One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian Liberation Struggle
Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal
No. 4 : The 100th Anniversary of the Ukrainian Revolution (1917–1921)
Kvit, Serhii
To understand historical processes, it is not nearly enough to take into account only objective distant social, political, and economic factors. We also need to pay attention to different wellestablished traditions, stereotypes and existing myths-archetypes, which unavoidably accompany and fill historical memory. Later, some of them are legalized by historiography or, better to say, by different conflicting historiographies. Such an unwritten tradition helps to understand social phenomena which came from somewhere and just exist by outlining dramatic differences of contemporary Ukrainian political culture, as opposed to a number of post-Soviet countries, in particular, Russia. It is especially interesting considering the global importance of the events happening in contemporary Ukraine. During World War I, Ukrainians were trying to create their independent state, as well as to fit it into the geopolitical context of that time. The defeat of the Liberation Struggle and all of Ukrainian history up to the collapse of the Soviet Union until today make us take a close look at historically remote events.