War, Migration, Memory: Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine – An Introduction

By Viktoriya Sereda and Andrii Portnov

This text is an excerpt from the introduction to the volume “War, Migration, Memory – Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine”, recently published in the series “Forum Transregionale Studien – Dossiers” at transcript Verlag and edited by Viktoriya Sereda. The dossier is available in print and open-access here.

Independent Ukraine emerged in 1991 as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has demonstrated socio-cultural inclusiveness through the automatic granting of citizenship to all those who lived in the country (regardless of ethnicity, language or religion), political pluralism through the regular change of power through democratic elections, and a clear propensity for peaceful resolution of the most acute political conflicts. The student Revolution on Granite of 1990, the Orange Revolution of 2004, and the Winter 2013/2014 Revolution of Dignity/Euromaidan – until 22 January 2014 – were fundamentally peaceful. Violence (including deaths) only started in early 2014 on the Maidan. Immediately after the victory of the Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied Crimea and contributed to the outbreak of war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Since late February 2014, Ukraine has been at war, and on 24 February 2022, this war took on the character of a full-scale invasion. If not 2014, then certainly 2022 raised the question of rethinking the entire experience of Ukraine and Ukrainians before and after 1991. Was the full-scale war a belated and very high price to pay for the peaceful political transformation of the 1990s? Or should 2022 be considered the year of the final collapse of the Soviet Empire? And what socio-political factors allowed Ukrainian society to resist the military aggression of its neighbour? How does the war affect the historical memory of Ukraine or Europe in general?

These and other questions are addressed by the authors whose texts are collected in this Dossier. They testify to individual searches for the meaning of historical events and to the sincere motivation for the establishment of Ukrainian studies against the background of confusion and trauma imposed by the current Russian aggression. We should not forget for a second the context and circumstances of these inquiries: an ongoing military conflict in the centre of Europe,  unprecedented in size and scope since the Second World War, a conflict that has taken on a genocidal character.

This Dossier focuses on Ukraine in the context of Russian aggression since 2014. What distinguishes the Ukrainian case from other cases of Russian aggression in the region is that it is a long-term conflict with a changing character. Initially, Ukraine faced the occupation of Crimea and its incorporation into the legal body of the Russian Federation. The Russian military aggression in the eastern part of Ukraine did not lead to the immediate integration of these territories into Russia but instead resulted in the creation of the quasi-state entities of the ‘DPR’ (Donetsk People’s Republic) and the ‘LPR’ (Luhansk People’s Republic) in occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. On 12 February 2015, after many long negotiations between the leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, a ‘package of measures for the implementation of the Minsk agreements’ (‘Minsk II’) was signed by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine. However, it did not achieve a stable ceasefire and did not prevent Russia’s further aggression. The unprovoked Russian full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022 brought Ukraine to the attention of an international audience. War and mass displacement exposed millions of Ukrainians to new challenges. These challenges triggered intensive reinterpretations of the past – both the distant and the very recent – and a reevaluation of their memory and sense of belonging through the experiences they are going through.

Extreme events such as war and displacement create ruptures in sense-making narratives and, as suggested by Ryan Quinn and Monica Worline, “tend to strip people of identity, leaving them no sensible narrative to enact”^[1]. People need plausible accounts of events to understand what is going on and how to respond through both individual and collective actions. Sense-making is an ongoing retrospective process grounded in personal experiences and is often linked to the construction of identity and a sense of belonging. In this process, history and the past turn into an important interpretive resource for one’s attachment or alienation. The imagined past may consist of the memory of recently experienced events (e.g., ‘after the beginning of the war’), which is later linked to selected symbolic markers, events, or figures from the past that help explain current events or legitimise individuals or their actions.

The essays of this Dossier aim to reach beyond the politics of history and examine how collective and individual memories and people’s sense of belonging are reshaped when used to interpret the shocking realities of the current war. Additionally, they investigate how memory is mobilised on a personal and collective level to deal with the ruptures and threats posed by this war in an attempt to explain what is happening. The main research questions addressed in this volume are not new. Scholars have been working on similar issues for a long time and have developed several explanatory schemes.^[2] For example, Peter Gatrell’s work on refugees during the First World War illustrates how the outbreak of war can dramatically change the established landscape of social and national identities. He argues that the new category of ‘refugee’ created by the war suddenly became an important social category and a factor of identity. For millions of people, it outweighed many of their previous statuses and identities, influencing not only their perceptions of themselves but also their destinies.^[3]

