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In the fall of 2013 the world has once again recalled the word “Ukraine.” The protest that became known as the Euromaidan Revolution started on 21st November 2013 as a response to Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend signing the Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine. It became the starting point of a dramatic political, cultural and economic change that affected daily existence of the majority of Ukrainians. Created during the first days of the protest as a name for a Twitter account, the term ‘Euromaidan’ consists of the two parts—“Euro,” an abbreviation for Europe, and “Maidan,” a Turkish term for a “square” or, symbolically, “open space.” Adopted by Ukrainians during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, the term ‘Maidan’ became a symbol of the revolution and an ongoing desire of the country to obtain its cultural and socio-economic independence from the Russian reign. The subsequent process of decommunization is the pinnacle of what is recorded in the world’s chronicles as a historic statement of Ukraine—the 94 days of the Euromaidan Revolution.

Officially lasting until 23 February 2014—the day when the Ukrainian Parliament voted to impeach President Yanukovych (Shipenkov and Pelevina 2013: 2), the “Maidan” or “The Revolution of Dignity” claimed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides of the protest, turning into years of rivalry between Russia and Ukraine. Since spring of 2014, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and war in Donbas remain matters of both national and international dispute and attract the attention of political, media and scholarly public (Allison 2014; Gobert 2017; Mankoff 2014; Robinson 2016; Viatrovych 2015). Irrespective of the discipline—be it sociology, political science, anthropology, economics or art, the existing studies of the aftermath of the 2014 revolution are exceptional in their diversity. They vary from classical discussions of the post-Soviet space as that of “conflicting and confused identities” (Weeks 2014: 61) to those of interpretation of the post-Soviet developments as attempts of the state’s “humanization” (Enwezor 2008: 12) or liberation from the Soviet or Russian empire (Shkandrij 2001: 14).

In this book I present the results of extensive fieldwork in different regions of Ukraine as of 2013-2018, as well as ample analysis of academic, media and archival sources that address both Ukraine and the broader post-Soviet space. I examine what I argue to be the core characteristic of (post)Euromaidan Ukraine—multivocality. An outcome of research that recorded the Maidan protests live and includes 64 interviews and videos with the protestors, civic activists, politicians, members of non-governmental organizations, soldiers, artists, and ordinary citizens of oftentimes opposing stands, this book explores decommunization as both the political and cultural component of ongoing realities of the revolution and its aftermath. It is both an ethnographic study of particular cities and people, and at the same time, an analysis of the meaning-making process related to national identities. Very simply put, I came to study data that was “raw”—the visual, interview or video material transcribed on the fly. The videos, photos and interviews were recorded in order to analyze the events and their aftermath as they happened live. Eventually, the book developed into a project that examines (post)2013 decommunization taking place at both the regional and national level, where the the ordinary citizens’ and the government’s involvement in diverse forms of the meaning-making—be it political poster exhibitions, preservation or demolition of communist symbols, or renaming of the streets—is a multivocal, sinuous phenomenon.

In her definition of Euromaidan as a space that reflects socio-political and cultural composition of Ukraine, the curator and analyst of Hudrada, Lada Nakonechna, delineates Maidan as a “multitude of completely different people who would never cross paths ordinarily” (Nakonechna 2014: 15). In theoretical terms, the concept of ‘borderlands’ has been often used to explain the emergence of socio-political and cultural diversity and provide an alternative for re-articulation of the idea of mono-ethnicity or homogeneity of the political and cultural spaces of states like Ukraine. According to Professor of comparative politics Tatiana Zhurzhenko, as for the geopolitically amorphous zones “in between,” such as Ukraine, it is rather natural for “borderlands [to] generate hybrid identities and create political, economic and cultural practices that combine different, often mutually exclusive values” (Zhurzhenko 2014: 2). The units situated between the politically and culturally diverse domains, borderlands are associated with multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet, such qualities of the borderlands pose a practical challenge to governments in power, as, if not being acknowledged at the institutional level, carry potential of threatening the integrity of the state.

