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Politics of Memory

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‘Eternal Russian-Ukrainian Friendship’ – A Case Study of How a Political Concept Was Memorialized and is Dememorialized

25 May 2021 Oleksandra Gaidai

The article touches on a concept that was in the very essence of imagining relations between Ukraine and Russia: “The Friendship of People.” The historical imagination had a tangible impact on Russian politics, and no political concept has ever been so damaging for Ukraine as this one. This concept undermined Ukraine’s subjectivity and led to the “rewriting” of Ukrainian history. Monuments dedicated to the “friendship” of these two peoples reveal the centrality of this notion in Soviet politics toward Ukraine. Notably, these monuments appeared only in Ukraine – there are none in Russia. The article analyses the erection of ...

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The Ricochet of Leninopad and the Second Wave of Desovietization of Lithuanian Public Space

25 May 2021 Rasa Čepaitienė

The article analyses the influence of the desovietization of Ukrainian public space (known as Leninopad), which started in 2014 as part of the “second wave” of the dismantling of Soviet monuments in Lithuania. Two well-known cases that have sparked the most debate among experts and the public are discussed in detail: the removal of the socialist-realist sculptures from the Green Bridge in Vilnius in 2015, and the removal of a monument to the writer Petras Cvirka in 2021. The conclusion is that in the post-Soviet and post-socialist region, in response to Russia’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, shifts in the politics of history h...

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Interview with Nikolay Koposov: "Putin’s Actions and Ideology Are Changing the World, Making It Potentially Unsafe for Everyone for Generations to Come"

25 May 2021 Nikolay Koposov

Nikolay Koposov is a Distinguished Professor of Practice at the School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology. Before joining Georgia Tech, he worked at Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Helsinki, and École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He was the Founding Dean of Smolny College, a joint venture between Saint Petersburg State University and Bard College, New York. Koposov specializes in modern European intellectual history, post-Soviet Russia, and the politics of historical memory. He has authored six books, including Memory Laws, Memory War...

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