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BETWEEN LENIN AND BANDERA
(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
