Essays Catching the Specter: Stepan Bandera between Myth, Meme, Death, and Memory in War-Turn Ukraine

In this essay, the author is engaging with the transforming presence of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) in the Ukrainian social media space between 2014 and 2024. Building along and against the mainstream discussions on collective memory, The author argues that with the presence of war, the Ukrainian social media users memefied Bandera, making him a useful tool for politically-driven activities and an emptied signifier to be used in ironic contexts. The author also shows that in war-torn Ukraine, the meme and the myth of Bandera are intertwined with the commemorations of those who died on the frontline, which requires a nuanced understanding of the country’s changing memory landscape.

Published on balticworlds.com on November 5, 2024

 In this essay, I am engaging with the transforming presence of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) in the Ukrainian social media space between 2014 and 2024. Building along and against the mainstream discussions on collective memory, I argue that with the presence of war, the Ukrainian social media users memefied Bandera, making him a useful tool for politically-driven activities and an emptied signifier to be used in ironic contexts. I also show that in war-torn Ukraine, the meme and the myth of Bandera are intertwined with the commemorations of those who died on the frontline, which requires a nuanced understanding of the country’s changing memory landscape.

On August 27, 2023, a woman passed through Heldenplatz, or Square of Heroes, in Vienna, as the partakers of the rally celebrating the 32^nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence were dispersing. She carried a white tote bag with a portrait of Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), a leader of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The bag was signed sentimentally “Daddy Bandera.” The woman, whose appearance was not suggesting any nationalist affiliations otherwise, linked the festivities with the historical figure prominent in the debates on collective memory in Ukraine and questioned by scholars for his violent political stance and relations with the Nazis and the image of whom has been submitted to multifarious renderings in various discursive contexts over the last decades. The two questions I have been pondering over since then. “How did this sentiment become possible?” and “Why did the presence of Daddy Bandera seem harmless on that summer evening?”

To approach these questions, I offer to consider the entangled practices, opinions, and policies that have unfolded around Bandera’s personality over the past decade in Ukraine, which highlighted how the figures from the past can acquire the shifting meanings in a diverse media environment. The gravity and ambivalence the commander of Ukrainian nationalists of the 1930s-1950s has in contemporary Ukraine’s public space is enormous. In his recent impactful book, Memory Crash, Georgiy Kasianov assigns Bandera a key part in the “exclusivist model of historical memory” developed in Ukraine within the nationalist narrative, itself guided by “the idea of uniqueness, singularity, and independence of the community known as the ‘nation.’”[1] Kasianov, following a reach tradition of scholarship, argues that since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, the memorialization of Bandera has been promoted by activists, first from diaspora and later from those belonging to a radical right-party Svododa or similar political units, and several political figures who got into power during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko (2005-20010) and Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019), defined here as “mnemonic warriors.”[2] However, the author’s focus on state-affiliated actors leaves aside the public perception of the figure. Kasianov, along with similar studies on memory politics in contemporary Ukraine, refers to the public exclusively on the matter of approval or disapproval of Bandera, bringing the available statistical data.[3] The broader engagements with the figure behind the state-driven narrative is limited only to those who stand out as radical proponents of making Bandera present in the official memory. While this approach illuminates the state policies, it dismisses the areas beyond the state regulation or the “memory warriors” interventions. This is precisely the realm I offer to look at, using Bandera as a quasi-object for analysis.

Referring to Bandera’s case in his public appearance does not necessarily fit the time of scholarly discussions about approaches to wartime collective memories. The question about Bandera does not belong to the sphere of epistemic injustice or epistemic violence at first sight.[4] His figure was widely discussed by the authors in Ukraine along with dozens of publications appearing in Anglophone scholarly or semis-scholarly discussions. However, the question about epistemic injustice may appear if one zooms in and tries to understand his presence in wartime social media spaces. Conventional models in memory studies or studies dealing with the politics of history would offer a picture of the state-imposed memory about him and the proliferation of far-right narratives for which Bandera is one of the central figures.[5] Adding to these debates poses a challenge of acknowledging the previous scholars and avoiding relativization of his figure. “Is it even possible to discuss these matters in times of war?,” Per Anders Rudling rhetorically asks in his recent book.[6]The answer is already there. However, the close engagement with the critical literature on the subject would still lead toward the repetition of the conventional view on Bandera’s legacy in Ukrainian realities that does not answer the question of why the Daddy Bandera tote bag appears in Vienna and nobody reacts?

