Simone Attilio Bellezza
Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of Humanities of the University of Eastern Piedmont
Simone Bellezza was Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2008 and 2019), the Centre for Advanced Study of Sofia (2014), the Harriman Institute of Columbia University (2016), the University of Toronto (2017), and the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2021). The fil rouge of all his work is the study of national belonging and its relationship with other kinds of loyalty (social, political, cultural, and religious). His book The Shore of Expectations: A Study on the Culture of the Ukrainian Shistdesiatnyky (CIUS Press, Toronto, 2019) was awarded the Pritsak Book Prize by ASEEES in 2020 and is forthcoming in Ukrainian translation by Duch i Litera in 2024. He is currently working on a history of Ukrainian diaspora in the West during the 20th Century.
From Public History to Fake History: Ukrainian History in the Italian Media since 24 February 2022
This paper will analyze the presence of Ukrainian and Soviet history topics in Italian public debate starting from Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After a brief introduction on the Italian public debate originated from the publications on the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, this paper will demonstrate that some characteristics, already identifiable since 2005, are still valid today: despite the commitment of scholars of Ukrainian history and literature in the effort to explain Ukrainian-Russian relations, the Italian mass media (publishing houses, newspapers, and TV) have mainly hosted self-styled experts on Ukraine who falsified Ukrainian history to explicitly defend Putin and the aggression war. Curiously enough, these experts were not historians, or if they were professional historians, they were not experts of either Eastern European or modern history. The paper will analyze the works by Nicolai Lilin, Alessandro Orsini, and Franco Cardini, showing that they portrayed Ukrainian democracy as a neo-Nazi dictatorship and Putin as a victim of the aggressive expansionism of the USA towards Eastern Europe. In the field of scientific publications, there has been no shortage of cases in which experts in Eastern European history have spoken at conferences and written books within a Russo-centric logic that justifies Russian military actions: the most sensational case is that of Aldo Ferrari (chair of Eurasian history at the University of Venice and director of the Eastern European section of the Institute for International Political Studies) and his history of Crimea. The most popular voices in defense of Ukraine have substantially failed in the effort to explain the true causes of the conflict for two reasons: 1) on one hand, experts have not been able to produce a sufficiently simplified discourse that could reach a mass audience (e.g. Andrea Graziosi); 2) on the other hand, as in the case of the most successful volume on Ukrainian history in Italy, written by Giorgio Cella, the latter was not an expert of Ukrainian history and his overly simplified version of history was incapable of responding to the specious controversies raised by the supporters of Putin's regime.
Simone Attilio Bellezza
Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of Humanities of the University of Eastern Piedmont
Simone Bellezza was Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2008 and 2019), the Centre for Advanced Study of Sofia (2014), the Harriman Institute of Columbia University (2016), the University of Toronto (2017), and the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2021). The fil rouge of all his work is the study of national belonging and its relationship with other kinds of loyalty (social, political, cultural, and religious). His book The Shore of Expectations: A Study on the Culture of the Ukrainian Shistdesiatnyky (CIUS Press, Toronto, 2019) was awarded the Pritsak Book Prize by ASEEES in 2020 and is forthcoming in Ukrainian translation by Duch i Litera in 2024. He is currently working on a history of Ukrainian diaspora in the West during the 20th Century.
From Public History to Fake History: Ukrainian History in the Italian Media since 24 February 2022
This paper will analyze the presence of Ukrainian and Soviet history topics in Italian public debate starting from Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After a brief introduction on the Italian public debate originated from the publications on the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, this paper will demonstrate that some characteristics, already identifiable since 2005, are still valid today: despite the commitment of scholars of Ukrainian history and literature in the effort to explain Ukrainian-Russian relations, the Italian mass media (publishing houses, newspapers, and TV) have mainly hosted self-styled experts on Ukraine who falsified Ukrainian history to explicitly defend Putin and the aggression war. Curiously enough, these experts were not historians, or if they were professional historians, they were not experts of either Eastern European or modern history. The paper will analyze the works by Nicolai Lilin, Alessandro Orsini, and Franco Cardini, showing that they portrayed Ukrainian democracy as a neo-Nazi dictatorship and Putin as a victim of the aggressive expansionism of the USA towards Eastern Europe. In the field of scientific publications, there has been no shortage of cases in which experts in Eastern European history have spoken at conferences and written books within a Russo-centric logic that justifies Russian military actions: the most sensational case is that of Aldo Ferrari (chair of Eurasian history at the University of Venice and director of the Eastern European section of the Institute for International Political Studies) and his history of Crimea. The most popular voices in defense of Ukraine have substantially failed in the effort to explain the true causes of the conflict for two reasons: 1) on one hand, experts have not been able to produce a sufficiently simplified discourse that could reach a mass audience (e.g. Andrea Graziosi); 2) on the other hand, as in the case of the most successful volume on Ukrainian history in Italy, written by Giorgio Cella, the latter was not an expert of Ukrainian history and his overly simplified version of history was incapable of responding to the specious controversies raised by the supporters of Putin's regime.