DOI: 10.18503/2658-3186-2021-5-4-101-109
Abstract. Creating a new national narrative was the key element of nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The post-Soviet history research was thematized by antitotalitarian attitudes and the political need for new symbols, new heroes, victories and tragedies to build the nation. The new narrative challenging Soviet myths was created on the basis of declassified Soviet archives, witness testimonies, studies issued from the Ukrainian diaspora of North America and pre-Soviet concepts. The article is based on the historiographical and historical works published during the post-Soviet period (1991-2021). The research aim is to identify new approaches, new pertinent subjects, new argumentation that distinguish the historiography of Ukraine from the Soviet and the Russian narratives. More detailed analyses are applied to the concepts that have been instrumentalized by Ukrainian politicians and filled the canon version of Ukrainian history with ideas. They are the history of Kiev Rus as a proto-Ukrainian state, the Cossack Upspring and The Treaty of Pereyaslav as the first Ukrainian nation-building project and the famine of 1932-1933 as the biggest tragedy of Ukrainian history. It is concluded that post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography is engaged in a nation-building project, while the international context actualizes new approaches, including those eliciting and deconstructing national myths and cultural frontiers. The article can be interesting to specialists interested in Ukrainian history and memory studies.
Keywords: Ukraine, historiography, national myth, national narrative, nationalism, history, memory studies, post-Soviet studies.
Author:
Tatiana G. Pashkovskaya, Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor at the Department of World History, Institute of Humanities, Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University (NMSTU), Magnitogorsk, Russia; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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For citation
Pashkovskaya T. G. Post-Soviet Ukrainian Historiography: The New Canon of National History, Gumanitarno-pedagogicheskie issledovaniya [Humanitarian and pedagogical Research], 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 101–109.