Legacies of Stalin or Putin? Public Opinion and Historical Memory in Ukraine

Abstract

Our research considers the relationship between historical memory and political evaluations of the past and present. We first examine how historical reflection on the Soviet Union under Stalin is influenced by memories of familial suffering during World War II and victimization under the widespread Soviet gulag prison system. Based on a 2019 representative survey of Ukraine, we show that respondents who recall family members being injured or killed fighting during World War II and those who recount families being imprisoned in Soviet gulags have increased positive and negative appraisals of the Soviet Union under Stalin respectively. However, we also find that favorable opinions of Stalin are strongly predicted by approval of Vladimir Putin, who has actively promoted rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy to bolster personalist rule at home and justify revisionist agendas abroad, including in Ukraine. Our results underscore interactions between the present and past in shaping historical memory such that what appears as enduring legacies of the past could also be a function of present political circumstances.

Citizens and Peace Mediations in Divided Societies: Identifying Zones of Agreement through a Conjoint Survey Experiment

“…Those could be supported by grassroots and victim-oriented consultations to safeguard the rights of those affected by conflicts, for example, by introducing census platforms to collate property data and preferences for compensation, exchange, or restitution, across dispossessed property owners and users and by targeting international aid for displaced persons and refugees. While several studies have pointed to the impact of historical legacies on public opinion we know very little about the interaction of legacies with other variables (Grossman et al 2015; Shkliarov et al 2021; see also Haass et al. Introduction to this special feature section).…”

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

“…Whereas earlier work centered on analyzing party documents or official speeches (Art 2006;Berger 2012;Bernhard and Kubik 2014), the newer wave of scholarship features a plethora of conceptual and methodological approaches. They include examining how present-day attitudes and behaviors are rooted in the legacies of communism (Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2017), assessing how the narration of history becomes a resource for populists (e.g., Kralj 2021;Elçi 2021), and interrogating the link between the attitudes individuals exhibit toward authoritarian precedents and their approval of contemporary autocrats (Shkliarov, Mironova, and Whitt 2021).…”

“…The centrality of the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany remains essentially unchallenged even by younger generations (Krawatzek 2021), suggesting the successful intergenerational transmission of an uncritical war narrative. But although the Kremlin today tightly controls the framing of World War II, including in school textbooks (Khodnev 2019) and the media (McGlynn 2020), Russians still hold diverging opinions about the Soviet period, depending on factors such as their political attitudes (Shkliarov, Mironova, and Whitt 2021) and family background (Gerber and Laruelle 2021;Gerber and van Landingham 2021).…”

“…past. Among others, Gerber and Laruelle (2021), Gerber and van Landingham (2021), Shkliarov, Mironova, and Whitt (2021), Kitagawa and Chu (2021), and Krawatzek (2021) have contributed to shifting our focus to those who are on the receiving end of memory politics by studying the narratives that prevail across society. Our article builds on this scholarship by fielding two vignette experiments, allowing us to understand, respectively, whether Russians believe that a person who makes a historical statement that conflicts with an established mnemonic norm should be punished and whether the assessment of such a statement differs depending on the legal context and the identity of the speaker.…”