Motivation
Historical analogies have figured prominently in Russian discourses attempting to justify the war in Ukraine (Krawatzek and Soroka Reference Krawatzek and Soroka2022a). Beyond the infamous claim of alleged Nazis ruling Ukraine, the Kremlin has tried to drum up support for its actions by imbuing patriotic appeals with historical references.Footnote 1 The seeming consensus in Russian society today on how to view the Great Patriotic War (Goode Reference Goode2021; Kratochvíl and Shakhanova Reference Kratochvíl and Shakhanova2020; Soroka and Krawatzek Reference Soroka and Krawatzek2021; Miller Reference Miller2023) explains why the Kremlin appeals to the Red Army’s fight against European fascism alongside political nostalgia for the Soviet era and rejects the Belovezh Accords, as Putin underlined during his speech welcoming the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics to Russia (2022):
In 1991, in the Belovezh Forest, without asking the will of ordinary citizens, representatives of the Party’s then-elites decided to bring down the USSR, and people suddenly found themselves cut off from their homeland. This tore apart and dismembered our people’s community, and turned into a national catastrophe.Footnote 2
However, emphasizing the historical elements that Russians share contains potential risks for the Kremlin. Making a narrative connection between the Great Patriotic War and the invasion of Ukraine could also destroy Russia’s foundational post-Soviet narrative. As Yevgeniya Albats emphasized after the revelation of the Bucha massacre, Russia’s actions in Ukraine will lay waste to:
… the myth of the liberators, which was the most important component of our self-identification, what lay at the very root of the national memory — regardless of whether you are a supporter of the regime or not. … Photographs of civilians who were shot, whose hands were first tied, and then shot in the back of the head and left like cattle in the street — we will not forget this, nor will they forget us.Footnote 3
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy likewise uses historical analogies abundantly when addressing domestic and international audiences. In speaking with foreigners, Zelenskyy tries to construct a shared mnemonic framework between Ukraine and its Western partners (Krawatzek and Soroka Reference Krawatzek and Soroka2022a). At home, meanwhile, Zelenskyy narrates the unity of the Ukrainian people as a historical community and appeals to common experiences in the face of persisting divisions that an exclusivist model of remembrance has hardened (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022). To some extent, today’s appeal to unity predicated on a civic, as opposed to a strictly ethnic, model of nationalism can build on the increased self-identification with Ukraine that has been observed among Russian speakers, even if linguistic practices had not necessarily changed before Russia’s invasion in 2022 (Kulyk Reference Kulyk2019a). This contrasts with earlier research using data from 2012, which identified language preferences (along with age) as an important factor for understanding country-level divisions when it comes to views on the Red Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Katchanovski Reference Katchanovski2021).
In contrast to the avalanche of economic, military, and political elite analyses devoted to Russia and Ukraine, assessments of the social reactions to official memory narratives remain rare. Most studies focus on elite discourse (Fedor et al. Reference Fedor, Kangaspuro, Lassila and Zhurzhenko2017; Harris Reference Harris2020; Klymenko Reference Klymenko2020; Kushnir Reference Kushnir2018; Kuzio Reference Kuzio2019; McGlynn Reference McGlynn2020), and although an important component, are only part of the picture. In order to fill this knowledge gap about the conditions that lead to specific historical attitudes, we analyze an original survey administered in January 2021 that allows for a better understanding of that baseline.
For Ukraine, we find a persistent division in historical attitudes among those who chose to take our survey in Russian as compared to those who took it in Ukrainian. For most questions, this division remains more important than any other socio-demographic factors or political attitudes. In the Russian case, mnemonic divides that could separate regime supporters from opponents are less pronounced. Even if differences of degree are (statistically) significant, these are not differences in kind. We identify important divisions within Russia that relate to age, gender, and the political interests of respondents, but still find a largely integrated mnemonic community.
The profound divisions over the past that characterize the official “relationship” between Ukraine and Russia, reflected in a highly politicized and antagonistic usage of history by both countries’ elites, also characterize divisions between both societies’ perception of the Soviet past. Evaluating these two countries is of political relevance and scholarly importance for the comparative literature on memory and national identity (Popova and Shevel Reference Popova and Shevel2023; Zubrzycki and Woźny Reference Zubrzycki and Woźny2020; Zhurzhenko Reference Zhurzhenko2010). The mnemonic consensus in the Russian case — which, among other things, favors a narrative that emphasizes commonalities between Russians and Ukrainians — is pronounced and does not encounter much social resistance or criticism, especially given an authoritarian public sphere. Hardly any counter-narratives circulate, even if the Kremlin cannot further instrumentalize history to create political support. However, an undisputed mnemonic consensus risks creating social apathy, as a result of which society becomes disengaged; personal frustration with politics may even sustain long-term disbelief in political efficacy (Zhelnina Reference Zhelnina2019).
Inversely, the Ukrainian case, based on our findings from early 2021, represents an ardently disputed internal mnemonic terrain, though political elites have, since the fall of the Soviet Union, consistently focused on justifying Ukraine’s sovereignty and statehood by contesting Russian claims to the contrary (Popova and Shevel Reference Popova and Shevel2023). Numerous narratives exist at the societal level, and the field of remembrance therein is fractured. These divides exist primarily along linguistic lines, but also include generational and gendered components; at the same time, Russian aggression appears to have meaningfully attenuated them in recent years. Yet whether waging defensive war against Russia will lead to these societal divisions disappearing remains to be seen in light of the country’s future developments.
