RE-VISION OF HISTORY

challenge

MANIPULATIONS OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA

Trying to rewrite history and explain it on their own, Russian propaganda uses outright lies, manipulations and fake narratives. Some of their favorites include "Ukraine is an artificial project of the West", "Kyivan Rus' was a Russian state", "All Ukrainian nationalists were fascists", "Crimea has always been a part of Russia", and "the USSR was a powerful empire, and Stalin was a hero".

Claims like these are intended to undermine the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty and provoke conflicts among Ukrainians. Knowledge of history and understanding the methods of propaganda allow people to distinguish truth from fiction, and to mind their own information security.

solution

DEBUNK THE MOST COMMON MYTHS

We decided to prepare a book that analyzes key narratives of Russian historical propaganda about Ukraine and gives a response to them.

The result is our new publication, Re-Vision of History: Russian Historical Propaganda and Ukraine. The book was edited by Volodymyr Yermolenko, a writer and the editor-in-chief of the online platform UkraineWorld. In our study, we invited Ukrainian historians to comment on six key misleading narratives of history propagated by Russia. The book consists of two parts: an analysis from the participants of the project "LikBez Historical Front" and an interview with Yaroslav Hrytsak, Ukrainian historian and intellectual. It is available in Ukrainian and English.

The joint efforts by analysts from Internews Ukraine and Singularex helped to identify and analyze the most harmful narratives of Russian propaganda with the help of neural networks and other machine learning tools. The Russian-language segment of the Internet in Ukraine and the social media platform "VKontakte" (VK) in particular were key points of focus. Though VK has been banned in Ukraine since 2017, it still has more than 9.5 million Ukrainian users as of 2019. Its communities often spread fakes, which mislead Ukrainians.

outcome

A THOUGHT-PROVOKING CAMPAIGN

Our large-scale project analyzed more than 850 thousand posts from VKontakte and 16 thousand posts from Facebook to single out the main narratives of Russian propaganda and analyze them, relying entirely on historical facts.

The presentation of the book took place in Kyiv at Ukraine’s national news agency, Ukrinform. It was followed by an open discussion at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the participation of historians and students.

To make the project interesting for ordinary social networks users, we prepared an interactive online test. It has been taken by almost 100 thousand visitors of the website. In addition, the #HistoryReVision Facebook-campaign has reached about 50,000 users.

As the introduction to the book says, "[h]istory is not something that happened a long time ago. History is about something that keeps on going around us. The past is woven into us as personal memory. Essentially, we are the history that happened to us, and the stories we tell about ourselves". Understanding the history of one’s own country has become especially important in today's world of information and hybrid wars.

This publication was compiled by NGO Internews Ukraine with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework of the Civic Synergy Project and under the auspices of the Ukrainian National Platform of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation.