Yet, nearly two years later, Memorial has not closed down. Its staff, led by mostly aging, bookish historians, have not just forestalled their demise but steered the organization to the razor’s edge of Russian political dissent.

It has no headquarters and no legal status in Russia. Its bank accounts are frozen and its programming has been pushed to the Moscow sidewalks. Yet, at a time when nearly all independent Russian media are operating in exile and Kremlin critics have been jailed, silenced or left the country, Memorial, in many ways, is roaring: publishing books, monitoring the ongoing trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, offering free consulting to the relatives of people who disappeared during Soviet times on how to search archives for information, advocating for the growing list of political prisoners in Russia, and expanding its offices outside the country.

None of this is happening in the shadows. Memorial organizes regular “Topography of Terror” tours in Moscow, with one route going right up to the doorstep of Butyrka, one of Russia’s most notorious prisons during the Soviet era. The excursion ends with participants sitting down to write letters to the new generation of Russians imprisoned on politically motivated charges and awaiting trial inside the 250-year-old facility. Tickets sell out almost immediately.

“Our work could not stop for a single day,” historian and Memorial founding member Irina Scherbakova said.

Its annual “Returning the Names,” when people line up to read aloud the people killed by the Soviet regime, took place online on October 29 in cities across the world. Set up by the group in 2007, the event used to be held in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, lasting twelve emotional hours but for the last few years, Moscow authorities have denied the group a permit.

While Memorial has worked under Kremlin intimidation for years, the war in Ukraine created an entirely new reality for an organization pursuing a mission to investigate Soviet-era crimes and expose present-day political abuses. In one of the most horrific recent cases highlighted by Memorial, Russian poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was raped with a dumbbell by law enforcement officers in September 2022 during a raid on his home after he posted a video online reciting an anti-war poem.

Memorial has withstood dismantling attempts thanks to a survival strategy put in place by its founders. Memorial is not a single organization, as its members like to remind the public, but a movement. Since its founding in 1987, the group has grown into a sprawling, decentralized network of organizations and individuals resilient against the Kremlin’s targeting.

There are more than 200 Memorial members and volunteers working globally, with just under a hundred left in Russia. With each local branch registered independently, it would take 25 separate court cases to entirely shut down the network inside the country. There are satellite offices in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Earlier this year, two shuttered Russia-based Memorial organizations re-registered outside the country under new names in Switzerland and France.

“From the very beginning we knew we didn’t want a hierarchy,” explained Scherbakova. “We always knew that this was a grassroots story. If there had been a hierarchy, Russia would have destroyed us a long time ago.”

Memorial’s affiliate offices abroad have long been largely made up of local historians studying the Soviet period, but now many branches are absorbing staff that fled Russia.

The Prague office has become in the past 18 months a new headquarters of sorts. Today, the staff is a mix of Czechs and Russians. At the age of 70, the director of Memorial’s library, Boris Belenkin, fled Moscow for Prague last year. Belenkin calls the space a new “place for life” where Memorial workers can once again hold seminars, organize research fellowships and host visiting scholars.

From the Prague office, Memorial is also re-launching one of its most beloved programs: an essay-writing contest in which students in Russia were asked to delve into 20th century history. The contest had been run since 1999 in participating schools across 12 time zones before being called off in 2021. Finalists were flown out to Moscow to present their work at Memorial headquarters. For many students from far-flung regions, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their country’s capital. Over the years, schools dropped the program, caving to pressure from local officials and concerned, “patriotic-minded” parents.

Within Russia, pressure on staff continues to escalate. The director of Memorial’s branch in the Siberian city of Perm was arrested in May for “hooliganism” and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. Offices in Yekaterinburg and other cities face routine harassment and arbitrary fines from local authorities, pushing some to the verge of closing. A prominent Memorial historian, Yuri Dmitriev, is currently serving a 15-year sentence at a prison in what Memorial says is a politically motivated case. Both men are currently being held in facilities that were once part of the Soviet Gulag camp system.

In Moscow, nine Memorial members including Alexandra Polivanova, a programming director who leads the Butyrka prison tour, have become the targets of an ongoing criminal investigation. In May, authorities charged Memorial board member Oleg Orlov with “discrediting” the Russian military, a new crime in Russia that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. In court in September, Orlov was asked to defend his denouncement of the war in Ukraine as well as his career documenting human rights abuses for Memorial in Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. On October 11, the court found Orlov guilty and fined him. The government prosecutor requested that Orlov undergo a mental health evaluation, citing his “heightened sense of justice, lack of self-preservation instincts, and posturing before citizens.”

Memorial believes the criminal cases against Moscow staff are motivated by their ongoing advocacy for political prisoners in Russia. Memorial Center, which is the organization’s human rights branch, runs a database of people imprisoned under politically motivated charges and is often cited by international organizations. It also publishes regular updates on the prisoners and their cases, features interviews with their family members and organizes letter writing campaigns. Today, there are 609 people on Memorial’s list — a number that has tripled in the past five years.

Scherbakova, Memorial’s director and a historian of the Soviet Union, says this number is higher than during the late stages of the Soviet Union.

“In my opinion, today’s situation is much scarier and crueler,” said Scherbakova.

Memorial has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since it condemned Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and other territories in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The government’s most powerful legal tool is the Foreign Agents Act, legislation designed to pressure groups and individuals who receive funding from outside the country. Passed in 2012 and expanded in 2020, the law imposes up to five years of imprisonment for failing to comply with an exhaustive system of tedious financial reporting and bureaucracy.

Russian authorities have also used the foreign agents law to target  individuals. In mid-October, Russian police detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist at Radio Free Europe with dual Russian-American citizenship, for failing to register as a foreign agent when she traveled to Russia for a family emergency. If convicted, Kurmasheva faces up to five years in prison.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have since adopted similar legislation to quash dissent at home.

“Today, being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, a Trotskiest, all of that has been folded into the term ‘foreign agent,’” said Belenkin, the Memorial library director and a founding member of Memorial who was added to the Kremlin’s foreign agents list in 2022.

