Communist origamis

An analysis of the urban decommunization process in (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 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 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- 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 ( 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 4. National crumbles ...... 25 5. Relational Nations ...... 28 6. Assembled states ...... 30 7. Situated visibilities ...... 31 8. Naturalizing objects ...... 35 Theoretical ...... 38 Communist Origami ...... 38 1. Fragmented modernity ...... 38 2. Present-pasts ...... 40 3. Pleats ...... 42 Outline of the thesis ...... 43 History of Decommunization ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. 1. CHOREOGRAPHIES OF WAR ...... 50 1.1. Uncertainty of belonging ...... 50 1.2. Enacting the Nation ...... 54 1.3. Making the city National ...... 65 1.4. Conclusion ...... 67 2. CIRCUMSCRIBING SOVIET RUST ...... 69 2.1. Dangerous Soviet-ness ...... 69

6 2.2 Legendary communism ...... 73 2.3 Jurassic Communism ...... 80 2.4 Conclusion ...... 86 3. EUROPEAN DESIRES ...... 87 3.1 Incomplete decommunization ...... 88 a. Decommunized fantasies ...... 89 b. Dull communism ...... 93 3.2 Comic communism...... 98 3.3 Capitalist communism ...... 102 3.4 Conclusion ...... 106 CONCLUSION ...... 108

7

INTRODUCTION

Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, has been the subject of intense journalistic work in the recent years, due to its struggles and efforts surrounding its recent decommunization3. As the country in its entirety, the city in question had to implement decommunization laws passed by the Verkhovna Rada4 which outlawed communist symbols in Ukrainian public settings (2015)5. This decision followed the Revolution of Dignity (2014), a popular uprising that condemned President Yanukovich’s neo-Soviet political strategies and demanded a more Europhile trajectory for the Nation 6 . This uprising targeted Lenin statues in public squares, that were dragged within the political unrest through various practices, catalyzing the discontent of the protesters against the President, his neo-Soviet rule and the “communist stagnation” in which the country had been bathing (Zhurzhenko, 2017). After Yanukovich’s departure from power, a different take on the country’s communist past has been put forward in which urban depictions of Soviet nationhood played a central role, becoming a proxy for the decommunization of the nation and of its cities. Once the law was approved, city councils started to work to comply to the new crafting of the city, evaluating and listing the elements that were assumed not to be in compliance with the new “decommunist” urban publicity5. The first official attempt to decommunize the city entailed a series of tricks in order to superficially change the reference of some elements of the communist heritage (mainly denominations of metro stations or of neighborhoods) in order to preserve intact the allusion to communism7. After the interventions of regional powers, however, efforts were made, toponomastic was changed and monuments were demolished in order to completely decommunize the city.

Since its independence, Ukraine started to construct its national reconstitution by managing, more or less coherently, its recent Soviet past (Zhurzhenko, 2015). The process of Ukrainian decommunization ties in with the general process of National reconfiguration that the country underwent since its Independence (1991); however, this last re-management arises in extra-ordinary times, notably during the country’s open conflict with the Russian Federation. This most recent

3 I define decommunization as the process that has been going on in Ukraine (as well as other former socialist countries) in order to distance the Nation-state from the communist past. This process includes law projects, urban changes, adaptations of former Soviet festivities to new ones, etc. Specifically, my research will focus on the process of decommunization that followed the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine. 4 Ukraine’s federal government. 5 https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2015/05/15/7068057/ 6 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine/kiev-protesters-gather-eu-dangles-aid-promise- idUSBRE9BA04420131212 7 https://glavnoe.ua/news/n249641

8 wave of decommunization efforts 8 builds on the precedent struggles of national building, contributing to the re-formation of the past, which Ukraine is assessing in its post-Soviet phase. Notably, in the ambiguous identity of Kharkiv, whose belonging to the Nation state has recently been contested, even through armed mobilizations, the emergence of the State takes a peculiar turn. This decommunization process coincides, then, with the reorientation of a New Nation in geopolitical terms.

Nevertheless, these attempts at the re-organization of the national recent past are not simply and smoothly adopted in Ukrainian localities. Kharkiv, for instance, adapted awkwardly to this “New Ukraine”, with various stake-holders actively engaging, positively or negatively, with the (un)official implementation of the process. The latter deals with representation of the former hegemonic power, (i.e. the Soviet Union) which does not hold any formal political power; however, it is still effectively present through its material objects, which linger in their broken hegemony. As it lingers in its material and semiotic fragmentation, actors intervene in order to manage creatively the material remnants of the previous hegemonic power. This cultural and material fragmentation opens a window of opportunity for multiple reconfigurations of meanings, weaved on the broken- ness of the Soviet Union. For instance, activists dissatisfied with the process, continued the process of decommunization by toppling busts of Soviet figures or by setting up a web platform to prompt the decommunization effort9. Other groups, on the other hand, have been operating in the city to preserve and show (notably to tourists) the communist remnants of the city, positively evaluating the “post-Soviet urban experience” of Kharkiv. With the cultural totality of the former power gone to pieces, actors hasten to gather them in various ways, mobilizing them to build conceptions of the New Ukraine. While managing these fragments, actors are building on them, creating various conceptions of the Nation-that-was. The plethora of activities that has been accompanying the city's decommunization sheds light on the various and heterogeneous ways in which “urban communism” is being tackled during the process. The latter provokes different takes on the concrete communist remnants of the city, which different groups assemble differently depending on their use of the city. It is, in fact, out of heterogeneous urban desires and semiotic processes to craft and “impose” a (genealogical) image of the city that what I call “communist origamis” form and act, which I will later explain. In fact, these differing practices signal the presence of differing communisms related to a vision of the Nation’s origins its normative destination and its central figures. By acting on the communist heritage, actors craft varying urban temporalities, through which oppositional assembled

8 Ukraine experienced a first wave of public decommunization in its Western regions right after its independence. For more details, see the section “History of Decommunization”. 9 See the project “decommunize Kharkiv” http://decommunize.kharkiv.ua/

9 histories reverberate. Because of the depictions being at the center of the controversial desired future of the city, the process of building on them (including defining them as communist or not, to be decommunized or not, past or future, and so on) reveals, at the same time, the absence of a monolithic conception of “Soviet-ness”; it shows the presence of differing urban material communisms that the decommunization process is unfolding in its brittle material remnants. The latter semiotically restructured the city’s material communism, which becomes the center of practices that are productive of differing temporal assemblages; the latter, in turn, define the urban communism of the city itself. Practices of definition, destruction, preservation collaborate in the knitting together of various material communist remnants, that are allegedly wrapped together in order to produce the desired city's image as well as its national belonging. In fact, the management of these temporal splinters does not entail solely the configuration of the national recent past; rather, it tackles various Nations, re-worked through Soviet urbanity itself. This re-working, moreover, takes place in the general scarcity of urban depictions of Ukrainian nationhood in Kharkiv; this material unequal distribution increases the unsure emergence of the New Ukraine; how are actors, then, crafting new National configurations in the process of urban decommunization? How are Soviet-era urban objects managed to create national configurations?

My thesis will explore how differing groups (notably: EGEA Kharkiv, Dekomunizatsiya UA, Save Kharkiv, Frajkor, Order and Tradition) are producing differing temporal conceptions of the communist heritage of the city in order to craft various communisms, complying to their desired genealogy of Kharkiv (for instance, is it a (post-) Soviet city, a Ukrainian city or a fighting city?). This process takes an even higher stance in light of Kharkiv’s position during the recent conflict. The city risked to become the third separatist territory of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian war, as it was briefly occupied by pro-Russian forces10. The need to attach Kharkiv to the broader National territory, thus, acquires a heightened status, due to its uncertain belonging, framed by my interlocutors as a “struggle for modernity”. The peculiar history of the city, moreover, influences the temporal knitting at place; former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, Kharkiv is a historically Russian-speaking Ukrainian city, where Russophile (geo)politics have been more popular than in other parts of the country11. This border city has a historically ambiguous belonging and affiliation to , a status which comes into place in this national reconfiguration.

10 https://carnegieeurope.eu/2018/09/12/how-eastern-ukraine-is-adapting-and-surviving-case-of-kharkiv-pub-77216 11 http://od.org.ua/en/ выбор-харькова-как-регион-голосовал-в-i/

10 I will follow the ways in which actors compose temporal conceptions of architectural and aesthetic urban objects, notably in relation to the Soviet past; it is my hypothesis that by doing so actors engage in a practical creation of National genealogy through urban manifestations. They define and craft pasts and futures of the city, building on the very present in which they find themselves through the interaction with the material environment. Differing publics engage with the urban environment to concretize their differing temporal conceptions onto the urban environment itself.

I will use this case-study to investigate urban communism as an assemblage that knits together a variety of heterogeneous elements – such as the material objects themselves (statues, busts, mosaics, building’s façades, etc.), genealogical conceptions of the city (where does it come from, where is it now, where will it go, etc.), governmental measures (at different levels both national, provincial and local) and participation of local people with the heritage at stake. As it develops on the surface of Soviet fragments, this assemblage emerges within the process of decommunization, as it participates in the anxieties and hopes of the New Ukraine. As actors hold different splinters of “rusted communism”, they construct different conceptions of the Nation; these conceptions are sewed together with temporal threads (M’charek, 2010), by which desired futures of the city are expressed, mobilizing the recent communist past. For instance, actors criticize the worn-out façades of Soviet houses as hinting to the failure of the socialist modernization project; their current bad state is conceived as an innate characteristic, ascribed to their historical origin. They are Soviet, thus, ruined. This material paleness is, then, opposed to the kaleidoscopic brightness of capitalism, a desired future absent on these material objects, but present in the New “modern” Ukraine – at least hopefully.

The urban communist assemblage, thus, finds itself at the center of a “building process”, driven by a desire of crafting a shared urban genealogy. Therefore, I will be researching temporal (hi)stories – and how interactions with material artifacts enact differing past-presents in order to explore how they affect and inform the constructions of differing publicities in the post-communist city; how are actors on the ground knitting the ambiguous past-present of the city? What future are they trying to craft? Through what projects are they struggling to implement it?

11 Methodology

1. Setting and population

At the beginning of my fieldwork in Kharkiv two unexpected things happened. Firstly, the night of my arrival, the statue of Zhukov 12 that was still standing in the city, was destroyed by some nationalist organizations. That provided a very interesting social atmosphere during my stay, as the debate around the legitimacy of communist elements was lit up again. Secondly, I contacted the informants that I had previously spoken with on Facebook: the representative of “EGEA Kharkiv”13 (English in the original) and one of the representatives of “Decommunize Kharkiv”14(English in the original)15; I chose these two groups as they provided two opposite positions with respect to Soviet cultural elements, respectively the will to preserve and promote them and the will to destroy them. They quickly reacted to my messages and I was able to organize (in)formal meetings with them during the first days of my stay. Unexpectedly, however, they informed about the smallness and/or inactivity of their groups. EGEA Kharkiv’s members were on holiday at that time; Decommunize Kharkiv, on the other hand, was composed of only 4 members. Because of these reasons, I re-assessed my approach and started looking for new groups to integrate. I used a snow-balling technique to gather my informants, which gave me access to two meta-groups: nationalists and post-Maidan students (notably people who were 13/14 during the revolution).

a. Nationalists One group was composed by regular visitors of a nationalist military tent, which stood in Freedom Square, Kharkiv’s biggest square. The tent was put on at the beginning of the conflict to collect goods for the volunteers at the front. Recognizing the Bandera flag16 on top, I figured that under this tent would collect a number of various (ultra-) nationalist volunteers, who could have

12 Zhukov was a Soviet Marshal, who became a Soviet national hero, within one of the founding myths of the Soviet Union: the victory of communism over fascism in WWII. It is often associated with Soviet patriotism; some nationalist activists in Kharkiv as they asked on Facebook to spot the philo-Russians celebrating during the quarantine, jokingly put an image of Zhukov next to a Saint George Ribbon, symbol of Russian nationalism. The symbolic charge of the figure, thus, is poignant in the disputed territory of Kharkiv. https://www.facebook.com/svitanokkh/photos/a.498054737257146/991930764536205/?type=3&theater, retrieved 25/04/2020. 13 EGEA Kharkiv is a local group of a European network of geography students. 14 Decommunize Kharkiv (now Dekommunizatsiya UA) is an civic initiative born out of the desire to fully implement the decommunization process. 15 The group during fieldwork change name and became Decommunize UA. 16 Stepan Bandera is a controversial figure in Ukrainian history, on the edge of Nazi collaborator and National fighter. More infos will be presented in the first empirical chapter.

12 been emotionally attached to the communist objects of the city. I approached them and I was confirmed in my presupposition. The access to the tent was not particularly difficult, which allowed me to visit them several times. There was a stable group of older men and an adolescent boy; other members of other age groups were not stable, but changing all the time. I had various discussions with them about the Soviet Union, current Ukrainian politics and local post-Soviet issues (like Zhukov’s statue). However, it was more difficult to convince them to have a one-on-one interview; only one older man agreed to it. The tent is composed not only by the object itself but also by a plethora of signs, political cartoons, pictures, explanations, posters, writings, photos going from the Kharkiv’s Maidan revolution to victims of the conflict in Donbass. These elements are gathered around the tent and positioned on wooden structures at eye-level that were frequently looked at by pedestrians. Some events were organized by the “tent” and one of them took place behind it. These events were political in nature; I participated in two of them: one was a rally of (what seemed like) various political candidates for the upcoming elections; the other was a demonstration in front of the city council against the re-establishment of Zhukov’s statue, the re-nomination of a previously decommunized street back to its “communist” denomination and the suppression of the tent itself.

During an excursion to show me their work, the leader of Decommunize Kharkiv informed me about a local initiative called “Save Kharkiv” (English in the original), that he described as an organization that worked for the preservation of ancient, pre-revolutionary houses in Kharkiv. I succeeded in contacting them and being introduced by several of its members. They were mostly well-educated people (architects, lawyers, journalists) in their 40s/50s. I interviewed them and participated in one of their demonstrations. While interviewing them, they put me in contact with other members linked with the decommunization process of Kharkiv, that they thought I had to “absolutely talk with”. These people were: a local historian that provides city-tours of the local “red terror”, a museum collaborator that worked with decommunization and the Soviet past of the city, the main political actor behind the local concrete actuation of the decommunization process. Thanks to these contacts I was also invited to two interesting events (although they were completely in Ukrainian): a film projection at the museum and a day-long conference about the importance of and culture at the local “Maidan organization center”. These two events were done in collaboration with a pro-Maidan organization based in Kyiv with members that worked in the National Institute of Memory; these members did not grant me an interview. I participated in various conferences organized by these latter group.

13 b. Post-Maidan students When the members of EGEA came back from holiday, I started to interview them and propose them to show me some of the “most communist elements of the city”. This request was unsuccessful as they were confused about what I meant with that; then, I created a stock of pictures of Soviet elements of the city that I photographed and asked them their impressions about it (I went on using this technique for all of my interviews). Moreover, one member organized an excursion for me in one of the districts of the city. These people (in their early 20s) were very excited about being interviewed and spread the voice about this experience. Because of this, I had people that wrote me on Telegram directly to “help [me] with [my] diploma”. These people were of the same age as the previous participants and provided similar responses to my questions.

c. The grandparents A population group that was highly mentioned during my interviews was: “the grandmothers and grandfathers”. This population was depicted as being strongly in favor of the Soviet Union and as fighting against activists for the conservation of Soviet urban elements. I decided, then, to look for them and in order to find them I went to the park where the Zhukov’s statue stood, in one of the peripherical spalnie rajony. This population, however, was not very eager to talk to me, especially about these issues. They reacted very angrily even at questions like “do you think Zhukov should be standing here?”. Hence, I could collect various small-talks, brief interactions with these, prevalently, grannies and only one full interview with a man.

I conducted some observations in “Zhukov’s park” and registered the interactions that people had with the statue both when it was in ruins and when it was restored. Furthermore, I took part and observed an event that took place in front of Zhukov’s statue the day after its restauration. Thanks to this event, I was able to get in contact with two far-right organizations: “Order and Tradition” and “Fraikor”. I contacted them through Facebook and despite their initial doubts they granted me one interview each with the leaders of their organizations. The interview with Fraikor’s leader included an excursion that he prepared around the communist elements of the city. Later in August, they organized a march during “Ukraine’s Independence day”, that I took part in.

2. Data

My three main data gathering techniques were: in-depth semi-formal interviews, photo elicitation, observations.

a. Semi-structured interviews

14 I conducted and registered around 21 interviews with all the members that I encountered under the scope of the research. All the interviews were in Russian, with the exclusion of three of them. They lasted around 1/1h30 and were divided into three main areas: the informants’ relationship to the Soviet past, with a focus on historical figures (mainly Lenin, Zhukov and Gagarin); their relationship with the decommunization process and their justification of it; their hopes and visions of the future of the city. The questions were divided as follows: -the first set of questions were done in order to understand how actors would define qualitatively the Soviet Union and how they would negotiate the historico-cultural limits of Ukraine. -The second set of questions relates to the justificatory process of the previously sketched limits through the case-study of the decommunization process. -The third part of the interview tries to understand the position of the cultural elements that emerged and were discussed during the interview within the informants’ future vision of the city. -Moreover, through the latter part I tried to investigate the legitimization practices that were put forward by various informants to condemn or to praise elements related to the Soviet Union.

Assessment of interviews

The quality of the interviews was dependent on informants’ ages, roles, institutional belongings as well as their definition of myself. In the case of EGEA, for instance, the fact that they perceived me sometimes as a backpacker student from and sometimes as a researcher from the Netherlands influenced the way in which they would participate in the interviews. Sometimes my informants were hiding behind culturalist or essentialized personas or participated to the interviews in a very rigid way. The latter case includes members of more structured organizations, more navigated public speakers that were used to being interviewed by journalists and were able to re- propose a ready-made discourse. The more experienced, older and higher in the social hierarchy, the more difficult it was to get out “spontaneous” information or to be in control of the interview. However, I tried to counterbalance these defense techniques by addressing them personally and asking them their own responses; the outcome was heterogeneous: sometimes I would get the same response, or I would be accused or wanting to trick them in saying something subjective on an objective matter; sometimes they would re-assert the standard response of their organization. This questioning, however, allowed for the emergence of fuzziness and confusion in their scripts. This made it possible to have a glimpse on less standardized and “external” information (like for instance their bodily responses to some issues); moreover, this fuzziness granted the possibility of reflecting together to the point that they started to ask me what I would think about the subject. Even though I followed a list of questions, I allowed myself to diverge from them whenever possible and to follow my informants; following them I tried to challenge their visions, the rigidity

15 of their argumentations, present them with possible contradictions of their discourse and implicitly asking them to explain the holes in their argumentations. This created some frictions during my interviews, with informants getting frustrated and even angry; to balance this out I made sure to sooth them by reassuring them in the legitimacy of their positions and appearing extremely interested about their explanations. Through in-depth interviews, then, I was able to collect both standardized discourses about Soviet cultural objects and memory as well as sparks of contradictions within the discourses. Some of these standardized scripts narrated the awakening of the Nation through the Euromaidan Revolution (echoing Poroshenko’s rhetoric), some of them would describe the annihilation of Ukraine during the Soviet Union (proposing a common “ultra-nationalist” vision with Bandera at its center), some others would put forward a culturalist post-soviet image (reminiscent of the content put forward by Vera Serduchka, Little Big, Leningrad, etc17). I made sure to bite up the fixed nature of these scripts by poking my informants with provocations, questions and invocations of their personal outlooks.

b. Photo elicitation This biting was continued through the use of the photo elicitation technique, that I performed systematically right after the end of my interviews. I used photos that I personally took in Kharkiv with my phone and showed them through my phone. The photo used were both ordinary and spectacular; that means that some of them were pictures of ordinary elements of the city with communist/Soviet elements on it, whereas some others were elements that I knew were controversial (i.e. the destroyed statue of Zhukov). My intention was to get a deeper understanding of the definition processes that actors would put in place; moreover, that would make me understand what they would link with the discourse that they displayed during the interviews (for instance, are decorative stars on buildings related to the communism that is spoiling the city/country or not? Is the hammer and sickle as bad as depictions of Lenin?) By using this technique, I could get more emotional responses to the objects at stake, opening up a room for discussing their personal relations to particular Soviet cultural objects. Thanks to this, I could get more precise and more personal accounts of the evaluation processes of various objects as well as understanding the (ir)relevance of some of the objects. The latter, moreover, enabled me to question them even more about what makes an element Soviet or what makes an element up for decommunizations. My presupposition was that seeing these images would induct the memory of the interactions with the cultural object depicted in the photo, thus allowing me to understand what kind of relation exist with different objects. Moreover, when confronted with the photos, my

17 These groups are popular post-Soviet music groups, which promote a camp essentialized vision of post-Soviet life.

16 informants felt the need to explain the objects, triggering a consequent justification for the need of its decommunization (or preservation). Furthermore, this confrontation produced different reactions at the sight of different objects, which, amongst other elements, provides a further source of analysis and different accounts of communist cultural elements than the ones presented in the interview.

c. Observations I attended several political events organized by local (ultra-)nationalists. Initially my intention was to find new possible actors to interview but I soon realized that it was very unlikely for me to establish a contact during these rallies. I started, then, to treat them as choreographed acts, in which my research questions were staged. In fact, these political events always focused on the Russo- Ukrainian relations and where always performed through Soviet urban objects. Moreover, the characters were all presents: the activists, the grannies, the police, the journalists and also the titushki18. These acts correspond to the performance of the standardized discourse put forward by nationalist organizations; these public demonstrations are the hyperbolic implementation of their visions and their values with respect to the decommunization question. However, they are not merely redundant or confirming the data of the interviews. On the contrary they differ from the discourses that are reproduced during the interviews insofar as they exceed the discourse itself. I wrote down on my phone or on a notebook my observations while the events took place, interrupting my activity only to take pictures or videos of the events. After the end of the events, I would record general and personal impressions about them. This three-fold rendering of my participation at these events makes it possible not only to analyze my observations, but also to study the photos that were taken. These data, hence, allow to extrapolate the autonomous and original mobilizations of various groups around Soviet cultural elements. In fact, the choreography itself is a rich source of information as it sheds light on the original ways in which these groups want to be seen in the public sphere and how they want to be seen interacting with the Soviet references of the city.

3. Secondary Data

In the process of data-gathering I was invited to 7 different excursions throughout the city. They were organized around Soviet elements of the city to show different phenomena: the process of decommunization, Soviet urban projects, the Soviet monuments of the city. I used these excursions

18 Titushki is a name that became popular in Ukraine after the Euromaidan. It refers to hooligans being payed to scare away political adversaries.

17 as enhanced interviews during which I was able to gather my informants’ views on the Soviet past, the decommunization process and the future of the city, as well as their impressions about precise monuments that they chose themselves. In fact, people selected a specific set of Soviet cultural objects to present me a specific vision of the Soviet Union, which I balanced with continuous questions about their choices and with the imposition of other elements to be included in the excursions. This data provides an insight in the specific type of urban elements that are considered as valuable for these people. Finally, the bodily and emotional responses of my informants during the excursions can provide further elements of analysis concerning the affected relationship with communist public elements.

The group EGEA Kharkiv produced multimedia content including both organizational plans and promotional videos. This set of data allows for the analysis of dramatized depiction of the groups themselves and their views. They represent the ways in which they think it is the more appropriate for them and for their audience to appear. It is an interesting depiction as it finds itself between their own image of themselves, their image of the ideal public, their representation of their image by their imaged public and possibly their image of their enemies.

4. Coding

I used Atlas.ti to code my fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews. I coded them in vivo using various concepts that I developed through by working on them during my fieldwork. As I went through them, I was able to test them with the definitive material I collected. Such continuous dialogue with my data allowed me to refine my conceptualization around my research problem. This more systematic coding was sided with a less canonical approach, by following the stream of my thoughts around my fieldwork, plunging into them, trying to follow the assemblages that might have arisen from my fieldnotes (Mazzei, 2014). Mazzei underlines the importance of writing “difractionally”, namely to let the material make new connections (2014). The dialogue between this double approach allowed me to work systematically through my data while keeping a gap in order to allow for possibly surprising connections to arise to the surface.

5. Terminogy

Throughout this paper I use interchangeably the notion of Soviet and communist elements. This decision stems from the official language provided by the Ukrainian government. It is through the decommunization laws that public depictions of Soviet nationhood are outlawed. Only one of my informants protested to my linguistic choice, pointing to the fact that the Soviet Union never

18 implemented communism de facto. However, the majority of my informants also referred interchangeably to communism and Soviet Union.

19

Framing and literature review

1. Liminal histories

The city of Kharkiv occupies a peculiar political geography; located close to the border with the Russian Federation, the city’s connections to its neighbors are both cultural and social. Kharkiv’s population is characterized by a Russian-speaking majority19, extending their ties beyond the national borders. Many of my interlocutors pointed to this liminal identity referring to two main aspects: the extension of their parental ties and leisure activities in (at least before the revolution). The Sovietization process started soon in the city, in order to proclaim the victory of the Bolshevik forces over the Nazi occupation (Hewryk, 1992). Soviet modernity started to be implemented, comprising the establishment of a socialist society through a Russian prism (Murawski, 2018). This was often implemented by population displacements and forced culturalization policies during Stalin’s years (Magosci, 1996). This history strongly resurged after the (2004-2005) 20, which helped craft Ukraine as a post-genocidal society, victim of communist terrors (Zhurzhenko, 2017). However, this new identity does not stick homogeneously throughout the Ukrainian territory; on the contrary, some of its cities struggle to take up this new national configuration. Ukraine’s status as a borderland country has been long explored (Brown 2004; Richardson 2008). Its neighborliness with the Russian Federation has been haunting Ukraine’s history and continues to reverberate in its post-Independence trajectory. The name of Ukraine is often related to its status as a borderland, tracing its origin to the dictum “U Krainj”, meaning “at the border”. The territories which comprehend contemporary Ukraine have been long disputed by various Empires, changing their status as parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the . In the 18th century, Ukrainian history was marked by the Russian Imperial desires to enlarge its possessions in the European continent during the reign of Catherine II (Basilevski, 2016). Its liminal existence as a borderland was further marked by its official denominations during the Russian Empire, as , Southern Russia, New Russia. The Western part of Ukraine was one of the Red revolutionary movement and Kharkiv quickly became the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1919), even before the official formation of the Soviet Union

19 For more information, see: http://www.ucipr.org.ua/publicdocs/RussophoneIdentity_EN.pdf 20 The revolution was a general uprising against national corruption and election’s scandals. More information in the section “History of Decommunization”.

20 (Magocsi, 1996). The newly founded State emerged in opposition to the Ukrainian People’s Republic, with Kyiv as its capital. The Western part of today’s Ukraine was integrated in Ukraine only after WWII with the Soviet Union’s endeavors in the battles in Eastern Europe. Through a centuries long experience of occupations by various empires, stretching its Western and Eastern parts towards different directions, contemporary Ukraine was delineated during its Soviet constitution as one of the 15 Republics comprising the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The geopolitical consequences of Cold War, which divided Europe into the Western and Eastern blocks influenced Ukraine’s position as a borderland, changing its place from the edge to the center of the communist block (Jones, 2017). Neighboring with USSR’s satellite states like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, the Westerner Republic of the Soviet Union found itself at the center of the passage of goods and people. In its Post-Soviet transition, however, Ukraine appeared on the threshold between empires again, as Hungary, and Slovakia were quickly integrated in the European Union in 2004. Bulgaria and Romania followed in 2007, heightening the status of Ukraine as an in-between country, having lost its centrality in the former Eastern block21. The tension that characterizes these recent geopolitical changes is echoed in the city of Kharkiv; the latter was the first capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, located in the Eastern part of the country, one hour by car from the Russian Federation. As the first capital of the Socialist Republic, the city underwent a thorough Sovietization, through the transformation of its built environment as a manifestation of the victory of the proletariat over the former occupying bourgeois powers (Hewryk, 1992). In the general fervor of the enthusiastic first modernism of the 30s, the capital city became the stage to experiment the grandiosity of socialist modernity, which implied not only social engineering, but also architectural endeavors. The tallest sky-scraper of the Soviet Union (and of Europe) was built in the city, , exemplifying the modernization abilities of the people living outside of capitalist exploitation; universities were built, mass-housing complexes saw the light, the city sprang in the name of socialist modernity(Hewryk, 1992). Socialist elements crowded the city, creating it as an example of the grandiose endeavors that Soviet power could provide for the socialist world to come. Throughout the socialist life of the city, various infrastructural projects were implemented, like metro stations for instance, always decorated with the heraldry of the Soviet power, including bas-reliefs of Lenin, hammers and sickles, socialist stars, packs of hay. The presence of this symbolism was ensured by the collaboration between Soviet powers and art institutes, which collaborated in order to encrust Soviet socialist heraldry in strategic public spots (Silina, 2015). An example of this collaboration is

21 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/world/europe/01cnd-union.html

21 the creation of standardized statuary depictions of Lenin, based on his funeral mask (Yurchak, 2015). Public depictions of the Soviet leader were always molded on this basis and reproduced throughout the territory of the Soviet Union, including Kharkiv and the rest of Ukraine. The Sovietization efforts are still clearly visible in the city, encompassing not only architectural styles like modernism and socialist realism, but also monuments of the protagonists of Soviet times, both personalized and anonymous 22 and general Soviet heraldry (coats of arm, hammers and sickles). During my interview with a city’s public official, they proudly mentioned the specificity of Kharkiv as being the Ukrainian city with the uttermost presence of Soviet modernist architecture, attracting tourists from all over Ukraine. If architectural heritage is considered positively because of the economic and status benefits that it can bring to the city, its “Soviet industrialism” was considered as a plague by other informants. Mass-housing had the same destiny, often considered as an inadequate effort of a modernization process that did not hold its strength anymore. Fragmented, yet standing, the rusted, worn-out creations of the enthusiastic Soviet modernization are lingering in the city, complexifying the identity of Kharkiv. The overabundant Soviet-ness cramps the city in its own temporal understanding; if the city exists in an independent Ukraine which emerged against the Soviet Union, its built environment keeps, more or less coherent, the ties with the former power. If the Soviet Union does not bear any political strength anymore, its built environment is still ambiguously present in the city. This ambiguity is further enhanced by the post-Cold War European geopolitics, which transported the country to a new border condition. As the country stands between the European Union and the Russian Federation, Kharkiv’s built environment stands between its former national configuration (Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine) and the recent conflictual moves towards a European direction for the country, embodied in the Euromaidan struggles.

