Abstract
Despite more than 20 years of independence, Ukraine’s former political system has not vanished, as it had created and left behind immense material and cultural resources. The new, often weaker system is not able to obliterate or eliminate signs of the past completely. Thus, cleansing or preserving a landscape feature is an act of historical politics and represents national needs and expectations. In this context, the main question is how do Ukrainian authorities incorporate the Soviet heritage, in our case political monuments, into the cultural and public space of modern Ukraine? The present research scrutinizes the politics of memory towards the Soviet past in contemporary Ukraine. It looks at policies towards Soviet heritage in political monumental art at the governmental and local levels in central Ukraine. The article analyses official documents on Soviet heritage in Ukraine, the conditions of its enactment and the specifics of implementation. Secondly, the research investigates the activities of local authorities in protecting or demounting Soviet monuments. Finally, the analysis examines the attitudes of the population, which include both actions and views. The “ground” level analysis helps us to avoid misleading generalizations in the field of historical politics and discloses the way that politics of memory is perceived and shared among the population.
Highlights
Despite more than 20 years of independence, Ukraine’s former political system has not vanished, as it had created and left behind immense material and cultural resources
The main question is how do Ukrainian authorities incorporate the Soviet heritage, in our case political monuments, into the cultural and public space of modern Ukraine? The present research scrutinizes the politics of memory towards the Soviet past in contemporary Ukraine
It looks at policies towards Soviet heritage in political monumental art at the governmental and local levels in central Ukraine
Summary
The process of Soviet statesmen monuments dismantling in Ukraine started in the western region in 1990, when the national democratic political party “Narodnyi Rukh” had leading positions in the local authorities. In 2012, in the town Shpola (Cherkasy region), deputies of the nationalistic party “Svoboda” initiated the process of the demounting of the Lenin statue standing on the territory of the local sugar plant They managed to persuade their colleagues that the time to get rid of the monument had come.. In Ukraine, the idea of a Soviet Monuments Park was discussed only in Kyiv and only after the Kyiv City State Administration initiated the dismantling of 27 Soviet monuments (9 of them were Lenin statues) in 2008, following the Decree of 2007. The deviant government actions within the memory policies, expressed through establishing a new national narrative along with preservation of the Soviet elements, led to the simultaneous formation of nationalistic and pro-Soviet narratives of interpretation of the past Neither of these narratives had a dominant position in central Ukraine; they rather had limited numbers of active supporters.
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