Oleksandr Hrytsenko’s work, Decommunization in Ukraine as a state policy and as a socio-cultural phenomenon, is structurally divided and presented in two large parts corresponding to its title. Given that my professional experience is in cultural studies, my review mainly focuses on this work’s analysis of de-communization in Ukraine as a socio-cultural phenomenon and the application of experience of cultural studies approaches to de-communization in Ukraine.
The book takes a classic cultural studies approach, appropriately distinguishing between the final/intermediate and primary/secondary products of de-communization. The study’s starting point is Hrytsenko’s conceptualization of de-communization as the systematic and complete removal of the Soviet ideology, not only from the public space but also from the public consciousness. Several aspects of the author’s understanding of the context are noteworthy here. The author attempts to thoroughly and comprehensively describe socio-cultural forms of de-communization in Ukraine across its legal, political, and artistic dimensions. An important methodological assumption is the cultural sphere’s division into production and consumption elements, and the equation of de-communization with ideology. This identification is made not only at the definitional level but also by the determination of the research material, which includes texts of laws, journalism, and other print media materials, following a text-centred approach to “culture”.
The author identifies ideology through textual practices, characteristic of discourse-centric approaches that are typical for the political sciences. For cultural studies, however, ideology is a broader phenomenon characterized not only by the content of ideas but also by the medium through which they are conveyed. This provides a different perspective on the construction and deconstruction of cultural practice in general. The textual parameters of print media were the basis of vertical communication and created the opportunity for state monopoly, which required not only practices of text production (print and writing journalism) but also the cultural production of mass literacy (i.e., the institutionalization of education). The Soviet Union’s fight against illiteracy was, therefore, not simply a humanist project; it also aimed at producing an audience for the dissemination of communist ideology. Analyzing the formation of Soviet education as an instrument of the ideological machine would also be a promising topic for research.
The approach of cultural research to ideology is different from that of political science or sociology. Understanding ideology in terms of its conceptual content (as a system of rationally connected ideas), but also as a function in society (such as a legitimization of power) is a valid and fruitful methodology. However, cultural studies place more emphasis on the “materialities of communication” of ideology, such as technical reproduction, “cultural industrialization” and a surplus of discourse practices. Including these angles of analysis could have broadened the scope of Hrytsenko’s valuable study.
The author describes the nostalgic Soviet orientations of Ukrainian society as rudiments that need to be decommunized; they are the background without which the Russian invasion and annexation would not have been carried out. It should be emphasized that the patterns of nostalgia are implemented first and foremost through image practices. Rational criticism of communist ideology and measures to limit its extrapolation into the political (slogans of political parties) and the legal (laws on de-communization) spheres are insufficient here. Appeals to the geopolitics of emotion animate the correlation of Soviet images and their Russian versions as “correct” or “truthful”.
Hrytsenko provides a list of basic “Soviet methods” of communization in the field of image practices, in particular iconoclasm of Soviet pictures and images, the imposition of a certain ideology as the “correct” form of artistic experience, and administrative and coercive methods of administration of such cultural policies. The image practices in the Soviet Union were largely reduced to the logic of serving an ideology. The author exposes the drawbacks of the Soviet cultural policy: the rehabilitation of the “one-size-fits-all” art and the demonstration of the primitiveness of the artistic methods of Socialist Realism. He also analyzes the experience of the Soviet patterns revised by the Soviet authorities themselves (for example, in the post-Stalinist period). The author summarizes the experience of extracting literary works filled with ideological meaning from the Ukrainian school curriculum, such as the “optimistic socialist kitsch” of Oles Gonchar’s works (p. 212). With this example, the author successfully explains how the content of a cultural product (and primitive versions of ideological stamps even more so) does not tell us how it works in the logic of forming a cultural context.
Most variants of new media cultural production and narratives are now produced outside of the printed text. This means that the content and form of cultural products are different, particularly influencing how ideologies function outside the monopoly of print media. Indeed, products such as videos, demotivators, memes, and social networks have opposing forms of perception and memory production to discursive practices. They are forms of horizontal communication that a centralized command-bureaucratic system cannot control. There is a need to expand the study of cultural production and its impact on the formation and functioning of ideological and image practices, particularly de-communization. Many of these are successfully produced in the Ukrainian cultural space in the logic of confrontation with Russian aggression.
It was the construction of new cultural products, such as the hit TV show Servant of the People (which was not directly aimed at criticizing communist ideology), that filled the cultural space of Ukraine with new images and senses and enabled the creation of a party that has been successful in resistance to war. The Ukrainian experience teaches us how to work not only by replicating anti-ideological clichés to conscious opponents of communism but also how to work with varied audiences. Thus, the experience of de-communization in Ukraine is even much broader than Hrytsenko presents in the book. His study serves as a useful departure for the further study of de-communization in post-Soviet societies. It is, of course, impossible to do everything in one book and it must be hoped that future research will deepen this perspective.
A scientific understanding of de-communization requires theoretical distance, but a world in which Russia has nuclear weapons and threatens their use needs consideration of consequences on a very different scale. A cultural policy cannot be reduced to direct action and bureaucratic implementation alone. Any analysis of this complex sphere is contradictory and suggests the possibility and necessity of further movement in the production and consumption of cultural practices, including in civil society. But without the experience of scientific reflection and debate, there can be no further shift in this field. In particular, without reflecting on the experience of de-communization, to which O. Hrytsenko’s work is devoted, the successful experience of the Ukrainian resistance to Russian military aggression cannot be understood.