The Cultural Front in the War for Independence: Ukrainian Identity in Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Lora Tseytlin

The Birch Journal, Spring 2024, pp. 22-29.

Ukrainian national identity has historically been subject to Russian imperial aggression not only through military conquest, but also by means of fierce cultural warfare. In the 337 years during which Ukraine was subject to foreign rule, Russia enforced sixty separate prohibitions of the Ukrainian language in pursuit of forced Russification.1 Under the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, strict censorship of and degrading attitudes toward Ukrainian culture limited national writers, filmmakers, and artists to depictions of Ukrainian national culture as the realm of underdeveloped village life and folklore. Ukrainian artistic expression was deemed suitable only for light color or humor, unworthy of being considered high art. This systematic repression of dignified Ukrainian culture and forced imposition of a Russian view of Ukraine effectively functioned to represent Ukraine’s national character as undeserving of self-determination. Hence, for those in the Russian imperial center––as well as the Soviet peripheries and the rest of the world–– Ukrainians were represented as merely more rural and pitiful Russians: the so-called “Little Russians.” For much of its history, domi- nant cultural narratives have depicted the Ukrainian nation as nothing more than a backwards and ill-defined province rightfully belonging first to the Russian Empire, then subsequently to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin.

Film especially has long been weaponized by the Soviet Union to enforce its imperialistic cultural agenda, playing a particularly critical role in the representation and distribution of Ukrainian identity to both domestic and international audiences. Hence, after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Ukrainian filmmakers were presented with the opportunity to re-define what it means to be Ukrainian in the eyes of the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the imperial narrative of Ukraine as propagated by the Russian empire and the Soviet Union continues to influence certain recent film representations of modern Ukrainian national identity – perhaps in part due to the continued persistence of this imperial narrative in the Ukrainian collective consciousness. This imperial lens through which some modern Ukrainian filmmakers represent their national identity, although often touted as satire, is nonetheless occasionally ideologically aligned with existing Russian neo-colonial narratives. However, it is essential to note that many Ukrainian filmmakers in the past decade have become front-line defenders of Ukraine’s war effort on the cultural front due to their successful portrayals of Ukrainian identity as fiercely independent, profoundly distinct, and strongly unified––all while still addressing the inevitable complex- ities that result from of centuries of suppres- sion and Russification.