Soviet Ukraine - Laboratory and Battlefield of Modernity

• Date: July 3, 2025, 2:15 p.m.
• Location: University of Regensburg, Campus Sammelgebäude, Room 214
• Lecturer: Anna Veronika Wendland
• Location: University of Regensburg, Campus Sammelgebäude, Room 214
• Organizer: Chair of History of Southeast and Eastern Europe at the University of Regensburg, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg in cooperation with the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America in the Modern World” and the Center for Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies “Think Space Ukraine”, funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA)
• Language: German

The lecture is part of the research colloquium “History and Social Anthropology of Southeastern and Eastern Europe”. You can find the program of the colloquium under the link.

The history of Soviet Ukraine is one of the most controversial fields in Ukrainian historiography and public discourse. Hobsbawm's dictum of the 20th century as an “age of extremes” applies to the seven decades of Soviet rule over Ukraine, which included the Second World War and the German occupation, more than to almost any other country.

Between 1922 and 1991, the citizens of Soviet Ukraine not only experienced the horrors of forced collectivization, Stalinist mass terror, famine, genocide, war violence and ecological catastrophe, but also the first demarcation of “Ukrainian” borders on the maps of the Soviet Union and the world - and the rise of their Soviet republic to “secunda inter pares” in the domination of the Soviet Union in the post-war period of the Second World War. Alongside the catastrophes are cultural awakenings and avant-gardes, great hopes for the liberation of Ukraine from foreign rule and the liberation of Ukrainian women - and above all the long history of Ukrainian social mobilization from a peasant nation to an urbanized industrial society.

However, it was not only Ukrainian society and demographics that were turned upside down in the Soviet Union - Ukrainian landscapes were influenced too: collectivization and agribusiness, urban growth, heavy industry, hydropower and nuclear energy were imprinted on them with irreversible consequences. The environmental history of Soviet Ukraine can therefore also be written as a history of upheaval.

Ukrainians thus associated and still associate the Soviet era with highly ambivalent memories, which have also been shaped by the historical policies of post-Soviet Ukraine since 1991. Unlike in Russia, Ukrainian archives of the Soviet era are still accessible to researchers, which will transform them from a previously little-noticed periphery of Soviet Studies into a possible future center of research of the Soviet history through the counter-narrative of the periphery. For some years now, the view of Soviet Ukraine has been revised once again, because Ukrainians now perceive it through the prism of the new experience of violence in the Russian war of aggression, in which previous experiences of Russian-imperial violence against Ukrainian people, language and culture seem to be repeated.This does not make a sober historical assessment of the significance of Soviet Ukraine for Ukrainian nation-building easy.

The lecture is a discussion offer at an early stage of the project in which some theses are being tested. A lecture on the history of Soviet Ukraine is to be turned into a monograph along with online source modules. The project is guided by the idea of a double reversal of perspective - firstly, a view of the history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of its peripheries, and secondly, a view of Ukraine by a non-Ukrainian author who perceives some aspects of Soviet Ukrainian history differently to those directly affected. In addition, the book aims to integrate aspects of Ukrainian history that have previously received less attention, such as its environmental, industrial and technological history, into an overall portrayal of Soviet Ukraine as a laboratory and battlefield of modernity.

Anna Veronika Wendland

PD Dr. Anna Veronika Wendland is a historian of Eastern Europe and technology.  She studied and completed her doctorate in Cologne and Kyiv, worked at the GWZO Leipzig and the LMU Munich, and has been a research associate at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg since 2009. Project leader and associate at the Collaborative Research Center SFB-TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security”. Main research interests: nationalism, history of Russian-Ukrainian relations, urban history, environmental and technological history of Ukraine. 

For her habilitation thesis “Kerntechnische Moderne. Nuclear Cities, Nuclear Working Environments and Reactor Safety in Eastern and Western Europe 1966-2021”, Wendland conducted research over several years as a long-term observer of human-machine relationships in nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Germany. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she has been a frequent point of contact for the media and politicians on nuclear safety issues in Ukraine. In 2023, she published an overview of the history of Ukraine (Befreiungskrieg. Nation Building and Violence in Ukraine, Campus: Frankfurt-New York, 2023).

Photographer: David Severin Osadchuk