Communist origamis: an analysis of the urban decommunization process in Kharkiv (UA)

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Communist origamis

An analysis of the urban decommunization process in Kharkiv (UA)

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Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for

Master of Science (Research) in Social Sciences

Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Amsterdam

Cescon Fabio 11796766 May, 2020

Supervisor: dr. Olga Sezneva

Second Reader: dr. Kobe de Keere

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https://www.unian.net/politics/10573059-u-zelenskogo-prokommentirovali-snos-byusta-zhukovu-v-harkove-neprodumannaya-gumanitarnaya-politika.html, retrieved on 25/04/2020. The picture portrays a woman standing in front of the destroyed statue of Zhukov in Kharkiv. All the other pictures in the thesis were taken by the author.

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To Olga, for having taken the dust out of my brain, To Joris, for the love and the irreparable lacerations,

To Dana, for having given me shelter, when I did not have a roof,

To the dear friends of mine, who did not make it, Crippled by poverty, uncertainty and instability;

I caress you.

To the broken hopes of youth,

To rage,

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Abstract

In Kharkiv (UA), communism is not singular, rather it is multiple. In this borderland city with a contested urbanity, multiple tactics to craft national belonging are at stake. As the urban decommunization process is unfolding, actors engage with Soviet urban materials, knitting on them competing national configurations. This process followed the 2014 revolution in the country, during which the newly elected president Poroshenko (2014-2019) outlawed any public representation of official Soviet Union heraldry. Previously banal, unremarked urban elements became politicized, grabbing attention and demanding political action. In order to explore the “communist assemblages” taking shape in the country, I spent three months doing fieldwork in the Eastern-Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where I participated to 3 ultra-nationalist public events, conducted 21 semi-structured interviews, using photo elicitation technique, and taking part in 7 guided tours organized by my interlocutors. These techniques allowed me to analyze how different groups defined and interacted with the city’s Soviet elements. Arguing against a univocal conception of the Nation, I show how the latter is shaped through contingent semiotic processes stemming from peculiar urban encounters. Through these encounters, actors weave together heterogeneous histories, sites, and materialities letting emerge multiple relational conceptions of both Ukraine and the Soviet Union. By showing how particular urban elements index political commitments, I follow how material elements are gathered together in order to face the city’s overabundant Soviet-ness. I propose the concept of “origami” to make sense of this semiotically charged transformative process in order to look at how actors craft temporal belongings and promote borders through the materiality at their disposal.

Key words

Post-Maidan Ukraine; communist assemblage; materiality; urban conflict; temporality; Post-Soviet transformation; decommunization

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Foreword

“…the past enters the present not as legacy, but as novel adaptation”

(Burawoy & Verdery 1999: 4).

My thesis is about time, but not metaphysical time. It is about material time; a time that is crafted, aligned, destroyed and reconfigured. It is about the present time; it is about historical time that gets created in the present. It is about the creation of the historical present time as it emerges through buildings, statues, monuments and decorations. My thesis is about a contested time, a claimed time, a destroyed time, a naturalized time. It is about positioning the splinters of time together, making them collaborate or opening the conflicts between them. It is about the material construction of histories, heritages and presents.

This time is not any time, it is a specific one, notably a communist time, crumbling in front of a new National configuration. A time that emerges from the reconfigurations of material representations of communism. The latter, moreover, is not any communism, but a specific one. It is an urban post-Soviet communism, negotiated in the city of Kharkiv, in Eastern Ukraine. It is a communism that is sticky (Ahmed, 2004); it sticks to the buildings, statues and people that hold it. It is a communism that needs to be dealt with, a communism that is made illegal, local, obsolete. It is a communism that is not unitary, nor univocal; it is a communism that is yet to be settled, which needs to be framed.

My thesis is about an urban materiality that boils and the practices that manage its movements. It is about various reconfigurations of communism emerging in the contingency of the Ukrainian conflict and its decommunization policy. It is about the vivacity of urban materials and their interactions with local actors, who fashion these buildings, statues and decorations while being fashioned by them. It is about folding times into material objects, a socio-material origami allowing different shapes to take form, through the paper, the hands and the pleats. These origamis, however, are not only new, contingent and unstable; rather, they also can be solidified and maintained in their form for a longer period of time. The possibility that something holds together (Haraway, 2016) and does not crumble, the practices that are associated with these possibilities and the emerging elements that come out of it will be the fil rouge that goes through my thesis.

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This angle of inquiry stems from the omnipresence of Soviet urban elements in my field2, which were presented as either sources of pride, interest, “peculiarities” [osobennosti] of the city; either as shameful, unlawful, anti-human [anti-chelovecheskij], cancerous elements of the city. Different types of urban objects [statues, monuments, façades’ decorations, buildings themselves] were mobilized when discussing different aspects of the city’s “Sovietness”. The military character of some of these elements, for instance, is sometimes highlighted in order to articulate the potential danger or the animosity [meaning their existence as radical enemies of the Nation] at is present in communist elements. On the other hand, the stylistic value of a composition with communist elements, for instance, is sometimes put forward in order to justify their presence despite their potential shameful Sovietness. These semiotic changes [i.e. the changing of meanings, references and alignments] and reconfigurations are taking place in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, after the implementation of decommunization laws and the symbolic negotiations that it entailed, in the midst of the War in Donbass (2014-present) and the Russian occupation of the Crimean Peninsula (March 2014).

I will attend to the pleats that my informants are folding through and on Soviet urban objects in order to understand not only how these origamis are crafted; but also, how they are used to create roots from some cuttings and to prune some other genealogical possibilities. These origamis are folded through different assemblages, aligning various meanings, places and histories together letting emerge multiple communisms.