In 2021, the government brought Memorial before the Supreme Court, alleging that it had violated the law by failing to label a handful of social media posts with boilerplate text disclosing that Memorial is classed as a foreign agent. But by the closing argument, prosecutors dropped any pretense of holding Memorial accountable for a few unlabeled social media posts. Instead, the general prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, took to the floor to dramatically rail against the group.

“Memorial speculates on the topic of political repression, distorts historical memory, including about World War II, and creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” said Zhafyarov, mocking Memorial for “claiming to be the conscience of the nation.”

“Why, instead of being proud of our country, are we being told we must repent for our past?” Zhafyarov asked the courtroom.

Russia’s Supreme Court is led by Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, who began his career sending anti-Soviet dissidents to Gulag camps in the 1980s and managed to stay in power following the collapse of the USSR — one of many Soviet officials who survived the transition to democracy.

Grigory Vaypan, part of Memorial’s defense team, said that ultimately this was an opportunity to expose the government’s real motivation for bringing the group to court and state for the historical record what Memorial’s closing was really about. “Zhafyarov rose, and instead of telling us about those posts on Twitter and Instagram, he said, ‘We should close Memorial because Memorial is pursuing a narrative that is not in the interest of the state,’” said Vaypan. “They needed to close Memorial because Memorial messed with the government’s narrative that ‘we, the Russian state, the state that won the Second World War, are unaccountable to the world.’”

“Re-reading the closing argument now makes much more sense to me than it did back then,” said Vaypan. “What the prosecutor said was a prologue to the war.”

Memorial lost an appeal in the Supreme Court in March 2022 as Russian troops marched to Kyiv. The war has left members asking themselves the same question that is echoing across Russian civil society: How did things go so wrong?

At Memorial, an initiative dedicated to preventing the return of totalitarianism to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has led to a difficult, at times contentious, internal re-examination of its own legacy.

“We’re trying to understand what wasn’t right in our work over the past 35 years: How we didn’t build up cooperation with Russian society, how we failed to see different, more complex forms of discrimination and oppression,” Polivanova, the programming director, said. “We had blind spots in our work to the point where, in a sense, we all allowed this terrible war to happen.”

There was a mixed global reaction last year when the Nobel committee announced that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared among Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate from Belarus. The director of the Ukrainian organization Oleksandra Matviichuk praised Memorial’s work but refused to be interviewed alongside Yan Raczynski, who accepted the award for Memorial in Oslo. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany called the shared recognition “truly devastating” in the context of the ongoing war, launched by Russia in part from Belarusian territory.

Not everyone at Memorial thinks the group should be judged through the lens of Russia’s war and hard turn towards authoritarianism.

“Without question, a medium-sized organization, with limited resources, and even with our network, could not change anything,” said Belenkin, director of Memorial’s library, in regards to the war. “Memorial is not relevant here.”

But Polivanova, who operates the tours and is a generation younger than much of Memorial’s leadership, believes that Memorial must re-examine its own legacy in connection to the war. The ongoing discussion among Memorial members on this topic has been “very difficult,” she said. She has reworked her tour lineup, with one of the new Moscow excursions dedicated to the Ukrainian human rights activist Petro Grigorenko.

Born in a small village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region in what was then the Russian empire, Grigorenko rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become a World War II hero and a major general. At the height of his career in 1968, Grigorenko broke with the Soviet Army by speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. Punishment came swiftly: He was arrested in Moscow, diagnosed as criminally insane and underwent punitive psychiatric treatment, a practice that has re-emerged under President Vladimir Putin. Somehow, Grigorenko managed to continue speaking out for the cause of long-persecuted Crimean Tatars, dared to criticize the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, and founded the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups before being exiled.

“In the past, we didn’t consider this story to be so important,” Polivanova said. “This historical perspective was not stressed at Memorial.”

The updated tour lineup that includes Grigorenko’s life in Moscow has had a surge in popularity since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past year and a half, Polivanova has had to triple the number of weekly walking tours and still isn’t able to keep up with demand. Registration fills up almost immediately after dates are announced.

The tours are one of the rare public forums available to Russians to discuss the war. “People are really engaging,” Polivanova said. In September 2022, she added readings of Ukrainian poetry written by authors killed during Stalin’s purges to a tour of a mass grave site in Russia’s northeast. On many excursions, participants start to take over, she said, drawing direct comparisons between the cruelty of Soviet repression and news of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and other frontlines in Ukraine.

The tours have also attracted a different kind of participant. “Patriotic” activists crashed the organized outings for weeks at a time last fall, threatening those in attendance and publicly denouncing members of Memorial as “traitors.” Since then, Memorial started to require that participants provide links to their social media accounts when registering for a tour.

As people line up for Memorial’s tours, the government’s attempts to reverse many of Memorial’s decades-long efforts to seek accountability for crimes committed under communism remain relentless.

In September, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service debuted in front of their offices a looming statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the infamous Soviet political police apparatus. The statue was almost an exact copy of a Dzerzhinsky monument that stood for decades in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency. In 1991, Russians who had gathered to protest for an end to totalitarian Soviet rule and a transition to democracy tore it down. Today, the spymaster, ally of Lenin and Stalin, architect of the Red Terror, stands again in Moscow.

The post Surviving Russia’s control appeared first on Coda Story.

Suddenly, we are Australians at war on the Western Front in 1918: Shells fly overhead with flashing lights, while the room shakes with the kaboom of bombs and machine guns. Actors shout and fall across the screens, their blood flying out in cartoonish spatters. The surround screens position us in the center of the action, a soldier in the trenches. Over on the right, a man fires off his prop machine gun, his face contorted like a boy playing soldiers.

A booming voice comes over the speaker, warning us about the unequaled horror of gas attacks. Darkness — then a fixture opens up on the floor, filling the room with smoke. It rapidly clears, and soon we are watching the brave Australian soldiers defeat the Germans, guided throughout by the military genius of the handsome Australian general John Monash. After an upswell in the music, the French prime minister is congratulating those brave Aussies for turning the tide of the war. We knew that you would fight a real fight, the heavily-costumed Georges Clemenceau declares, but we did not know that, from the very beginning, you would astonish the whole continent. The lights come back on and the doors slide open. The Aussies have won the war, saving the whole of Europe, and perhaps the world, from tyranny.

