Ukraine’s transformation has involved challenging its Soviet-era cultural legacy, forming new state cultural institutions, leveraging grassroots activism, and engaging with Western organizations such as the British Council and Goethe-Institut.
The slow demise of the Soviet model of cultural policies (1990s and 2000s)
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of an independent Ukraine in 1991, the country moved to a market economy system, while newly formed political-industrial groups fought for control over economic assets. In this process, culture became sidelined and expenditure on culture plummeted, resulting in the gradual deterioration of the country’s cultural ‘infrastructure’ and a decline in popular consumption of culture. The extensive system of libraries, theatres, ‘houses of culture’ and the like, inherited from the Soviet era, dwindled in size. Theatre attendance declined from 17.6 million visits a year in 1990 to 6.9 million in 2013. The number of public libraries decreased from 25,600 in 1990 to 19,100 in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of film-screening venues plunged from 27,200 to 1,600 over the same period, while the number of cinema viewers fell most dramatically – from 552 million to a mere 14 million. Ukraine’s state spending on culture in that period lagged behind that of neighbouring Poland and Russia. Cultural goods became inaccessible for millions of Ukrainians, especially in small towns and villages.
Despite the financial constraints, the state system of cultural management still resembled the paternalistic Soviet model, with its support for networks of state cultural institutions and so-called ‘national artistic unions’ for most sectors. Yet with the collapse of the Soviet system, the state’s political and ideological grip over culture weakened. A number of independent cultural initiatives sprang up – the state did not interfere with these, though nor did it provide financial support. At the same time, the emerging independent cultural sector resented the lavish support which artistic unions and key state cultural institutions continued to enjoy, benefiting as they did from cosy relationships with the culture ministry (known, since 2020, as the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy).
From being an instrument of communist ideology, culture was now becoming a tool for nation-building as Ukraine emerged from Russia’s shadow and tried to forge its own sense of identity. Its state bodies, responsible for ‘humanitarian’ policies, embarked on a project to construct a new narrative of Ukrainian history and identity. However, this was widely seen as superficial and decorative: for example, it involved, among other things, the replacement of Soviet and Russian cultural figures with Ukrainian ones in the school curriculum. There was little understanding that the task at hand was much more complex: to build an integrated cultural space with well-developed shared symbolic systems communicated through shared platforms.
A number of factors hampered efforts to craft a national cultural identity, including: significant diversity between the regions, complicated by language identities and diverging regional histories; the limited appeal of a Ukrainian-centric narrative (further undermined by the state’s unattractive packaging of it); an enduring loyalty to the Soviet identity among a significant share of the population (especially in the east and south of the country); the significant presence of Russian cultural products (films, books, entertainment, historical narratives, all advancing a distinct system of cultural codes) in the Ukrainian cultural space; and insufficient state funding and a lack of affirmative action in support of high-quality Ukrainian cultural output.
The development of the cultural sphere in Ukraine between 1991 and the Euromaidan movement in 2013 could be characterized as a process of transition. The state was largely seen as obsolete, corrupt, out of touch and inefficient. On a positive note, it should be recorded that the state did not interfere with the development of an independent cultural scene or commercially viable businesses in the cultural and creative industries, nor did it exercise systemic censorship.
Ukraine’s independent community of artists and cultural managers grew in strength. Its members saw themselves as liberal and European, articulated their discontent with the authoritarian tendencies and censorship of the Viktor Yanukovych presidency (2010–14), and drove the development of Ukraine’s arts scene so that culture intersected with social issues and politics. Yet the artistic and cultural community remained fragmented, starved of funding and craving a bigger role for itself, as demonstrated by years of stalemate over Ukraine’s representation at the Venice Biennale of contemporary art. As one commentator put it: ‘For years the two cultures – official and informal – successfully ignored each other. If there was any cultural policy before Maidan, that was it.’
