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Ukraine As long as the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, the commemoration and official historical interpretation followed the pattern set by Moscow. The principal narrative was that of the victory in the "Great Patriotic War". Since the entire Ukraine was occupied during the War, the story of the Resistance was stressed perhaps even more than in the Russian part of the Soviet Union. |
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A minor national deviation from the Soviet model could be seen in the choice of Ukrainian theatres of war that were emphasized. It was no accident that one of the most popular stage plays in the 1960s was Vadim Sobko's "Kievskaja tetrad'" (Kiev Notebook), which deals with a legendary group of Kiev partisans in the Resistance. In the scenery designed by David Borovskij, the stage designer of the famous Taganka Theatre in Moscow, dead trees surrounding the hiding place of the partisans symbolize their hopeless situation. |
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Following the prescribed politics of memory, the opera "Molodaja gvardija" (The Young Guard) was performed in Kiev and many other cities of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. Yury Meytus composed it after the eponymous novel by Aleksandr Fedeev. The novel is based on actual occurrences in the War, the heroic resistance struggle of a group of Komsomolists in the city of Krasnodon in the Donets Basin. This "Young Guard" succeeds in carrying out a number of sabotage acts in the novel. They are not afraid to engage in armed conflict and execute collaborators. But they are betrayed and finally captured by the Germans, tortured and executed. After the liberation of the Ukraine the Red Army finds their bodies in a mass grave. The young martyrs are posthumously distinguished as "Heroes of the Soviet Union". The model for the stage design of the 1947 Kiev State Opera performance shows a group of young fighters before a flaming red background, storming up a slope with waving flag in hand, set for their noble objective and ready to make any sacrifice. |
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