Serhy Yekelchyk
Biographic Data
| ID | 971195 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Serhy Yekelchyk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Serhy |
| FAMILY NAME | Yekelchyk |
| SIGNATURE | YEKELCHYK S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Victoria |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9401-3475 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Yet another Russian invasion? Echoes of 1917–20 in Russia’s war on Ukraine
The revolution of 1917–20 has become a prominent reference point in discussions of the current Russo-Ukrainian war in both countries, in part because Vladimir Putin blames Vladimir Lenin for the creation of an “artificial” Ukraine from “historical” Russian lands. This article argues instead that the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine was, in many respects, similar to Putin’s war. Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks operating in Ukraine shared many cultur…
Uphill from the Maidan
This paper explores long-term trends in Kyiv's symbolic geography that ultimately led to the main battles of the Revolution of Dignity (2013–14), which occurred on two streets heading uphill from the Maidan into the government quarter: Hrushevskyi Street and Instytutska Street. The study delves into the historical development of the Pecherske and Lypky neighbourhoods as both real and symbolic centres of authority in modern Kyiv, demonstrating how…
Naming the war
This article discusses the representation of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, in Ukrainian official discourse, media, and mass culture. A new stage in the war with Russia that has been ongoing since 2014, the invasion prompted a search for a new political and cultural vocabulary. If the Ukrainian state at first tended to use familiar Soviet models, mass culture responded with powerful memes, slogans, and images th…
Memory Wars on the Silver Screen
In post-communist Russia the state has been supporting the production of historical films reflecting the official politics of memory, in which primacy is given to the victory in World War II. Often filmed in Ukraine, where the national cinema industry was nearly extinct until recently, these films project an imperial stereotype of modern Ukrainian identity as a fake and Ukrainian patriots as traitors. In contrast, the Ukrainian patriotic war narr…
Symbolic plasticity and memorial environment
This article examines the afterlife of the most prominent Soviet monuments in Kyiv to survive the first wave of demolitions during the early 1990s. It shows how some of them evolved into symbols of solidarity with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which made them targets of attacks during the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013–14. In an attempt to trace the changing meaning and public resonance of Soviet monuments, the author develops Jan and Aleida Assmann’s …
In Memoriam
Long life is not given to very many Russian poets, nor is a creative life lived entirely on the poet's own terms.But that was the fate of Elizaveta Mnatsakanova (May 31, 1922-September 10, 2019), who died in Vienna in 2019 at the age of 97.Born in Baku, she moved to Moscow to study at the Philology Faculty of Moscow State University and then took two degrees from the Moscow Conservatory.In Moscow, she made her living as a musicologist, and began …
Nationalization through Total War
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Regional Identities in the Time of War
The author argues against the widespread Western stereotype of Ukraine as a nation divided into two parts: the pro-Western, nationalistic west and the pro-Russian east. He emphasizes the importance of studying Ukraine’s individual regions because their reaction during the 2014 war was determined as much by their diverse historical traditions and cultural identities as by the decisions of the local elites and grassroots political activism on both …
The Crimean Exception
The author proposes a new perspective on the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the Crimea as reactive settler nationalism. After the Russian imperial conquest of the peninsula and the gradual displacement of the Crimean Tatars, the 1917 Revolution galvanized the Tatar national movement, which entered into an alliance with the Ukrainian one. A similar situation developed in the late 1980s, when the peninsula’s Russian ethnic majority fo…
Searching for the Ukrainian Revolution
This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the "Russian Revolution." In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of "national-liberation struggle" is too reduction…
Metahistorical Scepticism in Aleksei Goldenveizer’s Chronicle of Everyday Life in Kyiv, 1917–1921
This article analyzes the memoir of a Russian-speaking Jewish lawyer, Aleksei Goldenveiser (1890–1979), as a source on the history of Kyiv during the revolutionary period (1917–1921). His work stands out among other reminiscences about the Revolution in Ukraine because of the author’s unprecedented attention to details of everyday life, along with his self-identification as simply an apolitical resident of Kyiv. Especially striking is the author’…
Studying the Blueprint for a Nation
