Russian-Ukrainian relations are usually considered in the frame of foreign policy, security studies, economics, and international relations. Politics of history rarely comes to the attention of observers, and even more rarely is it examined through the prism of bilateral relations. As a rule, researchers focus on historical politics in each country (Sherlock Reference Sherlock2007; Miller and Lipman Reference Miller and Lipman2012; Kasianov, and Smoliy, and Tolochko Reference Kasianov, Smolii and Tolochko2013; Fedor and Kangaspuro et al. Reference Julie, Kangaspuro and Lassila2017; Walker Reference Walker2018; Pearce Reference Pearce2020; McGlynn Reference McGlynn2023) occasionally turning to some aspects of interaction and mutual influence (Wilson Reference Wilson1995; Korostelina Reference Korostelina2010; Riabchuk Reference Riabchuk2016; Torbakov Reference Torbakov and Olga2017; Prymachenko Reference Prymachenko2017; Koposov Reference Koposov2018). Observers occasionally analyze Russian and Ukrainian historical policy in interaction and reciprocity (Korostelina Reference Korostelina2010, Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022a, Reference Kasianov2022b). After the outbreak of full-scale war, an avalanche of conferences explaining the causes and preconditions for Russia’s attack on Ukraine swept over academe with numerous papers and reports devoted to Russian politics of history as the ideological component of aggression. Again, most recent publications deal primarily with Russia’s perception of history as a precondition and ideological justification for war, with few references to Ukrainian developments (Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2022).
The article addresses this gap in the literature by comparing the fundamental features of historical politics in Russia and Ukraine over the past thirty years. It addresses the interaction between the two conflicting master narratives, analyzes how the shared past is instrumentalized in domestic politics and bilateral relations, and explores how memory wars could shape preconditions for actual warfare. The article examines similarities in perceptions of problems, challenges, tasks, and ways of implementing historical politics in Russia and Ukraine. At the same time, it focuses, first, on comparing and contrasting differences between the master narratives developed in the two states on a number of specific issues, and, second, on elucidating how and why these narratives clashed and shaped preconditions for war.
The shared past implies a set of events and phenomena jointly experienced by communities in a single physical (geographical) and political space. Arranging this past into a coherent narrative makes it a shared history. It can serve as a basis for forming a common collective historical identity (e.g., national) or justifying a separate version of history. Ukraine has a shared past with all its neighbors, but only Russia cultivates it as a “common history,” promoting the concept of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” based on it.
The most common interpretation of the special role of shared history in Russian – Ukrainian relations primarily reduces analysis to an instrumentalist paradigm, i.e., using the past to justify the actions of both the aggressor and the victim. Without disputing such an explanation, this article proposes to consider another, no less critical aspect: mnemonic anxiety and securitization of memory as internal motives and drivers of the controversies and long-lasting conflict that turned into a war.
This article argues that within the complex relationship between Russia and Ukraine, a shared historical background, perceived and conceptualized as a shared history, gave rise to mnemonic anxiety, a subspecies of ontological or existential anxiety (Mitzen Reference Mitzen2016). The mnemonic anxiety emerges as a reaction to an imagined or actual threat to the fundamentals of national identity, or collective Self, in this particular case - the reaction to a perceived threat to historical identity. Consequently, the divergent and, in this case, opposing or even antagonistic interpretations of the shared history are mutually perceived by both sides as a threat to the fundamentals of national Self and, thus, as an existential threat. As a result, both parties resort to discourses, actions and measures described in the literature as securitization of collective memory (Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010; Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2015; Resende and Budrite, Reference Resende and Dovile2016; Klymenko and Siddi Reference Lina and Marco2020). Accordingly, historical master narratives being considered by the Russian and Ukrainian political and cultural power holders and cultural elites as an issue of national security, becoming essential elements of an existential conflict.
In this interaction, the Russian ruling class and the intellectual and cultural elites played a proactive role, seeking to prevent Ukraine from leaving the imagined space of a “common past” considered by them as a core precondition for the Russian nation’s existence. Ukraine’s detachment from this past and the creation of its own sovereign past, especially one embedded in a common European history, gave rise to mnemonic anxiety because it was seen as an assault on the Russian historical identity in which Ukrainians and Russians represented “a single people”. Russia’s securitization of a “common past,” based on the idea of the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” where there is no space for a separate Ukrainian nation, in turn, generated mnemonic anxiety among those part of Ukrainian political and cultural elites who saw this approach to the past as an encroachment on the sovereign Ukrainian identity and an existential threat, provoking them to politics of securitization of memory.
Similarities
Since the beginning of the 1990s, both countries have faced similar challenges in identity building and accomplished identical responses.
Both countries needed cultural and political homogenization to create a common political identity space and impose civic loyalty. This task confronted the internal cultural, linguistic, historical, and civilizational diversity. Moreover, both countries had to deal with historical regions, which emerged as cultural and civilizational frontiers at certain historical stages and became part of the empire or nation-state, already having relatively stable forms of local identity. These regions possessed elaborated cultural memory, which did not always coincide with the center’s unifying memory narrative and sometimes contradicted it (Shnirelman Reference Shnirelman2009; Evtukhov Reference Evtukhov2012; Miller and Malinova, and Yefremenko Reference Miller, Malinova and Dmitrii2023).
Both countries combined principles of civic and ethnic nationalism, referring to “people” as a fundamental notion equivalent to a political nation. Іn Russia —“multinational people” (Konstitutsia Rossiiskoi Federatsii 2020), іn Ukraine — “the Ukrainian people — citizens of all nationalities” (Konstytutsia Ukrainy 1996).
In the Ukrainian Constitution, “Ukrainian nation” refers to ethnic Ukrainians while “people of Ukraine” to all citizens (Konstytutsia Ukrainy 1996). The Constitution of the Russian Federation contains the concept of “the Russian people” (in a purely ethnic meaning) now equal to the “state-forming people.” (Konstitutsia Rossiiskoi Federatsii 2020). Accordingly, cultural and political homogenization on the principles of civic loyalty to the political nation in the presence of a “state forming people” or “titular nation” poses a challenge in terms of equity of the “state forming people” or “titular nation” with minorities.
At the practical level, this problem has been solved again over similar lines: through centralized educational policy and imposition of dominant discourse, sometimes through ideological and administrative coercion, and legal regulation of the realm of memory, including suppressive measures.
Following the classical scenario of a “nationalizing state,” both countries introduced unified history teaching programs. In addition to the conventional federal standard and history curriculum, Russia also introduced (by the initiative of Putin) a single cultural standard in teaching history at school, mandatory for all subjects of the federation (Istoriko-kulturnyj standart 2013). In Russia, the concept of a supranational state became a semantic framework of a unified historical metanarrative (first implicitly and then explicitly with the idea of ethnic Russians as a state-forming people). Ukraine introduced a unified school curriculum and “History of Ukraine” course in the 1990s. Ukrainian ruling class and education managers based the uniformity of the master narrative on ethnocentric history, the history of Ukraine perceived as primarily the history of ethnic Ukrainians (Janmaat Reference Janmaat2000, Reference Janmaat2007; Popson 2001; Rogers Reference Rogers2007). However, various power groups, intellectuals, and educators have challenged the ethnocentric narrative’s validity and normative power, having different reservations: ethical, axiological, educational, etc. (Yakovenko Reference Yakovenko2009; Kasianov and Polianski Reference Kasianov and Poliansky2012). Moreover, state-led centralization did not secure the actual unification of history teaching, while teachers resented fluctuations in political directives and extremes of the ethnocentric interpretations of history (Sereda Reference Sereda2013).
Regulating interpretations of the past through special “memorial laws” was also a similar practice (Koposov Reference Koposov2018; Zhurzhenko Reference Zhurzhenko, Barkan and Lang2022). Memory actors use laws not only to justify invented traditions. Memorial laws set boundaries of permissible in interpreting the past and introduce punishment for crossing these boundaries — up to criminal persecution. Russia introduced a law that criminalized unwanted interpretations of the history of World War II. Ukraine declared unlawful the denial of Holodomor as genocide of Ukrainians and public disrespect to the participants of the liberation struggle in the 20th century (Zakon Ukrainy 2006, Zakon Ukrainy 2015). Ukraine also criminalized propaganda of the Communist and Nazi symbols (Zakon Ukrainy 2015a). Administrative liability and criminal persecution for violation of the memory legislation are common practices in both countries (Bachmann and Lyubashenko et al. Reference Bachmann and Lyubashenko2021; Kasianov Reference Kasianov2023).