The Monash Centre is more than just a vivid historical fantasy. It is the culmination of a decades-long, state-sponsored conservative campaign to reorient Australian national identity — one aimed at shifting Australian public memory towards a triumphant set of narratives about war. 

The Centre isn’t a popular destination. It’s hard to get to. Almost all professional historians have disavowed it. And it cost the Australian government a fortune to build. Naturally, I decided I would have to go and see it.

Buying history

When the renowned military historian Bruce Scates was invited to advise on the Monash Centre, he was cautiously hopeful. Scates had published widely on WWI and advised the Australian government on numerous projects. The government at the time had been dedicating increasing sums of money to the commemoration of WWI, loosely timed around the centenaries of Australia’s involvement in battles at Gallipoli (now in Turkey) and on the Western Front — particularly at the French town of Villers-Bretonneux.

Villers-Bretonneux is important to Australians. In April 1918, all five Australian divisions — alongside forces from Britain and the French Empire, most notably Morocco — successfully recaptured the town in order to help slow Germany’s spring offensive. In the years following the war, an Australian connection remained in Villers-Bretonneux. Australian school children donated money to the rebuilding of the war-damaged town, while family members of deceased Australian soldiers — many of whom were buried in nearby cemeteries — came to pay their respects. Villers-Bretonneux became Australia’s European war commemoration hub. An Australian National Memorial was erected there in 1938 and expanded in 2014 with a massive budget and a crack team of advisors — Scates plus six other top historians.

“I thought the possibilities were enormous,” Scates told me. “Firstly, this was the most literate fighting force in the world: These men and women have left behind an extraordinary testimony. And I hoped, given the amount of money that was spent on the Centre, we’re talking about 100 million Australian dollars [roughly $67 million], we could do a lot with those stories throughout the exhibition and make a really powerful statement about the human cost of war. But that didn’t happen.”

Gradually, Scates realized that the parts of the Australian government responsible for designing the Monash Centre were uninterested in presenting a realistic version of Australia’s involvement on the Western Front. “They were working to manufacture a certain view of the war, one that was seen as politically desirable and had nothing to do with the actual telling of history,” he said. Suggested material about the causes or costs of war was continually edited down or removed. In meeting after meeting, Scates watched government officials steer the museum towards jingoism. “The assumption was: ‘We’re paying for this museum, so we will buy the kind of history that we want to hear,’” Scates said.

Scates and three other historians resigned in protest, but the Centre carried on, eventually opening in 2018 to great fanfare, boasting that it uses extensive “immersive and emotive elements” to “deliver a compelling visitor experience.” This appears to be accurate. According to one of the Centre’s contracted designers, Russell Magee, “We’ve observed people walking out crying on a daily basis and that’s what we wanted to achieve.” 

The Monash Centre may have missed its projected visitor targets by around 50% in the first year, but it has become a touchstone for conservative cultural politics in Australia. And it remains a monumental presence in the cold, rainy countryside of northern France. It is a lasting tribute to the chauvinism and steady militarization of Australian public memory over the last two decades and a clear articulation of the right-wing project — driven, above all, by the Australian Liberal Party and Australia’s Department of Veteran Affairs — to reshape Australian memory politics and national identity.

Celebrating war

I came to Villers-Bretonneux on a rainy spring day to see for myself this monument to the memory culture that has dominated Australian public life since I was a child. That culture has tended to center on Anzac Day, the national public holiday on April 25 that takes its name from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac), which, despite both nations having recently acquired independence from Britain, supported the British army in WWI. 

The date was chosen to reflect the anniversary of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey, when Anzac soldiers joined British and French Imperial forces in a combined attack on the Ottoman Empire. Although the campaign was a disaster in military terms, with the Anzacs withdrawing after months of terrible suffering, the bravery and togetherness shown in defeat inspired Australians in the latter half of the 20th century to claim Gallipoli as an emblem of the young nation’s identity. Since the 2000s, state-sponsored commemoration has been moving away from the losses at Gallipoli and toward Australian victories on the Western Front, including the battle at Villers-Bretonneux that also happened to occur on April 25.

The Monash Centre is located about a mile and a half outside Villers-Bretonneux, a quiet town that still wears its Australian connection with pride. The town hall has kangaroo decals on its facade and an Australian flag alongside the French tricolor. 

I walk north among stony green fields until the Australian National Memorial looms into view. The Monash Centre has been dug into the hillside so as not to disturb the view of everything else. There are hardly any other visitors, but the grounds are crowded with half-erected marquees, portable toilets and half-unpacked tables and chairs. Workers shout to each other as they prepare for a massive Anzac Day ceremony, which will be broadcast live to Australia in 10 days.

During the interwar period and after World War II, Anzac Day was a relatively somber affair, primarily aimed at people who lost loved ones in the conflicts. As the 20th century proceeded, WWI commemorations shrank as ever fewer veterans were alive to participate. But it also retreated on account of the cultural shifts, beginning in the 1960s, that saw progressive Australians looking to distance themselves from a military history with Britain and instead to rally more around multiculturalism.

This cultural shift, however, began to reverse course in the late 1990s, when the incoming conservative prime minister, John Howard, made WWI commemoration the focus of his cultural program. Opposed to recognizing Australia’s history of colonial violence and dispossession, Howard rejected what he called the “self-laceration” and “guilt” of prior governments. “In the Anzacs can be found the model and inspiration for the nation’s own self-esteem,” boasted an editorial in the conservative newspaper The Australian on Howard’s first Anzac Day. The federal government initiated a wave of massive state funding for education and memorialization programs, all of which focused not on independent Australia’s successful defense against fascist Japan in WWII but on the country’s achievements while fighting for the British Empire in a distant war that is widely considered avoidable and wasteful.