Particularly after the Euromaidan revolution, when multiplicity of the grassroots narratives on political and cultural evolution of the state became distinct (Documenting Maidan 2014), traditional usage of the concept of ‘borderlands’ as the theoretical framework that explains construction and weakness of national identity was no longer fully sufficient (Zhurzhenko 2014; Sakwa 2016; Snyder 2014). In her earlier work on formation of Ukraine’s socio-political identity, Zhurzhenko argues that geographically close to Russia, Eastern regions of Ukraine have been “politically loyal to the Ukrainian state, [where] many of [the Russian speaking Ukrainians and Russians in eastern Ukraine] were adherent to both the Ukrainian and Russian political stands” (Zhurzhenko 2002: 2). At the same time, many of them neither wanted to accept the imposition of a Ukrainian cultural identity based on ethnic/linguistic criteria combined with anti-Russian sentiments, nor the opposition of a ‘European Ukraine’ to an ‘Asiatic Russia’ (ibid: 2). Twelve years later, as being affirmed by the author of this quote, “every part of this sentence [had to be] reconsidered.” During and after the Euromaidan revolution, with the exception of Donbas, broad ideological consensus has emerged among all regions of the country, with the anti-Russian sentiments obtaining the scale of a national rather than regional condition.

In his analysis of (post)Euromaidan Ukraine, Timothy Snyder argues that, facing the undeclared military aggression from the distinctly stronger neighbor—the Russian Federation, as the state of ‘borderlands,’ Ukraine has turned into ‘bloodlands’ (Snyder 2017: 4). Forced into circumstances where their lives were put in danger, large populations of cities like Zaporizhzhya, Kharkiv, or Kryvyi Rih opted for the Ukrainian state by “being driven by considerations of safety and fear of violence, inspired by a new sense of patriotism, or led by the pain of national humiliation and by solidarity with those fighting for the nation’s territorial integrity” (Zhurzhenko 2014: 3). At the same time, both during and after the revolution, some parts of the population have sympathized with separatists and the Russian Federation. Following Zhurzhenko, they continued to do so in exchange for higher salaries, pensions, or due to political and cultural loyalty to Russia. Back in 2014, when conflict in Donbas was still at its peak, the question on ‘how to live together again in one state after the war was over’ was one of the most acute ones.

Considering the diversity of socio-political and cultural backgrounds of the participants of the revolution and that of the media, political and academic analysts, dozens of books and academic articles have been published on multiple aspects of Maidan and its aftermath. However, even as years went by, little attention has been paid to specific ways the political and cultural meanings in Ukraine were being constructed. Not to deny the existence of narratives on “termination of military activities in Donbas being one of the primary objectives of “correct” narration of present” (Shevel 2015), the process of de-Sovietization emerged as the dominant legislative and discursive formation of post-Euromaidan Ukraine. Officially, the ‘decommunization’ or massive elimination of the Soviet heritage from the physical, ideological and mental space of Ukraine has started with toppling of the monument of Lenin in Kyiv on December 8 2013. The toppled and smashed Lenin became the symbol of ‘Europeanization,’ triggering further acts of detachment from the Soviet legacy such as lustration of the corrupt ruling elites or banning of the Communist Party. It has taken the scale of national reforms that penetrated both the economic and socio-political domain, and affected the physical and cultural topography of Ukraine.

Since the early days of the Euromaidan revolution, the fundamental dilemma was “how to undo the legal, institutional, and mnemonic legacy of the Soviet era that mandates and institutionalizes one ‘correct’ interpretation of the past without repeating the Soviet approach of mandating one ‘correct’ interpretation and punishing the public expression of dissenting viewpoints” (Shevel 2015). The possibility of aggravating domestic divisions in Ukraine by alienating the south and east from the rest of the country, passing decommunization laws and establishing anti-Soviet narrative as the only national and legal framework has been acknowledged by both the Ukrainian and international scholars (Cohen 2016; Hartmond 2016; Hitrova 2016; Marples 2018; Soroka 2018). When it comes to taking the Soviet monuments down or renaming the streets, for instance, the studies have shown absence of any sizable public protests against the governmental policies of such kind (Portnov 2017; Shevel 2016; Viatrovych 2015). At the same time, the same studies also affirmed that “there [was] no evidence of the widespread support for decommunization in the Ukrainian society” (Shevel 2016: 3). As such, if one were to trace civic reaction to the official implementation of the 2015 decommunization laws three to four years down the line, neither support nor noticeable public objection to decommunization could be detected. The explanation of what was eventually taking place at the grassroots, ordinary citizens’ level, I argue, is largely missing.

