Culture has been a key part of the response to Russian aggression. However, culture sector reform remains a work in progress, with Ukraine’s uneven distribution of cultural resources presenting a particular challenge.
Unprecedented levels of cultural production and cultural activism over recent years have contributed to a wider societal transformation in Ukraine in several areas. Notably, the country’s shift towards a civic identity based on shared values has benefited from the efforts of its creative class to promote a pluralistic and inclusive cultural space. This cultural pluralism continues to play an important role in helping Ukraine to withstand the ongoing soft power offensive by Russia, which is actively promoting divisive historical and cultural narratives about Ukraine.
As millions of Ukrainians remain exposed to the consequences of the war in Donbas, arts and culture have proven to be important tools for restoring trust between different segments of society, healing traumas and rebuilding communities. This dynamic is consistent with the findings of research on other conflict-hit countries – a recent British Council report that draws on case studies from Syria and Rwanda argues that arts and culture can have a positive impact in fragile states.
Cultural activism has also had an important, and often overlooked, impact on the state’s nationwide project of political decentralization. The spread of cultural activity to peripheral regions of Ukraine, and into war-affected areas and beyond, has accompanied (and facilitated) the granting of more powers to devolved communities, thereby strengthening the social fabric and social cohesion and helping to shape the local development agenda.
Culture is becoming an increasingly important factor in economic development. The country’s growing creative industries sector not only creates employment and contributes to GDP, but often drives innovation and blends profitmaking with social entrepreneurship and education initiatives. This further strengthens social capital and resilience.
Consolidating the identity shift
The events of 2013–14 served as a powerful trigger for a gradual shift in Ukraine’s national identity away from the dualistic cultural status quo that had hitherto prevailed. An extensive scholarly literature describes the split identity, or ‘two Ukraines’ within one country, that was a feature of society before the 2014 revolution (and that, to a reduced extent, exists today). Although its nuances are often missed in media commentary, this identity clash can broadly be characterized as a contest between European and Eurasian modes of development, and in effect between anti-Soviet and neo-Soviet sensibilities. It reflected the juxtaposition of a distinctive Ukrainian historical and cultural narrative with an ‘eastern Slavic’ identity associated with the Russia-centric idea of ‘brotherhood’. In Ukraine’s post-Soviet history, this dichotomy came to be reduced to a West vs East cliché, instrumentalized for political ends.
There has been a growing societal consensus around making liberal democratic values and horizontal networks rather than vertical hierarchy the building blocks of a new political nation.
After the Euromaidan revolution, a new trend began to emerge. The discourse increasingly emphasized a values-based identity, shared by diverse groups across the country regardless of their ethnic origin, linguistic preferences or cultural loyalty. There has since been a growing societal consensus around making liberal democratic values – respect for the rule of law, individual rights, etc. – and horizontal networks rather than vertical hierarchy the building blocks of a new political nation. Inevitably, this identity choice has slowly strengthened Ukraine’s Western orientation and signified a drift away from its eastern Slavic identity.
Russian aggression has been one motivating factor, prompting a growing number of Ukrainians to support the national cultural identity project. By 2017, some 77 per cent of Ukrainians from the predominantly Russian-speaking east and south identified themselves as Ukrainian by nationality, compared with 66 per cent in 2012. The share of the population expressing loyalty to the Ukrainian language in these regions increased from 23 per cent to 39 per cent in the same period. Intellectuals from these regions embarked on a radical rethink of their personal identities and the identities of the regions they represented.
These two features – Russia’s external aggression and Ukraine’s domestic identity shift – sparked a moment of intense creativity, manifest in a flowering of the arts and public debate, including the prolific production of new literary works, theatre productions, films, curatorial visual work, music and large-scale cultural events. In turn, these developments stimulated an appetite for cultural consumption previously unseen in Ukraine.
Cultural output and policy over this period also focused on reappropriating Ukraine’s forgotten cultural heritage, such as its rich interwar avant garde theatre and film. The trend was informed by a post-colonial drive to shake off the discourse of Russian cultural superiority, and to recast this heritage as part of the European cultural movement. In parallel, efforts were made to deepen appreciation of the role of other cultures and languages in the mosaic of Ukraine’s cultural identity, such as Russophone literature, and Ukrainian Jewish and Crimean Tatar histories and cultures.
This outpouring of creativity would not have been possible without the systemic efforts of state institutions. All of the new cultural institutions – as well as some other institutions with a longer history, such as the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory – contributed to it, but the toolkits they utilized for the identity-building project varied significantly.