Financial constraints were exacerbated by the limited availability of Western donor funding during this period. The gap was partially filled by Ukraine’s powerful tycoons: one of them, Victor Pinchuk, established the Pinchuk Art Centre, which consistently promoted the development of contemporary art in Ukraine, supported curators and critics, and funded artistic residencies and scholarships abroad. In addition, a long-term programme to support the development of museums and contemporary artists was funded by another tycoon, Renat Akhmetov.
Enablers of revolutionary change
The Euromaidan revolution of 2013–14, also known as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, created the momentum for change in cultural politics. It bolstered the influence of an independent network of cultural activists and artists who could no longer be ignored by the state. A lobby group promoting reforms in cultural policies took shape in Ukraine’s parliament; the views of this group were aligned with those of civil society.
Ukraine started to feature more prominently in the foreign policy of its European partners, which markedly increased their funding and unrolled numerous new cultural and educational programmes, administered by Western cultural relations organizations such as the British Council, the Goethe-Institut, the Polish Institute and others.
These three groups of actors – grassroots activists, the parliamentary lobby group and external cultural relations organizations – proved to be key in pushing reforms of Ukrainian state cultural policy.
Grassroots cultural activism
The political revolution served as a massive catalyst for artistic expression, and was also a symbolic milestone for civil society organizations advocating their right ‘to be the citizen, to lay claim to power and to initiate change’. A number of civic cultural initiatives sprang up: experimental artistic and curatorial projects, crowdfunded film festivals and experimental theatre working with war trauma through art, platforms to revitalize the post-industrial landscapes of Ukraine’s east, groups working to preserve endangered national heritage, and various platforms for discussions on identity.
This broad movement shared similar features with a number of other civil society initiatives in Ukraine at that time. It benefited from active citizenship, a horizontal structure, broad dialogue and consensus-building, and a resourceful approach to funding (for example, initiatives often utilized grant funding from Western donors as well as domestic crowdfunding). The movement inaugurated a new understanding of culture as a tool for development and social contribution, as cultural techniques were also used for non-cultural ends to contribute to social cohesion, resilience, community capacity-building, the inclusion of disadvantaged groups and urban regeneration.
The political revolution served as a massive catalyst for artistic expression, and was also a symbolic milestone for civil society organizations advocating their right ‘to be the citizen, to lay claim to power and to initiate change’.
While many emerging cultural initiatives steered clear of the government, others attempted to galvanize the authorities into action. A group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) even resorted to staging a provocative sit-in on the premises of the culture ministry in 2014. The action evolved into a two-month, open discussion between cultural activists, practitioners and ministry officials – including the culture minister himself – on reform of Ukraine’s cultural sector. In 2014, an alliance of NGOs also embarked on the design of a strategic document (‘Culture 2025’) for the sustainable development of culture in Ukraine. They collaborated with the ministry to formulate the strategy’s key pillars. Cooperation was possible thanks to the appointment of experienced cultural managers in leading positions at the ministry, such as Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta, appointed deputy culture minister in 2014. Eight regional strategic sessions followed, spanning nine cultural sectors and involving some 700 activists nationwide.
The document argued for a new understanding of the role of culture: that it should be treated not as a ‘luxury good’ but as a tool for setting the societal agenda and driving societal change, as a source of creativity and innovation, and as an integral part of the economy. A priority was the principle of open access: ensuring that all stakeholders were engaged in mapping the course for reform, and that all had equal access to policymaking and state resources. ‘Culture 2025’ also advocated a move away from the short-termism that plagued policymaking. It emphasized the need for long-term planning, a functional restructuring of the culture ministry, a competitive appointments procedure for leading public sector cultural jobs, and the establishment of arm’s-length bodies tasked with rolling out a programme of state grant funding for arts and creative industries. A number of these principles became state policy and were enshrined in law.
In this way, cultural activism and a network of civil society organizations created parallel structures to fill the gap created by an incompetent state. Active engagement by these groups defined what would become the cultural policy model for Ukraine for years to come. It was a model that was participatory and consensual rather than decided internally by civil servants; culturally diverse rather than monocultural; responsive to the needs of different groups rather than one; and informed by a perception of culture as a means of developing and bettering society rather than as a luxury.
