Historical Politics, Legitimacy Contests, and the (Re-)Construction of Political Communities in Ukraine during the Second World War
The proposed monograph is a study of historical politics and legitimacy contests in Ukraine during the Second World War. By situating the operations of the Soviet state and its wartime antagonists within a broader strategic, military and political context, the book will elucidate the role of historical politics and legitimacy contests in the violent processes of the building and breaking of political communities. More specifically, the study show how the daily exercise of power by agents of the Soviet state—through public pronouncements, commemorations, state surveillance, show trials, and repression of bearers of alternative political identities-- had a tangible impact on the behaviour and everyday ideological iterations by thousands of historical subjects in the formerly occupied territories, be it former Ukrainian nationalist activists, local collaborators, Soviet partisans, members of intelligentsia or children that experienced the Axis occupation. At the same time, these people were anything but passive recipients of the official narratives. Many of them actively pursued their distinct agendas within the historically conditioned environment fraught with power inequalities that structured their choices and furnished them with tools of interpretation and languages of expression of their experiences. In the process, they often displayed ability to influence, manipulate, and occasionally even thwart the officially sanctioned narratives, prompting Soviet officials, ever preoccupied with issues of legitimacy, to continually adapt to the reality on the ground.
An independent Scholar, Oleksandr Melnyk received his PhD in 2016 from the University of Toronto, his M.A. from the University of Alberta (2004), and his B.A. Kherson State University (2002). He was the recipient for the 2017 Bayduza Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2017 and the Stasiuk Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2016, both from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta). His publications include “War Dead and (Inter)-Communal Ethics in the Ukrainian-Russian Borderlands” (forthcoming in the conference proceedings volume, 2019); “Charismatic Warlordism and De-Centralized Insurrection: Donbas in Spring-Summer 2014” (under review by the East-West Journal of Ukrainian Studies); “From the ‘Russian Spring’ to the Armed Insurrection: Russia, Ukraine and the Political Communities in the Donbas and Ukrainian South” (under review for the special issue of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Review); “Stalinist Justice as a Site of Memory: anti-Jewish Violence in Kyiv’s Podil District in September 1941 through the Prism of Soviet Investigative Documents,” Jarhbücher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas 61 (2013), Heft 2: 223-248; and “Political Identity Under Invasion: Kherson Oblast’ in Summer 1941,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 30 (1), Summer 2005: 47-73.