The new state cultural institutions that had emerged after the Euromaidan movement adopted an inclusive approach towards articulating the new civic identity. The UCF – as mentioned, the main grant-giving body for arts and culture – declared its support for an ‘innovative cultural product’, ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘intercultural dialogue’, rather than taking a prescriptive line favouring any particular ideology or ethnic group. UCF-funded projects worked towards consolidating Ukraine’s civic national identity by focusing on local histories, developing the networks and capacity of cultural workers across all regions, supporting projects of national significance, and boosting a sense of a shared cultural space, such as through the Biennale of Young Art, the Lviv Book Forum, the Gogolfest theatre festival and others.
The Ukrainian Institute, responsible for the promotion of Ukrainian culture abroad, stressed in its strategy that it understood Ukraine through ‘inclusivity’, and ‘as a multinational community and a multitude of identities’. It indicated that, similar to its counterparts in Europe and North America, it is moving away from a traditional understanding of ‘soft power’ and towards international cultural relations, predicated on cooperation and co-production.
These approaches were deeply anchored in European cultural management principles: open access, inclusivity, transparency and partnership-building. The institutions further strengthened civic identity-building by promoting this approach more widely among the country’s creative classes, reinforced with
a pro-European orientation.
The discourse of inclusive identity in Ukraine broadened to include disadvantaged groups: women, the LGBTIQ+ community and people with disabilities. In 2019, the UCF launched its own dedicated programme for inclusion through arts, and adapted digital museum content for disabled people. Western donors played a significant role in promoting public awareness of LGBTIQ+ issues, although these topics remained outside the scope of activities supported by the state cultural institutions.
In contrast to these approaches was a set of more prescriptive and rigidly enforced post-Euromaidan measures aimed at ‘securitizing’ Ukraine’s identity in response to Russia’s attacks on it. This was a calculated response to Russia’s systematic and long-standing promotion of themes and narratives denying Ukraine’s cultural distinctiveness. Russia had used proxy groups in Ukraine, including the media, the Russian Orthodox Church and public diplomacy organizations such as Rossotrudnichestvo, to disseminate these narratives. The prevalence of Russian cultural products in Ukraine was also an important factor: films and books promoting Russian worldviews, and Moscow-aligned narratives on everything from the Second World War to Russia’s imperial history, had all enjoyed unfettered access to the Ukrainian market under President Yanukovych. These tools and approaches had all aimed to support an eastern Slavic identity of brotherhood, wrapped into the concept of ‘Russkiy Mir’ (‘Russian world’), and based on shared linguistic, cultural and religious loyalty and history.
Following Russia’s military interventions against Ukraine in 2014, the Ukrainian authorities responded by banning a range of Russian TV channels, TV series, books and more. To counter the deluge of Russian material, Ukraine made concerted efforts to boost the production of its own patriotic films, with dedicated funding approved and disbursed by the Ukrainian State Film Agency. To be eligible for funding, films had to ‘develop national consciousness’ and ‘patriotic sentiments’. A policy of radio production quotas – with a mandatory proportion of programming and songs in Ukrainian – limited Russia-produced content and encouraged the production of music in the Ukrainian language.
Ukrainian artists and intellectuals challenged Russia-backed historical narratives about Ukrainian identity as a subset of the ‘Russian world’.
This cultural counteroffensive against Russia was expanded in 2015, when the state body responsible for formulating policies of remembrance, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, drafted and moved to implement a set of ‘de-communization laws’ and monitor adherence to them. The laws, which were approved by the Rada, were designed to prompt a nationwide re-evaluation of crimes committed by totalitarian regimes and expose the ‘inhuman and anti-democratic nature’ of such regimes – it was noted that the process acquired ‘a new urgency as neo-Soviet Russian policies of aggression infringed on the very existence of independent Ukraine’. The new laws mandated the opening of all archives, the removal of Soviet-related place names, symbols and monuments from public spaces, and the promotion of a new discourse of national history with an emphasis on heroism and the struggle for liberation.
Although the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory was not a new institution, having been set up in 2006 by the then president, Viktor Yushchenko, its role was strengthened after the Euromaidan revolution when it was granted executive powers to enforce the official line on national memory. Unlike other state institutions in the field of identity and culture, the institute had a single-tier executive structure (with no supervisory board) and reported directly to the Cabinet of Ministers.
