Memory and Moral in Ukrainian Semi-Political Public Discourse

The politics of memory refers to the strategies political actors apply to make society remember, interpret or forget historical events in a particular way. One of the reasons why an already established country's memory regime could change is an experience of violent events, namely revolutions, and wars. One could consider memory regimes in change as a tool of "mental decolonization," which formerly oppressed countries could use to reveal and diminish the "epistemic violence" by producing knowledge within an ex-dependent country and its system of values and sense of modernity. However, transformations of memory regimes affected by violent events could bring new dangers and pose new moral questions to society and political entrepreneurs. To illustrate, this paper addresses the case of Ukraine and its changing memory regime that started with the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Political actors in the country, including politicians, governmental institutions, and civil society, offer different accounts of memory politics that may be appropriate for their country. One way is to establish a unified memory regime presupposing a monolithic narrative in which all the actors are either agreed with or do not have the will to politicize. Another way is to go for a pillarized memory regime allowing all memory actors to be political pluralists or abnegators who respect others` opinions and are engaged in non-politicized debates. This last, however, may seem dangerous to radical memory entrepreneurs who opt for deep decolonization with no compromises and no place for metropolitan imperial culture. The peculiarity of Russia as an empire and the lack of a scientific school to study post-Soviet decolonization and modernity complicate the memory regime's transformations. This paper aims to shed light on these processes at the intersection of memory politics, decolonization, and discursive practices by revealing how semi-political actors, who enjoy people`s trust, are embedding their accounts of the Ukrainian past to the general landscape of memory debates while appealing to the moral evaluation to legitimize new social practices they assume to be proper to rich the desired decolonization.