2. Like Hello?! We’re not in Soviet Union anymore!

The omnipresence of communist symbols is a trait that was either mentioned or confirmed by the majority of my informants during my fieldwork in Kharkiv. The decorations on buildings, the memorial plates, the statues were used to justify this omnipresence that was crowding Ukraine’s post-independence public space. The omnipresence of Soviet elements, however, was still mentioned as a source of remarque, and sometimes discomfort, especially when referring to the Euromaidan and its consequent urban

22 Personalized figures include Zhukov, Lenin, Maselskyi and other relevant Soviet politicians. Anonymous figures include collectives of farmers, workers, etc.

22 decommunization; Oksana23, for instance, former member of EGEA Kharkiv when talking about the quantity of Soviet elements in the city firmly said: “Like, hello? We are not in Soviet Union anymore!”. Some ultra-nationalist organizations 24 were also dissatisfied with the state of the process of decommunization and independently continued to dismantle and denounce depictions of Soviet Nationhood in Kharkiv’s public spaces. Public Soviet depictions were not officially tolerated anymore, or at least not to the same extent, as they came to represent a foreign presence, a lurking overabundant enemy. The quantity of these depictions was defined as infringing on the conception of an independent Ukraine, making them not only illegitimate, but also places of struggle around allegiance to an independent Ukrainian Nation; in the words of the nationalist activists25 that I interviewed, people in favor of the preservation of these elements were “anti-Ukrainian”, whereas the ones that were against them were real patriots26. The legitimacy of these monuments, thus, is undergoing semiotic and material reconfigurations in post-Maidan Kharkiv, by practices of destruction, denunciation and linguistic transformation. Post- Soviet Ukraine is made antithetical with the presence of explicit Soviet depictions of nationhood, as the latter is overabundant, visible, out of place and, most importantly anachronistic (or made so). As Oksana said, Ukraine is not Soviet anymore, a sentence that englobes the temporal ambiguity that she felt in her country and her city: the reference to the Soviet Union is lingering in the national definition, if not only in its negative dimension (Ukraine is not the Soviet Union). This negative definition refers to a temporal dimension, which acknowledges the presence, in its past form, of the Union as Ukraine becomes the absence of the Soviet Union. This ambiguity is reflected in the urban environment of Kharkiv, where Soviet decorations, insignia and heraldry continue to be highly present in the public space, even though my interlocutors informed me that I “should have seen how it was before [the decommunization process]! They were everywhere!!”

3. The scarcity of Ukrainian-ness

While Ukraine is not Soviet anymore, its current configurations are not yet clear. The fragments of the Soviet leap to modernization are still lingering in the Ukrainian city and the contours of the New Nation struggle to emerge. This material tension is better understood in the

23 All the names of my informants have been anonymized. 24 Ultra-nationalist organization is the emic word used to describe extreme nationalist groups, sympathizers of Nazi heraldry, vocalizing the discontent with the Russian influence in the country. Other names include: ultra-right, fascists, nationalists (vs patriots). 25 This group of people included people of different organizations, from violent para-military activists to self-defined patriots spreading nationalist ideas through cultural initiatives. 26 Some of my informants expressed their doubts about people’s neutral interest in Soviet modernism. They told me clearly that they believed that if someone likes Soviet-era elements, they are at core anti-Ukrainian.

23 light of the politics of nationhood during the Soviet Union; the USSR recognized political legitimacy to the various ethnicities living in its territory, making it a pluri-ethnic state. However, particular ethnic identities were all subjugated to the ultimate civic Soviet one (Brubaker, 1994). The latter was characterized by a general and universal proletariat, who was, more often than not, Russian-speaking (Brandenberger, 2000). The power of the attachment to this Soviet identity has repercussions in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city with a Russian-speaking majority. As Soviet elements are still present, they continue to evoke an attachment to a particular conception of nationhood which clashes with the ethno-nationalist endeavors of the post-Maidan government (Shuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020). These clashes become visible in internal political conflicts with mayors fighting against decommunization policies. As some local politicians try to implement baroque expedients to not change the reference to the Soviet Union, national governments insist on the need to conform to new dispositions of public displays of nationhood 27. This political struggle appears even more saliently as it unfolds in a material disparity between explicitly Soviet and Ukrainian built environments. Various nationalist activists vocalized Kharkiv’s lack of Ukrainian symbolism and the need to provide the city with its heroes. “Ukraine had a lot of heroes in its history, but in Kharkiv you only see Soviet representatives. The occupants of the country are glorified over the national one. Things need to change”. The change desired by Innokentin, an ultra-nationalist activist, however, clashes with the intentions of the city’s government, which makes sure to put back to their place every Soviet monument that anonymous nationalist activists dismantle. The scarcity of material representations of Ukrainian-ness in favor of an overabundant Soviet-ness is stressed through the dispositions of various monuments. The statue of Kharkiv’s founder, for instance, a Cossack, one of the symbols of , is found at a cross- road at a very trafficked area. It is impossible for a big group of people to gather around it, without stopping normal circulation. Innokentin denounced this difficulty and compared it to the central placement of Lenin’s statue which stood at the center of Freedom Square. The statue’s position facilitated gatherings in front of it, making it easier to organize national demonstrations in the adjacent square. The centrality of the statue is so flagrant that activists gathered around it during the demonstration for the Orange Revolution. However, after Euromaidan the in-built hierarchical disposition started to be more and more disputed as it came to defy the configurations of the New Ukraine, asking for urban re-management.

27 Notable is the long struggle around Zhukov’s bust in Kharkiv, which was destroyed several times but unknown activitists and put back into place every time. For an insight in the debate, see https://ren.tv/news/v-mire/425540- mer-kharkova-o-snose-biusta-zhukova-pora-vozvrashchatsia-s-maidanov-k-zdravomu-smyslu

24 The geographical in-betweenness of Ukraine between the European Union and the Russian Federation is symbolically represented in the political struggles embedded in the Euromaidan. This double in-betweenness is enhanced by Kharkiv’s built environment, which stands between its former national configuration (Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic) and the recent conflictual moves towards a European direction for the country. Furthermore, at the beginning of the Euromaidan revolution, the city’s council was occupied and Pro-Russian fighters declared Kharkiv’s People’s Republic28. This brief political entity stood with the other two independentist regions of Ukraine against Kyiv, on their basis of their political and historical affiliation with Russia. In the midst of these conflicting affective political geographies, Kharkiv’s built environment is managed in various ways. These recent geopolitical transformations influenced Ukraine’s National contours; as a result, recent governments promoted a narrower conception of the Nation, leaning towards an ethnically exclusionary configuration (Zhuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020). This political drift encompasses urban environments as well, regulated with the pack of decommunization laws. However, Kharkiv lacks the material elements to found this radical transformation, as the fragments of Soviet modernity are still crowding them. What are the techniques that actors are mobilizing to manage this incongruence? How are people expressing what it means to be Ukrainian in the contradictory city of Kharkiv?

4. National crumbles

The national problem in Kharkiv becomes a very material one, as the Nation which is publicly displayed does not coincide with its new conceptions. Urban decommunization tackles not only Ukraine’s recent past, but also its previous national configuration, aligning it to a present desired route, marked by changed geopolitical affiliations. As highlighted by Kudaibergenova, in times of political transition, states undergo processes of traditionalization in order to consolidate power and create a more defined national identity (2017). She points out how in the case of post-Soviet , official discourses around the legitimate, mythical social past of the Nation are mobilized to legitimize specific socio-political configurations. The aura of the constructed boundless past is strategically mobilized to guarantee desired political goals and stability. Specific cultural elements are proposed as exemplary, authentic traditions, which are then used to put forward an idea of national continuity stretching from a boundless, glorious State to the contemporary national configuration (Stephens, 2016). Influent groups struggle to impose their genealogical vision of the Nation as the hegemonic one, which will become the sanctioned

28 https://carnegieeurope.eu/2018/09/12/how-eastern-ukraine-is-adapting-and-surviving-case-of-kharkiv-pub-77216

25 delineation of National identity (Kudaibergenova, 2017). History is mobilized through political and cultural prisms to produce legitimizing discourses, whose factitious authenticity is mobilized as pristine, hiding its manufactured character. Discursive struggles over the Nation’s origin and its historicity are key elements in the understanding of the state’s stability (Hobsbawn and Ranger, 2012). Historical conceptions of the Nation are worked and reworked within legitimizing discourses of the political community; within this process, actors develop a legitimacy framed through specific configurations of temporal continuity, which, in turn, defines the state’s national community of reference. The use of temporality in the construction of specific configurations of the Nation is not only manifested in the particularistic mobilizations of History; temporality is also mobilized normatively to craft divides, expressed through notions of backwardness and modernity. As explained by Butler, the latter presupposes a conception of linear time, which moves towards the concretization of a specific goal. She points out to the political nature of such gesture, notably the structuration of development on the basis of the set standard (Butler, 2008). By referring to a “non-modern practice”, official actors are creating a matrix of exclusion/inclusion in the political community. In the case of Kharkiv, for instance, defining people attached to Soviet monuments as lacking the ability to understand modern times buys into this logic. Disregarding these attachments does not merely create a normative distinction between subjectivities; rather, it delineates a normative temporal consideration, where Soviet-ness is valued negatively. Through this negative judgement, Soviet-ness is excluded from the community’s positive identification, hinting to a specific national configuration. If the discursive approach to the Nation let us see the crucial role and the processual role of temporality and historicity, it falls short in the case of Kharkiv’s paradoxical material composition. If normative national discourses are present (decommunization policies are emblematic in this case), they do not allow us to fully understand the situation on the ground. As the city overflows with Soviet-era elements (so much so that changing all of them is impossible without having to reconstruct its fundamental infrastructures) how do people interact with the normativity of their environments? How do they make use of these materials to make sense of the presented normativity? It is difficult to see how a solely discursive analysis would give us access to such information. In his analysis of the “nationalization process” in post-Soviet states, Brubaker mentions language policies and citizenship legislation as drivers in the solidification of national communities (2011). Particularly, the author analyzes how Soviet national legacies influenced the current project, notably the construction of specific ethnic groups and territorial belonging for the mentioned groups. Cramped within these historical influences, the novel states adopt measures in order to

26 create a more or less homogeneous Nation, favoring more or less ethno-national conceptions of the State over pluri-national models. By focusing on the nationalization process, the author deals with the state’s macro-level in its processual formation. Brubaker discusses the danger of such approach himself, highlighting how it risks to reify the Nation as an all-encompassing entity. He points, for instance, to the role that national statistics have in the creation of national categories (2004). He defies the conceptual use of Nation as an entity in favor of an analysis of Nation as a working category, mobilized by different actors. As such, he proposes a valuable technique against methodological nationalism, a recurrent bias in social sciences which takes the Nation as an all- encompassing level of analysis to understand society at large; the bias goes as follows: once the national level is explained, the rest will follow accordingly (Wimmer &Glick-Shiller, 2002). The reification of the Nation which the author allegedly contrasts, however, appears in his own papers through the lack of contextualization as well as the strong focus on the National institutional level. If he stresses the causal power of citizenship legislation combined with migration patterns29, he fails to address, for instance, the ways in which such desires of belonging arose; what makes someone decide to leave Latvia, the country where they lived all their lives? What makes someone long for a country they never lived in but which was allegedly built for their ethnos? Brubaker’s epistemological position fails to grant access to these queries, queries that moves us in our exploration of the contradictory national configurations of Kharkiv. Ukraine’s newly adopted legislations on language and history surely plays a role in the reconfigurations of the Nation; however, it leaves unanswered the reasons why this legislation was needed. Moreover, it would not shed light on the effects of such reconfigurations for actors, scrunched between normative discourses and their lived experience. Such approach would not grant access to peculiar dynamics happening on the ground, such as the destruction of a specific category of monuments within a national transformation, as it was the case in Euromaidan. By overseeing the material implications of national formation, these approaches deprive the Nation of its processual and unstable configuration, by conceiving it as a unidirectional process aimed at stabilization. As such, they fail to account for the ways in which national legitimation work by adapting to continuous normative temporal understandings of itself and of its historical place. If stabilization is the aim of formal national institutions, the Nation does not exist merely through them, nor through the discourse that it produces to legitimize itself A crucial aspect of the Nation is its sheer materialization itself in its (public) territory. The Nation is produced through its banal material objects, like money and flags (Billig, 1995). Billig claims that the Nation’s

29 He mobilizes the example of ethnically identified Russians, who migrated to the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite being born and having lived in Latvia all their lives.

27 legitimacy is based on a community, whose existence depends not only on the circulation of writing through different technologies, thereby creating imagined communities of belonging (Anderson, 1991); but also, on the circulation of everyday objects amongst individuals. The passing of objects from hands to hands bursts the symbolic contours of the Nation, thus strengthening its national community. The merit of Billig is to have taken seriously the ways in which everyday objects might partake in national configurations. However, the author seems to consider objects as closed reference of cultural meaning, failing to attend to the thickness of material objects. If flags, for instance, can be identified as national symbols, their semiotic existence is not univocal. A nation can mean different things; for instance, Italian flags in front of restaurants in the touristic center of Amsterdam might denote the high or bad quality of the place, depending on various factors, such as the cultural background of the visitors, their knowledge of food quality in massively touristified places, the exoticism that they ascribe to Italy, etc. The discursive and material takes on the Nation previously sketched leave out contestations as well as creative re-appropriations of macro national measures by actors positioned in specific locations. In Billig’s account, for instance, money and flags, although banal, they are quintessentially national; the possible ironic contestations or their semiotic transformations do not appear as a readily available possibility. These theories underline a unidirectional process, through which the national community is formed; however, they leave untouched the existence of the mentioned community, which arises as an epistemological unit of analysis rather than a social existing entity. They fail to analyze the extent to which these national processes exist de facto, preferring an analysis of the situation which dialectically passes from analytical categories to studied reality. They flesh out the macro mechanisms mobilized in national processes, proposing a static conception of the Nation, thus failing to understand the circulatory, contested ways in which it emerges. As I will show in this thesis, the Nation is not a self-standing entity, it does not pre-exist contingent enactments; on the contrary, it emerges in various and contingent ways through disparate agglomerations of entities performed, amongst others, at the urban level.

5. Relational Nations

Analyzing the Nation through its relational emergence defies possibilities of methodological nationalism as it does not presume its existence in epistemically strict boundaries; rather, it allows to observe how it appears in multiple ways through differing materials, combining international, urban, national, regional registers. These combinations are not only present through discursive or institutional manifestations; rather, they emerge through objects and their capacity to become something else. As analyzed by Latour, the politics of things – or Dingpolitik – is grounded in their

28 potential of becoming entangled with novel chains of elements, including both humans and non- humans (Latour, 2005). As such, they can enter in new relationships, able to disrupt precedent configurations, as they get entangled or disentangled with other socio-material entities. Attending to materiality as a relational entity allows to follow the ways in which socio-material configurations are gathered together in order to produce desired worlds, including states, urban realities, political economic fantasies and their interpenetrations (Abrahamsson et al., 2015; Callon, 2014). By looking at the ways in which the State emerges through socio-material enactments, it is possible to embrace “the empirical diversity of the social life of the state” (Ssorin-Chaikov, 2003), attending to the various configurations in which it can be assembled. Such an approach allows to understand the State not as “vitality-denying ideological obfuscation” nor as a mere fiction that needs to be revealed through the attentive lens of critical theory (Mazzarella, 2010). I depart from theories of nationalism that conceive of the state as a mere fictional performance, embedded in invented traditions or imagined communities (Hobsbawm, 1983; Anderson, 1991); on the contrary, I will try to make sense of its multiple material emergence and configuration as social fact performed by actors. Theories of the Nation which rely on a dichotomic ontology, by which perceived reality is a mere epiphenomenon of “realer” structures, reduce objects to a mere void to be filled, a valueless representation of a deeper and more meaningful structure (Bourdieu, 2015). However, by attending at material enactments of Nationhood, it is possible to understand how this fiction is both crafted by people in their socio-material stumblings and affectively cherished or antagonized. For instance, in the case of post-Maidan Kharkiv, the Nation is enacted through multiple figures, as exemplified through celebrative marches which I observed during Independence Day (analyzed in Chapter 1). In that case, actors’ clothing, gestures, and slogans enacted nationhood as the fighting Nation in its Eastern front. Furthermore, this enactment was aligned with Shevshenko 30’s statue in front of whom demonstrators payed their respects. The Nation is then aligned with two conceptions of nationhood: the mythical boundless one which exhumes from the statue of Shevshenko and the victorious, fighting one; the two assembled together are casted against not only Russia but the Soviet Union, aligning them together and fighting them by attacking communist depictions in the city31. This example sketches the centrality of material elements in the emergence of Nations, which, in turn can be cherished or antagonized. It is, in fact, through these semiotic and affective engagements that the Nation emerges, by aligning various conceptions of nationhood (Laszczkowski & Reeves, 2018).

30 Shevshenko is the national Ukrainian poet; some of my informants referred to him as the “saint of Ukraine”, saying that “almost every Ukrainian has at least one copy of his books at home”. 31 For a more detailed description of the case, see Chapter 1.

29 It is thanks to relational accounts on nationalism that it is possible to acquire a nuanced understanding of the constitution of the Nation, without relying on a univocal analysis. Observing the Nation through socio-material assemblages grants access to its flickering character, paving the way to analyses of the emergent properties and capacities of national assemblages, which hold on people, affecting them and leading them to action. Focusing on the relational properties of national assemblages, moreover, sheds light on the ways in which specific assembled Nations affect some bodies instead of others, prompting contestations over national values or attachments to specific socio-material groupings (Stephens, 2016). These national assemblages can arise in seemingly banal and everyday objects like roads, which can become enmeshed in national attachments, ideas of belonging, passage of borders, prosperity, race (Merriman and Jones, 2017). The Nation, thus, can be understood through the lenses of affective atmospheres, emerging from relational socio- material assemblages, generating peculiar conceptions of nationhood (Stephens, 2016). As such, nationalist affects can be understood not as springing out of an essence, but rather emerging through assemblages of elements which contingently flash out temporary configurations of the Nation, which might stick to bodies, objects and materials. Therefore, these elements can trigger national atmospheres when particularly aligned, possibly dissolving once the assemblage ceases to be in tension. I argue that analysis of the Nation relying on this approach would not get stuck on reified abstractions, by attending to the different levels of analysis which are always enmeshed in the per- formance (giving of form) of the Nation, through its material configurations.

6. Assembled states

The process of national building, thus, is not a process happening once and for all; nor does it follow a compartmental logic, by which national processes are conceived as separated from urban and global processes, combining only human actors. These affective encounters are both ordinary and extraordinary in nature, highlighting how the State does not precede its enactments; on the contrary, it is enacted and enacts through the semiotic and affective configurations that emerge in its social life. I suggest that when “the state becomes real” through these encounters (Laszczkowski &Reeves 2018), it does not always take the same forms, meanings, temporalities. On the contrary, when the state emerges in the affective encounters sprouting from socio-material assemblages, it does so in contingent ways, following the performativity of specific networks. Spaces and material objects become privileged sites where to observe the social life of the state, its material semiotic manifestations and the effects that they provoke. For instance, when enacted during the aforementioned nationalist event, Ukraine is a victorious soldier trumping both its historical occupant (Soviet Union) and its contemporary one (Russian Federation); the attachment that it

30 provokes is one relating to war, victory, and cherished mythical nation. On the other hand, when enacted through supermarkets, abundance of commodities against a Soviet economic scarcity and obsolescence, Ukraine emerges as a capitalist, flourishing, European country whose affinity with democratic values is indexed through its consumption possibilities. The latter state is casted against Soviet buildings, whose boxiness, greyness and standard format highlight the non-modernity that should be wiped off the surface of the new, modern Ukraine. These two brief examples demonstrate the multiple ways in which the Nation can be enacted through material elements. Hence, the understanding of affect that I mobilize in my thesis is not one that would imply the mere discharge of structuring affective forces onto subjects; rather, an affective relation that implies the co-creation of both human and non-human actors (Navaro-Yashin, 2009). Once these intensities are tied to specific political symbols, the state becomes calcified in specific spatial realities and infrastructures (Graham & Martin, 2001). For instance, in the cases of transition of power, national narratives of liberation are proposed, often conjugated in a dichotomic narrative juxtaposing the evil old regime with the good new regime (Beyers, 2018). These discourses are taken up by actors on the ground and channeled through material objects and practices which jags the discourses, re-knitting state- sponsored conceptions of National liberation. In short, the state is “done and undone” through these affective and semiotic encounters (Pinker & Harvey, 2018). Actors in Kharkiv encounter incongruent manifestations of Nations in their urban encounters, stumbling on bridges decorated with Soviet heraldry or passing by monuments of Soviet heroes. It is through these interactions that national configurations can be tinkered and re-managed, as material concretizations of the Nation are taken up by actors living through its material and urban territory. Social change in these matters occurs in the enmeshed relation happening between the long-standing material world and the more contingent lives of social actors, negotiating their enmeshed character.

7. Situated visibilities

This peculiar enmeshed interaction is not a straight-forward one. The process through which public depictions of nationhood become objects of contestation is not linear; some monumental representations of national heroes can be contested by differing groups, while still being considered national heroes (see for examples recent struggles around colonial figures in Europe, notably Pitts, 2019). The case of the demolition of the statue of Saddam Hussein, for instance, right after the occupation of Bagdad, differs radically from the presence of Lenin in the squares of , Russia and (partly) Ukraine. A change in regime does not necessarily produce nor imply a radical change in the material constitution of the Nation. For instance, Soviet elements were hardly contested in Eastern Ukraine until recently, when specific material objects erupted as incongruent with their

31 semiotic environment. One should not, however, buy into a naïve conception of causality, for which actors hasten to shape their material environment as soon as a differing conception of the Nation appears. On the contrary, these enmeshed relationships are topological, meaning that things are not gathered on the basis of their temporal or spatial proximity (Farias, 2016). On the contrary, layered histories, sites and entities can become visible in objects, generating peculiar socio-material entanglements.

In a material environment of overabundant Soviet-ness and scarce Ukrainian-ness, the radical geopolitical drift let emerge unexpected socio-material relations. The assemblage paradigm allows to investigate the possibility of the “coming together of the previously unrelated” (Farias, 2011) shedding light on the ways in which diverse elements are aligned to enact complex agglomerations. Peculiar practices and sites make and un-make socio-material realities, turning them into conglomerations of specific bodies, buildings, infrastructures. It is in the waving together of these socio-materialities that entities like cities, nations, bodies (Farias, 2011; Stephens, 2017; Mol, 2002) are enacted and, possibly, transformed, making them not a coherent and univocal entity; rather, they become multiple entities, emergent through peculiar aligned chains. It is through assemblage theory that the Nation can be understood not as an abstract, free-floating entity, but rather as a socio-material assemblage which is done and un-done through its concretizations on the ground. This ground is nor anywhere nor nowhere, rather it is always somewhere (Haraway, 1988). As a situated enactment, the Nation becomes entangled with the material elements through which it is given form. For instance, the enactment of the urban as a national configuration and of the national as a specific urban configuration in their very material aspects is what the assemblage paradigm can allow us to intercept. As the paradigm asks us not to presuppose the existence of entities before their enactment in site-specific socio-material configurations (Farias, 2016), it is possible to follow the ways in which actors make appear national configurations through the urbanity in which they live; moreover, urbanity itself might be arranged as to provide a material basis for specific national configurations. For instance, Soviet-era objects might make the city a grey Soviet city, with an industrial heaviness to it; these depictions might not be considered as the glorious examples of modernization leaps, but rather the crash of personal individuality, as some of my interlocutors expressed. The material world thus becomes a crucial basis on which to understand the Nation as specific colors, styles, materials and eras can be wrapped together, enacting specific national configurations (Féhérváry, 2013). The latter, moreover, do not strictly refer to still-existing Nations, rather they can refer to Lost Nations, disappearing Nations, past Nations. In the case of Kharkiv, for instance, Soviet elements can be assembled together in order to give form to a specific conception of the Soviet nation, forming a specifically situated material configurations of the recent

32 past of the Ukrainian Nation. In other words, Soviet elements are constituted in post-Maidan Kharkiv in order to do the Nation as a configuration in which, for instance, Soviet-ness is considered as alien; additionally, their assembled character might produce a city which conforms to ideas of belonging to both national (Ukraine) and international (EU) communities.

33 These different entanglements happen specifically somewhere, notably the city of Kharkiv, a city on the border within a larger borderland. These inter-national threads will embroil with the status of the city as the former capital of Soviet Ukraine, as well as with the recent attempts to make it part of the Russian Federation. It is through local attachments that the Nation is forged, being enacted through urban locality. As illustrated by Stephens, for instance, the configurations of the Nation are shaped by material structures; the Seven Bridge, an infrastructure connecting England to Wales, came to signify an affective border, signaling the entrance (or exit) to a cherished border (2017). The bridge became a recurrent element in the imaginary of the Nation, shaped by its connections and environment. As for Kharkiv, the enactment of the Nation also serves to anchor

A rain gutter painted with the Ukrainian national the city to a specific conception of nationhood, colors in Kharkiv. as its temporal and sovereign belonging is ambiguous. For instance, at the height of the Revolution in 2014, actors started to paint urban elements with the national colors of Ukraine in what my interlocutors referred to as the “War of Colors”. They defined such practice as crucial in the midst of the Revolution, when the fate of Kharkiv as a Ukrainian city was uncertain. By painting the city with the national colors, (some) city dwellers were making sure that Kharkiv stayed in Ukraine, uttering their desire not to become Russian by expressing materially their attachment to the Nation, in this case materialized through the colors of the flag. Using the colors of the national flag to transform the building’s colors, Kharkovites aligned various human and non-human elements in order to enact not only a national configuration, but a specific one. A Nation emerging from the blue and yellow colors of the flag, which covered the very materials of the city; a national yellow-blue city, moreover, whose unity was materially threatened by people fighting for its annexation to the Russian Federation. The super-position of these elements – notably the colors, the flag, two conflicting nations, urban materials – acquired a specific meaning, transforming banal objects, like rain gutter, into a radical

34 political affirmation of national belonging, inscribed, in tour, in a logic of European expansion (in the midst of the Euromaidan). The Nation was biting off ground to an opposite one, by the seemingly banal action of actors, painting (semi) public elements.

