The Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine

Focusing on the study of schools, festivals, commemorative practices, and monuments, Catherine Wanner, an anthropologist and professor at Pennsylvania State University (USA), shows how Soviet-era narratives underwent transformations after the collapse of the Soviet Union to reflect a new Ukrainian-centric perspective. In the process of these transformations, we see how new histories are understood and interpreted “from below,” in society. The struggle to remember or forget has become particularly intense, reflecting regional differences and the persistence of cultural differences created by the Soviet regime. The book “The Burden of Dreams” is especially valuable in that it shows the multi-leveled nature of the difficult task of finding cultural unity that Ukraine faced after years of Soviet rule, which turned certain dreams into burdens.