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Stripping Bare the Empire: Ukrainian Resistance as Anti-Imperial Iconoclasm
This chapter discusses the Ukrainian response to the historical distortion revealed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 from the perspective of art and visual history. It focuses on how Ukraine has visually countered Moscow’s claims of genuine historical ties with the Kyivan Rus’, which were used as the official justification for the invasion. The chapter examines the literary criticism, visual irony, and activist strategies employed in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale war to challenge the one-sided historical narrative imposed by the aggressor. It explores the difference between critical analysis and spontaneous, ephemeral, and activist resistance on one side, and the fundamentality of official misrepresentation of history on the other. The ironic practices of cultural alienation used by Ukrainian critics, artists, and activists against the Kremlin regime’s narrative, as part of the ongoing war of images during the current conflict, can be seen as revolutionary and iconoclastic. They not only embody Ukrainian resistance through art, activism, and scholarship but also actively challenge the self-proclaimed image of ‘Russianness’ itself.
