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What are the reasons behind, and trajectories of, the rapid cultural changes in Ukraine since 2013? This volume highlights: the role of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the formation of Ukrainian civil society; the forms of warfare waged by Moscow against Kyiv, including information and religious wars; Ukrainian and Russian identities and cultural realignment; sources of destabilization in Ukraine and beyond; memory politics and Russian foreign policies; the Kremlin’s geopolitical goals in its 'near abroad'; and factors determining Ukraine’s future and survival in a state of war. The studies included in this collection illuminate the growing gap between the political and social systems of Ukraine and Russia. The anthology illustrates how the Ukrainian revolution of 2013–2014, Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and its invasion of eastern Ukraine have altered the post-Cold War political landscape and, with it, the regional and global power and security dynamics.

This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in the 1970s, a Soviet institution that functioned as an ideological organ fighting against Ukrainian nationalists domestically and abroad. The central figure of this article is Heorhii Shevel who governed the Ministry from 1970 to 1980 and whose tactics, strategies, and practices reveal the existence of a distinct phenomenon in the Soviet Union—the nationally conscious political elite with double loyalties who, by action or inaction, expanded the space of nationalism in Ukraine. This research illuminates a paradox of pervasive Soviet power, which produced an institution that supported and reinforced Soviet “anti-nationalist” ideology, simultaneously creating an environment where heterodox views or sentiments were stimulated and nurtured.

This study analyzes the Soviet politics of silence during Stalin’s collectivization campaign in the context of peasant resistance, state violence, and the famine in 1928–1929, and illuminates the primary function of strategic silence—an information blockade which creates a space for violence and human suffering. Only in silence does the landscape of violence emerge and its spiral dynamics consume everyone, assailants and victims, proceeding swiftly to the eventual destruction of this landscape. In Ukraine, strategic silence and the relatively hermetic information blockade highlights the intentional nature of state violence: it produced a ghetto of exclusion that helped crush peasant resistance to collectivization and prevented Ukraine’s potential secession from the Union. More profoundly, the politics of silence is analyzed as “cultural” violence and one of the most important building blocks in the foundation of genocide that routinely provokes and escalates direct violence, a phenomenon which culminates in massacres, repressions, and famines, as happened in the Ukrainian case.

This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, and considers the formation of an efficient synergetic structure of Soviet secret organs in Moscow and Ukraine. The narrative identifies participants from central and regional secret departments who engaged in systematic mass operations against Zionists, and reveals that despite Moscow's initial vacillation between tolerance and persecution of Zionist parties, the Soviet secret police exhibited a continual escalation of repressions against Zionists. The policies of the secret police in Ukraine illuminate their personal adaptation to the coercive Soviet system of centralisation and ideological exclusion.

In 1929–1934 Galician intellectuals who emigrated to Soviet Ukraine from abroad were subject to mass repression. This article demonstrates how the party and the Soviet secret police discredited and eliminated this intelligentsia. Leading party officials perceived Galicians as possessing a strong sense of national identity and internal unity, and therefore an obstacle to plans for homogenizing Soviet Ukraine. The research draws on Ukrainian periodicals published in the early 1930s, on files relating to two major group criminal cases that were conducted in the early 1930s and that are now available to scholars in the Security Service archives of Ukraine (the former Soviet secret police archives), and on recent scholarship in the field. The archival evidence demonstrates that the cases were fabricated and the charges against Galicians were constructed as part of a planned “anti-nationalist” campaign.

This article makes use of documents from secret police archives to show that the Soviet secret police in Ukraine, the GPU (State Political Administration- Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie), together with the centre in Moscow, played a crucial role in the national operations of 1929-1934. These documents contradict the views of historians who argue that the regime's key power centres-Moscow and the secret police-were sincere in promoting Ukrainian culture and language. Instead, the archival materials indicate that a counter-Ukrainization was already being planned in the mid-1920s. The article argues that trials of \"nationalists\" were organized in order to prevent the crystallization of a political opposition in Ukraine at a time of crisis brought about by collectivization and famine. The repression of Ukrainians had a national component, was inspired by the centre, carefully organized by the secret police, and implemented through a steady flow of group criminal cases. Protocols from the interrogation rooms, testimonies by interrogators themselves, and scholarly literature on the topic are used to reconstruct the motivation of the GPU men who fabricated the criminal cases. The article demonstrates that all the cases were constructed according to a master narrative and presents a case for why torture was used: to legitimize the widespread use of terror in Ukraine, the regime required that the victims confess to being Ukrainian nationalists and members of anti-Soviet organizations whose goal was separatism.

This study examines spatial dimensions of state violence against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and the creation of a place of surveillance, the famous House of Writers (Budynok Slovo), an apartment building that was conceived by an association of writers “Slovo” in Kharkiv. This building fashioned an important identity for Ukrainian intellectuals, which was altered under state pressure and the fear of being exterminated. Their creative art was gradually transformed into the art of living and surviving under the terror, a feature of a regimented society. The study explores the writers’ behavior during arrests and interrogation, and examines the Soviet secret police’s tactics employed in interrogation rooms. The narrative considers the space of politics that brought the perpetrators of terror and their victims closer to each other, eventually forcing them to share the same place. Within this space and place they became interchangeable and interchanged, and ultimately were physically eliminated. Importantly, the research illuminates the multiethnic composition of the building’s residents: among them were cultural figures of Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish origins. Their individual histories and contributions to Ukrainian culture demonstrate the vector of Stalin’s terror which targeted not Ukrainian ethnicity as such but instead was directed against the development of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian statehood that were perceived as a challenge to the center’s control and as harbingers of separatism. The study also reveals that the state launched the course of counter-Ukrainization in 1926 and disintegrated the Ukrainian intellectual community through mass repressive operations which the secret police began to apply from 1929. The study also demonstrates that, together with people, the state purposefully exterminated national cultural artifacts—journals, books, art and sculpture, burying human ideas which have never been and will never be consummated. The purpose was to explain how the elimination of most prominent Ukrainian intellectuals was organized, rationalized and politicized. During the period of one decade, the terror tore a hole in the fabric of Ukrainian culture that may never be mended.