Politics of Memory in Latvia and Ukraine: Official Narratives and the Challenges of Counter-Memory

Abstract

This article provides a comparative analysis of the national cases of mnemopolitics of Latvia and Ukraine. The authors examine the historical politics of Ukraine and Latvia through the prism of two conceptual approaches - the “nationalizing” state of Rogers Brubaker and the “memory regimes” of Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik. The article demonstrates how two opposite narratives compete and coexist in both countries - the official national-centric and Soviet countermemory narratives.