Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society – serie

CONTENTS Special Issue: Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance. Part I Guest editor: Yuliya Yurchuk Introduction. Understanding Ukrainian Spirit: Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance and Resilience Yuliya Yurchuk Feeding the Feed: How Food Memes Reflect Resilience in Daily Life in a War-torn Ukraine Daria Antsybor and Michel Bouchard Cultural Memory and Decolonization: The Case of the Motherland Monument in Kyiv Yana Prymachenko The Pain of Courage: Re-Imagining Militarization and Masculinity in Ukrainian Digital Illustrations of Soldiers Colby Fleming This special issue proposes to approach Ukrainian resistance from the cultural studies perspective. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who address different aspects of resilience and resistance focusing on gender, humor, literature, visual representations, and memes. The authors approach these widely circulated images and narratives as expressions of deep cultural structures that produce meanings. They are rooted in history, past lived experiences, and societal structures that govern human activities and interactions. These images and narratives signal changes in the self-perception of people and shifts in worldviews shattered by war. Although the material analyzed by the authors is very different, they all come to the main overarching conclusion: Ukrainians at time of war actively renegotiate their identities and recalibrate their understanding of history and the place of Ukraine in the world. Overall, the special issue contributes to the discussions on Ukrainian resistance relying on the evidence found in the grassroots local context. The articles collected here shed light on the deeper structures that enable production of images and narratives that we see on the surface. These structures are rooted in history, cultural memory, gender regimes, and politics. These structures too undergo renegotiations, transformation, and recalibration. To a certain extent, the articles not only analyze but also document and archive the cultural products created by Ukrainian society in the first years of the full-fledged invasion. As such, they will be also valuable as historical sources to be used by researchers in the future.

This issue is on the downplaying of Russian nationalism, misinterpretations of the 2014 crisis, sympathetic portrayals of Crimea's occupation, and the use of the term "civil war" rather than "Russian-Ukrainian war" for the Donbas conflict.