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2.2 Legendary communism ... 73 2.3 Jurassic Communism ... 80 2.4 Conclusion ... 86 3. EUROPEAN DESIRES ... 87 3.1 Incomplete decommunization ... 88 a. Decommunized fantasies ... 89 b. Dull communism ... 93 3.2 Comic communism... 98 3.3 Capitalist communism ... 102 3.4 Conclusion ... 106 CONCLUSION ... 108

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INTRODUCTION

Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, has been the subject of intense journalistic work in the recent years, due to its struggles and efforts surrounding its recent decommunization3. As the country in its entirety, the city in question had to implement decommunization laws passed by the

Verkhovna Rada4 which outlawed communist symbols in Ukrainian public settings (2015)5. This decision followed the Revolution of Dignity (2014), a popular uprising that condemned President Yanukovich’s neo-Soviet political strategies and demanded a more Europhile trajectory for the Nation6. This uprising targeted Lenin statues in public squares, that were dragged within the political unrest through various practices, catalyzing the discontent of the protesters against the President, his neo-Soviet rule and the “communist stagnation” in which the country had been bathing (Zhurzhenko, 2017). After Yanukovich’s departure from power, a different take on the country’s communist past has been put forward in which urban depictions of Soviet nationhood played a central role, becoming a proxy for the decommunization of the nation and of its cities. Once the law was approved, city councils started to work to comply to the new crafting of the city, evaluating and listing the elements that were assumed not to be in compliance with the new “decommunist” urban publicity5. The first official attempt to decommunize the city entailed a series of tricks in order to superficially change the reference of some elements of the communist heritage (mainly denominations of metro stations or of neighborhoods) in order to preserve intact the allusion to communism7. After the interventions of regional powers, however, efforts were made, toponomastic was changed and monuments were demolished in order to completely decommunize the city.

Since its independence, Ukraine started to construct its national reconstitution by managing, more or less coherently, its recent Soviet past (Zhurzhenko, 2015). The process of Ukrainian decommunization ties in with the general process of National reconfiguration that the country underwent since its Independence (1991); however, this last re-management arises in extra-ordinary times, notably during the country’s open conflict with the Russian Federation. This most recent

3_{I define decommunization as the process that has been going on in Ukraine (as well as other former socialist}

countries) in order to distance the Nation-state from the communist past. This process includes law projects, urban changes, adaptations of former Soviet festivities to new ones, etc. Specifically, my research will focus on the process of decommunization that followed the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine.

4_{Ukraine’s federal government.}

5_{https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2015/05/15/7068057/}

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine/kiev-protesters-gather-eu-dangles-aid-promise-idUSBRE9BA04420131212

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wave of decommunization efforts8 builds on the precedent struggles of national building, contributing to the re-formation of the past, which Ukraine is assessing in its post-Soviet phase. Notably, in the ambiguous identity of Kharkiv, whose belonging to the Nation state has recently been contested, even through armed mobilizations, the emergence of the State takes a peculiar turn. This decommunization process coincides, then, with the reorientation of a New Nation in geopolitical terms.

Nevertheless, these attempts at the re-organization of the national recent past are not simply and smoothly adopted in Ukrainian localities. Kharkiv, for instance, adapted awkwardly to this “New Ukraine”, with various stake-holders actively engaging, positively or negatively, with the (un)official implementation of the process. The latter deals with representation of the former hegemonic power, (i.e. the Soviet Union) which does not hold any formal political power; however, it is still effectively present through its material objects, which linger in their broken hegemony. As it lingers in its material and semiotic fragmentation, actors intervene in order to manage creatively the material remnants of the previous hegemonic power. This cultural and material fragmentation opens a window of opportunity for multiple reconfigurations of meanings, weaved on the broken-ness of the Soviet Union. For instance, activists dissatisfied with the process, continued the process of decommunization by toppling busts of Soviet figures or by setting up a web platform to prompt the decommunization effort9. Other groups, on the other hand, have been operating in the city to preserve and show (notably to tourists) the communist remnants of the city, positively evaluating the “post-Soviet urban experience” of Kharkiv. With the cultural totality of the former power gone to pieces, actors hasten to gather them in various ways, mobilizing them to build conceptions of the New Ukraine. While managing these fragments, actors are building on them, creating various conceptions of the Nation-that-was. The plethora of activities that has been accompanying the city's decommunization sheds light on the various and heterogeneous ways in which “urban communism” is being tackled during the process. The latter provokes different takes on the concrete communist remnants of the city, which different groups assemble differently depending on their use of the city. It is, in fact, out of heterogeneous urban desires and semiotic processes to craft and “impose” a (genealogical) image of the city that what I call “communist origamis” form and act, which I will later explain. In fact, these differing practices signal the presence of differing communisms related to a vision of the Nation’s origins its normative destination and its central figures. By acting on the communist heritage, actors craft varying urban temporalities, through which oppositional assembled

8_{Ukraine experienced a first wave of public decommunization in its Western regions right after its independence. For}

more details, see the section “History of Decommunization”.

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histories reverberate. Because of the depictions being at the center of the controversial desired future of the city, the process of building on them (including defining them as communist or not, to be decommunized or not, past or future, and so on) reveals, at the same time, the absence of a monolithic conception of “Soviet-ness”; it shows the presence of differing urban material communisms that the decommunization process is unfolding in its brittle material remnants. The latter semiotically restructured the city’s material communism, which becomes the center of practices that are productive of differing temporal assemblages; the latter, in turn, define the urban communism of the city itself. Practices of definition, destruction, preservation collaborate in the knitting together of various material communist remnants, that are allegedly wrapped together in order to produce the desired city's image as well as its national belonging. In fact, the management of these temporal splinters does not entail solely the configuration of the national recent past; rather, it tackles various Nations, re-worked through Soviet urbanity itself. This re-working, moreover, takes place in the general scarcity of urban depictions of Ukrainian nationhood in Kharkiv; this material unequal distribution increases the unsure emergence of the New Ukraine; how are actors, then, crafting new National configurations in the process of urban decommunization? How are Soviet-era urban objects managed to create national configurations?

My thesis will explore how differing groups (notably: EGEA Kharkiv, Dekomunizatsiya UA, Save Kharkiv, Frajkor, Order and Tradition) are producing differing temporal conceptions of the communist heritage of the city in order to craft various communisms, complying to their desired genealogy of Kharkiv (for instance, is it a (post-) Soviet city, a Ukrainian city or a fighting city?). This process takes an even higher stance in light of Kharkiv’s position during the recent conflict. The city risked to become the third separatist territory of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian war, as it was briefly occupied by pro-Russian forces10. The need to attach Kharkiv to the broader National territory, thus, acquires a heightened status, due to its uncertain belonging, framed by my interlocutors as a “struggle for modernity”. The peculiar history of the city, moreover, influences the temporal knitting at place; former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, Kharkiv is a historically Russian-speaking Ukrainian city, where Russophile (geo)politics have been more popular than in other parts of the country11. This border city has a historically ambiguous belonging and affiliation to Kyiv, a status which comes into place in this national reconfiguration.

