Georgiy Kasianov - Böcker

This volume presents the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the collective memory of the Holodomor—the Ukrainian Great Famine of 1932-1933—examining its construction, evolution, and contestation across nearly a century. Moving beyond historical accounts of the event itself, this book interrogates how memories of this catastrophe have been shaped, mobilized, and interpreted within multiple discursive frameworks.Drawing on interdisciplinary methodological approaches from memory studies and political science, the author provides a rigorous examination of how the Holodomor has been constructed as social (cultural) memory by actors who challenged Soviet policies of enforced amnesia. This book illuminates the complex interrelationship between memory agents, political institutions, and commemorative practices while critically assessing the securitization of memory and its implications for academic discourse.This theoretically nuanced contribution to memory studies and Eastern European historiography will be indispensable for researchers and postgraduate students engaged with genocide studies, collective memory, post-Soviet politics, and the intersection of historical narrative and national identity formation.

This account of historical politics in Ukraine, framed in a broader European context, shows how social, political, and cultural groups have used and misused the past from the final years of the Soviet Union to 2020. Georgiy Kasianov details practices relating to history and memory by a variety of actors, including state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political parties, historians, and local governments. He identifies the main political purposes of these practices in the construction of nation and identity, struggles for power, warfare, and international relations.Kasianov considers the Ukrainian case in the context of a global increase in the politics of history and memory, with particular emphasis on a distinctive East-European variety. He pays special attention to the use and abuse of history in relations between Ukraine, Russia, and Poland.

A first attempt to present an approach to Ukrainian history which goes beyond the standard 'national narrative' schemes, predominant in the majority of post-Soviet countries after 1991, in the years of implementing 'nation-building projects'. An unrivalled collection of essays by the finest scholars in the field from Ukraine, Russia, USA, Germany, Austria and Canada, superbly written to a high academic standard. The various chapters are methodologically innovative and thought-provoking. The biggest Eastern European country has ancient roots but also the birth pangs of a new autonomous state. Its historiography is characterized by animated debates, in which this book takes a definite stance. The history of Ukraine is not written here as a linear, teleological narrative of ethnic Ukrainians but as a multicultural, multidimensional history of a diversity of cultures, religious denominations, languages, ethical norms, and historical experience. It is not presented as causal explanation of 'what has to have happened' but rather as conjunctures and contingencies, disruptions, and episodes of 'lack of history.'