CBEES Advanced Seminar with Per Anders Rudling.

Speaker: Per Anders Rudling, Research Associate at CBEES
Chair: TBA
Discussant: David Gaunt, Professon in History, Södertörn University

Abstract

Following the end of World War II, several hundred thousand people from Western Ukraine found themselves in exile and forced emigration. Intensely nationalistic, the West Ukrainian emigre community developed a collective memory centered heavily on victimisation.

The traumatic experiences of political violence of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes came to form a basis for a new political identity. Political violence and ethnic cleansing carried out by Ukrainian nationalist groups, however, found no place in this collective memory.

During the same period as the memory of the Holocaust increased in importance in western historical and political culture, the historical memory of the Ukrainian diaspora was re-exported to post-Soviet Ukraine, where it came to form the basis for a new national memory under presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko.

The presentation deals with the migration of memory, from displacement and emigration to repatriation and canonisation.