Retrospective Reassessing: Ukrainians’ Memories of Life Before the War Revisions of the Imagined Past

Abstract

This article examines how Ukrainians retrospectively reassessed their pre-war lives during 2022–2023, based on interviews collected in the Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration, Memory project. The study argues that war trauma reshapes both individual and collective memory, producing shifts in how the past is valued and narrated. At the individual level, many respondents tended to idealize or positively reframe their former everyday lives, often recognizing overlooked freedoms, relationships, and routines. At the collective level, memories were more ambivalent: former criticism of social problems such as corruption or disunity was sometimes downplayed, sometimes sharpened, depending on the speaker’s current perspective. These contrasting reassessments reveal how memory functions as a dynamic process of reconstruction under conditions of crisis. The analysis highlights how personal testimonies not only register loss but also expose broader cultural patterns of adaptation, self-censorship, and resilience in the face of war.