Alexandr Osipian

Associate Professor of History and Cultural Anthropology in the Department of History and Cultural Studies at Kramatorsk Institute of Economics and Humanities, Ukraine.

He studies discourses and practices of a usable past construction – history writing, public perceptions of the past, historical imagination, cultural memory – in Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century to the present. He has conducted research at the Central European University (Hungary), European University Institute (Italy), Warsaw University, Jagiellonian University, Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau (Poland), and University of Leipzig (Germany). Together with his colleagues from Belarus and Moldova, he conducts comparative research on the politics of memory and national identity construction in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova since 1991. His articles have appeared in Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Russian History, Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space, Perekrestki/Crossroads.

“Ukrainian Piedmont” vs. “Industrial Heart of Russia”: Regional Exceptionalism as a Resource of Political Mobilization and Electoral Manipulation in Ukraine, 2004–2012

This paper addresses the following questions: How is society manipulated and divided by the politicians in Ukraine? Why do the maps of electoral preferences reflect constant regional division in the 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2010 elections? Why are history and memory issues so important in political debates and mass media in Ukraine? How are regional stereotypes of the perception of “self” and “other” connected to the different imperial legacies? What strategies will be used in the 2012 and 2015 election campaigns?

My hypothesis is that in post-Soviet countries “new true history” or “recovered old true history” was used by new-old political elites as a substitute for the lacking ideology. There, history became a quasi-ideology. In Ukraine, after the evident decline of the Communist party in 1999 and 2002 elections and, in particular, in 2004–2010, history was used to divide society and to manipulate its electoral preferences. Each of Ukraine’s three electoral macro-regions – West, Center, and Southeast – was shaped by the different historical experiences and myth-memories. According to Harvard professor Timothy Colton (2010), “[Ukraine’s] political multi-culture at the national level has rested on a foundation consisting to a considerable extent of political monocultures at the sub-national level.”