Ukraine’s politics of history has found itself in “crisis mode” since at least 2005 (Liebich et al. Reference Liebich, Myshlovska, Sereda, Gaidai, Sklokina, Myshlovska and Schmid2019, 86-93), though the topic had been controversial even before the country gained independence (Shevel Reference Shevel2011). Mnemonic practices have been characterized by “the presence of strong elements of ethnic nationalism, populism in ideas and practices, a morbid sensitivity to the grievances and tragedies of the past, a blame game directed against neighbors, cultural complexes, and by a mix of nativism, isolationism, and a desire to borrow and repeat perceived ‘European practices’” (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2021, 338). Still, care must be taken to not misunderstand these dynamics, especially during and after the Maidan protests. For example, locating the rise of “radical” nationalism in a postcolonial paradigm, Törnquist-Plewa and Yurchuk argue that the presence of pro-OUN and UPA memory politics surrounding 2013/2014 should be seen as an “inversion of the colonial discourse,” suggesting that they are not primarily about registering support for the ideological stances or actions of these organizations but rather activating a societally resonant anti-Soviet narrative (2019, 4). It must also be acknowledged that a great deal of localized mnemonic variation was evinced after Maidan, rendering the overall paradigm concerning the past “an ambivalent amalgam of Soviet and national-Ukrainian discourses” (Chebotarova Reference Chebotarova2020, 123). Additionally, many discourses, as over the controversial renaming of streets and monuments following the 2015 passage of Ukraine’s decommunization laws, were driven more by current-day realities than actualizations of past grievances (Shapoval Reference Shapoval2021). Moreover, this mnemonic topography is not self-contained; the visibility of historical politics in Ukraine responds to domestic as well as international developments, notably Russia’s support for the separatist enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Competing narratives over the past have had important implications for international relations, both before and after 2022. For example, following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Polish grievances over the 1942-1945 massacres in Volhynia and eastern Galicia returned to public debate. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk intervened directly in the feud over history in July 2024 (which involved Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba), with Tusk underlining that Ukraine would stand no chance of gaining membership in the European Union without the exhumation and commemoration of the Polish victims of Ukrainian nationalists.Footnote 4 Clearly, confrontations over historical interpretations have significant cross-border repercussions (Götz and Staun Reference Götz and Staun2022; Krawatzek and Soroka Reference Krawatzek and Soroka2022b; Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2014; Kucia Reference Kucia2016; Platt Reference Platt2020). Moreover, discourses surrounding the past are often selectively received and instrumentalized to serve pre-existing domestic agendas when they travel to new contexts (Adams Reference Adams2022). In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, several countries in Central and Eastern Europe demolished Soviet-era monuments, including those dedicated to Russian writers and poets. The majority of these, however, were memorials that glorified Soviet military feats, placed on sites where large numbers of soldiers from the multiethnic Red Army (Bezugolny Reference Bezugolny2020) died while “liberating” that part of Europe (for example, in the Polish settlements of Siedlce or Międzybłocy). In the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking Estonian city of Narva, the relocation of a Soviet T-34 tank-cum-monument became an international incident after a period of disinformation and social agitation.Footnote 5 Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the removal of Russian symbols was more far-reaching; in cities such as Ternopil, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, or Mykolaiv, monuments to the poet Alexander Pushkin were dismantled, along with the removal of a monument to Maxim Gorky in Suspilne and a memorial plaque to Mikhail Bulgakov in Kyiv.Footnote 6
Identifying the conditions under which the politicization of history leads to social polarization or integration has implications for thinking about other cases. Across the globe, collective memory has become a vehemently contested political realm, particularly with the rise of the populist radical right (Dilling and Krawatzek Reference Dilling and Krawatzek2024). The analysis of Russia and Ukraine therefore provides potential insights for theorizing how the politics of history may play out further afield. Inversely, comparative insights illustrate how mnemonic fragmentations shift over time and demonstrate that they do not necessarily stand in the way of political unity, as the incompatible narratives over World War I between Flemings and Francophones demonstrate in the Belgian case, where the central government has shunned developing a strong national historical narrative as it would have fueled the country’s centrifugal forces (Kesteloot Reference Kesteloot2013).
The implications of this research are significant. We believe that irrespective of the eventual unfolding of the Russian war against Ukraine, any policy aimed at defining a social basis for post-war societies will need to address the pre-war mnemonic cleavages between, but also within, them. Whatever the political agenda, if it seeks to have some basic level of bottom-up support, it will need to take into account the broader mnemonic consensus at home and find a way to deal with the narratives present in neighboring countries.Footnote 7 Consequently, to entertain this debate, we must first understand the mnemonic structure in the two societies.
This piece relies on one of the few comparative surveys conducted simultaneously in Ukraine and Russia regarding how views on history relate to political attitudes. We jointly designed the respective country surveys, which were administered through the Berlin-based Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS). In the first section of this paper, we introduce the divergent ways in which narratives about key historical events of the Soviet era have evolved in Russia and Ukraine and present our specific argument. The second section discusses the data and our analytic strategy. In the third section, we present findings before concluding with a discussion of future directions this field of research may take.
Ukraine and Russia: A Tale of Two post-Soviet Realities
Authority over historical narrative and the public symbols that encapsulate it is a key expression of the identity of any national community, and political leaders strive to control this authority domestically as well as internationally. Consequently, the recognition of such a narrative is a crucial element in establishing the political and societal legitimacy of any state.Footnote 8 Russia’s war against Ukraine also demonstrates that wider social and political dynamics within and between both countries, in particular those related to issues of national identity and conflicts over historical interpretation, require more in-depth study. However, the historical narratives that political discourse generates, and their heterogeneous impact on local societies, have received scant attention when it comes to the analysis of the post-Soviet space (Laruelle Reference Laruelle2021). Sometimes academic historians have themselves — unintentionally or not — contributed to uncritically reproducing government-sponsored Russian historical narratives about Ukraine (Zayarnyuk Reference Zayarnyuk2022) or, inversely, of a one-sided and ethno-nationalist Ukrainian narrative (Himka Reference Himka, Miller and Lipman2012; Yurchuk Reference Yurchuk2021).
