Fighting Fences vs Fighting Monuments: Politics of Memory and Protest Mobilization in Ukraine

This article explores anti-Communist politics of memory “from below” during the last years of Viktor Yushchenko's presidency in Ukraine. Using original protest events data I compare dynamics, repertoire, political actors, and targets of politics of memory protests with protests against illegal constructions privatizing urban public space, as one of the most frequent social-economic protest issues, in the context of the split between institutionalized and non-institutionalized “civil society.” Focusing analysis on attacks against Soviet monuments, I show how state anti-Communist politics of memory provided legitimacy for the far right mobilization. The dynamics of the most successful grassroots anti-construction initiatives, “Save Old Kyiv,” shows how tightly social-economic protests might be interwoven with the politics of memory, although with destructive consequences for the success of the former.