Introduction1
The Post-socialist and Comparative Memory Studies working group of the Memory Studies Association (PoSoCoMeS) held its first conference online, encouraging meaningful dialogue among scholars studying different geographical areas. In doing so, the working group contributed to high scholarly standards for post-socialist memory studies across disciplines and created a global framework for academic dialogue on post-socialist memory. With the event initially planned to take place in Chișinău, Moldova, the conference kept a Moldovan and Romanian focus in its online form, holding regular events related to these two countries.

Plenary events
The plenary events set the conference's tone by tackling some of the most significant themes in the field. MELTEM AHISKA (Istanbul) addressed some recurring issues in Turkish politics and argued that imperialism and colonialism have ongoing effects on how the present time is experienced by producing structures of feeling. KULSHAT MEDEUOVA (Astana) focused on the transformation of the commemorative landscape in post-Soviet Kazakhstan illuminating the widespread replacement and displacement of Soviet monuments with new ones funded by the state, as well as the emergence of non-state mnemonic actors. VITALY CHERNETSKY (Lawrence, Kansas) looked at memory wars through the lens of multidirectional memory by drawing on Odessa as a representation of a multicultural Eastern Europe. The plenary lecture by STEFAN BERGEN (Bochum) revolved around the potential for agonistic memory frames of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. He argued that antagonistic forms of memory have been dominant in this memory, combined with cosmopolitan memory regimes, favored by the EU's memory politics. HEIDI GRUNEBAUM (Cape Town) examined the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism, claiming that postcolonial education from non-national or anti-national perspectives is necessary to rethink proposals for partition and better understand colonial legacies in the region and beyond.

Published works were also a focus of two plenary events. The first plenary discussion offered a dynamic conversation between the authors KATJA PETROWSKAJA (Berlin) and MARIA STEPANOVA (Moscow) reflecting on their novels Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther)2 and Pamiati pamiati (In Memory of Memory)3, which both deal with the possibilities of literature to recollect erased pasts and reconnect communities and generations. The second talk was on NIKOLAY EPPLÉE’s (Moscow) book The Uncomfortable Past4, from which a lively debate spun around finding national consensus about complex histories and whether it is possible to develop a widely accepted discourse.

The conference also included a series of cultural and artistic events, such as a film screening of DRAGOS TUREA's documentary, The Soviet Garden. A reading of a fragment from the play Requiem for Europe by ARTIOM ZAVADOVSKY invited the audience to reflect on how international companies have enforced their discourse, policies, and especially their interests in Moldova, and how these have affected Moldovan daily life. Further amplifying artistic perspectives, the conference also featured the collective Chto Delat, a working group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Russia, as well as their educational platform, the School of Engaged Art.

Roundtable discussions
Two roundtable discussions addressed the issue of the memorialization of traumatic pasts. The first debate led by SIMINA BĂDICĂ (Brussels) with LJILJANA RADONIĆ (Vienna) and GRUIA BĂDESCU (Konstanz) on the exhibition of difficult pasts in museums and memory sites offered an opportunity to discuss current trends in showing recent pasts in the museum from a scholarly and practical perspective. The second roundtable of BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT (Warsaw), DIETER POHL (Klagenfurt), and YANA BARINOVA (Kyiv) focused on the commemoration of the tragedy of Babyn Yar. Speakers from both discussions agreed on how complex the memory of difficult pasts usually is and emphasized the importance of encouraging the public to ask critical questions about the past. The roundtables also pointed out that we should distinguish between the functionality of memorials and museums in the memorization of traumatic past events.

Overview of panels

Memories of Specific Pasts

Eight panels explored the memories of specific pasts from various thematic angles. The session on World War II addressed the state’s role in forming memory through the practices of commemoration and pointed to the difficulties of working through contrasting memories of the past in highly politicized environments. The panel on the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps discussed the questions of who is to be blamed, who is to be grieved, and whether there is a functional Holocaust memory culture, while revealing the complexity of the Holocaust memory. Similarly, the session on global memories of the Holocaust showed diverse forms of remembrance and illuminating evidence for how the circulation of the Holocaust memory varies. The session dedicated to the understanding of the Soviet past examined how people construct and re-interpret narratives of the Soviet period, discussing emotions as a motivation to promote and preserve family stories or personal opinions. The session on the Holocaust memory in Romania and Moldova focused on the official beginning of Holocaust memorialization and its evolution in the region, while tackling the issues of guilt, responsibility, and collaboration and how they contribute to the lack of coherent memorialization policies in both countries. Contested narratives of the past events in two countries were addressed in the panel on wars of memory in Russia and Ukraine. All panelists underlined how antagonistic memory of the strict distinction between "us" and "them" might perpetuate feelings of hostility towards "the others". Two panels centered on memories of violence and trauma. They stressed the importance of distinguishing the actors involved in the memorialization of the past events, considering that they have different power resources at their disposal, and questioned how the traumatic events are being defined. More concretely, the session on the legacies of mass violence explored how societies that underwent a difficult past of conflicts and repressions cope with the violent past, while the panel on traumatic memories looked at how memories of specific historical events are expressed or articulated in the present. In essence, all those panels raised the fundamental questions of hegemonic narratives, the rightness of memory, politics of memory, and memory security.

