Russia: Erasing Ukraine’s Memory

The Kremlin demands control not just of Ukraine’s future, but also of its past.

Source Novosti Donbasa

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never just about toppling its government or conquering its territory. It was also a war on memory — an essentially colonial endeavor by Vladimir Putin to erase Ukraine’s identity and reimpose a Kremlin-approved version of history. 

For the Russian president, subjugating Ukraine meant not just defeating its army, but deleting the national consciousness that had for centuries resisted Moscow’s grip.

Ukrainians understand what’s at stake and have joined the battle to preserve and spread what the Kremlin wants forgotten, and to remove the symbols of past imperial rule. That was the case after Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, and even more so after the full-scale assault in 2022. 

As part of a national decommunization effort, hundreds of Lenin statues were torn down across the country. By 2021, the last such monument on public land had been removed. As the Lenins tumbled, Russia was busy restoring the image of Joseph Stalin, unveiling new statues of the dictator who engineered the Holodomor, the manmade famine that killed perhaps 4 million Ukrainians in the 1930s and provided cover for a campaign of brutal national repression by the NKVD.

Despite Putin’s disdain for Lenin (who he historically “blames” for creating 1,200 year-old Ukraine), statues of him have reappeared across Russian-occupied territory. As historian Serhy Yekelchyk told The Economist these monuments are not about communism but control: “In Ukraine,” he said, “Lenin doesn’t stand for communism, but for Russian control.”

That reaches beyond symbols. In previously occupied Kherson, historians became targets. In autumn 2022, Oleksiy Palah, an expert in 18th-century history, was detained for nearly a month by Russian forces. “Historians are more dangerous than soldiers,” they told him, “because they poison people’s minds.” 

In July, Russian occupation authorities in Luhansk removed a granite cross monument to Holodomor victims, claiming it “insulted the patriotic feelings of the residents.” Dozens of similar memorials, along with tributes to Ukrainian cultural figures executed by the Soviet regime, have also been destroyed in Russian-occupied territories.

This effort to rewrite history is not new. As early as the 2000s, Russia pushed for the “harmonization” of Russian and Ukrainian history textbooks, a move widely criticized by Ukrainian historians as an attempt to impose Moscow’s imperial narrative. Russian-approved textbooks erased mention of events like the Holodomor and minimized Ukrainian national movements, portraying Kyiv as a provincial outpost and centering Moscow as the cradle of civilization. 

John Vsetecka, an Assistant Professor of History at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, explained that “the memory of the Holodomor is strong in Ukraine, and it is one that continues to cut across generations despite the distance in time.” He noted that Ukrainians have kindled this memory “to remind the world of what can happen when aggression goes unchecked.” According to Vsetecka, Holodomor memory politics became increasingly mainstream during the 2000s, particularly during the 2004-25 Orange Revolution.

“The Holodomor has played a pivotal historical role in Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. Beyond the battlefield, this war has been, in many ways, about the fight for historical narratives,” said Vsetecka.

Kristina Hook, an Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, emphasized that “many Ukrainians understand that Putin’s plan to crush Ukraine is part of a long tradition of horrific violence to their assertions of independence and autonomy.” 

She stated that modern Russia’s denial of the Holodomor has laid the foundation for its current campaign of cultural and physical destruction. “Looking back, we can see that these bitter roots of denying Ukrainian autonomy over their [own] state, their society, and their historical interpretation have again borne genocidal fruit,” she said.

After all, Russia’s foreign policy turned increasingly aggressive and hostile toward the West following the Orange Revolution, a pivotal moment that not only shaped Ukraine’s democratic identity but also triggered a lasting shift in Russian foreign policy, pushing the Kremlin toward nationalism and authoritarianism, along with renewed military aggression against its neighbor and open hostility toward the West. From that point on, Putin viewed democratic movements as a direct threat to his grip on power, constantly referring to the danger of what he termed “color” (i.e., popular) revolutions.

Fearing the spread of people-power movements, Putin responded by launching an aggressive campaign against democratic uprisings, laying the groundwork for Russia’s later invasions of Ukraine and its broader confrontation with the post-Cold War international order.

Now when Putin tells Donald Trump that the “root causes” of the war must be addressed before a ceasefire takes hold, his meaning is clear. He demands the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state and the obliteration of the popular memory.

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By David Kirichenko. David Kirichenko is a freelance journalist and an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. Article first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.