Howard also injected a celebratory tone into WWI commemorations, which had previously prioritized sober mournfulness. The idea that Anzacs had been fighting to defend democracy and freedom became commonplace in political speeches, in the media and in classrooms. “It is about the celebration of some wonderful values of courage, of valor, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost,” Howard said on Anzac Day in 2003, two months after Australia had joined the Iraq War. “They went in our name, in a just cause, to do good things to liberate a people.”

Anzac Day is now Australia’s de-facto national day. Politicians of both major parties, the right-wing Liberals and the center-left Labor, give speeches — often at the sites of overseas battles like Villers-Bretonneux — about how Anzac values of courage, camaraderie and sacrifice helped “forge” the young Australian nation. Anzac-themed football games draw large crowds. Pubs host parties involving the wartime betting game “two-up.” Throughout, the word Anzac has come to mean not just Australians who served in WWI but also, by association, that wartime generation and Aussie soldiering generally. And a specific set of images and stories about WWI — those battlefield values, red poppies and muddy trenches, the melancholy silhouette of a lone mourning infantryman — have coalesced into a quasi-mythological national narrative that Australians refer to as “the Anzac legend.”

Any critical voices are accused of disrespecting the suffering soldiers and, by extension, Australia itself. The sports journalist Scott McIntyre was fired from his public broadcaster job after tweeting critically about Anzac’s role in public life. The Sudanese-Australian media presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia after being harassed by right-wing media and politicians for making a Facebook post one Anzac Day that referred — using the standard Anzac commemorative phrase “lest we forget” — to armed conflicts in Syria and Palestine and to Australia’s scandal-ridden offshore refugee detention centers.

According to Frank Bongiorno, the president of the Australian Historical Association, the 21st century resurgence of interest in WWI history was not a revival of earlier Anzac narratives but rather a total reinvention of them. By the 1960s, Bongiorno explained, Anzac had come to seem “irredeemably identified with conservative values of the old imperial white Australia” but has, in recent decades, been reinvigorated to emphasize the involvement in WWI of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians. To Bongiorno, however, this newfound inclusiveness is only superficial, eliding the real diversity of Australian wartime experience while insisting on the privileged status of British (and occasionally Irish) Australians.

The new variation on Anzac has become a robust point of political consensus. Successive Liberal and Labor governments have continued to bolster Anzac’s profile by committing huge sums to commemoration activities. By 2015, it was estimated that over 500 million Australian dollars (about $336 million) of taxpayer money had gone towards the centenary, including over $67 million for the Monash Centre. “It’s said that Australia’s spending on the WWI centenary was greater than all the other countries combined,” Bongiorno said. “And since then, we’ve seen further spending.”

All in the family

I walk across the cemetery toward the Australian National Memorial, which lists the names of roughly 10,700 graveless Australian soldiers who died in France. My phone buzzes with a notification from the Monash Centre app, which I was instructed to download upon arrival. Brief stories about dead soldiers have been loaded into the app and geotagged, with an actor’s reading designed to begin as users approach the relevant grave. The app invites me to try looking up a name on the walls, perhaps that of an ancestor. I decline.

At the entrance to the memorial, I encounter a series of wreaths and one laminated card:

In loving memory

Of my great great great uncle

Gone but never forgotten

I thank you all for that you

Sacrificed for my freedom

The geographer Shanti Sumartojo, who has researched Australian commemoration sites in Western Europe, describes Villers-Bretonneux as the “jewel in the crown” of a curated set of experiences marketed together as the Australian Remembrance Trail. To her, the emotional impact of the memorial lies in how it combines personal and collective elements, making individual visitors feel physically humbled by the monumental architecture and the massive accumulation of soldiers’ names. It is no coincidence that Villers-Bretonneux and other Remembrance Trail sites are advertised using explicitly Christian language: Visitors are called “pilgrims,” cemeteries are referred to as “hallowed ground” and “sacred sites.”

The memorial also serves in the construction of a national narrative. Above all, according to Sumartojo, the emphasis on family names — coupled with the language of inheritance and the close focus on WWI — reinforces a national identity based not in civics and democracy but in ethnic kinship. This national kinship is, of course, slanted in favor of those whose family histories in Australia go back past 1918. “As an immigrant to Australia, and as a biracial person myself, that’s one of the reasons I’m so fascinated by Anzac: It’s this really powerful narrative, but I don’t think it actually holds space for contemporary Australia very well, because it’s so masculine and settler-colonial and white,” Sumartojo said.

At Villers-Bretonneux, memory follows the logic of inherited valor. I happen to have my own family connection here, although it’s not listed on the wall. My great-grandfather served Australia as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, where he was injured — so the family story goes — by a shell explosion that buried him, rendering him mostly amnesiac, left for dead and wandering lost. Eventually, he found his way to a company of Canadians who, recognizing his accent, passed him on to Australian forces in Belgium. From there, he was sent home to Australia where, gradually working off his trauma, he became gainfully employed and started a family — our family.

For most of my life, my family’s wartime history did not interest me at all. (My grandfather was in the army, too, having served in the Pacific against Japan.) Growing up in Australia of the 2000s, being descended from Anzacs meant occupying a privileged position in the national narrative — but I never felt comfortable accepting it. For one thing, this badge of honor felt like something I had done nothing to earn. For another, the way Anzac was discussed under the Howard government did not at all match the diverse Australia I knew.

Only recently did I discover the urge to learn more about my great-grandfather and his life. I had only ever known two things about him. He had been anti-war, hence his decision to enlist as a stretcher-bearer rather than a soldier, and he had been blown up on the Western Front. It suddenly struck me as a terrible irony that this man, who hated war so much that he cried when his son enlisted for WWII, would be remembered by his descendants only for being a soldier. Peppering my mother with questions, I learned that my great-grandfather was a man of remarkable gentleness. He loved birds, especially magpies. He was a whiz at fixing radios. And he was a committed pacifist.

My previous incuriosity is nobody’s fault but my own. Still, I cannot help but think that the Anzac legend offered me no viable narratives for thinking about my ancestors except the one that centered war. My pacifist great-grandfather, who never participated in Anzac Day, didn’t fit into the narrative, so I scarcely thought about him. 