10_{https://carnegieeurope.eu/2018/09/12/how-eastern-ukraine-is-adapting-and-surviving-case-of-kharkiv-pub-77216} 11_{http://od.org.ua/en/ выбор-харькова-как-регион-голосовал-в-i/}

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I will follow the ways in which actors compose temporal conceptions of architectural and aesthetic urban objects, notably in relation to the Soviet past; it is my hypothesis that by doing so actors engage in a practical creation of National genealogy through urban manifestations. They define and craft pasts and futures of the city, building on the very present in which they find themselves through the interaction with the material environment. Differing publics engage with the urban environment to concretize their differing temporal conceptions onto the urban environment itself.

I will use this case-study to investigate urban communism as an assemblage that knits together a variety of heterogeneous elements – such as the material objects themselves (statues, busts, mosaics, building’s façades, etc.), genealogical conceptions of the city (where does it come from, where is it now, where will it go, etc.), governmental measures (at different levels both national, provincial and local) and participation of local people with the heritage at stake. As it develops on the surface of Soviet fragments, this assemblage emerges within the process of decommunization, as it participates in the anxieties and hopes of the New Ukraine. As actors hold different splinters of “rusted communism”, they construct different conceptions of the Nation; these conceptions are sewed together with temporal threads (M’charek, 2010), by which desired futures of the city are expressed, mobilizing the recent communist past. For instance, actors criticize the worn-out façades of Soviet houses as hinting to the failure of the socialist modernization project; their current bad state is conceived as an innate characteristic, ascribed to their historical origin. They are Soviet, thus, ruined. This material paleness is, then, opposed to the kaleidoscopic brightness of capitalism, a desired future absent on these material objects, but present in the New “modern” Ukraine – at least hopefully.

The urban communist assemblage, thus, finds itself at the center of a “building process”, driven by a desire of crafting a shared urban genealogy. Therefore, I will be researching temporal (hi)stories – and how interactions with material artifacts enact differing past-presents in order to explore how they affect and inform the constructions of differing publicities in the post-communist city; how are actors on the ground knitting the ambiguous past-present of the city? What future are they trying to craft? Through what projects are they struggling to implement it?

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Methodology

1. Setting and population

At the beginning of my fieldwork in Kharkiv two unexpected things happened. Firstly, the night of my arrival, the statue of Zhukov12 that was still standing in the city, was destroyed by some nationalist organizations. That provided a very interesting social atmosphere during my stay, as the debate around the legitimacy of communist elements was lit up again. Secondly, I contacted the informants that I had previously spoken with on Facebook: the representative of “EGEA Kharkiv”13 (English in the original) and one of the representatives of “Decommunize Kharkiv”14(English in the original)15; I chose these two groups as they provided two opposite positions with respect to Soviet cultural elements, respectively the will to preserve and promote them and the will to destroy them. They quickly reacted to my messages and I was able to organize (in)formal meetings with them during the first days of my stay. Unexpectedly, however, they informed about the smallness and/or inactivity of their groups. EGEA Kharkiv’s members were on holiday at that time; Decommunize Kharkiv, on the other hand, was composed of only 4 members. Because of these reasons, I re-assessed my approach and started looking for new groups to integrate. I used a snow-balling technique to gather my informants, which gave me access to two meta-groups: nationalists and post-Maidan students (notably people who were 13/14 during the revolution).

a. Nationalists

One group was composed by regular visitors of a nationalist military tent, which stood in Freedom Square, Kharkiv’s biggest square. The tent was put on at the beginning of the conflict to collect goods for the volunteers at the front. Recognizing the Bandera flag16 on top, I figured that under this tent would collect a number of various (ultra-) nationalist volunteers, who could have

12_{Zhukov was a Soviet Marshal, who became a Soviet national hero, within one of the founding myths of the Soviet} Union: the victory of communism over fascism in WWII. It is often associated with Soviet patriotism; some nationalist activists in Kharkiv as they asked on Facebook to spot the philo-Russians celebrating Victory Day during the

quarantine, jokingly put an image of Zhukov next to a Saint George Ribbon, symbol of Russian nationalism. The symbolic charge of the figure, thus, is poignant in the disputed territory of Kharkiv.

https://www.facebook.com/svitanokkh/photos/a.498054737257146/991930764536205/?type=3&theater, retrieved 25/04/2020.

13_{EGEA Kharkiv is a local group of a European network of geography students.}

14_{Decommunize Kharkiv (now Dekommunizatsiya UA) is an civic initiative born out of the desire to fully implement}

the decommunization process.

15_{The group during fieldwork change name and became Decommunize UA.}

16_{Stepan Bandera is a controversial figure in Ukrainian history, on the edge of Nazi collaborator and National fighter.}

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been emotionally attached to the communist objects of the city. I approached them and I was confirmed in my presupposition. The access to the tent was not particularly difficult, which allowed me to visit them several times. There was a stable group of older men and an adolescent boy; other members of other age groups were not stable, but changing all the time. I had various discussions with them about the Soviet Union, current Ukrainian politics and local post-Soviet issues (like Zhukov’s statue). However, it was more difficult to convince them to have a one-on-one interview; only one older man agreed to it.

The tent is composed not only by the object itself but also by a plethora of signs, political cartoons, pictures, explanations, posters, writings, photos going from the Kharkiv’s Maidan revolution to victims of the conflict in Donbass. These elements are gathered around the tent and positioned on wooden structures at eye-level that were frequently looked at by pedestrians.

Some events were organized by the “tent” and one of them took place behind it. These events were political in nature; I participated in two of them: one was a rally of (what seemed like) various political candidates for the upcoming elections; the other was a demonstration in front of the city council against the re-establishment of Zhukov’s statue, the re-nomination of a previously decommunized street back to its “communist” denomination and the suppression of the tent itself.

During an excursion to show me their work, the leader of Decommunize Kharkiv informed me about a local initiative called “Save Kharkiv” (English in the original), that he described as an organization that worked for the preservation of ancient, pre-revolutionary houses in Kharkiv. I succeeded in contacting them and being introduced by several of its members. They were mostly well-educated people (architects, lawyers, journalists) in their 40s/50s. I interviewed them and participated in one of their demonstrations.