The goal of this section is to disentangle the official interpretations of the Soviet past as they shape the Russian and Ukrainian mnemonic landscape and to assess the extent to which these are multidimensional in nature. We likewise trace how they have changed over time. In Russia, we argue, historical narratives have become increasingly uniform — after experiencing some heterogeneity during the Yeltsin era — and turned into a key matter for the securitization of domestic politics. By 2022, the dominant Russian historical narrative included a positive assessment of the Soviet era overall, alongside a nationalization of history that downplayed the significance of international allies (and, indeed, the multiethnic nature of the Red Army itself) during World War II. In Ukraine, the trajectory of narratives about the Soviet past is very different, with a profound turn away from the historical representations of the Soviet era as a result of the Orange Revolution and especially after the 2013-14 Maidan protests (Chuprinova, Sevruk and Sokolvska Reference Chuprinova, Sevryk and Sokolovska2024). Controversies within Ukraine over how to assess the Soviet period began already in the late 1980s, and until the Maidan protests, substantial heterogeneity persisted on both political and societal levels. In due course, however, the heterogeneity in political discourse largely disappeared. In both countries historical narratives, albeit now interpreted differently, remain focused on key events of the Soviet era, the repercussions of which we assess through our survey.
Russian politicians actively create and disseminate historical narratives; furthermore, they have conceived of mechanisms to punish the voicing of discordant viewpoints. Over the last decade, Moscow has forcefully limited the range of permissible statements about the Soviet period,Footnote 9 most obviously via the imposition of punitive memory laws that enable the state to imprison or fine those who deviate from the government-sponsored view.Footnote 10
Russian President Vladimir Putin likes to portray himself as a historian, one who regularly expresses his thoughts about Russia’s past and its place in the world. However, Putin uses history in an essentializing manner and does not strive for an understanding of the complex and entangled legacies that characterize Eastern Europe. His account is teleological and propagandistic, presenting a one-sided interpretation of the past that is immune to new insights and methodological approaches and exclusively serves to justify present-day political claims at home and abroad (Soroka and Krawatzek Reference Krawatzek2021). Putin deploys history not so much to guide his political decisions as to justify them. The emphases he gives to past events change over time, and his speeches on historical topics should therefore “be seen first of all as communicative political acts” (Miller Reference Miller2023, 72).
The Russian president’s rhetoric surrounding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine replicates previously established patterns. In July 2021, Putin questioned the very existence of a Ukrainian nation in an article to which the punditocracy granted great attention.Footnote 11 This article — one of the few on the Kremlin’s webpage available in Ukrainian — portrays Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus as comprising “essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” with Putin asserting “we are one people” through references to an abstract medieval history distorted by a healthy dose of presentism and predicated on the exigencies of Russia’s contemporary foreign policy. When Putin writes that “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus’,” he ignores the long history that separates today’s three Eastern Slavic nation-states and the fact that appealing to Rus’ for legitimacy is in fundamental conflict with any claims for the territorial legitimacy of any modern nation-state. Putin also conveniently dismisses the fluid character of national identities as discursive constructions (Wodak Reference Wodak2009) and ignores the Ukrainian national awakening of the 19th century (Kuzio Reference Kuzio2006; Zayarnyuk and Sereda Reference Zayarnyuk and Sereda2022), which paralleled what was occurring across other Central and East European societies (Janowski Reference Janowski2000; Judson Reference Judson, Judson and Rozenblit2005; Miller and Lipman Reference Miller and Lipman2012).Footnote 12
Scholars such as Volodymyr Kulyk have further emphasized the importance of Tsarist-era patterns of argumentation that deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation in the Kremlin’s rheotric, alongside the promulgation of the cult of the Great Patriotic War — used by Moscow’s propagandists to ostensibly discredit Ukrainians as “Nazis” — for justifying Russia’s war in Ukraine (Reference Kulyk2023). As a result, ideas espoused by commentators like Alexander Dugin (Reference Dugin1997) regained visibility, and with it, a Ukrainophobic and Eurasianist discourse transmitted by the Kremlin-controlled media and various political actors.
Ukraine’s 2004-2005 Orange Revolution, which brought Viktor Yushchenko to power instead of the Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych, marks a major tipping point in the politicized use of historical narratives.Footnote 13 While de-Sovietization and pluralization of the past had been ongoing in Ukraine since the 1980s (Shevel Reference Shevel2011), it markedly accelerated with Yushchenko’s presidency.
For some interpreters, the version of Ukrainian history that developed after the independence of 1991 produced a problematic vision of the past that was “inevitably essentialist and culturally exclusivist in the sense that it construed the history of Ukraine as the history of ethnic Ukrainians, largely ignoring the other peoples who have inhabited the country’s terrain” (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2015, 149). Others have construed the growing focus on Ukrainian ethno-history as a much-needed, and indeed inevitable, corrective to the hegemony of Soviet accounts established over many decades (Törnquist-Plewa and Yurchuk Reference Törnquist-Plewa and Yurchuk2019). These radically opposed — both in terms of the ways in which past events were interpreted and how subsequent discourses regarding them were understood — and geographically unequally distributed visions of Ukrainian history could coexist in relative peace as long as disputes remained confined to the political arena, a condition that changed with the Orange Revolution. In its aftermath, the politics of ethno-symbolism expanded and became part of Ukrainians’ collective memory. For some of the Russian and Russian-speaking population, Yushchenko’s politics constituted a violation of their status in Ukraine. Simultaneously, the political elites carrying these resentments found a powerful ally in the Russian president, who increasingly reached out to groups that identified with a Russian cultural complex, but that resided beyond the country’s borders. As a result, Yushchenko’s warrior-like promotion of a de-Sovietized interpretation of the past that was not beholden to a Russocentric pan-Slavicism but instead stressed Ukrainian victimhood was severely criticized not only by Russian but also Polish politicians (Kulyk Reference Kulyk2019b, 1034).