What happens to a society when war stories — even gruesome and sad ones — dominate its self-image? I wonder this as I follow the signs out of the National Memorial and toward its 21st century extension, the Monash Centre. These signs lead me down into a series of trench-like walkways, where bits of retro Aussie slang (cobbers, diggers, mates) are carved into the walls and speakers blaze with noises of gunfire and shells. This place, it seems, is at once a cemetery, a museum, a monument and a reenactment experience — a reflection, perhaps, of the Anzac legend’s own crossed purposes.

Entering the Centre, I am greeted by a friendly Australian docent. She recommends hurrying so I have time for The Experience, which, she assures me, is very immersive and very moving. The interactive app guides viewers through the exhibits, triggering massive screens that show historical photographs and ultra-high-definition reels of actors who, dressed in WWI garb, either reenact key moments from the war or deliver quotes taken from soldiers’ letters and published testimonies. These screens, interspersed with boxes of objects, tell a version of the Anzac experience that heavily emphasizes Western Front victories. Hardly any space is dedicated to Australia’s decision to enter the war. No space at all is allotted to the vigorous peace movement — or, indeed, the two tremendously divisive conscription referenda that were voted down during the war. One follows the Anzacs’ narrative arc from excitement and confusion through the shock of gory early battles to the Aussies’ triumphant mastery of trench warfare. When it is suggested that Anzacs were defending the democracy and freedom of Australia and its allies, I begin to wonder if the Centre’s organizers have got their world wars mixed up.

Bongiorno has described how images of Anzac changed during the postwar decades, from the celebration of successful warriors toward the increasingly funereal tones of the 1980s and 1990s, when Anzacs started being represented primarily as sufferers. This mournful tone — and the accompanying gruesome portrayals of war — has been offered as a defense against accusations that Anzac’s prominent role in Australian memory culture is essentially militaristic. Yet, at the Monash Centre, battles are referred to as being among “the greatest” on the Western Front, with John Monash branded the “greatest” general. War is where nations are forged, where men are made and where a community’s heroic status can be secured for eternity. As William James once wrote: “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” If all the focus is on how the war was “won,” not on why it was fought — and who tried to stop it — then military engagement becomes the only viable form of courage.

As I enter the Centre’s middle chamber, and the video-game jingoism of The Experience gets underway, it becomes clear how easily the ostensibly anti-war strains of earlier Anzac memory culture can slip into the full-on glorification of violence. The French-Australian military historian Romain Faithi has been an outspoken critic of the Centre’s lurch toward national chauvinism. “Sometimes I just wonder what the men who are under would think about it,” he told me. “Would they be touched that thousands of people remember them, or would they be like, ‘You are so wrong. Fighting this war served no purpose except killing millions of people.’”

The Monash Centre reflects the broader imbalance of war and peace in Australian public memory. Throughout the 2010s, former Prime Minister Howard’s opposition to historians and the arts was taken up by successive Liberal governments, which inflicted crippling austerity on national cultural institutions and the main public arts funding bodies. To the academic and journalist Ben Eltham, this represents a kind of “implicit cultural policy” whereby arts budgets are cut while comparatively massive waves of funding are directed towards Anzac-style war commemoration.

Eltham also emphasized the war memorial’s enthusiastic courting of corporate sponsorships from defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (The ex-Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, who ran the National Memorial from 2012-2019, was chosen as the president of Boeing Australia in 2020.) I asked Eltham if it was surprising that military contractors were eager to contribute to a cultural mythology that still emphasized the goriness of wartime suffering. “I think it makes perfect sense,” he said. “In every nation, there seems to be a pretty direct relationship between the veneration of these old dead young soldiers and the glorification of future conflicts.”

The Monash Centre, and Australian memory culture more broadly, offers a warning for the United States. The U.S. author and former Marine Phil Klay has written eloquently on the limitations of a culture that offers veterans showy rituals of gratitude but remains essentially indifferent to the soldiers themselves and to the emotional and physical costs of war. James Fallows has noted in The Atlantic that politicians and the press typically discuss the military with “overblown, limitless praise,” while pop culture emphasizes the “suffering and stoicism” of the troops without ever venturing to learn about them. Outsiders, Fallows concluded, view the military “both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions.” One example of the funereal turn in American military memory culture came in the debates over Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests. When commentators accused Kaepernick of “disrespecting the troops,” they typically pointed not to U.S. military successes but to the immensity of the veterans’ sacrifice and suffering. His then-teammate Alex Boone said that Kaepernick “should have some fucking respect for people who served, especially people that lost their life to protect our freedom.”

A national soldier cult, it seems, serves nobody — not even the soldiers. And an iconography of suffering offers no protection against militarism. Leaving the Monash Centre, I remember the story Romain Faithi told me about Alec Campbell, the last living Anzac who experienced the battle at Gallipoli. Campbell was a socialist and trade unionist. He warned against the glorification of Gallipoli and was bemused by the frenzied media attention he received in old age. “When he was the only one left,” Faithi said, “the government approached him for a national funeral and he said, ‘Heck no, I used that part of my life. Don’t go to war!’ But of course it was bigger than him. So when he died, the government used him anyway.” Alec Campbell’s state funeral took place in 2002. His casket was placed on a two-piece gun carriage and led by a military Dodge truck, preceded by four riders on horseback wearing WWI uniforms.

The post Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of WWI appeared first on Coda Story.

Gurinder Dhillon still remembers the day he realized he had been tricked. It was 2009, and he had just taken out a $16,000 loan to start a new life. Originally from Punjab, India, Dhillon had met an agent in his home village who promised him the world. 

“He sold me this dream,” Dhillon, 45, said. A new life in Europe. Good money — enough to send back to his family in India. Clothes, a house, plenty of work. He’d work on a farm, picking fruits and vegetables, in a place called the Pontine Marshes, a vast area of farmland in the Lazio region, south of Rome, Italy. 

He took out a sizable loan from the Indian agents, who in return organized his visa, ticket and travel to Italy. The real cost of this is around $2,000 — the agents were making an enormous profit. 

