Forging Ukrainian national identity through remembrance of World War II

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the collective remembrance of a specific historical event shapes the national identity that underpins a state’s foreign policy objectives. By drawing on multidisciplinary insights, the paper explains how political actors frame past events in order to promote a certain conceptualization of a national community. Taking Ukraine as a case study, the paper demonstrates how Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in 2014–2015 prompted Ukrainian policy-makers to re-define Ukraine’s relations with the EU and Russia by re-evaluating the experience of Ukrainians in WWII.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• World War II
• framing
• Ukraine
• memory

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and detailed comments on drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lina Klymenko is a researcher at Tampere University, Finland, and an adjunct professor at the University of Eastern Finland, Finland.

Notes

1 Established in 2006, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) is a state-sponsored institution that has the mandate to provide an official interpretation of Ukrainian history. See Kasianov, 2016 for the history of the institute and its political orientation under the leadership of Ihor Yuchnovskyi, Valerii Soldatenko, and Volodymyr Viatrovych.

2 The adoption of the de-communization laws in Ukraine led to an intense public debate in Ukraine and abroad. A great number of scholars, experts, and human rights activists have expressed their opinions on the laws. See Krytyka, 2015; Shevel, 2015; Himka, 2015; Coynash, 2015; and Yavorsky, 2015. See also a letter written by international scholars to President Poroshenko (Marples, 2015). In this letter, the signatories appealed to the president to abstain from signing into practice the law on the condemnation of Nazism and Communism and the law on fighters for Ukrainian statehood in the 20th century.

3 Officially translated as ‘We honor. We prevail’.

4 For a visualization of the new commemorative WWII emblem, see Kiguradze, 2014 and Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, 2015.

5 See Yurchuk, 2017 for an overview of how the western Ukrainian memory of the OUN and the UPA as fighters for Ukrainian statehood became part of the official discourse of WWII remembrance in post-Soviet Ukraine. However, see also Portnov, 2016 on how the Ukrainian public perceives the OUN leader Bandera.

6 The history of the OUN and the UPA was also critically assessed by some Ukrainian scholars. See the reviews of Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s book on Bandera (Rossoliński-Liebe, 2014) by Ukrainian historians (Radchenko, 2015; Zaitsev, 2015). See also Himka, 2011a and Amar et al., 2010.

7 A public survey undertaken in December 2015 showed that Ukrainians have ambiguous attitudes towards the WWII commemoration. For example, the survey revealed that 41% of respondents in Kyiv City supported the change from ‘the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945’ to ‘WWII of 1939–1945’, 69% in the Lviv region, 23% in the Donetsk region, and 18% in the Kharkiv region. The introduction of 8 May as a Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation was supported by 70% in the Lviv region, 65% in the Kyiv region, 36% in the Donetsk region, and 26% in the Kharkiv regions. For details of the survey, visualized by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, see the History and Identity Project of the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine at http://gis.huri.harvard.edu/contemporary-atlas/revolution-of-dignity/history-and-identity-module.html (accessed 3 October 2017). I would like to thank Viktoriya Sereda for drawing my attention to this survey.

8 A public survey undertaken by the Rating Group Ukraine in October 2015 showed that 41% of respondents acknowledged the struggle by the OUN and the UPA for Ukrainian statehood, while 38% did not support this statement, and 21% remained undecided. As the Rating Group Ukraine reported, from 2014 to 2015 the number of UPA supporters grew from 27% to 41%, marking the first time that the number of UPA supporters has exceeded the number of its opponents. See the survey conducted by the Rating Group Ukraine in October 2015 at http://ratinggroup.ua/en/research/ukraine/dinamika_otnosheniya_k_priznaniyu_oun-upa.html, (accessed 12 May 2017).

9 Given this understanding of WWII, the Ukrainian political actors also made sense of the current war in Donbas. By seeing the Donbas war through the lens of WWII, they provided an explanation of how the war began and how it could end.