The first decades of the Soviet Union were marked by a chain of catastrophic events that left deep and lasting scars: the famine following the Civil War, forced collectivization and dispossession of the peasantry, the expansion of the Gulag system, political repression and the Great Terror, the Soviet Finnish War, World War II, the Holocaust and Nazi crime regime in the occupied Soviet territories, followed by postwar famine and renewed repression under late Stalinism. These experiences of mass violence and trauma continue to shape collective memory in the former USSR and throughout neighboring European countries. This panel explores how the memory of Stalinist era catastrophes, as well as WWII related trauma, has been processed, constructed, and mediated in Soviet and post Soviet visual and textual culture particularly through cinema, art, literature, and media. Given the long term effects of censorship, trauma, and fear of reprisals, many of these topics could only be publicly addressed decades after the events themselves. Moreover, while archival access remained limited until the fall of the USSR, the arts and media played (and continue to play) a central role in shaping public narratives and emotional responses to these historical traumas. The panel includes four papers that critically examine how representations of state violence and war crimes have evolved over time, demonstrating the centrality of visual and narrative forms in framing national and transnational memory. While each paper focuses on a specific case study, together they provide a comparative perspective on how contested histories are remembered or silenced across different periods and contexts. This panel offers a multifaceted exploration of how memory is produced and contested across decades. Through this lens, the panel engages directly with the conference theme, demonstrating how artistic and media representations shape, mediate, and challenge collective understandings of traumatic history.
Dr. Dmitry Astashkin (Memorial Museum of the Defence and Siege of Leningrad) Constructing Global Memory: Soviet Media and the International Narrative of the Leningrad Siege (1941–1944) This paper explores how Soviet media during World War II shaped international understandings of the Siege of Leningrad, turning a prolonged and devastating military blockade into a symbol of collective resilience within the Allied narrative. The Siege of Leningrad (September 1941–January 1944), in which the city was encircled by German and Finnish forces for nearly 900 days, resulted in widespread civilian starvation, infrastructural collapse, and high mortality. While the event was central to wartime Soviet experience, its representation abroad was shaped by carefully managed media strategies aimed at reinforcing Soviet legitimacy and strengthening global anti fascist solidarity. At the core of this transnational effort was Leningrad Radio, whose broadcasts often relayed by the BBC became key sources for international news outlets from the United States and the United Kingdom to Brazil, India, and Australia. These reports constructed a narrative that emphasized determination, survival, and the role of the Soviet Union in the global fight against fascism. Soviet cultural materials such as Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony were also adapted for international audiences, offering symbolic images of wartime resilience. Yet this messaging was shaped by the dual pressures of Soviet censorship and the propaganda needs of Allied diplomacy. While foreign press outlets reported civilian death tolls exceeding one million by 1943, Soviet domestic media avoided quantitative representations of human loss. This selective framing created a version of the Siege that prioritized heroism over the complexity of civilian experience. Drawing on international press archives, cultural propaganda, and diplomatic correspondence, this paper examines how the Soviet Union managed global perceptions of the Leningrad Siege and how this early international narrative functioned as a template for later memory cultures.
Dr. Irina Rebrova (Center for Research on Antisemitism, TU Berlin) Framing the Holocaust: Between Memory and Silence in Russian Screen Narratives In post Soviet Russia, particularly from the 1990s to the early 2010s, a wave of documentary films emerged that directly addressed the memory of the Holocaust as it unfolded across various Soviet regions occupied during World War II. Notably, works such as “Judenfrei: Free of Jews” by Yuri Kalugin and the multi part documentary project “Shoah. Eastern Front” by Israeli filmmaker Boris Maftsir marked a significant shift toward localized and personalized remembrance. These films amplified the voices of survivors and communities, emphasized the specifically Jewish nature of the suffering, and often documented the actual locations of mass executions. Their visual and narrative strategies fostered both historical awareness and emotional resonance, offering a rare space for confronting the Holocaust within the Russian cultural sphere. In recent years, however, this trajectory has shifted. With the launch of the federal initiative “No Statute of Limitations” in 2019, the Holocaust has increasingly been subsumed into the broader narrative of the “genocide of the Soviet people.” The 2024 media project “The Unconquered,” a series of animated films, depicts events closely aligned with the historical reality of the “Holocaust by bullets”: mass shootings, the use of gas vans, and looting of victims’ belongings. Yet the word “Jew” is never mentioned. Victims are consistently referred to as “peaceful Soviet citizens,” mirroring the Soviet era strategy of universalization and ethnic erasure. This paper examines the shift from particularized to universalized memory in the representation of the Holocaust in Russian documentary cinema. It asks whether the erasure of Jewish identity is a deliberate political choice or an inherited legacy of Soviet memorial culture.