While interviewing them, they put me in contact with other members linked with the decommunization process of Kharkiv, that they thought I had to “absolutely talk with”. These people were: a local historian that provides city-tours of the local “red terror”, a museum collaborator that worked with decommunization and the Soviet past of the city, the main political actor behind the local concrete actuation of the decommunization process. Thanks to these contacts I was also invited to two interesting events (although they were completely in Ukrainian): a film projection at the museum and a day-long conference about the importance of Ukrainian language and culture at the local “Maidan organization center”. These two events were done in collaboration with a pro-Maidan organization based in Kyiv with members that worked in the National Institute of Memory; these members did not grant me an interview. I participated in various conferences organized by these latter group.

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b. Post-Maidan students

When the members of EGEA came back from holiday, I started to interview them and propose them to show me some of the “most communist elements of the city”. This request was unsuccessful as they were confused about what I meant with that; then, I created a stock of pictures of Soviet elements of the city that I photographed and asked them their impressions about it (I went on using this technique for all of my interviews). Moreover, one member organized an excursion for me in one of the districts of the city. These people (in their early 20s) were very excited about being interviewed and spread the voice about this experience. Because of this, I had people that wrote me on Telegram directly to “help [me] with [my] diploma”. These people were of the same age as the previous participants and provided similar responses to my questions.

c. The grandparents

A population group that was highly mentioned during my interviews was: “the grandmothers and grandfathers”. This population was depicted as being strongly in favor of the Soviet Union and as fighting against activists for the conservation of Soviet urban elements. I decided, then, to look for them and in order to find them I went to the park where the Zhukov’s statue stood, in one of the peripherical spalnie rajony. This population, however, was not very eager to talk to me, especially about these issues. They reacted very angrily even at questions like “do you think Zhukov should be standing here?”. Hence, I could collect various small-talks, brief interactions with these, prevalently, grannies and only one full interview with a man.

I conducted some observations in “Zhukov’s park” and registered the interactions that people had with the statue both when it was in ruins and when it was restored. Furthermore, I took part and observed an event that took place in front of Zhukov’s statue the day after its restauration. Thanks to this event, I was able to get in contact with two far-right organizations: “Order and Tradition” and “Fraikor”. I contacted them through Facebook and despite their initial doubts they granted me one interview each with the leaders of their organizations. The interview with Fraikor’s leader included an excursion that he prepared around the communist elements of the city. Later in August, they organized a march during “Ukraine’s Independence day”, that I took part in.

2. Data

My three main data gathering techniques were: in-depth semi-formal interviews, photo elicitation, observations.

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I conducted and registered around 21 interviews with all the members that I encountered under the scope of the research. All the interviews were in Russian, with the exclusion of three of them. They lasted around 1/1h30 and were divided into three main areas: the informants’ relationship to the Soviet past, with a focus on historical figures (mainly Lenin, Zhukov and Gagarin); their relationship with the decommunization process and their justification of it; their hopes and visions of the future of the city. The questions were divided as follows:

-the first set of questions were done in order to understand how actors would define qualitatively the Soviet Union and how they would negotiate the historico-cultural limits of Ukraine. -The second set of questions relates to the justificatory process of the previously sketched limits through the case-study of the decommunization process.

-The third part of the interview tries to understand the position of the cultural elements that emerged and were discussed during the interview within the informants’ future vision of the city. -Moreover, through the latter part I tried to investigate the legitimization practices that were put forward by various informants to condemn or to praise elements related to the Soviet Union.

Assessment of interviews

The quality of the interviews was dependent on informants’ ages, roles, institutional belongings as well as their definition of myself. In the case of EGEA, for instance, the fact that they perceived me sometimes as a backpacker student from Europe and sometimes as a researcher from the Netherlands influenced the way in which they would participate in the interviews. Sometimes my informants were hiding behind culturalist or essentialized personas or participated to the interviews in a very rigid way. The latter case includes members of more structured organizations, more navigated public speakers that were used to being interviewed by journalists and were able to re-propose a ready-made discourse. The more experienced, older and higher in the social hierarchy, the more difficult it was to get out “spontaneous” information or to be in control of the interview. However, I tried to counterbalance these defense techniques by addressing them personally and asking them their own responses; the outcome was heterogeneous: sometimes I would get the same response, or I would be accused or wanting to trick them in saying something subjective on an objective matter; sometimes they would re-assert the standard response of their organization. This questioning, however, allowed for the emergence of fuzziness and confusion in their scripts. This made it possible to have a glimpse on less standardized and “external” information (like for instance their bodily responses to some issues); moreover, this fuzziness granted the possibility of reflecting together to the point that they started to ask me what I would think about the subject. Even though I followed a list of questions, I allowed myself to diverge from them whenever possible and to follow my informants; following them I tried to challenge their visions, the rigidity

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of their argumentations, present them with possible contradictions of their discourse and implicitly asking them to explain the holes in their argumentations. This created some frictions during my interviews, with informants getting frustrated and even angry; to balance this out I made sure to sooth them by reassuring them in the legitimacy of their positions and appearing extremely interested about their explanations.

Through in-depth interviews, then, I was able to collect both standardized discourses about Soviet cultural objects and memory as well as sparks of contradictions within the discourses. Some of these standardized scripts narrated the awakening of the Nation through the Euromaidan Revolution (echoing Poroshenko’s rhetoric), some of them would describe the annihilation of Ukraine during the Soviet Union (proposing a common “ultra-nationalist” vision with Bandera at its center), some others would put forward a culturalist post-soviet image (reminiscent of the content put forward by Vera Serduchka, Little Big, Leningrad, etc17). I made sure to bite up the fixed nature of these scripts by poking my informants with provocations, questions and invocations of their personal outlooks.

b. Photo elicitation

This biting was continued through the use of the photo elicitation technique, that I performed systematically right after the end of my interviews. I used photos that I personally took in Kharkiv with my phone and showed them through my phone. The photo used were both ordinary and spectacular; that means that some of them were pictures of ordinary elements of the city with communist/Soviet elements on it, whereas some others were elements that I knew were controversial (i.e. the destroyed statue of Zhukov). My intention was to get a deeper understanding of the definition processes that actors would put in place; moreover, that would make me understand what they would link with the discourse that they displayed during the interviews (for instance, are decorative stars on buildings related to the communism that is spoiling the city/country or not? Is the hammer and sickle as bad as depictions of Lenin?)