Aspects of Post-socialist Memory

Nine panels dealt with complex and interconnected aspects of post-socialist memory. The session on post-socialist memory politics touched aspects of bottom-up or top-down memory politics in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine in the last decade from a micro- or macro-perspective. The panel on post-socialist perspectives on theories of memory highlighted the role the nation and international environment play in the formation of post-socialist memory, and raised the question whether scholars have the ambition to develop new approaches to memory based on the post-socialist context and challenge established theories. Likewise, the panel on modalities of memory politics focused on national memories. It centered on questions of conflicting narratives that reduce possibilities of dialogue and cooperation among national states or groups within the same country. The session on scales of memory in mediations of socialism explored various memory representation strategies in the post-socialist sphere from Polish vernacular strategies and the poetics of Gonzo to a Czech book series and unbuilt monuments. The panel highlighted the interdisciplinary and diverse ways memory can be mediated and studied. Another session presented various angles and approaches to analyzing the 1990s with strong transnational and transregional perspectives. The session on nostalgia introduced projects connected by the notion of a lost future, while different meanings of the post-socialist nostalgia concept were identified and the need to capture all connotations of nostalgia conceptually was underlined. The oral history session offered a lively debate on aspects of oral history and its position in the respective countries where the researchers work, and showed some opportunities but also shortcomings of the oral-historical method. The session about history and symbols in changing societies centered on the use of memory to create identity in multiethnic societies, e.g. Moldova and Transnistria. It discussed how different groups deal with elites' official impositions and how these impact everyday life practices. Also, the last panel on post-socialist visual memory practices in Romania focused mostly on the key region of the conference. The presentations showcased the diverse manifestations of Romanian visual memory like tattoos or representations in the urban space. They all drew attention to negative heritage in the contemporary age and showed examples of its dangers and effects.

Memory and the Media

Five panels dealt with representations of historical narratives in the media. These included the panel on memory, visuality, and popular culture, which focused on mediations of the past for present-day audiences such as photographs, period dramas, and films. The panelists emphasized that the media productions under study were more than just representations of the past, as they conveyed a clear message promoting an agenda. They also reflected on the implications of such messages, mainly as the productions targeted people with no direct experience of the represented period. Another session addressed different aspects of remembering the past through visual representations, with a focus on photography. The presentations, which focused on photographs of violence or conflict in Russia and Poland, highlighted the importance of visuality in today's society and problems of abusing photographs or lacking visual literacy. The session on memory and art addressed the role of art in dealing with trauma caused by a regime, a transition, or an experience of a non-democratic political system. The session on politics, ethics, and aesthetics of post-transitional time presented projects dealing with memory in literature and art and discussed common temporalities of the transition period. The projects in the session tackled the processes of coming to terms with the previous regime's legacies and traumas following its downfall. The panel on the mediated memories and affective resonances centered on how memories of contested pasts are presented through different memory mediations and highlighted the complexity of remembrance of the socialist past in and beyond the post-Soviet space.

Spaces of Memory

Five panels in particular approached the memorialization of historical events and figures in public spaces. A session analyzed how controversial issues such as war, patriotism, and trauma are approached in museums, while the session on new regional, national, and local identities investigated the presence of these controversial topics in exhibitions vis-a-vis the role of citizen initiatives in the promotion of such. Comparative and transnational perspectives of memory politics in Eastern Europe were discussed in a session that centered on the ethnicization of historical narratives and cultural heritage pertaining to the Soviet past, while the panel on post-socialist heritage and tourism examined the reconstruction and re-interpretation of heritage focusing on what is preserved, represented, or silenced in different contexts, especially when tourism is involved. The urban memory session investigated the different aspects of reading a city and discussed the interplay between top-down processes and bottom-up agencies. Overall, these different panels highlighted the role of museums, heritage sites, tourism, the urban landscape, as well as mnemonic networks on how or what we collectively remember.