This article discusses the development of a Canadian historiography of modern Ukraine. It argues that the early focus on Ukrainian nation building determined the range of topics that interested Canadian historians, but over the following years their methodology changed significantly. The development of social history provided indispensable tools for in-depth analysis of the Ukrainian national movement. The subsequent development of a new cultural…
The Great Fear
With the wealth of scholarly literature on the Great Terror, it is difficult to expect a fresh approach or new conceptual framework from yet another survey volume on this topic. But James Harris delivers just that, an innovative explanation of the Stalinist repressions through the prism of information gathering and processing. His main argument in this book is refreshingly simple: the Soviet system of collecting information about external and int…
Good Ukrainians vs Petliurites
Using as a case study Vladimir Beliaev’s popular young-adult novel The Old Fortress and its two film adaptations, this article examines evolving Soviet representations of the Ukrainian Revolution. Its main focus is on the cultural construction of “Petliurites” as the “other” of Soviet Ukrainian identity. The article demonstrates that the Stalinist model of historical memory required a strong Ukrainian nationalist enemy in order to highlight the h…
Myth, Memory, Trauma
With this volume, rich in archival detail and interpretative insight, Polly Jones consolidates her reputation as an authority on de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union. The political history of this period is well known, and much has also been published about the Thaw in Russian literature. Dr Jones, however, retells the story in a different way, combing through the archives in search of popular reactions to official pronouncements and literary wor…
The early 1960s as a cultural space
This article analyzes the early stage of the Ukrainian “sixtiers” movement as a semi-autonomous space of cultural expression that was tolerated by the authorities and defined, developed, and inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals. In contrast to present-day Ukrainian representations of the sixtiers as a force acting in opposition to the Soviet regime, the spatial angle employed here reveals an ambiguous relationship with official institutions…
Thinking Through Ukrainian Cinema
Surprisingly, there has never been an English-language history of cinema, a major within Soviet cinema best known for Oleksandr Dovzhenko's interwar masterpieces and the school of the 1960s, but which m fact includes a far greater number of significant and controversial films. In showcasing recent research on cinema, tins special issue prepares the ground for such surveys. Much like the 2009 special issue of KinoKultura on cinema, edited by Vital…
Stephen Velychenko. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine
Social history is a latecomer among the genres in which the revolution in Ukraine has been narrated, and it is fitting, if somewhat counterintuitive, that bureaucrats are the first social stratum to receive monographic treatment in English. The leaders of the Ukrainian Revolution, including the great Ukrainian historian and chairman of the revolutionary parliament Mykhailo Hrushevsky, claimed that their defeat at the hands of both the Whites and …
Stalinist Confessions
What Is Ukrainian about Ukraine's Pop Culture
The Ukrainian cross-dressing and language-mixing pop star Verka Serduchka (played by male actor Andrii Danylko) is the most controversial product of Ukrainian post-Soviet mass culture. Ukrainian nationalists reject Serduchka as a parody of their nation, while Russians took umbrage at her 2007 Eurovision entry, which allegedly contained the words “Russia goodbye.” This article interprets the character of Serduchka as a jester, who makes audiences …
Diktatand Dialogue in Stalinist Culture
Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the "taming of the arts." Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the "revisionist" generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham sugg…
Ukraine Birth of a Modern Nation
In 2004 and 2005, striking images from the Ukraine made their way around the world, among them boisterous, orange-clad crowds protesting electoral fraud and the hideously scarred face of a poisoned opposition candidate. Europe's second-largest country but still an immature state only recently independent, Ukraine has become a test case of post-communist democracy, as millions of people in other countries celebrated the protesters' eventual victor…
No Laughing Matter
Stalin
Stalin's Empire of Memory
Naming the war
This article discusses the representation of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, in Ukrainian official discourse, media, and mass culture. A new stage in the war with Russia that has been ongoing since 2014, the invasion prompted a search for a new political and cultural vocabulary. If the Ukrainian state at first tended to use familiar Soviet models, mass culture responded with powerful memes, slogans, and images th…
Symbolic plasticity and memorial environment
