The revolution of 1917-20 has become a prominent reference point in discussions of the current Russo-Ukrainian war in both countries, in part because Vladimir Putin blames Vladimir Lenin for the creation of an "artificial" Ukraine from "historical" Russian lands. This article argues instead that the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine was, in many respects, similar to Putin's war. Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks operating in Ukraine shared many cultural assumptions and policies with their ideological nemesis, the Russian White Army, and ultimately with Putin's ideologues. Paramount among these was an "imperial ambiguity" about what Ukraine was in relation to Russia, reflecting uncertainty about Russia's own identity. Some Ukrainian Bolsheviks at the time viewed Moscow's policies in Ukraine as colonialist. The article demonstrates that it was the international situation and Ukrainian resistance that forced Lenin to adopt the notion of ethno-linguistic Ukrainian territories, which he acknowledged as a useful foreign policy tool. Rather than "creating" Ukraine, Lenin can instead be credited with the creation of a "Russian" Crimea, which a century later would serve as a launchpad for Russian aggression.

This paper explores long-term trends in Kyiv's symbolic geography that ultimately led to the main battles of the Revolution of Dignity (2013-14), which occurred on two streets heading uphill from the Maidan into the government quarter: Hrushevskyi Street and Instytutska Street. The study delves into the historical development of the Pecherske and Lypky neighbourhoods as both real and symbolic centres of authority in modern Kyiv, demonstrating how the area between the city's main avenue, Khreshchatyk, and Lypky became a significant space of interaction and conflict between the ruling authorities and society. Cet article explore les tendances a long terme de la geographie symbolique de Kyiv, qui ont constitue le cadre des principales batailles de la Revolution de la Dignite (2013-14), soit deux rues montant du Maidan vers le quartier gouvernemental : la rue Hroushevsky et la rue Instytutska. L'etude se penche sur l'evolution historique des quartiers Pecherske et Lypky en tant que centres d'autorite reels et symboliques dans la Kyiv moderne, demontrant comment la zone situee entre l'avenue principale de la ville, Khreshchatyk, et Lypky est devenue un espace important d'interaction et de conflit entre les autorites dirigeantes et la societe.

The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine. By Patrice M. Dabrowski. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2021. xviii, 270 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. 16.99 e-book. - Volume 82 Issue 1

Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Way Things Looked from Kyiv Serhy Yekelchyk (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). Like Vladislav M. Zubok, I have a vivid recollection of my immediate reaction to the news of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The August 1991 coup left a particularly strong imprint on my memory. At the time I was an aspirant with an almost-completed dissertation draft, and my first thought was that "they" would force me to rewrite most of the text or write a new thesis on a Soviet-style topic. But my thought about "them" came complete with the notion of "us," the members of Ukraine's generation of the late 1980s and early 1990s—students and young professionals for whom the notion of political freedom had become fused with the conscious choice of Ukrainian culture as an anti-imperial identity marker. I knew that this imagined community would not give up and allow the authorities to go back to the bleak days of the late Soviet period. The student hunger strike on the Maidan in October 1990 had proved that by forcing the resignation of Vitaly Masol, the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR's Council of Ministers. The different memories of 1991 do not suggest that one particular memory was right and the other was not. Instead, all of them highlight the fact that the end of the Soviet Union was a complex event produced by multiple social and political processes that unfolded simultaneously, the resulting dynamic differing depending on the region. The optics of a Russian contemporary could differ from that of a Ukrainian one, and the full picture would emerge only when these two optics (and many more) were reconciled. Just as the perceptions of the fall of the Soviet superpower differed in 1991, so do its subsequent interpretations—depending on their [End Page 853] focus. In this sense, Zubok's gripping and extremely well-researched account concentrating on the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken by the central authorities reads particularly well in concert with studies emphasizing the agency of mass movements in the non-Russian republics, such as Ronald G. Suny's The Revenge of the Past, Mark Beissinger's Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, and Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire.1 Among the many contributions of this book, the most important one is Zubok's detailed inquiry into the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his motivation for starting the fateful reforms in the first place. It is true that the constitutional structure of the Soviet Union made the Union republics natural default foci of loyalty, if the center were to weaken and Soviet policies made ethnicity a powerful idiom of dissent.2 It is also correct to say that many republics, especially in the so-called Soviet West, experienced national mobilization outside the USSR during the interwar period and, as Soviet republics during the postwar period, developed a significant tradition of political dissent that was articulated in terms of ethnic identity and national rights, even if these activities were largely suppressed by the early 1980s.3 Still, it was Gorbachev's series of political decisions that created a discursive and, later, political space for reclaiming the republics' sovereignty—even if he believed these measures to be unavoidable. We might view them differently, perhaps as being forced by growing popular disillusionment with the viability of the informal late Soviet "social contract," but this does not detract from their importance. Zubok argues that the origins of Gorbachev's reforms should be sought in his commitment to Leninism. He produces an impressive list of evidence ranging from Gorbachev's own statements to the memoirs of those closest to him. It is difficult not to agree with Zubok on this, but I would like to propose an amendment aimed at considering this term in the intellectual context of the late Soviet period. There was simply no other way to ground any [End Page 854] reforms in theory other than to present them as a...

