Dictated by Moscow: Art, Anti-Semitism, and Economics in Late Soviet Kyiv

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The papers in this panel tackle life in the Ukrainian capital during the last decades of the Soviet Union. The papers place Kyiv within a scheme of systemic oppression whereby people’s ethnicities, memories, forms of artistic expression, and even wallets were manipulated to meet the political needs of the Kremlin. They then tackle the opportunities offered by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the collapse of the USSR—an unexpected political liberation which granted tremendous opportunities and extracted significant costs for a population new to independence. The papers dwell, too, on how the memorialization of this time must still actively contend with the repression, antisemitism, and poverty associated with Kyiv’s last Soviet decades.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Jeff W. Jones, UNC at Greensboro

Papers

• Unearthing Kyiv’s Buried 'Wall of Memory': The Suppression and Excavation of Melnychenko and Rybachuk’s Masterwork - Megan Buskey, Independent Scholar

• Kyiv, Ukraine, and the Beginnings of Gorbachev’s Economic Reforms - Martin J. Blackwell, Stetson U

• Arduous Memorialization: Confronting Soviet State Antisemitism Legacies in Modern-Day Kyiv - Yevhen Minko, Central European U (Austria)

Discussant

• Anna Shternshis, U of Toronto (Canada)