Memory politics in Ukraine and Russia as a component of modern warfare

The memorial to the victims of the Holodomor famine in Kyiv. Photo: paparazzza / Shutterstock

Following 1991, Ukrainian historical policies were for a long time in an embryonic state. During the first decade, despite little state support, activities were limited to a paradigm shift away from the Soviet method of studying one’s own history to an approach centred on Ukraine. There was a very large number of topics that over the previous decades, and even centuries, of Russian occupation that were deliberately concealed, distorted and falsified. As a rule, efforts and research were solely based on the enthusiasm of researchers and without stable state support. As difficult as it was, the National Academy of Sciences and its structural units, including institutes dedicated to historical sciences, were preserved. 

Russian historical policies are based on the simple appropriation of someone else’s history, especially when it is a success story of a neighbouring people, state or person. Sometimes this contradicts obvious facts and common sense, but Russian propaganda stubbornly claims that this is all “common heritage” – we are one nation and so your success is ours. Thus, over the long period of Vladimir Putin’s rule, the memory policy of Russia has gained clear institutional forms. Yet, the main tasks of these institutions were not to support scientific research on the true history of the nations who make up the Russian Federation, but rather the battle against historical facts that do not correspond with the main political line. This can be seen in the sad fate of the non-governmental organization Memorial, which despite all the difficulties it faced, attempted to report the truth about the crimes of the Soviet party-state. 

While there is not enough space here to highlight all aspects of the memory policies of both states, key issues will be examined, including the remembrance of the Holodomor; the Second World War; the Orthodox Church; and the ideology of Russkiy mir (Russian world). 

Holodomor and its consequences 

I will start with one interesting case that a friend from Kharkiv told me about. His friend has a family, a husband and daughter. They are happy, but when she sees her daughter, she had a strange desire to kill her. As a result, this lady began to visit psychologists for help. Finally, it was revealed that during the Holodomor famine of 1932-33, in order to survive, this woman’s grandmother killed and boiled her own child and saved the rest of her family from imminent death through this terrible act. Scientists claim that this is post-genocide trauma, which can appear through generations, as in the above case. 

The older generation, which miraculously survived those terrible times and the crimes of Stalinism, forever remembered them and never had any good feelings about the past. In official Soviet textbooks there is no mention of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine. This surprised the elderly people because they remembered the truth. They recalled it and remained silent, because it was the only way to avoid persecution by the Soviet government. Moreover, when the threat of hunger appeared again, after the Second World War in 1946-47, residents from Dnipro fled en masse to western Ukraine, where there were no collective farms yet.  

Russia’s new war against Ukraine, which has been going on for 11 years, also has a food dimension. Despite its terrible post-genocide heritage, Ukraine during all the years of its independence increased and restored its agricultural lands, on which it has cultivated grain not only for its own needs but also for exports. After the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russian troops began to massively export the captured grain and sell it as their own to the countries of the so-called Global South. At the same time, they were threatening to withhold the food exports, which could have created a famine in other parts of the world. This was a cynical move, as the previous crime against the Ukrainians as a nation was not punished by the international community. Moscow brazenly denied it in the 20th century, just as it does so now. 

The Holodomor crime was revealed thanks to the study of this terrible page of Ukrainian history. Research began in the 1980s in the United States and Canada via the Ukrainian diaspora. As a result, the US House of Representatives created an appropriate investigative commission. The late American historian James Mace and his British colleague Robert Conquest began to actively deal with this issue (Conquest’s book Harvest of Sorrow was published in 1986 was made available in Ukraine only in the mid-1990s). The historians’ works have left the world shaken. Later, at the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the results of research by Ukrainian academics, in particular Professor Stanislav Kulchytskyi, began to pop up. The most recent research on this issue belongs to the Japanese researcher Gioraki Kuromiya and the American-British researcher Anne Applebaum. Despite all the documentary evidence and conclusions of demographers and reports of western journalists from that time period, the Russian leadership and its fifth column in Ukraine – in the form of the Party of Regions, Communists and other political and public organizations – continue to deny the fact that an artificial famine took place on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.  

This policy of denial became even more aggressive after Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. The objection to this history intensified after the victory of the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. Of course, this took place following the Orange Revolution. Yushchenko, who Putin despised, was directly involved in promoting the international recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian nation, which annoyed the Kremlin even more. 

Second World War – two views, two memories 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, nostalgia for past greatness and international respect grew in Russia. The turbulent 1990s, especially in the early years, were marked by chaos across the post-Soviet space. Stability, something that most people in the former Soviet republics had been accustomed to, was in short supply. Russian citizens, in particular, felt this instability acutely, as they lost their dominant geopolitical status. Their president, Boris Yeltsin, appeared weak, especially on the international stage, evoking a sense of national humiliation rather than pride. Furthermore, Yeltsin’s critical stance on the Soviet past, highlighting repression and poverty, only deepened such discontent, particularly since economic hardships had not disappeared in post-Soviet Russia. 