8. Naturalizing objects

The possibility of emerging of various assemblages is rooted in the capacity of objects to become something else (Farias, 2017). A metal sickle on a Kharkiv’s bridge, for instance, can become entangled with different configurations: a sign of the Soviet presence in the city, a sign of Russian annexation, or a sign of Ukrainian renaissance against its neighbor’s aggression. It is through their relationality that things can become unexpectedly visible, thus generating new relations (Farias, 2016). As expressed by some of my interlocutors, the Soviet-ness of urban elements became visible only after the decommunization process started in the city. The previous everydayness of these objects made them invisible, unremarked and unremarkable. However, the revolution, the conflict and the policies transformed the ordinary Artyom of “Artyom street” into Artyom the communist, in the contested city of Kharkiv. As the various examples sketched before suggest, the emergence of affinity between elements, might induce semiotically rich effects, through which it can be possible to tinker the Nation (Peirce, 1955). The basis for this relation between “ideas” and “objects” in an equal status and not in a subordinate way (i.e. one being the epiphenomenon of the other) relies on the concept of qualisigs “sensuous qualities of objects […] that exist beyond their particular manifestations” (Keane, 2003 : 414); redness or lightness, for instance, are qualisigns, existing beyond their particular embodiments. A red flag has the sensuous quality of the mentioned color, it thus embodies redness, which, in turn, could not exist without its physical manifestations. Qualia, furthermore, are only semiotic potentialities, meaning that they are not able in themselves to produce meaning; they need particular social relations, which are enmeshed with the materiality of the elements themselves (Fehérváry, 2011). The evaluation process of qualia through iconicity (mirroring relation), indexicality (causal relationship [neighborliness]) and symbolism (arbitrary relationship) enacts specific material objects into socio- materially meaningful elements. An example of this relationality is the evaluation of mastery, in which the latter is indexical of the long training process that it required to achieve mastery itself. However, it is interpreted as social value, as prestigious and desirable social value through an iconic relation, in which its indexicality (i.e. if I have mastery it is because I went through a long process of training) is perceived as an intrinsic quality of an individual, mirroring its innate ability. This examples sheds light on the mechanisms of naturalization, through which a contingent process becomes an a-temporal characteristic of one’s identity. The process of naturalization highlights the

35 ways in which indexicals and their social effects are entangled together producing things and meanings, which act as they have always already existed (Jones, 2017). The potential of Piercean semiotics and particularly of qualia for social analysis is notable, as it offers social scientists the possibility of combining similar aspects of the perceptible world, despite their manifestations in differing material assemblages. It allows to analyze an abstract entity, such as “Soviet-ness” among a delimitated group of objects perceived as its manifestations, such as “material communism”.

As the unbalanced material configurations in Kharkiv (overabundant Soviet-ness and scarce Ukrainian-ness) makes its post-Maidan national configuration problematic, actors make use of qualisigns to naturalize desired configurations. Human and non-humans col-laborate to knit together identities (such as people, places, buildings, statues), which come to exist as natural alignments, producing affects (Mol, 2002). Such alignments emerge through interdiscursivity, namely an indexical relationship, in which an assembled entity is made contiguous to another, thus changing their meaning and possibly their effects (Jones, 2017). As mentioned before, this process was fairly visible during my fieldwork and several of my interlocutors mentioned it to me; the communist origin of various streets in Kharkiv or of some of its monuments was ignored before the decommunization process, it was just another part of the city. However, once the decommunization process started these elements became vivid indexes of the city’s historical development, sometimes contested and sometimes cherished. Soviet elements become signs of the failure of the socialist project of modernization, hindering the leap towards liberal conceptions of the (European) nation. Time-spaces are knitted on them, notably the Soviet Union as a finished political project, letting emerge possible normativities concerning the modernity of a style or of a belief. Moreover, as they assemble heterogeneous time-spaces, they are generative of differing layering of history, making it appear through the very materiality of the place (M’charek, 2014). For instance, the worn-out façades of Soviet-era buildings can acquire the meaning of the indifference of the city’s population towards this epoch. This indifference, in turn, can become an index of the city’s identity as incompatible with socialism. As Kharkovites are defined as trade-oriented, they are distanced from these material elements, a distance which is naturalized by the indifference towards these elements; the latter, moreover, is indexed from the worn-out character of these façades. Such a socio-material understanding, moreover, can be promoted as a sign of the capitalist nature of the city, thus, its legitimate belonging to the fantasized “Yevropa” [Europe]. Therefore, socio-material assemblages knitting national configurations through the urban materiality of Kharkiv can be productive of legitimizing temporalities; the latter, in turn, can be mobilized as naturalized histories, which can be used to articulate desires of belonging. In the incongruent national configuration of Kharkiv, cramped with an overabundance of Soviet elements and a scarcity of Ukrainian ones, actors are

36 actively knitting histories in order to interact with the long-standing materiality in their limited capacity to act. Overpowering human actors, infrastructures need to be dealt in inventive ways, especially in the process of constituting temporal contours for the Nation as well as stabilizing it in precise geographies of belonging.

37 Theoretical proposition

Communist Origami

Kharkiv is traversed by a tension: crowded with an overabundant presence of Soviet-era elements it lacks elements susceptible for the material configuration of post-Soviet Ukrainian-ness. The unbalance of this material distribution creates frictions in the socio-material encounters in the city as actors stumble on Soviet elements in differing situations: in their commutes, in their living blocks, in their trips, as they relax in parks. As they pass through their city, Kharkovites run into semiotically unstable urban objects, that bear the potential of generating contradictory national depictions, comprising both national identity and its desired trajectory32. These elements linger in the city in the general inability (both political and practical) to get rid of the material infrastructure. Nevertheless, the presence of Soviet elements is contested, mobilizing actors towards action. Different groups intervene in these contestations, trying to make sense of the changing meaning that they occupy within the new conception of the Nation. In order to make sense of this process, I introduce the concept of communist origami, to better understand the phenomenon taking place during the decommunization process, as it unfolds in the socio-material reconstruction of Kharkiv’s built environment. In order to make sense of this concept, I will firstly present the qualitative character of material(ized) Soviet modernity in Kharkiv and its fragmented presence, productive of temporal and material liminality. Secondly, I will sketch how these fragmented materials are the sources of present-pasts, notably temporal mediations articulating the relationship between pasts and presents; these configurations, moreover, take place in order to trace desired futures for the nation, occurring, nevertheless, in the present. Thirdly, I will discuss the role of qualia, as the material basis for the pleats of these past-presents. Actors pleat the semiotic foils of fragmented Soviet objects, thereby giving form to specific origamis, which fill cracks, tinker temporalities and help to craft desired worlds. 1. Fragmented modernity Soviet modernity is present in Kharkiv, overabundantly so, traversing its roads, its metros, its central and peripherical buildings. It is the mass housing projects of the 50s and 60s, defined by my informants as “extremely Soviet”. It is the stars on the towers of massive public building looking over the city; it is the constructivist elements, the socialist realist central buildings, the decorations of Stalin-era housing [stalinki]. Once built in the jump to construct actually-existing

32 After the end of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet countries abandoned the Soviet policy, by which Soviet socialism was the best ideology, and crafted themselves as development countries, running after Western examples (Smolentseva, 2017).

38 socialism (Hewryk, 1992), these urban elements do not possess anymore the ideological, material and bureaucratic underpinnings knitting them within the future-oriented scope of the advent of communism (Oushakine, 2010; Yurchak, 2006). As illustrated by Lefebvre, urban constitutions are formed following the scope of a totality, which always already fails to be materialized (1976). This future-oriented totality is the structuring principle of collective action, which struggling to materialize this totality continuously develops it. With the collapse of Soviet socialism, the future- oriented goal presupposed in the construction of concrete communist infrastructures crumbled, losing its immediate political reference and efficacy. The celerity of this collapse, moreover, made the presence of these material elements further complex; everything that felt as if it was forever, was suddenly not anymore (Yurchak, 2006). In this unforeseen change of power, the built environment of Soviet socialism was left in an awkward position, as their socio-political justification was not (officially) readily available anymore. Left divorced from their former palimpsest, Soviet urban elements were standing as a reminder of a recently broken glory (at least ideologically), which was distancing more and more from its actual reality. Broken-ness is analyzed by Latour as an epistemologically fruitful source, in so far as it makes clearly visible the parts embroiled in the object at stake (Latour, 1998). It is when networks break open, that their parts acquire visibility, as the smooth enactment of the phenomenon is suspended. Similarly, in the case of Kharkiv, Soviet elements, once smoothly considered as parts of Soviet nationhood, broke open once the reality of Soviet socialism came to an end. Fragmented, yet present, Soviet modernity lingers in Kharkiv as present splinters of past configurations. In this fragmentation, previous differences are made negligible, and similarities become visible. What was previously related to a there-and-then becomes relevant for a here-and-now creating spatio-temporal clusters. These chronotopes associate previously separated things together, making them coincident (Bakhtin, 1981; Silverstein, 2005).

Ukraine’s central governments dealt differently with this process of national fragmentation, entangling or disentangling Soviet elements in the process of nation-building. As these elements become disentangled from affective relationships of nationhood, their presence becomes not only visible, but problematic. Their problematic character relies on their disputed presence as markers of national belonging and (fallen) modernity. The broken pieces of Soviet modernization still vibrate in the Ukrainian present, making them susceptible objects of identification. Despite the presence of some pre-revolutionary architecture, Kharkiv fundamentally lacks urban elements unrelated to the Soviet fragmented totality. Kharkiv’s Ukrainian-ness is rarely depicted in other ways than the ones

39 clustered in the material elements left behind by Soviet socialism33. Cramped by the omnipresence of explicitly Soviet depictions of nationhood, actors struggle to build a coherent conception of a New Nation. Standing on the ground of a former Soviet Republic, these elements produce an ambiguous temporality, making their presence as legitimate national configurations doubtful. Actors intervene in order to stabilize this ambiguity as it erupts in the contested public space of Kharkiv. It is through the management of these remnants that actors can effectively work on the totality presupposed in these material fragments, notably the Soviet presence in Ukraine. Finding ways to make these fragments work, then, becomes crucial for two main reasons: firstly, they are the most present elements at Kharkovites’ disposal; secondly, they offer themselves as mediators through which to delineate the ambiguity relating the inter-national configuration. As such, they become tropes for the stabilization of questions such as: is Ukraine Russia’s near abroad or a future EU member? Is Kharkiv Ukrainian or Russian? In the impossibility to both ignore and rebuild completely the city’s Soviet infrastructure, actors need to creatively manage these material elements, mediating their national representation. In the broken-ness of the present Soviet Union, actors assemble various temporalities in order to make sense of this ambiguous presence; then, what is the role of material elements in the formation of these cramped temporality? How do actors and urban elements interact? 2. Present-pasts

With the end of the Soviet Union, the messianism of Soviet proletariat crumbled, and with it the myth of Soviet modernity (Murawski, 2018). The latter imagined the creation of a socialist society on the basis of a New Socialist Man, arising anew through Soviet social engineering. Once the Union failed, however, the fatherless Man of Soviet modernity was shown in its genealogy and with it the entire project of Soviet modernity. Shattered in its political sovereignty, its material constitution survived it, generating differing actions in various post-Soviet states, from the complete destitution of its explicit built environment (Baltic States) to examples of relatively untouched continuity (Belarus). As the genealogy of the Soviet project becomes evident, the possibility of drawing it differently appears as a possibility and various actors implement it in heterogeneous ways. In a Freudian vocabulary, once the fathers are beheaded, their heads can be used (and will necessarily be used) for new creative configurations. The literature around materiality and objects has long neglected the role of temporality (M’charek, 2014). However, I argue that when analyzing the Nation and its reconfigurations,

33 Notable exceptions to this are examples of pre-revolutionary architectures, such as the legacy of the architect Beketov and the Salamandra house.

40 focusing on the temporal conflicts generating from its contested built environment can be fruitful. In the case of Kharkiv, actors are dwelling in the complex fragmentation of the Soviet Union as a daily reality; they juggle with the ambiguous temporality of this material world, notably in the contested time of decommunization and geopolitical turmoil. The concrete pieces of the “Lost Nation” resurge as elements generative of surprising relations, which, thus, need to be stabilized in their incoherent vibrancy (Bennet, 2009). The lost Nation as emergent from its broken elements reverberates in the present, enhancing the material discrepancies of national presence in the city. In their fragmentation, Soviet elements become shaky, as if rusted in their ability to produce banal legitimacy, glorious patriotism, or roaring modernity. Standing as rusted fragments of a totality that was, these elements start to brittle and foil up, showing the histories layered in them (Yurchak, 2017). The newly acquired mortality of these figures emerges from its politico-temporal relation; the latter encompasses the strident relation between the end of the Soviet Union as a political unity and its persistence as a built materiality. Out of this screeching, the tunes of these elements open for re-interpretation, re-management, and re-allocation. Actors take up the urban fragments of the Soviet Union, seen already as capitulated objects, susceptible to the passage of time34. As elements of a past vibrating in the present, these objects offer themselves as material surfaces on which to extract and constitute knowledge on the past and articulate their present state. Soviet urban elements become the basis for the social generation of configurations of the past, constituted within present contingencies. Actors dwelling in the liminality that this temporal fragmentation creates, give shape to these present-pasts. As elements of a recent past, they are used to tinker the relation between the past and the present, which in turn mediates as well their future aspirations. Actors are then crafting national temporalities on the Soviet fragmentations left in their city. For instance, some of my interlocutors defined with disdain the Soviet-ness of Khrushchiovki35, as their boxiness, greyness, and emotional coldness revealed an undesirable modernity, a failed modernity, not bearing any hope for the future (Keane, 2003). These temporally liminal buildings help constitute a normative understanding of both the past and present, as their material characteristics naturalize the unfitting backwardness of their project. Temporality is layered, presenting the nature of some elements through specific material characteristics: failed modernity should be wiped off in favor of novelty, which however, struggles to see the light. Yet, these characterizations do not erupt from within the objects themselves (Bennett, 2009); on the contrary, their meaning always appears relationally (Abrahamson et al., 2011). These semiotic transformations emerge from socio-material interactions

34 Soviet mortality was made evident in my interviews, when explicitly Soviet elements were defined as victims of time, whereas depictions of Shevshenko were sacralized and considered as immune to temporal decay. 35 Khrushchiovki are typical Soviet mass buildings, created in the 60s during the presidency of Khrushchiov.

41 happening on the background of the fragmenting totality of the Soviet Union. In this liminal time, arising from the fragments of Soviet modernity, temporal splinters get positioned together, in order to give shape in the present time to a historical time. This creation gets done through contestations, destructions and naturalizations of configurations of (temporally situated) Nations. However, how do these configurations get done? 3. Pleats Present-pasts are crafted and mobilized by various, and sometimes competing, actors as the fragmented temporality of these urban elements sticks to their social trajectories (Ahmed, 2004). This relation is not straight-forward; on the contrary, it is through messy and heterogeneous encounters that origamis are formed. These elements get their shape through the present-pasts crafted on their semiotic brittleness. Actors get caught in the foils that are sticking out from the surfaces of these elements and thereby they act upon them. They try to glue them back to the surface, they attempt to peel their foils off completely or sometimes they play with them. Post- Soviet tourism, for instance, emerges from this process of fragmentation, as an epiphenomenon which makes use of the lingering crumbled modernity. If the configurations that actors perform are different, in any case they pleat these material foils in peculiar ways, thus shaping various origamis. The pleats which form the present-pasts in which origamis are formed do not randomly take place. On the contrary, it is the material characteristic of concrete fragments, mostly of Soviet-ness, which make the temporal relation between this recent past and the present time appear in specific ways. Qualia mediate the specific configurations, the pleats through which these socio-material assemblages are configurated. Specific semiotic characteristics, i.e. the material grandeur of a monument, the discolored-ness of façades, the standardized form of a building spur differing reactions; finding themselves in the contradictory liminality sketched before, actors pleat these past- presents in strategic ways in order to create a national composition, through which they can manage the unbalanced material configuration of Kharkiv. It is through this process that actors are able to tinker desired configurations of Nations, on the very materialities at their disposal. By assembling together heterogeneous elements and normatively mediating their temporality through specific qualia, they are able to hold together socio-material origamis. The latter as the art of paper-folding is an effort to create forms; as the temporal foils are peeling out of communist urban objects, actors dwelling on their liminality, semiotically pleat them to negotiate their ambiguous temporality. As such, they build urban entanglements, mobilized to tackle the affective power of Soviet fragments. These compositions fill gaps, they re-orient temporal logics and build desired worlds and borders on the very surface of contested urban material objects. As such, actors are able to work on the deposed totality, still haunting Ukraine’s presence: the Soviet Union.

42 The centrality of this process is strengthened by the polluting character of Soviet elements (Douglas, 1966); these elements triggered in my interlocutors emotions related to public hygiene, or corporeal disease. Elements of the Soviet Union are considered as cancerous presences in the city, which trigger polarizing reaction, most notably amongst self-proclaimed patriots. Their presence in the city was considered as unorderly, needing a thorough material re-management. The contours of the nation needed to be allocated in geographically coherent orders. On the basis of material elements, people construct heterogeneous assemblages in order to contain Soviet-ness and construct Ukrainian-ness while dwelling in an over-abundant Soviet environment. By doing that, they construct temporal conceptions of the nation, mediating them through built communist elements, pleating present-pasts. Furthermore, this process allows them to materially re-adjust Ukraine with respect to the Soviet character of Kharkiv. A fragmented totality is present in the city, rusting it and threatening to take over again – at least through its rust. In an effort to contain the potential spill- over of material Soviet-ness, actors pleat it by giving form to the crumbling totality, thus attempting to craft new conceptions of Nationhood on its very materiality.

I suggest the communist origami as a concept able to sensitize us to how objects enact and are enacted in periods of national transition. As Ukraine is moving towards a new configuration, radically divorced from its previous socialist contours, actors are pleating new geographies of belonging by assembling various socio-material elements. Heterogeneous elements are entangled together in order to stabilize a desired geography of belonging, cutting from the previous National display. Managing the temporal relations between the two Nations, origamis allow to make use of a discordant urban panorama in order to stabilize the contours of the new nation as well as urban belonging. As they pleat different forms, they do not operate on compartmentalized levels; the Nation is not done merely at the National level through legislative procedures; rather, it is gathered and constituted in the urban origamis assembled by actors. For instance, national memory policies regarding the Soviet Union are entangled with the monumental size of some Soviet objects, which give form to an image of the Soviet Union as a brutal occupying power, which has not been completely ridden off. What are the pleating produced in Kharkiv, then? What are the elements which are folded together to produce national forms and entanglements? What peculiar histories are weaved together? How do origamis allow to tinker desired futures?

Outline of the thesis

In order to reply to these questions, I will firstly illustrate Ukraine’s history of decommunization by underlining the stakes and struggles around the process. I will show how national and urban politics on national configurations are entangled in a complex way, showing

43 quests for belonging and historical alliances. In Chapter 1, I will show how this history gets re- managed in informal nationalist politics, by assembling together heterogeneous elements to produce a Nation as a peculiar historical continuum, starting from its Nazi-era sprouts. I will, then, show how this conception of the Nation is anchored in the city in order to align the city in a specific geography of belonging, in opposition to both present and historical aggressor; this allows actors to pleat Ukrainian-ness in the city of Kharkiv. In Chapter 2, I will analyze actors’ strategies to cope with the overabundant presence of Soviet-ness in the city. As the latter bears the potential of polluting Kharkiv’s temporal belonging, actors pleat a legendary communism, in order to deal with the historical relation between the city, the Nation and the Union. Furthermore, I argue that they metaphorically occlude Soviet elements, pleating them in what I call Jurassic communism, in order to cope with its symbolic thickness, while managing the absence of Ukrainian-ness. As such, they are able to create Ukrainian-ness through the very Soviet materiality. In Chapter 3, I will deal with the strategies that actors put in place in order to make sense of the unfinished process of urban decommunization. I will argue that they pleat comic and capitalist communism in order to negotiate their inevitable everyday proximity with materializations of Soviet-ness. Through this exploration, I will show how actors create desired conformations of Ukrainian-ness within this unbalanced materiality, aligning to an idealized West.

44 History of Decommunization

Ukraine reached independence through a referendum in 1991 which started the transition process from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Republic of Ukraine (which will later become “Ukraine”). The independence did not bring about visible social unrest and transition happened in a rather pacific way. Moreover, the Republic of Ukraine did not radically cut from the former Soviet ruling elite nor with the general popularity of the communist party in the parliament (Gaidai, 2015). However, President Kravchuk (1991-1994), in compliance with the 80s and 90s resurgence of historical policies of Soviet republics, started to put forward not only a sketch of the future national history; rather, he also started to underline historical tropes (such as Stalinism as a moment of sheer political repression, the famine of 1932-1933 “” or totalitarianism as a characteristic of the Soviet power) to legitimize his presence as the leader of independent Ukraine and to distinguish himself from the Soviet power, of which he was a relevant figure just some years before (Kas’ianov, 2010). Ukrainian elites put forward a “soft” variant of the politics of history, without imposing a strict new national narrative for the nation, both immaterially (such as national beliefs and rituals) and materially (such as statues, busts, mosaics, architectural embellishments, etc.) (Kas’ianov, 2010). The ambivalence surrounding the situation was made evident during the “war on monuments” in Western Ukraine (where the majority of the population identifies as Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking). During this event, official and unofficial actors started to dismantle statues of Lenin and replacing them by monuments and memorials of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) 36 , which was followed by a negative sanction by president Kravchuk (Gaidai, 2015). Although Kuchma (1994-2004), Kravchuk’s successor, failed to diminish the ambivalence surrounding the two narratives, he managed to change the official attitude towards the demolition of Soviet monuments, stating that their removal was not obligatory. This move granted pro- and anti-Soviet local authorities the ability to manage Soviet urban elements on their own terms.

During the 2000s the politics of history and the problem of de-Sovietization acquired a more divisive and decisive role, especially after the strategic use of it by President Yushchenko (2005- 2010), the leader resulting as a winner after the Orange Revolution 37 (Wolczuk, 2001). The President used National history and Holodomor to further strengthen the process of Nation building

36 For more details, see Chapter 1. 37 The Orange Revolution was a series of mass protests taking place in Ukraine (especially in Kyiv) after the 2004 national elections, condemned as marred by corruption and fraud.

45 in contraposition to the Soviet Union. The famine, then, became the element around which the USSR could be casted in opposition to Ukraine’s flourishing as well as the element against which Soviet leaders could be evaluated negatively or positively with respect to Ukrainian history. Monuments to remember the episode flourished in the country as well as conferences and debates around it. Furthermore, the president founded the “Institute of National Remembrance” to shape the official project of political national memory (Kas’ianov, 2010). The Soviet totalitarian power was crafted as the cause of Ukraine current instability and stagnation since during Holodomor the Soviet elite killed “the best ” and thus “spoilt Ukrainian genetic pool” (Kas’ianov, 2010). South-Eastern Ukraine and (where a high percentage of the population defined themselves as Russian or Russian-speaking (Kulyk, 2018) – at least before the Revolution) responded negatively to such official state line, notably concerning the process of both material and immaterial de-Sovietization (Kas’ianov, 2010).

Such a dissent reverberated in the following election, where Yanukovich (2010-2014) won mostly thanks to the support of South-Eastern Regions. The new President tried to return to the ambivalent philosophy of Kuchma, trying to reconcile Ukrainian and Soviet narratives into one “neo-Soviet” framing of the nation (Gaidai, 2015). Four years after his election, however, Yanukovich found himself in the midst of a popular uprising: the Euro-Maidan. The event sparked after the rejected a deal with the European Union, favoring instead a Russian compromise (Wanner, 2016). This political act was perceived by the public as both a sign of the Russophile attitude of the government (which would be pursued despite the potential benefits to Ukrainian citizens) and of its corruption. These signs fomented the general discontent, leading a considerable number of people to demonstrate against the government and its decision (Wanner, 2016).

As people took the streets, they openly criticized Yanukovich’s (geo)political actions and the dependent relationship that he was creating with the Russian Federation. This relation was explicitly denounced by the demonstrators that voiced the collusion and subordination in which the government was putting the Nation, in a relationship reminiscent of Soviet times (Zhurzhenko, 2017). This correlation was made evident through the process of Leninopad, the systematic toppling, transformation and destruction of statues depicting Vladimir Lenin, that freely sparked during the demonstration. The revolution eventually led to a change in power, bringing as the new President of the country. The new leader of Ukraine openly declared himself as a sympathizer of the uprising and concurred with its denunciation of the dependency created with Russia. Furthermore, the Europhile government also took up the public denunciation of the Soviet collusion, trying to establish itself as an (official) extension of the revolution. In order to implement

46 this tactic, Poroshenko's government sanctioned the process of Leninopad, by actively taking part in it. Notably, a pack of four decommunization laws were passed in the country, which equated the Nazi and Soviet regimes and outlawed any public references to their ideologies. As a result of this policy, Leninopad became a governmental intervention to tackle and dismantle of any public reference, representation, depiction, glorification of Soviet-era symbols – encompassing statues, urban toponymies, mosaics, etc.

Hence, as many other post-socialist countries, after the fall of socialism Ukraine started to craft its independence in an ambiguous relationship to the Soviet past, both in opposition and in continuity (Wolczuk, 2001), (Hrytsak, 1998). The “new national myth” was fostered through various cultural policies, including policies to foster Ukrainian language and culture, helping to craft a unitary national entity (Kuzio, 2001). Although the immaterial heritage has been tackled by independent Ukraine, its material culture, specifically the concrete elements of the Soviet Union has been more controversial. In spite of the implementation of various policies, actions around urban depictions of Soviet Nationhood were nor unanimous nor accepted anywhere in the country; on the contrary, Ukraine has continued debating the role of some elements, such as the role of the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War, the overall project of de-Sovietization and the “common” public symbols of the Nation (Kas’ianov, 2010). Consequently, Ukrainian urban landscape has kept its communist contours, as squares, mosaics and monuments depicting figures and elements of Soviet imagination, still decorate its cities. This state of affairs stands in contrast with the Ukrainian conception of nationhood (Wolczuk, 2001). This awkward presence makes the past of Ukraine a difficult and unstable place, as it is not evident whether the glorified past that is depicted throughout its territory is part of the Nation's past or whether it consists of remains of an occupation. This contradictory presence leads to wondering to what present (if we can speak of present in this case) do these depictions belong to: the Ukrainian one or rather to the Soviet one? What role does the Soviet era play in independent Ukraine?

In light of this historical haunting that characterizes Ukrainian's political identity, it is possible to comprehend more sharply the role and the importance of the signing of the decommunization laws. These laws emerged as a radical statement of refusal of dependency as well as a project of redefinition of Ukrainian nationality, implemented in an effort to “finally” relieve the Nation from the ties of dependency. As a matter of fact, the decommunization of public spaces rhymes with the willingness of the new government to let the historical teleological unfolding of the Nation be accomplished at last.

47 The divisive attachment to urban Soviet materials was made evident during the Maidan revolution as well as in what has been called “Anti-Maidan”. The latter involved the negative reaction against the destruction of Soviet material elements (notably Lenin) and their physical protection during the events. People gathered in front of their city’s Lenins in order to prevent Maidan supporters from destroying them, which resulted in physical violence. The anti-Maidan movement developed mostly in the Eastern part of the country, in the so-called “Russophile” regions of Ukraine (Zhurzhenko, 2016). The movement was helped by a series of “voluntary soldiers” from the Russian Federation, who joined the Pro-Russian demonstrators in order to fight against the “Fascist Revolution”. In several cities of the country the demonstrators entered the city councils and occupied them, more or less successfully; as a consequence, two Eastern regions (Donetsk and Luhansk) declared their independence with respect to Ukraine, proclaiming the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic38. Moreover, Russian troops entered the Crimean Peninsula occupying strategic power sites on the region, leading to the installation of the Aksyonov government, allowing for the referendum over the annexation of Crimea to take place39. This series of conflicts developed in what has been called the War in Donbass and the Crimean War. It is in the midst of these events and the geopolitical struggles between the two nations that the decommunization laws were enacted, signaling a symbolic change in the National understanding of Ukraine with respect to its neighbor.

The decommunization process was carried out on the whole territory of the country; yet, one city stood out for the number of communist-related sites: Kharkiv, a central-eastern city at the border with the Russian Federation. The urban landscape of the city was thoroughly reconfigured as a consequence of the decommunization process. Consequentially, the city's identity went through a transitional phase, which was carried out by the city's political elites. This reconfiguration lasted for six months, namely from May to November, 2015; it was then extended to May 2016. During this phase the central government urged the various infra-national powers to comply with the decommunization laws, through the re-managing of their urban landscape. In addition, Poroshenko made sure to transmit a list of potential renomination candidates, that would not have been accepted in the new Ukrainian public space. This element illustrates that the central power considers the decommunization process as a pivotal element for the definition of the new representation of the Nation and of the legitimate national outlines. This political project of identity delimitation is carried out through the administration of public space in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, specifically in the management of its Soviet symbolism. However, the latter is not an unequivocally defined nor

38 https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ukraine/russia-and-separatists-eastern-ukraine 39 https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ukraine/ukraine-will-centre-hold-1

48 sanctioned entity; if some residents of Kharkiv condemn the presence of busts representing Soviet leaders, others defy the law to pay homage to these very figures. Through such gestures, actors on the ground are building on these remnants – to be denied or to be cherished. Therefore, this continues to float in this ambiguous present-past that seems to haunt Ukrainian's public space since its independence; what are the tactics that are put in place to make sense of this urban communism? How are actors managing this past-present? The questions acquire an additional thickness in light of the anti-Maidan protests that the city underwent. During the wave of pro-Russian unrest (Russian spring) both pro-Russian Kharkovites and “foreign people” (Jones, 2017) took the streets of Kharkiv, occupied the city’s council and put a Russian flag on top of it. The Ukrainian security service cleared the building and no further attempts to occupy the city occurred in the city. The Russian spring came to an end in Kharkiv, although staying in people’s memory. How are actors on the ground negotiating these conflictual urban elements and the memories that they carry?