Vladislav Staf (New Sorbonne University, Sorbonne University) Art as an Act of Сommemoration: Memories of the Gulag in the USSR and post Soviet Russia (1988–2022). To date, we know little about the art created by prisoners in the Gulag system operated in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1950s. The Gulag prisoners lacked the most basic necessities, so it was extremely difficult to engage in art. Nevertheless, art was still being created: for example, in Zhezqazgan (Kazakhstan) paintings created by prisoners were found in the ruins of a Steplag barracks and managed to be saved. Perhaps the most famous example is the 680 drawings by Gulag prisoner Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, later collected in the book “How Much Is a Person Worth?” The first exhibition of art related to the Gulag and other crimes of Stalinism took place many years after the collapse of the Gulag system. In 1988 at the House of Actors of the Union of Theatre Workers in Moscow: it was a posthumous exhibition by Pyotr Belov, ‘The Queue for Truth,’ which showed the crimes of Stalin’s dictatorship. At the end of perestroika in the USSR, this exhibition caused a great response. A year later, the first historical exhibition about the Gulag was opened in the USSR at the Solovetsky Museum Reserve. In the period from 1990 to 2010, a considerable amount of art devoted to the theme of Stalinist repression appeared in post Soviet Russia. This paper demonstrates various types of this art, ranging from painting (Belov) to the contemporary opera ‘OTPECHATKI’ (Imprints), which was performed in 2019 at the Arkhstoyanie festival. The final destination will be the 2022 “Sandarmokh Where the Trees Have Faces” art exhibition in Prague: after 24 February 2022 it had become unsafe to continue talking about the Gulag in Russia.
Meeri Siukonen (University of Helsinki) Filling the Void? Cultural Memory of Soviet Terror of Finns in the 21st Century. Among the victims of the Soviet terror were also tens of thousands of individuals classified as Finns living in the Soviet Union. These included groups that had been living in the Russian Empire before the 1917 revolution (such as Ingrian and Kola Finns) as well as communists and other migrants who left to Soviet Russia in the years and decades following the revolution. Unlike in many post Soviet countries that gained independence after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, in Finland the memory of Soviet terror has not formed a key historical event of national memory. However, in recent years the experiences of Finns’ repression in the Soviet Union have attracted much interest in Finland, resulting in numerous scholarly and archival projects, media representation as well as artistic interpretations of the topic. Through the analysis of selected novels, memoirs and films as well as their media reception, this paper examines the cultural memory of Finnish victims of Soviet terror in the 2010s and 2020s. I aim to explore why the memory of Soviet terror has become “memorable” – i.e. recognized and relevant – in Finland only relatively recently, despite the vast numbers of memoirs and research that has been published earlier. Moreover, the paper analyzes what kind of cultural memory of Soviet terror of Finns is being produced in contemporary Finland. It is suggested that the reasons for the topic’s relevance and the discourses defining the remembrance of Soviet terror of Finns have to do with the difficult legacies of Finland’s own past, the changes in the relationship to Russia before and after Russia’s full scale attack to Ukraine and more globally mediated memory discourses
20260731T140020260731T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires9.12. Languages of Memory: Representing Stalinist-Era Crimes in Art, Film, and MediaSV403 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
