Interview with Senior Political Science & History student, Annie Faulkner conducted January 2023
Q: Tell me about your thesis project.
My thesis is on historical memorials and monuments commemorating Ukrainian history. It explores how perceptions of power and historical narratives arise from the way that history is memorialized, looking at the differences between the ways that historical events were commemorated under the Soviet Union versus Ukraine after independence.
For example, looking at Holocaust memorials has been really interesting because the Soviet Union did everything in their power to erase the experiences of the Jewish community during World War II. There are a lot of examples of places where a real Holocaust Memorial wasn’t built until Ukraine was able to become fully independent.
Especially with the war that’s happening, now they’re starting to tear down some of these Soviet era memorials. The project is looking at the politics of power and how that plays into how we remember history.
Q: What have you done for your project so far?
Right now, I’m just cracking down on research. I’m putting together a directory of as many memorials in the country as I can find. Of course, I’m not going to use all of those for the written thesis, but it’s been really helpful going from city to city and seeing the kinds of things we’re looking at, how things are. Western Ukraine is generally more pro-independence or nationalist, whereas in the east, like in the Donbas and Crimea, there’s a lot more room for Russian sympathy.
So, I’m currently in that research stage, just beginning to try to write my first draft. I’m compiling as much information as I possibly can.
This week, I’ve been doing a lot of work looking at a park in Kyiv, which was a really big site during the Holocaust. The Nazis killed about 100,000 people there. There’s a ravine at the edge of Kyiv where they shot mostly Jews, but also Roma and Ukrainian nationalists and prisoners of war, all sorts of people.
The first Soviet memorial was built in 1976, and it was dedicated to Soviet citizens who were killed at the site but didn’t mention that most were Jewish. In 1991, one month after Ukraine declared independence, a memorial statue of a menorah was put up.
Since then, in this kind of park in and out of this area, there have been more and more memorials popping up dedicated to different groups of people. In this small area, there are about 15 memorials pointing to different things.
It’s been really interesting, looking at this competition for who gets remembered. The politics of that have been very interesting to me.
Interestingly, the Soviet government was so set on not allowing people to remember this as a site that was important that they were trying to build a sports stadium on top of it. In the 50s and 60s, they had a brick factory dump all of its loam, all the mud byproducts, right into the ravine to fill up the pit where everyone had died. To do this, they had to build a dam, but during a rainstorm the dam broke and there was a mudslide that killed 1,000 people. So, in their efforts to make sure that nobody remembered the crimes against the Jewish community, they ended up killing another 1,000 civilians. The Soviet death count was 145, and the Ukrainian death count was about 10 times higher. If I hadn’t been looking into the memorials, I would never have known that. This one park is what I’ve been focusing on all week—it’s fascinating. It’s called the Babi Yar or the Babyn Yar, depending on the translation.
Q: What conclusions have you come to so far, based on your current body of research?
A big part of it is that there’s not a singular historical truth, in a lot of ways, but at the same time, the people that are in power are the ones that control the narrative, and that’s problematic in a place that’s been colonized for 1,000 years. I think I need to do more research before I come to a more set conclusion.
Looking at a country that’s so recently gained independence, only about 30 years later, this tells us about the relationship with Ukraine and Russia coming out of the Soviet Union and how they’re able to establish themselves as a separate political and historical entity. Because of this iteration of what my thesis is, it’s just gotten narrower. Looking at broader historical themes in Ukraine over time, there’s a big question of “How did it become a separate entity in itself?” It’s never been independent until 30 years ago, it’s always been colonized by countries like Poland, Austria-Hungary, or Russia, so how does a political and cultural entity come out of a place where the language has almost been driven extinct? How does an area that’s never been given the chance to decide its own destiny exist? By what frameworks does their history become history?
Q: What do you plan to do with this research?
I’m hoping to get it published somewhere. I’m not really sure what that’s going to look like yet.
Q: What inspired you to research this topic?
Last spring, I was doing the DC Semester Program, so I was living in DC and doing an internship at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. I was working there when the war started.
For one of the programs that I was working on, we were doing an international global fellowship, so we took 26 mid-professional, middle-aged career people from 25 different countries, divided into five different regional/global region, for professional development. It was really interesting to work on it, because I was there with people like a Supreme Court Justice in Brazil and the youngest Congresswoman in Guatemala, people that are doing a lot of amazing work. But we actually had two representatives from Ukraine—one of them was a colonel in the army and the other funded the NGO “Youth for Global Progress”.
We were interviewing people the week that the war broke out. When we asked one woman to interview, we were like, “Hi, ma’am, would you be available for an interview this Thursday or Friday at these times?” And she responded, “I’m fleeing the country with my son, how’s Monday?” It was so amazing, meeting and interacting with those people.
The Institute monitors a lot of global issues like that, they already had a working group on Russian relations, so I was sitting in on a lot of those meetings with these incredible people. Through that environment, I learned so much about this issue.
It’s also at an intersection between my majors: political science and history. I wanted to combine those disciplines in a way. This is a history thesis, but at the same time it’s very political. While I was working with contemporary politics and contemporary issues at my internship, for the majority of Americans there’s really no understanding of the historical issues that have led us to this place. I wanted to look at what I was looking at from different angles, like a broader cultural development angle.
This was actually Dr. Cornell’s idea. I sent him the books I was reading, and he sent me the books he was reading and commented on interesting angles to take.
Q: How have faculty or your peers helped you out with this project?
Dr. Cornell has been really helpful! I was originally supposed to do a poli-sci thesis, but I had to drop it, and by then my interests had changed. Dr. Cornell is my advisor for the department, so he really helped me start back from square one and figure things out. The 401 History Capstone class was also really helpful, having Dr. Scarlett to help guide me, and also Renee’s help. Renee Rogers and I were both doing Soviet history projects, and our little group was really good, it was a cute class. Renee had a lot of interesting resources. Interestingly, my capstone project and my thesis both started from the same place but ended up being wildly different projects.
Q: Would you say that helping students pursue these types of projects is something that’s really important to the history/anthro/classics department?
Absolutely. One of the things I’ve found to be really helpful in this department that I really value is that all the professors here are really passionate about research and helping students with it. Like, we had that event last semester, the speed-dating research event. Professors that I’ve never met before were really interested in what I was doing and wanted to engage with me about that. I just love the department and the professors here.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Talk to people. Talk to your classmates, talk to your professors, ask questions. You’ll find out some cool things.
Annie’s email is aefaulkn@butler.edu for any students interested in hearing more about her research or experiences.