The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine

Download or read book The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine written by Guido Hausmann and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ukrainian Euromaidan in 2013–14 and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war in the Eastern part of the country have posed new questions to historians. The volume investigates the relevance of the cults of the fallen soldiers to Ukraine's national history and state. It places the dead of the Euromaidan and the forms and functions of the emerging new cult of the dead in the context of older cults from pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet times from various Ukrainian regions until the end of the presidency of Petro Poroshenko in 2019. The contributions emphasize the importance of the grassroot level, of local and regional actors or memory entrepreneurs, myths of state origin and national defense demanding unity, and the dynamics of commemorative practices in the last thirty years in relation to pluralist and fragmented processes of nationand state-building. They contribute to new conceptualizations of the political cult of the dead.