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Introduction
SPPS Edited by Andreas Umland Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Vol. 231
Anna Kutkina
Between Lenin and Bandera
Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies
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ibidem
229 Oxana Schmies (Ed.)
230 Christopher Ford
231 Anna Kutkina
232 Lincoln E. Flake
233 Nikoloz Samkharadze
234 Arve Hansen
235 Eleonora Narvselius, Julie Fedor (Eds.)
236 Regina Elsner
237 Bo Petersson
Anna Kutkina
BETWEEN LENIN AND BANDERA
With a foreword by Juri Mykkänen
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Cover illustration: Photo: © 2021 by Anna Kutkina, graffiti in Kyiv, Ukraine, by Aleksei Kislov and Julien Milan.
ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7506-2 © ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2021 Alle Rechte vorbehalten
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Contents
Preface by Juri Mykkänen ........................................................... xi Acknowledgements ..................................................................... xv
Introduction ............................................................................................ 1 1: Theory as ‘Hegemonic’ Practice .................................................... 15 Constructing multivocality ........................................................ 23 The ‘imagined community’ ........................................................ 27 Bridging ........................................................................................ 31
2: The Postcolonial Soviet ................................................................... 37 Disputing othering ...................................................................... 43 The opposition ............................................................................. 48 Debating decommunization ....................................................... 52
3: ‘Researching’ Methods .................................................................... 61 Interviews, visuals, texts ............................................................. 68 Textual and narrative analysis ................................................... 74
4: The Poster—Roots of the Lenin cult .............................................. 79 Methodology of the poster ......................................................... 81 The leaders cult ............................................................................ 86 Historical memory ....................................................................... 90
5: Art of the Protest .............................................................................. 95 Messages of the revolution ....................................................... 100 The “Strike Poster”—“Страйк Плакат” ................................ 104 Posters and the state .................................................................. 112 Romanticization + realism ........................................................ 118 Birth of dialogism? .................................................................... 121
6: Meanings of Lenin ......................................................................... 127 The ‘Leninfall’—original multivocality .................................. 129 Creative remembering .............................................................. 137 The Lenin camouflage ............................................................... 145
7: Filling the ‘Pedestal’ ...................................................................... 153 Bandera and the nationalist discourse .................................... 156 The bookshelves: mirroring decommunization .................... 162 “One Hundred Years of Fighting for Independence” .......... 168 The ‘other,’ the Ukrainian, and the state ................................ 176
Sources
Figure A: Map of Ukraine: visual presentation of the collected data ..................................................................................................... 62 Figure B: Exponential non-discriminative snowballing sampling (Dudovskiy 2012) ..................................................................... 63 Figure C: Layered textual analysis (Covert 2014) ........................... 75
To All Ukrainians
Preface
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.i 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.ii 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 Bakhtiniii, 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
