ABSTRACT
A young state, Ukraine became independent when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. As the old order crumbled, new national heroes replaced the old, after a difficult process of soul-searching. A country divided by culture, language and religion now faced the difficult task of consolidating the republic as a nation-state. Establishing a common pantheon of national heroes for this divided country has proven difficult. While nationalism is strong in the western part of the country, Soviet historiography still lingers in the heavily Russified east and south. In Western Ukraine, this process of revising Ukrainian history has often involved turning the villains of Soviet historiography into the heroes of today. This trend is particularly strong in Galicia, which had not been under Moscow’s control before 1939, and has a separate political history and traditions, its own pantheon of heroes. Unlike the Ukrainians in the Russian empire, who had a certain openness to the Russian language and culture, the Galicians developed an exclusivist either/or identity, clearly delineated from Polish and Russian identities (Himka 2006: 18).
