 520th anniversary of the founding of these communities obviously has very complex historical contexts within different past state regimes. The following analysis of the village festival will first demonstrate how such a celebration was achieved. Further, it will examine the extent to which a socio-spatial demarcation was reproduced just as efforts were simultaneously made to eliminate it. The village is a striking example of the manifestation of the experience and perception, design and imagination of present and past spaces.
The article addresses the emerging memorial spaces on the fault lines of the post-Soviet and Western memorial cultures. Taking as a case study the Memorial Complex in Trastsianets, located on the fourth biggest site of Nazi mass killing in Europe, it analyses the way Belarus revisits its memorial paradigms and factors the Holocaust into its national narrative. Looking at the political underpinnings of the project, rivaling artistic visions and the transnational diplomatic efforts involved, the article examines how different stakeholders negotiate the symbolic significance and material appearance of this major but little known Eastern European Holocaust site.
Mykola Borovyk offers a summary of the formation and transformation of the public presentations and assessments of collaboration during and after the Second World War in the USSR, and later on in independent Ukraine. On the base of oral history sources, he examines vernacular models framing the presentation of wartime collaboration and collaborators in autobiographical accounts. Focusing on the textual peculiarities of the oral autobiographical recollections, Borovyk explores relations between official representations of history and collective memory of the war and collaboration outside the sphere of elite memory actors.
Research by students of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw, conducted in the years 1992–2010 in various regions of western Ukraine, shows that in rural communities and in areas with low levels of urbanization local ties and knowledge transmitted within the family circle and the neighborhood community play a large role in maintaining identity and a strong group separateness. An important element of local knowledge is imagining about the past. This article describes selected ideas about past and recent history. The author suggests that knowledge about the past is read and interpreted within the framework of a religious worldview, which constitutes the basis of the common cosmology of the communities examined. Hence local narratives about the past have a different nature, and vary both from historiography and from the dominant transmissions in the western Ukrainian national discourse of collective memory. They are actualized in daily life and serve to build adaptive social strategies.
Post-Maidan Europe and the New Ukrainian Studies - Volume 74 Issue 4 - Andrii Portnov
In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother's hometown of Buchach--in former Eastern Galicia--carries him on a journey across the region and back through history. This poignant travelogue reveals the complete erasure of the Jews and their removal from public memory, a blatant act of forgetting done in the service of a fiercely aggressive Ukrainian nationalism. Bartov, a leading Holocaust scholar, discovers that to make sense of the heartbreaking events of the war, he must first grapple with the complex interethnic relationships and conflicts that have existed there for centuries. Visiting twenty Ukrainian towns, he recreates the histories of the vibrant Jewish and Polish communities who once lived there-and describes what is left today following their brutal and complete destruction. Bartov encounters Jewish cemeteries turned into marketplaces, synagogues made into garbage dumps, and unmarked burial pits from the mass killings. He bears witness to the hastily erected monuments following Ukraine's independence in 1991, memorials that glorify leaders who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews. He finds that the newly independent Ukraine-with its ethnically cleansed and deeply anti-Semitic population--has recreated its past by suppressing all memory of its victims. Illustrated with dozens of hauntingly beautiful photographs from Bartov's travels, Erased forces us to recognize the shocking intimacy of genocide.
Different but the Same or the Same but Different? Public Memory of the Second World War in Post-Soviet Lviv
This article addresses the changes of post-Soviet culture of memory of the Second World War in the western Ukrainian city and regional centre of Lviv. Attempts to forge a heroic and innocent memory of Ukrainian nationalism in the Second World War have constituted the single most influential factor shaping the post-Soviet culture of memory. Yet, at the same time, the latter is a complex social phenomenon. This article argues that, despite real continuities, the influence of nationalism in contemporary Lviv cannot be understood as a simple «mirror image» of Soviet myth-making. The article also stresses that outcomes are open and can be dire as well as hopeful. In a bitter paradox, post-Soviet Lviv can turn itself into a substantially open urban society, intentionally producing a closed, intolerant, misleading and narrow-minded past for itself, as it were «from below», in a way that Soviet myths could never have achieved. On the other side, the manner in which nationalism now has to pursue its aims of closure and discursive hegemony may unintentionally help confirm modes of public discourse, which then can also open up alternatives.