Political backing for cultural policy reform
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine post-2013 and its ‘weaponization’ of cultural identity strengthened the political case for a revamp of cultural policy, resulting in the formation of a lobby in the Ukrainian parliament pushing a pro-reform agenda. Over time, members of this lobby achieved the promulgation of a number of key legislative initiatives, including overseeing the creation of two brand new institutions which received the status of arm’s-length agencies. One was the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation (UCF), a vehicle providing state grant funding for arts and culture subordinated to the culture ministry; the other was the Ukrainian Institute, designed to promote ‘a positive image of Ukraine internationally’, which was subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The 2017 legislation that established the UCF, the Law on Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, was in part the product of lobbying by Maryna Poroshenko, Ukraine’s then first lady. She went on to chair the UCF’s board, although her appointment provoked mixed reactions. The Ukrainian Institute, meanwhile, came into existence as a result of efforts by the pro-reform part of Ukraine’s diplomatic core; these efforts were led first by Andriy Deshchytsya (acting foreign minister, 2014) and then by his successor, Pavlo Klimkin (foreign minister, 2014–19), and drew on advice from foreign cultural relations organizations and similar arm’s-length bodies.
In 2016, Ukraine’s parliament also approved a new law on the competitive selection of managers for state cultural institutions. The law’s introduction was a response to the demands of civil society to end decades of feudal-style management practices. It led to the appointment of a new generation of cultural managers at some institutions; however, in some cases the move was resisted or sabotaged by the old cohort of managers.
The newly founded institutions initiated further legislative improvements: for example, in 2020 the UCF, the culture ministry and a parliamentary committee jointly prepared changes to Ukraine’s tax and budget codes to facilitate the use of state grant funding for culture. At the time of writing, however, the changes were yet to be voted on by parliament.
External cultural relations organizations
Cultural policy reform in Ukraine received powerful backing from a number of Western donors and partners. The EU proved to be the main driver of this process, coordinating its efforts with national cultural institutes such as – most prominently – the UK’s British Council and Germany’s Goethe-Institut. The EU’s move towards an extensive programme of financial support for culture in non-member states started in 2007 with the European Agenda for Culture. This was followed by the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, which included provisions for cultural cooperation between EU member states and third countries.
In 2011, the Eastern Partnership Culture Programme was launched to promote ‘culture policy reform’ and capacity-building among ‘cultural operators’ in the six Eastern Partnership countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The programme was designed to run to 2015 and was worth €12 million. It contained a grant component – as this was the first time that EU grants for culture had been made available in Ukraine, the programme generated tremendous interest. These developments were followed in 2015 by the establishment of the EU-Eastern Partnership Culture and Creativity Programme, which had a budget of €4.3 million and served as a networking and debating platform for cultural operators in Eastern Partnership countries. The programme included further investment in capacity-building and initiatives to encourage understanding of the concept of a ‘creative economy’.
In 2014, Ukraine and the EU ratified the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement, a milestone document for bilateral cooperation. One of the agreement’s chapters was dedicated to culture, stating: ‘The Parties shall undertake to promote cultural cooperation in order to enhance mutual understanding and foster cultural exchanges, as well as to boost the mobility of art and artists from the EU and Ukraine.’ The document paved the way for an ambitious programme of cultural mobility, ‘Culture Bridges’, which had a budget of €1.3 million for Ukraine and operated from 2017 to 2020. Implemented by the British Council, the programme offered opportunities for people working in the Ukrainian cultural sector to engage with their counterparts in the EU. Demand to participate was enormous. In parallel, in 2016 Ukraine joined Creative Europe, the European Commission’s framework programme for support to the cultural and audiovisual sectors.
The European Commission’s commitment to people-to-people contacts and support for civil society culminated in 2019 in the most ambitious undertaking to date: the establishment of the House of Europe. This €12.2 million project involves a consortium led and funded by the EU, with the Goethe-Institut as an implementing partner. Covering ‘creative industries, education, health, social entrepreneurship, media, and youth’, the House of Europe ‘encompasses 20+ separate programme lines enabling [participants] to go for conferences, professional events, internships, and networking in the EU, or to enrol in study tours, residencies, trainings, and other forms of support’. The programme is scheduled to run until 2023.