In this paper, I aim to reflect on how and why approaching the figure of Bandera in collective memory practices amidst war appears to be problematic on the levels of knowledge production, dissemination, and reception. In the first part of the text, I foreground the tendencies of Ukrainian social media between the years of 2014 and 2024, which demonstrate the flexibility of Bandera’s presence on social media and memeification of his image. I define memeification as process of meme creation that, in this context, captures a moment of Bandera’s and his portraits being frozen, implicitly declared as representative for the person in general, and utilized as a tool for conveying a political message through irony. Contrary to the myth that surrounds the person’s actions (thus is dynamic),[7] the meme praises particular, almost static, moments picked by its creators, providing space to new popular meanings and increasing the role social media may play in shaping memory politics.[8] In the second part of the paper, I discuss the epistemological implications of Bandera’s memeification during the international war. I argue that while the war imposes restraints on scholarly production impairing a provision of nuanced accounts on glorified personas, it also requires to consider new lenses to understand the changing memory practices. The war brings the issue of commemoration to a new level because of the growing among of deaths, which poses additional questions in front of the scholar and an activist, both epistemological and moral.

 

War and Meme(s)

The broad popular engagement with Bandera can be traced back to the Euromaidan, massive civil protests against the authoritarian policies of the government that led to the resignation of then in-office Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. On January 1, 2014, in the heat of mass protests in Kyiv, the Svoboda party members organized their traditional torchlit procession to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, which this time attracted other protesters who previously did not partake.[9] Those protests also revived the wide appearance of references to Banderites (banderivtsi), a derogatory term used by the supporters of Yanukovych’s regime and the Russian state media to present the radicalism of protesters. After the Russian annexation of Crimea and the beginning of Russo-Ukrainian war, the label was actively used among Russia-sponsored media sources to mark the Ukrainian government or its supporters.[10] At the same time, the term was adopted by the pro-Ukrainian actors, including Ukrainian citizens of Jewish descent, who started designating themselves as Judeo-Banderites, thus reversing with irony the conspiracy theories on Judeo-Banderites who, as Russian media reported, wanted to enslave Ukraine.[11]

The carnivalesque reinterpretation of the nationalists’ leader did not necessarily imply sincere identification with the historical figure of Bandera or his followers. It rather marked the eager to respond to the aggression in an ironic way. The humorous dimension was highlighted by the raising number of memes created against the propagandistic usage of Banderites, culminating in the recurring reminders about “celebrations” of Bandera’s birthday during the New Year dinners in Russia because both dates coincided. The meme originated from the nationalist “discursive communities,” to use Linda Hutcheon’s term, who were active in the Russian-based social media Vkontakte in late 2015 but gained broader reach.[12] Again, the leader’s birthday is an important date for commemorative practices inside the radical movements who rely on the cult of their “forefathers” to maintain the community ties.[13] Yet, the memeification relativized Bandera’s cult with two conspicuous effects. On the one hand, it was closely tied with the New Year’s celebration, one of the most important festivities of contemporary Russian popular culture, to reverse the claims of the state propaganda about Banderites. On the other hand, Bandera’s birthday also became a meme whose popularity went beyond the nationalist “discursive communities.” The meme found a good audience among those who previously did not participate in nationalist practices of commemoration but who supposedly read schoolbooks featuring Bandera or other Ukrainian wartime nationalists. Scholars liked to notice these very schoolbooks in their accounts on post-1991 development politics of memory as a sign of its nationalization, but the reception of these mentions do not appear in their studies.[14] Moreover, the surveys from pre-2014 period showed that there was no significant difference across generations in terms of perception of Bandera or OUN, as Ivan Katchanovski highlights.[15] Thus, the state-imposed politics of memory did seem to work in terms of creating the right image of whom its agents defined as heroes, but at least it managed to familiarize larger numbers of people with the name of Bandera, memes about whom could then resonate widely.

