Kiev, Maydan Nezalezhnosti, November 2016. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.Almost a third of a century has passed since the collapse of the USSR, and like never before, the symbolic legacy of the 1917 October revolution is at the centre of Ukraine’s political discourse. The protests on Kyiv’s Maidan and ensuing conflict with Russia have reawakened, to use the eminent theorist of nationalism Ernest Gellner’s metaphor, the Sleeping Beauty – the Ukrainian nation – from the “mystic sleep” she seemed to have fallen into after the 2005 Orange Revolution. New, ambitious projects await – among themffecting a final break with the Soviet past.
Why, after all this time, is the Soviet legacy in Ukraine still just about “Public Enemy No 1”? And why does dealing with it require a strategy of revolutionary propaganda on a truly Leninist scale?
In fact, perhaps it’s precisely the practices of decommunisation which best reflect the social and political climate in post-Maidan Ukraine – and not least, the country’s complex relations with its neighbours.
