Famine Files: Truth, Authority, and Reckoning with Repressive Past in Ukraine and Russia

Karolina Koziura, European University Institute

The process of opening the Soviet archives, which began in the late 1980s, led to unprecedented access to long-closed Communist Party and government archives, revealing those parts of Soviet history that could not be officially studied until then. The newly rediscovered piles of clandestine materials stored at the Secret Police archives inspired historical redress across Eastern Europe. Whether in the case of German Stasi, Polish Bezpieka, or Romanian Securitate, Secret Police archives were at the center of heated debates concerning authority, authenticity, and control over the communist past. At the same time, the (re)discovery of files led to the spreading of national(ist) rhetoric and the “hardening” of international borders. This presentation calls to decolonize the prevailing representations of the Soviet past by tracing how the knowledge about the Soviet-era famines resurfaced differently in Ukraine and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet regime. By comparing political debates over the meaning and status of “famine files,” I argue that the differences in circulation, control, and (re)usage of Stalin-era atrocity files contributed to the emergence of radically opposed perspectives of shared history in both countries. By examining how the notions of history, responsibility, and justice have been debated in both countries since the 1990s, I demonstrate how the epistemological uncertainty surrounding the “famine files” brings political anxiety that opens the violent past for various manipulations in the present.  This presentation places the case of Ukraine-Russia history wars in the comparative context of Eastern Europe, where since the 1990s, Communist-era documents have been crucial mediators that transformed, distorted, and modified the meaning of the repressive past. This presentation draws on my first book project that examines the transnational processes of reckoning with the Ukrainian Famine from the 1930s till the outburst of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

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 Presented in Session 153. Production of Knowledge Regimes: Experts, Political Authority, and Legitimation I