ABSTRACT
Oksana Mikheieva examines intense debates in Ukraine around the materialized symbols of Soviet heritage, especially monuments and commemorative practices, and discusses the dilemmas around de-communization in Ukraine. Mikheieva draws on the texts of Stalino/Donetsk guides published between the 1950s and the 2000s, and on interviews with the city's residents, differentiating between the controlled and non-government-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. The study investigates the monumental politics between the 1920s and the 1980s, the rise of alternative narratives, and discussions around the Soviet canon in the Perestroika period, the return of local memories of different social groups to the collective memory in the 1990s, and concludes with the year 2014, which saw both the strategy of resisting symbols of opponents and at the same time elements of Russification in Donetsk. The chapter demonstrates how new memory practices and a return to the repressive elements of the past were installed in the absence of public debate and the formation of a new historical narrative, and that this attempt to construct a public space in which the Soviet heritage coexisted with the contemporary only served to exacerbate the social divides and foster antagonism between the two models of understanding the past.
