‘Eternal Russian-Ukrainian friendship’ – a case study of how a political concept was memorialized and is dememorialized
Journal: AREI
Year: 2023

The article touches on a concept that was in the very essence of imagining relations between Ukraine and Russia: ‘The Friendship of People’. The historical imagination had a tangible impact on Russian politics, and no political concept has ever been so damaging for Ukraine as this one. This concept undermined Ukraine’s subjectivity and led to the ‘rewriting’ of Ukrainian history. Monuments dedicated to the ‘friendship’ of these two peoples reveal the centrality of this notion in Soviet politics