The return of suppressed memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and unsilencing difficult histories

Returning history and seeking for ways how to break silences

As we are finishing this introduction in February 2022, Russian president Putin has started a war on Ukraine—the largest country in Europe—justifying his aggressive invasion of the neighboring country with the need to “defend itself,” “denazify” Ukraine, and “protect people who have been subject to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv.” In his hour-long televised speech announcing the attack Putin not only manipulated with the notions that are commonly discussed in relation to WWII traumas, but also denied that Ukraine has ever had “real statehood,” and stated that the country was an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space.” With his brute falsification of history used to invade an independent state, assert power, and justify his imperial megalomania, war has suddenly turned from a distant past into a present-day disaster for millions of people and an unexpected return of this past. This hits most alarmingly Eastern Europe, especially the countries that share a border with Russia, to whom this war comes in the sequence of violent events that show the strength of Russia’s imperial ambitions and continuing attempts to return to totalitarian politics. In recent years this includes harsh repressions toward protesters against authoritarian regime in Belorussia, most violent since the fraudulent presidential elections of Alexander Lukashenko in August 2020, or fierce attacks at anti-government demonstrators in Kazakhstan in January 2022, silencing all forms of dissent, including anti-government activists and human rights advocates. For people in the region, silencing about the violent and traumatizing experiences is a “return of history,” since past repressions were also often followed by silences and unprocessed memories in order to protect family members from prosecutions (Etkind, 2013).

In Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus such repressed and unprocessed memories also involve the heavy history of the Great Famine or Holodomor (1932–1933), which according to different estimations took the lives of 3.3 to 7.5 million people (Applebaum, 2017; Kasianov, 2021; Snyder, 2012). In many contexts across the former Soviet Union displacement of entire ethnic groups has remained little researched. Moreover, migration was prohibited as a research theme during 50 years (REFERENCE). These consequent traumas have left many “blind spots” that only slowly become acknowledged and researched in Eastern European narratives of WWII and the Soviet occupation when intellectuals and scholars turn to revisit local archives and collect oral histories.

This special issue was born out of first rethinking how different artistic media initiate process of sharing difficult memories in the region and second seeking for ways through which to articulate notions of locality that could contribute to their articulation. Addressing processes of breaking silence it broadens the prevalent focus in trauma studies literature on literary narrative (i.e Caruth, 1996; Felman and Laub, 1992; Pederson, 2018; Radstone, 2007). The issue grows out of the symposium “Prisms of Silence” (21.–22.02.2020) organized in the framework of the project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” (2019–2023) held at the Estonian Academy of Arts that brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and curators. Building upon transdisciplinary research it adds to nuancing our understanding about the relationships between locality, silencing, and remembering in Eastern Europe as well as the impact of diaspora communities to the latter. Its contributors examine the contexts of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, United States, Canada, and South Africa.

Eastern European complex and layered history which involves a multiplicity of often conflicted memories poses challenges to finding ways of transmitting historical memory without losing its local specificities and sensibilities. In conceptualizing twentieth century history many terms have been borrowed from Western scholars, while Eastern European scholars’ contributions are frequently formed based on local facts but altogether on knowledge produced elsewhere and on frameworks, which are not rooted in the particular histories of the region. Another long-term pattern has been that while Eastern European scholars realize ethnographic research, it’s Western-based scholars that theorize its processes and are more visible as authors in international publications and platforms. One of its reasons is related to language, translation, and dissemination issues—the lack of international presence of publications by scholars from our region, despite the fact that memory issues have been widely and in-depth studied locally. Local scholars works, written in “minor” languages, remain within national recognition. The lack of mutual recognition of this work regionally is another reason, since locally produced scholarship has not always paid attention to international scholarship and even less to other authors from the region (Wawrzyniak and Pakier, 2013: 261). Nevertheless, translating unprocessed past to local and transnational contexts, as our contributors stress, is not only linguistic, but also actively developed through arts, and thus through means that escape straightforward translations (Piotrowski, 2012: 157) due to their affective and non-linguistic nature. Such cultural forms and narratives enable more nuanced ways of understanding erased memories and communicating traumatic experiences. Therefore, filmmakers, musicians, and artists have been equally important in conceptualizing the processes of remembering, silencing and forgetting by providing names to such processes and occasionally by rethinking their own participation in them.

