Suchergebnisse

Despite more than 20 years of independence, Ukraine's former political system has not vanished, as it had created and left behind immense material and cultural resources. The new, often weaker system is not able to obliterate or eliminate signs of the past completely. Thus, cleansing or preserving a landscape feature is an act of historical politics and represents national needs and expectations. In this context, the main question is how do Ukrainian authorities incorporate the Soviet heritage, in our case political monuments, into the cultural and public space of modern Ukraine? The present research scrutinizes the politics of memory towards the Soviet past in contemporary Ukraine. It looks at policies towards Soviet heritage in political monumental art at the governmental and local levels in central Ukraine. The article analyses official documents on Soviet heritage in Ukraine, the conditions of its enactment and the specifics of implementation. Secondly, the research investigates the activities of local authorities in protecting or demounting Soviet monuments. Finally, the analysis examines the attitudes of the population, which include both actions and views. The "ground" level analysis helps us to avoid misleading generalizations in the field of historical politics and discloses the way that politics of memory is perceived and shared among the population.

This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies