CBEES Advanced Seminar with Irina Rebrova, Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, Technical University Berlin.

Speaker: Irina Rebrova, Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, Technical University Berlin.

Discussant: Susanne Barth, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University

Chair: Florence Fröhlig, Associate Professor in Ethnology at the School of Contemporary and Historical Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University

Abstract: This presentation discusses the ongoing project “Reframing Grassroots Holocaust Remembrance in post-Soviet Russia: from the first waves of democracy in the 1990s to the present-day autocracy,” realizing at the Center for research on Antisemitism, Technical University Berlin, supported by the Landecker Foundation. It deals with the contemporary official narrative of the victims of World War II and the place of Holocaust remembrance in it. The all-Russian project “Bez sroka davnosti” (“Without limitation period”) was introduced in 2018. Since that time the term “genocide of the Soviet people” during World War II became the key concept of the state memory policy in today’s Russia. More than 10 open trials had been held in Russia since 2020 to judge Nazi perpetrators who killed millions of Soviet civilians in the occupied regions of Russia. A number of student competitions are held, which continue to construct the official “reality” of what had happened during the war. The situation changes constantly and one of the latest ideas within the project “Bez sroka davnosti” is to establish an Extraordinary State Commission to fix the atrocities of the Ukrainian Nationalists in the current war. Even the usage of the commission’s tittle, which derives from the period of World War II seeks to legitimate the terroristic regime and to present the continuity with the Soviet winner state. That’s why the current political climate in Russia forced researchers to highlight local efforts of Holocaust remembrance in order to find channels to support the activity of local communities, to analyze antisemitic official rhetoric, to contest the official account of the “genocide of Soviet people”, and, ultimately, to preserve the memory of more than 120.000 Holocaust victims on Russian soil.

Dr. Irina Rebrova is a historian of Holocaust and other NS-victim groups in the Soviet Union. She defended her PhD thesis at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Technical University, Berlin. The title of her PhD thesis and published in 2020 book is “Re-constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus.” She holds a Russian PhD degree (candidate of science in history) and MA in sociology (Gender studies). She has published a number of articles on Oral History, Gender History and Social Memory on World War II in Russian, English and German academic journals and edited volumes. Among others, she was a fellow at the Claims Conference Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies in 2015-2017, at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich in 2016, at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s in 2017. During 2014-2022 she was a Research Associate in Hadassah Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, USA. Since 2022 she is a member of the board of the German non-profit association KONTAKTE-KOНTAKТЫ that promotes intercultural tolerance, education about history and donations for the victims of the Nazi era in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia through international exchange. Her latest project “Remember us…” dealt with the history and memory of people with disabilities who became Nazi victims in the occupied regions of Russia during the Second World War (http://nsvictims.ru/). In November 2023, she began her term as Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Center for Research on Antisemitism TU Berlin with the project “Reframing Grassroots Holocaust Remembrance in post-Soviet Russia: from the first waves of democracy in the 1990s to the present-day autocracy.”