In this lecture, Andrii Portnov will reflect on the immanently complex, essentially contradictory, and profoundly important correlation between the notions of “Soviet” and “Ukrainian.” He will also discuss the Soviet notions of “nationalism” and “patriotism.” Through a close reading of selected texts from the 1920s to the 1980s, Portnov will try to elaborate on the attempts to portray the Soviet experience of Ukraine as a colonial and postcolonial one. Why and how did a supposedly internationalist state pursue imperialist policies and promote the ethnicity-based legal category of “nationality” and a semi-federal structure? How did the state-sponsored Ukrainization of the 1920s turn into the Russification of the 1950s and 1960s? How did Ukrainian-Soviet patriotism gradually become Soviet-Ukrainian patriotism? Why did the Soviet Union never dare to proclaim the emergence of a “common Soviet nation?” Portnov will explore how the answers to these questions help us to understand the dissolution of the USSR, the trajectory of post-Soviet Ukraine, and the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.