De-communization policies received a very mixed reception. Many viewed these as polarizing the public discourse and limiting freedom of expression. But the policies also enabled wide access to archival materials and were an integral part of a wider societal effort to reappraise Ukraine’s history during the Soviet period. Ukrainian artists and intellectuals challenged Russia-backed historical narratives about Ukrainian identity as a subset of the ‘Russian world’. They also increasingly engaged in more nuanced treatment of their country’s own history, willing to explore some of its darker chapters, such as collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War or Ukraine’s participation in the Soviet project.
A contrasting consequence of the new laws was the inspiration of a wave of grassroots cultural initiatives to preserve and study Soviet monumental art. Such art had came under attack as a result of the introduction of a ban on public displays of totalitarianism, including Soviet symbols. The Ukrainian Institute further highlighted the importance of this layer of Ukraine’s cultural history during the ‘Bilateral Cultural Year Ukraine-Austria 2019’: images of Ukraine’s Soviet mosaics were woven into an animated show, projected on to the walls of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier.
While the securitization of identity was an explicit feature of Petro Poroshenko’s presidency (2014–19), his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has adopted a less demonstrative approach to the identity debate: his public pronouncements have consisted of generalized appeals for national unity, eschewing specific allegiance to language or national heroes. Critics have argued that, by failing to articulate which values this unity should be based upon, Zelenskyy’s rhetoric is slowing the consolidation of Ukraine’s civic identity. Moreover, his focus on popular entertainment, which has become a trademark of public holiday celebrations under his presidency, is very much at odds with the understanding of culture as a form of activism, and as a transformative and democratizing force, that became widespread in post-Euromaidan Ukraine.
Culture in conflict
Russia skilfully manipulated identity and history narratives in fomenting unrest in Donbas in 2014. The subsequent war split the Donetsk and Luhansk regions into areas controlled, respectively, by Russia-backed militants and the Ukrainian government. On the Ukrainian side, a broad move began to shake off the propaganda tropes deployed in regard to the region, and to reappraise the region’s identity and history. Cultural activism took centre stage in this process.
A number of previously little-known intellectuals from Donbas, who had had to flee the region because of the conflict, led this nationwide discussion. The themes of war trauma, displacement, and local and family histories became prominent in many artworks. These themes fed into synthetic projects, combining performances, citizen engagement and initiatives to overcome traumas. One such project, the Theatre of Displaced People, involves a touring theatre production company in which the actors themselves are internally displaced persons reflecting on their traumatic war experiences (such as being in captivity or surviving shelling). The group is run by an international team of theatre directors and assisted by a psychologist, who helps the actors work with their trauma and gain empowerment through production and community-building.
Numerous platforms for discussing and documenting local histories and building them into the national narrative also emerged. Bleak industrial cities in the parts of war-torn Donetsk and Luhansk that had stayed under Ukrainian government control – notably Severodonetsk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol, Slavyansk, Pokrovsk and Dobropillya – suddenly found themselves the focus of a surge of cultural activism as local volunteers, often refugees from the war zone, set up platforms combining arts with civic activism (the latter focusing on regeneration, sustainable development, overcoming trauma and fighting propaganda).
Cultural exchanges between Ukraine’s regions have become another feature of the cultural landscape in recent years. Volunteers have driven this movement, showcasing western Ukrainian culture in the east of Ukraine and vice-versa; in the latter case, they have helped artists from Donbas to be received in Lviv. These region-to-region contacts have helped to promote a sense of shared civic and cultural identity, as activists have worked to narrow geographical cleavages in social and political attitudes.
The effects of this process have been underlined by events in the major urban centres of Lviv in the west and Kharkiv in the east. In both cities, there has been a reconstruction of complex local identities, as new cultural spaces have opened up and as cultural legacies have been re-evaluated. In the case of Kharkiv, with its proximity to the Russian border and the war zone in Donbas, these discussions have had additional resonance in strengthening the pro-Ukrainian identity of the city and its resilience to Russian propaganda.
In Odesa, a city in the south, this battle of narratives manifested itself in a stand-off between the pro-Russian lobby in the local government and the new, pro-Ukrainian director of a major museum. Olexander Roitburd, the director of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, transformed the museum into a prominent space for exhibitions and debate, weaving its offering into the national cultural context and creating a viable alternative to Russia’s traditionally strong cultural grip over the city. However, Roitburd’s clash with the local authorities ultimately led to his being ousted as museum director.