“The thing is, when I got here, the whole situation changed. They played me,” Dhillon said. “They brought me here like a slave.”

On his first day out in the fields, Dhillon climbed into a trailer with about 60 other people and was then dropped off in his assigned hoop house. That day, he was on the detail for zucchini, tomatoes and eggplant. It was June, and under the plastic, it was infernally hot. It felt like at least 100 degrees, Dhillon remembers. He sweated so much that his socks were soaked. He had to wring them out halfway through the day and then put them back on — there was no time to change his clothes. As they worked, an Italian boss yelled at them constantly to work faster and pick more.

Within a few hours of that first shift, it dawned on Dhillon that he had been duped. “I didn’t think I had been tricked — I knew I had,” he said. This wasn’t the life or the work he had been promised. 

What he got instead was 3.40 euros (about $3.65) an hour, for a workday of up to 14 hours. The workers weren’t allowed bathroom breaks.

On these wages, he couldn’t see how he would ever repay the enormous loan he had taken out. He was working alongside some other men, also from India, who had been there for years.  ”Will it be like this forever?” he asked them. “Yes,” they said. “It will be like this forever.”

Ninety years ago, a very different harvest was taking place. Benito Mussolini was celebrating the first successful wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. It was a new tradition for the area, which for millennia had been nothing but a vast, brackish, barely-inhabited swamp.

No one managed to tame it — until Mussolini came to power and launched his “Battle for Grain.” The fascist leader had a dream for the area: It would provide food and sustenance for the whole country.

Determined to make the country self-sufficient as a food producer, Mussolini spoke of “freeing Italy from the slavery of foreign bread” and promoted the virtues of rural land workers. At the center of his policy was a plan to transform wild, uncultivated areas into farmland. He created a national project to drain Italy’s swamps. And the boggy, mosquito-infested Pontine Marshes were his highest priority. 

His regime shipped in thousands of workers from all over Italy to drain the waterlogged land by building a massive system of pumps and canals. Billions of gallons of water were dredged from the marshes, transforming them into fertile farmland.

The project bore real fruit in 1933. Thousands of black-shirted Fascists gathered to hear a brawny-armed, suntanned Mussolini mark the first wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. 

“The Italian people will have the necessary bread to live,” Il Duce told the crowd, declaring how Italy would never again be reliant on other countries for food. “Comrade farmers, the harvest begins.”

The Pontine Marshes are still one of the most productive areas of Italy, an agricultural powerhouse with miles of plastic-covered hoop houses, growing fruit and vegetables by the ton. They are also home to herds of buffalo that make Italy’s famous buffalo mozzarella. The area provides food not just for Italy but for Europe and beyond. Jars of artichokes packed in oil, cans of Italian plum tomatoes and plump, ripe kiwi fruits often come from this part of the world. But Mussolini’s “comrade farmers” harvesting the land’s bounty are long gone. Tending the fields today are an estimated 30,000 agricultural workers like Dhillon, most hailing from Punjab, India. For many of them — and by U.N. standards — the working conditions are akin to slave labor.

When Urmila Bhoola, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, visited the area, she found that many working conditions in Italy’s agricultural sector amounted to forced labor due to the amount of hours people work, the low salaries and the gangmasters, or “caporali,” who control them.

The workers here are at the mercy of the caporali, who are the intermediaries between the farm workers and the owners. Some workers are brought here with residency and permits, while others are brought fully off the books. Regardless, they report making as little as 3-4 euros an hour. Sometimes, though, they’re barely paid at all. When Samrath, 34, arrived in Italy, he was not paid for three months of work on the farms. His boss claimed his pay had gone entirely into taxes — but when he checked with the government office, he found his taxes hadn’t been paid either. 

Samrath is not the worker’s real name. Some names in this story have been changed to protect the subjects’ safety.

“I worked for him for all these months, and he didn’t pay me. Nothing. I worked for free for at least three months,” Samrath told me. “I felt so ashamed and sad. I cried so much.” He could hardly bring himself to tell his family at home what had happened.

I met Samrath and several other workers on a Sunday on the marshes. For the Indian Sikh workers from Punjab, this is usually the only day off for the week. They all gather at the temple, where they pray together and share a meal of pakoras, vegetable curry and rice. The women sit on one side, the men on the other. It’s been a long working week — for the men, out in the fields or tending the buffaloes, while the women mostly work in the enormous packing centers, boxing up fruits and vegetables to be sent out all over Europe.

Another worker, Ramneet, told me how he waited for his monthly check — usually around 1,300 euros (about $1,280) per month, for six days’ work a week at 12-14 hours per day. But when the check came, the number on it was just 125 euros (about $250). 

“We were just in shock,” Ramneet said. “We panicked — our monthly rent here is 600 euros.” His boss claimed, again, that the money had gone to taxes. It meant he had worked almost for free the entire month. Other workers explained to me that even when they did have papers, they could risk being pushed out of the system and becoming undocumented if their bosses refused to issue them payslips.

Ramneet described how Italian workers on the farms are treated differently from Indian workers. Italian workers, he said, get to take an hour for lunch. Indian workers are called back after just 20 minutes — despite having their pay cut for their lunch hour.

“When Meloni gives her speeches, she talks about getting more for the Italians,” Ramneet’s wife Ishleen said, referring to Italy’s new prime minister and her motto, “Italy and Italians first.” “She doesn’t care about us, even though we’re paying taxes. When we’re working, we can’t even take a five-minute pause, while the Italian workers can take an hour.”

Today, Italy is entering a new era — or, some people argue, returning to an old one. In September, Italians voted in a new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. As well as being the country’s first-ever female prime minister, she is also Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini. Her supporters — and even some leaders of her party, Brothers of Italy — show a distinct reverence for Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.

In the first weeks of Meloni’s premiership, thousands of Mussolini admirers made a pilgrimage to Il Duce’s birthplace of Predappio to pay homage to the fascist leader, making the Roman salute and hailing Meloni as a leader who might resurrect the days of fascism. In Latina, the largest city in the marshes, locals interviewed by national newspapers talked of being excited about Meloni’s victory — filled with hopes that she might be true to her word and bring the area back to its glory days in the time of Benito Mussolini. One of Meloni’s undersecretaries has run a campaign calling for a park in Latina to return to its original name: Mussolini Park.