By using this technique, I could get more emotional responses to the objects at stake, opening up a room for discussing their personal relations to particular Soviet cultural objects. Thanks to this, I could get more precise and more personal accounts of the evaluation processes of various objects as well as understanding the (ir)relevance of some of the objects. The latter, moreover, enabled me to question them even more about what makes an element Soviet or what makes an element up for decommunizations. My presupposition was that seeing these images would induct the memory of the interactions with the cultural object depicted in the photo, thus allowing me to understand what kind of relation exist with different objects. Moreover, when confronted with the photos, my

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informants felt the need to explain the objects, triggering a consequent justification for the need of its decommunization (or preservation). Furthermore, this confrontation produced different reactions at the sight of different objects, which, amongst other elements, provides a further source of analysis and different accounts of communist cultural elements than the ones presented in the interview.

c. Observations

I attended several political events organized by local (ultra-)nationalists. Initially my intention was to find new possible actors to interview but I soon realized that it was very unlikely for me to establish a contact during these rallies. I started, then, to treat them as choreographed acts, in which my research questions were staged. In fact, these political events always focused on the Russo-Ukrainian relations and where always performed through Soviet urban objects. Moreover, the characters were all presents: the activists, the grannies, the police, the journalists and also the

titushki18.

These acts correspond to the performance of the standardized discourse put forward by nationalist organizations; these public demonstrations are the hyperbolic implementation of their visions and their values with respect to the decommunization question. However, they are not merely redundant or confirming the data of the interviews. On the contrary they differ from the discourses that are reproduced during the interviews insofar as they exceed the discourse itself. I wrote down on my phone or on a notebook my observations while the events took place, interrupting my activity only to take pictures or videos of the events.

After the end of the events, I would record general and personal impressions about them. This three-fold rendering of my participation at these events makes it possible not only to analyze my observations, but also to study the photos that were taken. These data, hence, allow to extrapolate the autonomous and original mobilizations of various groups around Soviet cultural elements. In fact, the choreography itself is a rich source of information as it sheds light on the original ways in which these groups want to be seen in the public sphere and how they want to be seen interacting with the Soviet references of the city.

3. Secondary Data

In the process of data-gathering I was invited to 7 different excursions throughout the city. They were organized around Soviet elements of the city to show different phenomena: the process of decommunization, Soviet urban projects, the Soviet monuments of the city. I used these excursions

18_{Titushki is a name that became popular in Ukraine after the Euromaidan. It refers to hooligans being payed to scare} away political adversaries.

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as enhanced interviews during which I was able to gather my informants’ views on the Soviet past, the decommunization process and the future of the city, as well as their impressions about precise monuments that they chose themselves. In fact, people selected a specific set of Soviet cultural objects to present me a specific vision of the Soviet Union, which I balanced with continuous questions about their choices and with the imposition of other elements to be included in the excursions. This data provides an insight in the specific type of urban elements that are considered as valuable for these people. Finally, the bodily and emotional responses of my informants during the excursions can provide further elements of analysis concerning the affected relationship with communist public elements.

The group EGEA Kharkiv produced multimedia content including both organizational plans and promotional videos. This set of data allows for the analysis of dramatized depiction of the groups themselves and their views. They represent the ways in which they think it is the more appropriate for them and for their audience to appear. It is an interesting depiction as it finds itself between their own image of themselves, their image of the ideal public, their representation of their image by their imaged public and possibly their image of their enemies.

4. Coding

I used Atlas.ti to code my fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews. I coded them in vivo using various concepts that I developed through by working on them during my fieldwork. As I went through them, I was able to test them with the definitive material I collected. Such continuous dialogue with my data allowed me to refine my conceptualization around my research problem. This more systematic coding was sided with a less canonical approach, by following the stream of my thoughts around my fieldwork, plunging into them, trying to follow the assemblages that might have arisen from my fieldnotes (Mazzei, 2014). Mazzei underlines the importance of writing “difractionally”, namely to let the material make new connections (2014). The dialogue between this double approach allowed me to work systematically through my data while keeping a gap in order to allow for possibly surprising connections to arise to the surface.

5. Terminogy

Throughout this paper I use interchangeably the notion of Soviet and communist elements. This decision stems from the official language provided by the Ukrainian government. It is through the decommunization laws that public depictions of Soviet nationhood are outlawed. Only one of my informants protested to my linguistic choice, pointing to the fact that the Soviet Union never

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implemented communism de facto. However, the majority of my informants also referred interchangeably to communism and Soviet Union.

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Framing and literature review

1. Liminal histories

The city of Kharkiv occupies a peculiar political geography; located close to the border with the Russian Federation, the city’s connections to its neighbors are both cultural and social. Kharkiv’s population is characterized by a Russian-speaking majority19, extending their ties beyond the national borders. Many of my interlocutors pointed to this liminal identity referring to two main aspects: the extension of their parental ties and leisure activities in Russia (at least before the revolution). The Sovietization process started soon in the city, in order to proclaim the victory of the Bolshevik forces over the Nazi occupation (Hewryk, 1992). Soviet modernity started to be implemented, comprising the establishment of a socialist society through a Russian prism (Murawski, 2018). This was often implemented by population displacements and forced culturalization policies during Stalin’s years (Magosci, 1996). This history strongly resurged after the Orange revolution (2004-2005)20, which helped craft Ukraine as a post-genocidal society, victim of communist terrors (Zhurzhenko, 2017). However, this new identity does not stick homogeneously throughout the Ukrainian territory; on the contrary, some of its cities struggle to take up this new national configuration.