Conclusion

Through its virtual format, the conference brought together scholars from different parts of the globe and across a multitude of disciplines to address crucial questions in memory studies. The broad scope allowed for a comparative and transnational perspective, which also included cases beyond the working group’s focus region such as South Africa, Vietnam, China and Venezuela. By identifying itself as a facilitator of scholarly exchange, the PoSoCoMeS fostered complex global discussions on post-socialist memory and has reinforced the necessary networks to propel these discussions forward.

Conference overview:

Opening plenary session

Alexei Tulbure (Chișinău), Aline Sierp (Maastricht), Serguei Ehrlich (Chișinău), Daria Khlevnyuk (Moscow), Ksenia Robbe (Groningen)

Plenary lecture

Meltem Ahıska (Istanbul): Reflecting on the imperial complex. Thinking through memory knots beyond national histories

Session 1. Memories of WWII

Anastasiia Pavlovskaia (Saint Petersburg): The “Siege Bread” memorial action and the all-Russian emotional community of memory of the siege of Leningrad

Jelena Đureinović (Belgrade / Vienna). Between anticommunism, ethnicisation and militarisation: The Second World War in memory politics of post-Milošević Serbia

Alexandra Arkhipova (Moscow) / Anna Kirziuk (Moscow): To know and to commemorate. Memory of the Holocaust and WWII in the former occupied territories of the USSR

Discussant: Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus)

Session 2. Memory and art

Zhijian Qian (New York): Fragmentary memory: visual reflection on the cultural revolution in works of artists born in the 1960s

Dorine Schellens (Leiden): “I Live – I See”. The role of Moscow Conceptualism in memory debates about the Soviet past

Ksenia Zakharova (Moscow): Images of lost future. Hauntology in contemporary art

Discussant: Marko Jenko (Ljubljana)

Plenary event: The Soviet Garden (2019)

Director Dragoş Turea in conversation with Oksana Sarkisova (Budapest)

Plenary lecture

Kulshat Medeuova (Nur-Sultan): The post-Soviet memoryscape in Kazakhstan

(Session 3. Removed from the program)

Session 4. Understanding the Soviet past

Liucija Verveckiene (Vilnius): Sorry, proud or silent? (Re)constructing grandparents’ Soviet pasts

Kirill Molotov (Moscow): Methods for constructing the memory of the USSR. YouTube critique of Yury Dud’s documentary Kolyma

Ekaterina Melnikova (Saint Petersburg): The memory of the siege: emotions and material remains

Discussant: Galina Yankovskaya (Perm)

Session 5. Urban memory

Anastasia Romanova (Chișinău): Language ideologies and their impact on urban toponymy

Anna Vyazemtseva (Moscow): Russia’s architectural heritage of the 1920–1950s in contemporary historiographic perspective

Ekaterina Zakrevskaya (Moscow): Do political controversies necessarily cause differences in patterns of memory? A comparison between the Immortal Regiment and the Immortal Barracks

Discussant: Gruia Bădescu (Konstanz)

Session 6. Nostalgia

Milica Popovic (Paris/Ljubljana): Yugoslavism – a memory of an era or a politics of the future?

Katharina Niemeyer / Maria Silina (both Montreal): #Ostalgie. Remembering the former GDR 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Daria Khokhlova (Moscow): Types of irony and nostalgia in Russian popular music. Haven't you heard, Lenin is risen?

Kaja Kraner (Ljubljana): Nostalgia for the future. The post-socialist generation of visual artists in Slovenia

Discussant: Otto Boele (Leiden)

Plenary discussion: Memory, Fiction, Non-Fiction

Katja Petrowskaja (Berlin) and Maria Stepanova (Moscow) in conversation with Ksenia Robbe (Groningen)

Session 7. Modalities of memory politics

Alexey Miller (Saint Petersburg): Antagonistic, agonistic and “mute” modalities of memory politics around the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe

Dmitry V. Efremenko (Moscow): The securitization of memory in post-Soviet space and its consequences for interstate relations

Olga Malinova (Moscow): Remembering the 1990s in Russia. Mnemonic actors and public practices

Discussant: Daria Khlevnyuk (Moscow)

