The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine

Traditions and Dimensions from the First World War to Today

Guido Hausmann, Iryna Sklokina, Guido Hausmann, Iryna Sklokina

• Publisher: V&R Unipress
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783847113836
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783847013839
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

The Ukrainian Euromaidan in 2013–14 and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war in the Eastern part of the country have posed new questions to historians. The volume investigates the relevance of the cults of the fallen soldiers to Ukraine's national history and state. It places the dead of the Euromaidan and the forms and functions of the emerging new cult of the dead in the context of older cults from pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet times from various Ukrainian regions until the end of the presidency of Petro Poroshenko in 2019. The contributions emphasize the importance of the grassroot level, of local and regional actors or memory entrepreneurs, myths of state origin and national defense demanding unity, and the dynamics of commemorative practices in the last thirty years in relation to pluralist and fragmented processes of nationand state-building. They contribute to new conceptualizations of the political cult of the dead.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Body
• Preface
• Guido Hausmann (Regensburg): The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine. An Introduction
• Andrii Liubarets (Kyiv): How to Exploit the Dead: Commemorating the Battle of Kruty from 1918 to the Present
• Jagoda Wierzejska (Warsaw): The Cult of the Lviv Eaglets and Contested Memories of the Battle of Lviv in the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939)
• Iryna Sklokina (Lviv): Commemorating the Glorious Past, Dreaming of the Happy Future: WWII Burial Sites and Monuments as Public Places in Post-War Ukraine
• Olena Petrenko (Bochum): Death as the “Majestic Finale of a Heroic Life”: Making Sense of Imminent Demise in Battle among Ukrainian Nationalists (1920s–1950s)
• Kateryna Kobchenko (Kyiv): Soviet Heroines of the Second World War: Their Making and Remaking in Ukraine
• Polina Barvinska (Odesa): Uses of the Past. The Fallen Soviet Soldiers and Sailors in Odesa
• Yuliya Yurchuk (Södertörn): From Subversive Memory to the Cult of Heroes: The Memory of the OUN and UPA in the Case of Hurby Battle Commemoration
• Olesya Khromeychuk (London): On the Periphery of History: Remembering the Waffen SS ˋGalicia' Division in Ukraine
• Ekaterina Makhotina / Philipp Bürger (Bonn): Making (Monumental) Sense of War: Memorials of the “Great Patriotic War” in the Soviet Union and in Post-Soviet Russia
• Oleksandra Gaidai (Kyiv): “Take Me to a Mausoleum”. Coping with Lenin's Statue in Poltava
• Oksana Myshlovska (Bern): The Sacralization of the Ukrainian Statehood and the Nation: The Cult of Stepan Bandera and the Fighters for Ukrainian Independence in Western Ukraine
• Serhy Yekelchyk (Victoria): The Heavenly Hundred: Fallen Heroes of the Euromaidan in Post-Revolutionary Ukraine
• Authors