Memory Beyond Borders: Exile, Environment, and Law in the Former Soviet Space

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel unites scholars from Jeffrey Olick's memory studies seminar examining how memory traverses physical, temporal, and institutional boundaries across the former Soviet space. Their research reveals how memory practices are transformed, contested, and repurposed when detached from traditional "containers”— such as the nation-state, fixed commemorative sites, and established historical narratives — demonstrating memory's mobility across diverse contexts.
The first paper examines how Georgian, Ukrainian, and Azerbaijani émigré intellectuals responded to Soviet occupation, revealing how diasporic communities created, stored, safeguarded, and utilized national memory beyond territorial borders. The second explores Kazakhstan's Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, contrasting embodied "slow memory" in contaminated landscapes with institutionalized "commemorative memory"—demonstrating how nuclear legacies create new temporal and spatial relationships. The third analyzes how Russia's 2022 invasion accelerated Ukraine's decommunization laws, showing how memory legislation adapts when national security frameworks are dramatically altered. Together, these studies illuminate memory's dynamic nature across disrupted spaces, bodies, and institutions, contributing perspectives on how communities navigate rupture and continuity through displacement, environmental transformation, and legal contestation.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Robert Geraci, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Civilized, Victorious, or Tragic? A Comparative Study of the Georgian, Ukrainian, and Azerbaijani Interwar Exiles - Elene Kekelia, George Washington U

• Polygon(s) Borders: Contested Nuclear Legacies of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Testing Site - Olya Feldberg, U of Virginia

• What Explains Punishment in Historical Memory-Related Court Cases?: The Case of Ukraine since 2022 - Andrii Nekoliak

Discussant

• Bartlomiej Gajos, Mieroszewski Centre (Poland)