ABSTRACT
“The Heroes of Kruty demonstrated to all Ukrainian generations what real patriotism means,” stated the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in a speech commemorating the Battle of Kruty, in 2016. The Battle of Kruty took place on 29 January 1918, involving youth military units of the UNR and the Bolshevik forces advancing towards Kyiv in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. For the political leadership of post-Soviet Ukraine, the Battle of Kruty became a symbol of the Ukrainians’ struggle for their country’s independence from Russia. This paper traces the official post-Soviet commemoration of the Battle of Kruty embodied in various memory sites, such as museums, exhibitions, and monuments. Accordingly, this study seeks to understand how collective remembrance works as a means of national identity construction in general and in the Ukrainian context in particular.
