Memories of Soviet Repressions in Post-Multi-Colonial Post-Soviet Spaces*

 Zuzanna Bogumił (Project Leader) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at University of Warsaw. She specializes in memory studies, museum studies and anthropology of religion. For last years Bogumił worked on the secular and orthodox memories of Soviet repressions in Russia. She wrote: Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia's Repressive Past (Berghan Books 2018), and More than Alive: The Dead, Orthodoxy and Remembrance in Post-Soviet Russia (together with Tatiana Voronina, Peter Lang 2023). She is also one of the advocates of the postsecular turn in memory studies and co-editor of two books on this issue: Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective (with Yuliya Yurchuk,  Routledge 2022), and Towards Postsecular Memory Studies (with Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, forthcoming Brill.

Tuya Shagdar is an anthropologist. Her research focuses on the emergent political forms, legacies of state socialism, and Mongolian Buddhism. She recently defended her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge with a dissertation focusing on postsocialist transformations through the method of studying up. Tuya also holds an MPhil degree in social anthropology from the same university. Her previous postgraduate training was in comparative literature (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). In addition to teaching anthropology, she taught courses in literary theory and film studies at the National University of Mongolia. She speaks Mongolian, Russian, and English in addition to basic knowledge of Japanese and French. 

Andriy Fert, PhD in history is currently a lecturer at Kyiv School of Economics and a fellow at Center for East European and International Studies in Berlin (ZOiS). He was an Ukrainian PI in the international research project Postsecular Approach to Memory Processes in Central-Eastern Europe (Visegrad Fund, 2023–2024). Since 2017, he has been working for the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband e.V. (DVV), coordinating projects related to history education in secondary schools in Ukraine. His studies focus on religion in the Soviet period and religion’s role in memory processes. He currently studies the impact of the Russian war against Ukraine on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Ketevan Gurchiani is a professor of anthropology at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is particularly interested in lived religion, the domesticated and undomesticated nature of the city, and informal practices of resistance. Since 2020, Ketevan Gurchiani has been leading the project: "Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage" https://urbanassemblage.iliauni.edu.ge). In this project she is interested in different aspects of the intertwining of human and non-human in the city. Ketevan Gurchiani is also involved in the projects "An Anthropology of Gardens Otherwise and Elsewhere", "Surrogacy as Networked Phenomenon", and “Conflict and Cooperation in Eastern Europe”. Webpage https://faculty.iliauni.edu.ge/arts/ketevan-gurchiani/?lang=en

Iwona Kaliszewska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on intersections among Islam, state and anti-state violence, and more recently on war and humanitarian crisis. Iwona has been conducting research projects in Dagestan and Chechnya since 2004, and lately in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. Her most recent book For Putin and for Sharia. Dagestani Muslims and the Islamic State has recently been published by the Cornell University Press.

Raili Nugin is a sociologist, working at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. During her academic career she has studied transition to adulthood, generational conceptualisation, youth mobilities, rural youth, rural-urban relations, memory transmission and social exclusion. Within her different research projects (international and national), she has also studied Russian ethnic minorities in Estonia and recently, Ukrainian refugees in the context of rural-urban networks. She has authored several research articles in different journals (Memory Studies, Journal of Youth Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Sociologia Ruralis), edited a book about generations (“Generations in Estonia: Contemporary Perspectives on Turbulent Times,” Tartu University 2015) and written a monograph about the generation born in the 1970s (“The 1970s: Portrait of a Generation at the Doorstep,” Tartu University 2015).

Tomasz Rawski is a political and cultural sociologist focused on researching memory politics, nationalism/war and state socialism in contemporary Eastern Europe and beyond. He authored a book on Bosniak nationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1995 and several articles in renowned journals, including East European Politics and Societies, International Journal of Comparative Sociology and Problems of Post-Communism. He participated in research projects focused on memory politics, including H2020: REPAST and H2020: DisTerrMem. He was a visiting scholar at University College London, Uppsala University and University of Sarajevo.