Session 8. Museums and memory: war, patriotism and trauma

Ene Kõresaar (Tartu) / Kirsti Jõesalu (Tartu / Helsinki): From the “occupation paradigm” to the universalization of totalitarianism. On changing representations of World War II and communism in Baltic history museums

Rachel Tough (Norwich): Curating memory. Dealing with the past at the War Remnants Museum

Ekaterina V. Klimenko (Warsaw): Patriotic martyrdom. Russia – My History and the political uses of (Stalinist) repressions in Putin’s Russia

Discussant: Sara Jones (Birmingham)

Session 9. Post-socialist heritage and tourism

Alena Pfoser (Loughborough): Tourism as memory making. A comparative ethnography of city tourism in the post-Soviet space

Alisa Maximova (Moscow): Local community attitudes to memory activism focused on preserving the village past: two cases from Vologda region, Russia

Gruia Bădescu (Konstanz): Centennial materialities in Alba Iulia: Reconfiguring the heritage of empire in the celebrated place of the nation

Discussant: Rémi Praud (Brussels)

Session 10. Post-socialist memory politics

Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius / Ilana Hartikainen (both Helsinki): Tangled temporalities. Memory politics in right-wing media coverage of migration in Poland and the Czech Republic

Georgiy Kasianov (Kyiv): Decommunisation in Ukraine: actors, actions, outcomes (2015–2019)

Andrzej Czyżewski (Łódż): The 50th anniversary of the “March events”: communicative memory, “commandos” and the politics of memory

Discussant: Jan Kubik (New Brunswick/London)

Plenary lecture

Vitaly Chernetsky (Lawrence, Kansas): Multidirectional memory as challenge and promise in post-Soviet contexts. Theoretical reflections and the paradoxical promise of Odessa as a case study

Session 11. The memory of the Holocaust in Romania and Moldova

Ana Bărbulescu (Bucharest): The Transnistria ghetto – a social approach

Marius Cazan (Bucharest): The other side of bravery. The 6th Vȃnători (Hunters’) Regiment in the campaign of 1941

Irina Shikhova (Chișinău): Holocaust memory in Soviet and post-Soviet Moldova

Claudia-Florentina Dobre (Bucharest): Competing memories: Gulag and Holocaust in post-communist Romania

Discussant: Arkadi Zeltser (Jerusalem)

Session 12. Museums and memory. New identities: regional, national, local

Marina Sokolovskaya (Yekaterinburg): The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre about the war in Chechnya. The structure of the museum exhibitions and the stories presented

Sofia Tchouikina (Paris): Exhibiting family memory and “interpersonal” objects in an NGO museum space. Memorial’s Moscow exhibitions on the Gulag and repressions

Sofia Gavrilova (Leipzig): The construction of exhibition patterns in Russian regional museums

Discussant: Sara Jones (Birmingham)

Plenary book talk

Nikolay Epplée (Moscow), author of The Uncomfortable Past (2020), in conversation with Maria Lipman (Moscow)

Session 13. Global memories of the Holocaust

Nevena Daković (Belgrade): Balkan cinema and the new Holocaust memory culture

Biljana Marković (Vienna): Milos Crnjanski’s hidden Jewish portraits and the rise of a global memory of the Holocaust

Oleksandr Pahiria (Lviv): The Janowska forced labour camp in Lviv in historical studies and post-Soviet memory in Ukraine

Discussant: Daniel Levy (Stony Brook)

Session 14. Memories of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps

Robert Sommer (Chicago): Camps brothels. The difficult representation of forced sex labor in socialist East Germany

Alexandra Tcherkasski (Hamburg): Remembering the Holocaust – Soviet state memory politics or no uniform memory politics at all?

Isabel Sawkins (Exeter): “Tragedy. Valour. Liberation”. The Russian national exhibition at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Aleksandra Szczepan (Krakow): Terra incognita. Eastern Europe in (post-)colonial Holocaust studies

Discussant: Vladimir Solonari (Orlando)

Plenary event: Requiem for Europe

Fragment from a text by Nora Dorogan, Nicoleta Esinencu, Kira Semionov, Doriana Talmazan and Artiom Zavadovsky. Read by Artiom Zavadovsky

Plenary lecture

Heidi Grunebaum (Cape Town): Between postcolonial memory politics and imaginaries of partition. The question of Israel/Palestine

Session 15. Traumatic memories

Anastasia Nikitina (Moscow): Inherited fear. Online reception of Yury Dud’s documentary Kolyma

