ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the undoing of the late-Soviet historical model. Outlining a hybridity of the pro-Soviet and the nationalist in recent textbooks, the chapter delves into a deeper kind of hybridity marking the persistence of the Soviet-style understanding of social change and subjects of history, which includes a simplistic interpretation of historical causation, an organicist representation of the “people,” and an emphasis on the need for political leadership informed by the only correct ideology. Yekelchyk shows how the textbooks analyzed argue implicitly that Ukraine is unconnected to the “Asiatic” Russian Empire and present a construction of history that is characterized as European and “multinational.” At the same time, the many textbook examples—and their omissions—illustrate how a construction of a multinational Ukraine seems to contradict portrayals of regional tensions with the south-east, ideological agendas, and the introduction of the concept of the Ukrainian “national revival.” The chapter examines how national history has emerged as an important ideological battleground in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, and exposes how the textbooks undermine modern concepts of multiculturalism and equal rights in imagining national history as a struggle against the nation's enemies.