Playing with the multi-faceted importance of the date, different Ukrainian online users paved the way to the further transition of Bandera’s image from mythical to memeified. Both features are essential for establishing belonging within a group, where the image is shared, i.e., they constitute bonds. In both cases, birthday is the reference point with recognizable meanings and different functions for those who appeal to it. While for the myth, Bandera’s birthday is only one element which carries potential for commemorative actions, for the meme, the birthday is a cornerstone, somewhat representative for the whole personality. With years passing, references to the meme around Bandera’s birthday persisted, which made his appearance post-ironical, when the boundary between the irony of the meme and the reference to real Bandera was blurred.[16]

The post-Euromaidan period was also marked by Bandera’s return to official memory politics, especially evident after the 2015 passing of so-called laws on decommunization. The name of Bandera crowned dozens of streets in Ukraine, although its presence was ambiguous as many toponyms on the cities’ margins were named after him. Still, such a shift raised a lot of discussions among the Ukrainian scholarly community and the actors involved in memory practices on various levels regarding the legacy of the OUN leader. His legacy was problematized in the scholarly discourse with yet no biography of Bandera being published in Ukrainian.[17]At the same time, simplified Bandera’s image proliferated on social media, thus undermining the efforts to stop the state-driven practices to commemorate him and other Ukrainian leaders of the interwar period. In that regard, criticism from the international scholars and some of the Ukrainian intelligentsia had no visible results until the moment when the country’s leadership changed in 2019, with Anton Drobovych, newly appointed head of the Institute for National Memory being initially more moderate than his predecessor, Volodymyr Viatrovych, in terms of Ukrainian side of the history of the Second World War. Yet, as Eleonora Narvselius noticed about the previous decade, Bandera was still there.[18]

In 2021, two remarkable events happened. On June 26, the non-fiction publisher Nash Format presented a new edition of Perspectives of Ukrainian Revolution, Bandera’s magnum opus, during the Arsenal Book Fair in Kyiv. When the publisher’s representative asked a question whether anyone from the audience had previously read Bandera, only one person raised his hand in response.  The following day, Denys Antipov, a lecturer at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, published this short video on his TikTok.[19] It presented Vladimir Putin surrounded by people in Moscow with the audio of the song “Our father is Bandera, Ukraine is our mother” added. The video became viral on TikTok and later the song appeared in many variations. In October of that year, a group of schoolgirls used the audio of the same song to create their video where they enthusiastically lip-synced it.[20] This creativity was noticed by the pro-Russian media Vesti whoсlaimed that the girls wanted to challenge their teacher in such a way, summarizing it as “Hitlerjugend 2.0.”[21] The message was quickly debunked, while other schoolchildren emulated the video. It became a popular trend across the country, while the attempts to maintain the presence of the historical Bandera in this situation did not receive any significant resonance.[22] Bandera was perceived as a provocative meme to trigger Russian propaganda or just have fun because the song’s melody was catchy.

When the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine started, the power of Bandera as a meme became even more evident. Bandera’s portraits provided templates for the memes. After Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra won the Eurovision in May 2022, online users wore a pink bucket hat, a signature garment of Kalush Orchestra’s singer Oleh Psiuk, on Bandera. The image of Bandera wearing a pink bucket hut likewise went viral.[23] Some of the Ukrainian officials also utilized the name of Bandera in an ironic way. Two days after the invasion started, Andrii Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, asked the city residents to concoct the Molotov cocktails, which he called “Bandera smoothie.”[24] The collocation quickly spread into daily usage, at first entering the social media vernacular, but later even undergoing the process of commodification: pins, mugs, or even beverages have been named after Sadovyi’s coinage. Many salespersons put Bandera’s face on the multitude of items to attract consumers’ attention. Simultaneously, the merchandise distanced them from Bandera’s deeds and his biography became irrelevant as commodities with Bandera’s flavor utilized by rather minor brands succeeded at the market (see image 1). The omnipresence was conducive to various and indiscriminate replications of Bandera’s name: several local councils, navigating the new wave of street-renaming, decided to change their toponyms accordingly, even when criticism of excessiveness and unrelatedness was raised from the right milieu. Bandera, after all, was the “safest” choice.