During her campaign, a video emerged of Meloni discussing Mussolini as a 19-year-old activist. “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy,” she told journalists. Meloni has since worked to distance herself from such associations with fascism. In December, she visited Rome’s Jewish ghetto as a way of acknowledging Mussolini’s crimes against humanity. “The racial laws were a disgrace,” she told the crowd.

A century on from Italy’s fascist takeover, Meloni’s victory has led to a moment of widespread collective reckoning, as a national conversation takes place about how Mussolini should be remembered and whether Meloni’s premiership means Italy is reconnecting with its fascist past.

Unlike in Germany, which tore down — and outlawed — symbols of Nazi terror, reminders of Mussolini’s rule remain all over Italy. There was no moment of national reckoning after the war ended and Mussolini was executed. Hundreds of fascist monuments and statues dot the country. Slogans left over from the dictatorship can be seen on post offices, municipal buildings and street signs. Collectively, when Italians discuss Mussolini, they do remember his legacy of terror — his alliance with Adolf Hitler, anti-Semitic race laws and the thousands of Italian Jews he sent to the death camps. But across the generations, Italians also talk about other legacies of his regime — they talk of the infrastructure and architecture built during the period and of how he drained the Pontine Marshes and rid them of malaria, making the land into an agricultural haven.

Today in the Pontine Marshes, which some see as a place brought into existence by Il Duce — and where the slogans on one town tower praise “the land that Mussolini redeemed from deadly sterility” — the past is bristling with the present.

“The legend that has come back to haunt this town, again and again, is that it’s a fascist city. Of course, it was created in the fascist era, but here we’re not fascists — we’re dismissed as fascists and politically sidelined as a result,” Emilio Andreoli, an author who was born in Latina and has written books about the city’s history, said. Politicians used to target the area as a key campaigning territory, he said, but it has since fallen off most leaders’ agendas. And indeed, in some ways, Latina is a place that feels forgotten. Although it remains a top agricultural producer, other kinds of industry and infrastructure have faltered. Factories that once bustled here lie empty. New, faster roads and railways that were promised to the city by previous governments never materialized.

Meloni did visit Latina on her campaign trail and gave speeches about reinvigorating the area with its old strength. “This is a land where you can breathe patriotism. Where you breathe the fundamental and traditional values that we continue to defend — despite being considered politically incorrect,” she told the crowd.  

But the people working this land are entirely absent from Meloni’s rhetorical vision. Marco Omizzolo, a professor of sociology at the University of Sapienza in Rome, has for years studied and engaged with the largely Sikh community of laborers from India who work on the marshes.

Omizzolo explained to me how agricultural production in Italy has systematically relied on the exploitation of migrant workers for decades.

“Many people are in this,” he told me, when we met for coffee in Rome. “The owners of companies who employ the workers. The people who run the laborers’ daily work. Local and national politicians. Several mafia clans.”

“Exploitation in the agricultural sector has been going on for centuries in Italy,” Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focusing on migration, said. She described that the Italian peasantry was always exploited but that the system was further entrenched with the arrival of migrant workers. “The system has always treated migrants as manpower — as laborers to exploit, and never as persons carrying equal rights as Italian workers.” From where she’s sitting, Italy’s immigration laws appear to have been designed to leave migrants “dependent on the whims and the wills of their abusive employers,” Tranchina said.

The system of bringing the workers to Italy — and keeping them there — begins in Punjab, India. Omizzolo described how a group of traffickers recruits prospective workers with promises of lucrative work abroad and often helps to arrange high-interest loans like the one that Gurinder took out. Omizzolo estimates that about a fifth of the Indian workers in the Pontine Marshes come via irregular routes, with some arriving from Libya, while many others are smuggled into Italy from Serbia across land and sea, aided by traffickers. Their situation is more perilous than those who arrived with visas and work permits, as they’re forced to work under the table without contracts, benefits or employment rights.

Omizzolo knows it all firsthand. A Latina native, he grew up playing football by the vegetable and fruit fields and watching as migrant workers, first from North Africa, then from India, came to the area to work the land. He began studying the forces at play as a sociologist during his doctorate and even traveled undercover to Punjab to understand how workers are picked up and trafficked to Italy. 

As a scholar and advocate for stronger labor protections, he has drawn considerable attention to the exploitative systems that dominate the area. In 2016, he worked alongside Sikh laborers to organize a mass strike in Latina, in which 4,000 people participated. All this has made Omizzolo a target of local mafia forces, Indian traffickers and corrupt farm bosses. He has been surveilled and chased in the street and has had his car tires slashed. Death threats are nothing unusual. These days, he does not travel to Latina without police protection.

The entire system could become even further entrenched — and more dangerous for anyone speaking out about it — under Meloni’s administration. The prime minister has an aggressively anti-migrant agenda, promising to stop people arriving on Italy’s shores in small boats. Her government has sent out a new fleet of patrol boats to the Libyan Coast Guard to try to block the crossings, while making it harder for NGOs to carry out rescue operations. 

At the end of February, at least 86 migrants drowned off the coast of Calabria in a shipwreck. When Meloni visited Calabria a few weeks later, she did not go to the beach where the migrants’ bodies were found or to the funeral home that took care of their remains. Instead, she announced a new policy: scrapping special protection residency permits for migrants. 

Tranchina, from Human Rights Watch, explained that getting rid of the “special protection” permits will leave many migrant workers in Italy, including those in the Pontine Marshes, effectively undocumented. 

“The situation is worsening significantly under the current government,” she said. “An army of people, who are currently working, paying taxes, renting houses, will now be forced to accept very exploitative working conditions — at times akin to slavery — out of desperation.” 

Omizzolo agreed. Meloni’s hostile environment campaign against arriving migrants is making people in the marshes feel “more fragile and blackmailable,” he told me. 

