Historian Georgiy Kasianov has authored, co-authored, and co-edited over twenty books on his native country of Ukraine.  I had the opportunity to speak with him in February 2024 about his book Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s.  Georgiy’s interest in the memory politics of Ukraine grew out of his own personal struggle to find ways to write critically about his country’s past.  Earning his doctorate at the end of the Soviet period, he faced the harsh reality of state censorship.  Even after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, he realized that historians were still not free to write about the country’s past.  Instead they found themselves bound to an older, narrowly defined ethnonationalist history that they themselves had helped to revive and scantify.  As Ukraine fights for its survival in the present, Georgiy Kasianov’s work reminds of dangers of politicizig the past without any long term plan for the future.  

When Georgiy Kasianov defended his history dissertation in 1987 there was no possibility of writing about his native Ukraine.  History had to be framed in terms of the Soviet Union.  Although this was the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika reforms, historical scholarship was still tightly controlled by the state.  When he submitted his dissertation Georgiy’s tutor deleted the names of still controversial figures like Trotsky, Bukharin, and Rykoff purged from the Bolshevik party during Stalin’s rise to power.  ”Better not to tease the geese,” his tutor explained, referring to the committee that would approve his dissertation.  As late as 1990, working in the archives on the history of Ukrainian intellectuals required stealth tactics like bringing two notebooks, a decoy for the censor and a real one kept hidden under his shirt for his actual work.  

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, Georgiy discovered that he was still not able to enjoy his academic freedom.  The pressure of the streets, he explained, or the desire of citizens for historians to fill the blank spots of history, to pursue historical justice, made it impossible to write freely about the past.  Moreover, historians themselves ended up reviving, recycling an older ethnonationalist history of Ukraine written by Mykhailo Hrushevsky at the end of the nineteenth century.  Hrushevsky’s ten volume History of Ukraine-Rus separated the history of Ukraine from that of imperial Russia.  For Hrushevsky, however, the story of Ukraine was inseparable from that of the Ukrainian peasantry and intelligencia.  Written in the age of horse and buggies and parachuted into the time of automobiles and space shuttles, Hrushevsky narrative was completely out of sync with the modern era.  Left out of his book were over twenty percent of the population of modern Ukraine who were not ethnic Ukrainian.  At best these groups were neglected and forgotten, at worst they were cast as aliens.  

The Ukrainian ruling class, that is, the cultural and political elites of Ukraine, did not have a well-considered strategy for forming national identity or, consequently, a cohesive strategy of historical politics. The actions in this sphere were sometimes a response to unforeseen challenges, and sometimes they were defined by the “course of things,” by the logic of the situation. […] The intensification of historical politics in the middle of the 2000s was a response to both internal and external challenges, problematic modernization and memory wars, respectively. The festival of historical politics in Ukraine between 2014 and 2019 was a reaction to the internal social crisis and to external factors: territorial losses and hybrid warfare.  Georgiy Kasianov, Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s.  

History textbooks in Ukraine embraced this ethically defined and often intolerant form of nationalism.  In the pages of these books, for instance, Crimean Tatars were often cast as “unreliable,” “perfidious,” or even “an outright enemy.”  Only reluctantly was the story of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars included in Ukrainian textbooks.  Before the middle of the 2000s, Georgiy notes, there was very little mention of the Holocaust in textbooks on the history of Ukraine.  Moreover, Ukrainian textbooks often cast their Polish neighbors in antagonistic terms.  The only saving grace, Georgiy comments, was that the state was not overly preoccupied with imposing this often intolerant, ethno nationalist reading of the past on all Ukrainians.  

For years the state took a largely hands off approach to the ethnic and linguistic diversity that existed in modern Ukraine.  About sixty percent of the population continued to use Russian.  Even top officials who spoke Ukranian in public switched to Russian in private life.  In the eastern regions of the country, this allowed for political interests, such as the Party of Regions and wealthy industrialists in areas such as the Donbas to exploit nostalgia for the former Soviet Union.  The economic hardships and corruption that followed Ukrainian independence caused many to see the former Soviet times through the lens of nostalgia.  This was especially true for the now depressed mining region of Donbas which had enjoyed prestige and higher standards of living during the Soviet era.  The Soviet nostalgic narrative was a way of tapping into this very real nostalgia to rally support, loyalty, and political power.  

It was external factors that caused a conflict between the Soviet nostalgic narrative and a national/nationalist narrative.  The Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas supported by Russia caused what Georgiy describes a “radicalization of historical politics” beginning at the end of 2013.  In 2014 hundreds of Lenin monuments were toppled and destroyed during what became known as the Leninfall. In 2015 Ukraine passed laws mandating the removal of Soviet era monuments. But Georgiy is skeptical about popular support for this upsurge against the communist past.  Instead he argues that nation/national political interests were the main movers of this process.  

The removal of hundreds of Lenin monuments left memory holes in central urban locations throughout Ukraine.  These holes were often filled with controversial figures from the national past.  The most prominent was that of Stepan Bandera, described by the French newspaper Le Monde, as a “Ukrainian ultranationalist who allied with Nazi Germany during World War II.” Celebrated on the right as a hero of the anti-communist struggle and the fight for independence, scores of statues to Bandera were erected straining relations within Ukraine and with its Polish neighbor.  Georgiy notes that nearly half of all Ukrainians had an unfavorable opinion of Bandera—an opinion that was even more pronounced in the eastern and southern regions of the country.  

Georgiy explains that memory politics can be intentional or reactive.  Ukraine, he laments, has never really had a well thought out long term approach to harnessing the past for the purpose of nation-state building in the present.  Instead it has functioned in a perpetual crisis mode.  Within the context of elections, for example, the Party of Regions might decry the imagined threat of a nationalist approach to the Ukrainian past.  Rival parties, such as the National Democrats, might react by promoting their version of the past for their own political purposes, but not because they had planned to do so beforehand. 

On the state level when Viktor Yushchenko (2005-2010) served as president he became a promoter of the memory of the Great Famine (1932-1933).  Under Yushchenko, the Great Famine became canonized as the Holodomor, an agricultural disaster engineered by the Soviet leadership to eradicate the Ukrainian peasants, the torchbearers of the Ukrainian nation.  But for Yushchenko, the Holodomor was a useful means of discrediting his political rivals by questioning whether they believed the Great Famine was actually a genocide.  In response, Yushenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) took the opposite approaches and refused to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.  This tit for tat approach to the past has deprived Ukraine of shared forms of memory that might resonate more broadly across the nation.   

As Ukraine remains locked in an existential struggle for its survival in the present, Georgiy Kasianov offers a powerful reminder of the dangers of misusing the past.  By resuscitating and making sacrosanct a century old ethnonationalist history, large segments of Ukraine’s population risk being marginalized or alienated.  This is especially true for Ukraine’s significant population of native Russian speakers.  While risking and often sacrificing their lives on the front, Russian speaking Ukranians are often cast as unreliable or even as enemy sympathizers.  Loving your country should not preclude speaking Russian or reading Tolstoy, Georgiy argues.  Beyond the need for success on the battlefield, there is an equally important need to craft a collective memory that unites all Ukranians in the shared goal of building a better future.