The reaction of Ukrainian society to all these challenges is quite complex, and this makes our task even more complicated and demanding. Scholars working on the region often simplified the complex transformations in Ukrainian society after 1991 and after 2014 (including the functions of memory and attitudes towards the past) into a binary of East-West divisions, a conflict of two identities (ethnic vs. civic),^[4] or two models of historical memory (national vs. Soviet).^[5] A more complex analysis of the variety of Ukrainian experiences in different parts of the country and on the national level could provide a more accurate picture.^[6] Accordingly, the essays in this Dossier consider multifaceted issues such as: how to differentiate between models of nation-building in Ukraine before the war (for example, in ethnic and civil regards); how do different perceptions of the nation interact in 2022; how do discourses of decommunisation and decolonisation figure into this interaction; what is the impact of war on the perception and prospects of Ukraine’s ethnic diversity; what are shifts in the linguistic of religious landscapes, gender roles, and many more.

Changes in Ukrainian society can be studied in various contexts and perspectives – local, regional, national, and global – and focus on certain topics. This Dossier combines two approaches: Through a variety of case studies and themes, it offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war; on the macro-level, it considers how war influences memory and its politics. While the perspectives on the transformational effects of war provide insights of and into shifts of memory and symbolic representations, experiences of dislocation, and the repercussions of war on minority groups, the focus on memory considers how war influences discussions on the politics of memory in official discourses, in the educational system or in the media in Ukraine, in the region and the world. Through this approach, some issues, such as the Polish-Ukrainian “memory wars”, are marginalised, while others, like the frameworks of understanding and commemoration of the Second World War, are reassessed. The essays reflect how the war fuels an antagonism between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian versions of historical and cultural memory. They address and illustrate the shifts in writing styles and in identities of Ukrainian writers. In relation to war-induced migration, the politics of counting displaced or gendered experiences of war are analysed: How does war (re)define roles and divisions within Ukrainian society? Another avenue of exploration delves into the ways different media outlets narrate and represent wartime realities. What, for example, are the main markers of victory and resistance? Which symbols (including famous literary characters, religious or territorial imaginaries) are employed to mobilise certain identities, to create a sense of belonging, or to draw new lines of division? Moreover, media coverage of events or situations in the occupied territories at times significantly depends on an editorial perspective, on state policy, or on military conditions that restrict journalists’ personal access to information. The case study of Mariupol illustrates how media messages (which are often prone to propaganda distortions and information restrictions) result in a multitude of perspectives and representations of the event and its participants. These narratives later might have a strong impact on the postwar reintegration of Ukrainian society. Moreover, several texts focus on the community level and explore the socio-cultural aspects of refugees’ adaptation, shifts in collective memories and identities, motives for returning or prolonging their stay, new forms of self-aid and self-organisation, and on topics that become salient or silenced in closed social media channels. 

This volume uses a cross-sectional approach to discuss the transforming impact of war on minority groups (ethnic, religious, or people diagnosed with cancer). In this collection, readers are presented with an exploration into the process of reclaiming the history of Crimea and Crimean Tatars through the lens of a single family’s narratives. It illustrates how minority groups use family memories to create narratives of belonging to a community or a particular space.

Studies focusing on the personal level look at how war transforms individual communicative and cultural memories and people’s experience of time, for example, when the natural flow of biographical time is disrupted by a ‘before and after the beginning of the war’. How do people reference to certain symbolic markers, events or historical figures, redefine their identities, legitimise, explain current events, or make a nostalgic escape from reality? References to the past might also help overcome the traumas of the present. These phenomena are discussed in this volume in contributions analysing personal stories of common Ukrainians posted by the witnesses of war on the “My War” platform or narrated by Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Germany during the in-depth interviews conducted by the authors.

[…]

All texts collected in this Dossier were written by Ukrainian scholars under the duress of war and displacement. Many of the authors base their contributions on interviews they conducted on social media and online resources. We think that, individually and together, the essays underline the need for a nuanced understanding and invite more research into the evolving consequences of the Russian war in Ukraine, for Ukraine, for Europe, and for its neighbouring regions. The identification of key questions and research problems related to War, Migration and Memory through a Ukrainian prism is the basic idea of our publication. We consider this collection to be a significant step towards establishing the intellectual legitimacy of Ukrainian voices as well as a contribution to the search for an appropriate comparative framework, methodological perspectives, and, ultimately, a new analytical language for describing our part of Europe.

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References

^[1] Ryan W. Quinn and Monica C. Worline, “Enabling Courageous Collective Action: Conversations from United Airlines Flight 93”, Organization Science 19/4, 2008, 497–516.

