In fact, this kind of association is one of the most important factors in
the internal consolidation of a nation, because differing attitudes towards the
historic path of development of a nation work against unity. Undoubtedly, it’s
possible to have different viewpoints on national heritage in any society, but
what is important is to have a critical mass of those who support the
mainstream national memory.
Where a more-or-less equal proportion of people in a society maintain
opposed concepts of the nation’s history, broad-based discussion of such a
controversial topic is often simply avoided. For example, in Spain, many people
to this day strongly favor different sides in the Civil War—Francisco Franco’s
right-wing fascists and the leftist republican camp. In the spirit of
reconciliation, whose main principles were laid out in a document known as the
Moncloa Pact, the Government of Spain has been trying its best to ensure that
these two groups of Spaniards do not enter into an ideological confrontation by
avoiding overly strong and large-scale abstract debates while neither
persecuting nor prohibiting either position. To ensure this kind of consensus,
however external and formal, Generalissimo Franco, although he was a dictator,
himself had an enormous pantheon built in honor of the dead on both sides of
the devastating conflict in 1936-1939. It was a way of acknowledging the need
for a national truce.
Still, there are no universal approaches to this kind of reconciliation,
and no policy of national memory as such. Every country and each nation has to
walk its own pathway to consciousness of the past and the formation of an
acceptable interpretation of historical events. Someone else’s experience is of
only relative and limited help.
One way or another, historical memory that is accepted and supported by the
majority of a country’s people fosters consensus about the past, which, in
turn, almost guarantees consensus about the future. For this reason, the
liberal-humanists who are “for everything good and against everything evil” and
naively call for leaving history alone and consolidating the nation exclusively
around current issues offer little more than wishful thinking that is very hard
to make real. In fact, the experience of many traumatized countries shows that
a nation cannot move ahead without an open and honest accounting of its past.
Would Germany’s socio-economic development and democracy have been possible
without the necessary level of unity in German society in its stance towards of
the Nazi era? The point is that a common view of history makes the formation of
a common vision of the country’s further development infinitely easier, while
disputes over the past quite often turn out to be disputes over the present and
future as well. Nations look at their past to see their tomorrows. It’s not
about antiquity but about memories of the future, so to speak.
A policy of national memory is one way to become conscious of the
historical heritage of the nation as a factor in contemporary civic and
political processes. The concept of “leaving history alone”, apart from brief
periods of the opposite, was tried out in Ukraine for nearly 20 years, but
everything that people tried to ignore, to not notice, has now floated to the
top, as might have been expected, and is demanding resolution: Moscow’s
totalitarian regime in Ukraine, the imperial "denationization" of
Ukrainians, the puppet republic that was the Ukrainian SSR and the pseudo-elite
that emerged from it—which some journalists prefer to call a lowlife elite—,
russification and its consequences, attitudes towards OUN and the UPA, to
communism and nazism, interpretations of Russia’s influence in Ukraine since
1991, the cult of the “Great Patriotic War,” and so on.
Still, despite the reluctance of Ukraine’s current leadership to resolve
the painful issue of national memory, this issue has been the subject of
intense dispute the entire time since Ukraine declared independence. We only
have to recall how fiercely the Communist Party of Ukraine and other
pro-Russian political forces resisted anything that was connected with
remembering the Holodomor, because any memory of this genocide would make it
extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to continue to collaborate,
given that it showed the true genesis of those forces and their role in
carrying out massive terrorism against Ukrainians. The party bosses understood
perfectly well that the more people memorialized the Holodomor and other
“achievements” of communist actors, the issue of historical and political
responsibility would be raised sooner or later and the party that emerged in
the summer of 1918 in Moscow would be banned. Of course, when it was useful,
CPU leaders would declare themselves a new, original force, rather than an heir
of the Communist Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union. And when it was
convenient, they would underscore this heritage in every possible way and
promote it.