At the same time, the deeds of historical Bandera are still important to commemorate for many groups in Ukraine, but their potential is far less evident than the memes created within popular culture that strengthen the feeling of the heroic. In this context, it is of no surprise that Ukraine.pride, an NGO advocating LGBTQ+ rights, used the same image as I noticed on a tote bag on a warm day in Vienna, to appropriate Bandera for their purposes in January 2023.[25] Bandera appealed to the “discursive community” directly opposing the nationalist one, being appropriated and recoded. It is indeed naming Stepan Bandera a hero of Ukraine madehim a hero, as Andre Liebich and Oksana Myshlovska point out, but it is equally naming Bandera daddy that made him daddy.[26]

 

Finally, the meme templates themselves got powerful symbolic meaning in the past two years. When rumors about renaming the monument “Motherland” to “Mother Ukraine” appeared in August 2023, it was only a matter of time for the monument of Bandera to appear in the memes, creating a new level of meme culture which also became viral.[27] At the same time, the books about Bandera appeared to be among the bestsellers during the book fairs in Ukraine in 2023.[28] Along with the myth, the meme led to the creation of a simulacrum of Bandera, an idealized image of the one who may help to fight in the battle for survival.

War and Memory

What does this motley picture about image creation, dissemination, and consumption reveal about the changing memory making practices? On the one hand, the narrative about Bandera is de-specified through meme. The memeified Bandera does not belong to anyone specifically. Yet, it is viral and shared in unexpected ways, cultivating simultaneously “vernacular nationalism,” to use Natalie Kononenko’s term, and a useful desacralized commodity.[29] Thus, meme takes away the monopoly to utilize the historical figure, the mythical “father,” from the radical nationalist discourses, and maintains it in a public domain. On the other hand, the controversy of Bandera is laying unresolved. His political activism between the 1930s and the 1950s does not appear in the public discussions in Ukraine, while the critique previously produced either by left-wing scholars in Ukraine or abroad is easily tokenized by those who would like to highlight the presence of radicalism in the war-torn country. The original critique’s goal to prevent the prevalence of right-wing discourses in the state-driven politics of memory is less and less articulated in the public sphere, both in Ukraine and abroad.

What is then specific in targeting Bandera as a case for understanding memory landscapes created by war? The questioning of Bandera aligns with the general fear of the prevalence of far-right in seemingly peaceful Europe. From this view, his (omni)presence in public spaces may suggests that far-right activists have had time and energy to promote their memory politics persistently and through different media in Ukraine during the ongoing war. Yet, it is difficult to engage with the far-rights from outside now, as many of them are on the frontline, so these are the academics or students in refuge or relocation who are urged to consider the dangers of Bandera. These who are directly affected by the war should also remember that they need to keep an eye on radical elements, as the specter of far-right is supposedly moving around the country. The specter caries a promise of complete emancipation from the big Other, while being effective in combating the Other on the ground, thus postponing the omnipresence of the imminent threat of occupation.[30] If following Derrida, however, one may notice that deconstruction is not necessarily related to language in this context, quite the opposite. It is material and its presence may be felt with every shelling. The images of destroyed buildings push the discourses of revenge, and those who can take the revenge may rely on almost instant support. Helplessness is beaten with weapons. Thus, to deal with the threat the specter of far-right may pose to memory politics or any other spheres, one needs to deconstruct first their own approach to understanding Ukraine through the lens of the prewar reality, as it almost lost its epistemological value more than two years ago. Unpleasant memory activists turned to be good warriors, and one needs to turn attention to the existing reality of war to deconstruct or find new meanings and ground for critique.

