Folk revival of early 1980s: performative ethnography in Soviet Ukrainian media

During the seminar Center researcher Bohdan Shumylovych presented his research.

Since 1979, in Ukraine, a new wave of folklorism has started. It coincided with the dismissal from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine of Valentyn Malanchuk, its key antinationalism ideologist. Nationalists and various forms of oppositional thinking were successfully suppressed in the Ukrainian SSR between 1965 and 1975, while in the late 1970s, authorities allowed certain liberalization in the national culture. It concurred with the final establishment of a peculiar "media spectacle" in the Soviet late 1980s, when millions of Soviet people were the grateful viewers of this "spectacle." An important part of Ukrainian media spectacle of the early 1980s were various folklore festivals. They allowed both to hear folk songs from different parts of the country, and to see and imagine the "national core" of a modernized Ukrainian nation.