Holodomor and the dissonant legacies of communist violence in Ukraine and beyond

• In Event: Collective Memory & Heritage

Abstract

Across Eastern Europe, the reckoning with the Communist past took different forms after 1989. Reopened secret police archives, public trials, informant scandals, new centers of remembrance, and anti-Communist educational projects reinforced the perception that the entire region is haunted by “memory ghosts.” In Ukraine, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, “file fever” shaped historical revisionism and efforts to (un)silence histories of communist violence. Archival opening did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, alongside the discovery of new documents, the public confronted long-suppressed trauma, grief, and compassion associated with communist violence. How did people narrate the previously silenced histories of experienced violence? And, more importantly, how did these silences shape the turbulent processes of Ukraine’s nation and state formation in the 1990s?
Focusing on the ways in which memories and trauma of the famine of the 1930s entered Ukrainian public discourse in the late 1980s, this presentation examines the dissonant legacies of communist violence in Ukraine and beyond. It demonstrates how historical and cultural conditions shaped processes of historical reckoning and the emergence of a language of cultural trauma, contributing to conflicting identities and divergent trajectories of nation and state-formation. In doing so, the presentation argues for rethinking the 1990s as a dynamic moment of both possibility and contradiction, one that simultaneously emancipated and repressed traumatic silences, with enduring consequences in the decades that followed.

Author

• Karolina Koziura, University of Toronto