In Russia, according to Agora human right watch organization, in 2014 - 2019 more than six thousand citizens were summoned to the court according to the 2014 memorial law (the accusation varied between public use of Nazi symbols, public disrespect to the memory of the Great Patriotic war, and dissemination of the allegedly wrong information about the wartime USSR), two third of them ended with administrative fines (Meduza 2018). The Russian authorities also have invented a special method to combat undesirable interpretations of the past: the status of “foreign agent,” which the Ministry of Justice assigns to legal entities and individuals. Under this policy, a number of organizations and persons were labelled as “foreign agents” that made their activity impossible in Russia. The most famous case was actual ban of the Memorial by assigning it this status. Some professional historians became targets of public pressure and criminal investigations (FIDH 2021).
In Ukraine, during the same period, one hundred and nineteen cases were open, majority concerned public use of the Soviet and the Communist symbols, about a dozen ended in courts (Hurzhiy Reference Hurzhiy2020; YDR 2024). Since the beginning of Russia’s large-scale war the punitive practices dramatically increased: about two hundres cases under the 2015 decommunization law ended with centences, varying between up to five years imprisonment, short probation periods and fines (YDR 2024) However, no criminal cases against historians known to public by the date.
Russia and Ukraine involve security and law enforcement agencies in the politics of history, however, in a different scale. President Dmitrii Medvedev appointed the representatives of the army, intelligence, and counterintelligence into the special commission, created to combat “falsifications of the history of Russia” (Ukaz Prezidenta RF 2009). The Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia Sergei Naryshkin, serves as a Chairman of the state-funded “non-governmental organization” Russian Historical Society, one of the most influential actors of the state-led politics of history. In 2020, the Investigative Committee of Russia created a special department to “prevent distortions of historical facts” about World War II, among other tasks (Sledstvennyi komitet RF 2020).
In Ukraine, President Viktor Yushchenko has assigned the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to investigate the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Holodomor) and the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944. In 2019, the SBU repeated the investigation of the famine on request of the National Museum of Holodomor. After 2015, the SBU, local prosecutors’ offices and police took part in the criminal investigations and prosecutions of violators (actual and imagined) of the law on decommunization (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022).
In search of historical grounds for forming the master narrative, both countries returned to the starting point at which the contradictions of an antagonistic nature originated. Russia resumed the imperial project of the second part of the 19th century, loaded with ideas of a unique path, spiritual messianism, and anti-Western rhetoric (White and Fekliunina Reference White, Valentina and White2014). Some observers consider it an “imperial nationalism” (Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2022). At the same time, Ukraine reverted to cultural, ‘organic’ nationalism in the perception of the past, emphasizing the cultural and political sovereignty of ethnic Ukrainians and pursuing emancipation from Russian dominance. In this respect, part of Ukraine’s cultural and political elites have returned to the historical worldview of the late 19th to early 20th century.
Finally, the shared past is a standard feature for both countries regarding the challenges of nation-building and their emergence as post-Soviet entities, inheriting the Soviet-style understanding of homogeneity and unity and the methods of implementing related policies. Russia, which moved to normalize the Soviet past in the 2000s, and Ukraine, which has consistently and increasingly radically denied this past, were similar in repeating Soviet-style methods and practices of ideological unification, particularly after 2014 (top-down policies, modalities of public discussion, increasingly punitive measures against deviations from an official line).
Examining the similarities in the historical policies of Russia and Ukraine does not suggest the conflation of the aggressor and the victim. Instead, it is crucial to avoid this equivalence. Despite Russia and Ukraine adopting similar historical policy patterns and utilizing analogous discursive strategies (owing to shared Soviet heritage), it is evident that these actions stem from fundamentally divergent perspectives, as this article shows.
Finally, similarities made up preconditions for differences. For example, similarities in addressing the fundamental schemes of the master narrative of the turn of the 19th-20th century lead us to understand the differences in the construction of developmental prospects. Russia, resuming its 19th-century imperial project as a replica of a supranational empire, claims a unique historical path, mission, and the status of a great power opposing “the West.” Ukraine, referring to the tradition of the 19th-century populist historiography, implements the classical nation-state project, which, with all its extremes, has no claims of civilizational exclusiveness and is oriented on integration into European and world communities.
Differences
Despite sharing the past and having similar modes of action in historical politics, significant differences persisted in perceptions, interpretations, aspirations, and political outcomes. For Russia, the shared past was a reason and precondition for the reintegration of Ukraine under Russian auspices after the “big mistake” and tragedy of 1991. For Ukraine, it was a departure point for the sovereignty agenda. The Russian ruling class and the overwhelming majority of cultural elites considered the shared past as a reason to doubt Ukraine’s political agency or even to deny it. In contrast, their Ukrainian counterparts see it as a motivation for a “civilized divorce” or negative othering of Russia. As a result, the shared past has become the basis for two antagonistic historical narratives.
This phenomenon of the shared past as a source of conflict is not unique: Indian-Pakistani, Sino-Japanese, Tajik-Uzbek, Ukrainian-Polish, Polish-German, or Hungarian-Slovak relations provide the most typical examples.
To understand the nature of the Russian-Ukrainian case, we should place it in the context of relations between the former imperial core and its peripheries (such as Russia’s relations with the Baltic states, Poland, Georgia, and Central Asia countries). This context presupposes the inevitability of conflict over the past between the former subaltern and the imperial core. Generally, Russian memory managers recognize the separate identity and historical distinctiveness of the peoples from former imperial peripheries, sometimes emphasizing Russia’s “civilizational role” (Danilov and Filippov Reference Danilov and Filippov2010).
The perception of Ukraine is different. Ukraine (and Ukrainians) were not perceived as cultural and civilizational Other to Russia. From the mid-19th century, the Russian imperial identity implied that “the Little Russians” were no more than a variety of the Russian people and that the lands they inhabited were part of the historical Russian lands (Miller Reference Miller2003). Moreover, around the same time, a cultural stereotype evolved, in which the statist history was considered the only “real” history. In the words of Hegel, people or nations that did not have a state were deemed “non-historical.” Russian ruling elites considered “Little Russians” natural subjects of the Russian empire state, perceiving them as a part of a bigger Russian people. Therefore, Ukrainians’ historical subjectivity was only possible in the Russian statist historical framework. Ukraine’s historical and cultural distinctiveness was acceptable at the folklore level (food, songs, dances, outfits) but would not be recognized or acknowledged as a legitimate basis for sovereignty. This worldview results in Russia’s claims on the Ukrainian past and present as part of the Russian proper and not recognizing Ukraine’s agency and sovereignty. Ukraine simply does not exist as a separate entity in the Russian historical identity. Suffice it to look at Russian history textbooks. Everything Ukraine has considered a phenomenon of sovereign Ukrainian history in Russian textbooks were events and facts of the history of the Russian state (Baturina Reference Baturina2011; Smirnov Reference Sergei2010; Yaremchuk Reference Yaremchuk2023).
Russian elites repudiated the naturalness of any self-determination ambitions of Ukrainians and presented them as an outcome of an external conspiracy against Russia. Since the middle of the 19th century, they treated Ukrainian separatism as a Polish, Austrian, or German intrigue, in a broader meaning — as a “Western” plot.
All these perceptions reemerged in the present Russian historical discourse. In its most blatant form, Putin articulated them in four theses: the contemporary Ukrainian state is an artificial creation of Bolsheviks (Lenin). Historical lands of other countries (first of all, of Russia proper) unjustly became a part of contemporary Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians are one single people. The “artificial” Ukraine is a puppet of the West used against Russia (Putin Reference Putin2008, Reference Putin2021, Reference Putin2022).
Not surprisingly, the Ukrainian political and cultural elites and a significant portion of society have sought to assert Ukraine’s fundamental distinctiveness within this shared history, emphasizing Russia’s cultural and historical otherness and claiming emancipation from Russian dominance. As mentioned earlier, this vision also dates back to the turn of the 20th century, when the Ukrainian national master narrative emerged precisely as a counter-thesis to the Russian grand récit (Hrushevsky Reference Hrushevsky1904). Since then, the Ukrainian master narrative presents Russia as a civilizational and cultural Other and the shared past as a history of subjugation and oppression by this Other.