Over time, the importance of debates concerning history as part of Ukrainian politics and public discourse kept growing. The 2013-2014 Maidan protests referenced a wide range of historical topoi, including the glorious Cossack past, Ukrainian victimhood at the hands of various colonizers, and the tendentious heroization of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and UPA leaders such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. The post-Maidan government led by Petro Poroshenko further embraced this agenda, as indicated by the adoption of a set of decommunization laws aimed at a profound reorientation of historical memory (Shevel Reference Shevel2016, 260). In the aftermath of these legislative changes, monuments to Communist-era figures were toppled across the country, while administrative units, streets, and public squares associated with the Soviet period were renamed after native sons and daughters associated with the fight for self-determination.
The key element of the Ukrainian commemorative landscape is the 1932-1933 famine (Holodomor), which has turned into “one of the constituting national historical myths” (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022, 218). Over the years, several attempts have been made to criminalize the denial of the Holodomor as genocide, culminating with President Viktor Yushchenko and the Verkhovna Rada recognizing the famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people on February 28, 2006.Footnote 14 However, this interpretation of the famine, opposed as it was to the late Soviet/current Russian narrative that it was a common tragedy of all those who resided in the USSR (it is important to highlight that initially the Soviet authorities denied that the famine had occurred altogether) and one that affected multiple regions, proved controversial. Nonetheless, it was also widely seen as a counterweight to externally imposed attempts to control Ukraine’s collective memory and a vindication of those Ukrainians who had been silenced for decades when it came to acknowledging the profound demographic and societal impacts of the famine, with alternative mnemonic currents already manifest in Ukraine by the late 1980s.
Exemplifying these discontinuities, Yushchenko’s successor in office, Viktor Yanukovych, stated at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in April 2010 that “it would be wrong and unfair to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation.”Footnote 15 Meanwhile, politicians who disavow this interpretation of the famine years, which is today dominant in Russia, have pushed for recognition of the Holodomor as genocide across the globe, in the process replicating the appeals made for recognizing the Holocaust as a means of not repeating the tragic mistakes of the past. The effort has been successful; a number of foreign states have recognized the Holodomor in this manner, with a prominent uptick evinced after Russia’s 2022 invasion.Footnote 16
But despite these internal fractures in recall, what is readily apparent today is that history continues to be exploited, first and foremost, for the benefit of bolstering and maintaining interstate conflicts. In the case of Ukraine, which is fighting an existential war against Russian aggression, this might be viewed as a legitimate practice to bolster a spirit of resistance among the population. By contrast, in the Russian case, the abuse of history serves to frame imperial ambitions as a natural continuation of a temporally transcendent national character, in the process violating the rules of the international order and creating physical as well as social destruction abroad and at home.
Analyzing Mnemonic Integration and fragmentation
Data: Capturing memory in surveys
Employing a sample of more than 2,000 individuals in both Russia and Ukraine, this paper examines how these societies relate to the politicization of historical topics. Our online surveys were fielded at the beginning of 2021 and were entirely devoted to testing attitudes toward historical figures and events through several continuous and categorical questions. Given their breadth and comparative dimension, this makes them, to the best of our knowledge, unique.Footnote 17
Individual respondents ranged from 18 to 65 years of age, resided in communities with more than 20,000 inhabitants, and were selected according to a quota sample meant to ensure they were representative of the underlying population in terms of gender, age, and place of residence relative to the above-noted parameters. We partnered with an established survey firm that has extensive experience working across the post-Soviet region and implemented the survey with strict quality controls during fieldwork. Respondents were drawn from actively managed consumer panels, which were subject to cross-validation of the relevant socio-economic data. Appropriate regression analyses were subsequently performed for each of the variables of interest (due to space constraints, the regression tables are part of the online appendix).
Analytic strategy
This article identifies the main cleavages that exist in Ukraine and Russia with regard to views on history. Its aim is to capture the factors that account for divergence on questions related to remembrance. In comparative perspective, we maintain that two different types of cleavages explain the absence or presence of mnemonic fragmentation in both countries.
Reflecting on previous research on social attitudes in Russia (Fabrykant and Magun Reference Fabrykant and Magun2019; Hale and Laruelle Reference Hale and Laruelle2020; Greene and Robertson Reference Greene and Robertson2022), we focus on an individual’s level of support for the Russian president as the main driving factor in understanding attitudes. Respondents who did not indicate their level of support for the president (that is, “don’t know” or refused responses) were classified based on a combination of trust in three other state or state-loyal institutions, namely traditional media such as newspapers and television, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Duma.Footnote 18 If respondents reported an exclusively positive or negative trust ranking relative to these three institutions, they were included in the respective pro- or anti-regime category. A few respondents indicated opposing views on their trust in these state institutions, in which case we added their view on the legitimacy of anti-government protests, leaving a total of only 68 respondents out of 2110 that could not be assigned to any of the two groups. Eventually, we arrived at a nearly equal distribution within our sample, with 1042 respondents classified as anti-regime and 1000 as pro-regime. It should be noted that while trust in key state institutions is an important indicator for the relationship between society and state, it possesses limited value for extrapolating to behavior and attitudes in the current Russian context, where such values are heavily disputed amidst ever-greater challenges to conducting meaningful research in the country (Rosenfeld Reference Rosenfeld2023).
We assume that regime supporters are overwhelmingly loyal to the historical interpretation that the Kremlin seeks to advance and protect, whereas those who are critical of the Kremlin will be more likely to advance deviant views. Given the overt politicization of the past in today’s Russia, we hypothesize that if anyone holds a critical stance on Russian history, it would be those who reject the political system in power — not because they would necessarily “know better,” but simply by virtue of being opposed to the political status quo. Nevertheless, a share of regime critics will support the government-sponsored historical view — in particular those that are older or religious — just as some regime supporters may be critical about the history-soaked political rhetoric that the Kremlin advances (Krawatzek and Soroka Reference Krawatzek and Soroka2024).