Gayane Shagoyan (Yerevan): “Victims” and “executioners” of the Stalin-era repressions in the public discourse of post-Soviet Armenia

Mila Bajic (Budapest): Generation Bombing: Remembering groups of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia

Ioana-Zoia Ursu (Cluj-Napoca) / Dragoș-Dumitru Ursu (Alba Iulia): Narratives of traumatic memory in post-socialist Romania: the “saints of the communist prisons”

Discussant: Nicolas Moll (Sarajevo)

Session 16. Memory, visuality and popular culture

Anne Pfautsch (London): Othering the East. Picturing the Eastern region in post-socialist Germany

Aleksandr Fokin (Tyumen): Imaginary USSR. Russian series about the late USSR

Boris Noordenbos (Amsterdam): Imagining the invisible. Soviet “durability” in recent Chernobyl cinema

Discussant: Veronika Pehe (Prague)

Session 17. Scales of memory in mediations of socialism

Barbara Markowska (Warsaw): The post-communist memory regime in a local community. A case study of Wąchock

Jan Miklas-Frankowski (Gdańsk): Fear and loathing in the neighborhood. Post-socialist memory and postcolonial resentments in the poetics of Gonzo (Dojczland by Andrzej Stasiuk and Mordor Will Come and Eat Us by Ziemowit Szczerek)

Tiziana D’Amico (Venice): Memory in the object, the object in memory. Object as representation of the socialist past in Czechoslovakia

Antoni Zakrzewski (Warsaw): “I don't think we will build this monument”. The forgotten statue of Stalin in Warsaw

Discussant: Simon Lewis (Bremen)

Session 18. Mediated memories and affective resonances of the socialist past

Irina Dushakova (Moscow): Media framing of memories about Joseph Stalin in Russia

Irina Troconis (Ithaca): Under the Comandante’s gaze. Memory and spectrality in Venezuela’s (post)socialist afterglow

Emma Crowley (Bristol): The “livication” of utopian discourse. Diverging memories of socialism and solidarity in the polyphonic novel

Discussant: Ioana Luca (Taipei)

Session 19. Legacies of mass violence

Margaret Comer (Tallinn): Heritagescapes of repression. Legacies of mass violence in contemporary Russia

Ana Kršinić-Lozica (Zagreb): Obscured legacy. Jasenovac as a phantom of the socialist past

Selbi Durdiyeva (Derry): The Russian Orthodox Church, exclusionary memory and relations with the state. The case of the Butovo memorial

Discussant: Lea David (Dublin)

Session 20. The politics, ethics and aesthetics of post-transitional time. Memory beyond post-history

Kylie Thomas (Amsterdam): Refusing transitional time in South Africa after apartheid

Florin Poenaru (Bucharest): Lost memories and memories of loss. Tensions of autobiography and history in secret police files

Melina Sadikovic (Bristol): The construction of memory, language and new spaces for sociality in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina

Ksenia Robbe (Groningen): Re-writing transition against post-history. The cases of Russia and South Africa

Discussant: Boris Buden (Universität Weimar)

Session 21. Wars of memory in Russia, Ukraine and in “the space in-between”

Mikhail Nemtsev (Moscow): Why does mature Putinism need a militant politics of history?

Robert Latypov (Perm): Regional specificities in preserving the memory of Soviet state terror. The example of the Perm region

Oksana Dovgopolova (Odesa): The Babyn Yar memory site in contemporary Ukraine. The level of values

Aleksey Kamenskikh (Perm): Russian and Ukrainian fields of memory. Is reconciliation possible?

Discussant: Aleksei Bratochkin (Minsk)

Session 22. Post-socialist perspectives on theories of memory

Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Warsaw): Milieux de mémoire in late modernity. Vernacular strategies of dealing with collective traumatic experience

Elmira Nogoibaeva (Bishkek): Memory in Central Asia

Andreea Mironescu (Iași): Toward a conceptualization of post-postcommunism in Romania

Patricia Manos (Boston). Russian blues, rainbow solidarity

Discussant: Mischa Gabowitsch (Potsdam)

Chto Delat (Saint Petersburg): Presentation of the Post-Soviet Studies project by the School of Engaged Art

Session 23. Post-socialist visual memory practices in Romania. A transnational, comparative perspective

Caterina Preda (Bucharest): The tramway of communism and the bus of the revolution. Artistic commemorative, nostalgic or critical practices in post-socialist urban Romanian space

Maria Alina Asavei (Prague): Engraving in the skin. Vernacular memorials for Ceauşescu, Tito, and Stalin