Thus, shared history was not a reason for a common present and future but a justification for parting. Shared past did not imply a common history for Ukrainians. “Ukraine is not Russia” — this idea was quite expressively formulated in the title of the book by President Kuchma, whom his opponents accused of a strong “pro-Russian” orientation (Kuchma Reference Kuchma2003).
More fundamentally, the controversy over a shared past can be described as an antagonism between imperial and national identities, where one (Russian neo-imperial) denies the right of existence of the other (Ukrainian).
Russian ruling class and cultural elites consider Ukraine’s claims for separation and sovereignty, together with aspirations to become a part of the West, an existential threat to Russia’s historical core (with Ukraine as an inseparable part of it). According to Dmitry Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the holders of such views saw the departure or separation of Ukraine from the Russian Federation as “splitting the core of historical Russia, which makes it an incomplete Russia. It also violates the unity of the Russian people and the Russian Orthodox civilization, turning a strong buffer in the southwestern direction into a convenient springboard for an external enemy to strike a powerful blow into Russia’s heart, depriving Russia of the chance to become a global economic heavyweight.” (Trenin Reference Trenin2021) In this context, the Ukrainian historical master narrative posits double threat to Russian historical identity: it opposes fundamentals of the Russian perception of Ukraine and Ukrainians, and the Russian perception of the historical Self.
Most Ukrainian political and cultural elites perceive the Russian idea of “one single people” and common history as a threat to the very existence of Ukrainians as a sovereign entity. Russia’s war in Ukraine has radically exacerbated this perception since February 2022. Mass killings of civilians and the enormous destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine prompted a recall of genocidal practices (Etkind Reference Etkind2022) and provoked historical parallels (e.g., with the Holodomor). Putin’s historical exercises, translated into military action, provoked radicalization of the Ukrainian discourse.
The contemporary Russian master narrative is directed not only inward as a basis for gluing Russians into a unified people. It is expansionist in two respects. First, as a concept of “compatriots abroad” and “the Russian World,” that is, in the form of Russian ethnocultural irredentism, translated into political expansionism accompanied by claims not only for compatriots’ souls and bodies but also for “historic lands.”
Second is the idea of Russia’s unique path, or “Russian Sonderweg,” which refers to the belief that Russia has a distinct historical and cultural path that sets it apart from the Western world. This idea has been put forward by various thinkers over time, including Nikolai Danilevsky, the “Eurasians,” Ivan Ilyin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Aleksandr Dugin. It suggests that Russia’s development and future should be guided by its unique characteristics and values in opposition to the West’s (Cherepanova Reference Cherepanova2010; White and Fekliunina Reference White, Valentina and White2014).
The modern Ukrainian master narrative displays classic features of the Eastern European standard of national history. In more general terms, Ukraine mainly followed the scenario of a “nationalizing state” (Brubaker Reference Rogers1996, Reference Brubaker2011) or nation-state (Stepan Reference Stepan2008), however, combining principles of civic and ethnic nationalism. Its main task was to unite the nation on an ethnocentric principle, where the history of Ukraine was primarily the history of the titular ethnic group. Leaving aside the extreme ideas of radical nationalists (Ukraine from San to Kuban), it shows no signs of political irredentism. It does not deny the right to the existence of other nations. It does not claim “historic lands.” In the last decade, the focus on ethnic exclusivity has been broadened to include (for instance, in the school textbooks) ethnic groups that shared the suffering of Ukrainians under totalitarianism: the Crimean Tatars and the Jews (Gisem and Martyniuk Reference Gisem and Oleksandr2018, Reference Gisem and Oleksandr2019; Pomietun and Hupan Reference Pometun and Hupan2018, Reference Pometun and Hupan2019; Mudry and Arkusha Reference Mudryi and Arkusha2019; Strukevich and Drovoziiuk Reference Strukevych and Drovoziuk2019; MON 2018).
Russia’s growing neo-imperial ambitions and permanent interference in the historical politics of Ukraine (not to mention skirmishes in the foreign policy arena) in the 2000s–2010s exacerbated mnemonic anxiety in part of Ukrainian society. It resonated with the nationalist narrative,Footnote 1 which held expressively anti-Russian attitudes. However, even after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas, a significant part of the population of Ukraine, especially in the southeast, still demonstrated a positive attitude toward Russians: 30% in 2015, 58% in 2019 and 39% in 2021 (respondents referred to Russia as “ordinary Russians.” A radical change of mood came only during a full-scale war: in May 2022, only 2% of respondents expressed a positive stance toward Russia, and 92% - were negative (KIIS 2021, 2022).
In the end, we are not simply dealing with a clash between two mutually exclusive historical narratives of the past, but with an antagonism of historical outlooks, an antagonism whose resolution the opposing sides now, a two years into the war, see only in the elimination of the opponent in its present form.
While for the Russian establishment, the liquidation of Ukraine as a “historical mistake” is quite common, for the Ukrainian historical outlook, the idea of the necessity of Russia’s disintegration has recently been the preserve of the most radical circles. Russia’s actions since the beginning of 2014 have contributed to the spread of this idea to broader audience. In Ukrainian official discourse (including historical one), the tendency to deny the existence of historical Russia in its present form is becoming vocal. Putin’s biased picture of Ukraine as an “anti-Russia” became a reality. The war just ratified Russia’s image of an eternal aggressor and oppressor. The idea of the historical necessity for Russia’s disintegration and the termination of its existence in its current form tuned into conviction (Motyl Reference Motyl2023; Danilov Reference Danilov2023).
Points of discord
Now we will consider specific episodes and cases of the common past that have served as the basis for conflict of memories.
“Kievan versus Kyivan Rus”Footnote 2
The heritage of Kievan Rus (in Russian), also known as Kyivan Rus in Ukrainian, has been a contentious topic in the official historical discourse of Russia and Ukraine. The contemporary debates about the belonging of Kyivan Rus to Ukrainian history started in the first half of the 19th century (Tolochko Reference Tolochko2012). After 1991, both countries remained faithful to the Soviet concept of the Kievan Rus as a cradle of the brotherly Slavic peoples. In the 2000s, both started to claim exclusive rights on the cradle.
In the Russian official historical discourse, Kievan Rus holds a consistent status as the origin of Russian statehood. In the early 2000s, Russian archaeologists attempted to reorient the beginnings of Russian statehood to the “core” Russian lands: Novgorod and Ladoga. However, the idea of Kievan Rus as a departure point of Russia’s millennial state history resumed. (Kasіanov, Smoliy, and Tolochko Reference Kasianov, Smolii and Tolochko2013). Yet in the 2010s, the term “Kievan Rus” gradually disappeared from Russia’s school curriculum. It was replaced by the “Ancient Russian State” or Rus” or “Russian land” as an origin of the millennial Russian statehood (Chubukov Reference Chubukov2021). Notably, in 2022, one of the authors of the textbook explained that the withdrawal of the term “Kievan” has nothing to do with “special military operation” in Ukraine… (Patsera Reference Patsera2022).
In Ukrainian history, Kyivan Rus is essential to the continuous Ukrainian millennium. However, a similar semantic shift has occurred here. Recently, “Kyivan Rus” also disappeared from the curriculum. Instead, educators introduced the concept of “Rus-Ukraine,” following a classical scheme of Ukrainian history constructed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky (MON 2022).
The struggle for the heritage of Kievan/Kyivan Rus also extends to prominent personalities. In 2016, on the thousandth anniversary of the death of Prince Vladimir the Great, a monument to the prince was erected in Moscow. At the unveiling ceremony, Putin called him “the spiritual founder of the Russian state” (Gordon, 2016). In contrast, a year prior, the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, claimed that Prince Volodymyr the Great laid the foundations of a free and independent Ukraine and determined the country’s European choice (Radio Svoboda 2015).