The impact of EU support has been substantial. Not only have Ukrainian cultural professionals gained experience in developing partnerships with their EU counterparts, they have learnt how to obtain grant funding and have improved project management skills.
The impact of all this EU support has been substantial. Not only have Ukrainian cultural professionals gained experience in developing partnerships with their EU counterparts, they have learnt how to obtain grant funding and have improved project management skills. A more systemic approach towards cultural management has developed among civil society actors. Above all, external support has boosted domestic capacity, as evidenced in the successful roll-out in 2018 of the UCF’s own grant-funding programme, which emulated many features of its EU-funded counterparts.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, the House of Europe rolled out an emergency package for cultural organizations and individual professionals, worth €0.8 million, aimed at supporting the invention of new business models, the creation of digital projects, and the purchase of office equipment to help creative enterprises whose business activities have come under pressure as a result of COVID-19. Local experts estimate that the package could help as many as 2,000 cultural activists.
Both the British Council and the Goethe-Institut have played significant roles in implementing EU-formulated policy towards Ukraine in the cultural sector. Both organizations fund extensive programmes in support of civil society, education, culture and youth, funded by their respective national governments. These programmes were scaled up after the Euromaidan movement. The British Council’s highest-impact programme, Active Citizens, promotes civic activism among young people across Ukraine’s regions and has helped to create fertile ground for future cultural activism platforms.
The Goethe-Institut’s flagship programme in Ukraine, the Cultural Leadership Academy, is designed to plug the gap in professional competencies among those working in the cultural sector in Ukraine’s regions. Operating in partnership with what is now the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy (MCIP), the Goethe-Institut has sought to strike a balance between accommodating the ministry’s vision for cultural leadership in Ukraine and introducing new ideas and thinking that leverage the competencies of the German cultural experts who act as facilitators. This has involved developing and adjusting content for the unreformed institutional environment of provincial Ukraine.
Seventy culture professionals from Ukraine’s regions graduated from the academy in 2018–19, and 200 more are expected to graduate in 2021. A separate strand of the programme has focused on the training of trainers – again, the programme has been adjusted to the local environment. In many cases the academy’s graduates, many of whom come from small provincial towns, have subsequently embarked on their own projects and have secured grants from the UCF to produce cultural content – a testament to the programme’s multiplier effect. However, the supply of support available through the programme remains dwarfed by demand for training in culture and the arts.
A collaborative component has become central to the cultural programmes run by the British Council and Goethe-Institut: in both cases, projects have showcased British or German artists but have also promoted joint productions with domestic artists/producers or have provided training for arts professionals in Ukraine. In the British Council’s case, this is a direct consequence of the UK’s international aid policy, which has a mandatory development component. As an example, the British Council’s ‘Taking the Stage’ programme resulted in 13 new productions in Ukrainian theatres, with each production delivered in creative collaboration with British theatre directors.
While these organizations have been credited with contributing to capacity-building and networking opportunities in Ukraine, their work has sometimes been criticized for repeatedly engaging the same people. Research has suggested that both organizations have focused too much on catering to well-educated elites in big cities. The Cultural Leadership Academy addressed this by conducting training in many Ukrainian cities, while the House of Europe announced that it would travel around the country using mobile pavilions to reach audiences in regional Ukraine.
A number of other countries have provided funding and expertise for culture and cultural policy in Ukraine. The most systematic contribution has come from Poland: its Polish Institute set up a Malevich Award for Ukrainian artists, has provided training to the culture ministry, and has engaged with signature cultural events in Ukraine. Other countries have focused on supporting specific events, such as documentary film festivals, or have promoted reforms in a particular area of cultural policy, such as libraries. Other major cultural relations players, such as the Institut français, continue to focus on showcasing their own national arts and culture, although their work in Ukraine also includes some collaborative projects with, and training of, local cultural producers.