Dan Drăghia (Bucharest): A difficult reconciliation with the communist past. Communist monuments and monuments to communism in Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria

Alexandra Oprea (Bucharest): Denouncing corruption through visual means. Civil society initiatives in post-socialist Romania

Discussant: Dana Dolghin (Amsterdam)

Session 24 Roundtable. Babyn Yar memory today – puzzles and troubles

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Warsaw), Dieter Pohl (Klagenfurt), Yana Barinova (Kyiv)

Session 25. Visual representation and photography as a source

Anna Topolska (Poznań): Photographing a city at war’s end and how a local community deals with trauma. WWII-era Poznań through the lens of Zbigniew Zielonacki’s camera

Diliara Brileva (Kyiv): Burning Kazan. Visualizing the trauma of the conquest of Kazan in the children's magazine Salawat Küpere

Boris Stepanov (Moscow): Russian glossy historical journals. Visual design and targeted audience

Oksana Sarkisova (Budapest): The limits of the visible. Silences, oblivion and Soviet-time vernacular photography

Discussant: Kylie Thomas (Amsterdam)

Session 26. Roundtable. Exhibiting difficult pasts in museums and memory sites

Ljiljana Radonić (Vienna), Gruia Bădescu (Konstanz)

Discussant: Simina Bădică (Brussels)

Plenary lecture

Stefan Berger (Bochum): The memory of communism in Eastern Europe – antagonistic, cosmopolitan or agonistic?

Session 27. The 1990s in post-socialist memory

Artemii Plekhanov / Usevalad Herasimau (both Moscow): Imagining the post-Soviet. Routine, fantasy and nostalgia in comics

Doris Mironescu (Iași): Literary memories of the 90s. Disempowerment, neurosis and self-mockery in Romania’s early transition period

Elena Malaia (Saint Petersburg): Memories of the future: a time capsule and nostalgia in a post-socialist Crimean village

Nona Shahnazarian (Yerevan): Hard memory and taboo topics. Post-communist Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan

Discussant: Ksenia Robbe (Groningen)

Session 28. Museums and memory politics in Eastern Europe. Comparative and transnational perspectives

Konstantin Pakhalyuk (Moscow): The local and the transnational in the museums of regional capitals in central Russia

Alexandr Voronovici (Moscow): Displaying the Second World War in Kyiv and Chișinău: former Soviet museums in Ukraine and Moldova in the 21st century

Anastasia Felcher (Budapest): Research methodology on writer museum networks across post-Soviet countries: Pushkin Museums after 1991

Discussant: Joanna Wawrzyniak (Warsaw)

Session 29. History and symbols in changing societies. Memory politics, mobilization and conflicts

Nika Timashkova (Zurich): Negotiating nationality and identity through clothing

Viacheslav Stepanov (Orel): The role of the elite in identity construction in the context of the unresolved Transnistrian conflict

Alla Ostavnaia (Tiraspol): Memory politics in constructing a civic identity. The cases of the Republic of Moldova and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria)

Discussant: Olena Fostachuk (Odesa)

Session 30. Oral history

Barbara Christophe (Braunschweig): Remembering socialism in post-hegemonic Lithuania. Agonistic memory as a relational concept

Ute Hirsekorn (Nottingham): A new paradigm. The past in the present – East German mentalities and values in post-1989 Germany

Natalia Dushakova (Moscow): “A Moldovan would read the Bible; we all would listen”: Old Believers' living memories of exile

Olga Gontarska (Warsaw): Struggle to survive. The Ukrainian film industry in the transition period (memories of film industry representatives)

Sabine Volk (Krakow): Monday marches, once again? Memories of “1989” in the PEGIDA movement

Discussant: Gelinada Grinchenko (Kharkiv)

Notes:
1 A longer version of this report has been published in the PoSoCoMeS newsletter (March 2021): https://67a6dad4-357b-4c90-a433-a56e713a1adb.filesusr.com/ugd/c1feef_c525214a63d84ec782af3d7a02c49f06.pdf. The authors would like to thank Ute Hirsekorn, Lana Lovrenčić, Ksenia Robbe, and Andrei Zavadski for their helpful comments and suggestions throughout the writing process.
2 Katja Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther. Geschichten, Berlin 2014.
3 Maria Stepanova, Pamiati pamiati, Moscow 2018.
4 The Inconvenient Past. Memory of the State Crimes in Russia and Other Countries, Moscow 2020.