49 1. CHOREOGRAPHIES OF WAR

1.1. Uncertainty of belonging

I was walking in Sumskaya street, one of Kharkiv’s historical streets, with Gregory, the leader of a local far-right organization. As we were walking, I pointed to a historical building, bearing its original script “House of the Council of the Congress of Miners of the South of Russia” [S’ezd Gornopromyshlennikov Yuga Rossii]. Gregory stopped, looked at it and whispered “shame” while shaking his head in disapproval. “It is a disgrace that while we are in an open conflict with Russia, just some kilometers from here, in Kharkiv there are still signs glorifying Russia”. He was against the historical script and perceived it as an unrespectful offense against both Ukraine and the soldiers defending it at the Eastern front. It was because of signs like that Imperial script that Kharkovites were more prone towards the Russian Federation. “They [Russian nationalists] use Soviet monuments to strengthen the idea of the Russian World, you know. They want to bring back the lost glory to the Soviet Union, bringing back together the former Republics. If we keep these monuments, we will help them keeping the Russian world alive, you understand? People are triggered by these monuments; they need to be taken down”. Gregory is not the only one stressing the link between Soviet monuments and their implicit geography, aligning them with the Russian Federation. The presence of explicitly Soviet and Imperial objects makes Kharkiv an unstable location, as they stand as tokens of a previous Soviet geography, which could be

Mentioned script on the Imperial building in made present again. The conflict in the East is Sumskaya street, Kharkiv. associated with this possibility. Kirill, one of the nationalists regularly visiting the military tent in Freedom Square told me that Russia took the rebellious regions as an expression of its inner grandeur instinct, its innate arrogance that characterized it since its Imperial times. The same could be happening in Kharkiv, as “the majority of Kharkovites are actually pro-Russian”, following Kirill. He further explained me that it is because of this alleged pro-Russian majority that Ukrainian nationalists need to be present and highly visible; they are a minority, though a “very active one”, as he proudly told me. Participating in demonstrations and occupying public spaces, (far-right) nationalists mobilize to Ukrainize the city, defending it from what they perceived as official pro-Russian policies at the local level. The status of the city’s mayor, Kernes, is ambiguous. He supported the Orange Revolution, yet he actively stood against decommunization efforts and the Euromaidan. For instance, during the 2014

50 revolution, he blocked the access to the main square, where Lenin’s statue was located, in an effort to block potential attacks on the statue. Moreover, he actively promises to rebuild destroyed Soviet statues in the city, not by changing them, but re-proposing them as exactly the same. He casts these activities against “terrorists” who wants to dishonor the memory of those who fight for Kharkiv’s liberation against Nazi Germany. His reluctance towards decommunization makes him in the eyes of some of my informants an enemy, as they identify decommunization with the building of New Ukraine. These brief examples illustrate the worries that traverse the city and its monuments: its historical and present belongings bear a thick affective force, pleated on the very materiality of the city itself.

The previous chapters explained the shaky position of the city within local, national and geopolitical claims. The city appears as preoccupied with questions of belonging, expressed through local politics as well as through management of Soviet materials. This inter-national uncertainty – Ukrainian vs Russian –, reached its greatest momentum when (pro-) Russian fighters occupied the city council and put a Russian flag, waving in the wind above the political core of the city. These intricacies make the Nation a disputable presence in the city, as well as the city a disputable entity in the Nation. This uncertain belonging echoes the recalcitrant history of the city, a city which was the capital of the Westerner point of the Soviet Union, in the middle of the socialist block. The city’s belonging, thus, does not appear straight forward. On the contrary, it articulates itself through varied, fragmented geographies, contradicting each other. a. Soviet Geography and nationalism

Ala, a woman I interviewed in a park, loves Russia, she used to spend so much time there, before the war. Like many other interlocutors she told me that her ties to Russia are numerous, not only she has relatives there, but her husband is Russian. Before the war, she tells me, when they were younger, they would go visit Russia every month, but now her invalid daughter and the lack of money prevent them to do so. She quickly adds the recent war as one of the reasons for their impossibility, but she wants me to know that it is because she thinks it would be dangerous, not because she dislikes Russia; she thinks Russia and Ukraine are almost the same. This sameness is not shared by Natasha (21), a member of EGEA Kharkiv, who, nonetheless, highlighted the several parental ties linking her to the close neighbor. Before the war, she tells me, she would go very often by car with her family; now it became almost impossible as they could wait more than 10 hours at border controls. Oleg’s (51) intimate story also highlights the intertwined relation existing between Ukrainian-ness and Russian-ness in Kharkiv. As I interviewed him several times in Zhukov’s park, he shared with me that his wife was Russian, from a city just after the border. They met in the

51 Soviet Union, when the borders between the Republics were not as rigid as they are now. He did not hold any grudge against her wife nor her family, he knew they are good people. However, he did not think he would go meet them soon; he thought Russia was Ukraine’s closest friend, and this dear friend just stabbed them. He thought they did not even need an army, because Russia would defend them if some Nation would attack them; that Nation, however, was Russia itself. For Oleg these events signified betrayal asking for decommunization (he told me he was in absolute favor of the destruction of Lenin’s statue). As I asked some older women about the destruction of Lenin and Zhukov statues, they replied with disdain about the deeds of “young fascists”, who did not respect what their fathers and grandfathers did. During our interview, Lyubov’ and Yekaterina clearly told me that they were against the destruction of Lenin and Zhukov statue. They promptly told me that Yekaterina’s father received an award during Soviet times, and that destroying these figures was like destroying the value of her father. Moreover, they told me, these figures were part of their childhood, they were brought up in the Soviet Union, Lenin was part of their lives. To prove me this point, Lyubov’ recited a poem about Lenin that she learnt in elementary school and that she could still perfectly remember; so well, that even Yekaterina was surprised. These personal stories highlight the messy relations existing between Ukraine, Kharkiv and the Soviet Union. If for the younger generation Ukraine and Russia are definitely two different countries, a lot of them still have regular visit to their relatives in the country. For the older generation, moreover, the differences between Ukraine and Russia are far more labile, as the city was very well integrated in the Russian-speaking hegemony of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet Union functioned as a pluri-ethnic state, encompassing Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Jewish, Estonian ethnicities, just to name a few. Every citizen of the Soviet Union possessed not only a Soviet civic nationality but also an ethno-cultural one, assigned on the basis of their family histories (Brubaker, 2011). If these ethnicities and their territorial counterpart were recognized, they did not possess any autonomy with respect to the central Russian-speaking government. Language acquires a crucial role in the Soviet understanding of citizenship, as one’s own native language iconized their ethnicity: a Ukrainian native speaker in Russia, was a Ukrainian, whereas a Russian native speaker in Ukraine, was Russian40 . Recent efforts to promote what some of my informants identified as the proper identification between the Nation and language has been made in Ukraine; however, Kharkiv screeches in this configuration as the city has a strong Russian-speaking majority. Despite his first language being Russian, one of my interlocutors, for instance, told me that since the Euromaidan revolution he made the vow not to speak Russian anymore, as a sign of national

40 Similar situations are more complex in central Asian Republics, where language is only one of the factors of national identification, which often takes on explicitly racial configurations, Laitin, 1998.

52 devotion. He had not spoken Russian for 4 years and he giggled when he could not find his words in Russian during our interview. Another sign of the importance of the congruence between Nation and language arose during my fieldwork as I was attending an ultra-nationalist rally. One orator was holding his speech in Russian and one of the people attending started protesting with his neighbor about it. The quarrel evolved as the other participant was not opposed to it, for him one’s native language was not a sign of one’s patriotism. These debates arose also around the new President Zelenski, a Russian native speaker, whose shaky Ukrainian language skills made him an easy target for radical nationalists. The status of language, thus, continues to be semiotically charged, indexing one’s own true allegiance in the midst of a conflict with the Russian Federation, with the regions with a Russian-speaking majority seceding or threatening to do so. Kharkiv’s Russian-ness, thus, becomes problematic as it indexes its potential betrayal. As discussed during a meeting of local Euromaidan activists, one of the priorities for making sure that Kharkiv could be decommunized, thus Ukrainian, it was necessary that its youth spoke Ukrainian even in private. Kharkiv’s ambiguous belonging, then, is not only springing from its recent urban conflict; rather, it is also influenced by the Soviet legacy of nationalities, making Ukrainian as a particular ethnicity with cultural traits and Russian as an almost universalistic one, rooted in the universal proletariat. The proximity of Kharkiv to the Russian federation, then, becomes potentially national, as the language spoken by the majority of the city indexes its nationality, a national belonging, thus, reminding its Soviet geography. This interconnectedness, the legacy of Soviet policies, the recent conflict as well as the urban unrest make Kharkiv a city worried about its own belonging, as it is continuously on the edge of returning to a Soviet geography. The borders of the city are blurry, allowing a heightened compenetration of Ukrainian-ness and Russian-ness, threatening to become Soviet again. b. Scarcity As I previously delineated, Kharkiv lacks urban materials which would represent this congruent ethno-nationality, where cultural expressions of the Nation would reflect their ethnic development. The city presents a phenomenal amount of Soviet constructivism and socialist realist architecture, with monuments to the heroes of the Soviet Union still very present in the city. The city is filled with elements of representation of Soviet nationhood, enhancing its uncertain belonging. As Zhurzhenko noticed, national memorials in Ukraine developed in contraposition to Soviet memorials, preponderantly after Yushenko’s government. The President elected after the Orange Revolution integrated the Holodomor as a central National phenomenon, whose material memorializations now pepper Ukraine’s territory (Zhurzhenko, 2015). After the Euromaidan,

53 another bloody event marked Ukrainian memory policies, notably the 96 victims resulted in the clashes in Kyiv in February 18th, 19th, 20th 41. The victims will be known as the Heavenly Hundred, and their deaths will be honored through urban elements, such as monuments and toponomy, taking the place of former Soviet elements. Such processes of nation-building are taking place in Ukrainian cities, defining the Nation through events, marking in blood the development of the country. However, these elements pale in front of the vast presence of Soviet elements in Kharkiv, which make it difficult to state clearly Kharkiv’s position, as they index its Soviet-ness. Hence, this unbalanced urban materiality makes Kharkiv’s belonging problematic at the urban, national and inter-national levels. This fuzziness will be managed by actors on the material themselves, or the lack thereof. As there are not enough elements to stabilize the city as Ukrainian, people engage in various, contingent practices in order to face the material difficulty of marking Kharkiv’s Ukrainian-ness. Actors engage in processes to enhance the visibility of the city’s Ukrainian-ness, constructing geographies of belonging that can compete with the Soviet ones. In order to illustrate this point, I will firstly show how people mobilize various materialities (like bodies, flags, flowers, tents) in order to enact the national character of Kharkiv. By assembling together various materialities, they enact a specific national configuration, on which they tinker other territories (Soviet Union and Russian Federation) and processes (the War in the Eastern front). Secondly, I will argue that by enacting the Nation, actors enact also the city as national, by pleating Soviet elements in peculiar ways, trying to anchor the city within the Ukrainian Nation. Thirdly, I will illustrate how these practices construct a specific temporal configuration of the Nation, which emerges through the pleating of a specific communist origami, notably Russian Communism. The latter is used to tackle the scarcity of Kharkiv’s Ukrainian-ness, portraying the heroism of the Nation.

1.2. Enacting the Nation

I evidently arrived too early at Constitution square. The only people who were present at that moment were policemen and journalists, waiting for the march to happen. The march to celebrate Ukraine’s Independence Day (August, 24th) will start at the square and will end in front of the statue of Shevshenko (Ukraine’s national poet), near Freedom Square, according to the official notice on social media. Constitution Square has a vast portion of its space as pedestrian space,

41 The literature has not set the question yet, with people arguing for the orchestration of the massacre by nationalist activists. For more information, see Katchanovski, 2019.

54 where a Nike statue has replaced a monumental statue celebrating the anniversary of UkSSR’s birth. On the statue people have already laid down flowers wrapped in ribbons with the colors of the Ukrainian flag; two big pots of gerbera daisies with the national colors of Ukraine seem to have been placed by officials at the ends of the statue’s pedestal. The square feels empty and the expensive wrappings of the flowers suggest that an official ceremony has already taken place. After some time, from various parts of the square, members of ATO42 start to gather in the space close to the Nike, under the trees to protect themselves from the boiling Ukrainian sun. Their military clothes are not the only element forming their uniform; green flags with “ATO” and golden laurels on them fly over various little groups that are starting to appear, little by little, on Constitution square.

Early gathering of the demonstration with ATO soldiers and “traditional” Ukrainian hair-styles.

They are soon met by other citizens, who arrive wrapped in Ukrainian or UPA43 flags, or rather wearing traditional Ukrainian clothes ranging from Vyshchyvanki 44 to full traditional clothing. Some of the women present showed up with intricate, traditional hair styles, with lily blossoms and ribbons with Ukrainian national colors in between their golden braids. These hyperbolic depictions of the Nation were juxtaposed to lay people in everyday clothes, who sometimes did not even have their bodies wrapped with flags. Amongst the chatting, laughter, and political discussions, the most elaborate costumes were awarded by the attention of the crowd, with several people asking to pose

42 ATO stands for Anti-Terrorist Operation, a unit created by voluntary soldiers to fight at the Eastern Front. The special status of anti-terrorist unit was strategically used to circumvent abiding national and international law. 43 The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a controversial historical nationalist army that fought against the Soviets for an Independent Ukraine. 44 Vyshchivanka is the traditional Ukrainian garment, an embroidered shirt used by both men and women.

55 for photos with examples of “living tradition”. From one corner of this conglomeration of soldiers, flowers, flags and traditional clothes, the organizers of the march made their appearance; a column of black-dressed people walked in an orderly way towards the end of the pedestrian part of the square; they stopped together far away from the main crowd, silent and immobile. Frajkor, an ultra- nationalist organization active in Kharkiv, arrived wearing their own uniforms, notably a white adjustment of the group name on a black T-shirt. The logo has a variation of the Cyrillic “f” of their name, which is designed as to hint to a horizontal Wolfsangel45. The group attracted the attention of everybody, who started to take pictures of them and with them. The police immediately stood next to them followed by the ATO members who took position next to Frajkor at the top of the large group. Two columns are now standing in front of the other people: a black one with their black flags and a green one with their green flags, all waving in the afternoon wind.

The two militaresque columns at the top of the march. Focus on ATO column.

After this pompous arrival, the members of Frajkor stood in their position for some time, letting themselves be seen and photographed by buzzing journalists and the crowd. Afterwards, they started a careful reorganization, in which two or three members of the group retouched the position of the other members both within the group itself and with respect to the rest of the people. They nudged them, moving from one member to the next, changing their positions, their postures.

45 The sign has been used by various groups and organizations in Ukraine, including Azov battalion, the Social-National party of Ukraine, Social-National assembly. The groups have denied the link with Nazi heraldry and proposed that the symbol stands for “Ideya Natsii”.

56 Various little changes in the position of arms, legs and flags were implemented; after each change, the “directors” would take some steps back in order to evaluate their deeds and decide if the composition was good enough. Once the composition was judged as satisfactory, they gave a signal, to which the drummers at the very top of the march started to play, giving the start to the march itself.

The two militaresque columns started to march forward, their flags standing high, accompanied by hits of the drums and followed by the mass of people wearing flag-cloaks, traditional clothes, hair-styles, and flowers. The march was precisely organized with predesignated spots to stop, as was evident from the drummers at the front of the demonstration knowing when and where stop playing. During these short breaks, members of Frajkor shouted widely-known “hooligan” chants, to which the crowd knew the expected responses, such as “Glory to Ukraine,” “Glory to the heroes!”, or “Ukraine is one, united and free!” and “Ukraine! Above all!”.

Frajkor column waiting for instructions from “directors”.

Once they arrived in front of Shevshenko’s statue, the mass of demonstrators reformed into a semi- circle around the monument. The groups started to wave their flags. They then shouted a final “Glory to Ukraine!” to which the crowd responded with the usual “Glory to the heroes!” and fired red smoke bombs while singing the Ukrainian national anthem46. A series of the same hooligan

46 The lyrics of the anthem itself echo the national struggle and were widely used during the Euromaidan. For instance: “Our enemies will vanish like a sun-dried foam,

57 chants with a novel element “PUTIN!” “DICKHEAD!” [“PUTIN!” “HUJLO!”] closed the ceremony, after which people started to chant repetitively “thank-you!” [spa-si-bo!]. The end of the march, however, is not the end of the event, which continues with various speeches about the war, the deaths in the East and the need “to show that Ukraine is united!”.

This ornate performance of the Nation stands out not only for the defined script that the various actors performed; not even for the plethora of materials implicated in the act (bodies, instruments, voices, clothes, flowers, flags, statues); rather, it is for the surprising degree of attention put into the organization of the acts themselves. As mentioned, the position of the flags was carefully managed in order to guarantee that they would unfold smoothly and nicely wave during the march. The drums were repetitive and pressing, ordering the rhythm of the people and signaling when to walk and when to stop. The care spent on the organization of the minutiae of the march’s logistics, which are telling of the time spent for rehearsing, highlights the importance that the event had for its participants; it should not just happen, rather it should happen well, and it should happen well for a public audience. As I was interviewing some of the “lay” participants of the demonstrations, they told me very clearly that they were participating to honor the soldiers in the East. To further their points, they often referred to the invasion of the city by pro-Russian para-militaries, who almost created the People’s Republic of Kharkiv. Without the intervention of voluntary soldiers, the war could be not only in the two Eastern provinces, but rather also in the streets of Kharkiv. These events heightened the liminal status of Kharkiv, by making erupt its existence as a border city on a borderland. As a consequence, the need to make visible Kharkiv’s belonging acquires a further meaning, as actors dwelling in liminality “must declare themselves most loudly” (Lemon 2000: 205).

Liminality does not necessarily mean that things need to be ironed out; however, in the conflictual city of Kharkiv, this liminality needs to be made clear, as its identity, belonging, and aspirations need to be stabilized. This demonstration, through its high volumes, colors, and quantity of different bodies marching together participates in the attempt to make Ukrainian-ness visible, manifesting it publicly. Clues of their success included not only the presence of a noticeable amount of police officers (from various units), swarms of journalists and photographers; but notably people looking from balconies, others waiting for them at strategic points and voluntarily joining them 47. The march gained public attention, as it passed through the city with bright greens, reds, yellows, blues,

We will be the only masters in our dear home.” 47 Notable was a group of elderly women, dressed in traditional clothing while holding Ukrainian and UPA flags, who started screaming loudly once the veterans passed in front of them.

58 chanting Nazi-era slogans and moving according to the beating of the drums. This highly visible and orchestrated manifestation of the Nation whirls together intertwining the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, and the red and black – blood and soil – of the UPA flag, with the military props of the front in Donbass. These elements are organized together, letting emerge an enhanced National configuration, linked with historical and present conflicts. By associating these elements together, actors are aligning different histories and places, enacting the Nation as a victorious entity marching against its present and historical enemies.

a. Rhyming histories

I use this vignette to portray the status of the Euromaidan revolution: the initial fervors of the demonstrations, perceived as a leap towards EU membership in the vein of their Black Sea neighbors are now only past impressions. There is little enduring material through which represent the Europhile leap, represented by the Euromaidan. The sparks of Maidan demonstrations are kept in pictures (hanging in both the military tent in Freedom Square and the headquarters of the local Euromaidan organizers), as well as memories, slogans and social connections. Gathering heterogeneous sites and histories, Kharkiv’s Euromaidan’s coda still produces effects, by configurating a specific configuration of the Nation, assembling various elements.

The work of Jones explored how history is done through semiosis in contemporary Ukraine; she analyzed how various semiotic processes collaborate to create history by associating different tropes and their materializations (Jones, 2017). Mobilizing the work of Silverstein on interdiscursivity, she shows how during the Euromaidan in Odessa, the Saint-George ribbons became a token through which it was possible to create a feeling that Soviet history was repeating itself. The latter became associated in intricate ways to become coeval, implying one another, through WWII tropes and icons (Jones, 2017). In the case of Kharkiv a similar process is at stake. A Soviet marshal like Zhukov becomes contiguous with the former Ukrainian president Yanukovitch in the words of Kirill; both arrived late at success, which for Kirill provoked an irreparable sense of inferiority, causing their terrible actions against the Ukrainian population. They both “felt Soviet” to Kirill, they both materialized Soviet-ness, as resulted from a specific kind of attitude towards Ukraine and its population (Lemon, 2009). Pro-Russian policies and Russian attacks towards Ukraine are aligned with historical images of Soviet oppression of Ukraine. The two become coeval, expressing a similar national relation between the Motherland – Ukraine – and its enemies – Russia and the Soviet Union. The struggle against the Russian Federation, then, becomes not only a struggle taking place against the contemporary oppressor; rather, it entangles the recent fight with the historical Soviet oppressor. These chronotopes, notably the associations of different times and

59 places in a single cluster, are mobilized by nationalists, enabling them to craft a peculiar configuration of the Nation, rooted in its historical resistance. Kirill hinted to this configuration as he offered me a little blue book, with a photo of Stepan Bandera on its cover. I would understand better the situation in Ukraine by reading it, he told me, even though I did not speak a word of Ukrainian. To further his point, he asked me to google a romantic painting, where the UPA black- red flag was waving next to the Ukrainian one. “People think that Bandera and this flag represent fascism, that they are non-patriotic. But you see?! These are historical proofs that they are bounded together!” Bandera is a controversial figure in Ukraine, as well as the red-black UPA flag associated with him. He was the leader of an insurgent army, fighting during WWII for the independence of Ukraine. Fighting against the Soviets on the side of the Third Reich, the UPA holds an ambiguous identity, between heroic nationalism and Nazi collaborationism, with accusations of massacres of Jews and Poles in Western Ukraine. During the Maidan events, the myth of Bandera witnessed a renaissance, as far-right heroes became appealing for nationalists demonstrating against what they considered a Soviet-like move from Yanukovitch. Red and black UPA flags were always present during (ultra-)nationalist demonstrations in Kharkiv and a big UPA flag was waving on top of the yellow military tent. For the radical nationalists I spoke to, the yellow-blue and the red-black flags were stuck together, forming a continuity of the “united Ukraine”. Ukrainian-ness materializes in these flags, flashing out its historical revenge against oppressing powers when waved together. The fight of nationalists fighting against the Soviets for a free and independent Ukraine, becomes aligned with the present fight against the geopolitical arrangement of Ukraine with the Russian Federation; the two clusters become chronotopically aligned (Silverstein, 2005). This arrangement, moreover, does not merely encompass international ties similar to the Soviet ones, but also tropes of colonization of the Russian Federation on the Ukrainian territory (Jones, 2017).

As exemplified in the words of Kirill, Ukrainian current national situation is intertwined with its Nazi-era past, put forward in its material concretizations, like books, flags, uniforms and chants. Through these elements, it is possible for actors to tackle the scarcity of Ukrainian-ness in their liminal position. The cruciality of these present-pasts, notably of pasts created in the present, plays into various processes; if the presence of Nazi-sympathizers and Nazi-inspired para-military (Azov) has been witnessed in the Euromaidan, their presence was not univocal. The Euromaidan revolution mobilized desires and anxieties of various people, amongst which there were also those of neo-Nazi members. These elements, then, are present in Kharkiv not only because of the preponderance of far-right groups in post-Maidan Ukraine (Ishchenko, 2016); but also, as they exemplify both the lack of widespread support for the Maidan in the city and the necessity of these

60 objects to make the Nation visible in the general presence of Soviet urban objects. This visibility, however, does not represent merely the Maidan order of the Nation; on the contrary, it is symptomatic of the creation of present-pasts through the available materials on the ground. By associating UPA flags, Bandera, and contemporary Ukrainian flags, while marching in the city with their military uniforms, actors are giving shape to a National configuration. The latter takes place through the very material characteristics of the objects that they are mobilizing. For instance, the syncopated music, the military Nazi-era slogans, as well as the uniforms help to embody a temporal relation between philo-Nazi armies fighting against the Soviet Union and the armed resistance against Russia, both in the city and in the Eastern front. In the case of Kharkiv’s celebration of Ukrainian independence, objects frame the character of the Nation, encoding it through “historical props” (Oushakine, 2013). Oushakine studied historical celebrations as means of present organizations of the past, mediated by objects relating these differing temporalities. For instance, he analyzed celebrations of ’s Victory Day as spectacles through which the past is lived by the re-proposition of historical objects and situations, allowing the emergence of an “affective cartography of history, that was not experienced first-hand” (Oushakine, 2013: 275). The plethora of the objects mobilized during Kharkiv’s demonstration as well as the thick coordination of people, refers to Oushakine’s conceptualization. Historical flags are put forward, bodies are rhythmically mobilized in order to perform a war-like scenario, as they march at the syncopated rhythm of the drums, while the wind shakes their flags. Various chronotopes are gathered together, as they march; not only the Nazi-Soviet mythical opposition and the contemporary Russian-Ukrainain tensions; what takes place in this enhanced material composition of the Nation is the tinkering of the National conflict in the East. These choreographies of war become the representation of the Nation itself, the ones through which the Nation emerges, in which the state affect is made present (Navaro-Yashin, 2002). As previously mentioned, however, the Ukraine which is performed is not any Ukraine; rather, it is a militaresque one, wrapped in its recent (geo)political reconfigurations. It is a victorious Ukraine, rising against its enemy and shouting its unity from the mouths of its defenders. The thick symbolism presented by the participants, in fact, hints to a very specific configuration of the Nation, which is not only its romanticized authenticity (as the traditional clothes, and hair-ties might suggest), but also its recent military history. The presence of war veterans and of the radical youth group intertwined with the chants performed during the event not only hint but re-propose the struggle of the contemporary conflict in Donbass. The acute nationalism takes the form of a specific historical entanglement, which is the recent conflict with Russia and the Russian spring at large

61 (Farias, 2016). This State dramatization englobes an explicit attack on Putin48, who is allegedly casted as the referent against which the Ukrainian Nation arises. Putin as indexical of Russia is othered, casted as an element against which Ukrainian-ness arises.

This relation was emotionally articulated in the words of my taxi driver as well, who brought me to the airport. As I asked him to talk about the decommunization process in the city, he turned towards the conflict with Russia and told me about the changing relationship with Putin. Before the war he liked Putin, he thought they were friends; now, on the other hand, he would punch him in the face if he were to see him in Kharkiv. To stress his point, he mentioned the alleged love that characterizes Russian citizens: “They just love [Putin], whatever he does! Like they did with Stalin, with Lenin; they are still living the Soviet life over there!” These choreographic recapitulations of wars assemble together various conflicts, proposing a configuration of the Nation anchored in specific historical entanglements. Qualisigns become crucial in this pleating (Keane, 2003). The green ATO flags are bounded to the green military uniforms of the veterans, highlighting the presence and the importance of the soldiers in the configuration of the Nation. The latter is semiotically aligned in the black-ness of the far-right activists’ uniforms and flags, marching at the top of the parade with UPA and Ukrainian flags together. These material bodies wrapped in these historically-laden materialities march through the streets of Kharkiv, shouting the chants of National liberation. These materials allow for a specific present-past to be forged, where temporally and spatially distant events are assembled (Farias, 2016). Not only these events are topologically linked together, but they also emerge in their quality, meaning their military aspect. These elements semiotically assembled in the demonstration entangle the Nation in specific struggles, giving a peculiar meaning to Kharkiv’s Independence March. Furthermore, the blackness of the flags and the uniforms materialize another military struggle, notably the urban clashes between pro-Russian soldiers and para-military nationalist ultras, as the latter’s uniform was black. The (historical) fight for the independence of the country, then, becomes entangled with the fight for the liberation of the city. The National emerges enmeshed in these heterogeneous scales, being informed by the situatedness of its composition.

The salience of the date in which the celebration takes place adds a further semiotic layer to the enacted Nation. Independence Day is one of the few secular national holidays through which the process of national building has departed from the previous Soviet Republic (Wanner, 1998). The holiday was not a “vernacularisation” of a previously existing Soviet holiday; on the contrary it celebrates the anniversary of the official withdrawal of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

48 “Putin!” “Dickhead!”

