Regime Changes of Memory: Creating the Official History of the Ukrainian and Chinese Famines under State Socialism and after the Cold War

Wemheuer, Felix

doi:10.1353/kri.0.0077

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…While Khrushchev himself failed to mention the famine in his "secret speech," in the more liberal climate of political "thaw" some Soviet historians-notably Danilov, Ivnitskii, and others-started to reassess the history of collectivization and addressed the issue of starvation for the first time. 9 In the Brezhnev era, historical revisionism was not welcome, and discussions on mass famines were limited to the dissident milieu. At the same time, the memory of the Holodomor became an instrument of the Cold War.…”

Section: Holodomor Nation Building and Regional Cleavages In Ukrainementioning

confidence: 99%

“Capital of Despair”

Zhurzhenko

2011

East European Politics and Societies

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The Great Famine of 1932—33, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor and silenced for decades by the Soviet regime, holds a special place in national memory. It was after the Orange Revolution that the Holodomor became the core of a new identity politics, which conceptualized the Ukrainian nation as a “postgenocide” community, a collective victim of the Communist regime. But the official interpretation of the Famine as a genocide met ambivalent responses in the regions. While formally complying with the official political line, the regional political elites in Eastern and Southern Ukraine often refused to accept the official interpretation of history and sabotaged orders coming from Kyiv. The present article focuses on the official commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Holodomor in Kharkiv, the former capital of Soviet Ukraine and epicenter of the famine. The “memory wars” in Kharkiv during 2006 to 2009 have revealed more than just tensions between the center promoting a new national identity and a reluctant “Sovietized” region adhering to its political mentality and commemorative culture. In fact, the official narrative of the Holodomor as a genocide and the corresponding memory regime have been contested, renegotiated, and modified on the regional level, through the conflicts and the bargaining of the local political actors. The borderland identity of Kharkiv, its geographic proximity to Russia, added an international dimension to the local memory wars as the Holodomor issue became a stumbling block in Ukrainian-Russian relations.

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Section: Holodomor Nation Building and Regional Cleavages In Ukrainementioning

confidence: 99%