Ithaca College

Professor Wasyliw presented his paper, "The Failure of Cultural Sovietization in the Ukrainian Village of the 1920s: Prelude to Collectivization and the Holodomor" on May 8, 2021. 

The ASN Annual World Convention was held May 5-8, 2021.  Professor Wasyliw presented as part of a panel entitled "Narrated Identities and Oral Histories Across Time and Space." 

Professor Wasyliw's paper, "The Failure of Cultural Sovietization in the Ukrainian Village of the 1920s: Prelude to Collectivization and the Holodomor," presents historical interpretive approaches that offer an evaluation of the impact of soviet cultural policies on the everyday life and values of Soviet Ukrainian villages, or a history from the perspective of villagers.  The Annales school approach offers a broader interpretive approach that considers all aspects of society and assesses village mentalities.  This offers a paradigm which evaluates the details of Ukrainian village everyday life and popular consciousness.  Subaltern studies also offer a parallel interpretive guidepost in offering narratives of non-elites as agents of change.  This study concludes with an assessment of cultural values and worldviews of Ukrainian villagers in 1928 on the cusp of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan to radically transform the Soviet Ukrainian countryside.  The final interpretive assessment considers Benedict Anderson’s conceptualization of “imagined communities” to assess competing Soviet, Ukrainian national, local village and other competing identities and values of Soviet Ukrainian villages and the broader interpretive approach of historian Lynne Viola and ethnographic studies modeled by the work of Natalie Kononenko and Valentyna Borysenko. 

Read more about his panel here.