A similar exchange occurred regarding Anna Yaroslavna (Regina), the daughter of the Kyivan prince. During a meeting with French President Francois Macron, Russian President Putin presented her and her father, Yaroslav the Wise, as Russians, causing an intensive Twitter fight between politicians (Raffensperger Reference Raffensperger2017). Representatives of Ukraine have asserted their property rights to the princess and queen and recalled popular tropes about the absence of Moscow on the historical map in the times of Anna Regina (Radio Svoboda Reference Radio2017), stressing Ukraine’s historical and cultural superiority over Russia.
Early modern period
For obvious reasons, both sides instrumentalized the period from the mid-17th to the early 18th century from the standpoint of mutual denial. The Russian historical discourse promoted the idea of the Russian state collecting “Russian” lands in the fight against external enemies. In the Ukrainian historical discourse, the emphasis was on proving the existence of a separate identity and agency of this period, highlighting those stories that emphasize the movement toward Ukraine’s independence. In Russia, the period from the Pereyaslav Rada (1654) to the beginning of the 18th century was interpreted as Ukraine’s “reunification” or “re-entry” into Russia (first on the Left Bank and then on the Right Bank). In Ukraine, it refers to the “Ukrainian national revolution of the mid-17th century” (Smoliy, and Stepankov Reference Valerii and Stepankov2009), the state and political subjectivity of the Cossack state of Ukraine, and the Hetmanate.
Of course, the memory war did not bypass this period. For example, celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Konotop of 1659, despite the utmost diplomacy and veiling of the commemoration (Yushchenko’s decree did not mention who defeated whom in this battle), caused a nervous reaction. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained that:
“…some forces in Ukraine are trying to find events and persons in the common, truly complex, sometimes contradictory Russian-Ukrainian history that was notable only for the fact that they were once directed against Moscow, against Russia, against Russians. For this sake, the names and deeds of those who would otherwise be ashamed are glorified. The bloody battle resulted from the betrayal of another hetman - of this series” (MFA Russia 2009).
At that time, the Ukrainian side, at least at the level of official spokespersons, refrained from presenting this event as a Ukrainian-Russian conflict (such interpretations were already in use in the public domain).
After 2014, the emphasis changed. On the FB page of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Battle of Konotop was mentioned as evidence of the war between Ukraine and Russia already in the 17th century (General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 2020).
The same is true for abolishing Hetmanate autonomy in the 18th century. Yushchenko included the destruction of the Hetman’s capital Baturyn in November 1708 by the Moscovites in the list of national tragedies‥ The president compared the Baturyn tragedy with the Holodomor as genocide (Chervak Reference Chervak2007). The “Baturyn tragedy” as a victimhood myth was embedded in the general semantic line of imperial domination and exploitation of Ukraine and Ukraine’s resistance. This line became an official trend under Leonid Kuchma and took final shape during Yushchenko’s presidency.
The next event, the Battle of Poltava, and the person of Hetman Ivan Mazepa were other examples of contrasting interpretations. While Russia traditionally sees the Poltava battle as a victory of glorious Russian arms and lists it in the official Days of Military Glory, Ukraine interprets it as the collapse of prospects for independence from Russia. In 2009, both countries marked the anniversary of the event. State Duma adopted a special address on the anniversary of the “victory of the Russian army near Poltava,” referring to Mazepa as a traitor, thus repeating the centennial tradition of anathematizing him (Regnum 2009). The Ukrainian government celebrated the 300th anniversary of the “events related to the military-political action of Hetman Ivan Mazepa [his break with tzar Peter. — GK] and the establishing of the Ukrainian-Swedish alliance.” (Prezydent Ukrainy 2007). Since the 1990s, Mazepa (with his portrait on a 10 hryvnia banknote) has been a part of the Ukrainian official national Pantheon as an early modern nation-builder.
Revolution of 1917 - 1922
In this context, the fundamental differences in interpreting the 1917-1922 revolution appear pretty natural. For Ukrainians, the revolution of 1917 is the “Ukrainian Revolution.” For Russians, it is an all-Russian event. The official Russian naming of the event gradually shifted from the formula “Revolution of 1917 in Russia” to the Great Russian Revolution, covering the entire range of events on the territory of the Russian Empire from 1917 to 1922 (Chubukov Reference Chubukov2021). The events in the regions were traditionally presented as local versions of the all-Russian process. In contemporary Ukraine, the “Ukrainian Revolution” canon, which emerged in the revolutionary émigré circles of the 1920s and persisted in the diaspora, was restored at the end of the 1980s. It separates Ukrainian events from the “Russian Revolution and Civil War” and presents them as a national liberation revolution and the beginning of modern Ukrainian statehood (Dornik Kasianov, et al. Reference Dornik and Kasianov2015).
Following the annexation of Crimea and the seizure of part of the territory of Donbas in 2014, as well as Russia’s support for the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, the theme of the confrontation with Bolshevik Russia in 1917-1920 gained the status of a Russian-Ukrainian war; moreover, the anniversary of 1917 marked, accordingly to the official line, a “hundred years of struggle” with Russia (UINP 2017). The then director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP), Volodymyr Vyatrovych, argued that modern Russia is currently waging a Bolshevik war against Ukraine, similar to the one that took place in 1918-1920 (Vyatrovych Reference Vyatrovych2017). Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, referring to the events of the revolution, recalled numerous battles during Russia’s “crusade against Ukraine” (Poroshenko Reference Poroshenko2019).
The Soviet period
Attitudes toward the Soviet past initially differed little between the two countries. In the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, Russia was ahead of Ukraine in denying and condemning the Soviet period, which did not prevent declaring itself a legal successor of the USSR. The situation changed in the early 2000s. In Russia, the “normalization” of the Soviet past began with restoring the Soviet anthem and the Great Patriotic War myth. In Ukraine, the ambivalence of the 1990s and attempts to nationalize the Soviet legacy was increasingly challenged by proponents of national and nationalist narratives. The competition between the national master narrative and the Soviet-nostalgic version of the past became a central issue in the history politics of Ukraine in the 1990s–2000s. After the Orange Revolution of 2004, President Yushchenko attempted to de-communize the country’s symbolic space by ordering the removal of monuments to the perpetrators of the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
Then, the interpretation of the Holodomor has become the conspicuous bone of contention between Russia and Ukraine and the most illustrative example of antagonism over the Soviet past. Ukraine has established the official canon of the Holodomor as a genocide of Ukrainians caused by the Communist regime. This interpretation was enshrined in the law (Zakon Ukrainy 2006). Russia’s official version of the event postulated that the famine of 1932-1933 was an all-Union phenomenon and not directed against any particular national or ethnic group. There was no state politics of commemoration of the victims of the famine. Russia interpreted insistence on the genocidal version as anti-Russian propaganda and policy. Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev even dedicated a special address to Yushchenko (unprecedented practice), offensively refusing to pay an official visit to the opening of the Kyiv Holodomor memorial in November 2008. He stated that the famine was not directed against any particular nation, that it was caused not only by the decisions of all Union but also the local leadership. According to him, singling out any nation as an extraordinary victim was immoral; the genocidal version of the Holodomor was aimed at separating “our peoples, united by centuries-old historical, cultural and spiritual ties, special feelings of friendship and mutual trust” (Prezident Rossii 2008).
The Holodomor issue went beyond bilateral relations and reached the level of international disputes. In the fall of 2003, the Ukrainian delegation to the 58th UN General Assembly brought the Holodomor issue to the international community’s attention, presenting a special resolution on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the famine. However, the document’s status was downgraded due to Russia’s opposition. Instead of a resolution, the Assembly issued a joint statement (signed by 64 states) with a comparatively lower significance level. The statement marked the arrival of “Holodomor” in official international speak, but the word “genocide” was removed. In the following years, Russian diplomacy did its best to block similar attempts by Ukrainian diplomats (under Yushchenko, Ukraine held a worldwide awareness campaign dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the famine aimed at recognizing the Holodomor as genocide of Ukrainians by the international community).
In 2007, the UNESCO General Conference adopted a resolution called “Commemoration of the Victims of the Holodomor.” Russian delegation effectively blocked Ukraine’s team efforts to introduce the term “genocide” to the text. In the summer of 2008, the Russian delegation repeated this pattern at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. In October 2008, the resolution of another international body, the European Parliament, referred to the Holodomor as a crime against humanity and did not include language on genocide, despite Ukraine’s efforts. The same scenario followed in December 2008. The Holodomor resolution containing the term “genocide” (timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) was not even included in the agenda of the UN General Assembly, again due to Russians (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022).
