Late last year, Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture released a succinct new take on the country’s national narrative, via YouTube: a five-minute animated music video unpithily titled “The History of Ukraine—Complete and Uncompromising, Unadorned and Pop.” With rap from the venerable Ukrainian hip-hop group TNMK, lyrics by the activist poet Artem Polezhaka, and nostalgic hand-drawn animation by Sashko Danylenko, the video is post-Soviet “Schoolhouse Rock!” for digital natives. Released in the heat of the U.S. Presidential impeachment hearings, it’s also a reminder that there’s more to Ukraine than phone calls from Donald Trump. Viewers should keep in mind, however, that every national story has a political slant.

In this case, the politics are a holdover from Ukraine’s previous administration, led by President Petro Poroshenko, who was elected after the 2013–14 Maidan protests, in Kyiv. One of Poroshenko’s priorities was to counter Russia’s propaganda war: tactics included suppression of media deemed anti-Ukrainian, new requirements for the use of the Ukrainian language in the media, and assorted projects intended to foster patriotism. The music video was funded by the Ministry of Information Policy, a department hastily established in 2014 and instantly denounced as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” by Ukrainian journalists concerned about threats to freedom of speech. (Under Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, it has been subsumed into the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport.) The video is also part of a more personal political project: Polezhaka told me that he wrote his lyrics as part of the ongoing series “That’s How Memory Works”—songs dedicated to the memory of a teen-ager killed during the 2015 bombing of a pro-Ukrainian march in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

Since Ukraine became independent, in 1991, state-sponsored historical commemoration has mostly taken the form of sombre remembrance of vanished heroes, with plenty of grandiose metal statuary. Ukraine’s far-right nationalists, meanwhile, prefer black balaclavas and torchlight rallies. The latter mode seeped into government policy after the Maidan protests, as part of an official move toward militant nationalism. But the angry aesthetic of this brand of nationalism can be off-putting. The enthusiastic response to “The History of Ukraine,” which quickly went viral, suggests that many Ukrainians are eager for a more positive, less menacing take on their national history. In comments on YouTube and Facebook, many viewers joked that the video could replace the entire history curriculum in Ukrainian schools.

The video opens with three Hutsuls, the fedora-wearing cowboys of the Carpathian Mountains, blowing their long wooden horns. We leap between churches and cottages, castles and factories. “Look to the left, look to the right,” Oleh Mykhailyuta raps. “This is your land, this is your state!” But who, exactly, is “you”? We start to understand as bouncy golden bubbles spell out “Glory to Ukraine” and “Glory to heroes” This nationalist slogan was often heard on Maidan, sometimes with the less friendly “Death to enemies!”

Mykhailyuta continues, “In the beginning there were no birds or fish. And then came the Big Bang.” Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” be damned: Ukraine started when the Earth did. This is the mystical aspect of nationalism, in which identity springs from the primordial soil.

The Big Bang is followed by the Neolithic Trypillians, who are rendered as chatty people bearing pottery. Next we encounter the battle-ready Cimmerians, a mysterious, likely Indo-European group described in Homer’s Odyssey as living “shrouded in mist and cloud,” in an “endless, deadly night,” at the edge of Hades. Herodotus later wrote that they lived north of the Black Sea, giving rise to the idea that they were early inhabitants of Ukraine. A land of “endless, deadly night” is perhaps not the most inspiring national model, but it’s an opportunity for a gag: Homer Simpson appears in a toga only to have his head erased, replaced by something more Greek. Next come the eastern Slavs and the founding of Kyivan Rus’, the kingdom that both Russia and Ukraine claim as their ancestor. (They will not agree to share.) Slavs do battle with monotone hordes, and then with each other.

This inter-Slavic battle is sadly familiar. In Ukraine, the American impeachment scandal has been overshadowed by the long-running war with Russia-backed separatists in the east of the country. Last April, Ukraine elected Zelensky, a comedian whose only previous political experience was on the hit sitcom “Servant of the People,” in which he played a schoolteacher who is elected President after becoming an accidental social-media star. Zelensky was elected in part on his promises to end the conflict and reintegrate the separatist-held regions into Ukraine. (His election may also have been a sign of Ukraine’s desire to laugh again.) A big part of Zelensky’s project is the promotion of a more inclusive, pluralistic version of national identity. Poroshenko, who is from southwestern Ukraine, ran for reëlection on the slogan “Army! Language! Faith!” Zelensky, by contrast, is from an industrial city in Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, and, as for many residents of eastern Ukraine, his primary language is Russian. (He also has a Jewish background, though he doesn’t emphasize that part of his identity.) In order to be elected, Zelensky had to prove his commitment to the Ukrainian language; his campaign featured humorous videos in which he studied obscure Ukrainian vocabulary words. Though he won in a landslide, his willingness to consider compromising with the eastern Ukrainian separatists and with Russia on a peace deal has elicited vituperative criticism from the most nationalist factions in Ukrainian society and from followers of Poroshenko, who is working hard to undermine his successor. Zelensky’s enemies like to paint him as a Russian pawn ready to betray the motherland.

Despite its upbeat aesthetic, “The History of Ukraine” reflects the idea, more characteristic of Poroshenko’s politics than of Zelensky’s, that Ukraine is defined by its enmity with Russia. A high-speed journey through the pantheon of Ukraine’s political and cultural national heroes—the Cossacks, the itinerant philosopher-poet Hryhorii Skovoroda, national bards Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka—is peppered with battle rap-appropriate disses directed at Russian heroes like Pushkin.

Danylenko’s gently colorful cartoon figures are so disarming that it’s easy to overlook the video’s more tendentious aspects. The Bolsheviks are described as a “plague,” represented by a sinister red bird-man wielding a hammer and sickle—an efficient personification that could also be described as a willful forgetting of the participation of working-class Ukrainians in the Revolution. Lenin is nowhere to be found, as if Ukraine’s recent “decommunization” campaign, which entailed the removal of Lenin monuments all over the country, extended even to the telling of history. Hitler makes only a brief appearance, referred to as one of several “sneaky” problems, and Ukrainians are described as fighting on “two fronts” in western Ukraine, against the Soviets as well as the Nazis. This last is a relatively subtle celebration of Ukrainian nationalist movements in the Second World War—made official policy under Poroshenko, but highly controversial because these groups participated in ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews. Most striking is the total erasure of the history of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities. One would have loved to see how the ingenious Danylenko would have portrayed the writer Sholem Aleichem, author of the Yiddish-language stories that inspired “Fiddler on the Roof,” or Isaac Babel, who immortalized Jewish Odessa.