Amid this uncertainty, one historical narrative remained untouchable: the mythos surrounding the Soviet-German war of 1941-45 (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War). After Vladimir Putin became president, the state’s approach to historical memory shifted. Stalin’s image gradually underwent rehabilitation – portrayed as an “effective manager” whose brutal policies, while acknowledged, were justified in pursuit of the grand objective of building up a superpower. Once again, as in the late Brezhnev era, May 9th, the day commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, took on a near-sacred significance. Large military parades in Red Square became a way of showcasing Russia’s military might as the rightful heir to the Soviet Union’s legacy. 

At the same time, the early years of the Second World War (1939-1941) and the controversial Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – including its secret protocols – were reinterpreted by Russian propaganda and pro-Kremlin historians like Aleksandr Dugin. They argued that the pact was a necessary measure to protect the Soviet Union from western aggression. This narrative helped fuel a creeping emphasis purely on the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, downplaying the contributions of the Allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. 

By 2010, then as prime minister, Putin reinforced this revisionist narrative, claiming in a televised speech that the Red Army would have defeated Nazi Germany even without Ukrainian participation. This was yet another attempt to instil in Russians a belief in their nation’s exclusive role in the victory. Putin also sought to rehabilitate Stalin’s legacy by referencing his famous post-war toast to the “great Russian nation”. Meanwhile, Russian propaganda repeatedly accused Ukraine of collaboration with the Nazis – sometimes citing real cases, but often fabricating or exaggerating them. Particular focus was placed on nationalist movements such as those led by Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk, while conveniently omitting the existence of the Russian Liberation Army (RLA), led by the former Soviet General Andrei Vlasov. This was also the case regarding numerous other pro-Nazi Russian paramilitary units, including Cossack formations. 

To justify the Soviet Union’s joint invasion of Poland with Nazi Germany in September 1939, Putin recently claimed that Poland had provoked Hitler’s aggression by refusing to meet his demands, thereby “forcing” Germany to act. This revisionist argument serves not only to rewrite history but also to rationalize Russia’s own modern aggression against Ukraine – using pretexts strikingly similar to those employed by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union against interwar Poland. Increasingly, Putin’s regime draws ideological inspiration from both Soviet totalitarianism and elements of Nazi rhetoric. As early as 2017, fringe circles in Russia began discussing an ideology blending Orthodox Christianity, communism and fascism. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this concept became widely known as “Rashism”. 

Following Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the country began observing May 8th as a Day of Remembrance for those who perished in the Second World War. May 9th remained Victory Day, but public discourse around these dates evolved. Efforts were made to educate the public on their differing historical meanings, while emphasizing that May 9th is also Europe Day. This was a clear signal of Ukraine’s shift towards European integration and a rejection of Russia’s historical narratives. 

 Orthodox Church and Russkiy mir 

It is worth recalling that the temporary subordination of the Kyiv Metropolis to the Moscow Patriarchate in the second half of the 17th century occurred with significant violations of canon law. Kyiv Metropolitan Sylvestr was sceptical of the alliance between the Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Tsardom of Moscow, formed in 1654 at Pereyaslav, as he foresaw the dangers this posed to the autonomy of the Kyiv Metropolis. 

Throughout the 20th century, Ukrainians made repeated efforts to restore an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church free from Moscow’s control. This movement gained momentum in the final years of the Soviet Union. In 1990, Metropolitan Mstyslav (Stepan Skrypnyk) returned to Ukraine from the United States and was elected Patriarch of Kyiv and All Rus-Ukraine at a church council. This moment marked the beginning of an intense struggle between Kyiv and Moscow – not only for the religious allegiance of believers but also for control over church property and financial resources. Both sides engaged in historical debates and, at times, the blatant manipulation of facts.  

As a result of these disputes, three Orthodox institutions were officially registered in Ukraine, each incorporating the name “Orthodox Church”: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) – which remained in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate; the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP); and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). 

According to Orthodox canon law, the UOC-KP and UAOC were considered non-canonical by the broader Orthodox world, a status reinforced by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which worked actively to prevent their recognition by other local Orthodox churches. To justify its influence over Ukraine’s religious sphere, the ROC, alongside the ideologist Dugin, promoted the concept of Russkiy mir (“Russian world”). This ideology asserts that despite political borders, a shared “Russian spiritual and cultural space” exists, which is reinforced by religious unity. The Russkiy Mir Foundation was even established and before Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, its branches operated successfully within the country. 

