Are there any experts who successfully predicted how the Ukrainian crisis would unfold after the Euromaidan revolution? On the one hand, the “Russian spring” project obviously failed: Vladimir Putin’s call for consolidating “Novorussia” did not catch the hearts of people beyond the limited part of Donbass. For example, after the launch of anti-terrorist operations in spring 2014, even such a Russified eastern city as Dnipropetrovsk turned blue-and-yellow, full with volunteer citizens supporting the government forces, thereby exhibiting the rise of Ukrainian patriotism. However, that was not the end of the story. During the national parliament elections in October, 2014 in the same Dnipropetrovsk Oblast the Opposition Bloc consisting of former Party-of-Regions members that did not endorse the Euromaidan surpassed the president’s party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc. Other eastern regions such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia mirrored Dnipropetrovsk in their electoral behavior. These snapshot observations speak for themselves: the social and political dynamics in Ukraine is much more complicated than is routinely described with the popular “east-west divide” discourse.

Quantitative research on the mass attitudes in Ukraine often opts for versatile “regions” to explain the social and political cleavages. Most of them, however, treat regions as proxy for historical and cultural attributes common to localities, ignoring the heterogeneous distribution of personal historical memories in a given geographical space. This study tests the explanatory power of individual acceptance of national history in shaping the attitudes toward the Euromaidan, utilizing ordered logit model on nationwide survey data collected from December 2014 to January 2015.

The author ran principal component analysis on the responses to the seven major historical events in Ukraine, and identified anti-Ukraine historical component, which denies the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as well as the collapse of the USSR and the country’s independence. In the ordered logit estimation with these principal component scores, the effect of the regional factor was mediated by historical memory in all eastern regions including Donbass, Sloboda, Lower Dniepr and Black Sea. However, explanatory power of the regional variable persists in Podolia and Left bank. This finding suggests the further need for studying interaction terms between historical memory and regions.

Furthermore, two-stage least square estimation with instrumental variable was conducted to verify the effect of historical memory on the attitudes to the Euromaidan, which rejected the above hypothesis at a five-percent significance level. This implies that causal arrows run reciprocally between these two variables.

The analysis also discovered the carriers of ambivalent “hybrid” memory, who miss the Soviet Union but welcome the independence simultaneously. These findings provide valuable insights into the amorphous nature of the eastern regions that embrace multilayered historical memories, and highlight key challenges for post-Maidan national (re)integration.