Between 2014 and 2022, the contrast in attitudes toward the Soviet legacy became even more tangible. Ukraine’s parliament passed the law which, first, equated the Soviet system with Nazism (as equivalent totalitarian regimes) and, second, prohibited the use of Soviet symbols (along with Nazi symbols) in public space (Zakon Ukrainy 2015). Accordingly, the politics of “decommunization” resulted in the massive cleansing of the public space from the symbols of the “Communist regime.” The peak of decommunization falls between November 2015 and spring 2016, when 51493 toponymical objects, 32 cities, 955 villages and settlements, 25 administrative districts (rayons) were renamed, and 2389 monuments and memorial signs to “totalitarian leaders” were removed, of which 1320 were Lenin’s statues (UINP 2016). In the new generation of textbooks published after 2018, the Soviet period was depicted almost exclusively in dark tones as an endless chain of oppression, mass repressions, deportations, famines, catastrophes, and national humiliation (with few exceptions in the sections devoted to science and arts). One textbook even opens with the table named “Crimes of the Communist Regime in the 20th Century” (Strukevych and Drovoziuk Reference Strukevych and Drovoziuk2019).
To a great extent, the Russian hybrid war in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea contextualized “decommunization” as state politics—promoters and supporters of decommunization perceived denial of the Soviet legacy as an anti-Sovet and anti-Russia policy.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the “normalization” of the Soviet past was gradually turning into a normalization or even forgetting of the extremes of communism. Though recognized as a tragedy, the famine of 1932-1933 did not become the subject of official commemoration. Political repressions continued to be recognized as a dark page of the Soviet past. Still, organizations engaged in their history and commemoration either found themselves in the position of “foreign agents” or banned altogether (e.g., the international “Memorial”). The protests surrounding the change in the status and editing of the Perm 36 Museum exhibit (eliminating Stalinism-blaming content) were quite revealing in terms of the possibilities for political editing of the Soviet past in the manner desired by the authorities (Goode Reference Goode2020).
Changes in attitudes toward Joseph Stalin can also be seen as an indicative trend. In 2014 - 2021, the proportion of respondents who expressed admiration, sympathy, or respect for Stalin increased in Russia from 40% to 60%, while those with a negative attitude decreased from 19% to 11% (Levada Center 2021). Presumably, the growth of positive attitudes toward Stalin in Russia was connected, among other reasons, to the pervasive and increasingly intense cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War. In Ukraine, in 2012 - 2021, the share of those who perceived Stalin in positive terms decreased from 23% do 18% while the percentage of negative attitude remained almost unchanged (37 and 38%), an indifferent stance increased from 27 to 34% (KIIS 2021b). Once full-scale war broke out, the differences intensified. In Russia, the share of those who treat Stalin with respect, admiration or sympathy in 2023 increased to 63%, while 8% had negative attitudes and 23% were indifferent to him (Levada Center 2023). In Ukraine, in the same year, 61% of respondents had a negative attitude to Stalin, 4% had a positive attitude and 26% were indifferent (KIIS 2023).
According to Putin, the Soviet period, with all its triumphs and tragedies, was an integral part of Russian history (Putin Reference Putin2020). At the same time, the official Russian discourse contained elements of revision of the Soviet period. The principal revisionist was Putin, and his revisionism concerned, first and foremost, Ukraine. In 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, he first raised the issue of the territories Ukraine had obtained from various states. In particular, he mentioned the “vast territories in the south and east” received from Russia during the Soviet period. In 2013, he again claimed that the Soviet Union rewarded Ukraine with Russian territories, emphasizing that it was only through coexistence with Russia as part of the USSR that Ukraine became a large European state. (Putin Reference Putin2008; Prezident Rossii 2013).
During the annexation of Crimea and the unfolding of the proxy war in Donbas, the manipulation with Ukraine’s territorial acquisitions as part of the USSR was transformed into a condemnation of the Bolsheviks for squandering Russia’s historical lands in favor of Ukraine. Then, the issue of “Novorossiya” emerged in public discourse: Putin specifically listed regions where Russia’s attempts to repeat the Donbas scenario had been observed (Odessa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv). In articles and speeches in 2021-2022, he repeatedly complained that the Bolsheviks and Lenin created Ukraine at Russia’s expense. In the end, this revisionist line toward the Soviet experience became the ideological justification for the outbreak of war (Prezident Rossii 2014, 2014a, 2014b, 2016; Putin Reference Putin2021, Reference Putin2022).
Great Patriotic War versus World War II
During the 1990s, the Soviet formula of the “Great Patriotic War” and the accompanying civic cult dominated official discourse in both countries. In Ukraine, an alternative version of the event gradually developed since the 1990s. The narrative went beyond the chronological boundaries of the “Great Patriotic War” and matched the time and space of the “Second World War.” It promoted a somewhat ambivalent approach, which combined antagonistic visions of the event, for instance, the Soviet heroes Pantheon and nationalist narrative (OUN and UPA). In Russia, the Soviet cult of “Great Victory” was initially revised in terms of the USSR’s complicity in the outbreak of the war (the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) and criticism of the exorbitant price of victory. In both countries, Soviet veterans and Communists fiercely resisted revising the Soviet victory cult.
In the 2000s, Russia resumed Soviet-style mythology. The state cult of the “Great Patriotic War” and the “Great Victory” gained momentum. They became a fundamental component of state ideology, ensuring society’s political and moral unity (Malinova Reference Malinova2015). During this period, elements of critical rethinking of the event were removed from the official narrative. The “Great Patriotic War” assumed the status of the central and most important part of World War II, stressing the significant role of Russia in defeating Nazism.
The trend has been escalating recently, with the criminalization of “wrong” interpretations of this historical event. In 2014, the Russian parliament introduced amendments to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which included provisions for the “rehabilitation of Nazism” and the punishment for the dissemination of “knowingly false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War” (Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 2020). Transformation of the cult of a Great Victory into the militant cult of moral and military superiority led to a deterioration of Russia’s relations not only with Ukraine but also with its closest neighbors in the West, particularly with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the European Union. In these countries, the process of European integration involved the revision of the ideology of the “liberation campaign of the Red Army” in 1944-1945, transforming the concept of “liberation” into “occupation,” which was not acceptable to Russia.
In 2019, the confrontation reached a new level, with the European Parliament, at the initiative of Poland, adopting a resolution on the anniversary of the beginning of World War II, naming Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union as the culprits of the outbreak of the war (European Parliament 2019). In response, Putin accused the West of revising history, arguing that the West (specifically Britain, France, and Poland) caused the war with their policies in 1934-1938 (President Rossii 2019).
Meanwhile, Ukraine moved from post-Soviet ambiguity to a pro-Western interpretation of World War II. Moreover, Ukraine drifted to the Eastern-European model of war remembrance, which presents this event in terms of national victimhood and the vicissitudes of a nation caught in the middle of a battle between two totalitarian regimes. This ideological shift is observable in memorial laws dedicated to the event. The one, adopted on the 55th anniversary of the victory, entitled “On Perpetuation of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” followed the Soviet legacy (Law of Ukraine 2000). The second, “On Perpetuation of the Victory over Nazism in World War II 1939-1945,” was adopted in April 2015 (Law of Ukraine 2015). The Soviet name of the event disappeared from official discourse. Soviet commemorative date, May 9, remained untouched due to its persistent popularity, however, it has lost Soviet ideological meaning. The law introduced a new “European” date – May 8 with a new sense: remembrance and reconciliation. Additionally, President Petro Poroshenko abolished all Soviet-era names (all related to the Great Patriotic War) in the honorary titles of military units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (Ukaz Prezydenta Ukrainy 2015). The very meaning of Ukraine’s place in World War II was increasingly changing toward the interpretation of Ukraine as a battlefield of two totalitarian regimes, Nazist and Communist.
