The Birth of a New Memorial Culture in Ukraine after the Euromaidan

Required for HUSI scholarship recipients. Open to the public.
Serhy Yekelchyk, Professor of History and Slavic Studies, University of Victoria

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Abstract

Any visitor to Kyiv will notice the unusual way in which the fallen heroes of the Euromaidan Revolution are being commemorated. The so-called Heavenly Hundred are remembered as individuals, with their small portraits and names arranged in a low-key, almost informal way serving as the equivalent of a major monument. The story is really more complex, because the winning project of the commemorative space still cannot be implemented, but it, too, is as far as it can be from the monumentalist Soviet tradition. The Lviv memorial of the Heavenly Hundred also eschews traditional forms in favour of a wall dotted with their portraits. In this talk, I will examine how the people’s revolution inaugurated a search for new forms of commemoration to reflect its democratic legacy.

About the Speaker

Born and educated in the Soviet Union, Serhy Yekelchyk obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta. He is the author of seven books on modern Ukrainian history, Stalinism, and Russo-Ukrainian relations. His monograph, Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford University Press, 2014) was the recipient of the Best Book Award from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and its Ukrainian translation in 2019 received a special diploma of the Lviv Book Forum. Yekelchyk’s most recent publication is Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020)—the second, much expanded edition of his popular book about the Euromaidan Revolution and Russian aggression in Ukraine. He is currently working on a history of Ukrainian culture under Stalinism. A professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk is current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies. 

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