62 from the Soviet Union. The festivity is celebrated widely as a proclamation of Ukrainian sovereignty through folkloric depictions49 of Ukraine, which some of my informants proudly shared on their social media pages as well. These depictions were also present in the mentioned demonstration, although they col-laborated with other materials (Mol, 2010). The independence of the country from the Soviet Union is materialized through the set of historical props previously mentioned: notably the ones exemplifying the Nazi-era struggles against the USSR, the contemporary conflict in the East, Kharkiv’s clashes. The independence of the country is semiotically aligned with the independence of the city with respect to the Russian Federation, acting to re-establish the bygone Soviet Union. The militaresque demonstration, thus, participates in the “affective management of history”, through which historical tropes are assembled by carefully staged historical props (Oushakine, 2013). These elements are semiotically aligned together, associating people, sites, times and (re-)animating historically bounded feelings through temporally defined assemblages. It is through the materiality of these materialities (as they wave in the wind, as they march and shout together, as they stand still in front of Shevshenko’s statue) that a peculiar configuration of the Nation is assembled, by making rhyme heterogeneous historical moments. Mobilized during a semiotically charged day as Independence Day, these Choreographies of War allows for not only the crafting of national configurations; rather they can tinker the national relation existing between Ukraine and its adversaries (Mol, 2008). “I was here in the city when Russia wanted to take Kharkiv. I saw so many cars with Russian number plates and they wanted to take our city. You know how many countries Russia invaded?! So many! Angola, Afghanistan, Georgia, and now they want to invade Ukraine. But our guys stopped them! And they did not have anything, they were volunteers!” Pro-Russian fighters occupied the city in 2014 and momentarily put a Russian flag on top of the city council, making it part of the Russian federation; as he was commenting these events, one of the demonstrators told me: “That’s how Russia has always acted. They did it with the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and now they are trying to continue to do so. But Ukraine showed it has the balls to fight back now!” Ukraine fought back and this victorious allure is staged in the parade through the chants, the flags and the glorification of the defenders of the Nation. By victoriously marching through the main streets of the city, actors are knitting a specific configuration of the Nation, which comes out triumphally from their historical enemy’s yoke. As these historically charged materials are carefully orchestrated together, they align histories creating the possibility of letting emerge a triumphant Nation breaking the chains of Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, post-Soviet Russia. The demonstration does not literally repeat the

49 For instance, the widely use of Vyshchivanki, traditional clothes and traditional hair styles.

63 military deeds, but it creates a semiotic alignment between these different locations, contingently transforming the streets of the city into conflict zones, into a “home front.” The hyperbolic performance transforms the streets and the people, wrapping them in the military allure, thereby making them participate in the conflicts. These choreographies full of chants, syncopated music, historical monuments and rehearsed actions are per-formed (giving form) acts of war, through which Ukraine is made highly visible and triumphally so. Through this performance, the demonstrators have control over the events and the conflict, in opposition to other unreachable events (the Eastern front, the Soviet annexation of Ukraine, Imperial colonization). This complex National configuration situated in the post-Maidan status of Kharkiv relates to a conception of the Nation which is not only victorious but also boundless. This character is exemplified not only by the folkloristic depictions of some of the participants; but also, by the climatic end of the march at the feet of Shevshenko’s Statue. As the national choreography ends, it pays homage to the national poet of Ukraine, symbol of Ukrainian nationalism and of the fight for the recognition of Ukrainian nationhood. The attendants wave their flags and offer their songs while holding their hands on their hearts. The National configuration, thus, is molded through these historical props, erupting through the consolidation of the various elements that the choreography puts together. It is a Ukraine, moreover, whose temporal origin fades into an undefined past, semiotically aligning the independence from the Soviet Union, the resistance from the Russian invaders, and the mythological sacred sprouts of the Nation.

End of the demonstration in front of Shevshenko’s statue.

These multiple threads are weaved together in order to enact a peculiar conception of the Nation, as a valent soldier fighting against its enemies. This affective relationship is channeled through the

64 statue of the National Poet, around which people gather to proclaim their independence. Indigenous Ukrainianness is enacted by and through the Statue of the mythic poet, within the (multi-)temporal performance of Ukraine’s independence(s). The peculiar militaresque Ukraine emerges through the mentioned semiotic alignments, as channeled through Shevshenko (Merriman & Jones, 2017).

1.3. Making the city National

The post-Maidan Nation assembled through the demonstration is not a free-floating expression; rather, it is a situated practice, rooted in the social entanglements born out of Kharkiv’s recent events. As the conflict in the East started, the city organized itself to help the volunteers at the front with basic necessities. Moreover, it also coordinated forces against pro-Russian forces in the city. The role of these social connections was highlighted by Kirill. When I questioned with him the value of “”, an ultra-right political party, he quickly looked me in the eyes and told me clearly that they were “brothers”. Following Kirill, the party had a central role in the construction of the tent and in the network keeping alive the nationalist fervor. “Right sector” was a crucial element of the post-Euromaidan alliance of ultra-nationalist groups and one of the coordinators of “political resistance”. The tent, its visitors told me, worked as an open congregation of people who were “loyal to Ukraine” as well as a place from where to share a nationalist take on Ukrainian history. The revolution that promised to move Ukraine within the Euro-zone, resulted in the calcification of an open presence of ultra-nationalist parties, fighting in the name of European integration (Ishchenko, 2016). Nevertheless, the spirit of the Maidan was kept alive and roaring, with several bords next to the tent displaying the 2014 demonstrations in Kharkiv and celebrating the territory gained in the “pro-Russian city”, as Kirill described it to me. The photographed Maidan celebrations are positioned next to other pictures, portraying victims of terrorist attacks in the city, as well as Ukrainian soldiers fallen in the East, accompanied by moving letters of the soldiers’ parents. This highly emotional archive is juxtaposed to pictures of Putin, drawn to resemble Hitler, next to the city’s mayor. As the materials to mobilize Ukrainian-ness in the city are lacking, nationalists mobilize other materialities to clarify the city’s belonging to the Nation. The National which is portrayed in this material archive is a militaresque one, semiotically aligning the victims at the front, Putin-Hitler, the Euromaidan, the tent itself. As such, the Nation emerges through the bloody actions happening at its borders. These tropes came back in the words of Konstantin, another frequent visitor of the tent, who told me that the current times were not so smooth anymore: nationalist politics were having a bad curve. “Now what is happening is revanche. They [pro- Russian politicians] are taking back all the efforts made by nationalists”; Kirill quickly intervened, contradicting Konstantin. For him, as long as the tent would be standing in Freedom Square, no

65 revanche was really about to happen, they [nationalists] would still be winning. The physical presence of the tent on one of the central cross-roads of the city, in front of the regional council indexed for Kirill the resilience of Ukrainian-ness in the city. Present as they were in their yellow color and their historical props, nationalists were standing clearly in the city, as guardians of the revolution’s achievements. The constitution of the tent, moreover, did not merely englobe the tent itself; rather it expanded through the occupied public territory, where pro-European, anti-Russian, conflict-related boards were standing. Pictures can become archival, working as tokens of events that happened in specific locations (de Lacerda, 2012). They become indexical of what they represent, by suggesting a link between the spatial and temporal event they immortalize and their current location (Jones, 2017). As material objects, moreover, they lend themselves to unexpected entanglements, productive of further weaving (Farias, 2017). In the case of the photographical archive of the military tent, their use as objects of remembrance is tied to its use within a strong national configuration. They do not merely re-present past events, rather they re-enact them (Oushakine, 2013), by localizing National configurations in the territory of Kharkiv. They stand as tokens of the militaresque triumphant Nation, rooting it in the territorial uncertainty of the city. This struggle of belonging slipped through the words of Kirill, as we were talking in front of the tent. “You know, when the pro-Russians pass by the tent, they get angry, you can see it, and those who often get angry, they die sooner! [laughter]”; that’s how Kirill defined the role of the military tent that stands at the end of Freedom Square. At the moment of writing the tent is still standing, although it serves more as a gathering point for ultra-nationalist parties and affiliates. “The majority of people of Kharkiv are pro-Russians and also Kernes [the city’s mayor] is pro-Russian. Patriots are a minority in the city but we are an active minority! Whereas the pro-Russian majority is only passive”. As some of the people attending the march, the people sitting at the tent hint to the contemporary Ukrainian conflict, while recasting it within the city itself. The city is defined as a pro-Russian city, led by a pro-Russian mayor who would side with the separatists at any time. The patriots, however, are standing strong in the city in order to prevent “the opponents of Ukraine” to gain victory. They actively occupy the urban space, in a strategically visible location, thereby, counteracting the alleged pro-Russian drives of the city and the mayor. It is through their material presence that Kharkiv can be territorialized within the National configuration. The Independence’s day march offered a similar ground, as it semiotically rooted the city within specific spatio-temporal configurations. Despite their ephemeral character, these actions can count on a photographical archive, already present in the tent and on the making in the case of the National demonstration. As previously mentioned, the construction of an archive strengthens the resistance of the events in the face of time. They associate places and events, by uniting them independently from the present time

66 and affecting their perception (Oushakine, 2013). As such, Kharkiv’s contested belonging is territorialized through the actions of ultra-nationalists, by associating Kharkiv’s ground with peculiar National configurations. Through their material presence, the mobilization of objects, and the construction of archives, actors are able to cope with the everyday experience of Ukrainian absence, by enacting extraordinary National depictions. Their ephemeral character does not infringe their effectiveness, especially in the peculiar conditions of Kharkiv. The scarcity of Ukrainian-ness in the city makes visible national spectacles arduous, as they need to link the Soviet-looking territory to New National configurations. In order to accomplish this urban nationalization, actors mobilize material objects, whose qualities allow for historical and spatial entanglements. By rooting the city within a national history of conflict with a “Russian other”, these socio-material choreographies stabilize the city within a Ukrainian geography of belonging. As they pleat materialized qualisigns through specific present-pasts, actors make rhyme heterogeneous national oppositions (primordial Ukraine vs Imperial Russia, Nazi-era Ukraine vs Soviet Russia, contemporary Ukraine vs Russian Federation) giving shape to a specific temporal configuration of the Nation. A Russian origami is pleated through these materials, as they attempt to territorialize the city within a national geography. As they do so, they knit the National through specific chronotopes, enacting it as a triumphant boundless entity. These elements col-laborate with one another to build a possibly ephemeral National constitution against the Soviet legacy present in the city. Within this knitting, however, the Soviet elements become indexical of the Russian elements, othered through the “nationalist dances”.

Russian communism as an origami, then, entails the national relationality knitted by these actors in their efforts to cope with the scarcity of material depictions of Ukrainian-ness. This origami is an entanglement in tension that might last the time of a day, of a demonstration, a march or longer, depending on the strength of the network implemented. For instance, it is possible that the pictures uploaded on social media will semiotically take roots in the square, in the statue, making them places of Ukrainian-ness. This material relationality, moreover, works to cope with the scarcity of national history unrelated to the Soviet Union. As such, these manifestations of the National gathered together heterogeneous instances of National oppositions. Aligned together, these oppositional elements allowed for both the visibilization and thickening of the historical development of the Nation in post-Maidan Kharkiv.

1.4. Conclusion

67 The emergence of Kharkiv’s Ukrainian-ness is shaped by its recent revolutionary events. As it stands as a conflictual city, reluctant to the implementation of decommunization and briefly occupied by pro-Russian forces, its radicalized nationalist activists knit together national histories. These socio-material origamis create ephemeral bumps and contingent resistances, through which geopolitical, national and urban politics can be organized. As actors tackle the scarcity of material Ukrainian-ness, they create temporal anchors allowing them to create new histories and new national configurations, assembling multiple sites and emotions.

68 2. CIRCUMSCRIBING SOVIET RUST

2.1. Dangerous Soviet-ness

After finishing our interview, Marina, a member of Save Kharkiv, and I walked out of the pastry-shop and continued speaking while walking together towards the closest metro station. She interrupted my small talks to continue her reflections about Soviet elements in Kharkiv. She explained to me in her fast speech that Lenin’s presence in the city is inadmissible in any way, as he is the symbol of tyranny par excellence. The episode reminded her a friend of hers, ethnically Ukrainian but raised in the USA. When she came to visit her in Kharkiv for the first time, they had some quarrels as her friend loved the statue of Lenin that stood in Freedom Square. Even during the Euromaidan, when Statues of Lenin were being dismantled [a phenomenon called “Lenin’s fall”], her friend firmly stood against their demolition, as she thought they were simply historical figures, which should be kept in place. “There lies the difference, I believe. Foreigners do not relate to these elements emotionally, they just think they are historical monuments, comic at best. But for any real Ukrainian, these statues are symbols of tyranny, they evoke the horrors, the repression and the killings committed against Ukraine”. As she finished the sentence, we continued walking for some seconds in silence until she pointed to a series of bas-reliefs of Soviet politicians on the wall on our right. “You see? These people for example, we don’t know who they are, we don’t know what they did, we just know that they are Soviet. We don’t know if they participated in communist atrocities; maybe they contributed to the weakening of the Ukrainian population, we don’t know! Nothing is written!! People can pass by, see a monument to a Soviet leader and become enamored with the Soviet Union! And it is everywhere like this in the city. That’s how they did it in the Soviet Union, they created legends about their glory, but none of it was true. There needs to be contextual plaques to say the truth about the Soviet Union, for Kharkovchani to know that communism was actually criminal.” Marina’s concern with Soviet elements regards not only their omnipresence, but also their status, their effect. They bear the potential of attracting people, of creating polished and fictional (hi)stories, without revealing the outrage of their deeds. Urban depictions of Soviet politicians are dangerous for Marina, as they can still have an effect on people, they can still evoke awe, respect, and value for representative of what she considers an evil regime. They are dangerous elements, still exuding the power that was once attributed to them. They burst into her eyes as icons of a tyrannical power, whose unquestioned presence dishonors the victims that they provoked. This effectiveness needs to be delimited and pointed down by positioning contextual plaques, which would establish “the truth around Soviet elements”. The necessity to delimit these objects in their historicity and their brutal wrongness does not go by itself. As our interview disclosed, Marina is

69 actively engaged in the preservation of pre-revolutionary architecture, as other members of Save Kharkiv. The presence of these historical elements does not need to be contextualized; they do not present the danger of exuding the absolutist character of Tsarist power. Soviet elements, on the other hand, demand a circumscription, they need to be casted as particularistic and problematic elements of the city’s landscape. As they are standing immaculate in Kharkiv’s public space they seem to highlight a continuation with the power they represented just 30 years prior, they entangle the city with the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. However, as Oksana severely told me, “Ukraine is not Soviet anymore”, a claim referring to the undesirable presence of Soviet objects, left undisputed in the city. The paradoxical presence of these elements in Kharkiv, then, needs to be clarified as their undefined status threatens to spill over, “enamoring” people with the Soviet Union, fomenting the reconstitution of former political geographies. The omnipresence of Soviet elements is mostly left unaltered50, a characteristic which causes outrage amongst my informants. They are still representing the city as an outpost of the former Nation, despite the horrors associated with them, including economic shortages, political repression, genocide (Jones, 2017). The efforts of Kharkiv to become a “Ukrainian site” [Ukrainskoe mesto]51 bump into the paradoxes hinted by Marina: the historical totalitarian regime being overabundantly glorified in the city. The two configurations, thus, become entangled in a peculiar way: one is the opposite of the other. The material political depictions of the Soviet Union, thus, become icons of a genocidal past, happened at the expense of the Ukrainian people. The evilness of the political project of the Soviet Union marks the Ukrainian Nation as its victim and its post-Independence configuration as its overcoming. The Soviet Union, then, becomes a token for a hindered, spoilt, and subjugated Ukraine, a Nation which was flourishing before Stalinian repression started its decay. Left undisturbed in Kharkiv’s public space, Soviet political depictions enter in this mournful characterization of the Nation, while being left in their glorifying allure. As material fragments of a history that should be mourned, they stand as obscene configurations, saluting the enemies, which “spoilt Ukrainian blood”.

After the Orange revolution the definition of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime was solidified, ranging it in the semiotic realms of other radical evils, such as Fascism and Nazism (Probst, 2003); decommunization laws calcified this association, equating by law communist and nazi-fascist political ideologies, out-lawing public depictions of both. Maidan activists denounce depictions of the Soviet Union as the vivid fragments of this totalitarian regime, echoing political

50 When they are decommunized. 51 My interlocutors used this notion themselves. Moreover, activities and parades to demonstrate that Kharkiv is Ukrainian happened often since the Revolution. See for example “Vertep-Festa”, a Ukrainian festivity hold in Kharkiv to celebrate the traditions of Ukrainian regions.

70 discourses around the radical evilness of the communist regime. For instance, Innokenty denounced the fact that people were still allowed to live in Soviet buildings, as people living inside them would inevitably suffer the limitation of individual liberties in-built in Soviet projects. Soviet socialism as a form of totalitarian regime becomes part of the dichotomy born out of the European experience of WWII, which presented a world divided in a Manichean way between a “good” liberal civilization contraposed to the evil “barbarism” of state-laden authoritarian political experiments of 20th century (Foucault, 2008). The alignment of Soviet socialism with 20th century European totalitarianisms makes it possible for the association of the first with the evilness ascribed to the latter. This legal move posits the Union as an obscene past, which defiled the Ukrainian Nation, contaminating it and suppressing it. Depictions of Soviet nationhood, once glorifying the regime in place become now tokens of the obscene vision of the regime “occupying Ukraine”, threating to re-establish the contours of this evil power. Their potential spill over, thus, needs to be contained in order to ensure that their recently fallen glory does not erupt again, by reclaiming the previous Soviet geography of belonging. Kharkiv is a Ukrainian site, a city belonging to a united Ukraine born out of the totalitarian experience, as the national rhetoric promoted by Yushenko refers. The management of Soviet political objects, thus, arises as a fundamental question, as they menace with their dangerous radicality to pollute Kharkiv’s belonging to a specific (geo)politics, notably the European national rhetoric of post-totalitarian Nation-states. The presence of Soviet elements, then, cannot be left untouched, they need to be mediated, controlled in order to contain their threatening symbolic charge, as they might re-ignite the love for these obscene figures. a. Screaming communism This charge, however, is not systematically present in any Soviet-era element of the city; on the contrary, only specific Soviet elements are singled out as potentially producing an alignment between former Soviet geographies and contemporary Ukrainian ones. It is when depictions of Soviet nationhood are identified through their location and imponent design that Soviet-ness materializes itself; through their visibility they catch the eyes of the passersby, glowing in their glorious stature. This distinction was stated clearly by Masha as she was explaining me why she pointed at a big Soviet star on the second – and last – floor of a building: that star presence was imponent, whereas other stars were insignificant. “That star is just screaming communism, it screams look at me!!”, that one screamed communism, it was impossible not to notice, whereas the little decorative stars on the façade of one of the main building of the university were “just simple, little stars, nobody cares about them”. Lenin was also screaming a lot in the words of my interlocutors, as they unanimously were against his presence in any form – statue, bas-relief, mentioned name. The presence of the founder of the Soviet Union was regarded as antithetical with Kharkiv’s Ukrainian-ness; if some of my interlocutors deplored the violent way in which the main

71 Lenin statue of the city was destroyed, they affirmed that everybody in Kharkiv was in favor of its demolition “even though our grannies cried a lot when they saw it happening”, as Oksana told me. Screaming communism is the communism that cannot be contained. It is the communism of Lenin, Stalin, Zhukov, A “screaming star” in XTZ. Sickles and Hammers. It is not the one of Soviet men and women of culture or of the communist elements that are not so visible. It is not the communism of building’s decorations, nor the one that is depicted on Shevshenko’s statue. It is not the one of the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War; it is not present in the weak, poor communist depictions. It is indeed in the still strong, high and beautiful ones, the ones that are anachronistically still there. The communism that screams is a public and high one, one that is strident, that orders to people to go to work in the fields and in the fabrics, to go to the front and die for the Nation, as Nastya (20), a member of EGEA, told me. When communism screams, it gives orders to the passersby: “When I look at these images, I can only think about the fact that they are ordering people to go work in the factories and plow the fields.” That is how Nastya defines the sickles and hammers that I show her, she defines them in their ideological anachronism; these objects, however, cannot give these orders anymore and even less to Ukrainians, as Ukrainians are not Soviet anymore “and we demonstrated it by destroying these elements.” Screaming communism is material communism that still glorifies a lost Nation and its ideology, it is a material communism that is excessive, noticeable and denounceable. This communism that screams, does so on different ranges, becoming more or less acute depending on the assembled varieties in which various actors pleat it in, depending on its ability to scream over contemporary Ukrainian nationhood. As Marina told me, it is through these specific configurations that communism can affect people, making them enamored of the tyrannical power still flickering in the city. The potential danger of these screaming depictions lies in this temporal pollution, threatening to turn Kharkiv into a Soviet city, as Soviet-era celebrations are still officially held 52 . On the other hand, when communism is

52 Notable is the contested celebration of Victory Day. Kharkiv’s mayor still encourages citizens to celebrate the holiday, despite it being outlawed.

72 bezvkusitsa [tasteless] or unremarkable, it does not create alarm. The series of sickles and hammers in a metro station that I showed to my informants, for instance, did not even grab their attention. When they firstly looked at the picture, they started to comment the advertisements hanging between the communist symbols; only when I specifically mentioned them, they noticed them, only to say that these elements were not problematic. These sickles and hammers were merely bad design, tasteless elements that needed to be changed with something more “modern”. They are merely obsolete objects, not able to survive their own historical design. Screaming communism needs not to be outdated (ustarevshij) and made with taste, otherwise it will just be unnoticed. However, the problematic nature of screaming communism is further heightened by the omnipresence of Soviet depictions, crowding the city with Soviet heraldry. This overabundance has been expressed unanimously by my informants, which prompted them to identify Kharkiv as characterized by a Soviet allure, which was kept dear by a lot of its citizens; through the eyes of my informants, the city overflows with Soviet-ness. This dangerous, screaming character, however, needs to be tackled as it holds the potential of drifting the city towards other socio-material configurations, muting the city’s Ukrainian-ness. The latter general absence, however, makes it difficult to highlight the Ukrainian character of the city, as divorced by the historical obscenity that the Soviet Union came to represent. In order to tackle both the material and semiotic overabundance character of Soviet materials, actors use these elements in order to craft Ukrainian-ness. In the political resistance of local official powers to destroy these elements and the difficulty of massively build new material representations of the Nation, actors develop strategies to cope with this paradoxical materiality.

2.2 Legendary communism

As the previous discussion highlighted, the Soviet political project has been condemned by my informants, sometimes referred as antithetic with the Ukrainian national project. Its depictions were condemned as sources of shame for the city, the Nation, and the government. Actors described the presence of monuments commemorating jubilees of the as outrageous, insulting the deaths of the Ukrainians who died during the regime. Their material character, their visibility is entangled with their potential danger, threatening to contaminate the city by re-igniting its previous configurations.

Vera (40), a member of Save Kharkiv, hinted to the historical obscenity of the Soviet Union as a political regime by referring to its propaganda techniques. Soviet propaganda is pervasive, she tells me, especially through the imagery of Lenin. “There had to be busts of Lenin everywhere! In the

73 schools, in the hospitals, everywhere”. As she continued to talk about Soviet propaganda, she turned towards public interventions that were put forward by Soviet powers in a town, where communist symbols were “much more present” than in Kharkiv. There, the profile of Lenin was ingrained in the mountains overlooking the town, wrapping it under their “influence”. As she detailed the presence of the Union, its political presence was described through its pervasiveness, sometimes expressed through its multitude, sometimes through its monumentality. These material qualities of Soviet political presence were characterized as invasive, imposing themselves on the territory. Vera stated it clearly, these material characteristics served one purpose: the forced appropriation of Ukrainian territory. Vera believed that Soviet power needed to constantly “mark their territory, like dogs”, they had to constantly remind people that “they are there, we are together and this is their possession”. The pervasiveness of Soviet elements, in both its multitude and monumentality, qualifies them as effective elements of aggressive foreign imposition. The Soviet Union was able to “conquer Ukraine” one monumental Lenin at a time, filling its territory and overlooking it from the heights of its mountains. The effects of these supernatural Soviet elements do not concern only national sovereignty, rather it also affects people’s minds. The pervasiveness of these elements as well as their imposing character eroded the will of the population, for Vera, installing fear and hindering the possibility of imagining political alternatives. Soviet repression and its management of political plurality becomes flattened and characterized by an occupational vocabulary. These monumental representations typified the brutal experience of the totalitarian occupation; these elements’ imponent stature occupied an exceptional portion of physical territory, transforming a whole mountain as a surface for the figure of Lenin. Analyzing brand performativity, Nakassis observed how logos of established brands become recognizable as real entities, possessing specific qualities (Nakassis, 2012). He calls this “brand ontology”, notably the existence of an object as presenting the stereotypical quality of a brand, on the basis of the recognizability of its logo. Similarly, these monumental and victorious elements become tokens of a type, notably a semiotic cluster of qualities and associations, relating their material characters to specific qualities of the Soviet political project. The exceptional occupation of physical territory indexed the exceptionally brutal occupation of sovereign territory and of people’s minds. The extra- ordinary character of these materials suggested the extra-ordinary quality of Soviet regimes as exemplified in Cold War civilizational tropes. The obscene barbarism of the Soviet Union was made present through the material aspects of these monumental depictions, identifying their spatial occupation with national oppression and political repression. Their material character indexes their political contours solidifying the ontological presence of the Soviet Union as an omnipotent entity,

74 crashing states, cities, and individuals. This exceptional Soviet-ness, thus, still lingers in its ontological presence through its material tokens.

In these encounters, the Soviet Union is enacted as a legendary entity, capable of actions lingering on the edge of the super-natural. As legendary ancient Greek soldiers or catholic saints, these elements are identified as having an extra-ordinary effects and actions. Legends are the sites of heroes, miracles, and the otherworldly. Through its omnipotent material excessiveness, capable of turning people into fearful zombies and states into “marked territories”, these elements tie together affective histories and temporal concerns. Ukraine has never been Soviet, or best, in the words of Svetlana (47), a member of Save Kharkiv, they surely were Soviet but she would not wish that any of the young members of her family would go through it; “the Soviet Union was awful”, she told me. Legendary communism excessively occupies public spaces and people’s minds, bulldozing the “natural(ized) political community”. It is an effective, grandiose and monstrous series of material objects that control helpless citizens from the height of a mountain. The Soviet Union appears as an extraordinary enemy which butchered Ukraine and broke the spine of its citizens, through the very material practices mentioned by Vera. These material elements through their pervasiveness, their big-ness and multitude typify Soviet brutality and obscenity, making it an all-powerful entity crashing the Nation. As such, it needs to be tamed, circumscribed, or dismantled.

Legendary communism, thus, is not merely about the Soviet Union; on the contrary, it is about the (historic) relation of the Soviet Union and Ukraine. As these tokens are singled out, denounced, and shown in their monstrosity, Ukraine emerges as the victim of the totalitarian regime, coming out of the darkness of its recent past. The externality of this “lost Nation” with respect to Ukraine’s development, however, should not be considered prima facie. Holodomor, for instance, is normally described as the consequence of Soviet intervention into Ukrainian early national building. The Soviet political aim to establish a socialist sociality produced the repression and genocide of Ukrainian people, as they were standing in opposition to Soviet socialist project53. However, ethnic Ukrainians did participate in the implementation of these tragedies in what should not be considered as a purely foreign intervention. Notwithstanding, pleated in its legendary configuration, communism is othered by assembling it as the presence of an occupying power. By doing so, Ukraine and the Soviet Union emerge as radically distant from one another, as they appear as ontologically exclusive. In the presence of legendary communism, of the brutal

53 They were Ukrainian nationalist, some of them eager socialist, some other not

75 occupation of the Soviet Union, “real” Ukraine was absent, “castrated by the Soviet occupying powers”, as the leader of a local far-right group told me. By othering the collaboration of ethnic Ukrainians in the Soviet political project, the Soviet Union is assembled as the historical legendary enemy of the Nation, which Ukraine still needs to shake completely off itself. Soviet socialism pleated through its extra-ordinary monumental depictions as a brutal, omnipotent, and alien residue still itching Ukrainian surface, is mobilized in a peculiar National configuration. As such, Ukrainian-ness emerges as always already different from these legendary assemblages, which can be, then, heroically dismantled. The typifictaion of Soviet political nature with massive, glorifying elements allows for the disentanglement of Soviet-ness from Ukrainian-ness, presenting the two relationally as a Leviathan suppressing the natural political community. Vera implicitly mentioned this disentanglement to me as she dismissed what she characterized as the “aggressive PR” of the Soviet Union. For her, such magniloquent present betrayed the inner weakness of Soviet socialism, as a strong and legitimate political power does not need to impose itself in such a grandiose way; a political power that needs to make itself so visible, so aesthetically “uncontestable” is a power that knows it is not welcomed, that knows its own alien presence. Through Vera’s contestations, Soviet materiality becomes not only a sign of colonization, but also of its intrinsic otherness with respect to Ukraine. It is because these elements were not native to Ukraine, not welcomed in Ukraine that they are so present and that they are so monumental; otherwise, Ukraine would have risen as the pre-Soviet trading history of Kharkiv could testify. These objects’ monumentality not only indexed the brutality of Soviet socialism, but also, they demonstrated their intrinsic foreign-ness. The latter was further highlighted by other informants, proclaiming a local history suppressed in favor of a Soviet one. “Lenin has never been in Kharkiv” told me Innokenty, expressing the incompatibility of Lenin and Ukrainian-ness. “It is absurd that we have his figure in the city while the guy has not even put his foot in Ukraine, not even once!” he continued, affirming the external character of the figure by his lack of physical presence. As Konstantyn was explaining to me why a giant statue of sickle and hammer should be removed he referred to the date engraved on it: 1917, the date of the Russian Revolution. “There was no revolution in Kharkiv in that year, that is not part of our history. It is something which was happening in Saint Petersburg but definitely not here. Why should we keep something that is foreign to our Nation?” The point was echoed by other informants active in the decommunization process of the city: the glorification of the Russian Revolution or of its leaders was not part of Kharkiv’s nor Ukraine’s history. The relation with the Revolution is made clear: it does not belong to the city and its presence signals a foreign occupation. “It is a shame! Simply a shame!!” tells me Konstantyn to finish his point against the monument. The revolution becomes not only brutal,

76 totalitarian, and foreign, but also pitiful. Through its material presence, legendary communism reveals the mournful history experienced by the Ukrainian Nation, as articulated by Ukrainian nationalists.