The results of our logistic regression convey that respondents who seek political information are more likely to support the regime, underlining that a higher interest in public affairs prevails among those who feel that their personal interests overlap with the political system around them, whereas those who oppose the system are more likely to withdraw from politics (see appendix). Moreover, those with higher levels of dependence on the system as it exists (via working in the public sector and/or having a relatively high disposable income) also tend to support the state (Rosenfeld Reference Rosenfeld2020), as do those who self-identify as religious. There is no statistically significant difference when it comes to age, gender, or whether a respondent has a higher education.
Turning to Ukraine, we split the sample by the language that respondents chose to respond to the survey in. Although the survey contains numerous questions on language use, the actual language respondents chose to have the survey administered in represents the most natural indication of linguistic preference. This question was asked on the landing page of the survey; out of 2052 respondents, 933 chose to take it in Ukrainian. Those who took the survey in Ukrainian were more likely to be younger than 35 years of age and were also more likely to live in the western part of the country or Kyiv. Furthermore, they tended to have attained higher levels of education, were more likely to seek out political information, and were also more likely to have higher trust values in various state institutions. By contrast, there is no statistically significant difference when it comes to gender, levels of wealth, or religiosity.
In Ukraine, we assume that the main difference concerning questions of remembrance is expressed by the language respondents completed the survey in. Language choices often serve as proxies for political and cultural preferences, though these can vary over time and depending on context (Arel Reference Arel2017). Caution is warranted, however, as this is not a clean dividing line: Speaking Russian in Ukraine may be either a practical accommodation or a political statement (or something in between). Nor are the distinctions between languages neatly coded. Instead, considerable overlap exists, and many in Ukraine speak an admixture of the two languages known as surzhyk, akin to something like “Spanglish” in an American context. Still, the language chosen for the survey is less subject to social desirability bias than questions about language use at home or the preferred language spoken with friends. Departing from this basic difference, we put the emphasis on further identifying socio-demographic variables while also accounting for the macro region in which the respondent lives. Indeed, the spatial fragmentation of Ukraine is striking when it comes to memory, with the anti-Soviet version of history remaining — despite all changes that have occurred and the rapid relative gains for this version of the past that have been evinced in the traditionally more Russified areas of the country — significantly more prominent in the Western part of Ukraine compared to the East and South.Footnote 19
We also examined the possibility of diverging political attitudes systematically relating to attitudes towards history among Ukrainian respondents; to do so, a parallel analysis to the one undertaken for the Russian sample was conducted by creating a variable that encompasses trust in several state institutions.Footnote 20 The results confirm our intuition about the salience of the linguistic divide, as attitudes towards the state are not statistically significant in any of the other models assessed for explaining differences in views on history.Footnote 21
Ukraine and Russia share in a long, intertwined, and complicated history, and as a result, their societies have experienced deep cultural as well as economic exchanges, with a significant amount of cross-border mobility, intermarriage, and travel evinced between the two countries prior to February 2022 (Bessudnov and Monden Reference Bessudnov and Monden2021; Libanova Reference Libanova2019; Wanner Reference Wanner1998). To capture the implications of this transnational reality, we further included a variable that assesses whether the respondent was herself born in Russia or Ukraine, or whether one parent of the respondent was born in the other country.
Mnemonic Divergence and Points of Convergence
World War II: Causes and contributions to the victory
A key topic driving the political conflicts within and between post-communist Europe is diverging interpretations of World War II, attribution of guilt for the war’s outbreak, and questions over collaboration with the occupying forces (Krawatzek Reference Krawatzek2021; Exeler Reference Exeler2022). This is nowhere as starkly reflected as in Putin’s proffered justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which he characterized as a “de-nazification” operation to remove Ukraine’s current leadership, depicting politicians in Kyiv as the ideological heirs of Stepan Bandera and the fascist World War II-era UPA.
The question of World War II and who bears responsibility for its inception is crucial because the Russian leadership puts great emphasis on the claim that Russia has always only conducted defensive wars. As Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitrii Peskov, put it in a February 20, 2022, interview: “Russia throughout its history has never attacked anyone.” Peskov went on to add that “Russia, which has survived so many wars, is the last country in Europe that even wants to say the word ‘war’.”Footnote 22
Among large swaths of the Russian population, there is an overwhelming agreement that the guilt for the war’s outbreak lies exclusively with Nazi Germany. Roughly 80 percent are of that opinion, eliding any Soviet responsibility in the wake of the signing of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which allowed Germany to attack Poland without fear of a Soviet response and the USSR to annex parts of that country along with, in due course, the Baltic states (Edele Reference Edele2017). The Pact has either disappeared from public discourse entirely or else is portrayed as a necessary attempt by Stalin to deal with Hitler, as Putin argued to an international audience in a 2020 article that appeared in the English-language magazine The National Interest. Social attitudes in Russia mirror this situation, with well below 20 percent of respondents assigning co-responsibility to the USSR for the start of World War II (Putin 2020).Footnote 23
Nuancing responses further, the difference between regime supporters and opponents is not immense (Figure 1). Even if the regression analysis highlights that there is a statistically significant association between regime support and a respondent believing Germany alone caused the outbreak of World War II, the rather modest substantive difference illustrates that this is hardly a categorical divide. Respondent age is consistently related to views on the victory in the war, with more than 30 percent of those younger than 35 — including regime supporters — disagreeing with the government-sponsored historical view.
Figure 1. Responsibility for the outbreak in World War II.
