Revising Memory, Rewriting Identity: Petro Grigorenko’s Memoirs

• In Event: Ukrainian Identity Within and Against Official Soviet Culture

Abstract

This paper explores Petro Grigorenko’s memoirs as a dissident counter-memory project, in which he takes responsibility for having been a passive perpetrator of oppression before helping pioneer the Soviet human rights movement. Unlike Soviet state revisionism, which sought to erase inconvenient pasts, Grigorenko’s memory work is an act of self-liberation, as he not only acknowledges his shame-inducing past, but also uses those experiences to educate others. This paper will draw on public theory while contributing to memory and trauma studies, taking inspiration from Polly Jones’ work on the writers and readers of late Soviet biography as well as Ann Komaromi’s scholarship on tamizdat.

Author

• Una Vulevic, Stanford U