Kutkina, Anna
(Helsingin yliopisto, 2020)
This dissertation is a study of (post)Euromaidan Ukraine as a socio-political and cultural space which undergoes a multilayered process of struggle over meanings. As a physical and political domain that emerged in a see-saw between Europe and Russia, the Euromaidan revolution was a unified protest that exposed multiple, at times contradictory beliefs: dreams of a just Europe, ultra-nationalist, Far-Right values, demands for prompt democratic transformation, hatred of authoritarian, corrupt government and naming of the ‘enemies’ or the ‘other.’ This research is a critical analysis of the articulation of such socio-political multivocality of the Ukrainian population, which found its physical and discursive expression within the process of post-2013 decommunization.
This dissertation examines the evolution of post-Euromaidan de-Sovietization beyond the framework of passing and implementation of the 2015 decommunization laws. I address the process of decommunization as a political and cultural phenomenon at both the regional and national level, where the ordinary citizens and the government are involved in diverse forms of the meaning-making (e.g. political poster exhibitions, preservation or demolition of communist symbols, or renaming of the streets). I examine the process of de-Sovietization of (post)Euromaidan Ukraine as both fragmented and unified in its multivocality, where old symbols and/or judicial structures such as the statues, posters or laws are being replaced by new physical (e.g. architectural) and narrative formations.
This dissertation consists of nine chapters, and is an outcome of 4.5 years of fieldwork conducted in western, central, southern, northern and eastern regions of Ukraine. It is an ethnographic study of data that includes 64 interviews, images and videos with the protestors, civic activists, members of non-governmental organizations, politicians, soldiers, artists, and ordinary citizens. To provide comprehensive understanding of different types of material, the method of ‘layered textual analysis’ (Covert 2014) is used. It involves structural analysis of the narratives present in the interview text, visual analysis of the photos, and guiding questions related to the content and relationship of the photos, objects and narratives. In this work, I use the concept of narrative to create a broader framework for categorization of the collected data-- to analyse, for instance, interviews, images, or videos of the protest or toppling of the communist statues as means of construction of the discursive narratives at both the grassroots and state level.
As means of examining the empirical data, this work draws theoretical parallels between theory of hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Cox 2019; Modelski 1991; Thompson 2015), Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of heteroglossia and monologism, and Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of the imagined communities. The primary objective of bridging these theories is to examine multivocality in decommunization as both the process and outcome of articulation of polyglossic or multi-voiced practices of civic dialogical interaction. A broader purpose of ‘hegemonic’ reading of the collected data is to explore (post)Euromaidan decommunization as a social phenomenon which is mediated through discourse, where political meanings are articulated, contested, and, as a whole, never permanently fixed.
As that of discourse analysis theory, the aim of this work is not to discover which groups exist within the society, or to unravel particular formations that object or support the process of decommunization. The primary objective of this research is to examine multiple mechanisms of selection of the discursive and physical elements that were included (or erased) from the physical space of (post)Euromaidan Ukraine (2013-2018), as well as to identify political and cultural means of the citizens’ and ruling elites’ consolidation of a politically and culturally diverse state.