It always struck me as funny how easily detectable, usually media-broadcasted transformations, how easily they can distract someone who is trying to spot micro processes. The barricades, fallen communist statues, a baseball hat, green and brown tents on Maidan, tents at the borderline war zone, elegant young couples, soldiers, the internally displaced professors and university students from Donetsk, Kryvyi Rih and Crimea, exhausted men drawing casually on a pipe next to the Lenin pedestal, Cossacks with their long moustaches, parents mourning “The Heavenly Hundred,4” ‘nationalists’ marching with photos of Bandera5, grandparents mourning “notorious Soviet past,” volunteers of the ATO6 bringing victory home, smiling, artists, journalists, more soldiers—this time in the wheelchairs, though, cursing both war and the state...And graffiti, and posters, and slogans and songs…“Ne Tvoja Vijna7” and “Nas Kynuly8”....all in the same space. Eventually, inevitably...at some point one cannot but wonder ‘how to make sense of it all?’

Curious about statistics or chronological reports can always find data on the number of communist statues being demolished, streets renamed, marches and protests in favor or against ‘Europe’ or ‘Russia’, or rather rarely, both. They can also find criticism of the lack of swift democratic transitioning, or on the contrary, speedy controversial de-Sovietization reforms. What I intend to do with this book is to take a step further by filling in the missing pieces on the nature, content and modes of articulation of the grassroots narratives on decommunization. Specifically, it will be shown how the process of regional and national de-Sovietization has taken multiple forms of political expression and can be examined as an integral part of hegemonic meaning-making. To unravel the hegemonic process, I address the regional evolution and articulation of meanings in different areas of Ukraine and reveal the complexity of the meaning-making. The book looks at public events such as posters and photo exhibitions or demolition of communist statues as effective mechanisms for exposing the multivocality of a state which, as the government of Ukraine claims, is being ‘unified’ in its fight for decommunization.

The theory of hegemony by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), as well as broader intellectual framework of the international relations and historical materialist traditions (Cox 2019; Modelski and Wilkinson 1999; Thompson 2015) addresses hegemony as being “more than dominance” (Cox 2019: 366), and “being born out of conflicts and contradictions in the process of socio-political decay” (Cox 2019: 377). The ground idea of discourse theory—that of the social phenomena being mediated through discourse, with meanings being never permanently fixed, is applied further in this work to examine decommunization as a broad array of narratives.

Such theoretical ‘reading’ of de-Sovietization is particularly relevant if we are to try making sense of diversity. Its purpose is to identify different ways discourses, such as ‘Europeanization,’ ‘de-Sovietization,’ or ‘Russification,’ are part of the meaning-making process that is “never complete” (Cox 2019; Laclau 1985; Thompson 2015). At the same time, if we are to comprehend “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1981) or acknowledge the existence of different voices, it is important to examine how the discursive or physical opposition to such discourses—be it oppositional political poster exhibitions or demolition (or preservation) of the Soviet monuments—is counter-hegemonic: how it establishes particular relations and orders of meaning that are of a contesting nature. The hegemonic approach, therefore, would permit us to detect decommunization as a political and cultural struggle over the ‘Soviet’ past and, potentially, ‘European’ present and future. This ‘struggle,’ however, does not imply socio-political or cultural division of the country’s population. As will be shown further, it involves articulation of both contentious and similar stands, where multiplicity of the socio-political positions is core to the meaning-making. As that of discourse analysis theory, the aim of this book is “not to discover which groups exist within the society” (Rear and Jones 2013), or to unravel particular political formations that object or support decommunization. My primary objective is to examine how the political and cultural diversity of the country’s citizens is being articulated and becomes visible within the process of the discursive struggle—within the scope of this work, that of post-Euromaidan decommunization. This ‘struggle’ or ‘contestation,’ as we are to see shortly, is a continuous process of meaning-making that is being articulated both during and after the revolutionary transformation of a state. Finally, and most importantly, irrespective of the arguments presented, theories applied or data discussed, the objective is to ‘study’ and understand people—the Ukrainians, as they are.