Katarzyna Roman-Rawska, assistant professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Literary scholar, sociologist, publicist and literary translator. She works on the intersection of culture and politics as well as anti-regime and anti-war resistance in contemporary Russia. https://pan-pl.academia.edu/KatarzynaRomanRawska

Margaret Comer is Research Fellow on the AHRC and DfG-funded project "Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage, and Compliance in and beyond the Holocaust'. From 2020 to 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Research Council-funded project 'Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena', based at Tallinn University (grant agreement no 853385). In 2019-20, she was the Research Assistant on ‘Safeguarding Sites: The IHRA Charter for Best Practice’, an interdisciplinary project funded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019. Her research focuses on the heritage of mass repression, Soviet and post-Soviet memorialisation and heritagisation, Holocaust memorialisation and heritagisation, grievability and memory, and contested memory. She is specifically interested in how post-repression societies variously portray violence, suffering, perpetration, bystanding and victimhood at sites associated with mass violence.

Magdalena Lejman is a Soviet film researcher, focusing on collective images of the Soviet society imposed by feature film and state propaganda. Graduate of cultural studies and history (PhD). Senior expert at the Univeristy of Warsaw, specialising in visualisation, dissemination and managment of research projects. 

Anna Pazio is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences, University of Warsaw. Holds a BA in Hebrew Studies and both a BA and MA in Sociology from the College of Inter-Area Individual Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Warsaw. Affiliated with the Research Lab on Deep Mediatisation at the Digital Economy Lab, University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on the sociology of politics, religion, and knowledge, with additional interests in memory politics and the philosophy of science.  

Alexander Makhov is a PhD candidate at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He does research on Russian memory regarding Soviet times in academic and public discourse. His ongoing PhD research focuses on the impact of state memory politics on the academic history of Stalinism and Soviet repressions in Russia under Putin's rule. He explores how the recent move towards authoritarianism in Russia transforms its public memory and shapes the new state-centered narrative of the Russian past. His other work explores how Russia's invasion of Ukraine forced Russian migrants to reshape their identity to ease the adaptation in new countries.

►International conference, Warszawa/Białystok/Wyszków

September 21-24, 2024

During the four-day conference titled “Remembrance of Soviet Repressions in Post-Soviet Spaces,” project members and invited experts on the memory of Soviet repressions discussed the existing convergences and divergences in the remembrance of Soviet repressions across various post-Soviet and post-dependent regions. In her opening speech, Zuzanna Bogumił addressed the current state of Soviet Repressions Memory Studies. On the second day, participants travelled to the city of Białystok to learn how memories of Soviet repressions are materialized in Poland's cultural landscape. They visited the Museum of Memory of Sybir, the Sybirak Memorial, and the memorials in Jedwabne, where memories of the Holocaust and Soviet repressions are in conflict. Over the next two days, through individual presentations and roundtable discussions, participants explored how Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war have updated memories of Soviet repressions, as well as the particularities of vernacular remembrances of Soviet repressions in various post-multi-colonial, post-Soviet spaces.

Conference Poster

Conference Program

►Regular online team meetings

September 2024 – October 2026 / online

We organize a monthly seminar to discuss selected existing research on the remembrance of Soviet repressions in post-Soviet spaces and in countries that were formerly dependent on the Soviet Union. We also examine existing concepts and theories in memory studies, heritage studies, and post-colonial and subaltern studies to assess their applicability and usefulness for our research.

►Postcolonial perspectives – postdependance entanglements: public online seminars 

May 2022 – October 2026

Series „Postcolonial perspectives – postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial Russian Far East”, no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and Social Memory and the Post-Imperial Russian Heritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852. These seminars are organized jointly with the Centre for Research on Social Memory. The seminars are held in Polish and/or English. 

Seminar with Sergio González Varela (University of Warsaw) on the topic: “From Brazil to Russia: Capoeira, a Tool for Decolonization?”

 17 Dec 2024

English

Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines ritual, play, music, and fighting elements. Created by slaves in the Northeast of Brazil, arguably in the seventeenth century, capoeira has been historically associated with the power of the weak. It has been used as a martial art to fight colonial oppression. During the twentieth century, it became a codified ritual that politically worked closely with the Black Marxist movement in Salvador, fighting for the recognition of the African heritage in Brazil. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, capoeira has expanded globally. However, its spirit for liberation from dominant ideologies continues to captivate practitioners in Brazil and abroad. In this presentation, I describe how practitioners have used capoeira in Russia and how this country's practitioners have interpreted this art's rebellious spirit in a post-Soviet context. Finally, I contrast the subversive configuration of capoeira with the efforts made by dominant state powers to use martial arts in general as a political tool to show strength, authority, and subjugation of others.

