Dovile Budryte is Professor of Political Science at Georgia Gwinnett College, USA. She also serves as Invited Researcher at Vytautas Kavolis Transdisciplinary Research Institute of Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. Her publications include articles and books on memory politics, trauma, Holocaust justice and gender studies.
Violeta Davoliute is Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, Lithuania. She has published extensively on the topics of forced displacement after the Second World War, historical trauma, identity, nationalism, public history and reckoning with the legacy of genocide in the Baltics and Europe.
This handbook shows how memory operates simultaneously as lived experience, institutional practice, geopolitical weapon, and resource for imagining the future. It explores decolonial and postcolonial approaches, memory laws, oral history, nostalgia, testimony and digital memory-making.
Spanning the aftermath of the Second World War, the socialist and post-socialist periods, and Russia´s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the volume covers post-socialist Europe and relevant diasporic and transnational contexts. Its case studies include the Holocaust commemoration in Belarus, museums in the former Yugoslavia, the Holodomor, Crimean Tatar cultural diplomacy, Poland´s Museum of the Second World War, Russia´s Memorial society, and Ukrainian virtual war museums. The thirty-two chapters gathered here collectively demonstrate that memory in the region is not a secondary reflection of politics but a constitutive dimension of political life itself.
The book will be of interest for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and scholars working on topics related to memory in the region, while remaining accessible to non-specialist readers.
Introduction: Memory as a Field of Struggle Part I: Conceptual Frameworks for Memory in Post-Socialist Europe Introduction to Part I: Conceptual Frameworks for Memory in Post-Socialist Europe 1. The Location and Dislocation of Memory: Decolonization Faces Transnational Memory Studies 2. Chronopolitics and Orientalism: Constructing the Other through Time in Western Imaginings of Central-Eastern Europe´s Memory Policies 3. The Politics of Memory and European Integration: Nationalism, Sovereignty and Democracy in Western and East-Central Europe 4. Auschwitz versus Gulag: An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 5. Crises Narratives, Memory Politics and Nostalgia: The Social Construction of CEE as a "Post-Soviet" Space of "Crises" 6. The Memories of Roma: A Taxonomy Part II: War, Mass Violence, and the Memory of Atrocity Introduction to Part II: War, Mass Violence, and the Memory of Atrocity 7. Psychiatry, Memory, and War's Aftermath in Socialist Eastern Europe 8. The Politics of Victimhood in the Russian Metanarrative of the Great Patriotic War 9. The Unwanted, National Heroes, and Saints: The Dead of the Second World War in CEE in Post-Soviet Times 10. Grassroots Holocaust Commemoration: A Case Study of Novogrudok and Naliboki, Belarus 11. The Forgotten 1990s War (Memorial Museums) in the Post-Yugoslav Space? 12. Can International Criminal Courts and Tribunals Contribute to Memory?: Analysis of a Case in Point (ICTY) and Lessons for Ukraine Part III: Empire, Decolonization, and the Politics of the Past Introduction to Part III: Empire, Decolonization, and the Politics of the Past 13. Decolonial Approach to Memory in Ukraine 14. The Politics of Memory in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict: From the Orange Revolution to the Full-Fledged War 15. Temporal Security and the Holodomor Memory in Ukraine's Resistance to Russian Aggression 16. Confronting the Legacy of Soviet Collaboration in the Baltic States 17. Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Trauma, Nostalgia and Colonialism 18. Diaspora Strategies for Defending Memory in the Post-Soviet Era: Crimean Tatars' Cultural Diplomacy through Music and Cinema Part IV: Institutions, Laws, and the Architecture of Memory Introduction to Part IV: Institutions, Laws, and the Architecture of Memory 19. The Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes: Politics and the Memory of Communism 20. Memory Institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania: Between Historical Research and Political Instrumentalization 21. Memory Laws in a Comparative Perspective: Belarus, Poland, Russia and Ukraine 22. Orthodox Churches and the Memory of Communism 23. Studying, Preventing, and Enduring Political Persecution: Memorial, 1987–2025 Part V: Contested National Narratives Introduction to Part V: Contested National Narratives 24. The Hungary Pendulum: Memory Politics Between Patriotic Joy and National Sorrow 25. Shaping the Past, Controlling the Present: Political Appropriations of Memory in Post-Communist Hungary 26. Fault Lines of Memory: Cultural Remembrance in Belarus between Europe's East and West 27. Lithuania's History of Partisan Warfare as a Source of Mnemonic Conflicts 28. Museums, History, and Politics: Poland and Ideological Weaponization of Museal Representations of the Past Part VI: Lived Memory, Nostalgia, and Testimony Introduction to Part VI: Lived Memory, Nostalgia, and Testimony 29. Postcommunist Nostalgia: From Biographical to Cultural Memory 30. Remembering "for the Time Being": Postsocialist Nostalgia and Temporality 31. Oral History, Time and Space in Memory Studies: The Case of Veterans in a (Once) Divided Europe 32. Memories in Future Tense: Anticipatory Practices of Ukrainian Virtual War Museums
