The Thin Red-Blue Line: Soviet Ukrainian Patriotism Re-Considered - Monthly Lecture with Andrii Portnov

In this lecture, Andrii Portnov will reflect on the immanently complex, essentially contradictory, and profoundly important correlation between the notions of “Soviet” and “Ukrainian.” He will also discuss the Soviet notions of “nationalism” and “patriotism.” Through a close reading of selected texts from the 1920s to the 1980s, Portnov will try to elaborate on the attempts to portray the Soviet experience of Ukraine as a colonial and postcolonial one. Why and how did a supposedly internationalist state pursue imperialist policies and promote the ethnicity-based legal category of “nationality” and a semi-federal structure? How did the state-sponsored Ukrainization of the 1920s turn into the Russification of the 1950s and 1960s? How did Ukrainian-Soviet patriotism gradually become Soviet-Ukrainian patriotism? Why did the Soviet Union never dare to proclaim the emergence of a “common Soviet nation?” Portnov will explore how the answers to these questions help us to understand the dissolution of the USSR, the trajectory of post-Soviet Ukraine, and the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

Andrii Portnov is a historian. He graduated from Dnipro National University and the University of Warsaw and defended his PhD thesis at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. Since 2012, he has been working in Germany, after first coming to the country as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Since 2012 he has lectured on various topics related to Central and Eastern Europe at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Free University of Berlin, the University of Basel, the University of Potsdam, the Free University of Brussels, Sciences Po Lyon, and others. From 2018 to 2025, he was Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). In 2015, he initiated and co-founded the Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative, which in 2016 became the Prisma Ukraïna – Research Network Eastern Europe. In 2022, Portnov was awarded the DIALOG Prize by the German-Polish Society. In 2023 he received an Ab Imperio Book Award for his monograph Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022). He is the author of more than 10 books and over 250 academic publications on the intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe, Ukrainian historiography, the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations, historical urban research, genocide, and memory studies. His synthesis on Polish-Ukrainian history has been published in four languages, and his most recent book publication is an introduction to Ukrainian studies in German: Ukraine-Studien: Einführung (Nomos Verlag, 2025).

Marta Bucholc, IWM Permanent Fellow, will offer commentary and moderate the Q&A session.

Please register here: https://civi.iwm.at/form/event-registration-the-thin-red