Among regime opponents, respondents who self-identify as religious are more likely to support the official view on the outbreak of World War II, whereas those regime supporters who are dependent on the state — notably through employment in the public sector—are also more likely to reiterate the official line of interpretation.
In Ukraine, the picture looks markedly different, with society divided between those who attribute exclusive guilt to Nazi Germany and those who assign co-responsibility to the Soviet Union. Ukrainian respondents taking the survey in Russian lean towards Soviet-era interpretations and today’s modal Russian respondent, whereas those taking the survey in Ukrainian give responses more similar to what one would expect to find in a Western European context. Following heavy pressure from politicians of the former Warsaw Pact states, debates about the Soviet Union’s shared responsibility for the war’s outbreak have become part of Europe’s broader public discourse. The 2008 European Parliament decision founding the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism (the date of this annual commemoration, 23 August, is the anniversary of the 1939 signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), as well as the OSCE’s 2009 Vilnius Declaration, which effectively placed an equal sign between the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, are examples of this.
The mnemonic divide within Ukraine is stark, and in addition to language, several other variables stand out; however, attitudes towards the state are not one of them. Unlike in the Russian case, younger people do not diverge on this question, but there is a clear gender difference, with women being more likely to place exclusive blame on Germany if they took the survey in Ukrainian. From among those who took the survey in Ukrainian, it is also the less politically interested who affirm the Soviet-era version of the war’s outbreak. Turning to those who took the survey in Russian, geography makes a difference, with respondents in the east of the country being more likely to agree with the official Russian view on history. Moreover, self-identified religiosity is important for predicting the view that Germany alone caused the war.
The question of which actor bears guilt for the outbreak of the war is closely linked to the question of which actor contributed the most to putting an end to the conflict. The latter reveals the legacy that the war has left and what society has made out of past suffering. Ownership of a historic victory is crucial for how a society emerges from a period of fighting, and for many years, post-communist Russia and the West shared a common interpretation of how World War II ended (Malinova Reference Malinova, Fedor, Kangaspuro, Lassila and Zhurzhenko2017).
In Ukraine, the prevailing view continues to attribute the victory to the Soviet Union as well as the Allied Forces, though this predilection is most clearly evinced among those who took the survey in Ukrainian (Figure 2). Respondents who took the survey in Russian are more proximate to the official Russian historical interpretation, even if among these respondents just under half are of the opinion that the victory is shared. Young people who took the survey in Russian were more likely to agree with the view that both the Allies and the Soviet Union contributed to the victory in the war, which shows that some of the Soviet heritage of viewing the war is disappearing among the youth.
Figure 2. Contribution to the end of World War II.
In Russia, meanwhile, the importance associated with nationalizing the victory was clearly articulated in 2021, when Vladimir Putin stated that at the most difficult and decisive moments of the war, “our nation was alone.”Footnote 24 While Putin was seemingly referring to the Soviet Union, from the context of the speech — he began by noting that Victory Day “was, is, and will be sacred for Russia, for our people” — it was clear that the Russian and Soviet nations were in large measure being conflated. Indeed, the defeat of fascism has increasingly come to be associated exclusively with Russia, with attendant rhetoric lessening the role of the other Allied powers and even downplaying the Red Army’s multiethnic composition. Abetting this interpretive shift was the boycott by European leaders of the 2015 Victory Day commemoration in Moscow, which marked the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. Whereas for the 2010 commemoration the Russian government released a glossy multi-lingual brochure titled “Our Common Victory” that recognized the contributions of all the Allies to defeating Nazi Germany, five years later Sergei Ivanov, then the head of the presidential administration, stated that it did not matter if foreign dignitaries were present, as this was “our celebration,” a point that Putin likewise underscored (Nechepurenko 2015).
The idea that the Soviet Union made the most decisive contribution to the victory is one that finds a significant degree of consensus among Russians (Figure 2). Seventy percent of respondents espouse this view, and although the difference between respondents classified as pro- or anti-regime is statistically significant, it is again not overly substantive. It is those younger than 35 years of age who are most likely to disagree with the official state-endorsed historical narrative, with 40 percent not sharing the official view, be they regime supporters or not. This speaks to the relatively limited ability of the Kremlin to target Russian youth, at least as of early 2021, despite the country’s concerted patriotic education programs.
Stalin’s contradictory legacy
Russian historical self-understanding increasingly includes a positive assessment of Stalin, one which underscores his contribution to the USSR’s socio-economic development and downplays the atrocities sanctioned by him (De Waal et al. Reference De Waal, Lipman, Gudkov and Bakradze2013; Nelson Reference Nelson2019; Gugushvili and Kabachnik Reference Gugushvili and Kabachnik2019). In Ukraine, on the other hand, Stalin’s post-Soviet revival has been much more modest, even if the dictator’s approval ratings in the east of the country were, in 2010, comparable to those in Russia (Plokhy Reference Plokhy, Fedor, Kangaspuro, Lassila and Zhurzhenko2017, 173). However, whereas Stalin’s resignification unites different parts of the population in Russia, in Ukraine, the memory of the dictator divides society. (Figure 3).Footnote 25
Figure 3. Attitudes towards Stalin.
On average, a majority of Ukrainians have unambiguously negative views about the Soviet Union’s wartime leader, with 60 percent saying that he is directly responsible for the death of millions.Footnote 26 Conversely, in Russia, a relativistic position prevails, with just over 50 percent arguing that he has more merit than disadvantages and 9 percent agreeing that he was a wise and capable leader. Such positive views have only increased in recent years,Footnote 27 mirroring the gradually more affirmative stance that the Kremlin has taken with regard to Stalin’s legacy. Indeed, the official “co-optation” of Stalin downplays his crimes and emphasizes his role in the war effort as well as the post-war reconstruction (Nelson Reference Nelson2019).
