Past Continuous: Is Bandera replacing Lenin?

Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s ruling party Law and Justice, allegedly told the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that “with Bandera, you will not enter Europe”. Critical statements have been recorded in also Israel, the United States and Russia. International interest in Ukrainian historical policy is not new, and while it recently attracts increased attention, there have been controversies in the past too. One of them was Viktor Yushchenko’s campaign to have the Holodomor (the Great Famine) recognised as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. The effort to rehabilitate Ukrainian nationalist leaders Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera as heroes also dates back to before the Maidan revolution.

Internal and external dimensions

A recent Ukrainian book by Georgiy Kasyanov, titled Past Continuous: Історичнаполітика 1980-х —2000-х: Українатасусіди (Past Continuous: Political History 1980s-2000s: Ukraine and its neighbours), examines the issue of historical policy. Kasyanov, a professor at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, is a respected Ukrainian historian. An author of numerous highly praised publications, he also has regular contacts with western academia.

The book is an overview of Ukrainian memory politics from the end of the 1980s to 2017. Kasyanov aims to develop a deep understanding of the main actors who shape memory politics in Ukraine today. Kasyanov further adds breath through a comparative study of regimes of memory in other places, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Yet the focus is of course Ukraine, and through his search he discovers not only the most obvious players, such as the president and the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, but also less obvious organisations, such as the Security Service of Ukraine, the courts, the postal service, political parties, the media and even individual historians. The final and longest part of the book focuses on the practices of historical policy in Ukraine, taking into account the internal and external dimensions of memory politics. We read about Lenin and Bandera and the roles they played in Ukraine, and about memory conflicts that Ukraine has had with Poland and Russia, amongst others.

Has Bandera replaced Lenin?

The level of detail in Past Continuous is impressive. The author digs into different aspects of historical policy, drawing on information from a wide range of documents and press reports. The most interesting are probably the excerpts from memory laws in Ukraine. Kasyanov takes a strikingly critical approach to the subject matter. It is clear that his views are far from both the official rhetoric of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance and the Soviet nostalgia that is on the defensive in Ukraine these days. His scepticism towards both of these trends is to Kasyanov’s credit.

Kasyanov tackles the interaction between two main narratives, which he conceives as national/nationalistic on the one hand and Soviet nostalgia on the other, that characterise Ukrainian historical policy discourse. I use the word interaction rather than conflict because the relationship between the two narratives is not always one of conflict. There is at times considerable crossover between the two – they do after all have to grapple with the same historical events. When the nationalistic narrative started to dominate Ukrainian historiography, the earlier term “proletariat revolution” was soon replaced by “the national revolution of 1917-1920,” while the title “Ukrainian hero” became a substitute for the “Soviet hero”. In Galicia, monuments of Lenin were quickly replaced with ones commemorating Bandera.

Even more interesting is the conversion from communism to nationalism that many Ukrainian historians underwent in the 1990s, a process unfortunately treated rather superficially in the book. It reveals the massive decommunisation of public space underway since the 2014 revolution to be largely a façade. The activities that are championed by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance may be changing content, but not form. The main narrative remains anachronistic and one-dimensional. The fact that Bandera rather than Lenin is today the main protagonist is quite insignificant.

Two narratives

Past Continuous is a story of competing narratives. Kasyanov argues that the national/nationalistic narrative has dominated Ukrainian discourse since the 1990s and is alive and well today. It survived Viktor Yanukovych’s rule and the activities of his minister of education, Dmytro Tabachnyk, which probably explains why Yanukovych’s departure from the classical interpretation of the Holodomor as an act of genocide did not bring about a significant shift towards Soviet nostalgia. However, while we can agree with Kasyanov’s view regarding the dominance of the national narrative, the question remains whether the same is true about the nationalist one.

In my view, Kasyanov’s concept of the national/nationalist narrative is too far-reaching and, as a consequence, not precise enough. Putting these two narratives into one cluster and opposing it with the nostalgic Soviet narrative leads Past Continuous to rely too heavily on the old debate of “two Ukraines” which was once put forward by Mykola Riabchuk. This perspective skims over the regional dimension of the debate, which Kasyanov is well aware of. The problem would presumably be that including a wider range of narratives would make this already long book even longer and less digestible for readers.

That said, the book remains a welcome and effective antidote to the nationalistic narrative aggressively promoted by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. Past Continuous is one of the most interesting history books published in the Ukrainian language this year.

Translated by Monika Szafrańska

Marek Wojnar is an assistant professor in the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, a historian, an essayist, and a regular contributor to Nowa Konfederacja and Nowa Europa Wschodnia. 

Memory policy, nationalism, Ukraine