To put the matter more complex, wartime situation also poses a series of challenges related to collective memory in Ukraine. Denys Antipov, who created a viral Tiktok which introduced a song about Bandera to Generation Z, was killed on the frontline in May 2022 – less than a year after the viral video came out. During the recent wave of street renaming in Ukraine, one of the streets in Kyiv was named after him.[31] While Antipov was a moderate memory activist and meme maker, many far-right activists who praised Bandera have also been killed on the frontline, and to commemorate them goes beyond the question of political debates, as it concerns first and foremost a question of ethics. As the state still develops official policies of commemoration, these are predominantly non-state actors who create narratives and lobby for the presence of memory in public spaces.[32] Some of those who praised Bandera as a symbol of struggle, become symbols themselves, not memeified, but carrying potential for new national myths. Would memorialising, and celebrating, those who commemorated Bandera be another push for reconciliation with those who find his name triggering? What would even be the appropriate wording to pose this question? To conceptualize the existing commemorative practices amidst the war would require separate thorough research, which would need to account for the fact that the memes about Bandera are posted on social media alongside tributes to people killed at war.

The uncertainty, both epistemic and existential, that the war brings, will not disappear once the war is over. The shifted image of Bandera did not replace the need to deal with the legacy of the Second World War. Thus, the issue of reconciliation about the previous war will be on time again, with the urge to act expressed by different international and/or domestic actors. It will potentially overlap with the unsettled post-1989 developments of memory politics in East Central Europe, brilliantly summarized by Florence Fröhlig:

The unappeased pasts continue to haunt the citizenry and urge various groups in Eastern Europe to compete for recognition of “their” past, their “trauma” which was long silenced or obscured in the official discourses.[33]

The calls for the recognition of the past will bring reminders about Bandera’s role in the crimes against Poles and Jews in Volyn and Galicia, which are nowadays a part of Ukraine. For those reminding, the memes about Bandera will mean little to nothing, as Bandera does not seem to be funny beyond the contexts of Ukrainian social media. Thus, the urge to reconcile on that might be brought as soon as the state of emergency disappears. In fact, this urge has already been voiced in the academic setting.[34] The wartime urge to topple statues and rename the streets amidst the war will be equally questioned along with the appropriateness of the memes used widely in wartime. The questioning will most probably come from outside unless there are internal actors who would be courageous enough to speak complexity to power. Along with that, the specters of the far-right will be brought to the attention again. This time, it will be the fear of corporatization of those who will survive the war, and among them, there will be enough power to question the calls for complexity of the past experiences of war. This questioning, probably violent, will be reported on X, formerly known as Twitter, as just another sign of triumphing nationalism in the annoying Ukraine that ask for aid to continue surviving.

The state may also change, incorporating the memory practices established during wartime into their official policies. The omnipresence of Bandera as a meme may facilitate this process as those who engage with the image of social media may not recognize the challenges of the newly acquired myths. When Russian missiles hit the university where Bandera used to study and the museum of Roman Shukhevych, the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1943 and 1950 some Ukrainian media reported it as a “war against dead heroes,” thus reempowering the presence of both historical figures in the public space.[35]Would these dead heroes be needed for the commemorative practices in the postwar state? This question does not even seem to be timely, as the full-scale war is reaching its third-year anniversary.

 

Concluding Remarks

The transformation of Bandera’s presence in the Ukrainian public spaces manifests the slow but visible transition from a myth brought from mostly diaspora communities and adopted on the local ground by nationalist groups mostly in the Western part of the country to an inclusive meme used by users regardless of their political or regional background. The triggers brought by the war in 2014 and 2022 only catalyzed this transition, while also leaving space for the myth to have more space. The commodification of the image desacralized Bandera and transforms the original jokes into a reflex, so that it becomes similar to an empty ritual. One who appeals to it does not feel anything but pleasure of creating and sharing the meme, repeated without reflection. Still, sharing this ritual of mememaking means belonging to the community that struggles for its survival. The meme’s emptiness and simplicity may be filled with new political, potentially exclusivist, meanings, which, built on the acceptance the meme reached, may expect wide support.

