The media, history and identity: competing narratives of the past in the Ukrainian popular press

Abstract

The article studies history-related texts in three popular newspapers as contributions to the construction of historical memory and national identity in post-Soviet Ukraine. After a quantitative thematic analysis of history pages in terms of their geographical and chronological priorities, I focus on representations on these and other pages of one crucial event of the past: World War Two. The analysis demonstrates that in Ukrainian media, the past in general and the last war in particular has been a subject of incessant but largely inconspicuous competition between the opposing versions of Ukraine's history which I call the Soviet and nationalist narratives.

Keywords:

• historical memory
• national identity
• banal nationalism
• historical narrative
• the media
• Ukraine

Notes

1. I thus disagree with Abdelal et al. (2007) who argued that their framework for analyzing collective identities could not incorporate salience and intensity as characteristics of individual identities. I leave open the question of possible interaction between salience/strength and contestation, in particular a minimum degree of agreement over an identity's content that is necessary for it to be salient.

2. It is worth mentioning that the very notion of a certain event's belonging to the history of a particular nation is also a construct of various discourses, not least that of the media.

3. According to one definition, a metanarrative is ‘a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience’ (Stephens & McCallum, 1998, p. 6).

4. Although the Crimean peninsula became part of Ukraine as late as 1954, it had belonged to the Russian empire and then the USSR since the end of the eighteenth century.

5. In one story, the experience of the German occupation of Kyiv in 1918 was presented as teaching ‘our fellow-townsmen’ a lesson that they should not ‘set hopes on strong allies who would impose order’ but rather themselves take care of it (Kal'nitskii, 2008). While clearly identifying the German rule as foreign, the story did not present any competing force as one Kyivans could rely on as ‘their own’.