Oral History, Memory and Memorialization in the Aftermath of Violence and Political Repression
Time: 2025-09-18 09:00 - 11:00
Location: Small Hall at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Natalia Khanenko-Friesen
Events within this Session
Testimonies of Czechoslovak Survivors of the Gulag in the Light of NKVD Documents
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
For more than two decades following the fall of the communist regime in 1989, the commemoration and research of Czechoslovak victims of Soviet political repression in the Czech Republic relied on oral and written accounts from survivors or their relatives. These testimonies were not only used by historians but were often uncritically reproduced in the media, focusing on dramatic aspects of the stories shared by survivors who lived to see the end of communist era. It was only in the mid-2010s that Czech historians began to work with personal investigation files of Soviet security services stored in Russia and Ukraine (notably by M. Borák, A. Hradilek, J. Dvořák). Efforts to find and digitize the personal files of Czechoslovak victims in Ukrainian and other post-Soviet archives under the project Czechoslovaks in the Gulag (led by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) resulted in an archive of thousands of personal files, including material related to most former Gulag prisoners who had shared their testimonies. Although analysis of these documents confirmed the core truths of most of the survivors’ accounts and the suffering they endured, problematic findings emerged. Historians faced challenges correcting exaggerated statistical data (such as the number of imprisoned compatriots, sentence lengths, camp death rates, etc.) and dealing with the ethical dilemma of refuting or amending survivors’ stories presented to the public, especially when some were still alive and held esteemed positions as hero-victims. The paper will illustrate this issue through various examples, with a special focus on three publicly debated cases opened by the author: Věra Sosnarová – the most famous Gulag survivor who was never actually imprisoned there; Michal Krecul – a war criminal; and Vladimir Hrozný – a criminal and collaborator with the Czechoslovak communist secret police. The aim is to present, discuss, and address key questions raised in public discourse surrounding these cases.
Speakers
Chornobyl Zone between Two Historic Crimes (1986/2022): Oral History and Memorialization of the Disaster
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Scientific and Archival Funds, Museum-Archive of Folk Culture of Ukrainian Polissia, State Scientific Center for Protection of Cultural Heritage against Technological Disasters (Kyiv, Ukraine), Research Fellow, Institute of History of Ukraine, NAS of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine), Co-Founder of the Chernihiv Research Centre for the Anthropology of War (Chernihiv, Ukraine), Co-Founder of the “Centre for Applied Anthropology” NGO (Kyiv, Ukraine) Among the wide range of issues facing oral history researchers today, a special place is occupied by the study of the peculiarities of the formation and transmission of historical memory in relation to the various disasters of the ХХ and early ХХІ centuries as factors in the emergence, circulation and changes in collective perceptions of Ukraine’s past and present. Finally, identifying the cause-and-effect relationship between disaster and historical memory may help to avoid future mistakes. A disaster of any origin is a physical phenomenon in a social context, since accidents and disasters result not only in the death of people, but also in the psychological, physical and social suffering of those who survived and had to adapt to new living conditions (including both the new social and ethno-cultural environment). Many generations of Ukrainians have had similar experiences, including the Holodomor, the flooding of villages during the construction of the Kremenchuk hydroelectric power station, the Chornobyl disaster, the annexation of Crimea, and the occupation of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014. One of the greatest disasters of our time is Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which caused a new stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war with numerous victims and losses. Some residents of eastern Ukraine, who were forced to move from the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone in 2014 to other parts of the country (or beyond), lost their homes for the second time after February 24, 2022, and experienced refugee status. The article attempts to analyze the various stages of memorialization of the Chornobyl disaster after the accident, as well as the state of cultural adaptation of the former inhabitants of the exclusion zone to the new conditions (both after the Chornobyl accident and after the Russian occupation) on the basis of oral history research; to trace the peculiarities of the narrative of the repeated loss of home by displaced persons from the Chornobyl zone as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the experience of the occupation of the places of compact resettlement of Chornobyl victims in the spring of 2022. As you know, after the Chornobyl accident a deserted exclusion zone of 2,044 square kilometers was created on