^[2] Janet S. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Stephan Milich, Friederike Pannewick, and Leslie Tramontini (eds.), Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma and Memory in Iraqi Culture, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012; Hariz Halilovich, “Reclaiming erased lives: archives, records and memories in post-war Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora”, Archival Science 14/3, 2014, 231–247; and Katrin Stoll, “Transcending the divide between history and memory: Szymon Datner’s practical Holocaust historiography in the early post-war period”, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of History and Culture 21, 2015, 4–23.

^[3] Рeter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

^[4] Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72/3, 1993, 22–49; Andrew Wilson, “The Donbas Between Ukraine and Russia: The Use of History in Political Disputes”, Journal of Contemporary History 30/2, 1995, 265–289; Mykola Riabtschuk, Die reale und die imaginierte Ukraine, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2005; Valeriy Khmelko, “Iz-za chego politikam udaetsia raskalyvat Ukrainu”, Vechernii Lugansk 24, 2006; Ivan Katchanovski, “East or West? Regional Political Divisions in Ukraine since the ‘Orange Revolution’ and the ‘Euromaidan’”, paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC, 28–31 August, 2014; Taras Kuzio, “Competing Nationalisms, Euromaidan, and the Russian‐Ukrainian Conflict”, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15/1, 2015, 157–169; Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, New Heaven-London: Yale University Press, 2015; and Bruno De Cordier, “Ukraine’s Vendée War? A look at the ‘resistance identity’ of the Donbass insurgency”, Russian Analytical Digest 198, 2017, 2–6.

^[5] Viktoriya Sereda, “Regional Historical Identities in Ukraine: Case Study of Lviv and Donetsk”, Naukovi Zapysky: Natsionalʹnyy universytet “Kyyevo-Mohylyansʹka Akademiya”, Sotsiolohichni nauky 20, 2002, 26–34; Viktoriya Sereda, “Rehionalʹni vymiry ukrayinskoho sotsiumu istorychne mynule ta natsionalni identychnosti”, Ahora. Ukrayina–rehional’nyy vymir 3, 2006, 29–41; Serhey Makeev and Anzhela Patrakova, “Rehionalʹna spetsyfikatsiya sotsiokulʹturnykh vidminnostey v Ukrayini”, Sotsiolohiya: teoriya, metody, marketynh 3, 2004, 109–125; Volodymyr Kravchenko, “Fighting the Shadow: The Soviet Past in the Historical Memory of Contemporary Ukrainian Society (RUS)”, Ab Imperio 2, 2004, 329–369; Oleksandr Hrytsenko, Prezydenty i pamʺyatʹ: Polityka pamʺyati prezydentiv Ukrayiny (1994–2014), pidgruntya, poslannya, realizatsiya, rezulʹtaty, Kyiv: KIS, 2017; and Georgiy Kasianov, Memory Crash, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022.

^[6] Serhii Plokhy (ed.), The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History, Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2016; Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko (eds.), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; André Liebich, Oksana Myshlovska, and Viktoriia Sereda, “The Ukrainian Past and Present: Legacies, Memory and Attitudes”, in: Oksana Myshlovska and Ulrich Schmid, Regionalism without Regions. Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019, 67–134; Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Yuliya Yurchuk, “Memory politics in contemporary Ukraine: Reflections from the postcolonial perspective”, Memory Studies 12/6, 2019, 699–720; Natalia Kudriavtseva, “Contested names in the toponymic landscapes of post-soviet space”, Ideology and Politics Journal 1/15, 2020, 4–10; and Andrii Portnov, Poland and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Asymmetric Memories, Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, 2020.

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About the Authors

Viktoriya Sereda is a sociologist, head coordinator of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS), and senior advisor to the PRISMA UKRAЇNA: War, Migration, Memory research group that she initiated and directed at the Forum Transregionale Studien in 2022/23. Since 2020, she has also been a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and professor in the department of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine). Her main areas of research include nationalism, migration and identity studies, memory studies, civil society, and urban sociology.

Andrii Portnov is Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder), founding member of the research college “Europäische Zeiten / European Times” and director of the research network PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. The majority of his publications are devoted to intellectual history, historiography and genocide and memory research in Eastern and Central Europe. He has published five books, including Lessons in Ukrainian History (published in Moscow by International Memorial in 2010), Historiography for Home Use and The Polish-Russian-Ukrainian Memory Triangle (published in Kiev in 2013 and awarded the Yuri Shevelov Prize) and Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City. In 2022, Portnov’s article “Poland and Ukraine: Intertwined History, Divided Memory in Europe” was published in the Essays series of the Forum Transregionale Studien.

 

 

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