This article examines the afterlife of the most prominent Soviet monuments in Kyiv to survive the first wave of demolitions during the early 1990s. It shows how some of them evolved into symbols of solidarity with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which made them targets of attacks during the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013–14. In an attempt to trace the changing meaning and public resonance of Soviet monuments, the author develops Jan and Aleida Assmann’s …
Interpreting Russia’s Imperial Dimension
During the last decade, scholars' increasingly sophisticated understanding of nation building has caused interesting divergence between their analyses of the nationalities problem in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold authorities like Walter Kolarz and Richard Pipes branded both tsarist and Soviet states as expansionist, Russian-dominated empires, which suppressed the natural nationalism of non-Russian nationalities. …
A Bare and Impolitic Right
Regional Identities in the Time of War
The author argues against the widespread Western stereotype of Ukraine as a nation divided into two parts: the pro-Western, nationalistic west and the pro-Russian east. He emphasizes the importance of studying Ukraine’s individual regions because their reaction during the 2014 war was determined as much by their diverse historical traditions and cultural identities as by the decisions of the local elites and grassroots political activism on both …
Searching for the Ukrainian Revolution
This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the "Russian Revolution." In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of "national-liberation struggle" is too reduction…
Stalinist Confessions
Diktatand Dialogue in Stalinist Culture
Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the "taming of the arts." Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the "revisionist" generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham sugg…
When Stalin's Nations Sang
In February 1944, as the victorious Red Army was preparing to clear the Nazi German forces from the rest of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a surprise official announcement stunned the population. The radio and the newspapers announced amendments to the Soviet constitution, which would enable the union republics to establish their own armies and maintain diplomatic relations with foreign states. While the Kremlin did not elaborate on the…
How the “Iron Minister” Kaganovich Failed to Discipline Ukrainian Historians
In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–Decembe…
The making of a ‘proletarian capital’
IN JUNE 1934 THE CAPITAL of the second most populous Soviet republic, Ukraine, was moved from Kharkiv to Kiev.' Rationales for the transfer were many. Kiev was a historical capital of Ukraine and an important cultural hub, advantageously situated in the geographical centre of Ukrainian lands. Located in the heart of a vast agricultural region for centuries dubbed the 'breadbasket of Europe', Kiev was an ideal point for overseeing Ukraine's then m…
Russia
Khrushchev
Cossack Gold
In July 1990, a Ukrainian legislator gained worldwide notoriety by claiming that the Bank of England owed sixteen trillion pounds sterling.1 This sum was the interest that had presumably accumulated over 270 years on a barrel of allegedly sent to England by an eighteenth-century Ukrainian Cossack leader, Pavlo Polubotok. Ukraine claims its barrel of gold, read a front-page headline of the Financial Times.2 The Ukrainian ambassador to the United N…
How the “Iron Minister” Kaganovich Failed to Discipline Ukrainian Historians
In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–Decembe…
The Unknown Lenin
Was Lenin a visionary whose ideals were subverted by his followers? Or was he a cynical misanthrope, even crueler than Stalin? This book, which contains documents from Lenin archive in Russia, lays bare Lenin man and politician, leaving little doubt that he was a ruthless and manipulative leader who used terror, subversion, and persecution to achieve his goals. Edited and introducted by Richard Pipes in collaboration with Y.A. Buranov of Russian …
Islam in the Soviet Union
"Islam in the Soviet Union: From World War II to Perestroika, by Yaacov Ro’i." Canadian Journal of History, 37(2), pp. 382–383
When Stalin's Nations Sang
In February 1944, as the victorious Red Army was preparing to clear the Nazi German forces from the rest of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a surprise official announcement stunned the population. The radio and the newspapers announced amendments to the Soviet constitution, which would enable the union republics to establish their own armies and maintain diplomatic relations with foreign states. While the Kremlin did not elaborate on the…
Stalin's Empire of Memory
Interpreting Russia’s Imperial Dimension
During the last decade, scholars' increasingly sophisticated understanding of nation building has caused interesting divergence between their analyses of the nationalities problem in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold authorities like Walter Kolarz and Richard Pipes branded both tsarist and Soviet states as expansionist, Russian-dominated empires, which suppressed the natural nationalism of non-Russian nationalities. …
A Bare and Impolitic Right
No Laughing Matter
Stalin
Ukraine Birth of a Modern Nation