The political and social developments in Ukraine during the last years of the Soviet Union (1988–1991) can be seen as an unfinished revolution. The proclamation of independence in 1991 marked a compromise between national-democratic forces and the republic's old Soviet elites, which slowed down democratic transformations and kept the Red directors in power. The emergence of a mass opposition movement during the early 2000s represented a return to the unfinished agenda of the revolution. The Orange Revolution (2004–2005) and the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014) re-established the connection between the civil society's struggle for democracy and the rights of the Ukrainian language and culture, which had first developed in the late 1980s. The emergence of a new Ukrainian political nation provoked an aggressive response from Putin's Russia, but its all-out invasion of 2022 only served to consolidate a modern Ukrainian identity as separate from Russia both politically and culturally.

This article discusses the representation of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, in Ukrainian official discourse, media, and mass culture. A new stage in the war with Russia that has been ongoing since 2014, the invasion prompted a search for a new political and cultural vocabulary. If the Ukrainian state at first tended to use familiar Soviet models, mass culture responded with powerful memes, slogans, and images that mobilized the public in defence of Ukraine. The Zelens'kyi administration soon recognized the importance of modern mass culture and switched to borrowing successful symbols from it. In some cases, state institutions put potentially popular materials on social media to see whether they would work well and then re-appropriated them once they entered popular culture. Ultimately, it has been the test of popular culture that has determined the success or failure of official rhetoric.

In post-communist Russia the state has been supporting the production of historical films reflecting the official politics of memory, in which primacy is given to the victory in World War II. Often filmed in Ukraine, where the national cinema industry was nearly extinct until recently, these films project an imperial stereotype of modern Ukrainian identity as a fake and Ukrainian patriots as traitors. In contrast, the Ukrainian patriotic war narrative has only been reflected in straight-to-DVD films celebrating the nationalist insurgency. This article focuses on three recent films: two Russian films set in Ukraine during the war, which caused protests in Ukraine, and the first full-length Ukrainian war film to receive mass distribution, Mykhailo Illienko’s Firecrosser (2012), interpreted here as an attempt to merge Soviet historical mythology with the Ukrainian one.

Free AccessThe Heavenly Hundred: Fallen Heroes of the Euromaidan in Post-Revolutionary UkraineSerhy YekelchykSerhy Yekelchykhttps://doi.org/10.14220/9783737013833.273SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous chapter Next chapter FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverKultur- und Sozialgeschichte Osteuropas / Cultural and Social History of Eastern Europe.Volume 14 1st editionISBN: 978-3-8471-1383-6 eISBN: 978-3-7370-1383-3HistoryPublished online:December 2021 PDF download

ABSTRACT This article examines the afterlife of the most prominent Soviet monuments in Kyiv to survive the first wave of demolitions during the early 1990s. It shows how some of them evolved into symbols of solidarity with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which made them targets of attacks during the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013–14. In an attempt to trace the changing meaning and public resonance of Soviet monuments, the author develops Jan and Aleida Assmann’s concept of “mnemonic energy,” which monuments emit. Specifically, the article puts it in dialogue with notions of “symbolic plasticity” and “memorial environment,” both proposed here for the first time. The author argues that these characteristics of Soviet monuments, which take into account changing social practices at their respective sites, ultimately determined their fate in the post-Soviet period. The author also tests Michael Taussig’s notion that monuments always contain within themselves a suppressed counter-narrative, which can be revealed when they are toppled, accepting it with the proviso that alternative readings need not be singular or stable.

Why did Ukraine become a key reference point of American political struggles? In recent years, Ukraine has emerged as the most prominent test case of American support for democracy and liberal economic reforms worldwide. A combination of several factors has made Ukraine and the...