Fabian Baumann: Banal Nationalism, Republican Pride, and Symbolic Ethnicity in Late Soviet Ukraine

Fabian Baumann: Banal Nationalism, Republican Pride, and Symbolic Ethnicity in Late Soviet Ukraine

While the Brezhnev period has traditionally been seen as a phase of de-nationalization in Ukrainian, this paper will argue that the late Soviet authorities in fact propagated a new form of Ukrainian nationhood, one based less on ethnohistorical commonalities than on territorial and institutional cohesion. Combining Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism” with Alexei Yurchak’s analysis of “hypernormalized authoritative discourse,” I will show that Soviet Ukrainian leaders reproduced the assumption of Ukrainian nationhood even as they deprived it of concrete political and cultural content. While First Secretary Petro Shelest still promoted ethnic history alongside pride in Ukraine’s republican quasi-statehood, his successor Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi preferred an image of Ukraine as a productive economic space free of ethnic specificity. Late Soviet Ukrainian banal nationalism left traces in everyday life, whether in sports reporting, school curricula, or the promotion of the Ukrainian language as a national symbol, though not as a medium of communication. Not least, it created a specific visual language combining institutional emblems with politically empty ethnic symbols. During perestroika, late Soviet banal nationalism was appropriated and instrumentalized first by the national-democratic opposition, and later by “national communists.” By being attractive to those Soviet Ukrainians who were indifferent to the nationalist cultural canon, this semantically empty form of Ukrainianness contributed to the viability of post-Soviet Ukrainian nationhood.

Language: English.

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Oberseminar im Wintersemester 2024/25.