Unsilencing the past

Eastern European scholars and intellectuals’ work can offer a rich vocabulary for thinking about postwar silence and its long-term operations. For instance, Lithuanian theater critic and public intellectual Irena Vesaite describes the “horryfying decades of silence” in the course of which she left to herself her family history that constitutes part of the termination of Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) community during the Nazi regime through the notion “left unsaid” (Vesaitė, 2020: 310–312). Estonian writer, filmmaker, and public intellectual Imbi Paju proposes the notion “memories denied” to discuss the silencing of sexual violence against women in the gulag prisoncamps in her film and book by the same name that discuss her mother’s experience of deportation and how such memories returned to her mother in the form of nightmares (Paju, 2007). Giving an agency to memories themselves Latvian literary scholar Zanda Gūtmane uses the term “memories that keep silent” for analyzing representation of totalitarian trauma in Baltic prose in reference to the crimes of Stalinism and the Holocaust. She refers to these memories in context of communicative and cultural memory, and their competition, as a result of which minority memories often are dismissed (Gūtmane, 2019: 531). Lithuanian literary scholar Violeta Davoliūtė proposes the notion “misplaced memories” to discuss the experience of the whole generation of intellectuals who “made a passage from the country to the city under conditions of war followed by the Soviet-style modernization” (Davoliūtė, 2016: 12). While researching the histories of Roma resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuanian scholar Aurėja Jutelytė refers to the postwar period as one of “archival silence,” thus instead she turns to oral histories to count such stories (Jutelytė, 2021: 79). Furthermore, reading between the lines has been a commonly used vernacular notion for making sense of Soviet everyday texts. Polish memory scholar Roma Sendyka underlines in her article in this issue the need to integrate vernacular memory for understanding the ways uncomfortable and neglected memories continue to be remembered. Her proposed notion “non-memory” characterizes how memory is transmitted from one generation to the next via daily routine processes and activities that despite often being unconscious embed traumatic memory and are particularly important for the unpacking of its social operation.

Collecting oral histories and in-depth life stories has been an often used method for transmitting the changes people experienced under different wars and occupying regimes, but also for bringing to the fore the continuity of individual lives through them. Simultaneously, this allows us to understand better people’s strategies of coping, ways of resisting and/or collaborating with different regimes. For instance, it is a recurrent method in the work of Belarusian writer, the Nobel prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich, whose books are based on her kaleidoscopic synthesis of vernacular memories. For writing her book, The Unwomanly Face of War (2004, English translation Alexievich, 2017), ¹ she collected women’s memories about WWII, thereby offering an alternative to the dominant patriarchal remembrance of war. “Women’s stories are different and about different things. A women’s war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words,” she writes. Although sometimes contested for her methods, too, giving voices back to previously unheard women, Alexievich’s work has paved the way to breaking silences about the entangled Soviet memories in other cultural forms too. Soviet and post-Soviet biographies and autobiographies as a lens through which to tell the traumatic totalitarian past that introduce attempts to reconcile with it, have been and still are efficacious genres doing the work of unsilencing, which bring to the fore diverse experiences of cultural memory. They comprise testimonies of the conflicting past, emotional and therapeutic processing of losses, and memorialization of this past. Combining reflections in text with sources from family archive artist Diāna Dimza-Dimme has proposed “home archeology” as her method for engaging with difficult memories in her Latvian-Jewish family negotiating both experiences of deportations, the Holocaust and Soviet era in ways that they shaped her family that she has presented in an exhibition Miriam from Mangalsala Island (Tali, 2018). Ukrainian artists Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev in their work turn to affect and postmemory in order to mediate the transgenerational trauma of the Holodomor, in the context of the difficulty of its representation due to scarce documental images and the long-time suppression of the subject in the Soviet memory politics. In their series "I still feel sorry whey I throw away food. . . Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor"(2018) they turn the taboo of throwing away food into a starting point through which to explore their own related feelings of guilt and shame and coupled it with fragments of landscapes from photographs that they found from fleamarkets. Since mass deaths by hunger leave no traces in the landscapes, it is these suggestive photos in combination with their documented affective experiences that offer a new visual language to talk about the Holodomor (Dostlieva & Dostliev 2019). There are many other examples of such practices that by using individual stories allow to bring more complexity to understanding unknown aspects of the past. Concepts and frameworks proposed by authors working in different artistic media not only add to currently available frameworks but also help to move toward a more nuanced understanding of the operations of memory during this period.

