PRESENT-DAY UKRAINIAN MUSEUM NARRATIVES AS FACTORS OF DETRAUMATIZATION OF THE MEMORY OF THE XX CENTURY TOTALITARIANISMS

Abstract

Summary. Museums, as a storage of memory and places of national consciousness shaping construct their exposition through narratives – a certain story about historical events. The purpose of the article is to analyze the practices of instrumentalization of historical knowledge about the World War ІІ and totalitarian repressions of the mid-twentieth century. The object of study is propaganda in museum activities in the USSR (on the example of the Memorial Complex "Ukrainian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945"), as well as experience of presenting the main aspects of overcoming the repressive and totalitarian heritage of Lviv museums (The Museum of the Liberation Struggle of Ukraine, The National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes "The Prison on Łącki Street", The Museum complex "Territory of Terror"). The research methodology is based on Jan Assmann՚s theory of individual, communicative and cultural memory. The applied historical and cultural approach allows not to involve verification of historical events and facts in museum exhibitions but analyze museum activities as a historical and cultural phenomenon, its role in creating the latest politics of memory in Ukraine. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the critical analysis of previously unexplored aspects of the activities of museums as national cultural institutions with an educational mission. It was proved that the map of the collective memory of Ukrainians about the war and repressions of the middle of the twentieth century consists of often mutually exclusive narratives. The integration of Ukrainian cultural memory with European historical interpretations is slow and inconsistent. As a result of the study, conclusions were drawn. The long period of "compulsory oblivion" as well as the aggressive anti-Ukrainian policy of the memory of the Soviet Union caused hybrid historical narratives about the repressive policies of 1939–1953 in Ukrainian history. In the first decades of Ukraine՚s independence, the Soviet ideological burden was reflected in the activities of the Memorial Complex "National Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945" which peculiarities were the instrumentalization of the experience of war under the influence of current political events and timid attempts to anthropologize the war. Present-day The National Museum of History of Ukraine in the Second World War has undergone two narrative changes since its foundation in 1974 – the first, "fixing the Soviet narrative" in the mid-1990s, and the second, "Ukrainian-centric anthropologizing of the narrative" after 2015. The latest changes continue and are proof of the difficulty of changing the hitherto perceptions of war. The museums of the western part of Ukraine represented a different mnemonic narrative. The abandonment of imperial-Soviet models immediately after the proclamation of independence, the formation of the collective consciousness of Ukrainians as a counterweight to the Russian threat, consolidation around historical traumas and finding ways to overcome it was characteristic of three Lviv museums created at the beginning of the XXI century – The Museum of the Liberation Struggle of Ukraine, The National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes "The Prison on Łącki Street", The Museum complex "Territory of Terror".