It is the meme that receives a general uncontrollable appreciation, relativizing the cult and creating space for popular creativity in war-turn Ukraine. In both cases, however, the historical Bandera does not have any space, his mythologized life itself was left in the background, within the walls of the memorial museum in his native Staryi Uhryniv without making much impact on the general perception of the person. To question Bandera publicly these days, one needs to question the image of Bandera, and the memes attached to that. While Bandera may turn to be an empty signifier in certain contexts, those who appeal to him are not. Their mortality along with their political position binds together the unsettled past, the uncertain present, and the undefined future of the place ubiquitously affected by war.

Yet, for the person carrying the tote bag with the Daddy Bandera sign, it may still be just a nice piece to carry. With this seemingly harmless choice for a rally accessory, however, this person may soon be asked about the imagined real Bandera and enter the renewed struggle for Bandera’s legacy, weaponized for achieving pragmatic political goals.

Note: This paper came as a result of my participation in CLEO Summer University ‘Our European Heroes’  (University of Belgrade, September 10-16, 2023) and CBEES Summer School 2024 “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post’” (Södertörn University, August 12-17, 2024). I am deeply grateful to the organizers for having an opportunity to present and discuss the paper there. I also thank Holly Case, Elżbieta Kwiecińska, Kateryna Osypchuk, and Polina Baitsym for their fruitful comments.

References

[1] Georgiy Kasianov, Memory Crash: Politics of History in and around Ukraine, 1980s–2010s (Central European University Press, 2022), 19.

[2] Ibid, 143.

[3] See David R. Marples, “Stepan Bandera: The resurrection of a Ukrainian national hero,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 4 (2006): 555-566, DOI: 10.1080/09668130600652118; David R. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (NED-New edition, 1. Hungary: Central European University Press, 2007); Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & Eurasian Studies 2107 (2011); Eleonora Narvselius, “The ‘Bandera Debate’: The Contentious Legacy of World War II and Liberalization of Collective Memory in Western Ukraine,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 54, no. 3–4 (September 1, 2012): 469–90, https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2012.11092718.

[4] In his recent essay, Vitaly Chernetsky lists a least a dozen of concepts that may be applied to understanding current debates about approaching Ukrainian contexts in academic settings (see “Confronting Epistemic Injustice: Centering Ukraine in the Paradigm Shift”, in CBEES State of the Region Report; 2024 A World Order in Transformation? A Comparative Study of Consequences of the War and Reactions to These Changes in the Region, ed. Ninna Mörner (Huddinge& Södertörns högskola), 23–30). Yet, they all are mostly united with the idea to apply the terms created in Anglophone environment to explain the old new field of studies.

[5] See, e.g., Per Anders Rudling, Tarnished Heroes: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the Memory Politics of Post-Soviet Ukraine (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2024), where the author calls for problematizing, deconstructing, and scrutinizing histories of OUN, marking them as tarnished heroes for the Ukrainian society. His argument is again targeting the state and society, while the last is not visible, in a sense as it appears as audience but not as an object of study.

[6] Rudling, Tarnished Heroes, 22.

[7] Scholars in memory studies define myth as a crucial element for memory practices, although the two should be distinguished. See Duncan S A. Bell, “Mythscapes: memory, mythology, and national identity.” The British journal of sociology 54, no. 1 (2003): 63-81.

[8] The literature on memes has recently proliferated, but most of the scholars either consider to research Internet memes as a community binding elements or look at their political meanings. In that regard, 4chan community as a case study has already become classic (see, e.g., ). Yet, what makes meme a meme in less considered in those studies so far as it seems to be almost self-evident. The present paper was inspired by Natalie Wynn’s video essay Cringe, published on her YouTube channel ContraPoints. Exploring mascotization of a “cringeworthy person” as a tool to mock the opposing political group, she argues that the mascotization “pairs with memeification when you take a single moment in a person’s life, you freeze it, and you declare that that moment fully represents a person.” Thus, the meme is a particle that replaces the person’s and the group’s reality with the image created at one moment by that one person (see ContraPoints, “Cringe,” Youtube video, May 10, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRBsaJPkt2Q, 19.21-19.52)

[9] The tradition of torchlit processions to celebrate Bandera’s birthday started in 2008 and, as Kasianov argues, received special meaning after Viktor Yanukovych got to power in 2010.