It is absolutely no coincidence that all those years, local pro-Russian
officials in eastern and southern Ukraine—of course, not just there, but most
actively in those regions—desperately fought to preserve its pantheon of soviet
ideological gods, not because of their great love of the arts, but in
preparation for the Southeast to be under Putin, or whoever was running Russia
at that point. That included not allowing Ukrainian cultural influence in any
way, shape or form on those territories. In Sevastopol, for instance, the head
of the municipal administration, appointed by President Kuchma, personally forbade
the building of a church belonging to the Kyiv Patriarchate—and so none was
ever built.
In other words, they were determined to keep Russian-Soviet historical
memory intact by not permitting any Ukrainian alternative. And so in many areas
of Ukraine, a cult of Russian arms, its all-encompassing “victories,” a cult of
Russian and soviet heroes, and billboard esthetics dominated. At the same time,
it was noticeable that there was a very careful rejection of any attempts to
more-or-less thoroughly and deeply analyze these “accomplishments” and military
“achievements.” Incidentally, southern Ukraine, despite its hordes of monuments
and names in honor of all kinds of Suvorovs, Potemkins, Kutuzovs, Catherines,
and Peters, there are very few monuments to the heroes of Kozak Ukraine who
were closely tied to the history of the region.
For instance, even when it was still under Ukraine, Sevastopol had a
monument erected to Admiral Klochakov, who was supposedly the first to lead his
squadron into what would be Akhtiarsk Bay in the future city, yet there’s no
mention of the Kozak Colonel and Kyiv-Mohyla Academy graduate Sydor Biliy, who
took the Dnipro flotilla into the bay of the future city of Sevastopol even
earlier than the Russian Admiral. While it was part of Ukraine, Sevastopol
erected a monument to Catherine the Great, although the real founder of the
city was not the German Empress of Russia but the Rear Admiral of the Russian
fleet, Scotsman Thomas MacKenzie, whom no one seems to remember. It seems that
Ukrainians were not the only victims of Russian politicized historical
memory...
What’s more, this policy in eastern and southern Ukraine has continued the
entire period of Ukraine’s supposed independence, and it’s not entirely clear
that it has stopped today. We only need to recall attempts to rename Kirovohrad
Yelysavetgrad after the Empress Elizabeth.
In contrast to Ukraine itself, pro-Russian forces have quite effectively
made use of the nearly 25 years of effective independence and lack of
control—and sometimes even open indulgence—provided to them by the leadership
in Kyiv. These forces applied their soviet agitprop skills and enriched them
with new Russian techniques. Lots of music, slogans, drums and fanfare,
hyperpatriotic verses, the exploitation of lingering negative attitudes towards
the US and NATO, and controversial tsarist-chekist romance—“feed the masses”—,
created an ideological compote that the courteous neutrality of official Kyiv
allowed to be fed to the hoi polloi in southeastern Ukraine
for so long.
After events in 2014, the confrontation between the two models of
historical memory—the patriotic nation-building and the
communist-imperialist—intensified sharply and, despite the specific situation
with the Russian war in Ukraine, it’s early to say whether the former has
overcome the latter ideology. The opponent continues to resist and sometimes
even goes on the attack. Lately, the epicenter of this confrontation has shown
up on the Inter channel, which is trying to consolidate all those elements in
Ukrainian society that are disgruntled with the rejection of communist names
and, therefore, the law on decommunization. With this purpose in mind, Inter is
proposing that all those who oppose renaming places, as the law requires, to
join the site polk.inter.ua—“polk” meaning a military company—, which address
appears on the Inter screen on a regular basis with the predictable slogans. On
some channels that are nominally Ukrainian, Russian and pro-Russian management
dominates.
Those in power in Ukraine today need to begin to bring order to this arena,
otherwise this task will be taken on by civic activists using direct action. The
confrontation of the two systems of national memory is a battle for the future
of Ukraine, for its very existence, and the state should not make the mistake
of maintaining a position of phony neutrality by keeping itself equidistant
from the two sides in this battle. This is the position that has been taken by
every government in Ukraine for a quarter-century now and today we see the
direct results of that...
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