The story of local Belarusians who collaborated with Nazi Germany is often a forgotten page of history. Yet, their brutal tactics and participation in the extermination of Jews and other populations are a sad reminder of life under occupation, as was the case of the Barysau police officers.

I remember when I was a small boy, I used to ride my bike with my grandfather. In one village near Babruisk, my grandfather would start a conversation with a local resident. The villager would ask, “Are you interested in the history of the war?” “Do you see the house on the left? A policeman lived there. So there was a lot of blood on the hands of this policeman. He shot Jews and Soviet POWs. He didn’t run away with the Germans; he was hiding here. Caught, and tried. Got a quarter, 25 years. No one else had seen him here.”

For years, Hungary’s Fidesz government under Viktor Orbán has employed historical revisionism and irredentist symbols in domestic politics. The notion of “Greater Hungary” and grievances over the loss of territories due to the Treaty of Trianon, as well as referring to it as a national trauma, are central to this. While the strategy may help Orbán domestically, it negatively affects Hungary’s relationships with some neighbours.

“Greater Hungary”, also known as “Historic Hungary”, refers to the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. Today, the notion of Greater Hungary involves an irredentist political idea and refers to territories Hungary lost through the Paris Peace Treaty, in Hungary more commonly known as the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which ended the First World War between the Allies and Hungary.

Albania’s relationship with its communist past remains a difficult subject today. Often forgotten in the transition to democracy, these decades are remembered in different ways in the country’s museums. This article looks at how three institutions engage with this past, reflecting on their effectiveness and how they may ultimately preserve this historical memory for the future.

Historical narratives often treat a place as a witness to traumatic events. Three Tirana-based museums recounting difficult periods under Albania’s communist regime vividly illustrate this process. These include the National Historical Museum (1981), located in a building designed and designated as a cultural institution, Bunk'Art 1 and 2 (2014), located in authentic bomb shelters built as part of the “bunkerisation” of the 1970s, and the House of Leaves (2017), housed in a building that served as the headquarters of the Sigurimi state security service. Although they all depict the same story, each does so in a different way. The narrative is determined not only by the time the exhibit opened, but also by where it is displayed.

Soon after the news of the assassination plot against Archduke Franz Ferdinand reached Vienna, shock gave way to reflection. The would-be-king and next emperor was now dead, a gruesome fact that created a political vacuum and opened the gates for new opportunities.

The murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not a person without flaws. His social talents were less than average, and he could not compare himself with an actual emperor like Franz Joseph I. The ruling monarch had come to power amidst the stormy circumstances of a people’s revolution and the previous Ferdinand’s forced abdication.

There seems to be a widespread inability in Germany to look at oneself from the position of others and to accept the intricacies of history and memory and their influence on the present. But it is not only the perception of place in the past that is the problem. For some in Germany everything east of the Oder river today is still lumped together as “Eastern Europe”.

February 24th 1940, the concentration camp of Hohenbruch in East Prussia: on the eve of his 50th birthday, the Polish publisher, writer and activist Seweryn Pieniężny Jr. is beaten up, forced to dig his own grave and then, in his underwear, shot by Nazi guards. According to the writer Eugeniusz Tryniszewski, who published a short biography of Seweryn in 1987, his last words, shouted in German so his executors would understand, were “Noch ist Polen nicht verloren!”, Poland has not yet perished – the first line of the Polish national anthem.

The current approach to decolonisation as a topic represents a significant problem. In many cases, this issue stems from politicisation and ideological calls to decolonise the history of East Central Europe, which have nothing to do with a methodological, or academic discussion. Usually, the term East Central Europe has been replaced by Russia, Eastern Europe, or the ideological term Eurasia. In general, the rhetoric of decolonisation has been based on the assertion that Russia and the Soviet Union were colonial empires.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas recently stated that the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is a moral crusade that can help the European continent redeem itself. However, this redemption has not yet been acknowledged by the European elite. On the contrary, the constant intellectual arrogance expressed toward Ukraine by Europeans has expanded, particularly in the field of history. In this respect, British historian Adam Tooze has suggested that today’s Russo-Ukrainian War dramatically reconceptualises Europe.

