History. People. Events. Research Report on the Memory of Contemporary Poles and Ukrainians

One of the main hypotheses of the project under which the study was carried out, assumed that contemporary Poles are more “deeply immersed” in the history than Ukrainians, in the context of their identities. We believe that Poles, when they express their identity, more often, with more emotional involvement and more explicitly refer to events from national history than do other nations, at least in Central and Eastern Europe. This hypothesis also stemmed from the conviction that one hundred years of Polish State influence on its citizens (counting from 1918, with a break only for World War II and the period after, up to 1956) greatly contributed to the deep historicalization of Poles’ beliefs about themselves as members of the community, in the case of the Polish majority as well as national minorities. Given this historical factor, the identity of the citizens of Ukraine seemed to be less built on the basis of images of the past. After all, a nation state that could set such goals for itself was created there only in 1991. Earlier, the state was oriented towards shaping the Soviet identity by using images of the past in a way that was declared false and rejected in independent Ukraine. Current report presents the main findings aimed at testing this hypothesis.