![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This article attempts to measure the multilayered, diverse historical memories of contemporary Ukrainians, drawing on a cluster analysis of nationwide survey data collected after the Euromaidan. A significant minority of Ukrainian citizens still gravitate toward Soviet–Russian narratives. These are not merely copies of those embraced in Russia, however; they include ambivalent ‘hybrid’ feelings of nostalgia for the Soviet Union while supporting Ukraine's independence. This article argues that historical memories of Ukrainians in the southern and eastern regions are amorphous and heterogeneous, and that the architects of the Novorossiya project failed to distinguish Soviet nostalgia from Ukrainophobia and separatist grievances.
Notes
1 For example, after the launch of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in spring 2014, even the Russified eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk turned ‘blue and yellow’. Volunteer citizens supported the government forces, demonstrating the raise of Ukrainian patriotism (Portnov Citation2015).
2 In this article I treat Soviet and Russian historiographies as a combined concept based on the assumption of significant continuities between Soviet and imperial Russian historiographies (Magocsi Citation1996, pp. 21–4) and between Soviet and contemporary Russian historiographies (Korostelina Citation2010, pp. 132–36) in their treatment of multiple issues pertaining to Ukraine, such as the Pereyaslav Council, Kievan Rus, World War II and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
3 Svoboda (Freedom) is a Ukrainian nationalist political party. The party won its first seats in the national parliament in the 2012 elections.
4 Sloboda is a historical region in the northeast of modern Ukraine and the adjacent area of Russia. In this context, Sloboda almost matches current Kharkiv Oblast’.
5 Although Korostelina's work is extensive, she does not deal with ‘the impact of historical education on students’ beliefs and attitudes’ (Korostelina Citation2011, p. 2).
6 However, the delimitation and classification of historical regions could have been done otherwise. For example, ‘Polesia’ and ‘Central’ can be divided into the ‘right bank’ and ‘left bank’ of the river Dnieper.
7 The sample is thus representative of the historical regions, but not of Ukraine as a whole. For the sampling of the original survey, see the Appendix.
8 In the original survey, 1942 is cited as the year of the formation of the UPA, in line with the official date, 14 October 1942. Most historians, however, believe that the UPA was founded in spring 1943, based on documentary materials.
9 The questionnaire was prepared in both Ukrainian and Russian languages.
10 This article does not intend to analyse interpretations of what Polish historians call ‘Volhynian genocide’ (Ukrainians—‘Volhynian tragedy’)—wartime massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
11 The Euclidean distances between the regions were calculated as follows. First, the percentage of positive answers was rated as a positive value, while the percent of negative answers was rated as a negative value. The percentage of the answers ‘indifferent’ and ‘don't know’ (on average 21.9%, 14.5% respectively) was omitted given the difficulty of quantifying them appropriately. Second, the net balance between the positive and negative values was calculated in relation to all combinations of regions and events (see ). One must keep in mind, however, that by doing so we lost information on the variance of the answers in each unit (region).
12 For all cluster analyses in this article I used the ‘hclust’ function of the package ‘stats’ of R Core Team (Citation2017).
13 For plotting the heat map I used ‘heatmap.3’ of the ‘GMD’ package by R Core Team (Citation2017). Red depicts a positive assessment; blue, negative (figures can only be accessed in colour in the version of the article online).
14 The same might hold true for the interpretation of the Christianisation of Rus (Korostelina Citation2010, p. 132). However, analysing aggregate data does not show us the subtle nuances behind the answers.
15 Individual data were provided to the author by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation on 13 October 2015.
16 For my assessment of Ukrainian historiography, I benefited from Subtelny (Citation1989) and Magocsi (Citation1996). For Soviet–Russian historiography, I referred to the accounts in Kondufor (Citation1981–1985). The interpretation of these texts may vary amongst researchers, but this only has a subtle effect on the final scores, and does not require any review of how the clusters are characterised.
17 Generally, factor analysis or principal component analysis is preferable for data compression. With this dataset on the historical issues, however, neither method gave interpretable outputs.
18 One should also note that group H tended to approve Rus Christianisation and Khmelnytsky, while disapproving of Ukraine's independence. This confirms the supposition made when analysing aggregate data, that the reasoning behind the positive assessment of the same events may differ. Even while the aggregate data suggested nationwide support for Rus and Khmelnytsky, group H sympathised with these key events in Ukrainian national history based less on Ukrainian patriotism than on pan-Slavic brotherly relations propagated by Soviet historians.
19 The remainder of respondents with ‘hybrid memories’ were scattered across group B (‘Ukrainian-Middle’) and group D (‘Reserved’).
20 A similar observation was made in relation to Russian adolescents. Nikolayenko (Citation2008) noted ‘the compatibility of Soviet nostalgia and national pride among Russian adolescents’ in the study of contextual effects on historical memory. However, it seems that the marriage of Russian and Soviet identities does not create serious internal conflicts of historical memory because Russia is the legal successor to the Soviet Union, and there is great continuity observed between Soviet and Russian historiographies.
21 For ethnic affiliation (natsional’nist’), all respondents were coded as ‘Ukrainian’, ‘Russian’ or ‘Other’ based on their answers to the question about ethnicity. For language use, the question was designed to reflect the widespread bilingualism in Ukraine. To the question, ‘In what language do you communicate with your family?’, respondents were asked to select one of the following answers: ‘Only in Ukrainian’, ‘Mostly in Ukrainian, but sometimes in Russian’ (coded in this study as ‘More Ukrainian’), ‘Mostly in Russian, but sometimes in Ukrainian’ (coded as ‘More Russian’), ‘Only in Russian’ or ‘in other language’.
22 A sociological survey conducted in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasti in December 2014 (coinciding roughly with the original survey of this study) shows that the Novorossiya project had minority support, between 20 and 25% of the population in these regions (O’Loughlin et al. Citation2017).
23 Paradoxically, the same criticism might apply to the operational naming of clusters in this study: Ukrainian and Soviet–Russian memories. However, cluster analysis made it possible to separate historical memories not as dichotomous nominal variables but rather as ordinal, multiscale categories depending on how strongly respondents espoused one or the other historical memory.
24 However, state efforts were not always consistent during the past two decades. The most enthusiastic promotion of history education was observed during Victor Yushchenko's presidency (2005–2010).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sanshiro Hosaka
SANSHIRO HOSAKA, Social Governance Program, School of the Graduate Studies, The Open University of Japan, Chiba, Japan.