The materiality assembled in legendary communism does not encompass only urban materials; rather, it encompasses audio-visual materials like historical documentaries. A group of pro-Maidan supporters from Western Ukraine, travelling around the country to help further the process, just arrived in Kharkiv and would show a documentary in a local museum. One of my interlocutors invited me to the exhibition of the movie, which she advertised to me as “a historical documentary about Soviet repression [repressiya]”. Focusing on the intricacies of the Bolshevik revolution in Kharkiv, the documentary highlighted the bloody consequences of the revolution, producing various sings of the cross amongst the audience. The movie underlined the initial fervor of local artists (writers, painters, architects, etc.) in the 20s, eager supporters of the socialist project of modernization. Despite their fervor, however, they were all executed one after the other by Soviet authorities, once they showed their patriotic commitments. The nationalistic dichotomy was sharply present, notably depicted through language; the whole documentary was in Ukrainian54, with the exception of Soviet authorities: they were portrayed as Russian speakers. The young, active artists portrayed in the documentary were drawn in detail in the passion of their youth, dramatically stopped by the arrival of Stalin repression. The passionate youth of the Nation could not win in front of the Orwellian power in the making. The documentary painted the first victims of the Soviet machinery, highlighting their martyrdom. They did not stand any chance in front of this blind, bloody bureaucracy with a system of omnipresent potential spies, eager to work against any “betrayer of the socialist project”. From the martyrdom of Ukrainian best youth, the documentary passed to the actualization of Soviet brutality, notably the systematic starvation of the Ukrainian population. The Bolshevik revolution passed from fervent joy, to repression to cruel genocide. The blossoms of the revolution turned into bloody mechanisms of Soviet repression. The revolution, the Bolshevik years and the Stalinian solidification of this terror are aligned in a unique developmental progress, drawing implicit causal relations between these historical events. Soviet-ness, then, takes the rhetorical shape of an Orwellian monster, biting heads off to appropriate new territory. As in the case of the monumental urban objects laid down by Vera, this narration presents a relational configuration of the Nation, emerging from the knitting together of these typified objects: the brutal

54 I do not speak Ukrainian fluently, which made it impossible for me to understand what the documentary narration was specifically saying. However, this allowed me to focus more on the visual depictions and the reactions of the audience. Moreover, the mutual intelligibility of Russian and Ukrainian allowed to have an insight into the events.

77 Soviet Union and the victimized Ukraine. As previously mentioned, the possibility of discourses of denunciation does not appear ex nihilo, rather it is the product of the fragmentation of Soviet power and the consequent loss of its legitimacy. Its lingering material fragments can be managed in unexpected ways, as their layered history appears in the present. By semiotically pleating and carving them in desired configurations, actors produce a specific configuration of both the Soviet Union and Ukraine. They produce a knowledge of the past through the material fragments sticking in the present. The monumentality of urban propaganda or the visual characters of historical documentaries become tokens of moral and political characters. The monumental rests, for instance, index the brutality of the Soviet Union, which can be pleated then in the present as the legendary butcher of Ukraine. The configuration of this present-past is indeed done in the present time, through a practice in which the Nation is done and re-done through the materialities present on its territories. Temporal splinters are gathered together in order to produce a national relationality, productive of two national configurations: barbaric Soviet-ness and victimized Ukrainian-ness.

Legendary communism, thus, exists as an origami encompassing socio-material entanglements taking form on the material characteristics of Soviet-era objects. Zhukov’s busts, for instance, is “purely Soviet propaganda” for Irina55 (40). She justifies her decision by the lack of historicity of the statue, as it was put at that spot during the 90s, during a first wave of decommunization “when people knew little about the atrocities of the time”. The notion of “externality” as well as overabundance with the respect to the “natural” and “correct” territory is presented through this wrong historicity, enacting Zhukov’s bust as a propagandistic element. The material characteristics of the bust itself, moreover, enacts legendary communism as well, through its big- ness and glorifying stance. It is not an “innocuous star on a building”, it is an imponent, centrally placed monument, making its presence as a “kat” [assassin]. However, communism is more than false history, it also creates un-truths, legends. Legendary communism hides the reality of the regime, for Irina; it hides the atrocities of Soviet life-style and of

55 Irina is a member of Save Kharkiv.

78

Zhukov’s bust in Kharkiv. communist higher powers that were perpetrated against local Kharkovites. When identified in decorative elements, such as sickles and hammers or stars on a historical building, it creates the presence of communist atrocities, it highlights the trope of Soviet tyranny, which mismanaged its population. For instance, when I showed Irina one picture of some intricated Stalinian Empire style column that I noticed in her city, she restrains from assuring their removal; their aesthetical value allows them to survive the decommunization wave. However, they are still working as Legendary communism, as with their beauty and monumentality they are hiding the fact that in that house “there were probably living four families in one room, with no running water”. Legendary communism does not merely work as a reminder of “what it was like” in the Socialist Soviet Republic of Ukraine, it creates an unworthy glorious, beautiful, legendary allure, that needs to be shown in its hypocrisy “through a picture or something, so that Kharkovites and tourists will know the truth about Soviet propaganda”. Legendary communism, thus, cannot go unnoticed or cannot be simply appreciated, it needs to be acknowledged in its untruthfulness, in its fake iconicity, in its existence as a token for atrocities. It is, therefore, through its visibility (be it its monumental character or its aesthetic value) and its recognition as a negative, unwanted and effective token that legendary communism emerges through Soviet urban elements in post-Maidan Kharkiv. The danger of Soviet fragments and their uncertain effect is dealt through a semiotic transformation, through which the historical relation between the Nations is negotiated in the present. It is through these assembled entities, that legendary communism can emerge by disentangling the Soviet scales still lingering on Ukraine’s skin. As such, the overabundant fragments crowding Kharkiv’s public space are used in order to narrate Ukraine, to affirm the city’s belongingness to the National history. Tying together various elements: materials, histories, dead bodies, and broken national trajectories, actors craft a relational conception of the Nation. So assembled, legendary communism creates effects, as they infuse shame [pozor], apparent national mystification [greatness of the Soviet Union], and outrage. As he was commenting the previously mentioned columns, Oleg summarized these vectors; “you see, you look at these elements and they look great and majestic; but there was nothing great during the Soviet Union; you could not afford bread, you worked all your life in the factories and the State controlled everything. These figures trick you, there is nothing great about them”. Entangled in these elements, Soviet communism becomes a legendary, mythological entity which narrates Ukraine as a victim of barbaric and unjust power, as the past Nation becomes an othered destructive contraposition to the National Ukrainian ideal. This origami is configured as preventing Ukrainian flourishment, both in the past (through genocides, totalitarian power, occupation) and in the present (by occupying its territory). Legendary communism, thus, is a socio- material assemblage tackling the material unbalance of Kharkiv as well as its unstable position

79 within the National borders. By disentangling the city from its Soviet fragments, this origami allows for the establishment of Kharkiv as a Ukrainian site [Ukrainskoe mesto]. Pleating the various

Stalinian Empire style columns in Kharkiv. fragments present, past-presents are formed and National configurations relationally crafted, disentangling the objects from its uncertain Soviet Ukrainian history. The latter continuously pops up, through urban encounters, festivities (Soviet-era celebrations, like Victory Day), and inter- national relations (Ukraine-Russia relations as declined as reminiscent of Soviet legacies). The efforts of Kharkiv as a Ukrainskoe Mesto to disentangle itself from it sneaks in the configuration of Nation itself, as being not-Soviet-anymore becomes one of the structuring elements of Ukrainian- ness. USSR, then, seems to emerge as an element whose present absence is needed in order to proclaim the New Nation. Ukraine as a wounded community needs its butcher to be present in its absence, so that their difference and relation can be highlighted, hinting to new geographies of belonging.

2.3 Jurassic Communism

This wounded community does not only pleat a legendary communism that needs to be destroyed; on the contrary, it also articulates itself through the necessity of keeping the memory of communist horrors alive, in order to prevent these horrors to take place again. However, the material manifestations of these atrocities need to be deprived of their mythological strength, otherwise they could potentially foment the re-presentation of these atrocities. In other words, communism needs to stay, but it has to leave.

80 Svetlana clearly tells me that Lenin, Zhukov “and all of these communist elements” need to be taken away. Monuments and building’s decorations are there to glorify and to spark respect in the population; but communism “does not deserve respect, they do not need to be remembered gratefully.” Their hands are covered in blood, they cannot stay in place as if nothing had been revealed, as if we were still in the pre-Gorbachiov era. On the other hand, communism cannot be forgotten; on the contrary, it needs to be preserved so that “history does not repeat itself”, so that hands don’t get bloody again. This paradoxical position is repeated by other informants that arrive to the same conclusion: a Soviet park is needed. “Those who want to see these elements, then, will just need to go there, you know? For tourists as well, so that they can go there if they want to take a selfie with Lenin!”, that’s how Irina partly sums up on Facebook our encounter, sharing with her friends the experience she had talking with me. During our interview, she explained to me that there was already a plan in Kharkiv in 2012 to bring all the Soviet elements of the city to a place in one of the spalnie rajony [sleeping districts] of the city and build there a park of totalitarian art. Thanks to the latter, these elements would not be inside the city anymore, but kept away in a park in its outskirt. The idea is underlined by Elena (52), a member of Save Kharkiv, who says that she would be eager to follow the experience of other “post-soviet countries like the Baltic states or Rumania [sic]”; they could also build “a natural reserve, you know, a park of Soviet art where to put all these dinosaurs” that are still standing in Kharkiv. The idea of the park seems to be not only popular, but also funny. Sara (21), a member of EGEA Kharkiv, explains to me the underlining joke when telling me about a communist park that has been created in one of the central regions of Ukraine: “You know the film Jurassic park?” That’s why it is funny, when you say Soviet park, she explained me, it is an immediate reference to the movie and you imagine the Lenins, the Stalins and the Zhukovs all in this Jurassic/Soviet park. They become parodies of themselves, as grotesque reptiles anachronistically walking on Earth. This metaphorical move is not merely anecdotical as it sheds light on the symbolic interaction existing between material communism and Kharkovchani. Pierce defines metaphors as affinities perceived through objects’ forms, drawing semiotically potent parallels between social spheres (Pierce, 1955). My interlocutors were metaphorically referring to these socially salient fragments trying to formulate a solution for their discrepant position; they needed to stay, yet they had to leave. The former Soviet leaders and heroes, once captured and put behind fences would lose their disruptive potential, their political aura, through the grotesque caricature that the Soviet park underlines. An example of the effectiveness of this domestication is found in the words of Svetlana, when discussing the future destiny of the Zhukov bust, still standing in the city. “There should be no monument of Zhukov, of

81 course. Unless there would be the Soviet Park we talked about before; there he could find his place” [laughter]. Through her giggles, I gathered her provocation. The alternative to destruction is not sincere preservation, but rather a ridicule preservation, transforming them in fossils of monstrous creatures of an ancient era. They would be fossils, unable to live up to their grandiose representations. However, the ridicule that this anecdote evokes seems to go beyond their fossil reference. The ridiculization that would be provoked by the park hints, furthermore, to the act of positioning them outside of their context, both materially and symbolically. This first transformation is coupled with their transformation into extinct monstrous creatures, anachronistically alive in a park in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thickening their ridicule, thus allowing them to be preserved. The case of the park sovetskogo perioda might help us to understand the implications of the previously sketched paradox that seems to shake material communism in Kharkiv: it is too brutal and cruel to both be kept and be taken away. The dinosaur-like hyperbolic transformation evokes at least two elements that are attributed to these elements: anachronism and danger. On the one hand, the metaphor that is underlined in the park hints to the excessive seniority of these elements, making them look ridicule in their fictitious strength. They are fossils pretending to embody a vitality and power that they no longer grasp, they are ridicule in their attempt to glorify a world that they can no longer hold. By staging them as (unwilling) characters of such a popular American blockbuster, actors underline the attempt to destroy their symbolic power, as they find themselves in an unexpected context, in an extra-ordinary (metaphoric) situation, staged in a “sots-art”-like performance. The ridiculization of these figures, thus, would allow their presence within the boundaries of a specific place: the park itself. They are transfigured, anesthetized, domesticated and, because of that, deprived of the power that previously triggered their removal. They become fossils of an already-gone world only within the parameters of the metaphorical and/or material park; if kept within their “original” glorifying designs, they would still be capable of hinting to the utopic world they used to point at. This ambiguity (their powerlessness and powerfulness) is mirrored in the joke itself. If the “pop” form (the reference to the American blockbuster) makes these figures ridicule, the content of this ridiculization (their dinosaurization) cannot but highlight the extra-ordinary, quasi mythical aspect of these figures. If they are de-politicized, they are so by becoming dinosaurs, not rabbits nor hamsters but gigantic reptiles. These gigantic reptiles, moreover, are linked to a specific imaginary, the one presented in the blockbuster itself, notably their danger for humanity. The anti-human [anti-chelovecheskij] character of communism in general, and of its specific material representations, was underlined several times by my interlocutors. “Those kinds of signs cannot be present in a civilized world. They are anti-human,

82 barbaric, they have no role to play in the civilized world”. That’s how Elena replies to me when asked why she would not like to keep Zhukov’s bust. She does not mobilize jokes, nor giggles or metaphors. On the contrary, she strongly and with a serious face, underlines its evil nature, its opposition to civilization and the danger to order that it represents. Apparently, a free T-Rex is not as good as a captive one. The semiotic transformation of protagonists of Soviet socialism into grotesque reptilians echoes Bakhtin’s reflections on the carnivalesque as a social performance, which speaks back to power, through the inversion of its structural positions (1984). The parody that the carnivalesque engenders develops within the discourse of power itself, allowing for a contingent inversion of power structures, making kings into beggars and beggars into kings. This parodic act works by representing in an exaggerated way the official image of power, highlighting its potential absurd nature. It ridicules it by stretching the limits of the legitimate discourse over power, bringing it near the point of breakage, through its extreme representation (Bakhtin, 1984). Jurassic communism expresses this relation, exasperating the discourse around the magniloquence of Soviet power, as expressed through its official rhetoric (Yurchak, 2006). Moreover, I argue that this exasperation allows for the containment of the anti-human character that material communism potentially holds. It is through this grotesque representation that their anti-human potential is anesthetized, by exposing Soviet imagery as balloons full of hot air. The ones who once were the land’s tyrannical kings become funny monsters, coming from a fictional representation iconic of USA, their direct Cold War enemy. Bakhtin’s analysis of grotesque realism focuses on the use of bodily analogies to ridicule power; the latter is humiliated through urination, defecation, sexual remarks, etc (Bakhtin, 1984). In the case of Jurassic communism, grotesque works differently, as its ridiculization never completely does with the inner danger and anti-chelovecheskij character that these figures evoke. The Jurassic grotesque has the role of containing these characteristics, although the latter are always potentially spilling over the semiotic boundaries. My informants regularly underlined that these elements could not be part of the city of Kharkiv; the dinosaurs could not roam free, but needed to be contained within the spatial boundaries of a park. Reflecting on the use of the grotesque in the work of Baudelaire, Swain highlights the innovative use of this figure of speech by the French poet, which becomes a specific kind of “madness”. In her analysis, the grotesque becomes an autonomous semiotic space, which can spill over at any moment and trespass the boundaries created through language (Swain, 2004). The anxiety around the confinement of material communism reveals the structure of this grotesque representation, as it continuously threatens to counteract the apotropaic measure. Zhukov cannot stay in the park, Lenin cannot stay in the square; however, they can stand in the Soviet park with no problem, attached to the leash of the semiotic transfiguration

83 that the metaphor of the park implies. In this case, the grotesque, then, does not completely overrun power, but contains it within its form. The anti-human character of communism boils too strongly to become the sacrifice for the emergence of Ukrainian-ness (as it is the case for legendary communism); its symbolic thickness can only be contained through irony and ridicule, containing as much as possible the possible polluting over-spilling in the city. By transforming official elements of Soviet socialism into pop figures, actors are eroding their authority through their grotesque limitations. As the anxiety produced by their presence highlights, Jurassic communism still exudes authority, which needs to be undermined through the strategic laughter provoked by the per-formance. This ironic relation has the potential to delegitimize the ground upon which political communities abide to a leader and/or an institution, notably authority itself (Arendt, 1970). The uncertain temporality that these figures occupy in Kharkiv (meaning being at the same time present and past) makes the enactment of their political authority not only a possibility, but an urgent matter that needs to be solved. They are still potentially effective as they could still be cherished, they could still be gathering Soviet sentiments; for instance, the mayor’s recurrent emphasis on the continuation of the celebration of crucial Soviet festivities and his dedication to the re-establishment of destroyed monuments exactly as before hints to their current and palpable affective relations. It is the potential threat of their anti-chelovecheskij actualization, which makes the grotesque performance essential. These material figures need to be confined semiotically and materially in order to hinder their potential politico-temporal pollution. As pop dinosaurs, Soviet figures are portrayed in both their ridicule and demonic, evil nature, as a threat to human kind that is (allegedly) being contained. They are de-politicized, while keeping a veil of the danger, of the cruelty that they were (and possibly are) capable of doing. The Soviet park would, then, be an element that would guarantee that communism would go away while remaining, so that dangerous experiments, such as the re-creation of Jurassic fauna, would not re-present itself. The experiment, then, can still be visible within the limits of the park itself; the latter, in turn, highlights the need of circumscribing the excessive communism that springs from certain material objects in Kharkiv. As previously mentioned, these objects need not only strong semiotic boundaries to manage their anti-chelovechnost’; they also need material boundaries and re- allocations, in order to secure the semiotic transformation. My interlocutors stated it clearly: one can ironically subvert these elements only within the limits of the park; if they stay outside of it, they linger on the edge of legendary communism. The park allows for the semiotic enactment, which takes place through the alignment of various Kharkiv’s material elements. Their belongingness to Kharkiv’s present is dismissed as they are re-assigned to a past temporality, indexing Soviet occupation. Irina suggested me the measure to take, meaning erecting the park in

84 XTZ, [Kharkovskij Traktornyj Zavod], one of the peripherical, poor, stigmatized districts of Kharkiv. The district was ironically described as the birthplace of gopniki56 and infused with Soviet lifestyle. Sara told me that people living in XTZ are not very modern, they are not like people living in the center; “they are still living the Soviet life. You wake up, you go to the factory, you come home, you drink beer watching TV and like that nonstop.” People in XTZ are still Soviet, not interested in the glitters of modern life, of travels and discoveries, they are stuck in their Soviet routines and wrapped in the imbecilic backwardness usually ascribed to lower classes. Not only XTZ’s people and their lifestyles are Soviet, but the district itself was built during Soviet times. It was built during the 20s and was meant to become the new socialist Kharkiv, creating the new socialist man through city planning and architecture. The two main factories of the city were built there and the district maintained a lot of Soviet modernist buildings. For Irina this combination made XTZ the perfect location for the construction of the park, not without a pinch of sarcasm. My interlocutors generally laughed when mentioning the dislocation of the statues to this district: the failed project of the construction of the socialist city is concretized in the social and economic failure of the district itself. Material communism will find its place looking over the ruins of its own creation: its architecture, its way of life and its people. This three-fold alignment of Soviet architecture, Soviet life-style and Soviet people in the peripherical stigmatized district of the city will allow for the “rightful” disposition of this awkward communist present (Farias, 2016). Communism will be re-territorialized, rooted once again amongst the people to whom it belongs, the ones forgotten by history. Another communist origami is thus created, pleating together these various socio-material elements; Jurassic communism is the communism that needs to stay, while re-managed, re-positioned and re-aligned so as to prevent the past to come back. It is a fossilized communism, which indexes its own monstrosity while fulfilling its pedagogical role. This communist past is casted as being on the liminal edge of the city, both materially and metaphorically. They cannot be entirely disposed with as they still occupy a foundational role in the construction of the Ukrainian nationhood. They are the negative elements of contemporary Ukraine, of an independent modern Ukraine, a Ukraine which is “not Soviet anymore”. Casted aside as the barbaric other, communism is materially and symbolically positioned at the edge of Ukrainianness; this struggle exemplifies the management of the threatening pollution that communism could bring to the modern civilization that pro-Maidan Kharkovites are trying to build. The overspilling overabundance of Soviet fragments in Kharkiv can then be tamed both metaphorically and materially, through its enclosure in a park. The Soviet Union will be there in an

56 Gopnik is a pejorative term to describe young people, usually from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, who are associated with crime, joblessness and harassment. These figures are similar to the British “chav”.

85 apotropaic way, in order for the necessary presence of Soviet-ness to be under control. Ukrainian- ness, thus, would reveal itself as the negative form of Soviet atrocities. Built on Soviet anti- chelovechesnost’, Ukraine arises as its negative, highlighting its not-Soviet-anymore character. The Jurassic assemblage allows for both the highlighting of Soviet danger and its containment, while at the same time mobilizing the overabundance to create an oppositional image of Ukraine. Jurassic communism, moreover, allows for further disentanglements of Kharkiv’s Soviet monuments. By gathering these monuments in one place, outside of their original location, they are materially disentangled from their first design. Furthermore, as they become indexes of Ukrainian-ness, elements of what Ukraine is not, they do not glorify the Soviet Nation anymore – or at least they do not do so, effectively. They become entangled with the material disposition, notably the Soviet zoo for extinct creatures, as well as the ironical turn that the disposition implies. As puppets in the hands of New Ukrainians, Soviet monuments are further disentangled from their potential activation of Soviet geographies. As such, Jurassic communism allows for a de-politization of these fragments, granting the possibility of using them to assemble the new configuration of Ukraine. Moreover, the creation of a Soviet park would approximate the Ukrainian nation to successful examples of socialist transitions, happened under the flag of the European Union. The Soviet park would align Ukraine with former socialist European countries, increasing by association the European-ness of its current configuration. The park would index their distance and disaffection with socialism, as it would show an open accusation and de-politization of Soviet modernity. Following the standards of their European counterparts, Ukraine would then be semiotically aligned with their political- economic path, and disentangled with other experiences such as Belarus, Kazakhstan, Transistria, etc. These Soviet-era objects, thus, would become entangled with European-ness, a relation which would further disentangle them from Soviet constellation. Jurassic communism allows actors to craft European geographies of belonging on Soviet materialities themselves, containing their danger and using them to craft new national configurations. Made a local attraction, Jurassic communism ceases to be a threat to the boundless Ukrainian Nation, shadowing its presence through its European modernity.

2.4 Conclusion

The city’s overabundant Soviet-ness is othered in an effort to disentangle its contaminating danger from the city. As Kharkiv’s belongingness is uncertain, socio-material entanglements are crafted in order to underline its configuration as a Ukrainian site. Soviet elements are othered, yet, they are mobilized in order to craft a negative conception of nationhood, by which “Ukraine is not Soviet anymore”. By carefully containing Soviet elements, actors are entangled in diverse material

86 purification techniques, through which they attempt to craft the historical relation between Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Origamis, in this case, fill gaps left open by the fragmentation of Soviet modernity. They fill the gaps created by cracked Soviet materialities by creating negative national conceptions that work to stabilize the country’s ambiguous position, by distorting and limiting the inimical Nation’s rests.

3. EUROPEAN DESIRES

Six years after the fervor of Euromaidan, the only aspect that remains in Kharkiv it’s the unfinished process of decommunization. The broken-ness of Soviet statues, the cumulation of dusty ruins breaking open in Kharkiv’s landscape, the emptiness left by the removal of Soviet heraldry gathered concerns in my interlocutors. They were concerned with the “civilized”, European direction of the country, which they could not see as clearly anymore. Some of them refused to consider the destruction of public monuments as a desirable way to transition to a “civilized country”; others believed that the emptiness left in the country did not leave any hope for its future. Depictions of Soviet Nationhood were destroyed; however, nothing seemed to be taking their place, except orthodox crosses and construction sites. Lingering in Kharkiv’s public places, the brokenness of these elements indexed the unachieved status of the revolution; they became material concretizations of the broken promises of Euromaidan, shattered by lack of finances, political will, mismanagement. This material incompleteness is not only remarked but uttered by my informants, who mobilize it to define the current state of the project. Ukraine, now, is a graveyard, disseminated with crosses on the pedestals of the monuments of former Soviet elements. The dismantlement of several public monuments was not systematically substituted with local nor national elements; on the contrary, when the crosses were lacking, a sheer absence of materials was often found in the place previously occupied by Soviet heraldry. The material qualities of these ruined monuments come to signify the death of the country, the current cul-de-sac status of the national transition. For my interlocutors, this unfinished status becomes iconic of the status of the country, notably a hopeless borderland in between two political economic vectors: Soviet communism and European capitalism. As the leap of decommunization goes ashore, ruins and crosses multiply, making the New National configuration struggle in its path towards Europeanization. As these urban elements produce unsatisfaction and unfinish-ness, they create emotions casting urban elements as indexes of political yearning and distaste (Ahmed, 2004). This normative economy of affect takes shape in the

87 city of Kharkiv, among its unbalanced urban national configuration. As a city known for its Soviet, industrial style, Kharkiv urbanity is traversed by this politics of emotions. The proximity of Soviet elements is managed to reproduce the normative aspiration disclosed by the unfinished process, namely the desire of European-ness and the disposition of Soviet-ness. In order to observe how this takes place in practice, I will firstly sketch the normative desires played out through the decommunization process, notably European-ness over Soviet-ness; I will present “dull communism” as one of the crystallizations of this political economical aspiration. I will then present two tactics that actors put forward in order to minimize the problematic proximity of undesired Soviet-ness in their daily lives. They distance themselves from them through irony and commodification, presenting it as a ridicule object that can be offered to foreigners. By doing so, they minimize their Soviet could-be-ness (Ahmed, 2004), which I will later explain, by managing their proximity to it through irony. Moreover, by dealing with Soviet elements through a market- based register, they align themselves to the European capitalist world, carving out a desired future on Soviet objects themselves. The latter, then, become objects through which the New Nation can be knitted, as they become objects that relate the European-ness of the actors that mobilize them

3.1 Incomplete decommunization

Towards the end of my fieldwork I approached a woman sitting in a park, next to the contested Zhukov statue. Trying to get access to more impressions about the city’s transformations I asked her whether she believed the statue should continue standing there. What interested her, however, was the chaos that these statues gathered; the objects were collecting various threads of internal national conflict, various tensions that were dangerous for the district, following her. She wanted the question settled: “either leave them there or build new ones”, she told me, “there should not be this uncertainty, this unsettled and unfinished status”. The decommunization process, for her, should be closed. The question triggered a waterfall of opinions about the current political situation, which she considered paradoxical and unsettling. “Everybody is trying to destroy all these statues, but then what? Nobody is building anything in their place! What you get is only broken statues and buildings! What a pity.” She was not enthusiastic about the process as she did not consider it as fully implemented; decommunization entailed the destruction of older monuments, sure, but the new ones struggled to be implemented. The same problematic was expressed by Innokenty; as he pointed at empty spots on buildings, he proudly told me that it was thanks to their political efforts that Soviet heraldry was removed. He quickly added, however, that the question was not settled as the elements had not yet been substituted. “We still need to put Ukrainian symbols where the coat of arms of the Soviet Union used to be placed. Now it is still unfinished, it looks ugly and that

88 makes us look bad”. The process of decommunization cannot stop at the dismantling of Soviet elements; it has to produce new figures, new decorations, new materials in order to fill the void left by the destruction of the old ones. Decommunization seems to fall short in Kharkiv; not only because it was not implemented fully, as some of my interlocutors argued57, but rather because it did not produce a valid counter Olympus. The city now feels emptied, incomplete. Gena, the leader of a far-right organization blamed the mismanagement of the decommunization efforts; some activists only wanted to destroy, without thinking about the consequences. “If you want to decommunize, then, you need to prepare a plan for what to build next. There is no sense to just destroy things for the sake of it, you need to know what to build afterwards! And unfortunately, that is not what they are doing. They are just creating stocks of ruins”. As Sara told me, decommunization feels like a barbaric endeavor when it is done in this manner. Destruction for the sake of destruction is not anything which she considers worthwhile, as the consequent ruins are only making the city worse. “Things need to be done in a civilized way” she told me “not like what they did to Zhukov or Lenin. That is just barbaric”. A similar dissatisfaction was expressed by Yuliya, a member of EGEA Kharkiv, as she showed me one of the decommunized Soviet statues in the city during our walking interview. The pedestal was still intact, however there was no human figure on it anymore; on its place a big wooden orthodox cross was standing. “You see, they put religious crosses on the place of Soviet elements. I don’t think it is nice, why do we need these crosses everywhere? Now Ukraine just looks like a graveyard, with no hope”. The promises of the Euromaidan, crystallized in the decommunization process, feel unrealized, incomplete. As the destructive efforts of decommunization grow in number in the city, actors are less and less satisfied with the process; the crosses and “the stocks of ruins” give a bittersweet aftertaste to my interlocutors, as they struggle to concretize the fantasy implied in the decommunization process. The promises of decommunization are stagnating, leaving actors to deal with the urban incompleteness of Euromaidan hopes. These hopes, related to fantasies of EU membership and abundance, are now wrecked in the broken statues that my informants pointed at. How do they make sense of these conflictual aspirations? What do these fantasies entail in Kharkiv? What tactics are they mobilizing to cope with the unfinished character of the process?

a. Decommunized fantasies

“Of course I am a decommunization supporter! I am for youth, modernity, development!” that’s what Lina, of my dormitory, told me when I ask her whether she agrees with the

57 This aspect could also be seen in the general city’s toponomy, where older streets’ names were changed only in extremely visible sites; the more difficult to access, uncontested allies kept their Soviet names.