[10] Irina Khaldarova and Mervi Pantti “Fake News: The narrative battle over the Ukrainian conflict,” Journalism Practice 10, no.7 (2016): 894.

[11] See, e.g., Myroslav Shkandrij, “Living with Ambiguities: Meanings of Nationalism in the Russian-Ukrainian War,” in Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine: The Challenge of Change, ed. Olga Bertelsen (Stuttgart: Ibidem Press, 2017), 121-138.

[12] Hutcheon argues that discursive communities may be recognized by “the complex configuration of shared knowledge, beliefs, values, and communicative strategies” (Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge : The Theory and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994), 87) The groups are always diverse and multiple, but the shared understanding of signs and practices is the key for their members to recognize and reinforce each other.

[13] On the importances of dates for creating collective and especially national identities see, e.g., Warwick Frost and Jennifer Laing, Commemorative Events: Memory, Identities, Conflict. (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 24-25.

[14] Narvselius, “The ‘Bandera Debate’,” 471; Yuliya Yurchuk, “Memory of the Past and Memory for the Future:  History on the Crossroads of Nation-building,” Current Issues in European Cultural Studies; June 15-17; Norrköpining; Sweden, no.62 (2011): 133-45.

[15] Ivan Katchanovski, “The Politics of Soviet and Nazi Genocides in Orange Ukraine,” Europe-Asia Studies 62, no. 6 (2010), 991; Ivan Katchanovski, “Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 48, no. 2-3 (2015): 217-228.

[16] See the critical account on post-irony on social media in Viveca S. Greene, Makena Rasmussen, and Dutch Clark, “Memeology: Normalizing Hate Through Humour?”. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare 4, no 2 (2021):75-80. https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v4i2.2962.

[17] The only Bandera’s academic biography published in Ukrainian was translated in late 2021 book by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. It appeared in a rather marginal publishing house owned by Anton Puhach, who for decades was involved in Ukrainian media business. In his review, Puhach the value of book as brining truth to the Ukrainian reader, with a clear anti-nationalist stance in memory politics, which, in author’s view, contradicts democratic values: Anton Pukach, “Tin Providnyka: Stepan Bandera i OUN: Heroi chy Zlochyntsi? [The Shadow of the Leader: Stepan Bandera and OUN: Heroes or Perpetrators]” FOCUS, February 8, 2022, https://focus.ua/uk/opinions/505765-ten-providnika-stepan-bandera-i-oun-geroi-ili-prestupniki.

[18] Narvselius, “The ‘Bandera Debate’,” 475.

[19] DenysAntipov (@denysantipov), Untitled, Video, June 27, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/@denysantipov/video/6978259922874043653.

[20] Persha Pryvatna Memarnia (@privatnamemarnya), Untitled, Video, October 13, 2021, https://t.me/privatnamemarnya/11035.

[21] See the screenshot at Pryvatna Memarnia (@privatnamemarnya), “Harna Ideia! [Nice Idea!]” Telegram photo, October 13, 2021, https://t.me/privatnamemarnya/11032. The original post which was published at Vesti’s telegram channel was deleted in the past year, together with all other available information.

[22] In media, the trend was covered along with explainers about the origins of the song. See, e.g., Nataliia Nahorna, “‘Batko Nash Bandera’: Khto IeAvtorom Populiarnoyi Pisni, Yaka Stala Khitom v  Тіk-Тоk, [Our Father Bandera: Who is the Author of the Popular Song which Became a Hit on Tik Tok]” ТСН.ua, October 19, 2021, https://tsn.ua/exclusive/batko-nash-bandera-hto-ye-avtorom-populyarnoyi-pisni-yaka-stala-hitom-v-tik-tok-1890910.html. Yet, the authors of the original sound did not manage to further their success.