Much is known about the infamous alliance system that led to the First World War. Ultimately dragging in all of Europe’s military powers, these agreements would lead to great battles typically associated with the Western Front. Despite this, the Eastern Front would prove to be equally bloody and conspiratorial, with the lands of modern Poland playing a central role.

Our imagination of past times is often influenced by cinema. This is probably the case as all topics we read about are preceded by cinematic imagination, which rules our thoughts and provides us with key visions of past events. This is especially true regarding the iconic topics of our European history, one of which is the formative event of the 20th century: The Great War of 1914-18.

Ukraine’s contemporary struggle for independence has a long history going back many centuries. The period towards the end of the First World War proved to be a particularly decisive time in this regard, with its historical memory influencing Ukrainian conceptions of history to this very day.

The short 20th century was highly tumultuous and unpredictable. It began in 1914 with the outbreak of the Great War on the European continent, which spread throughout the world. The Ukrainian lands, divided between the rival Habsburg and Romanov empires, became the scene of hostilities on the Eastern Front of the First World War. But the year that was a turning point in the history of Eastern Europe was clearly 1917.

The geopolitical conceptions of Vladimir Putin are strikingly reminiscent of the visions of Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Haushofer and especially Joseph Stalin. Putin basically thinks the same things as these figures but needs more justification. This is where a “memory masquerade” comes in, involving Nazism, racism, antisemitism and a reminder of the origins of Russia's greatness. The portfolio of historical and memorial references does not stop at European history for Russia.

On June 28th 2005 the Warsaw-based Batory Foundation organised a conference titled “Memory and Foreign Policy”. During this event, Bronisław Geremek, a historian and Poland’s former minister of foreign affairs, asked a question as to whether collective memory is part of foreign policy. His answer was the following: "I think it is a part of international relations, for example when governments protest when national dignity is attacked. Of course, it is a part of international negotiations, for example to open access to archives … but all this is only marginal in foreign policy.” We shall see whether this marginality of memory is true today.

In the current Russian war in Ukraine, history and the historical narratives underpinning the conflict are featuring front and centre. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has been very effective in his use of historical references, especially when addressing international audiences.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent fighting in that country have been accompanied by an avalanche of historical rhetoric from both sides, underlining just how important narratives about the past are for this conflict. As Joseph Nye reminds us: “Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in the information age it may be the state (or non-states) with the best story that wins.”

Despite contentious differences in memory, Polish-Ukrainian relations have remained close and notably strong in important national moments. This reflects two aspects of Polish society: a generation of youth acclimated to supporting Ukrainian sovereignty with compassion, and a national memory politics which allows humanitarianism, but only when it fits into a politically suitable narrative.

In 2003 the Polish philosopher and historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski gave a speech at the American Library of Congress titled, “What the Past is For”. Kołakowski believed that history serves not to predict the future nor to gain technical advice on how to deal with the present, but to discover the values constitutive of human identities. He told his listeners that “to say that [the events of the past] do not matter to our lives would be almost as silly as saying that it would not matter to me if I were suddenly to erase from my memory my own past personal life … The history of past generations is our history, and we need to know it in order to be aware of our identity; in the same sense in which my own memory builds my personal identity, makes me a human subject.”

Vladimir Putin’s 2021 article on Ukraine was primarily dedicated to the notion that Ukraine is historically inseparable from Russia. He at least conceded that a Ukrainian culture and language exists. However, in his February 2022 speech, Putin ignores these ideas completely, using revisionist history to eradicate an entire nation, its language, and culture. According to Putin, the history of Ukraine is now solely the history of Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s historical conceptions, or rather misconceptions, have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin is manipulating, altering, rewriting and at times even completely inventing history in order to justify his actions against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.