The political uses of the Great Patriotic War/World War II memory have intensified in Russia and Ukraine since the beginning of the war in Donbas in 2014. The Russia-backed self-proclaimed DPR and LPR have used the Russian cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War as a component of military propaganda (Babkina Reference Babkina, Aleksei and Yefremenko2020), which utilized Soviet terminology and symbolic practices from the Great Patriotic War mythology and presented the war against the “Kievan junta” as a continuation of 1945. Separatists have used the terms karateli (executioners) and banderovtsy (banderovites) to brand the Ukrainian army and voluntary battalions and appropriated the St. George stripe (invented in Russia to commemorate the Great Patriotic War) as a symbol of “liberation war.” In 2017, the Ukrainian parliament introduced administrative liability (fine) for public display of the stripe.
The narrative of the event known as the Great Patriotic War in Ukraine has undergone significant changes. On the one hand, there have been efforts to “nationalize” a portion of both the Soviet (referred to as the “Great Patriotic War”) and post-Soviet (referred to as “World War II”) stories by emphasizing the contribution of ethnic Ukrainians to the victory. For example, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) introduced the moving exhibition “Ukrainian World War II” under the slogan “Ukrainians in the ranks of the United Nations defeated the aggressor” (UINP 2015). The exhibition presented Ukrainians as a fighters in the Allies ranks, mentioning two Soviet heroes but not as representatives of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it included stories of UPA placing them within the framework of the Allies. All persons, presented in the exhibitions, were ethnic Ukrainians with the exception of the famous Crimean Tatar, the Hero of the Soviet Union, Amet Khan Sultan.
On the other, there has been a deliberate effort to separate further the Ukrainian narrative of the “Great War” from the Russian story and to emphasize their opposition. This trend has involved a shift in emphasis from victorious pathos to the tragedy and suffering of a nation caught between two totalitarian regimes and a focus on reconciliation. The reconciliation rhetoric did not prevent active measures to eliminate the Soviet symbols of the war from the public space. For instance, in Kharkiv, a prolonged public debate over renaming Georgiy Zhukov Avenue ended in 2021 with a court decision supporting renaming after the Soviet-time dissident Petro Hryhorenko (Suspil’ne 2021). The same year, the Lviv city council decided to remove the Soviet Monument of Glory in July 2021, provoking public debates in Ukraine (part of society resented this action) and an anxious response from Russia. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs mentioned “Ukrainian Nazis,” who tried to revenge Soviet soldiers for defeat in the past and pointed out the “tendency to the restoration of the ideology of neo-nazism in the center of the European continent.” (MFA Russia 2021).
The full scale war escalated the process of antagonization of the war narratives. Un Ukraine, the local authorities, particularly in Western regions started a campaign of removing of the Soviet time war memorials. In May 2023, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law finally abolishing the Soviet tradition supported by Russia. A new name for the commemorative date (the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in World War II) was adopted, and the date was finally changed - it will now be May 8, while May 9 officially became Europe Day (Zakon Ukrainy 2023). In Russia, the myth of the Great Victory turned into a militarist cult and the idea of “unfinished case” of the fight against Nazism.
The Ukrainian nationalist movement equated to “Ukrainian Nazism” became central to forming an aggressive-antagonistic discourse against Ukraine in the 2000s -2010s and one of the main ideological arguments for starting a large-scale war. The debates and wars of memory regarding the Ukrainian nationalist movement shaped it.
The Ukrainian nationalist movement
The reconsideration and reassessment of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN and UPA)Footnote 3 in the Ukrainian national narrative were multifaceted and intricate. Soviet ideological standards portrayed organizations and individuals associated with this movement as Nazi collaborators and enemies of the Ukrainian people. However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, a heroic myth of this movement, created by the veterans of OUN and UPA, began to develop, unfolding parallel political rehabilitation. This process, which involved establishing and diffusion the heroic nationalist memory narrative concerning the OUN and UPA, gained momentum under President Viktor Yushchenko and reached the national level after 2005. OUN and UPA became crucial actors in the history of the Second World War. At the same time, the nationalist movement was elevated to the status of national liberation and state-forming phenomenon (Marples Reference Marples2007; Liebich and Myshlovska Reference Liebich and Myshlovska2014; Rossolinski-Liebe 2014; Rudling Reference Rudling2016; Yurchuk Reference Yurchuk and Fedor2017). However, the issue of OUN, UPA, and their leaders was a matter of intensive debate in Ukraine (Wylegala Reference Wylegala2017; Umland, and Yurchuk Reference Umland and Yulia2017; Kasianov Reference Kasianov2024; Rudling Reference Rudling2024). The purified and glorified image of liberators, distilled from serious wrongdoings, was challenged by various actors: proponents of the Soviet-nostalgic narrative, liberal intellectuals, and Ukrainian and Western scholars.
The rehabilitation and glorification of the Ukrainian nationalist movement (OUN and UPA) in Ukraine presented a substantial ideological challenge for Russia. The depiction of OUN and UPA as Nazi collaborators was a fundamental component of the “Great Victory” myth, constitutive to contemporary Russian collective identity Therefore, the heroization of these organizations in Ukraine (which, as we remember, was considered a part of Russia’s historical body) was unacceptable. Moreover, the OUN and UPA fought with arms against the Soviets during and after World War II, declaring Russia the eternal enemy of the Ukrainian people. They considered their fight against the Soviets as a national liberation war against imperialist Russia. For Russia, they were natural-born enemies. Objections of an ideological nature were combined with a purely pragmatic strategy. Extremes of glorification of nationalist organizations and figures, ignoring or even whitewashing the dark sides of their past, were a convenient pretext to discredit and defame Ukrainian state and political figures as falsifiers and create an image of Ukraine captured by beast-like nationalists and descendants of Nazi collaborators.
In 2007-2009, the Russian media started streaming various broadcasts in which they presented the historical policy in Ukraine as a continuous “Banderization” and an “attack on Russian and Soviet historical values” (YouTube 2009). They emphasized protecting the interests and needs of compatriots in Ukraine, who they depicted as victims of “openly nationalistic, anti-Russian and Russophobic sentiments and manifestations in Ukraine” (MFA Russia 2007). They also unfolded diplomatic attacks at the bilateral level and within international organizations.
In June 2008, the Russian Foreign Ministry responded to an “appeal of the Russian community” of Ivano-Frankivsk to President Medvedev regarding celebrations honoring veterans of the SS Division “Galicia” by expressing the hope that official authorities in Ukraine would “put an end to attempts to revise the results of the Second World War” and “be aware of the harmfulness of the glorification of the SS” (MFA Russia 2008). Additionally, the statement called on international organizations such as the United Nations, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and OSCE to express their attitudes toward glorifying Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine.
In the winter of 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin addressed the topic, calling the decree of then-President of Ukraine Yushchenko to award the title of Hero of Ukraine to Stepan Bandera a “spit in the face of Western sponsors” (GraniRu 2010). This statement can be considered the beginning of elaborating the topic of Western complicity in the takeover of Ukraine by nationalists.
Concurrently, the Russian mission to the UN also launched a project called “condemnation of attempts to rehabilitate Nazism” at the UN level. The main focus of this project was to condemn the glorification of members of the “national” SS legions in Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine (SS Division “Galicia”) generally framed within the context of the fight against neo-Nazism, racism, and xenophobia. In 2012, the UN approved the draft resolution, and in November 2015, it did it again, this time at the request of Belarus. In 2020, the UN approved it for the third time. While the first resolution included recommendations for UN member states to “oppose any form of glorification of the Nazi SS and any of its components, including the Waffen SS,” the most recent variant expressed the inability of UN member states to comply with these recommendations (UN General Assembly 2012; 2015; 2020).
After 2014, the mythologized image of the OUN and UPA gained renewed significance: in Russia, as a bogeyman of the Ukrainian nationalism Nazism, in Ukraine as a heroic account, and as an anti-Soviet, anti-communist, and anti-Russian icon. Ukraine saw a rapid glorification of the nationalist movement, especially its heroic myth and representation as the main factor of the Ukrainian national liberation movement in the 20th century. The OUN party march became the official anthem of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. A new generation of textbooks presented OUN and UPA exclusively in a glorifying spirit. In Western Ukraine, the memory of the SS “Galizien” Division became a local cult (Rudling Reference Rudling2012). Darker aspects, such as the participation of OUN and UPA representatives in the Holocaust, the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in military formations of Nazi Germany, and war crimes against civilians, were either silenced or presented in a relativized manner by the proponents of the nationalist narrative of memory. Moreover, several new laws (Zakon Ukrainy 2015a, 2018, 2018a, 2018b) established a special status for OUN and UPA veterans as participants in the struggle for the liberation of Ukraine. Public display of a “disrespectful attitude” to them was declared unlawful.
