Історична пам’ять як чинник консолідації суспільства.

Анотація

Ukraine has been going through a complicated period of state-building, full of controversies and threats. It is taking place against the background of civilization developments and is accompanied by exacerbation of the country’s domestic challenges. These issues have deep historical roots. A century of the lack of statehood was aggravated by a range of internal contradictions, mass reprisals, genocides, and holodomors (man-made famine) against the Ukrainian nation. They resulted not only in multiple human toll, but also in ruining national identity, destruction of fundamental features of the Ukrainian ethnos – its language, culture, historical memory – i.e. the things which are able to integrate the nation into a single community. The issues, which the contemporary Ukrainian society is faced up with, are the problems of its entire history. That is why their leveling causes them to spring up time and again in various hypostases before the society, bringing about new threats and challenging its further development. Reconstruction of the past is possible and expedient as long as it caters for the interests of today and tomorrow. Legacy of the historical past has to be directed at overcoming spiritual devastation. It is intended to prevent any cultural diversity from turning into cultural splits; to nurture well-balanced, tolerant, well-disposed attitude to individual and group differences.

Tolerance as a new modus of interaction with Another world, different from mine, is recognized to be a core provision targeted at the world of multitude. Cultural interaction of different types of cultures consists in that by assimilating any values from another culture, one’s own culture transforms «alien» into «native» without losing its original specific content. «Disappearance» of Another is supposed to become dramatic for one’s own customary cultural reality as it deprives culture of the perspective for further evolution. Within such conception history appears as a prerequisite for the society consolidation, rather than a tool of ideological confrontation in the hands of politicians. A dialogue of the past and the present starts to gain political and cultural significance and reveals a potential to prevent those negative implications which have affected the policy of many countries in terms of their cultural interaction as well as national and ethnic relationships.