In this issue we propose the concept of “unsilencing” in reference to the ongoing processing of difficult memory. “Unsilencing” as a process of breaking silence is sometimes based on a series of silences that run through generations. Unsilencing is an act, which involves agency and has a potential to change the impact of the past on the present. It is usually a lengthy process that often requires courage and rigorous research, and that can sometimes lead to public condemnation for speaking out in these circumstances in which generations of people have grown up with differing ideas about truth and memory. It could have a healing effect through a dialogical approach, or engage with agonistic strategies in order to confront the selective and comforting or sometimes falsifying narrations of history. As we discussed above, after the collapse of the Soviet power in Eastern Europe this memory work was mostly carried out through the perspective of national remembering, leaving out those who were not part of the new power dynamics, like minority or gendered perspectives. During the past decade there is a visible tendency to critically address these new hegemonic and homogenizing memory frameworks and to revisit complexities embedded in them. The aim of this process is to look beyond the selective narrations of the past, foregrounding more diverse and neglected aspects of local history, also confronting nationally driven narratives. In forming this special issue we were interested in how it can contribute to conceptual frameworks and methods to analyzing the impacts of these traumatic experiences. The articles reactivate the discussion about the sensitivity of locality and contribute to simultaneously globalizing and vernacularizing twentieth-century memory in Eastern Europe about the influential and entangled series of conflicts and colonialisms. Our articles set Eastern European history at its heart to revisit dominant narratives of memory, its sites, myths, and contested symbols of trauma. Location, our authors suggest through a variety of contexts and approaches plays a key role in rethinking memories of repression.

Transnational, transcultural, translocal, and cross-cultural memories

After the fall of the Soviet Union—despite the vast scope of undertaken memory work about its totalitarian regime—undoing the long-sustained silences about more complex and contentious layers of the past traumas has sometimes remained marginal due to nationally driven political and institutional neglect. This work has become even more urgent, especially in view of Russia’s aggressive policy to restore its imperial power and revive its past. Both the current war in Ukraine, which in fact began in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and the war in Donbass, as well as the Russia–Georgia war in 2008, with attempts to expand into a strategically important region, Transcaucasia, recalls a ghostly return of the past. Furthermore, Russian recent political and economical engagements in Syria and Lybia invest the need to critically analyse these imperial agendas in an extended geographical scope.

These ongoing entanglements with the current political realities and the past require a search for new frameworks how to reflect on them. One such framework is a shift away from national to transnational perspective that has offered significant changes in memory studies as well as in other connected fields. On one hand, this shift marks turning away from national discourse and interest in forms of remembering across nations and cultures (Assmann, 2014; De Cesari and Rigney, 2014; Erll, 2011; Wawrzyniak and Pakier, 2013). On the other hand, it also shows strong connections and parallels between Eastern European and post-Soviet narratives, while also pointing to divergences between them. Moreover, it brings to the fore the need to develop a view of shared history that would primarily evolve from regionally based scholarship instead of Western paradigms of knowledge production. In the same vein, Polish memory scholars Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak have observed a new wave of research in which Eastern Europe is not treated as a mere supplement to discussions about European memory, but instead it becomes the very subject of comparative and transnational studies (Pakier and Wawrzyniak, 2018 : 12).

Locality has been an important concern for many Eastern European scholars not only in order to distinguish themselves from Western-based generalizations and theoretical perspectives, but also for producing alternative frameworks and theories to such knowledge. Michael Rothberg has advocated for a “located approach to transnational memory,” by which he means “paying rigorous attention to local but also situating attention to other scales” in order to articulate local concerns on national and transnational scales (Rothberg, 2014: 652). Although transnational memory brings important new considerations, in the light of the shifting nature of borders in Eastern Europe that have been far from self-evident, such an approach could have shortcomings and lead to simplifications that leave specific power-dynamics and regional perspective around it unnoticed.

Looking for more nuanced approaches to analyzing silences in the region, transcultural and translocal perspectives offer valuable added frameworks. The concept of transcultural memory offers a perspective that transcends national borders, are shared by groups at different locations, and is directed away from static toward dynamic mnemonic processes unfolding across time and space (Radstone, 2011). Estonian memory scholar Eneken Laanes has proposed the concept “transcultural memorial forms” to discuss how aesthetic media that has a global mode of circulation are used in articulating local memories as a cultural translation of local experiences and the ways of remembering into a global idiom and vice versa (Laanes, 2021: 43). Although her analysis focuses on literary works, the concept of cultural translation of memories has also been applied to visual and performative arts as powerful transcultural memorial forms, and to the different approaches they engage.

Different disciplined have introduced new nuances into thinking about locality and its impact toward knowledge-creation in recent years. In art historical scholarship the notion of “cross-culturality” has also recently been revived in order to describe cultures of encounter, to study how the travel of objects and ideas adds new significant layers for their interpretation and significance but also to locate researchers in a methodological field (Troelenberg et al., 2021: 7).

Translocal memory, understood as an intermediary term between “local” and “global” (Freitag and von Oppen, 2010) offers a perspective for integrating local specificities and connections between the different places in the region, yet avoiding equations between them. This perspective encompasses a focus on processes that happen in and between different localities and their interconnectedness (Peth, 2014). “We are always attached to a particular place, but this attachment is like a road sign, it points to another place, and thus works as a marker of planetary translocality,” as the Kazakhstan artists Maria Vilkovisky and Ruthia Jenrbekova from Krёlex zentr point out (Krёlex zentr Pagulich and Shchurko, 2021: 143).

While the concepts of transcultural and translocal primarily comment on relations in spatial terms, cross-cultural approach focuses on encounters between cultures, especially when appropriated in memory studies for dealing with historical trauma and loss, they resonate with multilayered social and political perspectives, epitomized in the assertion by US poet and feminist Adrienne Rich that “a place on the map is also a place in history” (Rich, 1986: 212). These multilayered perspectives contain complexities, relational connections, multidirectional approaches, and interactions between contemporary and historical layers. Returning to local histories and memories within the framework of wider narratives and commemorative contexts can voice silenced memories, while remaining attentive to the specific dynamics around reconciling with historical trauma. However, emphasis of locality can also act as emancipatory, confrontational, and agonistic potential against reductionism and selective narratives of the past used by contemporary political regimes, particularly for those that enact from increasingly nationalistic positions. Reprocessing trauma that is embodied in historically charged localities can be powerfully mediated through artistic media, as they have the ability to transmit its dynamics, using different tools, starting from documental approach to the ones engaging emotions, imagination, analytical, and conceptualizing views.