The meaning and commemoration of the Second World War as well as the use of the heroes and symbols that emerged from it are central topics of Ukrainian politics of history and key elements of remembrance culture in post-Soviet Ukraine. This essay analyzes the function and the transformation of the view of the Second World War's history in post-Soviet Ukraine. The focal point of this essay is state politics of history from independence in 1991 until the "Orange Revolution" in 2004. It is shown that culture of remembrance in Ukraine cannot be reduced to the existence of t w o irreconcilable Soviet and nationalist views of history, and that the polarized public debates over the war's meaning are not a sufficient indicator for the division of the country along remembrance-cultural or political lines.
This article contributes to the debate about the role of Stalin in the Soviet famine of 1932 – 33. It provides data on Stalin's statements and actions in 1932 – 33, judicial and extra-judicial repression, and the process by which the 1933 deportation targets were drastically reduced. It is suggested that starvation was a cheap substitute for the cancelled deportations. It is argued that in 1932 – 33 Stalin pursued a multi-pronged policy of state terror against the population of the USSR. Some general issues of interpretation are also considered, such as Bolshevik perceptions, the characterisation of Soviet industrialisation, and approaches to Soviet history. Extensive attention is given to the classification of Stalin's actions according to national and international criminal law. In particular, the question of whether or not in 1932 – 33 the Ukrainian people were victims of genocide, is analysed. Attentively studying the author's text, not only do [specialists] not stint their compliments, but they also make some critical remarks. Because (is it necessary to prove the obvious?) any really good book invites discussion (Ivanov 200625.
Ivanov , P. 2006. Book review in Svobodnaya mysl'-XXI 1–2. View all references, p. 120). The Stalinist leadership was only able to retain power then [in 1932] by using the most savage repression (Khlevnyuk 199232.
Khlevnyuk , O. V. 1992. 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo, Moscow: Respublika. View all references, p. 11).
Recent advances in research on the 1932–1933 Soviet famine, most notably the monograph by R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft [2004, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)], have generated a debate, involving Michael Ellman and Mark Tauger, on the pages of this journal. The present essay re-examines this debate in two areas: intentionality (did Stalin cause the famine in order to kill millions?) and the Ukrainian factor (was the famine a Ukrainian ethnic genocide?). I argue that there is not enough evidence to answer in the affirmative. The essay concludes by discussing the international context of the famine as a factor of critical importance.
These two books deal with genocide and historical culture in Ukraine. Johan Dietsch set out to examine how the Holocaust was being integrated into Ukrainian history textbooks. This was a typical enough project for a young Swedish scholar, given that Sweden has been so active in promoting a European understanding of the Holocaust in the formerly communist parts of Europe. In 1998, Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson founded the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, which first undertook a liaison to the Czech Republic and now maintains formal and informal liaisons with other post-communist countries, including Ukraine. In his book, Dietsch himself mentions that the Forum for Living History in Sweden arranged the exhibition "Raoul Wallenberg—One Man Can Make a Difference" in L´viv and that the Swedish Embassy worked with Ivan Franko National University in the same city to conduct a seminar on Holocaust education (197 n. 504). Moreover, Dietsch is part of the team working with Klas-Göran Karlsson at Lund University on a large research project entitled "The Holocaust in European Historical Culture," a very fruitful, interesting enterprise. In working on the reception of the Holocaust in Ukrainian historical culture, Dietsch saw that he also needed to take into account the historical memory of the famine that ravaged Soviet Ukraine in 1932–33. The latter is what is meant by the word "Holodomor" in the title. Dietsch tells us that the word literally means "plague of hunger" (205). It was coined by the Ukrainian writer Ivan Drach, but it first appeared in print in early 1988 in an article by another writer, Oleksa Musiienko (Kul´chyts´kyi, 142). The word soon passed into English, if not into dictionary English, then at least into the lexicon of the English-language publications of the Ukrainian diaspora.