Seminar with Tamta Khalvashi (professor of Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia) on the topic: “Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia”

 19 Nov 2024

English

Based on the forthcoming book Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia, Tamta Khalvashi explores post-Soviet Georgia as a unique postcolonial space that gives rise to an affective condition of peripheral shame. By mixing family archives and autoethnographic reflections with traditional fieldwork material, she follows glimpses of this shame in various urban settings, from the monuments on the move to indebted houses or from unburied bodies of Soviet mass killings to awkward coexistence of different religious and ethnic groups in urban courtyards of Batumi on the western edge of Georgia. Khalvashi offers a new way of conceiving shame, not just as a feeling of stratified geopolitical, social, or personal relations but as an impulse to straddle with or repair ongoing peripheral frictions. She thus approaches shame as a productive feeling that gives rise to inconvenient coexistence, which is the only way to live and survive on the margins of the postcolonial world.

Seminar with Ilya Kukulin (a research fellow at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture) on the topic: “Political and Cultural Mythologies of Post-Soviet Sovereignty”

 21 May 2024

English

The new states on the ruins of the USSR emerged not as a result of the struggle of enslaved peoples, but as a result of the crisis of central power. We could now discuss in what ways the new political elites of the former “union republics” -- and especially Russia -- reproduced the Soviet notion of sovereignty, and what new elements were included in this notion.  In my paper, I hope to discuss the cultural and political mythologies of sovereignty that have proliferated in the public rhetoric and Russian language literature of the “perestroika” period and in Russia in the 1990s.

Book discussion with the editor Alima Bissenova (Nazarbayev University) on a book “Labyrinth of Postcoloniality” (2023). Moderator: Zuzanna Bogumił

 21 April 2024

 English

This collection is an attempt to form a new post-colonial agenda, in which we, seven Kazakhstani authors, are trying to rethink and theorize our current state from the position of our own locality and develop a “local” point of view on the most pressing issues of “our post-coloniality” - a point of view that would be pronouncedly local but, at the same time, global – connected with the universal post-colonial experience.

Seminar with Wenzhuo Zhang (University of Melbourne ) on the topic: “(Re)interpreting Harbin’s Russian colonial heritage: changing China, changing perceptions.”  Moderator: Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper.

 21 February 2024

English

Rozmowa z Iwoną Kaliszewską, (Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW) i Grzegorzem Skrukwą (Wydział Historii, UAM) na temat „Obszar postradziecki w perspektywie postkolonialnej”. Moderator: Zuzanna Bogumił

 16 maja 2023

Polski

Rok temu w maju zainicjowałyśmy spotkania z serii „Postkolonialne perspektywy – postzależnościowe uwikłania”. Rok od tego spotkania i ponad rok od pełnoskalowej militarnej agresji Rosji na Ukrainę perpektywa post-kolonialna i post-imperialna stała się niemalże normą w mówieniu o wojnie w Ukrainie i analizowaniu przemian społecznych i kulturowych zachodzących w wielu państwach postradzieckich.

Book discussion with the authors William Partlett (University of Melbourne,) and Herbert Küpper (Research Centre for Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Regensburg) on the book “The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire” (Edward Elgar 2022)

 14 March 2023

English

First comment: Immo Rebitschek (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Chair: Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Faculty of Sociology UW)

The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as a moment of decolonization and the post-1991 constitution-building experience as a postcolonial one. Partlett and Küpper’s application of the post-colonial paradigm to the former Soviet world adds new facets to post-colonial constitutional theory by presenting a third type of (ideology-based) colonialism and a third type of decolonization.