New transnational connections are increasingly developed and articulated in relation to WWII and the Soviet era. Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to this memory are developed in parallel and the connecting of postsocialist and postcolonial studies offer new important cues and require reframing problems for reinterpreting these historical periods. Drawing from postcolonial studies, Estonian literary scholar Epp Annus has proposed the notion of “Soviet colonialism” for reinterpreting the Soviet experience as a particular kind of colonialism (Annus, 2018). German historian Jürgen Zimmerer has connected Nazi regime’s military policies and administration used in Eastern Europe with these previously used in German East-Africa and the Herero and Nama people in southwest Africa, particularly, arguing that the extermination of whole ethnic communities in these contexts made the Holocaust in Eastern Europe “thinkable and executable” (Zimmerer, 2005: 211). Both studies negotiate the terms “colonization” and “occupation” in relation to each other and establish important transnational and transcontinental connections. Furthermore, such connections are present also in the development of many fields of science, such as anthropology, ethnology, and their participation in shaping ideas about race under Nazi regime and prior to in German-speaking academic context that justified the division of people based on such distinctions. These different studies make clear the need to further reinterpret and articulate Eastern European history in relation to the Global South.

Article overviews

The articles gathered in this special issue bring to the fore the importance of translocal and transcultural perspectives for analyzing traumatic memories and loss. The authors engage and discuss different methods for “unsilencing” by examining the operations of artistic and curatorial research in art exhibitions, by revisiting historical imagery forgotten in museum storages, by seeking for answers about the past via diaspora communities works in literature and film, by revisiting the memory politics of performance and by exploring vernacular memories through legends and myths. These texts bring to the fore the persistent afterlives and mutations of silences, and the ways how the unsaid shapes public discussion or the dominant notions of social inclusion in politics and everyday life. The authors offer new tools for reconciling with the past on intimate familial as well as on public levels, and theoretical frameworks for analyzing how such memory work can open processes of silencing in novel ways. They also investigate how commemorative practices can challenge nationalist memory politics. By revisiting memory work of different generations, several authors discuss the memory of the Soviet deportations and Holocaust as heterogeneous and entangled experiences; they complicate the positions of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses as well as these of their descendants. These relationships between locality and silence are approached in the articles through language, affective, and gestural impacts, by combining intimate and public perspectives, by including gendered and ethnicity-based readings.

Studying the gray area between remembering and forgetting, Roma Sendyka proposes the notion “non-memory” to nuance our understanding about the ways memory is transmitted from one generation to the next. Relying on the work of Polish sociologists, Sendyka goes beyond dualistic models of remembering to draw attention to the operation of memory in relation to “what has not yet been comprehended, incorporated, digested, voiced, symbolized, and fully communicated” by adding to points of focus the cognitive framework of remembering. This idea of “non-memory” is of a performative nature, involving the unconscious, routine daily processes and activities, while its creation is a collective rather than individual process. Sendyka warns against politicization of silencing based on solely Western-centered understandings of memory and its operations, and she suggests that memory studies can contribute to conceptualizing silencing memory with its relational, socio-historical and cultural approaches. Through examples from Małków village near Hrubieszów and the town of Jedwabne she brings to the fore how remembering of traumatic forgotten events continues in everyday uses of space as well as in mythic stories and legends that allow to express what could not be publicly remembered.

Reconsidering the perspective of perpetrators in the contested context of Lithuanian WWII memory, Violeta Davoliūtė analyses works of autobiographical non-fiction, written by the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators. By connecting Lithuanian and North American perspectives of cultural memory and both Jewish and Lithuanian diaspora these works allow us to approach violence and trauma, as well as “encounters with the other” from intimate perspectives and attempts to “rescue history from generalities.” Focusing on works by the third generation of North American writers Daniel Mendelsohn, Rita Gabis, and Julija Šukys, she seeks to make sense of the intimacy of violence in contexts, where different ethnic groups had lived next to each other for generations. Davoliūtė reads their books as examples of agonistic strategy of remembering in their negotiation of received narratives, as well as their research-based accounts about their family’s involvement and consequent silencing about perpetration; they also contest the dominant narratives of the diaspora memories and implicit understandings of their “old countries” as sites of atrocities. Davoliutė’s analysis highlights locality as distinct from the nationalist utopia of antagonistic memory and the deterritorialized ethics of cosmopolitan memory. She argues that these authors enact homecomings in that they “return” from diaspora communities to the “home” of family memory and also articulate violence about historical sites of atrocity and trauma in their “old countries.”