Among respondents in Russia, the small difference between pro- and anti-regime respondents fails to achieve conventional levels of statistical significance. Rather, what matters most is gender and self-identified religiosity. Men, especially, regardless of their political stance, are 50 percent more likely to express positive views of Stalin. Religious respondents, especially those who are otherwise regime critical, are also more likely to agree with such assessments. Those who believe that their values are shared by other Russians furthermore approve of Stalin’s reign, speaking to the social integration that shared historical narratives foster. Meanwhile, speaking to age-correlated attitudes towards World War II, younger regime-critical opponents are more likely to also oppose positive assessments of Stalin.
A pronounced heterogeneity persists among Ukrainian respondents, as reflected in the language respondents chose to take the survey in, which constitutes the primary factor accounting for these divergent opinions. Those who took the survey in Russian are more than twice as likely as those who took it in Ukrainian to express positive views regarding Stalin. Meanwhile, differences in gender and age do not account for diverging opinions on the question. At the same time, Russian-language respondents with lower levels of education, those who live in eastern Ukraine, those who reside in smaller settlements, and those who self-identify as religious are even more likely to approve of Stalin. These respondents, in line with what was found in the Russian survey, are also more likely to believe that their values are being shared.
Holodomor: A national founding narrative or a general tragedy
The Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, also known as the Holodomor, has become a central component of present-day Ukrainian identity. Efforts among politicians to promote a narrative of the Holodomor as a Soviet genocide against Ukrainians go back many years, though the most prominent proponent of this interpretation was Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s president between 2005 and 2010.Footnote 28 He succeeded in having the Verkhovna Rada pass legislation recognizing the famine as genocide in 2006, and energetically campaigned for it to be internationally recognized as such.Footnote 29 Taken in this light, the famine has come to symbolize the long struggle among segments of Ukrainian society to gain independence from Russian, and later Soviet, colonization. In particular, members of the Ukrainian diaspora have been critical in developing this narrative, often aiming to establish a mnemonic relationship between the Holocaust and the Holodomor (Koziura Reference Koziura2025, 2).
Inversely, the neo-Soviet narrative of history relativizes the Holodomor and marginalizes Ukrainians’ experience of it by stressing that famine in the early 1930s was a common tragedy of the Soviet people that affected many parts of the USSR, one, moreover, that at least in part resulted from poor climatic conditions and not just extortionate grain requestioning from smallholders by the Soviet authorities. This latter view has been particularly prominent in the Russian-speaking eastern portion of the country.
In our survey, the divergence between Ukrainian and Russian survey takers is overwhelming on the topic of the famine (Figure 4). In Ukraine, 55 percent state that they understand the Holodomor as an artificial famine that was directed by the Soviet leadership specifically against Ukrainians, a view that a mere 5 percent of Russian citizens hold. On the Ukrainian side, the acceptance of this narrative has increased tremendously since the Maidan protests of 2013-2014, though, already by the end of Yushchenko’s term, the emergence of such a consensus was becoming visible.Footnote 30 Another 25 percent of Ukrainians refer to it as an artificial famine, but acknowledge that it should be considered a common tragedy of the Soviet people (Cameron Reference Cameron2018).Footnote 31 It is worth underscoring that Russian-speakers in Ukraine tend to share in the view that the Holodomor was an artificial event. The attribution of blame to the Soviet Union is particularly high among male respondents, but also among those who took the survey in Russian and live in larger cities. Speaking to the importance of the familial transmission of historical viewpoints, ascription of responsibility to the USSR is also higher among those who — irrespective of the language in which the survey was taken — have exclusively Ukrainian-born parents.
Figure 4. Assessment of the Holodomor.
In Russia, on the other hand, the most frequent response is a relativistic statement that takes the events out of their specific context by attributing the famine to natural conditions and unfavorable circumstances. This view of the Holodomor as a largely agentless tragedy that resulted from natural conditions is higher, in a statistically significant way, among those supporting the regime and people older than 35. Those with family connections to Ukraine — whether they support the Russian political regime or not — are not more likely to disapprove of the idea that the famine was caused by natural conditions, and those who are more interested in seeking political information also do not differ from other Russians. However, respondents living in larger settlements — and in particular in Moscow and St. Petersburg — are more likely to state that the Holodomor was intentionally inflicted by the Soviet leadership.
The Soviet era: Nostalgia and repulsion
In contrast to attitudes regarding World War II, those concerning the post-totalitarian Soviet Union (dated from Stalin’s death in 1953 until the beginning of the transition period in 1985) have their basis in the lived reality of either the respondents themselves or, at the very least, their parents. The dominant political discourse in both countries has put a very different emphasis on the Soviet experience — whereas nostalgia for the Soviet era has come to be a defining feature of Putin’s historical discourse, Soviet communism is increasingly considered to have been externally imposed on Ukraine. Indeed, the period immediately following the USSR’s collapse has become the negative point of reference for Putin’s historical discourse (Malinova Reference Malinova2021), with the “wild 90s” standing in contrast to a kaleidoscope of positive Soviet elements, helping to emphasize the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, the importance of a strong military, and a clear top-down political structure (the so-called “power vertical”). Post-Maidan Ukraine, meanwhile, saw the initiation of a resolute phase of decommunization, with the adoption of laws that make the display of Soviet symbols illegal. The emphasis on Ukraine’s historical roots in the 19th century has likewise gained in visibility since 2022 (Kappeler Reference Kappeler2014; Wessel Reference Wessel2022).
