By Tamar Jacoby
One of the most popular memes circulating on Ukrainian social media in the past year used an image, first popularized on Russian social media, of a grotesque creature with the body of a fish and the snout of a pig—a shvino karas, or pig fish. “A few decades ago, almost all Ukrainian popular culture was derivative of something Russian,” online meme curator and web developer Bohdan Andrieiev, 32, explained. “Before independence and for more than a decade afterward, we had no popular culture of our own.” This has changed dramatically in recent years, culminating in a burst of new Ukrainian creativity since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Social media, meme culture, pop music, and viral jokes have emerged as powerful tools of national solidarity—the bottom-up, ironic Ukrainian equivalent of old-style totalitarian propaganda.
According to Andrieiev, virtually none of this new popular culture draws on Russian sources—that’s now widely seen as inappropriate. “But this is an exception,” he said, “because we’re inverting the reference. It’s like the word ‘queer.’ What was a slur is now a badge of pride. Russians call Ukrainians pigs and pig fish and look down on us. But if we’re so pathetic, how come we’re beating them on the battlefield?”
Even after a year of intensive media coverage of the war in Ukraine, it’s easy to forget how new the Ukrainian nation is. In 1987, when Ronald Reagan admonished Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union—the rough political equivalent of a U.S. state. Ukrainians had their own language and folk traditions and there had been a few short-lived attempts over the years to form a Ukrainian government. But not until 1991 did Ukrainians establish an independent nation—and even then, the shadow of the Soviet Union hung heavily over the new country, both politically and culturally.
