The Making of a Media Nation

In this amazing book, a leading Ukrainian historian reveals the circular ways in which mass media produce the national culture that produces mass media. It’s no surprise that a big part of this book addresses cultural magic—political advertisement, group hypnosis, and TV healings. It is indispensable reading for those who wish to understand how the Soviet-era decay turned into a glorious rebirth of the Ukrainian nation. —Alexander Etkind, Professor of International Relations, Central European University, Budapest
Bohdan Shumylovych’s research makes an essential contribution to understanding national dynamics within the late USSR and exemplifies how television— both a propaganda tool and a popular medium —was able to promote the gradual emancipation of national cultures under a regime of Soviet censorship and centralization. —Ioulia Shukan, Professor of Sociology, School for Advanced Social Studies (EHESS), Paris
This is an outstanding and original contribution to the study of socialist world mass media, post-Stalin Ukrainian history, and the role of media in building national communities. Based on extensive archival research, using rich sources that are unknown in the English-language literature, this book tells the story of how Western Ukrainian regional television created programming in genres that were both central to late Soviet culture and deeply rooted in Ukrainian folk culture—despite attempts by Soviet authorities to purge and repress Ukrainian national culture and sentiment in the 1970s. Shumylovych demonstrates the centrality of the Soviet Union’s Western Ukrainian borderlands to producing some of the most important songs and films of Soviet television, while also creating a national-level Ukrainian identity in a Soviet Ukrainian television system that was initially divided into relatively isolated regional networks and studios. Throughout the book, Shumylovych includes a detailed, archivally grounded account of how media infrastructure shaped the evolution of television in Soviet Ukraine and beyond. The book’s chapters skillfully weave together political events and campaigns happening at the local, regional, national, and all-Union level, noting the ways in which local/regional and all-Union political objectives could reinforce or undermine one another and tracing the complex connections and interactions between Lviv-based television producers and Communist Party officials and their counterparts in Kyiv and Moscow. Shumylovych masterfully draws on existing scholarly literature from a variety of fields and in several languages, including media studies, history, cultural studies, nationality studies, anthropology, and more. This is a very impressive monograph and will be essential reading for scholars of late Soviet and Ukrainian culture and political life, Ukrainian history and history the Soviet Western borderlands, and for historians of television, mass media, and media infrastructure. —Christine Evans, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee