Authors
Viktoriia Svyrydenko1; 1 The University of Manchester, UK Discussion
The Euro-Maidan and Russia-Ukraine conflict has substantially impacted the process of constructing Ukrainian national memory and identity. Except for active promotion of decommunisation agenda, since 2014, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP), a major memory managing institution in Ukraine, has considerably broadened the repertoire of the historical periods it addresses in its activities. One of the new areas of the UINP’s memory politics became imperial legacies. Diverse territories of contemporary Ukraine over several centuries belonged to the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 prompted the UINP to have a closer look at this region over different periods, and specifically at the history of the Crimean Khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman empire, and its relevance to Ukrainian national memory. In this paper, I focus on different representations of the Ottoman imperial past in post-Euromaidan Ukraine through the framework of state propaganda and counter-propaganda production. The politics of memory in contemporary Ukraine to a significant extent, is shaped in response to Russia’s policies, practices and discourses. Narratives of Russian officials, and of the UINP, represent the examples of state propaganda and counter-propaganda. The dialogism between Russian official and Ukrainian memory discourses is traced on the level of three broader identitarian discourses: discourse of colonialism, discourse of imperialism, and civilizational discourse. Another methodological framework of my study is securitization. I argue that Ukrainian memory agents applied three interrelated discursive strategies: 1) securitization of discourses, 2) selective reading of the past events through the prism of today’s politics, and 2) dialogical relationship with official Russian narratives around the Crimea with the use of some of the same terminology with the inverted meaning. 
