Dmytro Tytarenko

In the contexts of military conflict in Donbas since 2014, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the history of the Second World War has been even more strongly instrumentalized for political purposes than it had been previously. This is especially the case in the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”. The memory of the Soviet past, and the “Great Patriotic War” as Soviet history’s most meaningful event, have turned into a powerful ideological resource.

This project will explore the salient features of memory practices related to the “Great Patriotic War” on the territory of the “people’s republics”.It will analyze the place of the war in the discourses of scholarship, education, memory workers, official and social media; show the forms, means and the evolution of imagery of the war; and correlate this evolution to political events between 2014 and 2021.