Stanyslav Vladyslavovych Kul´chyts´kyi, Doctor of Historical Sciences and deputy director of the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, is a character in Dietsch's book, and one in his own. In the fall of 1986, he was appointed to a secret Soviet Ukrainian party commission to research the famine with the aim of refuting a report on the famine about to be released by a U.S. congressional commission headed by the late James Mace. Kul´chyts´kyi wrote up the results of his research in an article in Ukrains´kyi istorychnyi zhurnal in March 1988. It acknowledged that there were serious problems with food in 1932–33 but minimized the death toll and almost exonerated the party from blame. Later, as the party leadership and then the leadership of independent Ukraine accepted the basic facts about the famine, he wrote a number of studies documenting the catastrophe more thoroughly. He has also been entrusted with other sticky historical issues by the political leadership, notably with the appraisal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during World War II. This, like the Holodomor, is a divisive, politically fraught issue in Ukraine today. Dietsch captures Kul´chyts´kyi's approach to history very well, quoting phrases from the very text by Kul´chyts´kyi that is under review: "It is the 'legal experts and government officials [who] must come to the legal and political conclusion' that the 1932–1933 famine was an act of genocide, while historians must provide 'scholarly evidence'" (199). Kul´chyts´kyi can be an excellent historian—he knows the archives, he works hard, he can conceptualize and order his arguments well, but he is a historian who often articulates and buttresses with scholarship the rather vaguely formulated visions and aspirations of the powers that be. In the book under review, which is not a piece of primary research but a conceptualization, his point is to explain why the famine of 1932–33 should be considered a genocide and to define who should be considered the perpetrators, and who the victims.
The book by Kul´chyts´kyi is actually only an extended essay. The first half of it is the text in Ukrainian, the second, the same text in Russian. My references will be to the text in Russian...
Politics of Ethnicity in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Beyond Brubaker
- Volodymyr Kulyk
Yazykovye ideologii v ukrainskom politicheskom i intellektual’nom diskursakh
- Volodymyr Kulyk
Constructing a National City: The Case of L’viv
- Yaroslav Hrytsak
Ukraine’s Orange RevolutionFrom Kuchma to Yushchenko. Ukraine’s 2004 Presidential Elections and the Orange Revolution,” Problems of Post-communismKuchma’s Failed AuthoritarianismRevolutionary Bargain: The Unmaking of Ukraine’s Autocracy through Pacting
- Adrian Karatnycky
Holod 1932–1933 rokiv u politytsi, masovii svidomosti ta istoriohrafii (1980-ti-pochatok 2000-kh)
- Danse Kasianov
- Macabre
Vtoraia mirovaia voina v istoricheskom soznanii ukrainskogo obshchestvaThe Politics of History and the Second World War in Post-communist UkrainePost-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus Dealing with ‘The Great Patriotic War
- Hrynevych
Boi s ten’iu: sovetskoe proshloe v istoricheskoi pamiati sovremennogo ukrainskogo obshchestva
- Vladimir Kravchenko
Ukraińcy wobec Wołynia 69); Compare: Grzegorz Motyka, “Druha svitova viina v pol’s’ko-ukrains’kykh istorychnykh dyskusiiakh
- Berdychowska
Volyn’ — nash spil’nyi bilTysiacha rokiv suspilstva i vzaemodii
- Viktor Medvedchuk
Memoirs of the Second World War in Recent Ukrainian Election Campaigns
- See Bohdan Harasymiv
Kulturpolitik als Geschichtspolitik. Der ‘Platz der Unabhängigkeit Maksym Strikha, “Znykomyi Kyiv budynkiv i nazv
- For More On Kyiv
Osoblyvosti reprezentatsii natsional’no-istorychnykh identychnostei v ofitsiinomu dyskursi prezydentiv Ukrainy i Rosii
- Viktoria Sereda
Der Preis des Sieges. Der Krieg und die Konkurenz der Veteranen in der Ukraine
- Andriy Portnov
- Tetyana Portnova
Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus Dealing with 'The Great Patriotic War
- Andriy Portnov
Judaism from Renaissance to Modern Times
- David Clark
The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33
- Nicolas Werth
Tysiacha rokiv suspilstva i vzaemodii
- Viktor Medvedchuk
- Volyn
Holod 1932-1933 rokiv u politytsi, masovii svidomosti ta istoriohrafii
- Georgiy Kasianov
- Danse Macabre
Sovetskii golod i ukrainskii golodomor
- Andrea Graziosi
Istorija baturyns‘koho zapovidnyka ‘Het‘mans‘ka stolytsia
- Natalia Mitroshyna
Raskolotaia pamiat': Vtoraia mirovaia voina v istoricheskom soznanii ukrainskogo obshchestva
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