Tetiana Boriak (Vilnius University)
Ukraine emerged from the USSR as a post-totalitarian, post-genocidal, and deeply Russified society with vague identity. Until the mid-2000s, humanitarian policy remained on the margins of state policy until the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM) was established in 2006 under President V. Yushchenko, a Holodomor survivor who championed Holodomor research and oral history projects. This marked the transformation of individual memories of the famine into a collective memory.
Limited in its activity during the presidency of V. Yanukovych, UINM was reestablished in 2014, after beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine. Since then, the UINM has played a leading role in preparation of the law on ban of Communist and Nazi regimes (2015) and in the decommunization process (only in 2016 more than 50,000 of streets were renamed). Since 2022, the issue of decommunization witnessed a new level of debates. Colonial approach to Ukrainian history began to be reviewed – Soviet and Russian prominent figures, commemoration of victims of WWII, increase of support of the statement that Holodomor was a genocide (over 90%). Oral history projects are written down; museums (e.g. War Childhood Museum) and memorial sites are opened. Russian practices on occupied Ukrainian territories only confirm importance of memory politics nowadays.