Margaret Tali focuses on two recent documentary films Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, and Memory is Our Homeland. These essay films center around family stories that have been formed through many losses and their unprocessed mourning, their authors reflect upon the long-term implications of their families’ refugee histories. Told from the third generation’s perspective and realized in Lithuania and Canada, they allow to nuance the reasons behind silences around these stories in their different communities. Reading the filmmakers research as transnational “therapeutic memory,” she’s interested in their sites in which despite being physically the same, communities of people and countries as their markers have changed. Tali shows how “[s]uch spaces carry different transcultural layers and markers of memories left by their current and former inhabitants.”

Asja Mandic discusses the emancipatory potential of artistic and curatorial work related to Yugoslav socialist and WWII narratives. As reminders of now neglected accounts of history, these narratives oppose the right-wing ideologies and ethno-nationalist views, which have been in the background of the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Yugoslavia as well as its wars, atrocities, and genocide in the 1990s. Mandic is analyzing the operation of this potential in her co-curated exhibition Treasures of Socialism that was on display at the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2011. It presented the neglected socialist realist works from the former Museum of the Revolution in Sarajevo. She gives an in-depth perspective to the political, institutional, and conceptual constraints in the process of working with these artworks, consisting mainly of portraits in socialist realist style that commemorate heroes and heroines, antifascist partisans of the WWII battles. Thus she also reveals how memories of locality and territoriality can contribute to an alternative to the narrative of (ethno-)nationalism that fed the atrocious Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

Mischa Twitchin analyzes the momentous play (A)pollonia (2009) by Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, which has been performed locally and internationally over a decade. The narrative of “(A)pollonia” connects ancient Greek tragedy with an intimate experience of betrayal in Poland under the Nazi occupation. Twitchin sees the play as a creative catalyst of cultural memory that poses new questions not only about the war but, as he shows, more acutely about current Polish memory politics, particularly the lawsuit against historians Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski who were accused in defamation of Poland. His sensitive reading of (A)pollonia in the context of recent Polish memory politics adds to nuancing the understanding of localization especially in relation to names and practices of naming. Twitchin shows how the familial and national intersect in such practices, and how such practices connect the living directly with the dead and the perished. Memory wars under the current cultural politics echo the desire to give ethno-nationalist meaning to “local” names.

Shelley Hornstein in her article discusses how does one represent the unrepresentable—the Holocaust memory—as a forensic evidence and as an account of the past that has been denied as fictionalized, but also as something that belongs to a “nomadic place,” that is, a place that lives extra-locally, and is “anchored everywhere and anywhere.” Understanding of a place as fragmented and nomadic has been essentially formed though contemporary technologies, new media, and digital tools like virtual maps, that is, “net locality.” But what Hornstein has in mind, is how memory of the Holocaust can be represented through exhibition or a museological experience that activates but also complicates layers of perception. She analyzes these questions discussing the exhibition by architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt in the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016). Titled Evidence Room, van Pelt created this exhibition after his involvement in a trial against Holocaust denier David Irving for which he was asked to prepare evidence and serve as expert witness about the atrocities of the Holocaust. In the exhibition he addressed the unrevealed, silenced, and morally repugnant aspects of architecture—the designs for the gas chambers in the Nazi death camps, particularly the ones in Auschwitz. Without identifying individual architects, van Pelt questioned the role of designers and planners in realizing concentration camps. The exhibition presented drawings and objects as evidence, but also as monuments —whitewashed, silent, and curated. Hornstein questions, how these forensic objects and evidence of locality told, but through copies, facsimiles, and reconstructions instead of material artifacts, and mediated through arts, turns into a powerful memorial tool, which combats preconceived or altogether unknown assumptions for how we may learn about or remember the violence of the past today.