Memory politics have been popular for some time. In this very detailed and fascinating account about the progression of the politics of history in Ukraine from the 1980s to 2010s, Georgiy Kasianov offers his frank and thoughtful views on its evolution. The book relates how Ukraine extricated itself from the Soviet legacy and forged a new national identity. It is divided into three parts: Concepts and Contexts, Actors, and Practices. The first part focuses on theory; the second on state institutions, nongovernment organizations, and historians; and the third provides an overview of historical politics, spaces of memory, and the politics of history in neighboring states, particularly Poland and Russia.
There are several predominant themes in this book. The first, in the section on Contexts, notes the importance of Holocaust remembrance in western Europe and how difficult it has been to apply the same perception to eastern Europe. In the latter countries, the prevailing canon is that they were the victims of “empires, regimes, and the hostile Other” (54). The author cites the example of Poland, where the participation of the nation in the Nazi Holocaust undermined the vision of Poles as victims, especially during the ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943.
Another is the relationship between Russia and its neighbors, particularly Ukraine. After 2012, Vladimir Putin agreed there should be a unified “canonical” approach to historical periods vital for the country, and the most obvious subject was the Great Patriotic War as a universal unifying myth. The revision of this myth by Russia's neighbors, including the formula “Communism = Nazism,” put in danger the image of Russia as a key player in the anti-Hitler coalition (78). By 2014, Kasianov points out, a Duma law made it a criminal offense to issue “false information” about the USSR's actions in the Second World War (81).
For Ukraine, the canon was the Ukrainian Famine of 1933, now known throughout the country as the Holodomor, with a significant majority of Ukrainians believing that it was a Genocide carried out by Iosif Stalin and his associates. In the 1990s, most Ukrainians were more concerned about the social and economic crises, but during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko the famine became Ukraine's canon and the national/nationalist narrative superseded the earlier Soviet nostalgic one. Both Yushchenko (2005–10) and Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) made it their quest to establish world recognition of the Famine as Genocide, one that was partially successful. Further, after the disintegration of the Party of Regions in 2014, the advocates of the national interpretation of history obtained a monopoly, as manifested in the Memory Laws of 2015 and Decommunization between 2015 and 2019.
Under Yushchenko, Kasianov notes, both Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych were made “heroes of Ukraine,” and the organizations they headed, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), were rehabilitated, glorified, and incorporated as major elements in the state's nationalist narrative (232). Yushchenko also exaggerated famine deaths, raising the total from 3.9 to 7–10 million, following the example of the World Congress of Ukrainians, and ignoring the more accurate research of historians and demographers.
Kasianov observes the similarities of Soviet and nationalist narratives, as well as their hero figures. One of his most biting comments is a comparison of Vladimir Lenin and Bandera: “Both were short and had physical defects. Both were intolerant not only of enemies but also of allies who deviated from their orthodox perspective (254).” For Kasianov, it was quite natural that the national or ethnocentric view of Ukraine's past took over quite smoothly from the Soviet version, and Decommunization imposed a new narrative just as ruthlessly as the Soviet authorities had imposed Marxism-Leninism earlier. Today both camps, in Kasianov's view, are “intolerant, vindictive, and aggressive” (396). He is similarly dismissive of the “manner of speech” of the “agents of historical politics,” which he describes as “cringeworthy,” a “language of slogans and screams,” a discourse that opposes “critical thinking, reasoning, and analysis,” “nauseatingly primitive” and it can “lead to so many absurdities that one cannot help but think about the banality of evil as well as the evil of banality” (397). The book criticizes the various Ukrainian governments for delving into historical politics, “The war over the past can easily become the ideological basis for a real war.” On the other hand, his comment in his Conclusion that the concept of Novorossiya “quickly went extinct” (395) has already been overtaken by time.
The book is a thorough survey of the changing perspectives of historical politics from the 1990s and the manipulation of history as a discipline by Ukrainian state actors from the government, to the Institute of National Remembrance (particularly under the leadership of Volodymyr Viatrovych prior to 2019), and—not least—the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). It contains a bewildering—and impressive—amount of information and sound judgment. But it is also in some ways an angry cry from the wilderness: Ukraine's most widely respected historian, cut off from all servility and rational analysis by those he once worked alongside, his discipline sacrificed to the whims of political leaders and activists working for political goals.