the territory of 76 settlements, from which 91,000 people were evacuated. Minimizing the catastrophic consequences of the Chornobyl disaster, comprehensive recording and systematic description of the disappearing ethno-cultural continuum became the goal of the State Scientific Center for Protection of Cultural Heritage from Man-Made Disasters, where I have been working since 2015. The priority task of the Center at the stage of its establishment was to conduct a series of field expeditions aimed at identifying and recording the entire spectrum of folk culture, language and natural environment of the region under study, collecting anthropological materials and historical and local information about each village, as well as museum objects and documentary heritage of former inhabitants. As an ethnologist and anthropologist who has been dealing with disaster discourse for a long time, I can say that a number of tasks related to this issue in the Ukrainian research field have long been solved using the method of oral history. However, it is mentioned only in passing in interdisciplinary studies. Oral history as a method was most often mentioned by researchers of the Holodomor and the World War II. The recording of oral histories on the Chornobyl accident took place in the course of research by representatives of various historical disciplines, without focusing on the oral history method. Even the similarity of the questions asked by the researchers to their interviewees in the field did not suggest the similarity of the research tools: “Did you have any dreams on the eve of the World War II that foretold trouble?” – “Did you have any dreams that foretold the Chernobyl accident?” or “How did you adapt to the new living conditions after the village was flooded during the construction of the hydroelectric power plant?” – “Was it difficult for you to organize your life after being evicted from the “exclusion zone”? In his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, in which he analyzes the dreams he had on the eve of the World War I, C. Jung noted: “All this time [from the fall of 1913 to August 1914. – S. M.] I was haunted by the expectation of an impending catastrophe: I knew that such dreams and visions were sent by fate. ˂…>. I was faced with a problem: I simply had to find out what had happened and to what extent my condition was due to a collective spirit”[1]. Similar testimonies and reflections were found during my recording of memories of the World War II and its harbingers during expeditions to the Kherson, Mykolaiv, Khmelnytsky, and Chernivtsi regions[2], as well as in the collection of folkloristic researches by T. Shevchuk and Ya. Stavytska on the peculiarities of the functioning of the Ukrainian dream tradition, in particular, prophetic dreams about the war in eastern Ukraine[3]. The study of the historical experience of any catastrophe is based on the study of a person in conditions of severe shock caused by a sudden disaster with tragic consequences, which led to a sharp turn in both personal and social life. In particular, a vivid example of such a change is the post-war resettlement of the inhabitants of the Veremiivka village in the Chornobaiv district of the Cherkasy region from the “bottom” (part of the village before the flood) to the “top” (part of the village after the flood) as a result of the construction of the Kremenchuk hydroelectric power station on the Dnipro River. For example, according to Maria Pereuznyk, a resident of this village born in 1938, the process of moving the graves of her ancestors to the cemetery of the newly formed village was particularly traumatic for the people: “We had graves downstairs. When we had to move them up, we had to knock down boxes. ˂…>. My relatives did it themselves. The state gave permission. Of course my parents were there, they dug the graves and buried them. And those who did not bury them were called “gravediggers” and were taken away. They dug down there, and then they dug a trench here on the mountain, and they were called “gravediggers”. And because it was a common grave. We dug our own grave, but it was a common grave. I saw it. This grandfather Yevdokim that I told you about, he was buried recently, Yevdokim. He was lying there in a black suit, and he was rich. And they opened the coffin, they pulled him out like this. And then they opened the lid. And there was a cemetery, maybe a little bit, so they let him go. My grandmother had made a headstone there, they call it a “dolomina”. And they laid him down and brought him here to the cemetery and buried him. I saw it with my own eyes. And the other ones are opened like this, and as soon as the wind blows, it immediately disappears somewhere, like air, and is gone”[4]. The largest man-made disaster of the ХХ century at the Chornobyl nuclear power station (1986) caused equally severe traumas and losses in the social and domestic sphere, as well as in the sphere of spirituality and culture of the inhabitants of Ukrainian Polissia. While the inhabitants of the village of Veremiivka had time and opportunity to build new houses, move their property and bury their dead before the village was flooded, the inhabitants of the Chornobyl zone were deprived of this. The Polishchuks who were resettled from the exclusion zone were forced to leave all their property, including deceased family members, at the previous burial site due to radioactive contamination, with no hope of returning: “I said goodbye to everything… Yablunky… I went to the cemetery, with my parents…”[5]. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, tens of thousands of former Chornobyl residents crossed the command checkpoint into the exclusion zone every year. Traditionally, they stood in long queues to visit the graves of their loved ones and commemorate their souls. Due to the tragedy that forced the residents to leave their homes in 1986, the meeting at the cemetery was not only an indicator of the Chornobyl residents’ adherence to tradition, but also an opportunity to see each other, remember the past, learn about the fate of their former neighbors, etc. After the occupation of Chornobyl by the Russian invaders in the spring of 2022, it became impossible to visit the exclusion zone due to the danger of mines. With the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, I joined the organization and implementation of the project “Humanitarian Aspects of the Russian-Ukrainian War: Historical and Cultural Visions and Modern Survival Strategies” (Chernihiv, Ukraine), which since May 2022 has been collecting and preserving eyewitness accounts of the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war, followed by their interpretation and introduction into scientific circulation. Over the past two years, our team has surveyed 25 settlements in the Chernihiv region (Chernihiv and Ripky districts) and 3 micro districts of Chernihiv, which were most affected by massive Russian shelling in the spring of 2022. My colleagues and I had to repeatedly record the testimonies of IDPs from the exclusion zone who were resettled compactly in the Chernihiv region in 1986 and survived the Russian occupation in 2022. A comparison of the testimonies about the losses experienced, the perception of the concept of “home”, and the (un)new experiences of adaptation shows that the interviewees have somewhat different ideas about the displacement from their homes as a historical fact, as evidenced by both the form (the volume of memories, the structure of sentences) and the content (the emotionality of the narrative, the detail of the description) of the interviews. As the interviews revealed, the experience of resettlement after the Chornobyl accident and the loss of their homes was more traumatic than the physical destruction of their homes during the Russian bombardment and the need to evacuate again. It is also important to note that in both cases it was the catastrophe that triggered the formation of traumatic memories as a segment of historical memory. However, there are many examples of historical memory becoming a factor in the emergence of a catastrophe.
[1] Yunh K. H. Spohady, snovydinnia, rozdumy. K.: Tsentr navchalnoi literatury, 2024. 360 s. [in Ukrainian]. [2] The materials of the expeditions are stored in the Archival Scientific Fund of Manuscripts and Sound Recordings of the Rylsky Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. [3] Shevchuk T., Stavytska Ya. Ukrainska usna snotlumachna tradytsiia pochatku KhKh stolittia (rozvidky ta teksty). K. : Duliby, 2017. S. 23–40. [in Ukrainian]. [4] Archival research fonds of manuscripts and sound recordings of the M.T. Rylsky Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. F. 14-5, Univ. p. 830, pp. 20-21. [5] Recorded by N. Leshchenko, a researcher at the State Scientific Center for the Protection of Cultural Heritage from Man-Made Disasters (hereinafter - SSCPCD) in the Osyka village, Narodychi district, Zhytomyr region, from an immigrant from the Chornobyl zone.
Speakers
Retold War: Oral History Projects and Narratives about the Second World War in Contemporary Ukraine
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The current study explores how narratives about the Second World War in Ukraine have changed in the context of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Starting in mid-2023, I asked my respondents: “How did you imagine the war when it appeared in your relatives’ stories?”. This question was the result of observing a shift in these narratives: prior to February 2022, stories about relatives who lived through the Second World War were framed in the realm of postmemory. After the full-scale invasion, however, these accounts have taken on a deeply personal tone, with the narrators talking about it as if it were part of their own experience. This phenomenon is situated within the broader historical and cultural context of Ukraine, where research on personal experiences during the Second World War has long been marginalised and limited to specific topics. The growth of oral history initiatives after 1991/2014 has opened up new opportunities for researchers. But how has this shaped the areas of interest of oral historians in Ukraine and their methodology? What does it mean to do oral history in a wartime society?
Speakers
The Srebrenica Genocide Oral History: An Academic Approach
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
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Oral History and Museums: The Case of Preserving and Representing Oral Historical Memory in Ukraine’s National Museum of Revolution of Dignity
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
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