89 decommunization process. The taxi driver echoed her words, as he was bringing me back to the airport. However, he adds a fundamental impasse: the minds of the people. “People still live like in the Soviet Union here. Politicians steal everything; we have so many oligarchs here, there is no future, they only promise many things while they are stealing. In such an environment, what do you think is worth changing two streets’ names?” While complaining about the ineffectiveness of the transformation, the taxi driver hints to the desires that this policy entails. The decommunization process relies on an “affective weight” bigger than the mere historical reconstruction or the distancing from the Soviet-Russian past. Changing squares’ names and demolishing busts comes with the promise of a project, the promise of fulfilling the desire of politico-economical Europeanization. At the beginning of the Euromaidan, the promise of full EU membership was felt by a lot of Ukrainians. At the time of Yanukovitch’s decision to continue the political and economic ties with the Russian Federation instead of embarking in a new economic collaboration with the EU, protesters signaled their desire of Europeanization. Their choice was to follow the path of EU membership, to distance themselves from their Russian ties and to join their Black Sea neighbors in a transition towards “European modernity”. Kirill described me Ukraine’s desire to join the EU through a school metaphor; he defined Western Europeans as the “firsts of the class” [otlichniki], followed by Eastern Europeans, who managed to “copy well” from the first ones; Ukraine is trying to follow the Eastern European example, although some parts of its population are resisting, as they are still enamored with the Soviet Union. The hierarchy presented by the nationalist is pretty clear: Western Europe is the desired goal that successful post-socialist countries like Poland managed to follow (Jones, 2017). The affective economy presented by the nationalist activist hints to a temporal scale, where the EU becomes iconic of modernity whereas the USSR iconizes hopeless stagnation. As Féhérváry noted in the case of Hungary, material objects mediate the relation between actors and the State; as desires for capitalist materialities over socialist ones, expressed a changing behavior towards the power expressed by the State both in its socialist and transitional phases (Féhérváry, 2011). These choices, moreover, were expressed through normative categorizations of qualia, where the greyness and boxiness of socialist architecture, for instance, was considered as undesirable; capitalist architecture, on the other hand, started to be considered desirable because of its colors and perceived modernity (Féhérváry, 2013). Subjects followed this affective politics by adjusting their choices to the implied hierarchy; as socialist products started indexing backwardness, the need to conform to capitalist design and style acquired an existential nuance. Socialism, experienced as a qualia, when materialized itself into material objects, threatened to index people in their proximity as participating in a Third World lifestyle (Féhérváry, 2011). A similar condition appeared in Kharkiv, as European-ness and Soviet-ness indexed a specific attitude

90 towards modernity. During our interview, Anja (21), a friend of one of EGEA’s members, clearly stated her position; she felt European, a feeling that she put in contraposition with Soviet-ness: “I certainly lean more towards Europe; the youth of this country feels European, we have other values, different from the Soviet ones.” As she continues to explain me this opposition she turns towards a consumerist/economical contraposition: “You know, during Soviet times there was nothing to buy. There was [supply] deficit, the supermarkets were empty, you could eat chocolate only for very special occasions. Now, you can buy chocolate whenever you want, like in Europe, you know, like in a civilized country.” These elements get stuck together in the words of Anja, Soviet Union becomes poverty and Ukraine-EU alludes to prosperity. This alignment is not inconspicuous; rather, it is symptomatic of a politics of desire (Ahmed, 2004). Anja disregards Soviet-ness as economically lacking, implicitly barbaric and thus undesirable; civilization, consumption, and Europe are, on the other hand, put forward and entangled with “Ukrainian youth”. Ukraine should strive for more possibilities of diverse consumption and not more deficient Soviet-ness. European- ness and Soviet-ness are competing elements in post-Maidan Kharkiv, which often play out in the material communism of the city. This competition does not take place merely in discourses; rather it traverses the city materially. The development towards the European world of goods and services needs to come at the expense of the symbolic communist elements of the city. They need to be sacrificed so that the real Ukraine with its real political economy and its real people can flourish. “We still have a long way to go, but decommunization is a first step towards Europe; I am sure we will reach it and leave all those people that are nostalgic for the Soviet Union behind us.” That’s how Tanya, a member of EGEA Kharkiv, explained me how she envisioned the future of her city, a future that goes towards Europe, thus leaving behind the Soviet Union. These words echo the words of Kirill, who painted the European hierarchy for me; for him, Europe is not only a desired goal but a sign of victory against the Soviet Union: “Europe is the proof that the Soviet Union is not right, that it failed, that communism is not good.” Europeanization, thus, is entangled with desires of a new material and temporally defined New Nation, rising at the expense of material concretizations of Soviet-ness.

91

Document hanged on one of the boards of Kharkiv’s military tent. These desires are entangled with heterogeneous elements; not only, they relate the recent political moves of the country, vis-à-vis Russia and the EU; rather, they play out such dichotomies on semiotically differenciated Nations: Soviet Ukraine (chained to Russia) and Independent Ukraine (aspiring to EU integration). These desires were displayed materially at the sides of the tent, by showing the backwardness of the Russian world with respect to the European world. Activists hanged a document pondering over the need of “joining the EU” next to the military tent, showing two passages of reflections. The first passage showed some data about the EU membership of some post-socialist countries: Slovenia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary. Beneath it, a UN rating of the quality of life was reproduced showing Russia and Ukraine lagging far behind the other post-socialist republics. The second point organizes the agenda to enter either the EU or the Customs Union, lobbied by Russia. The first path included structural reforms, investments “(like in Poland and China)”, end with corruption and oligarchs; the second path demands: “being ready to carry out commands from the Kremlin”. The two economic vectors implied in the Revolution are discussed and presented to the public; the document implicitly showed the future suggested by the two options: joining the ranks of successful post-socialist countries, with strikingly good life conditions; or being Russia’s puppet and continue stagnating. The leap towards the EU as exemplified in this image crystallizes an economic redemption: being a European country would save Ukraine and Ukrainians from the risk of Third World status. Ukraine and Russia are made contiguous through their poor standards of living, whereas the EU and its Eastern Member States are thriving and exemplifying through their material conditions that

92 “socialism was bad, that capitalism won”, as Kirill told me. As it finds itself in this dichotomic in- between-ness, Ukraine appears as pulled towards these two vectors, fighting for the definition of Ukraine’s identity: either past-oriented (Russia) or future-oriented (EU). Adhering to the Customs Union promoted by Russia, would imply turning the back to the possibility of EU integration in favor of a Soviet-like constellation. This dichotomy is semiotically crafted through figures and ratings, which semiotically aligns EU membership with socio-economic blossoming. As pointed by Latour, documents do not neutrally pass knowledge, rather they mediate it, transforming the elements that they carry (Latour 2005). As such, both the figures and their disposition on the documents mobilize a semiotic divergence between the two Unions as well as a path of (un)desirability. They carry spatial and temporal elements, such as well-off post-socialist countries, Russia’s aggressive foreign policy, Ukraine’s oligarchic system as well as the hope of getting rid of it. By assembling these entities together, these materials hint not only to the unfinished project of decommunization, but also at the value system that this process entailed and co-crafted. These entities wrap in themselves chronotopic aspirations through which city’s elements are seen and evaluated. It is through these ontological brands, notably the semiotic understanding of how a brand’s stereotypical characteristics work (Nakassis, 2012), of the EU and the USSR, that histories, cities, and Nations are associated and assembled together creating political economic semiosis. The incompleteness of material decommunization, then, becomes problematic as it indexes Kharkiv’s inability to move out of its Soviet atmosphere. As Soviet elements and their ruins occupy the city, actors put in place tactics in order to cope with the polarizing normativity which is taking place in Ukraine and in Kharkiv.

b. Dull communism

As the Euromaidan revolution unfolded, the country’s aspirations to go out of its perceived backwardness was entangled in its urban environment. Soviet figures indexed political as well as economic stagnation, that Euromaidan activists wanted to get rid of. Six years after the revolution, the normative opposition between communism/Soviet Union and capitalism/Europe crystallized and was further expressed through rich material images that refer to their un/desirability. As I was interviewing Alina (21), a member of EGEA Kharkiv, she spent some time to elucidate to me the difference between the city’s past and future, conjugated through communism and capitalism. “I think capitalism is not that bad [laughter]. Capitalism is variety [raznoobrazie] whereas the ideology of Soviet Union is more linked to communism; it seems to me [communism] is greyness, monotony [odnoobrazie] and simply boring [laughter].” In the words of Alina, communism seems

93 unattractive, dusted, and outdated. Communism is dull, uninteresting and monotone; it is the standardized, grey buildings that fill the city; it is the unexciting elements “made in USSR”, like the rusty Kharkiv’s trams or the old coughing Ladas. It is characterized by a dullness, which aligns urban spaces, commodities and also lifestyles, the communist lifestyle filled with lowered heads, poverty and oppression. As Irina was explaining me her position towards Soviet socialism, she also mobilized these figures; notably: “For instance, everybody goes in one uniform and that concerns not only clothes; also, any form of social dissent was not encouraged [during communist times]; everybody had to go like under one mold. And that does not attract me, I am more for individualization, for capitalism”. Aesthetic uniformity indexed political oppression for Irina, as the uniforms exemplified the inability of social dissent. Both elements, furthermore, naturalize Soviet greyness, related to its general oppressive conformity. In post-Soviet Kharkiv, communism is enacted through (images of) cheap massification of both objects and individualities; capitalism, on the other hand, emerges as a plethora of possibilities of realization, of development and consumption, shedding colorful LED light on the broken promises of Soviet socialism. Decommunization helps the trajectory of these lights, wiping away the busts, the sickles and hammers, the Lenins which help Soviet paternalism and the cults of personality to stick to people, the city and the Nation. To further her point, Alina pointed to the washed-off façade of one of the buildings in front of us. It was a standard modernist building in concrete, similar to the ones one can find in American big cities or in former Soviet countries. Its greyness, however, did not index for my interlocutor the modern, fast highways of capitalist cities, nor the efforts of modernization. Rather, they indexed the fragmented socialist project, boring, dull, and economically lagging behind. The standard format equated political oppression, greyness, the economic deficits, malfunctioning public transports and lower quality products. Through their washed-off-ness, their abandon-ness, they indexed a failed relict, wrecked on the shores of modern times. Their material surfaces and their aesthetic qualities are entangled with specific histories, as they gather together a political economic history and its attraction. The Soviet Union is not glorious, nor bright, but only boring, grey, and monotonous. Communism is dull and pales at the sight of capitalist kaleidoscopic materialities, whose attractive variety highlights its historical superiority. Dull communism is too tedious and standardized, as Masha told me, “it is not modern anymore”. The destruction of its backward dullness, then, becomes an act of containment vis-à-vis its potential contamination. As Svetlana told me, the more these elements were destroyed, the more it would be possible to re- establish historical justice and make sure that people will not grow up with feelings of sovok. Sovok is a pejorative term that is used to define people that are “still living in Soviet times, that are not

94 willing to keep up with the present and instead still go after Soviet mythology”; not only people can be sovok, though; also places can be and for Anja Kharkiv is one, despite “Ukraine being part of the European sphere”. Decommunizing Kharkiv’s urban materials, thus, becomes entangled with a double desire: a temporal one (not being Soviet) and a political economical one (being Euro- capitalist). As such, the decommunization process will push away the dull atmosphere created by worn out communist elements. Ukraine is part of the European sphere and as such it needs to be shaped in accordance to it, notably by taking away material communism, “the evil ideology of the Soviet Union” as Svetlana told me; in her words: “there is no place for totalitarianism in Europe” and Kharkiv belongs to the European sphere.

Dull communism, then, is typical of sovok, the non-modern, the non-European, the dusty fragments pointing to poor life conditions, which would be calcified through the Customs Union. This association comes through in the words of Anya, as she details the consequences of decommunization to me: “Well, it turns out that she [Ukraine] goes away from Russia [through decommunization] and the further away we are from Russia, the closer we are to the values of Europe, to [its] morality, to [its] mentality, namely to Europe.” Tanya seems to agree with her, as she makes the distinction as well between an open Ukraine freed from its hindering Soviet roots and a close, obsolete Russia forever imbricated in the Soviet Union. “You know, we made a revolution to become European; now people start to travel the world to see how things are done somewhere else, so that they develop; Russia, on the other hand, stays always the same, with its stolovie58, Lenins and sickles and hammers. For me there is an “iron association” between sovok and Russia”. Decommunization, thus, needs to happen to “vaccinate” Ukraine from the potential Soviet-ness of its neighbor and of its nostalgic inhabitants, still mudded with the Soviet Union. This past-present, notably the configuration of a past time in the present, takes place through the evaluation of the material consequences of decommunization; furthermore, the material qualities of Soviet elements are used as the material basis to construct a normative national relationality. The backwardness of Soviet objects becomes the other from the New Nation, as it strives to shape itself through European modernity. Two national configurations take shape through this process: a backward, ridicule Soviet Union and a modern Ukraine. As expressed by Lemon, semiotic assemblages can be formed through chronotopic entities, notably the association of times, places, and subjectivities (2009); these elements are clustered together in semiotic alignments, producing meaning and

58 Stolovaya is a typical cafeteria, which serves general food at generally low prices. In the words of my interlocutor, it became indexical of poverty, linking Russia and poverty together. The lack of stolovye in Kharkiv was mentioned as a proof of its modernity, of its European-ness.

95 differences. In the case of Kharkiv, European-ness and Soviet-ness can be considered as relational chronotopes, that create a view of material elements as well as subjectivities.

These chronotopic differences, therefore, assemble not only Kharkiv, Nations, histories and materialities, but also different subjectivities. The communist and capitalist identities conjugated through temporal vocabularies of backwardness and modernity are presented by my informants; they highlight the influence of state-led Soviet paternalism on Ukrainians and Kharkovites, unable to “manage themselves” as modern European individuals. “They were grinding our minds with this propaganda for 63 years! You know what that means?! It is three generations! They scared the population for three generations. Now I think we will need three generations to finally free ourselves. Three generations to understand that we have to take care for ourselves, not the government!” That’s how Oleg defines the emancipation trajectory triggered by decommunization and its oppositional ground. It will finally lead to an anthropological change, through which people will finally understand that they should not wait for the State to do things for them; on the contrary, they should be in charge of their own selves. This care for the self is also expressed by Tanya, who explains to me that Soviet people had their life planned for them, but this is not the case anymore in contemporary Ukraine; “you have to work hard to find a job, things are not prepared for you by the State anymore. You have to be responsible, pro-active and develop yourself; we don’t live in Soviet times anymore.” The need for this anthropological change is also expressed by Gena, the leader of a nationalist organization. While comparing Ukrainian and Polish schools, he underlined how “there, in Europe, they start to learn how to manage [upravljat’] themselves since an early age. They know that they have to earn money, that they have to be proactive, that they can develop themselves. They teach them self-management in school, but there is nothing like that here, in Ukraine, there is still too much [Soviet] paternalism”. The role of decommunization, particularly with respect with the dismantling of screaming communism, has been described as an essential step for the “independent development” of Ukraine, which is strongly linked with the destruction of its Soviet past. Anja is very clear about it: “I mean, now we are moving towards Europe, although they [Western Europeans] throw Ukraine here and there, like [sometimes] in the East and [sometimes] in Europe, I still mostly see a European future for Ukraine and for this, she [Ukraine] needs to grow out [ujti] from these Soviet Union’s roots”. The role of the decommunization process, then, is to intervene in order to shake up the Soviet minds and to fashion “free selves” healed from the “historical damage of propaganda”, to shake off the historical burden hindering the self- development of the country and of its citizens. These selves, freed from the heavy Soviet busts and statues, will be able to enjoy the promise of consumption that the sacrificed communism entails: the

96 promise of Europeanization. This promise includes both fantasies of commodities as well as images of individualities; Sasha, a leader of an ultra-nationalist organization says it clearly: “I lean more towards capitalism, for sure. I do not think that the State should provide for you; I am for individuality and progress […] and these symbols, they help reinforcing this Soviet mentality, this Soviet paternalism. They tell you “go work in the factory! Go die for the Nation!”. However, this is not what Sasha prefers as he leans towards an individuality and government style that are found in “Europe”; as Anja said: “In Europe they have another mentality, other ideas, customs, ethics. I mean I have friends who travelled through Europe and they told me how great it is there; people, there, are completely different! They treat each other in a more civilized way.” As Said explained, illustrating nations and communities through civilizational tropes is not a neutral practice; rather, it is built on the basis of a temporal divide, traversing modernity and backwardness. Arising to the status of civilized communities rhymes with efforts to come out of barbarism, to finally achieve modernity (Said, 1978). In the words of my interlocutors, Europe continuously emerges as the modernity that Ukraine should achieve, as it leaves behind its backward Soviet rests. The Europeanness that is semiotically constructed against Soviet socialism is a fantasy full of “choices”, “products”, “travels” and “individuality”, the very same elements whose lack is used to define communism by my informants. Soviet socialism is lack of products and services, outdated and comic in its efforts to still be relevant. It is, furthermore, the lack of choice and the impossibility to consume, both because of the lack of money and products. It is the lack of possibilities to travel to other countries than the Soviet Union; it is the factory and the low pensions. It is the impossibility of consumption, the impossibility of buying, it is “..the planned economy” as Oleg pointed out. The dichotomy of these two entities is portrayed in an antithetical way, portraying them as existing in an absolute oppositional way. As Innokenty put it: “Europe cannot exist where there are elements of the Soviet Union and we believe that Ukraine is located in the European Space”. This chronotopic opposition plays out through territories, commodities, urban materials, and subjectivities. When walking through XTZ Masha also pointed to something that she defined “really Soviet”, notably a home hairdresser, advertised through some 80s kitsch flowery design. When I asked her why she would define that as Soviet, she mobilized its undesirability; “I mean, I would never go there! Would you? I am sure I would come out with some babushka hairstyle!” Soviet-ness, again, seems to emerge as outdated, unable to provide a right service. Soviet-ness, even in its more consumerist nature, is inadequate, awkward and unfitting, incompatible with Ukraine’s youth. The Soviet Union is highlighted in all of its malfunctioning angles, portraying it as a heavy, old and slow machine that is responsible for the current state of affairs. Anja says it clearly, it is

97 because of this Soviet past of impositions, of injustice and limitations that Ukraine is lagging behind; it is because of the “rests” of the Soviet Union that Ukrainians are not living well; it is because of the influence of this past that people are “still waiting for the State to provide for them, instead of providing for themselves”. The destruction of this machine would imply the emergence of the possibility of the opposite elements from those gathered in material communism, notably abundant consumption in a free market. European-ness and Soviet-ness are played out in the situated National configurations occurring in post-Maidan Kharkiv. The there-ness of European capitalism is made contiguous with my interlocutors’ selves; however, the here-ness of Soviet fragments is othered and imbricated with Russian sovok-ness. The “West” with its lawful states and its abundant economies becomes a chronotope through which Ukraine’s status is evaluated (Lemon, 2009). The bulkiness of Soviet modernist buildings becomes a surface on which actors pleat a specific present-past, notably Soviet a-modernity as dull, unattractive, obsolete. This dull communism emerges relationally to a present-future59, notably Ukraine’s European aspiration. As such, the bulkiness and greyness of these elements, as well as “Soviet people” living in Ukraine become what Ukraine is not, risible in their efforts to still be relevant. In this othering process, based on this dichotomic enactments, the belonging of Kharkiv to the post-Maidan Nation is strengthened. As they pull the city towards Europeanization, actors are disentangling the city’s Soviet built environment to the city’s identity. As such, they are also caring for their own selves, as their proximity to these negatively evaluated objects risks to associate them with their Third World status. Dull communism, thus, exists as an origami, insofar as it builds on the foils emerging from the fragmented Soviet modernity of the city, to pleat a relational temporality between the New Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Using the latter’s very materiality, actors create a distance between the city, the new Nation and the political economic project indexed in Soviet buildings. The State emerges through the economic rests of the “Lost Nation”, lingering in its territory. However, what are the tactics that actors put in place in order to anesthetize their proximity to these elements? How do they negotiate their everyday contiguity with this built environment? I argue that they introduce two processes, notably comic communism and capitalist communism, through which they manage their proximity to these elements while simultaneously crafting their European-ness.

3.2 Comic communism

Sara Ahmed introduced the role of affective politics in the “economy of emotions”, a system through which actors manage belongings and figures of the “other”. She conceptualizes emotions

59 Present-future is a configuration of the future based and imbricated in the present time. It is a concept closely related to present-past, although not relating to the past, but rather to the future.

98 not as distinctively internal or external phenomena, but rather as effective entities, creating surfaces of boundaries and worlds (Ahmed, 2004). This emotional system relies on the “could-be-ness” of subjects, notably their potential affiliation to elements that are threatening for the Nation. As such, affects come into play, organizing and creating boundaries. As anybody could be a non-modern Soviet subject in Kharkiv, due to its peculiar entanglements (its pro-Russian character, its uncertain belonging), the necessity to deal with this could-be-ness becomes crucial. Kharkiv’s inhabitants could be Soviet, could be backward, could be undesirable, as they live in contiguity with Soviet fragmented modernity. As such, though, actors can, then again, use the brittleness of Soviet materiality to pleat specific origamis that manage this temporal contamination. This undesired modernity is tackled through irony and mockery of Soviet-ness, thereby distancing themselves from it. However, this ironic move also allows an identification with Soviet elements, but a twisted one, managing again the overabundance while distancing oneself from it. As such, sometimes communism makes people laugh on the basis of its outdatedness, of its incapacity to be at the same pace of modern times. It is not a laughter that arises from their grotesque semiotic transformation; rather, it stems from its incongruency with the present. Communism sometimes is clumsy, stumbling on its own attempts to be modern. Communism, for some of my younger informants, can be rather comic.

“Do you want to come and see the birthplace of gopniki?” that’s how Masha firstly contacted me on Telegram, inviting me to take part to a tour of XTZ [Kharkovskij Traktornyj Zavod]. Once I accepted and met her at the district, I asked her if she herself was a gopnitsa, as she was telling me that she lived in that district herself. Trying not to burst into laughter, she told me that of course she was one; gopniki are the real inhabitants of the district. She started to explain to me the origin of the district in front of the historical factory that gave the name to the neighborhood: the tractor factory. I interrogated her on the void emblem standing on the top of the main building, was there the coat of arms of the Soviet Union once? She laughed again and replied affirmatively. She knew that for me, like for all the other inostrantsy [foreigners], these symbols were exotic, picturesque, extra-ordinary. They were something unique, to be shown in their extravagance. “We know that foreigners don’t understand these objects, that for them these things are unusual, hence we need to show them and to explain them”; that’s one of the first things Ilona (22) told me during our interview. These post-Soviet tours that EGEA organizes were there to show Kharkiv’s peculiar reality to foreigners, a reality which is not merely a historical one, but an extravagant one full of gopniki, (post-) Soviet clumsiness and comedy. The removed coat of arms on the factory makes my interlocutor laugh as its absent presence builds on what is funny about material communism: its

99 ineffectiveness, its tentative presence, its lost grandiosity. They look awkward, funny, caught in the contradictory present failure of their own symbolism. Oksana also laughed when she was explaining to me the initial project of the main university of Kharkiv; they based the project on Moscow State University, an architectural structure typical of Stalin years that became iconic of the Soviet Union. What made her laugh was not only the fact that they wanted to build the same structure that they already built in Moscow; rather, the real comic part was the statue that they wanted to put on top of the university: a giant statue of Stalin overlooking the main square. We both giggled while she was pointing to the top of the university, the colossal statue felt random yet typical, as a kind of Soviet surrealism. It never came to realization, yet its possibility was not so unimaginable. “That’s how they did in Soviet Union!” told me Oksana “the bigger, the better!”. The laughter that came afterwards underlined the ironical standpoint that my interlocutor had. She did not think that the bigger was necessarily the better, on the contrary, she thought it was somehow funny. The cult of personality that the statue symbolized did not iconize horrors or totalitarianism; rather, it denoted a typical and inadequate “way of doing”. As Irina (21) was walking me through her own district, she stopped for a moment, she looked at me in the eyes with a smile and asked me “Do you believe in Satan?” She went on to explain to me that because of a mistake in the planning of the buildings, a series of condominiums were now shaped to form the satanic symbol: 666. They were initially meant to reproduce the acronym CCCP [USSR] seen from above; however, the construction of additional houses in the end curve of the “C”s created this satanic representation of the Soviet Union, destroying its respectability despite of its own will. This involuntary mistake shows the clumsiness of Soviet-ness, pleated in the sheer materiality of its own propagandistic activity. The monumental representation of itself and the glorious allure that it ideally should have evoked are pulverized in the concrete materialization of the project. The magniloquent ideological project jams through its own concretization, showing the real nature of Soviet socialism: its gaucherie, letting appear an unexpected result, notably the adoration of Satan. This inadvertent adoration makes Irina laugh uncontrollably as she shows me on her phone a satellite view of this material communism in all of its comicality. Communism, then, can be hilarious, or at least it has been comic for a lot of my informants. When presenting to me some urban objects, they would joke with me about it, underlining their comic character. For instance, as I was walking with Irina through her district she asked me if I had noticed the standardized characters of the built environment. “Did you see that everything looks the same over here? Everything looks as if it was made with a stencil.” She finished her comment with a loud laughter, pointing at the communist quirkiness that she was showing to me: standardized districts, with standardized houses, for standardized lives. Soviet camp style was shown in its reproducibility and being mocked for it. The

100 grey building blocks of Saltovka, one of Kharkiv’s sleeping districts, were not praised for the strength of their concrete, nor for the successfulness of the Soviet project to provide housing to all its citizens. They were, instead, mocked for their similarity, for the lack of variety and the impossibility to orient oneself within it as the standardization made it “difficult to recognize one’s own house”, as Marina underlined. Material communism sparks her laughter through its repetitiveness, in its re-proposition of the identical, over and over again; it is stuck in an image of modernity, damned by its concrete-ness: fixed, repetitive and grey. They do not completely fit this temporality anymore, as “they should have been gone since a long time”, as Sonya (21) told me. Comic communism is a communism that is inextricably linked to an outdated modernity, hindered by its own concrete, thus unable to move forward. Comicality exudes from objects which are not modern anymore, indexing a way of doing which is in contradiction with the present time. The laughter they provoked rose from their incongruent tempo, unknowingly dancing out of the present tune. Their lost vision, their lost modernity is what makes these imponent figures comic, as they still try to dance, loyal to their own rhythm. It is this rhythmic contradiction as well as the consequent contraposition between their imponent serious figures and the unknown clumsiness that makes my informants burst into laughter. What makes this material communism comic is their typical clumsiness, it is their belongingness in the sovetskij byt [Soviet lifestyle]. When they presented me these elements, my interlocutors put themselves in a liminal ironic position, both occupying and distancing themselves from the Soviet way of doing (Boyer, 2005). Irony as social identification allows subjects to manage undesirable traits, by both acknowledging their identifying aspect while distancing them through the very identification process (Boyer, 2005; Rethmann, 2009). For instance, by exposing it to me, Marina puts herself in a specific relation to Soviet elements; she interacts with the typical Soviet blocks in a double way, identifying herself with them, while ironically positioning herself outside of them. She plays with the characteristics of the district, joking about its funny state and offering to me its funny character. The irony used to portray comic communism can provoke a double-ended effect: distancing oneself from an undesired sociality, which allows the second-degree identification with it. Secondly, it justifies their permanence in the public space; their quirkiness, their uniqueness, their funny Soviet-ness excuses their presence as they exist as a part of a naturalized Slavic essence, amongst gopniki, babushki, and trams that go out of the rails. Through this double effect, the ironical attitude allows to cope with the lived proximity with the city’s Soviet-ness. As such, Soviet modernity drastically loses its total character; it becomes a peculiar, local character, which cannot compete with the boundless character of the New Nation. The ironic interaction that comic communism entails allows for the management of depictions of communism in the everyday life of members of EGEA Kharkiv. The

101 potential shame that could arise from the neighboring relation existing between my participants and the off-tune rhythm of communism is neutralized through irony. They do not fatally submit to the identification with communist depictions present in their everyday lives; nor do they try to embellish them or value them in their temporal contradiction. Instead they mock them, they ironically perform them, thus acknowledging their proximity with it while granting a distance, which allows for a playful self-worthiness. As the city is pulled schizophrenically towards two directions: a desired capitalist one and an undesired socialist one, actors knit comedic patterns on Soviet fragments. They do so, through the semiotic ideology60 at stake in post-Maidan Kharkiv (Féhérváry, 2013; Keane, 2003), notably the association of certain material qualities to Soviet modernity as clumsy; this clumsiness does not stand a chance against the fantasized modernity of “Yevropa”, with its colorful commodities and civilized people. Comic communism, thus, is pleated on these elements in order to create a distance with respect to this undesired modernity; as such, it manages this proximity by creating a distance, which, in turn, allows to tackle Kharkiv’s unfinished decommunization. In the unbalanced urban materiality of Kharkiv, Soviet elements can become ironically Ukrainian, as they signal the distance existing between Kharkovites and Soviet-ness. This liminality, thus, takes place not only on the unbalanced materiality; but also, on the dangerous proximity of these elements. By ironically identifying with Soviet-ness actors manage these liminalities while containing the could-be-ness implied in Russo-Soviet elements, notably their Third World status. The origami that is pleated here includes subjects, temporalities and material objects, pleated together to form a comic communism which enacts liminal subjectivities ironically interacting with the unmovable presence of communist materials. It is an origami that creates space, that creates distance by managing national temporalities through ironic identification. It is by distancing themselves from this material, by creating it as comically other, that they can create an identity as both separated and attached to Soviet materialities (Navaro-Yashin, 2007). Comic communism, thus, allows the affective management of the broken promises of decommunization, by creating a friction between subjects and their everyday built environment; however, how do actors manage their own self worthiness with respect with Ukrainian possible sovok-ness?

