Authors

Viktoriia Svyrydenko¹;  ¹ The University of Manchester, UK

Discussion

The Euro-Maidan and Russia-Ukraine conflict, has substantially impacted the Ukrainian national memory and identity. Except for active promotion of the decommunisation agenda, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINP), a leading state-affiliated mnemonic actor in Ukraine, has considerably broadened the repertoire of the historical periods it addresses. One of the new areas of the UINP’s memory politics are imperial legacies. Diverse territories of contemporary Ukraine over several centuries belonged to the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 encouraged 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. I focus on the visual narratives constructed in the context of the exhibition on Crimean Tatar culture, titled “A Journey through Unknown Crimea”, which was co-produced by the UINP and the Crimean Tatar NGO “Egridal” and held in Kyiv in August 2020. Arguing that the Russian imperial and Soviet domination over these territories brought intentional silencing of the prominent figures of the Crimean Tatar history, the exhibition promised to shed the light on “unknown,” Crimean Tatar, Crimea. Importantly, representing an example of an intense government-grassroots collaboration around civic nation-building issues and political mobilization at the time when the state is under threat of external aggression, the exhibition was also an attempt of the memory actors within the state of Ukraine to engage in the current decolonial trend within ‘the West,’ against the backdrop of Ukraine’s adversary, Russia, doubling-down on the promotion of old imperial and colonial narratives. I argue that, in the representation of the Crimean Tatar past, the exhibition takes an explicitly postcolonial perspective, reflected in: 1) negative attitude towards Russian Empire/Soviet Union/Russia; 2) victimhood as a central trope (deportation); 3) emphasis on the Crimean Tatar subjectivity; 4) hybridity of symbols, when the imperial symbols are combined with Crimean Tatar national symbols. Additionally, the exhibition’s approach demonstrates unreflective Soviet roots of ‘imagining the nation’ in the current anti-Soviet Ukraine and among the Crimean Tatar activists, whose relatives were direct victims of Soviet terror.