The Gordian Knot of Past and Present: Memory of Stalinist Purges in Modern Ukraine HALYNA MOKRUSHYNA Thesis submitted to the University of Ottawa in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the PdD in Sociology School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa © Halyna Mokrushyna, Ottawa, Canada, 2018 ii Table of Contents Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... iv Preface ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Methodology ....................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Research question ............................................................................................................................................................................ 10 Conceptual framework ................................................................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 2: Social memory framework .......................................................................................................................................... 17 Origins of the concept of collective memory – Maurice Halbwachs ............................................................................ 17 Revival of interest in the collective memory by the end of the 1980s ....................................................................... 21 Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire ................................................................................................................................................. 22 The cultural memory of Jan Assmann as a shared knowledge of the past................................................................ 26 Plurality of definitions of collective memory ........................................................................................................................ 28 Eric Hobsbawm’s “invented tradition.” ................................................................................................................................... 30 National memory .............................................................................................................................................................................. 31 What is a collective memory? ...................................................................................................................................................... 32 History and memory ....................................................................................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 3: Through forgetting to remembering: Memory in the post-war Western Europe ................................ 36 Chapter 4: Assessment of the Communist past in Central-Eastern Europe .................................................................. 46 Chapter 5: Russia Faces its Communist Past .............................................................................................................................. 59 Chapter 6: Ukraine’s Soviet Legacy ................................................................................................................................................ 77 Legislating the 1932-33 as a genocide ..................................................................................................................................... 87 Ukraine’s decommunization laws .............................................................................................................................................. 94 Soviet memory in post-Euromaidan Ukraine .................................................................................................................... 101 Chapter 7: Rehabilitating and remembering victims .......................................................................................................... 113 Rehabilitation of victims ............................................................................................................................................................. 113 Remembering victims .................................................................................................................................................................. 125 Chapter 8: Lviv ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 138 Historical context ........................................................................................................................................................................... 138 iii About numbers ............................................................................................................................................................................... 148 The Lviv Memorial Society ........................................................................................................................................................ 163 Chapter 9: Sites of memory of NKVD executions in Lviv ................................................................................................... 168 Zamarstyniv Wall of Memory and Sorrow .......................................................................................................................... 168 Yanivskyi memorial ...................................................................................................................................................................... 177 Museum-Prison on Lontsky ...................................................................................................................................................... 188 Conceptualization of the “occupational past” by Museum-Prison on Lontsky .................................................... 195 History of the Museum-Prison on Lontsky: Controversies of “Memory Games” ................................................ 207 Territory T ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 212 Other monuments to victims of Communist regime in Lviv ........................................................................................ 217 Victims of communist repression – fighters for Ukrainian national independence .......................................... 219 Chapter 10: Donetsk .......................................................................................................................................................................... 228 Donetsk – historical context ...................................................................................................................................................... 228 The Great Terror in Donetsk ..................................................................................................................................................... 235 Donbas in the after-war period ............................................................................................................................................... 244 Secret of Rutchenkovo field revealed .................................................................................................................................... 246 Erecting the monument .............................................................................................................................................................. 262 Commemorative plaque on Artema Street ......................................................................................................................... 268 Chapter 11: National heroes/nameless victims: divisive memory of Stalinist purges in Donetsk and Lviv 273 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 277 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 296 Appendix 1 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 348 iv Abstract The thesis examines the social memory of Soviet period in Ukraine on the national and regional levels drawing on the conceptual framework of social memory as shared, normative and formative knowledge of the past, subject to contentious interpretations of various groups and reflecting the power structure of the society. The analysis of the law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions in Ukraine, the law on the Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainian nation, and the decommunization laws shows that on the official level Ukraine moved from an ambivalent attitude towards the Soviet legacy, in which Stalinism was repudiated, to the condemnation