Ukraine’s status as a borderland country has been long explored (Brown 2004; Richardson 2008). Its neighborliness with the Russian Federation has been haunting Ukraine’s history and continues to reverberate in its post-Independence trajectory. The name of Ukraine is often related to its status as a borderland, tracing its origin to the dictum “U Krainj”, meaning “at the border”. The territories which comprehend contemporary Ukraine have been long disputed by various Empires, changing their status as parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. In the 18th century, Ukrainian history was marked by the Russian Imperial desires to enlarge its possessions in the European continent during the reign of Catherine II (Basilevski, 2016). Its liminal existence as a borderland was further marked by its official denominations during the Russian Empire, as Little Russia, Southern Russia, New Russia. The Western part of Ukraine was one of the Red revolutionary movement and Kharkiv quickly became the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1919), even before the official formation of the Soviet Union

19_{For more information, see: http://www.ucipr.org.ua/publicdocs/RussophoneIdentity_EN.pdf}

20_{The revolution was a general uprising against national corruption and election’s scandals. More information in the}

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(Magocsi, 1996). The newly founded State emerged in opposition to the Ukrainian People’s Republic, with Kyiv as its capital. The Western part of today’s Ukraine was integrated in Ukraine only after WWII with the Soviet Union’s endeavors in the battles in Eastern Europe. Through a centuries long experience of occupations by various empires, stretching its Western and Eastern parts towards different directions, contemporary Ukraine was delineated during its Soviet constitution as one of the 15 Republics comprising the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The geopolitical consequences of Cold War, which divided Europe into the Western and Eastern blocks influenced Ukraine’s position as a borderland, changing its place from the edge to the center of the communist block (Jones, 2017). Neighboring with USSR’s satellite states like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, the Westerner Republic of the Soviet Union found itself at the center of the passage of goods and people. In its Post-Soviet transition, however, Ukraine appeared on the threshold between empires again, as Hungary, Poland and Slovakia were quickly integrated in the European Union in 2004. Bulgaria and Romania followed in 2007, heightening the status of Ukraine as an in-between country, having lost its centrality in the former Eastern block21.

The tension that characterizes these recent geopolitical changes is echoed in the city of Kharkiv; the latter was the first capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, located in the Eastern part of the country, one hour by car from the Russian Federation. As the first capital of the Socialist Republic, the city underwent a thorough Sovietization, through the transformation of its built environment as a manifestation of the victory of the proletariat over the former occupying bourgeois powers (Hewryk, 1992). In the general fervor of the enthusiastic first modernism of the 30s, the capital city became the stage to experiment the grandiosity of socialist modernity, which implied not only social engineering, but also architectural endeavors. The tallest sky-scraper of the Soviet Union (and of Europe) was built in the city, Derzhprom, exemplifying the modernization abilities of the people living outside of capitalist exploitation; universities were built, mass-housing complexes saw the light, the city sprang in the name of socialist modernity(Hewryk, 1992). Socialist elements crowded the city, creating it as an example of the grandiose endeavors that Soviet power could provide for the socialist world to come. Throughout the socialist life of the city, various infrastructural projects were implemented, like metro stations for instance, always decorated with the heraldry of the Soviet power, including bas-reliefs of Lenin, hammers and sickles, socialist stars, packs of hay. The presence of this symbolism was ensured by the collaboration between Soviet powers and art institutes, which collaborated in order to encrust Soviet socialist heraldry in strategic public spots (Silina, 2015). An example of this collaboration is

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the creation of standardized statuary depictions of Lenin, based on his funeral mask (Yurchak, 2015). Public depictions of the Soviet leader were always molded on this basis and reproduced throughout the territory of the Soviet Union, including Kharkiv and the rest of Ukraine.

The Sovietization efforts are still clearly visible in the city, encompassing not only architectural styles like modernism and socialist realism, but also monuments of the protagonists of Soviet times, both personalized and anonymous22 and general Soviet heraldry (coats of arm, hammers and sickles). During my interview with a city’s public official, they proudly mentioned the specificity of Kharkiv as being the Ukrainian city with the uttermost presence of Soviet modernist architecture, attracting tourists from all over Ukraine. If architectural heritage is considered positively because of the economic and status benefits that it can bring to the city, its “Soviet industrialism” was considered as a plague by other informants. Mass-housing had the same destiny, often considered as an inadequate effort of a modernization process that did not hold its strength anymore. Fragmented, yet standing, the rusted, worn-out creations of the enthusiastic Soviet modernization are lingering in the city, complexifying the identity of Kharkiv. The overabundant Soviet-ness cramps the city in its own temporal understanding; if the city exists in an independent Ukraine which emerged against the Soviet Union, its built environment keeps, more or less coherent, the ties with the former power. If the Soviet Union does not bear any political strength anymore, its built environment is still ambiguously present in the city. This ambiguity is further enhanced by the post-Cold War European geopolitics, which transported the country to a new border condition. As the country stands between the European Union and the Russian Federation, Kharkiv’s built environment stands between its former national configuration (Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine) and the recent conflictual moves towards a European direction for the country, embodied in the Euromaidan struggles.

2. Like Hello?! We’re not in Soviet Union anymore!

The omnipresence of communist symbols is a trait that was either mentioned or confirmed by the majority of my informants during my fieldwork in Kharkiv. The decorations on buildings, the memorial plates, the statues were used to justify this omnipresence that was crowding Ukraine’s post-independence public space.

The omnipresence of Soviet elements, however, was still mentioned as a source of remarque, and sometimes discomfort, especially when referring to the Euromaidan and its consequent urban

22_{Personalized figures include Zhukov, Lenin, Maselskyi and other relevant Soviet politicians. Anonymous figures}

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decommunization; Oksana23, for instance, former member of EGEA Kharkiv when talking about the quantity of Soviet elements in the city firmly said: “Like, hello? We are not in Soviet Union anymore!”. Some ultra-nationalist organizations24 were also dissatisfied with the state of the process of decommunization and independently continued to dismantle and denounce depictions of Soviet Nationhood in Kharkiv’s public spaces. Public Soviet depictions were not officially tolerated anymore, or at least not to the same extent, as they came to represent a foreign presence, a lurking overabundant enemy. The quantity of these depictions was defined as infringing on the conception of an independent Ukraine, making them not only illegitimate, but also places of struggle around allegiance to an independent Ukrainian Nation; in the words of the nationalist activists25 that I interviewed, people in favor of the preservation of these elements were “anti-Ukrainian”, whereas the ones that were against them were real patriots26.

The legitimacy of these monuments, thus, is undergoing semiotic and material reconfigurations in post-Maidan Kharkiv, by practices of destruction, denunciation and linguistic transformation. Post-Soviet Ukraine is made antithetical with the presence of explicit Post-Soviet depictions of nationhood, as the latter is overabundant, visible, out of place and, most importantly anachronistic (or made so). As Oksana said, Ukraine is not Soviet anymore, a sentence that englobes the temporal ambiguity that she felt in her country and her city: the reference to the Soviet Union is lingering in the national definition, if not only in its negative dimension (Ukraine is not the Soviet Union). This negative definition refers to a temporal dimension, which acknowledges the presence, in its past form, of the Union as Ukraine becomes the absence of the Soviet Union. This ambiguity is reflected in the urban environment of Kharkiv, where Soviet decorations, insignia and heraldry continue to be highly present in the public space, even though my interlocutors informed me that I “should have seen how it was before [the decommunization process]! They were everywhere!!”