The divergent representations of the Soviet period in today’s Ukraine and Russia translate into fundamentally different understandings of that era (Figure 5). Faced with a choice of five positive and five negative associations, Russian respondents are more likely to select from the five positive ones, and Ukrainian respondents to select from the five negative ones. The associations that we provided in the survey are the following: economic stability, social justice, international importance, low crime rate, friendship of the people, poverty, travel restrictions, no economic freedom, lack of political choice, and surveillance of personal life. The differences are indeed remarkable, notably when it comes to aspects such as social justice, the friendship between different peoples, or economic stability, all of which Russian respondents are most likely to project onto the Soviet period. Although economic stability and international friendship are also prominent tropes in Ukraine, respondents mention them significantly less often than in Russia. Concurrently, the lack of political choice, which is not particularly prominent on the list of associations made by Russians, is the most frequent response given by Ukrainians. Other negative associations, such as a lack of economic freedom and the surveillance of personal life, are also remarked upon significantly more often by Ukrainians than by Russians.
Figure 5. Associations with the Soviet period.
In the Russian sample, greater than 40 percent of respondents, on balance, select more positive than negative associations (that is, two positive or one positive and no second choice). The total difference between regime supporters and opponents stands at 5 percent, with more positive associations being selected by the supporters (this is statistically a highly significant variable). In Ukraine, the difference by survey language is huge — while on average, 28 percent of Ukrainian respondents are positive about the Soviet past, this is the case for 36 percent of those who took the survey in the Russian langauge, but only 18 percent of those who took the survey in the Ukrainian language. Diverging memories are equally striking when we look at the exclusively negative recollections, which are indicated by 50 percent of Ukrainian-language respondents.
Among the Russian respondents, there is a great deal of variation in views on the Soviet period. A key factor driving the responses remains age, with respondents lacking personal experience of the Soviet era being much less likely to mention positive associations with it, irrespective of their political leanings. Moreover, on the whole, men are more positive about the Soviet period than women; this includes those critical of the present regime. Furthermore, regime critical respondents are more likely to be positive about the Soviet era if they live in a small settlement, work in the public sector, self-identify as religious, or report being economically less well-off. The level of education does not play a role in determining these views. Importantly, those who make positive associations with the Soviet Union — notably the regime-critical respondents — are also more likely to mention that they think their values are being shared, illustrating some sense of social integration that occurs through historical narratives even when respondents feel politically at odds with their overall context.
In the case of Ukraine, age also matters for views on the Soviet past, although not for the subset of respondents who took the survey in the Ukrainian language. But among Russian-language respondents, it is the younger ones who are less likely to have positive associations with the Soviet era, mirroring the attitudes of their peers in Russia as well as the wider attitudes expressed in Ukraine. Respondents in the eastern part of the country — and Russian-language survey takers in the West — are also more positive about the Soviet past. Gender matters, but only among those who took the survey in Ukrainian, with women being more likely to select positive associations. Religiosity, meanwhile, matters across all respondents, with those self-identifying as religious being significantly more positive in their assessments of the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, a respondent’s family background influences views regarding the past, with those who have family members from a former Soviet republic other than Ukraine being generally more positive about the Soviet era, but in particular when the language the survey was taken in was Russian. Positive views are also more pronounced among those who took the survey in Ukrainian if they do not seek political information frequently and if they have not completed their higher education.
Slipping Apart: The Social Basis of Divergence between Russia and Ukraine
This research represents one of the few comparative assessments of the receiving end of memory politics in two crucial post-Soviet countries. It also captures an important moment in time. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conducting such research has become increasingly difficult in Ukraine from a pragmatic standpoint, and impossible in Russia from a legal and political one. Consequently, the research presented in this article provides a rare baseline for the attitudes that prevailed within different parts of society and between the two countries proximate to the invasion. The attitudes measured reflect intense domestic efforts at shaping historical narratives in both Russia and Ukraine, where antagonistic and increasingly sanitized versions of history have been promulgated.
In the Ukrainian case, vivid disputes over appropriate historical interpretations can be identified in the data, with fundamental divisions evident between those who took the survey in the Russian and Ukrainian languages. This is despite the considerable nation-building efforts that took place (and the undeniable shifts in attitudes that they engendered) before Russia’s 2022 invasion. The extent to which this characteristic of Ukraine has changed as a result of the war is too early to predict.Footnote 32 While the powerful resistance to Russian aggression indicates a stronger sense of national unity, it is currently not meaningful to try and conduct comparative research. However, it should also be underlined that the Russian-language Ukrainian respondents in our survey did not, despite their distance from Ukrainian national narratives of the past, automatically support Russian politics.Footnote 33 Indeed, in what is one of our most important takeaways, the views on history that Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens express are not a mirror image of the views held by Russian citizens, notably on issues related to World War II that directly impact on Ukraine, that is the role of Stalin and the Holodomor (though there is greater proximity when it comes to general assessments of the post-Stalin Soviet Union).
In the Russian case, we encounter a much more unified collective memory. Even if regime supporters and opponents differ in statistically significant ways from one another, the substantive difference across the questions included here is rather limited. Such an integrated mnemonic setting underlines that a significant convergence has occurred between the state’s vision regarding history and that of society. However, the Russian state does not seemingly have the moral authority and capacity to mobilize this historical narrative for political ends, as the war in Ukraine demonstrates. The omnipresent historical discourse that accompanies the fighting noticeably fails to create a sense of enthusiasm and historical duty among Russia’s population.
For the social sciences in general, this war demonstrates the need to pursue the most basic task of analysis, namely that of categorization and measurement. In the understandable desire to assess effects, the discipline has lost sight of the importance that should also be attributed to describing the social and political world. Such a description conveys just how much the two post-Soviet countries differ after 30 years of national independence, and it provides a crucial metric that allows us to understand ongoing reactions to the war, as well as to think about possible developments and challenges once the fighting eventually comes to an end.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2025.10077.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Oxana Shevel and Maria Popova, as well as the two knowledgeable and critical reviewers for engaging with earlier versions of this piece. Their dedication helped to make clarify the arguments we wish to advance and our understanding of the issues at stake.
Financial support
Daimler und Benz Stiftung postdoctoral scholarship program.
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