War, Liberation, Repression: Trials as Storytelling in the USSR and Post-Soviet Space

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

With the Red Army’s march to Berlin, Stalin’s regime reinvented itself as the liberator of Europe. Yet for many people along the way, the resurgence of Soviet power instead represented only another form of subjugation. This panel examines liberation as a rhetorical device across time and place. Irina Makhalova analyzes the ways in which newly “liberated” Soviet citizens seized upon war crimes trials as venues for advancing their own versions of the occupation experience. Investigators could then pick and choose what would become authoritative. Paula Chan examines how in late Stalinist Riga, accusations of ingratitude and opposition to “liberation” fueled prosecution of the same Jewish survivors whose suffering gave purchase to Soviet claims of rescuing Europe from the evils of Nazism. The other two papers in this panel highlight the versatility of liberation narratives for repressive purposes. Irina Rebrova explores the ongoing use of trials and other relics of World War II by Putin’s administration to position the Russian Federation as an extension of the victorious USSR as well as the liberator in the current war in Ukraine. Such storytelling conspicuously avoids addressing the Holocaust. Gundula Pohl discusses related phenomena in post-Soviet Belarus, where state leaders are employing trials and “memory laws” to disarm people who might seek to oppose Lukashenko’s rule. Taken together, these papers showcase the importance of interrogating the concept of “liberation” in the past and present, above all by asking who decides what it means and at what cost it should be defended.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Seth Bernstein, U of Florida

Papers

• Soviet Civilians as Witnesses: Facing Liberation and Testifying in Closed Trials in the 1940s - Irina Makhalova, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)

• Patriots into Traitors: Late Stalinist Prosecutions of Holocaust Survivors in Riga - Paula Chan, U of Oxford (UK)

• The Concept of 'Genocide of the Soviet People' in the 'Victorious' State: Construction of the War Narrative in Modern Russia - Irina Rebrova, Technische U Berlin (Germany)

• Beyond Death: 'Genocide' Trials in Belarusian Courts - Gundula Pohl, U of Hagen (Germany)

Discussant

• Diana V. Dumitru, Georgetown U