Ukraine and May 9: Forgetting to remember

On March 11, 1882, the French historian Ernest Renan gave a lecture at the Sorbonne University. He sought to answer the question, "What is a nation?". Renan's approach explains well what has been unfolding in Ukraine and to Ukrainians over the past year. 

Renan criticised the notion that nationality was an innate characteristic of every person or community. Instead, "a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle". It is a purely irrational phenomenon. It consists of a component of the past and the present.

Let's start with the present. Renan conveys the component of the present with a metaphor: a nation is a daily plebiscite. A collective action that answers the question: do we need this state?

Ukrainians have experienced this component first-hand. If they had not supported the state a year ago, it would unlikely still exist in its current form. Of course, a professional army would have withstood the first attack, and mobilisation would have partially strengthened its ranks. However, the legitimacy of such a state in the eyes of foreign allies would have been significantly lower.

The component of the present answers the question, "Where are we going?". The past component is "Where did we come from?" This is a bit more complicated. 

Until quite recently, Ukrainians had very different ideas about the past. For example, in 2016, the Rating Group found that 72% of residents of the western regions supported the proposal to demolish all Lenin monuments in Ukraine, while in the south, the level of support did not exceed 20%. 

The same applies to the attitude towards the Soviet label of the "Great Patriotic War" and May 9. In 2020, according to a study by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, 42% of Ukrainians from the eastern regions believed that Ukraine should celebrate May 9 rather than May 8. In the western regions, this figure was twice as low.

Some would see this as a "division" of Ukrainians, but not Renan. Western European nations also went through this stage in their development. Therefore, the French historian believed that a nation not only remembered but also forgot. The circumstances dividing a nation disappear from memory.

"Unity is always achieved by violence. The unification of northern and southern France resulted from massacres and terror that lasted almost a century," he wrote 140 years ago.

Perhaps the historian was wrong, and unity can be positive. But, unfortunately, the Ukrainian experience does not allow us to answer the question unequivocally. The change in attitudes towards May 9 was caused by Russian violence. 

According to a poll conducted by the Rating Group in April 2022, 44% of residents of the Western macro-region believed that May 9 was a relic of the past. In the central region, the figure was 35%; in the southern region, 35%; and in the eastern region, 26%. There has been a rapprochement.

One can also put forward another argument. They say these changes have been gradually taking place over the past eight years, even before the full-scale invasion. This is true. But the trigger was still the Russian invasion, so violence was involved.

Demolishing monuments and renaming streets is also a form of forgetting, although it does not constitute physical violence. Decommunisation is ongoing, and every week the authorities remove artefacts feeding the Soviet myth from public space.

The practice of decommunisation raises many questions, analytically sound in terms of a "plebiscite" on the past. What should we forget, and what should we remember? Completely erasing the memory of the non-insurgent Ukrainian history of the Second World War means erasing the fates of some 5 million civilians and 4 million soldiers who fell. 

However, the memory of them can no longer remain a tool of Kremlin propaganda. The image of the "unknown soldier" is a Western European invention that the Soviet Union later stole. It emerged as an anonymisation tool, presenting one person as an image of a collective victim, wrote historian George Mosse. 

It allows us to hide the uncomfortable circumstances of a particular person's death. For example, how did it happen that the Soviet army was not ready for the Nazi invasion? In six months, the Germans occupied the most developed part of the Soviet empire, home to about 40% of its population. In less than six months, the Soviet army lost more than three million people, 74% of whom were "missing, captured, including unaccounted losses of the first months". 

These are the "unknown soldiers", but not the ones who are commemorated in Ukrainian towns and villages. These monuments are silent on why they are "unknown". Instead, they force us to remember the war the way the Kremlin intended.

The complete erasure of the memory of the Soviet history of war has not only morally negative consequences. Let's go back a year to 2022. At that time, many Ukrainians were angry with Germany because of its foreign policy identity. At the initial stage of the full-scale invasion, it was easier for the German elite to imagine the defeat and destruction of Ukraine than to consider the idea of confrontation with Moscow. 

This is the result not only of building an economic model on Russian energy carriers and fetishising Russia as the sole heir to the USSR. Berlin was quite uncomfortable with the idea of German weapons being used against Russians again. This worldview omits that the Nazis occupied Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. 

The entire current identity of the Russian state is built around the myth of the " Great Patriotic [War - TN]". Instead, the Swedish historian Per Anders Rudling draws attention to another phenomenon - the importance that the Soviet myth plays in the identity of the Belarusian regime. 

Lukashenko needs the Soviet traditional notions of the Second World War to defend something and play the role of a father who protects the population from foreign influences. In this way, he guarantees "stability". 

Moreover, on September 17, Belarus celebrates the "Day of National Unity". On September 17, 1939, the Soviet army joined the German invasion of Poland and later transferred the territories of Poland with a majority of ethnic Belarusians to the Belarusian SSR. 

We should not build hierarchies of victims and try to measure who suffered the most. At the same time, if we ignore the Soviet part of Ukrainian history in the Second World War, the Kremlin will be able to freeze this status quo at a minimal cost.

Neuroscientists and psychologists have long studied the role that forgetting plays in human memory. For example, in 1967, Michigan psychologist Arthur Melton conducted a word memorisation experiment that has become a classic in memory research. 

It turned out that people remembered better not those words that were constantly repeated in the list but those with a more significant gap between them. A paradoxical conclusion emerges: forgetting facilitates remembering. 

Previously, it was believed that forgetting was only passive and depended on how much time had passed, according to scientists from the Department of Pharmacology and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Milan. Instead, modern researchers are studying the mechanisms of active forgetting that lead to memory erasure. But, of course, there is nothing wrong with forgetting; it is necessary to remember new things. 

Every day, Ukrainians on the front line hold a "plebiscite" regarding the present. Every day, they choose to continue defending the state. The same can be done concerning the past, collectively deciding what to remember and how to remember it. These two elements create a nation, or so Renan believed.