Realms of Memory

Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Part 2

In Part 2 of Remembering Stalin’s Victims,  Georgetown University Professor Kathleen Smith explains how a conservative backlash swept Khrushchev from power and ended the first attempt to confront the Stalinist past.  While destalinization persisted in the form of the dissident movement, the nearly twenty year Brezhnev era that followed was one of official silence about the crimes of the past.  It was Gorbachev’s attempt to rescue the Soviet economy that unleashed a much broader wave of popular participation in remembering the past.  Conservative efforts to once again reverse course ultimately failed and contributed to the acceleration of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  Boris Yeltsin, as head of the Russian Federation successor state, had another opportunity to confront the Soviet past.  His failure to do so, and the general turbulence and instability of the period over which he presided, have been skillfully exploited by Vladimir Putin to return Russia to the authoritarianism we see today.  

Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Part 1

The early decades of the Soviet Union were marred by massive human dislocation, terror, and loss of life known collectively as the repressions.  With antecedents in the Lenin years but more closely associated with Stalin, Soviet leaders struggled on two occasions to confront the memory of the repressions.  Kathleen Smith, author of Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, compares the memory politics of the Khrushchev and Gorbachev years.  In many respects, Smith argues, it was the failure to come to terms with the past that opened the door to the kind of authoritarian rule we see in Russia today.  

Rehabilitating the Memory of Stalin in Putin’s Russia

The militarism we see in Russia today has much to do with the rehabilitation of the memory of Stalin.  The Stalin of the Great Terror, mass famine, and deportations has been recast as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriot War.  In Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia, Todd Nelson argues that this reimagining of Stalin is the deliberate work of Putin after his rise to power over twenty years ago.  Putin used everything from schools and the media to memorials and museums to craft a new Stalin narrative to instill Russians with a sense of national pride and to bolster the legitimacy of his authoritarian regime.

The Great Exodus from China: Memory and Identity in Taiwan

With the Communist victory in China in 1949 nearly one million civil war refugees flooded into Taiwan—the largest out migration from China in the modern era.  Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, helps us understand the relationship between trauma and memory in new ways.  He reveals how the memories of mainlander refugees changed over time and the therapeutic role they served.  He sheds light on how mainlander refugees and their descendants used their memory work to lay claim to a new home in Taiwan.  Perhaps most importantly, Dominic reveals how his own personal journey might offer the promise of reconciliation for Taiwan’s long divided communities.  

Remembering the Slave Trade in Liverpool

How has the slave trade been remembered in Liverpool—the world’s leading slave-trading port city in the eighteenth century?  Jessica Moody, author of The Persistence of Memory: Remembering Slavery in Liverpool, ‘slaving capital of the world,’ explains how the slave trade has never been forgotten in Liverpool. It has lived on through public debates about the city’s identity, through the city’s anniversaries, through the city’s black population, through the celebrations of civic heroes, through museums and through the streets and neighborhoods long connected to Liverpool’s dark past. 

Yasukuni Shrine and Japan’s Memory of the Asia-Pacific War

Why has Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine become such a lightning rod for the memory wars in Japan about the Asia-Pacific War?  Akiko Takenaka, author of Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, helps us understand how the meaning of Yasukuni has changed over time and why it has become the nation’s most controversial memory site.  

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

How did Germany go from being an international pariah at the end of World War II to a leader of the European Union and one of the most trusted nations on the planet? In Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman argues that having the courage to confront the past did much to transform Germany’s image at home and abroad. 

Realms of Memory

Realms of Memory is a podcast that looks at how countries confront their darkest chapters, what they gain by doing so, and what happens when they fail to take up this challenge.  We feature the insights of leading experts on a wide range of difficult national memories.