9.19. Russia's war on Ukraine: memory as resource and resistance

While in Latin America, memory politics is linked to transitional justice and truth commissions, and in Argentina to criminal prosecutions of the military junta, in Eastern and Central Europe, during Russia's aggression against Ukraine, memoryscape of historical unfreedom. Russia abuses history to justify war, using ‘historical arguments’ to deny the Ukrainian people's right to exist and to statehood, etc. The Russian government developed a plan to de-Ukrainianise Ukraine, which included the assimilation of Ukrainians. To this end, it was planned to use the Soviet nostalgia of some of the Ukrainian population, common culture, etc. In response, the Ukrainian government, as well as the governments of a number of neighbouring countries (Poland, the Baltic states), securitised the politics of memory as much as possible, proclaiming it part of national security. In Ukraine, more than 10 memorial laws have been passed since 2015. As noted in the Appel de Blois, political power has gained a monopoly on historical truth and restricts the freedom of historians with the threat of criminal sanctions. Every year in Ukraine, about 100 people receive criminal sanctions for expressing sympathy for the Soviet Union, using Soviet symbols, etc. In many countries in the region, national memory institutes have been established as special executive bodies with the right to evaluate historical figures and events and prohibit their commemoration in public spaces. During the war, pseudoscientific concepts and mutual accusations of Nazism were created. As the invasion of Ukraine began with the Russian leadership officially accusing the Ukrainian government of “Nazism,” one persistent feature of the Ukraine war has been squabbling between the sides about who is “fascist.” Ukraine has responded by creating the concept of “ruscism” (rashism) as a new kind of totalitarian ideology and practice under the regime of Putin.

Russia’s war against Ukraine, launched in February 2022, created new challenges for scholars of collective memory, intensifying tension between science and politics, as highlighted by Georgiy Kasianov in Memory Studies (15:6, 2022). It also prompted reflection on new lines of inquiry emerging from this traumatic and transformative context. Drawing on research in digital memory, real time memorialisation and conflict memory, this paper examines the instant commemoration of the ongoing war in Ukraine, with special attention to its function as a form of resistance. It maps the various forms, practices, and geographies of war commemoration under condition of real life violence including: digital and online forms (diaries, hashtags, social media memorial posts, digital art and online platforms); physical forms (memorials in liberated towns, wearable symbols such as flags, photos of fallen soldiers, pins, military tags); artistic expressions (music, theatre and film); commemorative acts taking place on the frontline, in the home front, and outside of Ukraine, in the diaspora, as well as in international and transnational contexts. This paper argues that the momentum of commemoration during the war becomes a powerful act of resistance. It resists erasure, ignorance and dehumanisation by asserting existence and continuity, by exposing aggression and injustice, by deconstructing Russia's imperial narratives that seek to delegitimise Ukrainian identity, ultimately claiming the future. At the same time, instant commemoration resists state sponsored memory within Ukraine by empowering non state actors and by creating alternative archives of war memory, which are more fluid, democratic and grassroots in nature. Due to its immediacy, incompleteness, and hybrid, often ephemeral, spontaneous, and dynamic nature, instant commemoration breaks spatial boundaries, and challenges linear temporality of collective memory making. Unlike post conflict models of memory, instant commemoration is less retrospective and more future oriented. It does not stabilise the past but actively anticipates the future.

This paper utilizes a unique online survey (n=2001) conducted in January 2021 (when Covid lockdowns made in-person work impossible) to look at baseline attitudes of a representative sampling of Ukrainians residing outside of the Donbas region towards the Soviet past. More specifically, this instrument employed a number of list and vignette experiments to assess not only citizen attitudes towards history, but also mapped these attitudes unto political and social preferences. As such, it provides a novel sample of mnemonic attitudes before the full-scale invasion of Russia occurred in February 2022 and allows the author to compare pre- and post-invasion recall o the past. This is am important contribution to our knowledge, as much has been written about how elites try to shape or manipulate history for their benefit or the benefit of the nation, but considerably less information exists on how successful such attempts are. We have a plethora of surveys conducted after 2022, but absent a proximate benchmark it is very difficult to access what impact the Russian invasion had on citizen attitudes. This paper provides that benchmark and expands its observations to the present day.

Historical memory and its emotional baggage is used increasingly by political actors to push forward specific domestic interests and to revive old schismatic relationships between European states. The proposed paper aims to analyse this development by asking the following questions: Under which conditions does the memory of the past get mobilized and how does it acquire salience in EU policy-making? How do interpretations of the past and the deployment of emotions influence political decision-making in the present? Using Russia’s war on Ukraine as a case study, the paper analyses two moments in time: the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of war in 2022. By examining the framing devices and analogies used in political speeches, resolutions and press releases by the EP, it analyses where, how by whom and to which effect historical analogies are being taken up as tools of interpretation. The aim is to study the cultural heritage of war and conflict as related to political mobilization of contested memory in the present.