Overall, the cultural development templates promoted by Western cultural relations organizations have anchored Ukraine’s cultural practitioners and activities to European practices. Implicit in this are a competition-based approach to funding, reliance on multi-stakeholder engagement, collaboration and consensus-seeking, and support for active citizenship. These principles became firmly embedded in the public discourse in Ukraine, and eventually institutionalized: the UCF strategy developed in 2018 stated that the ‘UCF is an instrument created by the state for civil society with a view to shaping the common European future through culture’, with ‘equal access to cultural resources’ among its priorities.
Building new state ‘infrastructure’ for culture: key lessons
New state institutions for culture: strengthening agency and sustainability
The convergence of the above-mentioned factors – grassroots activism, political backing for reform, and support from Western cultural relations organizations – created a unique window of opportunity for the development of a qualitatively new state cultural architecture in Ukraine. Not only did three brand new institutions appear on the scene, in the form of the UCF, the Ukrainian Institute and the Ukrainian Book Institute, but pre-existing institutions also saw reforms. The Ukrainian State Film Agency, which had been created prior to the Revolution of Dignity, underwent major restructuring. Several state museums and art platforms, such as the Dovzhenko Centre, the Mystetskyi Arsenal, the National Art Museum of Ukraine and others, were transformed into hubs for curatorial projects and debate.
As the UCF, the Ukrainian Institute, the Ukrainian Book Institute and the Ukrainian State Film Agency became the providers of state funds for the cultural sector, they aspired to new principles of management and governance, which entailed:
- Seeking consensus between civil society and the state;
- Establishing clear-cut and transparent rules for fund disbursement;
- Legitimizing and raising the status of sectoral expertise;
- Introducing long-term planning, strategy development and reporting;
- Promoting stakeholder engagement;
- Striving to maintain arm’s-length distance from their parent ministries;
- Separating their supervisory from their executive functions; and
- Understanding the importance of communications.
The adoption of these practices was facilitated in some cases by the fact that senior managers at the new institutions came from backgrounds deeply rooted in the experience of Western donors operating in Ukraine. In the case of the UCF, this link was made explicit: Yulia Fediv, the director of Ukraine’s National Bureau of Creative Europe (the EU’s dedicated programme for culture and the creative sectors), was selected to lead the new institution. Her appointment followed a joint decision by the European Commission, the EU Representative Office in Ukraine and Ukraine’s culture ministry to fold the bureau into the UCF in order ‘to mutually reinforce the state institution and the European programme’. Similarly, Volodymyr Sheiko was appointed executive director of the Ukrainian Institute after previously leading the arts department at the British Council Ukraine.
The appointment of supervisory boards and senior management at the new institutions attracted considerable public scrutiny. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs pursued a lengthy process in nominating and confirming the supervisory board of the Ukrainian Institute, its arm’s-length agency, with the board subsequently selecting a new director in an open competition. A similar procedure was followed at other arm’s-length agencies.
Managers at the new institutions demonstrated courage and political skill in navigating the minefield of political patronage, parent ministry relationships, bureaucratic and financial obstacles, and demands for transparency from civil society. The UCF was a case in point: it rolled out its operational capacity, achieving maximum impact, transparency and expert engagement, in the space of just two years. The new institution adroitly walked a fine line between adhering to its formal governance requirements and exploiting high-level political patronage to chart its own course. As a result, the UCF was able to assert its independence in setting programme priorities, distributing internal resources and establishing proper evaluation procedures, among other things.
The UCF’s position was bolstered by the firm legislative basis on which it operated. Whereas other institutions had been established by government decree, rendering them vulnerable to abolition on the whim of any subsequent government, the UCF’s status was enshrined in a dedicated piece of legislation. Moreover, as part of this legislation, the UCF for the first time secured a legal definition of state grant funding.
Independence and modern, accountable governance also brought challenges, however. The high degree of transparency under which the new institutions operated exposed them to intense public, expert and media scrutiny. In some instances, the UCF attracted criticism for awarding grants to projects perceived as offering insufficient impact; in addition, the quality of its newly formed expert councils was questioned in some quarters. Elaborate application procedures for grant funding were seen as deterring project proposals from the regions, which lacked the cultural management competencies of the big urban centres. Some experts expressed doubts about the cultural sector’s capacity to absorb the amount of grant funding available. In 2019, the UCF reported that 20 per cent of its grant funding had been returned to the state budget unused.
