Constructing multivocality

(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 sociopolitical 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 antiRussian 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