Communist Origamis an Analysis of the Urban Decommunization
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Communist origamis An analysis of the urban decommunization process in Kharkiv (UA) 1 Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for Master of Science (Research) in Social Sciences Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Amsterdam Cescon Fabio 11796766 May, 2020 Supervisor: dr. Olga Sezneva Second Reader: dr. Kobe de Keere 1 https://www.unian.net/politics/10573059-u-zelenskogo-prokommentirovali-snos-byusta-zhukovu-v-harkove- neprodumannaya-gumanitarnaya-politika.html, retrieved on 25/04/2020. The picture portrays a woman standing in front of the destroyed statue of Zhukov in Kharkiv. All the other pictures in the thesis were taken by the author. 1 To Olga, for having taken the dust out of my brain, To Joris, for the love and the irreparable lacerations, To Dana, for having given me shelter, when I did not have a roof, To the dear friends of mine, who did not make it, Crippled by poverty, uncertainty and instability; I caress you. To the broken hopes of youth, To rage, To naked kings. 2 Abstract In Kharkiv (UA), communism is not singular, rather it is multiple. In this borderland city with a contested urbanity, multiple tactics to craft national belonging are at stake. As the urban decommunization process is unfolding, actors engage with Soviet urban materials, knitting on them competing national configurations. This process followed the 2014 revolution in the country, during which the newly elected president Poroshenko (2014-2019) outlawed any public representation of official Soviet Union heraldry. Previously banal, unremarked urban elements became politicized, grabbing attention and demanding political action. In order to explore the “communist assemblages” taking shape in the country, I spent three months doing fieldwork in the Eastern- Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where I participated to 3 ultra-nationalist public events, conducted 21 semi-structured interviews, using photo elicitation technique, and taking part in 7 guided tours organized by my interlocutors. These techniques allowed me to analyze how different groups defined and interacted with the city’s Soviet elements. Arguing against a univocal conception of the Nation, I show how the latter is shaped through contingent semiotic processes stemming from peculiar urban encounters. Through these encounters, actors weave together heterogeneous histories, sites, and materialities letting emerge multiple relational conceptions of both Ukraine and the Soviet Union. By showing how particular urban elements index political commitments, I follow how material elements are gathered together in order to face the city’s overabundant Soviet-ness. I propose the concept of “origami” to make sense of this semiotically charged transformative process in order to look at how actors craft temporal belongings and promote borders through the materiality at their disposal. Key words Post-Maidan Ukraine; communist assemblage; materiality; urban conflict; temporality; Post-Soviet transformation; decommunization 3 Foreword “…the past enters the present not as legacy, but as novel adaptation” (Burawoy & Verdery 1999: 4). My thesis is about time, but not metaphysical time. It is about material time; a time that is crafted, aligned, destroyed and reconfigured. It is about the present time; it is about historical time that gets created in the present. It is about the creation of the historical present time as it emerges through buildings, statues, monuments and decorations. My thesis is about a contested time, a claimed time, a destroyed time, a naturalized time. It is about positioning the splinters of time together, making them collaborate or opening the conflicts between them. It is about the material construction of histories, heritages and presents. This time is not any time, it is a specific one, notably a communist time, crumbling in front of a new National configuration. A time that emerges from the reconfigurations of material representations of communism. The latter, moreover, is not any communism, but a specific one. It is an urban post- Soviet communism, negotiated in the city of Kharkiv, in Eastern Ukraine. It is a communism that is sticky (Ahmed, 2004); it sticks to the buildings, statues and people that hold it. It is a communism that needs to be dealt with, a communism that is made illegal, local, obsolete. It is a communism that is not unitary, nor univocal; it is a communism that is yet to be settled, which needs to be framed. My thesis is about an urban materiality that boils and the practices that manage its movements. It is about various reconfigurations of communism emerging in the contingency of the Ukrainian conflict and its decommunization policy. It is about the vivacity of urban materials and their interactions with local actors, who fashion these buildings, statues and decorations while being fashioned by them. It is about folding times into material objects, a socio-material origami allowing different shapes to take form, through the paper, the hands and the pleats. These origamis, however, are not only new, contingent and unstable; rather, they also can be solidified and maintained in their form for a longer period of time. The possibility that something holds together (Haraway, 2016) and does not crumble, the practices that are associated with these possibilities and the emerging elements that come out of it will be the fil rouge that goes through my thesis. 4 This angle of inquiry stems from the omnipresence of Soviet urban elements in my field2, which were presented as either sources of pride, interest, “peculiarities” [osobennosti] of the city; either as shameful, unlawful, anti-human [anti-chelovecheskij], cancerous elements of the city. Different types of urban objects [statues, monuments, façades’ decorations, buildings themselves] were mobilized when discussing different aspects of the city’s “Sovietness”. The military character of some of these elements, for instance, is sometimes highlighted in order to articulate the potential danger or the animosity [meaning their existence as radical enemies of the Nation] at is present in communist elements. On the other hand, the stylistic value of a composition with communist elements, for instance, is sometimes put forward in order to justify their presence despite their potential shameful Sovietness. These semiotic changes [i.e. the changing of meanings, references and alignments] and reconfigurations are taking place in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, after the implementation of decommunization laws and the symbolic negotiations that it entailed, in the midst of the War in Donbass (2014-present) and the Russian occupation of the Crimean Peninsula (March 2014). I will attend to the pleats that my informants are folding through and on Soviet urban objects in order to understand not only how these origamis are crafted; but also, how they are used to create roots from some cuttings and to prune some other genealogical possibilities. These origamis are folded through different assemblages, aligning various meanings, places and histories together letting emerge multiple communisms. 2 I spent three months, from June 2019 to August 2019 in the city of Kharkiv (UA). 5 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 8 Methodology ...................................................................................................................................... 12 1. Setting and population ............................................................................................................ 12 a. Nationalists .......................................................................................................................... 12 b. Post-Maidan students .......................................................................................................... 14 c. The grandparents ................................................................................................................ 14 2. Data ......................................................................................................................................... 14 a. Semi-structured interviews .................................................................................................. 14 b. Photo elicitation .................................................................................................................. 16 c. Observations ........................................................................................................................ 17 3. Secondary Data ....................................................................................................................... 17 4. Coding ..................................................................................................................................... 18 5. Terminogy ............................................................................................................................... 18 Framing and literature review ............................................................................................................ 20 1. Liminal histories ..................................................................................................................... 20 2. Like Hello?! We’re not in Soviet Union anymore!................................................................. 22 3. The scarcity of Ukrainian-ness ............................................................................................... 23