How to make sense of an atrocity in an environment of repressive silence? What kind of memory work needs to be done to overcome imposed forgetting? This presentation aimed to address these questions by analyzing the long-term legacy of political violence that travels across time and space. By unravelling the meaning of Holodomor, one of the biggest - yet unacknowledged - atrocities in the history of the Soviet Union, it traced the lasting effects of the denial of mass atrocity and documented the struggles of transnational mnemonic activists to reclaim authority over a silenced past. It further showed that to achieve reconciliation with a repressive past, history and memory need to be seen as mutually dependent transcending the national optic.
Karolina Koziura is a PhD Candidate at The New School for Social Research, New York and Józef Tischner Visiting Fellow at the IWM.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ludger Hagedorn moderated the talk. Katherine Younger, Research Director of Ukraine in European Dialogue, provided the comment.