Along with the rise of right-wing radical nationalist groups in Ukraine and their growing role in “street politics” after 2014 (nationalist parties were absolute losers in the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2014 and 2019), this trend provided the Russian discourse mongers with arguments to present Ukraine as a country embraced by extreme nationalism. The demonized image of “Banderites” was used during the “Russian Spring” of 2014 and in the propaganda of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republics. From 2014 to 2022, the theme of the Ukrainian nationalist movement was frequently brought up by Russian top officials and media as a component of the hybrid war. Rather quickly, the Russian propaganda theses about the intrigues of the nationalist-Banderovites were transformed into the idea of Ukraine captured by neo-Nazis and became a justification for starting a large-scale war against Ukraine (Shevtsova Reference Shevtsova2022).
The dialogue
A review of relations between Russia and Ukraine in the sphere of historical memory shows that Russia has always played a proactive role both in bilateral relations and at the level of international organizations (the most telling example is the story of blocking resolutions on the Holodomor as genocide). The easiest way to explain this is the difference in interests: Russia sought to preserve and consolidate its influence in Ukraine, while Russia was increasingly distancing itself toward Europe and the imagined “West,”, particularly in the 2010s.
As already noted, Russia has resorted to active attacks, waging wars of memory in 2007–2009 and after 2014. At the same time, it almost simultaneously used “soft power,” offering to resolve complex issues through harmonization of interpretations and institutional cooperation. The Ukrainian side did not refuse to communicate, especially at the level of scholars and academic institutions, where discussions were usually quite balanced, but perceived the idea of “harmonization” of the shared past not as a concession but instead as an opportunity for dialogue.
In summary, the interaction and attempts to discuss the common past between Russia and Ukraine during the 1990s and 2000s can be divided into three periods: 1) early 1990s to early 2000s with minimal contacts between scholars and government officials, 2) 2002-2013 with increased interest in joint projects and Russia’s intensification of activities in the “near abroad,” and 3) 2014 to present with maximum conflict, “war of memories” as part of Russia’a hybrid warfare and open aggression, and increased use of the past for political and war purposes by both sides. In this section, we will discuss bilateral initiatives to keep the dialogue.
The Russian – Ukrainian Commission of Historians
The idea of creating a commission of historians was initially formulated by an intergovernmental Russian-Ukrainian group headed by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matvienko and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Semynozhenko. The initiative came from the Russian side, which proposed to start consultations on the content of history textbooks, especially on those subjects that caused concern in Russia. Among these subjects were expectedly the legacy of Kyivan Rus, Russian-Ukrainian relations in the 17th century, assessment of the events of World War II, the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1930s-1950s and its leaders, and the famine of 1932-1933.
The initiative was suggested at an extremely difficult moment for the Ukrainian authorities: in 2001 a series of mass actions “Ukraine without Kuchma,” in 2002 - “Arise Ukraine!”, in the same year parliamentary elections were held, which formed a strong parliamentary opposition to Leonid Kuchma, consisting of national-democrats, nationalists and populists, led by Viktor Yushchenko. The opposition viewed Kuchma as a pro-Russian president, so the initiative to create a “textbook commission” allegedly aimed at the textbooks revision, immediately met with an organized protest; opposition websites published a letter signed by several hundred public figures, historians, publicists, teachers, journalists, and so on, protesting against the “restoration of Russian political censorship over Ukrainian textbooks” (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022, 352-355).
As a result, the initiative shifted to academic tracks. Once again, at the initiative of the Russian side the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences established joint commission of historians. The commission aimed to create a platform for dialogue between professional historians, similar to the Russian-German Commission of Historians established in the 1990s.
The commission’s primary objective shifted to preparing a popular outline of Ukrainian history written by Ukrainian historians for Russian readers and an outline of Russian history written by Russian historians for Ukrainian readers. The commission also held two summer schools for young Russian and Ukrainian scholars, taught by historians from both countries) in Kamianets’-Podil’sky and Moscow.
The work on the book was accompanied by working meetings to discuss the concept and to address issues of disagreement, particularly those that were the subject of heated public debate. The Ukrainian authors did not accept proposals of the Russian side to “harmonize” different visions of problematic pages of the common past. They agreed that the narrative should be free from non-academic and publisistic extremes, however, they insisted on the sovereignty of the Ukrainian national narrative. Finally, the participants agreed that each side would present its approach and vision in its volume. The project resulted in two separate books published in 2008 in Ukraine and Russia (Smolii Reference Smoliy2008; Chubarian Reference Chubarian2008). Their limited circulation (about 300 to 500 copies printed) prevented them from fulfilling their intended or imagined educational function.
In parallel, the Russian side developed a project to establish an association of history institutes of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. The association included representatives of Central Asia countries, Moldova, Belarus, and Armenia. The Ukrainian historians participated in this project as observers. The next project of the commission was the creation of two works on the history of relations between the state and society during the formation of the Soviet system in 1917-1938. This project lasted from 2010 to 2013 and was partially implemented by the Ukrainian side, the manual for teachers was published (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022b).
The commission’s last meeting occurred in December 2013, in Kyiv, during dramatic events at Maidan. After 2014, institutional contacts between Russian and Ukrainian historians within the commission ceased. In November 2014, the Institute of History of Ukraine refuted information posted on the website of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences about the alleged participation of the Ukrainian side in a meeting of the International Association of Institutes of History of the CIS countries. Later, one of the Ukrainain commission members wrote, “the activities of the commission, despite the sincere attempts of some of members to use this format for a genuine ‘dialogue of historiography,’ were also seen by the Russian leadership as a tool for pursuing a policy of further Russification and integration of Ukrainian historians into the non-existent ‘common’ academic and information space of the Commonwealth of Independent States” (Kulchytsky Reference Kulchytsky2019).
The “common textbook.”
The common textbook is generally a politically charged issue that arises in the context of shared history or contiguous borders that are the subject of ongoing disputes and conflicts. The interpretation of historical events is often highly contextual and subjective, making the idea of a common textbook a susceptible issue. Developing a joint history textbook is always a complex process that requires reconciling conflicting perspectives and interpretations.
The discussions surrounding a joint Ukrainian-Russian textbook were particularly noteworthy for several reasons. First, the term “joint textbook” was more of a media invention than an actual plan for a joint publication. The discussions were mainly about sensitive issues, agreeing on positions, and explaining specific problems. Second, the Russian side initiated these discussions and translated them into publishing projects, which provoked aggravation of mnemonic anxiety among a considerable share of cultural and political elites.
The first manifestation of interest in a joint textbook between Ukraine and Russia occurred in the early 2000s. In June 2002, following the governmental initiative on the joint commission of historians, the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow hosted a Russian-Ukrainian conference entitled “Russia and Ukraine in the European Cultural Space,” co-organized by the Institute of Ukrainian History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The conference’s purpose was to address the issue of the treatment of the past in textbooks, specifically “recommendations for the revision and harmonization of many sections of the history textbooks of the two countries that cause disagreement” (Ukrinform 2002). The conference adopted a memorandum emphasizing the need for a continued exchange of views on the content of history textbooks in Russia and Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the issue was immediately contextualized by the internal political struggle. It was set against the backdrop of the formation of an anti-Kuchma opposition in the Verkhovna Rada, the preparations for the “Year of Russia in Ukraine” (2003), and the launch of the “Rise, Ukraine!” campaign against the “Kuchma regime.” On June 11, 2002, the opposition website Maidan published an “Open Letter of Ukrainian Historians, Intellectuals and Public Representatives on the Threat of Political Revision of Ukrainian History,” in which the authors and signatories (numbering several hundred individuals) demanded the abolition of the Working Group and called for the cessation of all efforts to “revise the coverage of history in Ukrainian school textbooks to suit the political situation of current Russian-Ukrainian relations” (Maidan 2002). Since no one in Ukraine planned to write a “joint textbook,” the scandal wore off by itself.