1 The Denikinets were the voluntary soldiers of the Military White Guard Army of General Denikin, who were fighting against the Bolsheviks between 1917 and 1920. The Armed Forces of South Russia were the unified military units of the White movement in southern Russia. Accessed November 18, 2019. Source: https://kremenhistory.org.ua/tag/denikincy/

2 The term ‘Petlurovites’ was used toward soldiers and commanders of the Ukrainian Army led by a politician and journalist Semen Vasylyovych Peltura. Semen Petliura (1879-1926) was a Ukrainian journalist and politician, the Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Army and President of the Ukrainian National Republic (1918-1921). A symbol of Ukraine’s national struggle for independence for part of the Western Ukrainian diaspora, Petliura and his followers (“Petliurivtsi”) are associated with massive acts of violence against the Jewish settlements. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Paris-New York: 1970), Petliura and his followers committed 307 (25%) of crimes against the Jewish population in Odessa only during 1981-1922, and after the fall of Russian Empire in 1917, attributed a controversial role for connection with the pogroms of the Jewish settlements in other regions of Ukraine. Accessed March 2, 2019. Source: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CP%5CE%5CPetliuraSymon.htm.

3 Andrei Konchalovsky. Interview. BBC News Russian. Accessed October 2, 2017. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7bvLGaWLCE

4 The name “Heavenly Hundred” refers to deceased activists whose deaths are connected to the protests on Maidan in Kyiv, from 21 January to 22 February 2014. Volodymyr Kadygrob, #Euromaidan: History in the Making (Osnovy Publishing, 2014), 170-171.

5 Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (1 January 1909- 15 October 1959) was a Ukrainian politician, revolutionary and the head of a militant wing of Ukrainian independence movement. He was a leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization (OUN) during and after the Second World War. Within the national context of Ukraine, he is one of the most controversial figures of the country’s history. Remembered as a hero primarily in western regions for an attempt to proclaim an independent Ukrainian state, Bandera is seen as a war criminal in central and eastern oblasts. There, he is condemned for collaboration with Nazi Germany and for killing Jews, Russians and other ethnic minorities living on the territory of Ukraine. The ‘Banderite’ is a term (primarily of negative connotation) used to address the proponents of his figure. Accessed June 2, 2018. Source: /https://www.britannica.com/biography/ Stepan-Bandera.

6 ATO (or Anti-Terrorist Operation) is a term that was introduced by the government of Ukraine to identify Ukrainian military operations on the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk that fell under the control of Russian military forces and pro-Russian separatists. Since 2014, the term ‘ATO’ has been used by media, publicity and government of Ukraine as well OSCE and other foreign institutions to refer to the military activities in eastern Ukraine. Accessed September 14, 2015. Source: http://uacrisis.org/66558- joint-forces-operation.

7 The song “Ne Tvoya Viyna” (“Not Your War”) was released by the Ukrainian rock band, “Okean Elzy,” in April 2015. The song is an open statement of condemnation of Russian aggression and war in Donbas. Okean Elzy. “Not Your War.” Believe Music. May 2, 2015. Music video, 4:28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwQpCA3NWyk.

8 “Nas Kynuly” (“We were dumped”) is the song of Ukrainian singer, leader of the rock band “Skryabin,” Andriy Kuzmenko. The song is a provocative statement toward the government of Ukraine which, as being implied, has “dumped” its people and failed to deliver its promises. Skryabin. “Nas Kynuly.” #Скрябін #KuzmaForever #Кузьма. July 20, 2020. Music video, 3:30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5NH2yKh11M.