The history of Crimea further illustrates how religion and historical revisionism have been used to justify Russia’s expansionism. During Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, both Putin and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church repeated pseudo-historical claims about Crimea’s supposed historical belonging to Russia. 

A key element of this historical manipulation revolves around the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’. Since 1988, Ukraine has celebrated the anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’, which took place in Kyiv, specifically in the waters of the Pochaina river (a tributary of the Dnipro). However, Moscow sought to challenge Kyiv’s historical primacy by emphasizing that Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir the Great) himself was baptized in Chersonesus (modern day Sevastopol, Crimea), which at the time belonged to the Byzantine Empire. By promoting the idea that the “true” baptism of Rus’ occurred in Crimea rather than Kyiv, Moscow laid an ideological foundation for its later annexation of the peninsula – making Crimea the first victim of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. 

Despite strong opposition from Patriarch Kirill and the Kremlin, Ukraine successfully advanced its push for ecclesiastical independence. In December 2018, a historic Local Council was convened at St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, bringing together representatives of three Orthodox Churches. While almost all hierarchs of the UOC (Moscow Patriarchate) boycotted the event, two metropolitans – Simeon (Shostatskyi) and Oleksandr (Drabynka) – did participate. The UOC-KP and UAOC were fully represented. 

At the council, Metropolitan Epiphaniy (Serhiy Dumenko) was elected as the primate of the newly unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). On January 6th 2019, in Istanbul, he received the Tomos of Autocephaly from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, officially granting the OCU independence from the Moscow Patriarchate. The process of promoting the international recognition of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine continues, despite ongoing resistance from the Russian Orthodox Church and its political backers. 

Rediscovering lost history 

As Ukrainians took their first steps in exploring their own history, they began uncovering a wealth of previously forbidden topics and figures. Ukraine rediscovered its own writers, such as Ulas Samchuk, Ivan Bahrianyi, and the authors of the “Executed Renaissance”, along with the works of Vasyl Stus. Omeljan Pritsak, who had founded the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, returned to Ukraine from the United States and brought with him decades of scholarship on Ukrainian history. 

Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence, the exchange of academic research between Ukrainian and western historians became possible. This significantly contributed to shaping Ukraine’s historical policy. While initially chaotic, this effort later became more structured and institutionalized. Scholars began publishing the works of the historian Ivan Krypiakevych without censorship; reprinting Mykhailo Hrushevskyi’s ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’; and translating and publishing Ukraine: A History by the Canadian historian of Ukrainian descent Orest Subtelny. 

Following the Orange Revolution, during Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, Ukraine’s historical policy and memory politics began to take shape. However, much of the society did not fully grasp the president’s initiatives, expecting him to focus instead on economic development and improving living standards. Many citizens did not take the time to read the constitution, which outlines the president’s actual powers. As a result, Yushchenko prioritized historical policy as a key aspect of Ukraine’s international strategy. 

To support this effort, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory was established, which was modelled after Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. However, the development of the Ukrainian institute was slow, and it only became fully operational after the Revolution of Dignity under the leadership of Volodymyr Viatrovych. Despite its importance, the institute has faced chronic underfunding. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its activities nearly came to a halt, as its current chairman, Anton Drobovych, joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces to fight on the front lines. 

To address gaps in Ukraine’s memory and historical policy, young scholars launched an initiative called the Open School of History. This educational programme, described as a “historical front”, has been supported by young Polish researchers from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the University of Warsaw, who have helped organize public lectures in various Ukrainian cities. 

Why does memory politics matter so much to the Kremlin? Historically, the Romanov dynasty sought every possible means – legitimate or otherwise – to link the origins of the Russian Empire to medieval Kyivan Rus’ and its rulers, such as Prince Volodymyr and Prince Yaroslav. However, when Catherine II ordered that all ancient chronicles from monasteries across the empire, especially those in Ukrainian lands, be sent to St Petersburg, scholars found no solid historical evidence of Moscow’s connection to Rus’. After these original documents disappeared, new “copies” of the chronicles mysteriously emerged, now featuring references to Moscow, Vladimir, and other elements that conveniently aligned with Russian imperial narratives. In the Ukrainian online space, there is a popular joke that Moscow, officially only 850 years old, is desperately trying to convince Kyiv, a city with over 1,500 years of history, that it is actually part of Russia’s original homeland. 

Oleksii Lionchuk is a historian and teacher. He has a PhD from the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian University (Poland) and graduated with a master’s degree in history from Rivne State University of Humanities (Ukraine).  

history, Holodomor, Ukraine