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Category: History and Memory

I grew up hearing Ukraine’s village songs. Now we are helping young people bring them back.

A grassroots project is working to revive the dialects and folk traditions that have all but disappeared from rural Ukraine.

May 21, 2025 - Yuri Bilinsky

The end of the “Big Brother” myth in Armenia

The image of Russians as “protectors” and “saviours” has been deeply embedded in Armenian political mythology throughout the past two centuries. This mythology has been largely based on events connected to the rule of the Ottoman Empire, where Russia often positioned itself as the defender of the region’s Christian population. Armenia’s experience of the last 200 years shows that Russian imperial domination has been surprisingly resilient, having been able to reinvent itself in many ways.

May 5, 2025 - Mikayel Zolyan

Twenty-five years on, the Yeltsin Centre shows Russia’s danger

Although I have been to the Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg many times for research, about half way through my last visit, I began to feel uneasy. Videos of the coup and parliament bombings touched a nerve. How quickly the situation changed then. Images of buildings around Pushkin Square in Moscow, near where I used to work, being smashed by vandals and cars alike. Such events feel unthinkable in Moscow today. In the Yeltsin Centre, I realized just how likely they could be.

Twenty-five years ago, as Boris Yeltsin resigned from his position as president of the Russian Federation, his wife and daughter were utterly relieved. The job had taken its toll in just about every way and the Yeltsins were excited to get their family life back. But Russia and the world were stunned. It came out of the blue. What next for Russia after the chaos? Nobody knew.

May 5, 2025 - James C. Pearce

Memory politics in Ukraine and Russia as a component of modern warfare

As Ukrainians took their first steps in exploring their own history, they began uncovering a wealth of previously forbidden topics and figures. Following the country’s independence, the exchange of academic research between Ukrainian and western historians became possible. This significantly contributed to shaping Ukraine’s historical policy, which was also in many cases in direct opposition to the Kremlin’s interpretation of history. Unsurprisingly, history and memory are key components of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

History and memory regarding the events of the past have always been, and still are, powerful tools in relations between Ukraine and Russia. While Russia has tried to shape its historical policy since the late Middle Ages, when Moscow declared itself the “third Rome” and pursued “the gathering of Russian lands”, modern Ukraine, which was without statehood for a long time, began to develop and restore its true history after independence in 1991. It would also develop its own historical policy. 

February 28, 2025 - Oleksii Lionchuk

On fascism

This text is a reprint of Egelbert Besednjak’s 1922 analysis of fascism after its rise to power in Italy. The text is not only a solid analysis of the process of the rise of fascism over 100 years ago, but also a reminder how the reins of power can swiftly shift in a dangerous direction, even in a democracy.

February 28, 2025 - Engelbert Besednjak

Auschwitz-Birkenau. Death at a wave of a finger

As the years pass, the last witnesses to the nightmare of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death factory where more than a million Jews from all over Europe were exterminated, are passing away. What remains is the camp itself, and the objects within it that allow historians and conservationists to learn the stories of individuals. Their stories not only help to understand the tragedy of the victims who were exterminated here, but add a human, personal dimension to these memories.

January 27, 2025 - Bartosz Panek Jarosław Kociszewski

From Poland-Lithuania to science fiction

Science fiction is a genre that aspires to predict the human future through the lens of expected technological progress. Few realize that it emerged from the tragic experience of Poland-Lithuania’s Jewish community during the dark 20th century.

December 13, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

When Czechs knew freedom

The Velvet Revolution is now celebrating its 35th anniversary. This creative article commemorates the date of December 10, 1989, when the first non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948 took office. It is more important than ever to remember the lessons from this time of national euphoria. This is especially true with regards to the freedoms that peoples both in and outside of Eastern Europe enjoy and often take for granted. The piece is a collage of different memories and hopes of Czech citizens from that time of new liberty--drawn from both interviews and the author's imagination.

December 10, 2024 - Gabriel M. Paletz

New documentary features memories of Srebrenica

A new documentary directed by Ado Hasanović called My Father’s Diaries brings a new perspective to the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica massacre. The film includes original footage captured during the war, as well as the reciting of passages from the diary of Hasanović’s father. It sheds new light on the extremely difficult times faced by those trying to survive the brutality of war.

Ado Hasanović does not remember every detail of the Bosnian War (1992-95). But certain memories he cannot forget. Watching his family home burning. Leaving Srebrenica. It was 1993. He was seven years old. On a UN food truck, with his mother, brother and sister, Hasanović travelled 100 kilometres north, to the city of Tuzla. “The war in Bosnia was really terrible,” the 38-year-old Bosnian filmmaker explained from central Sarajevo. “Once we escaped, we became refugees. But my father remained in Srebrenica until [July] 1995.”

November 21, 2024 - JP O'Malley

The forgotten beginnings of US-China diplomatic relations

In the shadow of Cold War tensions, covert diplomatic talks took place in Warsaw from 1958 to 1970 between the United States and the People's Republic of China. These talks, today largely forgotten, laid the foundation for a rapprochement that would change the course of global politics in the 1970s.

The 1950s were an immensely complex decade for global geopolitics. Numerous African and Asian nations started to regain their independence, redefining the old colonial world order and thus weakening past colonial superpowers, such as the United Kingdom or France. Above all, however, the new world order was emerging, dominated by the duopoly of the United States and Soviet Union and a visible division of spheres of influence between them.

November 21, 2024 - Konrad Szatters

The 1863 uprising and the shared legacy of the Commonwealth

The January Uprising of 1863 was the last common struggle for the ideals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Today, when no existential disputes exist between the independent nations of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus, the memory of 1863 should be a stepping stone to teaching the history of the Commonwealth as a common legacy.

Earlier this year, the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, accompanied by the leader of the Belarusian democratic opposition in exile, celebrated together in Vilnius the 161st anniversary of the January Uprising. This event was fought by the nobility and intelligentsia of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the years 1863-64 against Russian imperial rule.

June 22, 2024 - Wiktor Babiński

A man outside the system

Oleksandr Muzychko was a brigadier general of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a personal bodyguard of its President Dzhokhar Dudayev and, above all, a Ukrainian. He went to more than one conflict zone across the post-Soviet states. Claiming that he had already “looked death in the eyes”, he was not afraid to go against the state system that had been built in Ukraine in the 20 years following independence. Murdered ten years ago, he remains in the memory of many.

This past winter Ukraine and the world commemorated the events that took place a decade ago. This was namely when Ukrainians rose up in peaceful protest in support of the country’s European integration. In November 2013, the EU and Ukraine were meant to sign an association agreement at the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius. However, at the very last minute, Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, announced that he would not sign the document. Yanukovych’s decision was met with outrage and frustration in Ukrainian society, which saw European integration as a vision for a better future. If not for them, then at least for their children and grandchildren.

June 22, 2024 - Oleksii Lionchuk

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