Continuity and Change in Remembrance of the Soviet Past: The Case of Lithuania - Violeta Davoliūtė
Continuity and Change in Remembrance of the Soviet Past: The Case of Lithuania: keynote speech by Violeta Davoliūtė (October 29, 2025)
Violeta Davoliūtė is Senior Researcher w Lithuanian Institute of History, Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University and Project Leader of Facing the Past: Public History for a Stronger Europe (Horizon Europe, 2022-2025). She has published extensively on the topics of population displacement and Soviet nationalities policy, historical trauma, identity, the politics of memory and nationalism in the aftermath of WWII in the Baltics and Europe. She is a co-editor of the CEU Press book series Memory, Heritage and Public History in Central and Eastern Europe.
In the final days of October, the University of Warsaw hosted the international conference “Mobilizing and Weaponizing Memories of Soviet Repressions”, which brought together over one hundred scholars from more than twenty countries — from Japan to Alaska. The event aimed to explore local forms of articulating the memory of Soviet repressions, both in the former republics of the USSR and in countries that once belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence. Timed to coincide with the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repressions (October 30), the conference examined the roles of governments, civil societies, religious institutions, and grassroots movements in shaping, preserving, and contesting the memory of Soviet repressions. Discussions focused on how these memories are being reinterpreted today within processes of decolonization and disengagement from Russian influence, as well as on the ways in which they may be instrumentalized in contemporary political and cultural debates. The conference was organized by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Culture and Arts, University of Warsaw, with support from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the Excellent Science – Support for Scientific Conferences programme (KONF/SP/0014/2024/02). Event partners included the Faculty of History – Warsaw Center for Global History, the Faculty of Sociology – Center for Research on Social Memory, and the History Meeting House.