3. The scarcity of Ukrainian-ness

While Ukraine is not Soviet anymore, its current configurations are not yet clear. The fragments of the Soviet leap to modernization are still lingering in the Ukrainian city and the contours of the New Nation struggle to emerge. This material tension is better understood in the

23_{All the names of my informants have been anonymized.}

24_{Ultra-nationalist organization is the emic word used to describe extreme nationalist groups, sympathizers of Nazi}

heraldry, vocalizing the discontent with the Russian influence in the country. Other names include: ultra-right, fascists, nationalists (vs patriots).

25_{This group of people included people of different organizations, from violent para-military activists to self-defined}

patriots spreading nationalist ideas through cultural initiatives.

26_{Some of my informants expressed their doubts about people’s neutral interest in Soviet modernism. They told me}

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light of the politics of nationhood during the Soviet Union; the USSR recognized political legitimacy to the various ethnicities living in its territory, making it a pluri-ethnic state. However, particular ethnic identities were all subjugated to the ultimate civic Soviet one (Brubaker, 1994). The latter was characterized by a general and universal proletariat, who was, more often than not, Russian-speaking (Brandenberger, 2000). The power of the attachment to this Soviet identity has repercussions in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city with a Russian-speaking majority. As Soviet elements are still present, they continue to evoke an attachment to a particular conception of nationhood which clashes with the ethno-nationalist endeavors of the post-Maidan government (Shuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020). These clashes become visible in internal political conflicts with mayors fighting against decommunization policies. As some local politicians try to implement baroque expedients to not change the reference to the Soviet Union, national governments insist on the need to conform to new dispositions of public displays of nationhood27. This political struggle appears even more saliently as it unfolds in a material disparity between explicitly Soviet and Ukrainian built environments. Various nationalist activists vocalized Kharkiv’s lack of Ukrainian symbolism and the need to provide the city with its heroes. “Ukraine had a lot of heroes in its history, but in Kharkiv you only see Soviet representatives. The occupants of the country are glorified over the national one. Things need to change”. The change desired by Innokentin, an ultra-nationalist activist, however, clashes with the intentions of the city’s government, which makes sure to put back to their place every Soviet monument that anonymous nationalist activists dismantle.

The scarcity of material representations of Ukrainian-ness in favor of an overabundant Soviet-ness is stressed through the dispositions of various monuments. The statue of Kharkiv’s founder, for instance, a Cossack, one of the symbols of Ukrainian nationalism, is found at a cross-road at a very trafficked area. It is impossible for a big group of people to gather around it, without stopping normal circulation. Innokentin denounced this difficulty and compared it to the central placement of Lenin’s statue which stood at the center of Freedom Square. The statue’s position facilitated gatherings in front of it, making it easier to organize national demonstrations in the adjacent square. The centrality of the statue is so flagrant that activists gathered around it during the demonstration for the Orange Revolution. However, after Euromaidan the in-built hierarchical disposition started to be more and more disputed as it came to defy the configurations of the New Ukraine, asking for urban re-management.

27_{Notable is the long struggle around Zhukov’s bust in Kharkiv, which was destroyed several times but unknown}

activitists and put back into place every time. For an insight in the debate, see https://ren.tv/news/v-mire/425540-mer-kharkova-o-snose-biusta-zhukova-pora-vozvrashchatsia-s-maidanov-k-zdravomu-smyslu

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The geographical in-betweenness of Ukraine between the European Union and the Russian Federation is symbolically represented in the political struggles embedded in the Euromaidan. This double in-betweenness is enhanced by Kharkiv’s built environment, which stands between its former national configuration (Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic) and the recent conflictual moves towards a European direction for the country. Furthermore, at the beginning of the Euromaidan revolution, the city’s council was occupied and Pro-Russian fighters declared Kharkiv’s People’s Republic28. This brief political entity stood with the other two independentist regions of Ukraine against Kyiv, on their basis of their political and historical affiliation with Russia. In the midst of these conflicting affective political geographies, Kharkiv’s built environment is managed in various ways. These recent geopolitical transformations influenced Ukraine’s National contours; as a result, recent governments promoted a narrower conception of the Nation, leaning towards an ethnically exclusionary configuration (Zhuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020). This political drift encompasses urban environments as well, regulated with the pack of decommunization laws. However, Kharkiv lacks the material elements to found this radical transformation, as the fragments of Soviet modernity are still crowding them. What are the techniques that actors are mobilizing to manage this incongruence? How are people expressing what it means to be Ukrainian in the contradictory city of Kharkiv?

4. National crumbles

The national problem in Kharkiv becomes a very material one, as the Nation which is publicly displayed does not coincide with its new conceptions. Urban decommunization tackles not only Ukraine’s recent past, but also its previous national configuration, aligning it to a present desired route, marked by changed geopolitical affiliations. As highlighted by Kudaibergenova, in times of political transition, states undergo processes of traditionalization in order to consolidate power and create a more defined national identity (2017). She points out how in the case of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, official discourses around the legitimate, mythical social past of the Nation are mobilized to legitimize specific socio-political configurations. The aura of the constructed boundless past is strategically mobilized to guarantee desired political goals and stability. Specific cultural elements are proposed as exemplary, authentic traditions, which are then used to put forward an idea of national continuity stretching from a boundless, glorious State to the contemporary national configuration (Stephens, 2016). Influent groups struggle to impose their genealogical vision of the Nation as the hegemonic one, which will become the sanctioned

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delineation of National identity (Kudaibergenova, 2017). History is mobilized through political and cultural prisms to produce legitimizing discourses, whose factitious authenticity is mobilized as pristine, hiding its manufactured character. Discursive struggles over the Nation’s origin and its historicity are key elements in the understanding of the state’s stability (Hobsbawn and Ranger, 2012). Historical conceptions of the Nation are worked and reworked within legitimizing discourses of the political community; within this process, actors develop a legitimacy framed through specific configurations of temporal continuity, which, in turn, defines the state’s national community of reference.

