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When the journalist Malcolm Borthwick of the Guardian visited the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site during the winter of 2019, he noted in passing that the last two surviving statues of Lenin in Ukraine are in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, as signs of time stood still.1 A few others in small villages have since been found still intact, but the fact remains that almost every symbol of the communist past of Ukraine has been removed, demolished, or replaced, much in the fashion that is known to have taken place in all the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. In itself, such an eradication of the past is dramatic, yet decommunization (as this refashioning of history is called) can be easily overlooked as a simple political victory over an oppressive regime and a justified removal of the visible insignia associated with the infamous past.

Anna Kutkina’s study of the events surrounding the official decommunization laws of 2015, ranging from the Euromaidan demonstrations in 2013 to the frozen conflict in the Eastern Ukraine through 2018, takes us on an ethnographic journey behind the façade of history’s rectification. The study reveals the contested nature of the stamped-out symbols. It highlights the processes and mechanisms of local and creative meaning-making, and its political nature beyond the official break with the Soviet past. With so many examples, Kutkina shows how complex an issue the past can be and how a symbol, despised by many, can be profoundly ambiguous, sometimes even for those Ukrainians whose experience of socialist rule was predominantly adverse.

As so often in postcommunist societies, the Ukrainian reaction towards its past has also assumed a nationalist outlook. But again, nationalism in Ukraine has many faces, sometimes hardly recognizable as expressions of nationalism. In obvious cases, amply illustrated by Kutkina, nationalist groups would paint statues of Lenin in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, thus celebrating the true Ukraine liberated from Soviet rule. But equally, others would dress Lenin in traditional Ukrainian shirts to acknowledge the potential of peaceful political transformation. The acts of transforming Soviet symbols, which at the first glance seem uniform, can therefore serve different ideas and memories of the past, and political projections into the future. In these acts, the Soviet symbols are vehicles for political expressions of multiple meanings.

A startling observation that cuts through Dr. Kutkina’s study are the many voices which, in their appearance, seem to say the same thing, celebrating a reborn nation rid of the Soviet past and Russian influence, but which, on closer inspection, reveal a rather ambiguous cultural landscape. A political poster from 2016 demonstrates this point well: John Lennon’s portrait overlaid with text saying, “Imagine there is no Putin.” It is a clever pun, but culturally it allows more than one interpretation. It is anti-Russian and obviously relates to Russian aggression. Yet, it targets the Russian president, rather than being a blanket denunciation of all things Russian. Another political poster showing raindrops in the form of small Lenin statues also alludes to Russian aggression, but this time reminding the viewer of the totalitarian past of the Soviet Union and the similarities of Russian conduct under its present rulers. Again, the message can be read as a selective condemnation of Russian politics —or, perhaps, a more general dissociation of Ukraine from specific elements of Russian culture.

In his On Populist Reason, Ernesto Laclau used Gustave le Bon’s classic book The Crowd as a starting point for his theory of signification. The important term that Laclau borrowed from le Bon was “suggestion,” which le Bon used to explain the influence of words and symbols on mass behavior. For le Bon, a simple word may bring forth—or suggest —a chain of associations that grows in the minds of people into images that arouse them to action with which the original word cannot be denotatively associated. Laclau takes this as an early, yet incomplete, attempt to theorize the arbitrary nature of signification.2 In other words, there is no prior fixation between an expression and interpretation; instead there are many possible ways to make the connection. Yet, to say that the meanings associated with statues, street names or political posters are multiple does not indicate the radical arbitrariness of signification. Quite the contrary, the sources for signification were already in place in Ukrainian history, to be recovered and appropriated in public. If the Euromaidan still appealed to images of the European legacy, human rights and good government, the war in the Donbass region and the Russian annexation of the Crimea enacted a different nationalist imagery. It ranged from the state-sponsored war propaganda, reminiscent of Soviet style socialist realism, to the popular cult of Stepan Bandera, a controversial nationalist leader who was lethally poisoned by a KGB agent in 1959. Signification may lack an innate order, but it certainly is structured and motivated. The resulting structures may be durable but they exist side by side, sometimes competing and sometimes dominating, but never totally occupying the symbolic field.

Dr Kutkina uses an older classic, Mikhail Bakhtin3, to make sense of the multiple voices that seek to leave their marks on the public imagery of Ukraine’s national identity. In the Bakhtinian manner, Kutkina’s ethnographic study shows vividly how various voices, with their different valorization of Ukrainian culture and history, come together in a dialogue. There is no ultimate order, only clashing, conflicting, contrasting, counterposing, and partly overlapping views and understandings expressed through the creative use of symbols. In the spirit of Bakhtin, an interesting angle in Kutkina’s work is her intentional disregard of social class or other sociological anchors of her subjects, the many Ukrainians engaging themselves in the interpretative acts. The symbolic dialogue that grew out of the Euromaidan was so diverse within the typical social divisions that arranging the symbolic dialogue along them would have been ill-justified.

Between Lenin and Bandera is an astute look into an unfolding scene of a symbolic struggle for national identity. It studies meaning-making as it happened and interprets political symbolism in a way that avoids the old sin of interpretative studies: the meaning of symbols is derived from the people doing the meaning-making instead of from the mind of an omnipotent observer. This is done without sacrificing analytical rigor. The study is at once deeply local and profoundly universal.

—Juri Mykkänen, February 2021

1 Revisiting Chernobyl: “It is a huge cemetery of dreams”. The Guardian, February 28, 2019.

2 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 22.

3 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 28.