Historiografia ukraińska. Doświadczenia sowietyzacji
Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość, Bd. 23 Nr. 1 (2014), pages: 401-429
Publication date: 2014-06-30
Abstract
The specifics of Ukrainian Soviet historiography is often reduced to the story of
repressions and censorship from above. In this article the authors try to question
this common approach and to show the complex dynamics in the history of Soviet
Ukrainian historiography in the context of Soviet national politics. Covering the
entire Soviet period (from early 1920s till the end of perestroika in the late 1980s)
the article seeks to explore the development of the institutions like Institute of
History of the Academy of Sciences, the History Departments at Soviet
universities, the Highest Attestation Commission (VAK), and the individual strategies
applied by various historians. The article examines the processes of imposing state
control and turning historical science in to an essential part of the state repressive
organism as well as logics of self-censorship, stylistic unification and struggle for
a limited spheres of non-conformism. In this respect special attention is devoted
to Lviv (finally incorporated into the Soviet Union only in 1940s) and its
intellectual influence. The Soviet specificity, a principal division between research
(ascribed to the Academy of Sciences) and teaching (the Universities), is analyzed
on various local examples: Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk. The developments in the
perestroika years and Ukrainian historians` response to the liberalization of the
Soviet regime are analyzed on both institutional and personal level. Post-Soviet
Ukraine inherited a centralized structure of the scientific institutions and decided
rather to fill them with a new ideological content than to go through painful and
systemic reforms. The new flags over initially the same institutions symbolized for
many the change of methodology and getting rid of Soviet heritage. The article
stresses a need to rethink a view of Soviet historiography as a collective victim of
totalitarianism and tends to conceptualize the paradoxical nature of post-Soviet
transformation in history writing.
Am häufigsten gelesenen Artikel dieser/dieses Autor/in
- Andrij Portnow, Memories of World War II in contemporary Ukraine , Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość: Bd. 19 Nr. 1 (2012)