[23] “Batko Nash Bandera, Stefaniia – Maty: Yaskravi Memy Pro Peremohu Kalush Orchestra Na ‘Ievrobachenni-2022,’ [Our Father is Bandera, Stefaniia is Our Mother: Effective Memes about Kalush Orchestra’s Victory at Eurovision-2022]” ТСН.ua, May 15, 2022, https://tsn.ua/ukrayina/putin-prokinuvsya-a-ukrayina-peremogla-yaskravi-memi-pro-peremogu-kalush-orchestra-na-yevrobachenni-2022-2062735.html.

[24] Andrii Sadovyi, “U toi Chas, koly Nashi ZSU Boroniat Derzhavu,… [While our AMU defend the country,…],” Telegram video, February 26, 2022, https://t.me/andriysadovyi/578.

[25] UKRAINEPRIDE (@ukraine.pride), Bez vlasnoi derzhavy… [Without Own State…], Instagram photo, October 1, 2022,https://www.instagram.com/p/CYM47VNtRk5/.

[26] Liebich, Andre, and Oksana Myshlovska. “Bandera: Memorialization and Commemoration.” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 5 (2014): 751.

[27] Oleksiy Dekan (@alekseydekan), A vzhe pizno podavaty svii variant? [Is it late to submit my own version?], Facebook photo, August 3, 2023, https://www.facebook.com/alekseydekan/posts/pfbid02rBzF62oCL8MZ9voi78mVoM8N1rTxjmFQvhLmScmiMxjsWDUknsg8nmuaYtoectbUl.

[28] “ TOP prodazhu Nash Format na Forum Vydavtsiv [TOP Sales of Nash Format at the Forum of Publishers],” Telegram, October 10, 2023, https://t.me/nashformat/1331.

[29] Natalie Kononenko, Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies: Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity (McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2023), 5.

[30] Instead of promising general liberation, as in the case with Marxism, in a wartime context, the promise is to liberate those who are already under occupation and remove the key cause of the occupation. “Emancipatory and messianic affirmation,” pointed by Derrida, has revealed itself throughout the war, and may even be sharpened if the war is lost to the big Other (see Jacques Derrida, “Spectres of Marx”, New Left Review, 205 (May-June 1994), 53-55).

[31] The same wave brought Bandera as far East as Izuim in the Kharkiv region. “Izium Stav Naiskhidnishym Mistom z Vulytseiu Stepana Bandery[Izuim Became the Most Eastward City with Stepana Bandery Street],” Istorychna Pravda, December 8, 2022,https://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2022/12/8/162142/.

[32] Ukrainian Parliament passed the law on the creation of National War Memorial Cemetery in May 2023, but up to this day, the project was not implemented, which caused the protests from the relatives of killed soldiers. See, e.g., Violetta Karlashchuk and Anna Zhelezniak, “Holosy Polehlykh Heroiv: Rodychi Zahyblykh Biitsiv Vymahaiiut Zbuduvaty Viiskove Kladovyshche [The Voices of Dead Heroes: The Relatives of Killed Soldiers Demand to Build War Cemetery],” Suspilne Kyiv, September 26, 2023. https://suspilne.media/kyiv/580763-golosi-poleglih-geroiv-rodici-zagiblih-bijciv-vimagaut-zbuduvati-vijskove-kladovise/

[33] Florence Fröhlig, “Victimhood and Building Identities on Past Suffering” in CBEES State of the Region Report; 2020 Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past. A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region, ed. Ninna Mörner (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2020), 23–28.

[34] See the above-mentioned Rudling, Tarnished Heroes, 22.

[35] Liubomyra Remazhevska, “Viina z Mertvymy Heroiamy: Vnaslidok Ataky Rosiiskykh Bezpilotnykiv Znyshcheno Muzei Shukhevycha taPoshkodzheno Universytet, de Vchyvsia Bandera. [The War with Dead Heroes: As a Result of Russia’s Drones Attack, Shukhevyck Museum was Destroyed and the University where Bandera Studied, was Damaged]”  Graty, January 1, 2024, https://graty.me/vijna-z-mertvimi-geroyami-vnaslidok-ataki-rosijskih-bezpilotnikiv-znishheno-muzej-shuhevicha-ta-poshkodzheno-universitet-de-vchivsya-bandera/.

Yevhen Yashchuk