We are currently witnessing and participating in the processes of reinterpreting the history of World War II and the formation of the modern historic narrative in Ukraine. An important aspect of this relevant discourse is the visibility of diverse women’s experiences in World War II.
The publication of the 2015 collective book of Ukrainian and foreign research devoted to the main forms of female war experiences and women’s participation in WWIImade a significant contribution to both the scientific and public discussion of this subject. The next step in this process was the decision made by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance to make women’s experiences in WWII the main focal point of remembrance in 2016 under the title “War Makes No Exceptions. Women’s Histories of World War II.” This project visually put together the “old” Soviet as well as “new” national heroines but has not yet offered a deeper reflection on their experiences.
At the same time, the official policy of decommunization stipulated in the law since May 2015 has played a major role in the reassessment of certain events and personalities as well as their significance, which includes the officially recognized heroes and heroines of the Soviet time.
Since then, the memory of World War II in Ukraine has often taken the form of a compromise, combining old practices with newer trends. One manifestation of this process is “Ukrainizing” the legacy of the Soviet “Great Patriotic War.” In this approach, the Soviet heroes of World War II who were not involved in Soviet crimes and had a connection with Ukraine remain among the officially recognized heroes of the modern Ukraine.
One such example is the Soviet heroine of the Ukrainian origin Lyudmila Pavlichenko, celebrated both in Ukraine and Russia, especially thanks to the film Nezlamna (“Unbreakable”; Russian title The Battle for Sevastopol), co-produced by both countries mostly before the Russian aggression in Donbas. The film as a biographical drama does not contradict the official life story of the famous Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko but does reflect her life without a clear ideological component, which has probably contributed to the film becoming one of the 2015 hits on the Ukrainian big screen.
Another trend in the contemporary Ukrainian memory policy is the glorification of new national heroes mostly done through “rehabilitation” of the personalities stigmatized as enemies in the Soviet times. It concerns primarily the participants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
In this case we can speak about two parallel processes: inclusion of the Soviet heritage and some of the old heroes on the one hand and of new figures from the nationalist resistant movement during WWII on the other hand into the national historic narrative. But these attempts to combine different and previously even hostile traditions are still lacking a deeper analysis or comparison. Another result of this strategy is that some traditional Soviet forms of commemoration and symbolic representation are now being filled with new national content.
Some important parts of commemorative and decommunization practices are the renaming of streets and the construction or destruction of monuments. The most vivid illustration of different memory sites coexisting in one space is the “mental topography” of Kyiv.
The ideological and visual coexistence of the “old” and “new” tendencies in the commemorative traditions can be illustrated by the creation in 2009 of two monuments to WWII heroines in Kyiv — Tetiana Marcus and Olena Teliha, the participants of the underground movement, Markus on the Soviet side and Teliha on the Ukrainian nationalist side.
Thus, the old traditions in visual forms and symbolic patterns coexist with new trends in the representation of new national heroes, the two influencing each other. As the result some traditional Soviet forms of commemoration and symbolic representation have acquired new national content.
Another current trend, different from the Soviet traditions, is to pay attention to various wartime experiences lived by women, not just the heroic ones. One manifestation of this trend is the creation of “double” monuments depicting a woman and a man with similar wartime destinies together.
The female figures are significant not only as monuments to famous heroines; the symbolic roles of female images as embodiments of the Nation or national tragedies carry even more meaning. This kind of female sculptures also goes back to the Soviet tradition with its symbolic figures of the Motherland. The best-known representation of this image is the figure towering over the Museum of the History of Ukraine in WWII. There have been attempts to include it symbolically into the new memory space. The most spectacular visual and performative manifestation of this tendency was the decoration of the figure in the Ukrainian national colors and style.
The figure of “Motherland” decorated with Ukrainian traditional dress
The modern Ukrainian cultural tradition also uses the allegorical female figures with a similar purpose, the most vivid example being the Monument symbolizing Ukraine’s independence on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), the central square in Kyiv. While the visual idea itself goes back to the old iconographic representation of the Holy Virgin, its modern manifestations are already strongly determined by the above-described Soviet tradition to associate the home country, a.k.a. the Motherland, with the female figure of the Mother.
The representation of the national tragedies through the figures of women or especially young girls serves to highlight the emotional effect of the tragedy, emphasizing the delicacy and defenselessness of the whole nation through the figure of a suffering young woman.
In this short overview, we have attempted to show how the female experiences of WWII are becoming visible in the memory space in its literal sense, through the example of Kyiv monuments. We can conclude that the roles of women in World War II are changing not only in the perception and interpretation of the wartime legacy, but also in the urban space and its “mental mapping.” Using the images of women less common in the previous remembrance tradition opens up new opportunities for creative expression and modern interpretation the wartime experience in its numerous forms.
Author: Kateryna Kobchenko