SUMMARY:

Serhy Yekelchyk’s article proceeds from the assumption that an imperial state creates room for the articulation of ethnic difference rather than pursues some kind of an assimilationist project. Moreover, the imperial rule necessitates the development of homogenizing and essentializing devices such as “India” or “Ukraine” that are useful both for the imperial definitions of what or who is being ruled and for the indigenous elites. The author argues that understanding Stalinist historical memory as a subspecies of an imperial discourse allows us to make sense of the hierarchy of many national pasts within it. Moreover, such an approach also throws some new light on the question of agency in the Stalinist cultural production. In the article, bureaucrats and intellectuals in the republics who interpreted the vague yet powerful signals from the Kremlin emerge as major players in the shaping of the Stalinist historical imagination. In his assessment of the role of this social group, Yekelchyk relies on the insights from post-colonial theory, which, in his view, is particularly helpful for making sense of the limits and possibilities in the promotion of non-Russian historical memory under Stalinism. Yekelchyk shows that the Stalinist project of memory was disadvantaged from the beginning by the state’s inability to control individual interpretations of historical narratives. But this was not its only problem. When in the 1930s the Stalinist USSR became the self-conscious successor of the Russian Empire, it had to incorporate into its narrative the story of tsarist conquests and territorial acquisitions. However, it never quite reconciled this narrative with the previous notion of “class history” or with the separate historical mythologies of the non-Russian peoples. In addition, residual counter-memories of the pre-Bolshevik nationalist historical narratives survived in Ukraine well after World War II. The German occupation further undermined the Soviet authorities’ control over public memory. The Kremlin sought to prescribe and homogenize social memory, but internal tensions within the Stalinist historical narrative and their inability to prescribe only one possible reading of cultural products undermined their efforts. The authorities could not fix the meaning of the past, from which the Soviet nations supposedly got their sense of orientation for the future. In the end, the Stalinist empire of memory was kept together by state intimidation – and began disintegrating as soon as the threat of political violence was removed. Yekelchyk develops these arguments in the sections of the article dedicated to the post-war pantheon of “Ukrainian classics”, Sovietization of Ukranian museums and the mnemo-projects of monuments and memorials.