Paradoxes of Liberation: War and Deliverance in Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines diverse conceptions of liberation in three different wars in the last century: the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Drawing from a variety of sources, including archives, oral testimony, visual and print media, combat journalism, and theoretical analysis of wartime ethics, the panel’s papers focus on questions of memory, trauma, propaganda, and collaboration in a context of contested notions of liberation during wartime. Relying primarily on oral history interviews, the first paper considers how a cohort of women who lived in the Central Black Earth Region during the Soviet-German War remembered the pain of occupation and the joy of liberation upon the return of the Red Army. The second paper examines how the anti-Soviet mujahedeen warriors deployed propaganda posters to promote demands for liberation from an oppressive foreign power and its puppet government. The third paper explores problems related to investigating and punishing suspected collaborators in territory that the Ukrainian Army had liberated from Russian control in 2022. While these three papers ponder different kinds of war fought in different eras of military history, they all assess their conflict from the point of view of the defending people struggling for liberation from a foreign power. In establishing this point of commonality, they illustrate that liberation not only represents a point in time in a continuum of conflict, it also can hold different meanings for civilians, the soldiers, and the state.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Daniel Giblin, The Citadel

Papers

• 'Ours Arrived! How Joyous We Were!': Memory of Occupation, Trauma, and Liberation in Kursk Oblast, 1941-1943 - Daniel Giblin, The Citadel

• Mujahedeen Propaganda Posters and the Struggle for Liberation against Soviet Occupation in the 1980s - Jeff W. Jones, UNC at Greensboro

• Euphoria of Liberation and Conundrum of Collaboration: Observations on Collaboration during the Russo-Ukrainian War - Jared McBride, UCLA

Discussant

• Eric Lohr, American U