The Memory of Entrepreneurship in Colonial, Totalitarian, Post-Totalitarian and Post-Colonial Times

In the talk, Tetiana Vodotyka will trace changes in remembering and commemorating businessmen and businesswomen in Ukraine. She will discuss how the memory of them was first established in the late 19th - early 20th century, then erased during the Soviet era and revived in the years of independent Ukraine, using the cases of a few entrepreneurs. Based on historical texts (both Soviet and Ukrainian) and media, analysis of emerging memory practices and narratives, she demonstrates how the image of entrepreneurs changed, was deliberately shaped and instrumentalised, reflecting the general shifts in memory politics and knowledge production, but, in spite of this, remained the least contested. These processes are today occurring in the context of the full-scale invasion of 2022, which had deep and comprehensive consequences, including in memory culture. On 21 March 2023, the Law «On Condemnation and Prohibition of the Propaganda of Russian Imperial Policy in Ukraine and the Decolonisation of Toponymy», was adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament. The law provided a legal framework for the decolonisation process, which, ironically, was only launched on a national scale and gained momentum after the Russian invasion of 2022. We might be living through the times when Ukraine goes through one of the final stages of the symbolic appropriation of its public spaces by its citizens and away with names in its toponymy that refer to the Soviet and Russian memory canon.

Dr Tetiana Vodotyka is an academic director for MA in Urban Studies and Postwar Reconstruction at Kyiv School of Economics and a research fellow of the Institute of Advanced study at Durham University. In 2016, she established a peer-review e-journal of Urban Studies (City: History, Culture, Society) and has been its chief editor since then. In her work, Dr Vodotyka combines research and public historical activities. Most of her popular texts (including books and articles in magazines and web resources) are devoted to Ukrainian economic history, entrepreneurship in Ukraine, and urban history. Among her books are: The History of Everyday Life. Kyiv. Beginning of the XX Century (in Ukrainian, Folio, 2022); Success Stories. Famous Ukrainian Businessmen in the 19th Century (in Ukrainian, Folio, 2020); Honourable Citizens of Kyiv. 1872-1914 (in Ukrainian, Varto, 2019, Book of the Year 2019 Award); Space of Possibilities. Ukraine in the Iron and Steam Epoche (in Ukrainian, Klio, 2018).

Image credit: A monument in Donetsk, Wikimedia