A further problem was that various government ministries, doubtless feeling pressure to launch new institutions and show rapid progress under the new system, were often insufficiently compliant with important legal and financial requirements in respect of budgets, tax, employment and other aspects of their operations – the fact that many such regulations were outdated, and largely incompatible with cultural innovation and rapid institutional growth, added to the impediments facing the new agencies. One illustration of the challenges can be seen in the case of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which initially tasked the Ukrainian Institute with opening a network of branches abroad. This was despite the fact that Ukrainian legislation contained numerous constraints on activities outside Ukraine, including the hiring of staff, the disbursement of grant funding and even the issue of invoices – the latter of which would have required amendments to Ukraine’s infamously rigid tax code.
Independence and modern, accountable governance also brought challenges, however. The high degree of transparency under which the new institutions operated exposed them to intense public, expert and media scrutiny.
The Ukrainian Book Institute, launched by the culture ministry in 2016, faced similar challenges as well as its own unique difficulties. Among other challenges, it had to refurbish its premises and renegotiate its legal status and renumeration packages while launching a programme of cultural activities.
Moreover, as new institutions started rolling out their activities, ministries were increasingly unwilling to uphold the principle of arm’s-length status. For example, although the culture ministry delegated some state programmes for book publishing and purchasing to the Ukrainian Book Institute, it fought to maintain control over how these programmes should be administered and also favoured close relationships with chosen publishers. Despite this, the Ukrainian Book Institute successfully resisted these pressures. It quickly established an open and transparent tender process for commercial publishers wishing to apply for state procurement contracts, paving the way for the purchase of their books for municipal libraries across the country.
Cultural diplomacy remained a difficult area. Ukraine’s diplomatic corps has yet to universally recognize the authority of the Ukrainian Institute in driving foreign cultural outreach or projects involving cooperation with foreign partners. The institute’s flagship project in 2019, ‘Bilateral Cultural Year Ukraine-Austria 2019’, lacked a clear modus operandi for interaction between the embassy and the Ukrainian Institute. It also highlighted the need for better internal communication within ministries in matters concerning their newly formed arm’s-length bodies.
As mentioned, older institutions, such as the Ukrainian State Film Agency, which had existed before the Revolution of Dignity, also went through major restructuring following the change of political leadership in 2014. In the Ukrainian State Film Agency’s case, this resulted in greater transparency in the process for managing and assessing film funding pitches, the engagement of independent sectoral expertise, and a consensual approach to working with sectoral business associations. In 2019, the agency added another layer to its governance by setting up the Council for Cinematography, which was granted powers to decide the disbursement of state funding to film projects, allocate funding between different types of film production, and appoint expert councils.
However, a further change of political leadership in 2019, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy replaced Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine’s president, demonstrated that the arm’s-length status of cultural institutions remains fragile, and susceptible to political pressure. A new head was appointed to the Ukrainian State Film Agency in January 2020, but critics contend that the recruitment process was marred by procedural violations and interference from vested interests. The agency imposed a temporary freeze on funding disbursements, wreaking havoc on film production companies and pushing leading museums, such as the Dovzhenko Centre, into bankruptcy. The most recent round of funding allocation for film projects has been marred by accusations of opacity and bureaucratic interference.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also demonstrated the inconsistency of MCIP policies. Initially, the ministry announced dramatic cuts – of up to 75 per cent – in the budgets of leading cultural institutions, although the austerity measures were reduced following an outcry by cultural managers. Subsequently, the ministry provided generous additional funding of UAH 590 million (£16.0 million) to the UCF for ‘institutional support’ to parts of the creative sector affected by COVID-19. However, the terms and conditions attached to the disbursement of these funds proved to be a poor fit for the needs of the sector, resulting in insufficient demand for these funds.
