Franziska Davies

When telling the story of the end of the Soviet Union, the focus is still mostly on events in Russia and Moscow. How much democratic movements in the “peripheries” of the Soviet Union and the “Eastern Bloc” contributed or were even crucial for the disintegration of communism is still under-appreciated, not only in historiography but in particular in Western memory culture. One example is the developments in Poland and Ukraine in the 1980s. The success of Polish solidarity in 1980 not only laid bare the shaky foundations of state socialism in Poland, it also indirectly challenged Moscow’s hegemony in Central Eastern Europe. In this period, Polish dissidents and solidarity activists also began to discover Ukraine from a different perspective, namely, as a country that had suffered under Russian imperialism just like Poland had, and advocated for a reconciliation with Ukrainians. To reconstruct how these Polish events influenced the re-emergence of the anti-Soviet national movement in Ukraine is one of the aims of Franziska Davies’ book. When Peredubova, the Ukrainian variant of Perestroika, emerged a few years later, this ultimately led to Kyiv’s declaration of independence in 1991, which turned out to be the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union.