The issue resurfaced in 2010, beginning Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency. In October 2010, the Intergovernmental Commission of Ukraine and Russia on Humanitarian Cooperation decided to establish a working group of Ukrainian and Russian historians. This time, the goal was to create a joint manual for teachers, as the then Minister of Education and Science Dmytro Tabachnyk noted. The set of topics covered in the textbook was intended to effectively reproduce the structure of a standard school history course, ranging from ancient times to the twenty-first century (Radio Svoboda Reference Radio2010). Like in 2002, the media immediately transformed the issue into a “common textbook” theme, despite numerous statements emphasizing that a common textbook was not the goal.
The discussion took place when the Yanukovych administration revised the historical policies implemented during the Yushchenko period. Moreover, Ukrainian cultural institutions such as the Ukrainian House and the Ukrainian Library were harassed in Moscow, leading to concerns among the politically active sector of Ukrainian society, consisting of national democrats and nationalists, that this was a form of encroachment by Russia on Ukraine’s cultural and political sovereignty.
The manual was published in Russia at the end of 2012, and the authors decided to focus on topics as far away as possible from politically sensitive contexts (Rossiia i Ukraina 2012). This cautious conduct did not protect them from criticism: earlier, there were warnings about the potential “wrong” interpretation of sensitive topics and this time, claims concerned the absence of such topics (Den’ 2012). In 2013, the manual was to be approved by one of the Ukrainian pedagogical universities, but the events of 2014 ended this project.
Attempts of dialogue after 2014
After the annexation of Crimea and the “Russian Spring” in Donbas, all state-supported joint projects on common history became history. Official contacts between historians ceased. While institutional ties have diminished mainly, various forms of academic collaboration continue. One notable example was the “Russian-Ukrainian Historical Phrasebook,” published by the Russian Free Historical Association in 2017 as eight biographical essays on controversial figures of shared history (Golubovskii and Sokolov Reference Golubovskii and Sokolov2017). Despite the unfavorable political climate, a major joint project initiated before 2014 was completed: the publication of the Samiilo Velychko Chronicle (Chronicle Reference Chronicle, Smolii and Tairova2020) was a tangible result of not only personal but also institutional cooperation between research centers in Ukraine, the United States, and Russia.
In 2017-2020, some efforts continued to maintain the academic dialogue between historians of the two countries. For example, Russian historians participated in the International Association of Humanities congresses held in Lviv in 2016 and 2018 (Ukrainian Catholic University 2016, 2018). With the support of the Finnish and Austrian governments, three working meetings of Ukrainian and Russian historians were held in Helsinki (Historians Without Borders 2017) and St. Poelten (Austria) to discuss contentious issues of the past between the two countries. In October 2020, a similar meeting was held in Malbork (Poland), joined by Polish historians. In the same year, the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched an initiative to support the continuation of such dialogues. The COVID pandemic abrupted all these contacts. Then, they became impossible after February 24, 2022.
Conclusions
The Ukrainian-Russian relations in the memory politics are hardly only one aspect in a broader picture of the history of the transition of the “civilized divorce” (D’Anieri Reference D’Anieri2019) into a series of uncivil wars: gas, customs, tariffs, trade, and wars of memory. At the same time, the controversy over shared history reveals the conflict’s depth and indicates that this story is not just about instrumentalist, manipulative use of history. It is about the antagonism of existential fundamentals. Mnemonic anxiety, translated into the battle of discourses and narratives, prompts radical actions in realpolitik, going far beyond the conventional instrumentalization of the past. This situation worsens since the ruling class, cultural elites, and the active part of society consider the “actual past” (Malinova Reference Malinova2015) as one of the essentials of national identity and an imperative for confronting the Other.
Russian-Ukrainian historical debates represent an instance of extreme mnemonic anxiety caused by the clash of mutually incompatible narratives based on the shared past. In the case under analysis, mnemonic anxiety is considered as a reaction to a perceived existential threat. For Russian elites, who regard Ukraine as part of Russia’s historical body and living space, Ukraine’s departure to a supposedly hostile West threatens Russia’s existence (not surprisingly, historical arguments about the fictitious nature of the Ukrainian state emerged in the context of the country’s prospects of NATO membership.) The struggle for a common history and historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians was also integral to the battle with the West, Russia’s historical Other.
Russia’s claim to historical unity was no less an existential threat to Ukrainian elites and a significant (now prevailing) part of society. For them, Russia was the constitutive Other—regardless of whether it was perceived as a friendly state and culture or an oppressor. The active part of Ukrainian society regarded attempts to absorb the Ukrainian past into the “common history” as a threat to the foundations of identity. This perception has aggravated after the annexation of Crimea and the launch of a hybrid war against Ukraine. Using historical arguments to justify annexation just enhanced mnemonic anxiety in Ukraine and provoked a symmetrical response in historical politics. Current events now condition it. Analogies of the recent war crimes and actions of the Russian army against civilians and analogies of anti-Ukrainian policies in the occupied territories with similar actions in the shared past have become commonplace.
The mnemohistory, as a hybrid of politically loaded history writing and cultural memory, became a national security issue—debates over the past turn into the struggle for existence in the present and future. Russia included the formulae on historical memory into strategic documents: the Constitution (2020), the National Security Strategy (2021), and the Foreign Policy Concept (2023). The Ukrainian state institutions represent memory politics as a security issue (NISD 2019). Both countries criminalized certain public representations of the past, considered a threat to internal order.
In a purely instrumentalist sense, the Russian—Ukrainian case points out several concrete areas where debates over the past reached a dangerous level. Shared history perceived in terms of mnemonic anxiety is a departure point as a previously “omitted variable” (Wang Reference Wang2018). The next is the predominance of the mnemonic warriors in the ruling elites and the evolution of memory regimes from fractured to consolidated (Bernhard and Kubik Reference Michael and Jan2015). Antagonist discourses (Berger and Karnsteiner Reference Berger and Wulf2018) about the shared past, generated and disseminated by the memory warriors, play an essential role in the weaponization and securitization of history and memory. Presentism is a necessary prerequisite: the past perceived as a present is a crucial condition. The same applies to transforming the central elements of remembrance into a semblance of the civic cult (the cult of the Great Victory in the Russian case or the cult of Holodomor in Ukrainian). However, all these determinants would not work for a violent action without other variables. The most important among them is an autocratic, personalist political regime, with the top leader preoccupied with history and securitization of the memory in the framework of international relations.
This story signifies another problem. The changes in the relationship between the creators and promoters of socially significant tropes and the tropes themselves are pretty revealing. Considering the trajectory of Putin’s historical rhetoric concerning the “Ukrainian question,” it is worth paying attention to how the promoter of the discourse himself falls under the power of his rhetoric and how this rhetoric pushes him to action (it does not mean, of course, that it was discourse alone). It is not difficult to see that the image of Ukraine as a country overrun by “nationalist-Nazi-Banderovites,” which has been created in Russia over the years, has taken on a life of its own and turned into a self-sustaining trope, affecting the minds of its creators and pushing them towards a particular type of action. Similarly, the efforts of the promoters of the nationalist memory narrative in Ukraine, which portrays Ukrainians as loyal followers of the OUN and the UPA, have contributed significantly to the distorted image of the country beyond its borders.
The use and misuse of the shared past and weaponization of history were not a novelty in modern history. Nonetheless, the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation is the first case in the 21st century where debates over the past became an issue of existential anxiety and securitization of memory and turned into military action right in the geographical center of Europe. In this respect, other cases of weaponization and securitization of memory and history deserve closer attention and further in-depth analysis. The Russian-Ukrainian case might be a valuable frame for studying Russia’s relations with Poland, Baltic states, and Kazakstan, for the Armenian—Azerbaijan case, not to mention the “usual suspects” in the Balkans.
In a broader world, mnemonic anxiety spreads globally, complicating international relations and giving rise to various conflicts within societies. Actions provoked by mnemonic anxiety can be constructive (e.g., building a common European historical identity based on shared values and common historical experience) or destructive (when it comes to the struggle for dominance). They can be disastrous, as demonstrated by Russia’s aggression in appealing to the thesis that Russians and Ukrainians are historically one people.
Financial support
Marcus och Amalia Wallenbergs minnesfond; Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej; PPN/PRO/2020/1/00012/U/00001.
Disclosure
None.
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