The Ukrainian cross-dressing and language-mixing pop star Verka Serduchka (played by male actor Andrii Danylko) is the most controversial product of Ukrainian post-Soviet mass culture. Ukrainian nationalists reject Serduchka as a parody of their nation, while Russians took umbrage at her 2007 Eurovision entry, which allegedly contained the words “Russia goodbye.” This article interprets the character of Serduchka as a jester, who makes audiences laugh at their own cultural stereotypes and prejudices, and at the same time as a representative of Ukraine's living folk culture reflecting an ambiguous national identity of this essentially bilingual country.
SUMMARY: Taking as its point of departure the 2015 “decommunization” legislation in Ukraine, this article looks at the transformation of historical memory in that republic from the late 1980s to the present. The author argues that the new canon of national heroes developed through the gradual transformation rather than the radical rejection of Soviet historical narratives, with the Cossacks being the most successful example of a historical symbol supporting a uniting, civic identity for a new Ukraine. Two case studies are used to demonstrate the challenges of merging the nationalist mythologies preserved in the Ukrainian diaspora with the models inherited from Soviet times: that of diaspora-funded films about the Ukrainian insurgents of the 1940s and the cult of the otamans developed by a network of regional historical clubs in central Ukraine. Both projects produced highly divisive historical mythologies that often employed incongruent cultural models reusing the Soviet clichés. Both also constructed an ethnically exclusive vision of Ukraine’s past, as opposed to an inclusive, civic one. The Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine and the subsequent war in the Donbas gave a powerful impetus to the process of memory work in Ukraine, while at the same time furnishing the inclusive, multinational canon of the “Heavenly Hundred,” who died for a democratic Ukraine. However, there exists a very real danger that the process of constructing a new Ukrainian historical memory can be hijacked by radical nationalists or discredited by Soviet-style administrative feats. Отталкиваясь от сюжета с принятием весной 2015 г. в Украине “исторических” законов, направленных на десоветизацию общества, статья обращается к проблеме трансформации исторической памяти в республике, начиная с конца 1980-х гг. и до настоящего времени. Согласно автору, новый канон национальных героев сформировался в результате постепенной трансформации, а не радикального оттор-жения советских исторических нарративов. Казаки служат наиболее удачным примером исторического символа, приспособленного для обоснования единой гражданской идентичности новой Украины. Труд-ности совмещения националистических мифов, культивировавшихся в украинской диаспоре, с советским историческим наследием иллю-стрируются двумя историями: о производстве на средства диаспоры художественных фильмов об украинских повстанцах 1940-х гг. и культе “отаманов”, продвигаемом сетью региональных исторических клубов в Центральной Украине. Оба проекта предлагают крайне поляризующие исторические мифологии, зачастую использующие несовместимые культурные модели, эксплуатирующие советские клише. Оба формули-руют этнически эксклюзивное видение прошлого Украины в противо-положность инклюзивному, гражданскому. Революция Евромайдана и последующая война на Донбассе дали новый важный толчок процессу работы над исторической памятью в Украине. Они способствовали оформлению нового инклюзивного, многонационального канона Не-бесной сотни, погибшей за демократическую Украину. Тем не менее, сохраняется весьма реальная угроза того, что процесс конструирования новой украинской исторической памяти будет захвачен радикальными националистами или дискредитирован административными усилиями в советском стиле.
This article analyzes the early stage of the Ukrainian “sixtiers” movement as a semi-autonomous space of cultural expression that was tolerated by the authorities and defined, developed, and inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals. In contrast to present-day Ukrainian representations of the sixtiers as a force acting in opposition to the Soviet regime, the spatial angle employed here reveals an ambiguous relationship with official institutions. The Ukrainian Komsomol organization in particular appears to be both a controlling and an enabling agent that, together with the Writers' Union, provided meeting venues for the sixtiers until the mid-1960s. This complex symbiotic relationship continued even after some creative youth pioneered the first attempts to claim public space for cultural events without the authorities' permission. The cultural terrain inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals was not fully separate from mainstream Soviet Ukrainian culture or in opposition to it, although their vibrant cultural space also reached into a world of non-conformist culture unregulated by the state. A series of government crackdowns beginning in the mid-1960s dramatically shrank this open, ambivalent space of semi-free cultural expression, imposing firm boundaries and forcing intellectuals to make political choices.
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