In the aftermath of the WWII the people and governments of countries participated in the war faced the problem of tailoring the memories of the war and the images and experiences of immense devastation and suffering. Since the late Stalinism period, the aim of the Soviet government was to preserve the type of socialism that had been established before the war (Furst 2010). At the same time, it was important to incorporate recollections about the war into private remembrances and frame into the soviet ideological discourse. Education played a central role in molding a young generation of communist citizens who unquestioningly adopted communist ideology. In the aftermath of WWII the grip of ideology over soviet schooling became even tighter. Since then schools and extracurricular activities were considered important means of strengthening ideological believes as well as shaping the images of the past and, in particular, creating the  myth of the war.

The study of the memory has brought into focus the traumatic memory of the Second World War experience, recollections of victims of the Soviet regime and Holocaust, accounts of everyday Soviet life, nostalgic longing and analysis of myth construction about the past (Skultans 1998, Todorova 2010, Boym 2001, Kirschenbaum 2010, Merridale 2005, Hirsch and Spitzer 2002, Yekelchyk 2004, Kucherenko 2011). However, experiences of childhood and schooling do not often appear as the subject of research (e.g. Sorlin 2005, Winter 2005, Douglas 2010, Kelly 2007, Furst 2010, Blessing 2010 etc.). Similarly little investigation has been done into the memory of the post-war childhood and schooling in Ukraine. At the same time, there is a need for the analysis and revision of narratives of post-war children. Those who were children in the aftermath of WWII nowadays are the main witnesses of the past able to share their knowledge and recollections.   

This paper compares the memories about post-WWII schooling with official soviet educational policy and explores how image of the war and ideological believes and were imposed through education and perceived by children. At the same time it will show the dialogue between knowledge of the war that children acquired at home from the stories of family members and knowledge gained at school.

The objectives of the paper are to:

• Analyse personal recollections to reconstruct the image of the post-war school years (both everyday experiences of school and extracurricular activities).
• Define the main methods and approaches of imposing ideological discourse and framing and/or constructing war remembrances in and through the system of schooling in Soviet Ukraine.

Memory of post-war schooling in Ukraine will be presented in comparison to similar studies of memory in other post-communist European countries. In order to provide a background the study will acknowledge the past politics of memory in Ukraine and the post-war state politics of children. Such analysis will allow a comparison between the personal memory of the war and the image determined by the state.  The regional difference and the difference in the ethnic, professional and social backgrounds of respondents also will be taken into consideration.

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