Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper: The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine

For a number of reasons—some of them outlined by this book’s editors in its introduction—Ukraine offers itself as a paradigmatic case of a society preoccupied by historical memory. These reasons include the extremely traumatic history of the 20th century, the ethnic diversity of the country, the different regional experiences with various political systems and occupying regimes, the legacy of Ukrainian nationalism, and (at least before 2022) a widespread Soviet nostalgia. A vibrant civil society, the highly competitive Ukrainian politics, and the country’s location between two opposing commemorative cultures, represented by Russia and the European Union, have contributed to the salience of historical memory in Ukraine’s public life. It is therefore a bit surprising that there are only a few books published in English that deal with Ukraine’s memory, identity, and memory politics, which makes this book all the more important.^[1] The collective volume offers an empirically grounded, nuanced, and conceptually sound analysis of memory culture(s), discourses, and politics in a country experiencing dramatic changes. Although in some cases the empirical research goes back to the 2000s, most chapters were written immediately after the Euromaidan revolution of 2013–14, the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the outbreak of the military conflict in the Donbas, thus offering an important glance into the latest, especially turbulent, chapter of Ukraine’s contemporary history. Published before the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 and largely avoiding the theme of Ukrainian-Russian memory wars, the book is nevertheless very timely and helps readers understand the complexity and diversity of Ukrainian society and the role of history and memory in its resilience.

Written almost exclusively by young, mid-career Ukrainian and Polish scholars, the book places Ukraine in the Central and Eastern European context and testifies to an intense academic dialogue between the scholars of both countries in the relatively new field of memory studies. Ukraine and Poland not only have a record of politically unsettling disputes about their common past but also share some fundamental features of their memory regimes, such as the political instrumentalization of the memory of the Communist regime and the subsequent polarisation along a right/left axis. This makes the Polish perspective on Ukraine’s memory and identity particularly interesting and also proves the possibility of fruitful cooperation between Polish and Ukrainian scholars on this divisive topic. This said, the book does not focus on the Ukrainian-Polish historical controversies. Only one chapter deals with the local Ukrainian memory of the interwar Polish state and of the vanished Polish population in today’s Lviv oblast. Instead, the book covers a rich variety of themes, some of them central to Ukrainian collective memory and public debates (such as the Holodomor and World War II), and others less explored in academic literature (such as the commemoration of Symon Petliura and the memory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic 1917–1921, or the Roma collective memory of extermination by the Nazis). Moreover, written by scholars from different disciplines—historians as well as social scientists—the book draws on a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches, from archival research to visual studies, from oral history and qualitative and quantitative sociological research to the analysis of political discourse.

Eva-Clarita Onken, drawing on Aleida Assmann’s work, once suggested seeing various “formats of memory”—individual, family, social, political, national and cultural memory—as a continuum spanning from bottom-up to top-down forms.^[2] The book’s chapters address these various formats of memory: cultural memory of Holodomor perpetrators (Daria Mattingly), collective memory of the Holocaust (Anna Chebotarova), and political memory of state independence and democratic transition (Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin). But more than that, some authors focus on interactions between different formats of memory, such as Mykola Borovyk, who asks to what extent individual memories of World War II have been re-shaped by political and historical discourses. Others question the applicability of some formats in particular contexts. For example, Anna Abakunova raises very interesting questions about the difficulties of constructing Roma collective memory and the relevance of the category of family memory rather than individual memory.

The volume consists of twelve chapters organized into five parts. Part I addresses the memory of the Holodomor (the Great Famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine) from two perspectives: the cultural memory of rank-and-file perpetrators as represented in Ukrainian Soviet and post-Soviet literature (Mattingly), and the development of the commemorative culture of the Holodomor using the concept of lieux de mémoire (Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek). Part II deals with the memory of World War II in Ukraine; along with Borovyk’s chapter mentioned above it includes Tetiana Pastushenko’s essay on changes in the public Victory Day celebrations following the Euromaidan and Russia’s hybrid aggression. It is based on interviews with participants in this public event conducted in Kyiv in 2014 and 2015. Part III addresses the difficulties of creating a heroic canon in Ukraine: Matthew D. Pauly deals with the commemoration of Symon Petliura, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921, whose legacy remains contested in today’s Ukraine, while Olesya Khromeychuk investigates the gender dimension of the memory of the Ukrainian nationalist underground before, during, and after World War II. Part IV deals with the memory of Ukraine’s (lost) multiethnicity and of ethnic violence and includes four chapters: on the role of monuments in the cultural landscape of Chernivtsi (Karolina Koziura), on the collective memory of the Holocaust (Chebotarova), on the memory of the Roma genocide on the territories of present-day Ukraine and Moldova during World War II (Abakunova), and on the memory of the Polish state and the vanished Polish minority in the western Ukrainian town Zhovkva (Anna Wylegała). Finally, part V brings the discussion into the realm of memory politics. Tomasz Stryjek traces the evolution of Ukraine’s memory politics from the declaration of state independence to the Euromaidan in the context of diverging trajectories in the Russian and European meta-narratives and ways of dealing with the Communist past. In the last chapter, Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin offers a sociological analysis of the perception of the 1990s in Ukrainian society and comes to the paradoxical conclusion that the approval of Ukraine’s independence by many Ukrainians does not exclude their positive attitude to the Soviet past. (How the 2022 Russian invasion has changed this is, of course, an open question).

While the chapters can be read separately (each of them has footnotes and a bibliography), the volume is certainly more than a collection of case studies: it is a coherent publication. On a critical note, the volume could have profited from a more explicit dialogue between the chapters and from a more thorough copy-editing of some contributions. It should nevertheless be on the reading list of memory scholars focusing on East Central Europe as well of those seeking to learn more about Ukrainian history and culture against the background of the current Russo-Ukrainian war.