In 2004 and 2005, striking images from the Ukraine made their way around the world, among them boisterous, orange-clad crowds protesting electoral fraud and the hideously scarred face of a poisoned opposition candidate. Europe's second-largest country but still an immature state only recently independent, Ukraine has become a test case of post-communist democracy, as millions of people in other countries celebrated the protesters' eventual victor…
Diktatand Dialogue in Stalinist Culture
Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the "taming of the arts." Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the "revisionist" generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham sugg…
What Is Ukrainian about Ukraine's Pop Culture
The Ukrainian cross-dressing and language-mixing pop star Verka Serduchka (played by male actor Andrii Danylko) is the most controversial product of Ukrainian post-Soviet mass culture. Ukrainian nationalists reject Serduchka as a parody of their nation, while Russians took umbrage at her 2007 Eurovision entry, which allegedly contained the words “Russia goodbye.” This article interprets the character of Serduchka as a jester, who makes audiences …
Stalinist Confessions
Stephen Velychenko. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine
Social history is a latecomer among the genres in which the revolution in Ukraine has been narrated, and it is fitting, if somewhat counterintuitive, that bureaucrats are the first social stratum to receive monographic treatment in English. The leaders of the Ukrainian Revolution, including the great Ukrainian historian and chairman of the revolutionary parliament Mykhailo Hrushevsky, claimed that their defeat at the hands of both the Whites and …
Thinking Through Ukrainian Cinema
Surprisingly, there has never been an English-language history of cinema, a major within Soviet cinema best known for Oleksandr Dovzhenko's interwar masterpieces and the school of the 1960s, but which m fact includes a far greater number of significant and controversial films. In showcasing recent research on cinema, tins special issue prepares the ground for such surveys. Much like the 2009 special issue of KinoKultura on cinema, edited by Vital…
The early 1960s as a cultural space
This article analyzes the early stage of the Ukrainian “sixtiers” movement as a semi-autonomous space of cultural expression that was tolerated by the authorities and defined, developed, and inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals. In contrast to present-day Ukrainian representations of the sixtiers as a force acting in opposition to the Soviet regime, the spatial angle employed here reveals an ambiguous relationship with official institutions…
Good Ukrainians vs Petliurites
Using as a case study Vladimir Beliaev’s popular young-adult novel The Old Fortress and its two film adaptations, this article examines evolving Soviet representations of the Ukrainian Revolution. Its main focus is on the cultural construction of “Petliurites” as the “other” of Soviet Ukrainian identity. The article demonstrates that the Stalinist model of historical memory required a strong Ukrainian nationalist enemy in order to highlight the h…
Myth, Memory, Trauma
With this volume, rich in archival detail and interpretative insight, Polly Jones consolidates her reputation as an authority on de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union. The political history of this period is well known, and much has also been published about the Thaw in Russian literature. Dr Jones, however, retells the story in a different way, combing through the archives in search of popular reactions to official pronouncements and literary wor…
Metahistorical Scepticism in Aleksei Goldenveizer’s Chronicle of Everyday Life in Kyiv, 1917–1921
This article analyzes the memoir of a Russian-speaking Jewish lawyer, Aleksei Goldenveiser (1890–1979), as a source on the history of Kyiv during the revolutionary period (1917–1921). His work stands out among other reminiscences about the Revolution in Ukraine because of the author’s unprecedented attention to details of everyday life, along with his self-identification as simply an apolitical resident of Kyiv. Especially striking is the author’…
Studying the Blueprint for a Nation
This article discusses the development of a Canadian historiography of modern Ukraine. It argues that the early focus on Ukrainian nation building determined the range of topics that interested Canadian historians, but over the following years their methodology changed significantly. The development of social history provided indispensable tools for in-depth analysis of the Ukrainian national movement. The subsequent development of a new cultural…
The Great Fear
With the wealth of scholarly literature on the Great Terror, it is difficult to expect a fresh approach or new conceptual framework from yet another survey volume on this topic. But James Harris delivers just that, an innovative explanation of the Stalinist repressions through the prism of information gathering and processing. His main argument in this book is refreshingly simple: the Soviet system of collecting information about external and int…
Political science (27 works) · Law (24 works) · History (22 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · Soviet and Russian History (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Ukrainian (17 works) · Law (15 works) · History (12 works)