Dyskusja wokół książki Zbigniewa Szmyta (Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza) zatytułowanej, “Zbyt głośna historyczność Użytkowanie przeszłości w Azji Wewnętrznej” (Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2020). Spotkanie prowadzi Zuzanna Bogumił

 10 Stycznia 2023

English

Zbyt głośna historyczność opisuje poszukiwania użytecznej przeszłości prowadzone przez mieszkańców postsocjalistycznej Azji Wewnętrznej. Autor, traktując historię jako politykę skierowaną ku przeszłości, analizuje jej użycia na poziomie państwa, społeczności lokalnej i na poziomie rodzinnym. Wiele uwagi zostało poświęcone praktycznym formom funkcjonowania przeszłości wykraczającym poza tradycyjną historiografię i politykę historyczną, a także poza instytucje ją reprodukujące: szkoły, muzea, uniwersytety.

 Seminar with Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University/ University of Warsaw), on the subject of "Global Easts-Entangled Mnemoscape in Postcolonial Perspectives". Moderator: Zuzanna Bogumił (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology PAS)

 13 December 2022

English

The end of the global Cold War has dramatically reconfigured the mnemoscape in the third millennium. In Eastern Europe, released memories of Stalinist terror and Holocaust collaboration unboxed the pandora box of conflictual memories. In East Asia and the other peripheral region, the West could no longer marginalize the memories of colonial genocide and atrocities because the imperative to defend Western civilization against Soviet communism had lost its historical force. With a focus on global Easts-Eastern Europe and East Asia, I will probe for the non-hierarchal comparability and multidirectional interactions among the memories of the Holocaust, colonialist crimes, and the Stalinist terror. Dislocating this triple victimhood from the memorial provincialism and relocating it in the postcolonial perspectives would be the first step towards mnemonic solidarity. Suggesting “critical relativization” and “radical juxtaposition” as conceptual tools, I will try to rescue global memories from remembering provincialism.

Dyskusja z Hanną Gosk (Wydział Polonistyki UW), Joanną Wawrzyniak, (Wydział Socjologii UW) i Tomaszem Zaryckim (Instytut Studiów Społecznych UW) na temat  „Polska i Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w perspektywie postkolonialnej”. Prowadzenie: Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Wydział Socjologii UW)

 10 Maja 2022

A|Z English

Militarna napaść Federacji Rosyjskiej na Ukrainę 24 lutego 2022, poprzedzona rewizjonistycznym wykładem historycznym Władimira Putina na temat historii Ukrainy oraz przedstawieniem pożądanego przez Rosję porządku geopolitycznego w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej, a następnie reakcje UE i NATO na wywołaną przez Rosję wojnę, w sposób wyrazisty pokazały trwałość zależnościowej sytuacji mieszkańców regionu Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej. Włączanie interpretacji historii Polski i całego regionu w nurt studiów postkolonialnych ma już swoją długoletnią tradycję, lecz ciągle aktualne pozostaje pytanie o to, co badania nad kolonializmem i perspektywa post-kolonialna (de-kolonialna) mogą wnieść do rozumienia przeszłości i aktualnej sytuacji państw i społeczeństw regionu (w różnych wymiarach – od ekonomicznego, przez polityczny, po kulturowy).

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EN: Results of the competition for the position of student/student or doctoral student/doctoral candidate in the NCN-20 project
PL: Wyniki konkursu na stanowisko typu student/studentka lub doktorant/doktorantka w projekcie NCN-20 

EN: Committee for research grants in the research project entitled: ‘Memory of Soviet repression in the post-multicolonial Russian Far East’. - Contract No. - UMO- 2020/39/B/HS6/02809, funded by the National Science Centre, kindly informs that as a result of the competition, the research fellowship for the position of fellow_2 is awarded to Anna Pazio, and for the position of fellow_3 is awarded to Alexander Makhov. Congratulations!

PL: Komisja ds. stypendiów naukowych w projekcie badawczym pt.: „Pamięć o represjach sowieckich na post-wielokolonialnym Rosyjskim Dalekim Wschodzie” – nr umowy - UMO- 2020/39/B/HS6/02809, finansowanym przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki, uprzejmie informuje, że w wyniku konkursu stypendium naukowe na stanowisko stypendysta_2 otrzymuje Anna Pazio, a na stanowisko stypendysta_3 otrzymuje Alexander Makhov. Serdecznie gratulujmy!

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