3.3 Capitalist communism

The affective political economy taking place in Kharkiv, relies on a normative difference between desirable European-ness and undesirable Soviet-ness. The economic ideologies implied in

60 The term refers to the association of different signification processes in a peculiar context; for more information, see Keane, 2003.

102 these political entities are played out through the city’s built environment, by defining certain material characteristics as symptomatic of an outdated and failed modernity. Actors negotiate their proximity with material fragments of this failed modernity through an ironical attitude, which allows a double-ended justification. However, if they succeeded in distancing themselves from their proximity with material Soviet-ness, they still could be passive Soviet selves, relying on State’s interventions. This dilemma gets cleared by the commodification of Soviet urban elements, allowed by the fragmentation of Soviet modernity. The latter allows for actors to offer communism as a product to foreigners, a practice that give them access to the “capitalist lifestyle”.

One of the marketing strategies that EGEA Kharkiv put forward in order to attract people in their city was to promote it as “the center of the real post-Soviet experience”. On the invitation to their summer activity “Kharkiv is calling”, the organization presents various pictures of the city, including the stunning socialist metro station of the city, constructivist architecture, babushki, pickled cucumbers and images of “Gopnik culture”. They promise to offer a lot of “Slavic weirdness”, which is portrayed already in the promotional videos that the leader of EGEA Kharkiv sent to me. They portray the members of the organization doing some sports, drinking beers while Little Big songs are playing on the background. Another video portrays them coming towards the camera from behind a tractor and posing in various typical “Slavic squats”, evidently playing on the stereotype of poverty and (post-) Soviet folkloric ideal-types: babushki, gopniki, pickled cucumbers and drunkenness. They invite visitors to explore the post-Soviet reality and to get to know “the rules of industrial districts’ life”; the “proletarian city” is, they say, waiting for us. When I ask Oksana, the former leader of EGEA Kharkiv, why they decided to use this terminology to define Kharkiv, she mobilizes economical terms, telling me that “this is what foreigners are interested in; that is what we can offer them, our Soviet elements. Of course we would not use the term proletarians nowadays, but [she]61 used it, you know, to attract tourists. That is what you do, you offer people what they want to see”. The Soviet history of the city is commodified by the members of this organization and offered to the visitors who would like to spend some time in the first capital of socialist Ukraine. This history is made attractive through “Slavic weirdness”, which is aligned with babushki and gopniki but also the industrial history of the city, its inefficiency, its Soviet architecture. These elements are aligned together and presented as a unitary element, offered to foreigners eager to explore the funny, commodified East. As Soviet-ness become entangled in this

61 She was referring to the author of the brochure, another member of EGEA Kharkiv.

103 folkloric, local, and bidimensional assemblage, it also creates a gap through which this failed modernity can attract new meaning (Nakassis, 2012).

Masha (21), a member of EGEA Kharkiv, repeatedly underlined the emptiness of Soviet elements, during our interview: “These elements are just stones, to me. They don’t have an influence at all; yes, sure they can sometimes be nice to look at; but to me they are just stones….and how can stones have an influence? For me in absolutely no way.” They were not something exceptional, but only stones, neutral parts of a history that was. The same conception was mobilized by the other members of EGEA Kharkiv; they were eager to show these Soviet elements to tourists and even to mobilize them to craft its urban attractiveness. They were anesthetized elements, innocuous elements, on which an exoticized Soviet-ness was knitted. In fact, these elements are shown for their Soviet and actors’ peculiarity; to show them, however, and to show them for other’s consumption implies their innocence, their externality with respect to the present. These elements can be shown because “they are just stones”, because they are ruins of a past that was, which does not threaten the Ukrainian present. It is a past which is finished, circumscribed in the temporal limits of its communist origins, which my informants categorized as completely ineffective for contemporary Ukraine; in the words of Irina (21) “We do not even have the communist party in power anymore [in Ukraine]! These symbols do not influence anyone anymore, they are just part of the city”. These uninfluential pieces of stones are, however, shown to foreigners, to portray the city itself, to attract new tourists in “the city of the proletariat”. Their irrelevance, moreover, is marked through the contraposition with Shevshenko’s statue; M: “These Soviet elements they are there to pass. Time will bring them down, it is just a matter of time.” F: “And what about Shevshenko’s statue? Is it also just a matter of time before it will vanish?” M: “Oh no, no, no! Shevshenko is here to stay!! I am sure it will stand there even in 100 years.” Material communism, then, is not here to stay; it is not only unimportant but subject to the passing of time. It is mortal, degrading, up for potential forgetfulness; these elements constitute a past period of the country, which does not define it as much as the national poet does. The soul of Ukraine does not lie in its material communism. However, it is this apparent irrelevance which allows the playful use of these materialities. This capitalist communism is not only spectacularized through the “stone-ness” of material communism; but also, through the ironic posture that actors mobilize to show it. As previously mentioned, irony allows the creation of a friction, a dual

104 performance simultaneously enacting the social performance and the social distance to the reference portrayed itself. The social distance that the ironic posture generates, works on both the individual level and urban communism. Through their ironic show, EGEA members are enacting a temporal distance, exposing these objects in the present as deprived of their historicity. It is because they are not really part of the present that they can be playfully mobilized to identify the city, it is because they are not the real contemporary Kharkiv that they can be shown as its ironic image. In the words of Sonya: “This is our history without a doubt, but it is not what we are anymore; the Soviet Union does not represent us”. Through this practice, actors enact a hybrid spectacle through which material communism ironically portrays the city’s identity, allowing it to inhabit a liminal position simultaneously being and not being the real Ukraine. By showing ironically this material communism actors are enacting it as a commodified folkloric element, not that different from Vodka, borshch or gopniki. They become temporally flat stones, peculiarly exoticized for the eyes of the bizarre foreigners, interested in them. Pleating the foils on the fragments of Soviet modernity, actors are crafting again the temporal relation existing between the Soviet Union and post-Maidan Ukraine. The Soviet Union exists as an irrelevant past configuration, whose history is present only temporarily. This origami makes the Nation specifically as a boundless entity with respect to Soviet Union; the Nation emerging from capitalist communism that can make use of its past configuration for its own profit, both economically and socially. The commodification of these elements, in fact, allows for their neutralization with respect to their political character. They become commodities, alienated from their political character and aura (Benjamin, 1969). As commodities to be consumed, they are shown in their mortality, in their contingency, in the configuration of the Nation, radically different from Shevshenko’s holiness. Jones successfully demonstrated that semiotic alignments not only naturalize new socio-material configurations; they also allow for unexpected associations (2017; Farias, 2013). As actors capitalize on Soviet-ness, the latter becomes an element through which European-ness can become closer, by using Soviet modernity as a commodity in a market-based economy. As such, the language through which my informants spoke about these activities was one of economic transactions; they were able to “understand a demand”. Sonya expressed this sentiment with a self- satisfactory smile: “We thought that people would be interested in these Soviet things because they did not have them in their country…and we were right.” They provided the right offer to the present demand, thus attracting foreigners (mostly from Central and Eastern Europe) to their city. Through these encounters, material communisms and the aligned Soviet-ness were offered to the “Europeans visiting” in a spectacle of quirky (post-) communism; the proletarian city, then, was pleated in order to be consumed (Rethmann, 2009). The organization can brand itself through the very communist

105 materiality, which was condemned as omnipresent. The objects themselves are transformed in bidimensional objects, that were portrayed in their commodified and cartoonified aspects. This commodification process as well as its branding through a market vocabulary plays into the semiotic ideology at play in post-Maidan Kharkiv. Ukraine finds itself in a semi- peripherical position, as a recipient of European aids and commodities (Dragneva &Wolczuk, 2016; Reznikova et al., 2018). Capitalist communism, then, inverts the trend as it is Ukrainians, who are offering to the West their products, their city, in its commodified contours. This move aligns actors with European-ness as they act in the semiotic field of capitalist-based lifestyle. These de- politicized Soviet commodities, then, become mediators of European-ness, casting the offering actors away from their alleged Soviet-ness. The desirable European-ness is then crafted on the basis of the undesirable Soviet-ness itself. What for other Kharkovites became an abjected other, has been recycled by members of EGEA making it an ironic part of their subjectivities (Navaro-Yashin, 2009). By offering these elements to their European counterparts, moreover, they enter in an economic exchange allowing them to enter into the desirable realm that they are so frequently denied. Capitalist communism creates a micro story of post-socialist success, by transforming both materials and subjectivities into worthy elements of capitalist modernity. Through this process, actors are identifying with these elements while twisting them. By managing the foils of fragmented Soviet-ness, actors are able to manage Ukrainian scarcity and Soviet overabundance. They transform communism into a commodity, improving the economic attractivity of the city, as well as crafting a New Ukrainian configuration on the basis of a de-politicized Soviet Union. A situated Nation is configurated through this communist origami, one which constructs its desired future on its very non-modern fragments. The latter become the entry point for European- ness as a political economic fantasy, based on market-based capitalism.

3.4 Conclusion

In this chapter, I argued that Soviet fragments can be creatively used by actors to manage the normative semiotic ideology crystallized in the decommunization process. As the latter’s fulfillment in the city stagnates, actors negotiate their proximity by knitting an ironic friction which allows them to dwell on the liminality introduced by urban decommunization. Moreover, by commodifying Soviet-era elements, they succeed in participating in the logic of capitalist economy, portraying themselves and their city as worthwhile. Origamis can then be frictional, casting some of its elements as backward and local(-ized), and some others as modern and European. Frictions are created on the fragments of Soviet modernity, allowing to create a space of actions in the

106 constricted agency of unfinished decommunization. In the folds of these frictions, a differenciated integration to European modernity can be knitted.

107 CONCLUSION

The case of decommunization in Kharkiv offered an insight into the socio-material interactions at stake in the formation of the Nation. This research demonstrated that the Nation is not a unitary entity, existing independently from actors use of it. On the contrary, we followed how different actors make use of material configurations of other Nations in order to assemble various, relational national configurations. I argued that through qualisigns, actors craft national assemblages, making sense of their geneaologies. As such, I showed how people make sense of Soviet objects in various ways. Soviet-era objects become semiotically wrapped in various configurations, taking up new meanings and new functions. For instance, a beautiful depiction of Soviet Nationhood can exist as an artistic endeavor for some people, as a propagandistic object, as a funny element, as a sign of a present conflict. It is the openness of objects to the constitution of multiple semiotic interrelations that allows for their easy reconfigurations. It is thanks to the fact that a beautiful monument can fade that it can also become an old monument, a romanticized monument, or a nostalgic monument of golden times. However, these transformations do not come by themselves, they are entangled in socio-material networks; if the monument is fading, it is because public authorities are not restoring it, possibly due to a current economic deficit, materially producing the monument not only as an old monument, but also as an index of the national economic condition. Furthermore, the monument as “poor Nation” might provoke the outraged reaction of citizens, who could attack it to symbolically attack the government, possibly generating a general unrest. Semiosis, thus, creates reality, assembles histories and causes actions (Jones, 2017). It is through their situated-ness thus that materialities are productive of assembled nations, which co-participate in the creation of historical territorialities in the holed landscape of transitional Nations.

The decommunization process of Kharkiv, then, appears as a boiling phenomenon, which makes visible previously banal elements, allowing for new configurations of meaning. As such, it triggered of belonging as elements became entangled with geopolitical and territorial dynamics. In the city of Kharkiv, the decommunization process created absence, as it introduced a radical difference between the overabundant Soviet-ness of the city and its national belonging. Actors remedied to this status by pleating origamis, crafting them through the materiality and histories that they have at hand. It is through these origamis that actors create nations and new territories, by pleating in heterogeneous ways the liminal materiality that they inhabit. These entities create bumps and resistance, they fill gaps and frictions, folding subjectivities, sites, and histories together. They give form to the histories layered in materials, giving meaning and appropriating

108 them, both positively (Russian communism) and negatively (Jurassic communism). These communist assemblages create time, by grabbing objects and securing territories. Origamis are fragile and weak; they are not infrastructural nor hegemonic. On the contrary, they emerge through the pleats of other materials, through the peeling foils of rusted monuments. Origamis are parasitic, sprouting out from entities in fragmentation. Through these fragments, they are able to produce new forms, new configurations, creating new spatial depths. They collaborate in the appropriation of a territory by configuring it through national and temporal qualities. In the case of Kharkiv’s contested geography of belonging, these origamis stabilize, through their parasitic presence, the borders of the nation through their temporal stabilization.

Borders are fluid in post-Soviet Ukraine, as Soviet fragments stand to signify a common history and a close sovereignty. Against this fluidity, origamis are folded, materializing borders through peculiarly assembled material objects, thickening historical separations. By reaffirming the border, moreover, these assemblages do not merely give form to a national belonging; rather, they create a temporal border, through which actors’ desired futures are crafted. Monuments to Soviet leaders, for instance, become proxy for a negative Ukrainization, allowing a semiotic alignment with the desired European Union. The temporal creation of territories emerging from the practice of origami materializes borders, as mediated through material elements and their configurations. Origamis give form to the past, thus securing desired futures, by the layering of temporalities.

Moreover, in the case of transitional nations, socio-material collaborations fill the holes left by sudden transformations. Origamis fill these spaces by thickening borders and transforming the temporal crumbles, left behind by fallen empires. Comaroff argued that in postcolonial contexts national redefinition passes through struggles over material territories, playing out geopolitical tactics (2014). He illustrates how cases of sovereignty in Singapore are subject to extreme fluidity, based on the state’s ability to create new territory by buying sand and pouring it on its coastlines. I argue that a similar phenomenon is at stake in Kharkiv, although a different materiality is at stake: the fragmented history of previous national configurations, entangled with questions of ethnicity, belonging, sovereignty, and economic fantasies. Kharkiv’s unbalanced urban environment is negotiated and transformed by various groups in order to contain its possible Soviet-ness and further its National belonging. The latter, moreover, does not emerge as a unique entity, but rather it is dependent on the material characteristics in which it is imbricated. As such, not only the Nation emerges in a plurivocal way, but it does so relationally. Ukrainian-ness is pleated with Soviet-ness in multiple ways, giving shape to their temporal relations in various, context-dependent ways. As these two entities are knitted together, they shape the semiotic configurations of Soviet fragments in

109 Kharkiv, participating in the thickening of borders and in the creation of historical sovereignty, namely the creation of a history legitimizing a Nation’s sovereignty over a territory.

As this historical sovereignty is crafted, the previous national unity is further stretched apart, isolating and further fragmenting the crumbles of Soviet modernity. Multiple communisms see the light, mobilized in the boiling process of temporal national re-configuration, making Kharkiv’s unstable urbanity a site for the creation of belonging and selves.

Acknowledgements

I finish this thesis after a fall. A very hard one, that broke open my knees and wrists. A fall that made me limping and dazed. If I was able to finish this project was thanks to the immense dedication and guidance that Olga gave me. Your care and intelligence were fundamental for both my healing and professional growth. I will be forever grateful for this.

I finish this thesis after a second migration wave, from Brussels to Amsterdam. This migratory passage put me in unexpected social conditions, fragmenting me and punching me. This thesis implied facing homelessness, mental lacerations, economic distress, fierce social exclusion, highlighting once more that higher education is not a free and open space.

I finish this thesis while eroding my own history. I cannot but feel this thesis like a divorce, a concrete barrier put between me and the dearest people in my life. They are unable to read nor comprehend what I spent two years of my life doing, as foreign languages are excavating my tongue. Unknown words multiply in my mouth, solidifying the wall between us.

I finish this thesis as I am slowly recovering, slowly putting out some shy new roots, sewing pulsating wounds. This process ended, let’s hope, now, for flowers.

110 BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABRAHAMSSON, S., BERTONI, F., MOL, A., IBANEZ MARTIN, R., ‘Living with Omega-3: New Materialism and Enduring Concerns’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 1, 4–19, 2015.

AHMED, S., Affective economies, Social Text 79, Vol. 22(2), 2004.

ANDERSON, B., R., Imagines communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, Verso, London, 1991.

ARENDT, H., On Violence, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

AVKSENTEV, A., Выбор Харькова: как регион голосовал в I туре, Khvilya, 5 April 2019.

BAKHTIN, M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

BASILEVSKY, A., Early Ukraine: A Military and Social History to the Mid-19th Century, McFarland, Winnipeg, 2016.

BENJAMIN, W., Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 1969.

BEYERS, C., “Moral Subjectivity and Affective Deficit in the Transitional State: On Claiming Land in South Africa”, in Affective States. Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions, Edited by Laszczkowski, M., Reeves, M., London, Berghan Books, 2017.

PINKER, A., HARVEY, P., “Negotiating Uncertainty: Neo-Liberal Statecraft in Contemporary Peru”, in Affective States. Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions, Edited by Laszczkowski, M., Reeves, M., London, Berghan Books, 2017.

BILEVSKI, D., Romania and Bulgaria join the European Union, The New York Times, 1 January 2007.

BILLIG, M., Banal Nationalism, SAGE, London, 1995.

BOYER, D., Spirit and System: Media, intellectuals, and the dialectic in modern German culture, University of Press, Chicago, 2005.

BOURDIEU, P., On the State: Lectures at the Colleges de France, 1989-1992, Polity, New York, 2015.

BRANDENBERGER, D., “Proletarian Internationalism, Soviet Patriotism, and the Rise of Russocentric Etatism during the Stalinist 1930s”, Left History, vol. 6(2), 80-100. 2000.

BROWN, K., A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

BRUBAKER, R., “Political Dimensions of Migration from and among Soviet Successor States”, In International Migration and Security, Ed. Weiner, M., Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993.

111

BRUBAKER, R., Ethnicity without groups, Cambridge, MA, Harvard university Press, 2004.

BRUBAKER, R, “Nationalizing states revisited: projects and processes of nationalization in post- Soviet states”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 34(11), 1785-1814, 2011.

BURAWOY, M., VERDERY, K., Introduction to Uncertain transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.

BUTLER, J., “Sexual politics, torture, and secular time”, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 59(1), 2008.

CALLON, M., “Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics”, The Sociological Review, vol. 46(S1), 1-57, 2014.

COMAROFF, J., “Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk”, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 39, F/W 2014.

DE LACERDA, A., L., “Photographs in archives: the production and meaning of visual records”, Hist. cienc. Saude-Manguinhos, vol. 19 (1), 2012.

DOUGLAS, M., Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge, 1966.

DRAGNEVA, R. & WOLCZUK, K., “Between Dependence and Integration: Ukraine’s Relations with Russia”, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 68(4), 2016.

FARIAS, I., “Assemblages” (ch 4) pp 41-50 in JAYNE, M., WARD, K., Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives, London, Routledge, 2016.

FARIAS, I., Assemblages without systems: From the problem of fit to the problem of composition, Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 7(2), 186-191, 2017.

FARIAS, I., BLOCK, A., Introducing Urban cosmopolitics: Agencenment, assemblies, atmospheres, Routledge, London, 2016.

FARIAS, I., “The politics of urban assemblages”, City, 15:3-4, 365-374, 2011.

FEHERVARY, K., “The Materiality of the New Family House in Hungary: Post-Socialist Fad or Middle-class Ideal?” City and Society, vol. 23(1), 2011.

FEHERVARY, K., Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

112 FOUCAULT, M., The birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at the Colleges de France 1978-1979, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2008.

GAIDAI, O., Memorialization of Lenin: Legislation and Attitudes (On the Materials of Kyiv, Vinnytsia and Cherkasy Regions), Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, vol. 2, pp. 137-154, 2015.

GRAHAM S., MARVIN, S., Splintering Urbanism, Routledge, London, 2011.

HARAWAY, D., J., Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, vol. 14(3), 575-599, 1988.

HARAWAY, D., J., Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2016.

HEWRYK, T., D., “Planning of the Capital in Kharkiv”, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 16(3/4), 325-359, 1992.

HOBSBAWM, E., J., Nations and Nationalisms since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1990.

HRYSTAK, Y., “National Identities in Post-Soviet Ukraine: The Case of Lviv and Donetsk”, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 22, Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe, pp. 263- 281, 1998.

ISHCHENKO, V., “Far right participation in the Ukrainian Maidan protests: an attempt of systematic estimation”, European Politics and Society, vol. 7(4), 453-472, 2016.

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP, Will the Centre Hold? Europe and Central Asia, Report 247, 21 December 2017.

JONES, D., A., Afterlives and other lives: Semiosis & History in 21st Century Ukraine, PhD dissertation, Michigan (USA), 2017.

KAS’IANOV, G., “The Holodomor and the Building of a Nation, Russian Politics & Law, vol. 48, no. 5, pp. 25-47, 2010.

KATCHANOVSKI, I., The far right, the Euromaidan, and the Maidan massacre in Ukraine, Journal of Labor and Society, vol.23 (1), 2019.

KEANE, W., “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication vol. 23, 409-425, 2003.

113 KULYK, V, Shedding Russianness, recasting Ukrainianness: the post-Euromaidan dynamics of ethnonational identifications in Ukraine, Post-Soviet Affairs, 34:2-3, pp. 119-138, 2018.

KUZIO, T., Identity and Nation-Building in Ukraine: Defining the ‘Other’, Ethnicities, Vol.1, Issue 3, pp. 343-365, 2001.

LASZCZKOWSKI, M., “Scraps, Neighbor, and Committees: Material Things, Place-Making, and the State in an Astana Apartment Block, City and Society, 27(2), pp. 136-159, 2015.

LASZCZKOWSKI, M., REEVES, M., “Affect and the Anthropology of the State”, in Affective States. Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions, Edited by Laszczkowski, M., Reeves, M., London, Berghan Books, 2017.

LATOUR, B., Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

LATOUR, B., 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public', in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 14-41, 2005.

LATOUR, B., A few steps towards the anthropology of the iconoclastic gesture, Science in Context, vol. 10(1), 63-83, 1998.

LAITIN, D.,D., Identity in Formation: The Russian-speaking Populations in the Near Abroad, Cornell University Press, Itaka (NY), 1998

LEFEBVRE, H., Reflections on the Politics of Space, trans. Micheal Enders, Antipode, vol. 8(33), 1976.

LEMON, A., Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post- Socialism, Duke University Press, 2000.

LEMON, A., “Sympathy for the Weary State?: Cold War Chronotopes and Moscow Others.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.51(4), 832-864, 2009.

MAGOSCI, P., R., A , University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1996.

MAZZEI, L., A., “Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis”, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 20(6), 742-746, 2014.

MERRIMAN, P. & JONES, R., “Nations, materialities and affects”, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 41(5), 600-617, 2017.

114

M’CHAREK, A., Race, Fragile differences, relational effects: stories about the materiality of race and sex, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 17(4), 307-322, 2010.

M’CHAREK, A., Race, “Time and Folded Objects: The HeLa Error”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31(6), 29-56, 2014.

MOL, A, Actor-Network Theory: sensitive terms and enduring tensions, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Sonderheft, 50, 253-269, 2010.

MOL, A., The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, Routledge, London, 2008.

MURAWSKI, M., “Actually-existing Success: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Specificity of (Still- )Socialist Urbanism”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 60(4), 907-937, 2018.

NAKASSIS, C., “Brand, Citationality, Performativity.” American Anthropologist, vol. 114, 624- 638, 2012

NAVARO-YASHIN, Y., Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, Princeton, NY, Princeton University Press, 2002.

NAVARO-YASHIN, Y., Make-believe papers, legal forms, and the counterfeit: affective interactions between documents and people in Britain and , Anthropological Theory, vol. 7, 79-96, 2007.

NAVARO-YASHIN, Y., “Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropology”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 15(1), 1-18, 2009

OUSHAKINE, S., “Totality Decomposed: Objectalizing Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles”, The Russian Review, vol. 69, 638-669, 2010.

OUSHAKINE, S., “Remembering in Public: On the affective Management of History”, Ab Imperio, vol.1, 269-302, 2013.

PEIRCE, C., S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Ed. Charles Harshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958.

PITTS, J., Afropean. Notes from Black Europe, Penguin, London, 2020.

PROBST, L., “Founding Myths in Europe and the Role of the Holocaust”, New German Critique, vol. 90(90), 2003.

115

RICHARDSON, T., Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

REN, Мэр Харькова о сносе бюста Жукова: Пора возвращаться с майданов к здравому смыслу, 04 June 2019.

RETHMANN, P., “Post-communist ironies in an East German hotel”, Anthropology Today, vol. 25(1), 21-23, 2009.

REZNIKOVA, O., OSAULENKO, O., PANCHENKO, O., “Indicators of International Trade Orientation of Ukraine in the context of Assessment of the Effectiveness of its Export Relation”, Statistics in Transition, new series, vol. 19 (1), 119-134, 2018.

SAID, E., Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978.

SHAPOVALOVA N., JARABIK, B., “How Eastern Ukraine is adapting and surviving: the case of Kharkiv”, Carnegie Europe, 12 September 2018.

SILVERSTEIN, M., “Axes of evals: Token vs. type interdiscursivity”, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 15. 6-22, 2005.

SILINA, M., conference paper delivered in September 2015, "Memorial Industry: V. I. Lenin Commemoration in Soviet Russia from 1924 until today." International Conference "Sites of Memory of Socialism and Communism in Europe", Bern, Switzerland.

STEPHENS, A., C., “The affective atmospheres of nationalism”, cultural geographies, vol. 32(2), 181-198, 2016.

SWAIN, E., V., Grotesque Figures. Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2004.

WANNER, C., Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine, Penn State Press, 1998.

WANNER, C., The Return of Czernowitz: Urban Affect, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place- making in a European Borderland City, City and Society, vol. 28(2), 198-221, 2016.

WIMMER, A. & GLICK SCHILLER, N., “Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences”, Global Networks, vol. 2(4), 301-334, 2002.

116 WOLCZUK, K., Chapter two. In search of a tradition: discontinuities of statehood in Ukraine’s history In : The Moulding of Ukraine: The Constitutional Politics of State Formation [en ligne], Budapest, Central European University Press, 2001.

YURCHAK, A., Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton University Press, 2005.

YURCHAK, A., “The body of Lenin: the hidden science of communist sovereignty”, Representations, vol. 129(1), 116-157, 2015.

YURCHAK, A., “The canon and the mushroom, Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse”, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol.7(2), 165-198, 2017.

ZHURAVIEV, O., ISHCHENKO, V., “Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine”, Post-Soviet Affairs (Online), 2020.

ZHURZHENKO, T., “Shared Memory Culture? Nationalizing the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in the Ukrainian-Russian borderlands”, in: European Memory: Eastern Perspectives, ed by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak, Oxford: Berghahn, 2015.

ZHURZHENKO, T., “Capital of Despair: Holodomor Memory and Political Conflicts in Kharkiv after the Orange Revolution.” East European Politics and Societies, 25(3), 2011.

ZHURZHENKO; T., “A Divided Nation? Reconsidering the Role of Identity Politics in the Ukraine Crisis”, Die Friedens-Warte, vol. 89(1/2), Die Ukraine Krise, 249-267, 2014.

ZHURZHENKO, T., “The making and unmaking of revolutions. What 1917 means for Ukraine, in light of the Maidan”, Eurozine, pp.1-21, 20 November 2017.

117