The use of temporality in the construction of specific configurations of the Nation is not only manifested in the particularistic mobilizations of History; temporality is also mobilized normatively to craft divides, expressed through notions of backwardness and modernity. As explained by Butler, the latter presupposes a conception of linear time, which moves towards the concretization of a specific goal. She points out to the political nature of such gesture, notably the structuration of development on the basis of the set standard (Butler, 2008). By referring to a “non-modern practice”, official actors are creating a matrix of exclusion/inclusion in the political community. In the case of Kharkiv, for instance, defining people attached to Soviet monuments as lacking the ability to understand modern times buys into this logic. Disregarding these attachments does not merely create a normative distinction between subjectivities; rather, it delineates a normative temporal consideration, where Soviet-ness is valued negatively. Through this negative judgement, Soviet-ness is excluded from the community’s positive identification, hinting to a specific national configuration. If the discursive approach to the Nation let us see the crucial role and the processual role of temporality and historicity, it falls short in the case of Kharkiv’s paradoxical material composition. If normative national discourses are present (decommunization policies are emblematic in this case), they do not allow us to fully understand the situation on the ground. As the city overflows with Soviet-era elements (so much so that changing all of them is impossible without having to reconstruct its fundamental infrastructures) how do people interact with the normativity of their environments? How do they make use of these materials to make sense of the presented normativity? It is difficult to see how a solely discursive analysis would give us access to such information.

In his analysis of the “nationalization process” in post-Soviet states, Brubaker mentions language policies and citizenship legislation as drivers in the solidification of national communities (2011). Particularly, the author analyzes how Soviet national legacies influenced the current project, notably the construction of specific ethnic groups and territorial belonging for the mentioned groups. Cramped within these historical influences, the novel states adopt measures in order to

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create a more or less homogeneous Nation, favoring more or less ethno-national conceptions of the State over pluri-national models. By focusing on the nationalization process, the author deals with the state’s macro-level in its processual formation. Brubaker discusses the danger of such approach himself, highlighting how it risks to reify the Nation as an all-encompassing entity. He points, for instance, to the role that national statistics have in the creation of national categories (2004). He defies the conceptual use of Nation as an entity in favor of an analysis of Nation as a working category, mobilized by different actors. As such, he proposes a valuable technique against methodological nationalism, a recurrent bias in social sciences which takes the Nation as an all-encompassing level of analysis to understand society at large; the bias goes as follows: once the national level is explained, the rest will follow accordingly (Wimmer &Glick-Shiller, 2002). The reification of the Nation which the author allegedly contrasts, however, appears in his own papers through the lack of contextualization as well as the strong focus on the National institutional level. If he stresses the causal power of citizenship legislation combined with migration patterns29, he fails to address, for instance, the ways in which such desires of belonging arose; what makes someone decide to leave Latvia, the country where they lived all their lives? What makes someone long for a country they never lived in but which was allegedly built for their ethnos? Brubaker’s epistemological position fails to grant access to these queries, queries that moves us in our exploration of the contradictory national configurations of Kharkiv. Ukraine’s newly adopted legislations on language and history surely plays a role in the reconfigurations of the Nation; however, it leaves unanswered the reasons why this legislation was needed. Moreover, it would not shed light on the effects of such reconfigurations for actors, scrunched between normative discourses and their lived experience. Such approach would not grant access to peculiar dynamics happening on the ground, such as the destruction of a specific category of monuments within a national transformation, as it was the case in Euromaidan. By overseeing the material implications of national formation, these approaches deprive the Nation of its processual and unstable configuration, by conceiving it as a unidirectional process aimed at stabilization. As such, they fail to account for the ways in which national legitimation work by adapting to continuous normative temporal understandings of itself and of its historical place.

If stabilization is the aim of formal national institutions, the Nation does not exist merely through them, nor through the discourse that it produces to legitimize itself A crucial aspect of the Nation is its sheer materialization itself in its (public) territory. The Nation is produced through its banal material objects, like money and flags (Billig, 1995). Billig claims that the Nation’s

29_{He mobilizes the example of ethnically identified Russians, who migrated to the Russian Federation after the}

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legitimacy is based on a community, whose existence depends not only on the circulation of writing through different technologies, thereby creating imagined communities of belonging (Anderson, 1991); but also, on the circulation of everyday objects amongst individuals. The passing of objects from hands to hands bursts the symbolic contours of the Nation, thus strengthening its national community. The merit of Billig is to have taken seriously the ways in which everyday objects might partake in national configurations. However, the author seems to consider objects as closed reference of cultural meaning, failing to attend to the thickness of material objects. If flags, for instance, can be identified as national symbols, their semiotic existence is not univocal. A nation can mean different things; for instance, Italian flags in front of restaurants in the touristic center of Amsterdam might denote the high or bad quality of the place, depending on various factors, such as the cultural background of the visitors, their knowledge of food quality in massively touristified places, the exoticism that they ascribe to Italy, etc. The discursive and material takes on the Nation previously sketched leave out contestations as well as creative re-appropriations of macro national measures by actors positioned in specific locations. In Billig’s account, for instance, money and flags, although banal, they are quintessentially national; the possible ironic contestations or their semiotic transformations do not appear as a readily available possibility. These theories underline a unidirectional process, through which the national community is formed; however, they leave untouched the existence of the mentioned community, which arises as an epistemological unit of analysis rather than a social existing entity. They fail to analyze the extent to which these national processes exist de facto, preferring an analysis of the situation which dialectically passes from analytical categories to studied reality. They flesh out the macro mechanisms mobilized in national processes, proposing a static conception of the Nation, thus failing to understand the circulatory, contested ways in which it emerges. As I will show in this thesis, the Nation is not a self-standing entity, it does not pre-exist contingent enactments; on the contrary, it emerges in various and contingent ways through disparate agglomerations of entities performed, amongst others, at the urban level.

5. Relational Nations

Analyzing the Nation through its relational emergence defies possibilities of methodological nationalism as it does not presume its existence in epistemically strict boundaries; rather, it allows to observe how it appears in multiple ways through differing materials, combining international, urban, national, regional registers. These combinations are not only present through discursive or institutional manifestations; rather, they emerge through objects and their capacity to become something else. As analyzed by Latour, the politics of things – or Dingpolitik – is grounded in their

Communist origamis: an analysis of the urban decommunization process in Kharkiv (UA)