This study aims to provide some basic key insights into the identity rupture that runs through Ukrainian society and which the Orange Revolution revealed to the Western world. Traces of the evolution of the national idea, from its emergence in the early 19th century to the declaration of independence in 1991, are included in the report, as well as failed attempts by social and national liberation movements in the 1920s.

World War II holds a decisive position, acting as a matrix of two competing narratives that shape the interpretive logic of the entire national history. Should it be called "Soviet occupation" or "liberation"? Is it the Holodomor, a term shaped like the Holocaust to denote the Great Famine of 1932-1933, "genocide" committed by the Stalinist regime against the Ukrainian people, or a "collective tragedy" common to the peoples subjugated by Moscow;

Even the widely accepted Taras Shevchenko, the 19th-century romantic poet, is not exempt from conflicting interpretations.

The author, a Ukrainian ethnologist who has emigrated to Quebec, uses an approach described as "distanced proximity" to analyze the contradictory sensitivities developed in the East and West, within the framework of two major experiences of the 20th century that deeply marked them: communism and nationalism.