This book explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival political movements also enter the picture insofar as their acitivities influenced Soviet policies. Methodologically, the study shifts attention from a limited body of normative texts and their creators within the Soviet political and cultural elite to a wider array of practices, organizations, and players engaged in power struggles and production of knowledge about the past in different social domains. Specifically, it brings into focus groups not normally thought of as participants in the production of Soviet memory discourse, notably NKVD officers, Soviet archivists, Ukrainian nationalists, Nazi collaborators, and former partisans in the German-occupied territories. The book not only demonstrates the complexity of nation-shaping processes, but also restores agency to some seemingly powerless actors.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Letter to Petro Vershyhora
- Table of Figures
- Note on Transliteration
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 The Second World War and the (Un-)Making of Political Communities
- 2 The Nationalist Challenge
- 3 Reckoning with War Criminality
- 4 Archives, Surveillance, and Historical Politics
- 5 Stalinist Justice as a Site of Memory
- 6 Partisans, “False Partisans,” and the Negotiation of Political Identities
- Epilogue History, Memory, and Legitimacy after 1945
- Sources
- Acknowledgements