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Stalinism and Russian and Ukrainian national identities

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Communist and Post-Communist Studies
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Taras Kuzio at National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy
Taras Kuzio
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Abstract

This article is the first comparative study of the policies taken by Russian and Ukrainian émigré’s, governments and intellectuals towards the legacy of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The article analyses how these differing approaches have contributed to diverging national identities in Russia and Ukraine which preceded, and were reinforced by, the 2014 crisis in their relations and war between both countries. Stalinization was not a central question for Russian émigrés and was supported by 50 out of 69 years of the USSR and since 2000 by the Russian state. Ukrainian émigrés were more influential and the state actively supported de-Stalinization over the majority of 25 years of independent statehood that integrated de-Stalinisation with national identity and since 2015, de-communization.
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Stalinism and Russian and Ukrainian national identities
Taras Kuzio
Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Relations, Johns Hopkins University,
Washington DC, USA
article info
Article history:
Available online 31 October 2017
Keywords:
Stalinism
Holodomor
Russia
Ukraine
Vladimir putin
abstract
This article is the first comparative study of the policies taken by Russian and Ukrainian
emigr
e’s, governments and intellectuals towards the legacy of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
The article analyses how these differing approaches have contributed to diverging national
identities in Russia and Ukraine which preceded, and were reinforced by, the 2014 crisis in
their relations and war between both countries. Stalinization was not a central question for
Russian
emigr
es and was supported by 50 out of 69 years of the USSR and since 2000 by
the Russian state. Ukrainian
emigr
es were more influential and the state actively sup-
ported de-Stalinization over the majority of 25 years of independent statehood that in-
tegrated de-Stalinisation with national identity and since 2015, de-communization.
©2017 The Regents of the University of California. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights
reserved.
For fifty of the USSR's sixty-nine years, it was led by Joseph Stalin (1922e1952) and three Soviet leaders who supported a
cult of Stalin (1965e1985). The USSR experienced only three short periods of liberalizations in the 1920s, following Stalin's
death in 1953 and in the second half of the 1980s. A Stalin cult has been supported by Vladimir Putin since he came to power
in 2000 representing the majority of independent Russia's quarter of a century of statehood. Stalin and Stalinism has therefore
represented a dominant influence over Soviet and Russian history over the last century. Putin believes “excessive demon-
ization of Stalin is one of the means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia”(Parfitt, 2017).
The cultivation of a Stalin cult and myth of the Great Patriotic War are intricately tied to the integration of Russian and
Soviet identities that took place from the second half of the 1930s and existed throughout the majority of Soviet history
during periods of conservative anti-reform entrenchment. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not seek to disentangle these
identities, President Borys Yeltsin usurped Soviet institutions in Moscow and half-heartedly approached building an inde-
pendent Russian civic nation outside of Soviet identity (Brudny and Finkel, 2011) and President Putin has fostered a deep-
ening of the integration of Soviet and Russian identities (Brandenberger, 2001). The emergence of Soviet Russian identity in
World War II and cultivated since during the “era of stagnation”and Putin's Russia is an obstacle to the forging of a new post-
Soviet identity (Vujacic, 2007).
Ukraine and Russia have viewed Stalin and his legacy in diametrically opposite ways. In Russia, liberals and nationalists
have clashed over Stalin. Russian nationalists in theUSSR and independent Russia have promoted a Stalin cult by highlighting
his transformation of a backward country into an industrialized,nuclear superpower that won World War II while at the same
time ignoring or justifying his crimes. Russian liberals received state support in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras but could
never compete against nationalists and national Bolsheviks who were influential in the conservative wing of the Communist
E-mail address: kuziotaras@gmail.com.
Communist and Post-Communist Studies
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2017.10.001
0967-067X/©2017 The Regents of the University of California. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Communist and Post-Communist Studies 50 (2017) 289e302
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... Russian media is also widely consumed in Ukraine, especially among ethnic Russians and Russian speakers (Peisakhin and Rozenas 2018). Hence, Russia maintains certain organizational advantages for shaping historical narratives in Ukraine, and Putin's efforts to revitalize Stalin's legacy is likely to be impactful among both his predominantly ethnic Russian supporters in Ukraine, as well as elicit negative reactions from non-ethnic Russian counterparts (Kuzio 2017). ...
... Model 2 shows that the effect of both gulag victimization and WWII memories are only weakly attenuated by the inclusion of additional extended controls. Consistent with Kuzio (2017), Model 2 also reveals that Ukrainian speakers have more unfavorable views of Stalin's rule compared to Russian and bilingual speakers (Russian speakers are the comparison group). Ukrainian speakers are also more likely to reside in Western Ukraine, where Stalin's political repression was more extensive (see Rozenas et al. 2017;Rozenas and Zhukov 2019;Zhukov 2007). ...
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