Pamięć o drugiej wojnie światowej i jej odmiany we współczesnej Ukrainie
Memories in World War II in contemporary Ukraine

Summary/Abstract: In post-Soviet Ukraine one can observe the coexistence, competition and interplay of various images and memories of World War II. The modified Soviet scheme remains the most influential despite the problems with adaption of the notion of the victorious country with the notion of Ukraine as the victim of two totalitarianisms. And this scheme has to interact with the memories of nationalistic underground in East Galicia and Volhynia as well specific memories of the Crimean Tatars and the Jews. Ukraine`s salvatory pluralism of memory functions not as a space for dialogue but rather as a number of closed and mutually exclusive narratives. In their struggle both post-Soviet and nationalistic narratives tend to avoid the questions of their own responsibility: for pogroms, deportations or mass killings. The lack of the social and political consensus over the image of World War II, on the one hand, complicates the formation of the all-Ukrainian vision of the past, but, on the other hand, prevents from the one-sided instrumentalization of such vision.

• Details
• Contents