“Meloni is entrenching the current system in place in the Pontine Marshes,” Omizzolo said. “Her policies are interested in keeping things in their current state. Because the people who exploit the workers here are among her voter base.”

And then there’s the matter of money and how people are paid. A few months into her administration, Meloni introduced a proposal to raise the ceiling for cash transactions from 2,000 euros (about $2,110) to 5,000 euros ($5,280), a move that critics saw as an attempt to better insulate black market and organized crime networks from state scrutiny.

Workers describe that they were often paid in cash and that their bosses were always looking for ways to take them off the books. “We have to push them to pay us the official way and keep our contracts,” Rajvinder, 24, said. “They prefer to give us cash.” Being taken off a contract and paid under the table is a constant source of anxiety. “If I don’t have a work contract, my papers will expire after three months,” Samrath explained, describing how he would then become undocumented in Italy.

Omizzolo says Meloni’s cash laws will continue to preserve the corruption and sustain a shadow economy that grips the workers coming to the Pontine Marshes. Even for people who once worked above the table, the new government’s laissez-faire attitude towards the shadow economy is pushing them back into obscurity. “That law is directly contributing to the black market — people who used to be on the books, and have proper contracts, are now re-entering the shadow economy,” he said.

In December, Latina celebrated its 90th anniversary — some people here call it the youngest city in Italy. Some believe that this land, with its marble towns built in the fascist rationalist style, has fascism and Mussolini to thank for its very existence. The town was founded as a kind of utopia: a vision for a fascist future.

“This place was born in 1932. You can see it everywhere, in the architecture, in the buildings. We can’t skip over fascism. We can’t tell this story from the beginning while cutting things away to suit our convenience,” Cesare Bruni, who organizes a monthly “market of memory” where people sell antiques and relics from the past, said. 

Bruni holds up an old photo from the New York Sunday News, showing a sun-dappled Mussolini visiting the newly drained marsh to help with the first harvest since the land was reclaimed, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. “Il Duce-Farmhand,” the headline reads, describing how the leader “put in three hours of hard work” out in the fields.

The idealistic image of the harvest was powerful propaganda at the time. Not shown were the workers, brought in from all over the country, who died of malaria while digging the trenches and canals to drain the marsh. It also stands in contrast to today’s reality. Workers are brought here from the other side of the world, on false pretenses, and find themselves trapped in a system with no escape from the brutal work schedule and the resulting physical and mental health risks. In October, a 24-year-old Punjabi farm worker in the town of Sabaudia killed himself. It’s not the first time a worker has died by suicide — depression and opioid addiction are common among the workforce. 

“We are all guilty, without exception. We have decided to lose this battle for democracy. Dear Jaspreet, forgive us. Or perhaps, better, haunt our consciences forever,” Omizzolo wrote on his Facebook page.

Talwinder, 28, arrived on the marsh last year. “I had no hopes in India. I had no dreams, I had nothing. It is difficult here — in India, it was difficult in a different way. But at least [in India] I was working for myself.” His busiest months of the year are coming up — he’ll work without a day off. And although the mosquitoes no longer carry malaria, they still plague the workers. “They’re fatter than the ones in India,” he laughs. “I heard it’s because this place used to be a jungle.”

Mussolini’s vision for the marsh was to turn it into an agricultural center for the whole of Italy, giving work to thousands of Italians and building up a strong working peasantry. Today, vegetables, olives and cheeses from the area are shipped to the United States and sold in upmarket stores to shoppers seeking authentic, artisan foods from the heart of the old world. But it comes at an enormous price to those who produce it. And under Meloni’s premiership, they only expect that cost to rise.

“These days, if my family ask me if they should come here, like my nephew or relatives, I tell them no,” said Samrath. “Don’t come here. Stay where you are.”

The post The Indian migrants lured into forced labor on Mussolini’s farmland appeared first on Coda Story.

Although nearly a quarter of Colombians identify as either Black or mixed race, the African diaspora and Colombia’s deep roots in the slave trade are conspicuously absent from official narratives about the country’s history. When Muntú Bantú opened in 2009, the museum was wholly unique in a country with one of Latin America’s largest Black populations yet no institutional centers or museums dedicated to their history, culture and heritage. The name is a tribute to the region’s African roots, referencing Bantu, a family of languages spoken across the African continent. According to the museum, Africa’s Bantu diaspora has a strong linguistic and cultural presence in the Chocó region, where it is located.

“Sometimes people enter as one person and exit as someone else,” Sergio Antonio Mosquera, an Afro-Colombian historian and the museum’s founder, told me in Spanish over a shaky WhatsApp connection. 

Visitors would pass through the building’s yellow facade and descend into the bowels of a ship, meant to evoke the transatlantic slave trade, and then be immersed in exhibits about African history and biodiversity, Black achievements in cinema and Afro-Colombian feminism. Some left transformed. 

“They found themselves with their history, their ancestors,” Mosquera added. “It’s a huge experience, understanding the world in Afro-diasporic thinking, not Eurocentric, Christian and white as we were taught.”

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But no one is walking through the museum now. A few months back, a local armed group set its sights on Muntú Bantú and sought to extort Mosquera and his colleagues, threatening violence if they didn’t pay up. The harassment led them to shutter Muntú Bantú in January, forcing the museum’s vast archive of Afro-Colombian history underground. 

In Chocó, the impoverished region in Western Colombia where it’s located, Muntú Bantú was a revelation — a gateway to an archive of repressed national memory. It had become a hallowed space in the community — so much so that for years, it was able to stay open despite the violence and instability plaguing Chocó.

Rich in natural resources like coca and gold, the Pacific Coast province is in the crosshairs of a violent battle for control between criminal groups lured by illegal mining and drug trafficking. These groups prey upon local businesses and organizations through extortion and harassment, and Muntú Bantú was no exception. When death threats and so-called extortion “war taxes” landed in front of Mosquera and his colleagues, they saw no option but to close up shop indefinitely over concerns for their safety.

The closure highlights the increasingly precarious position of activists working in the country’s conflict zones, particularly in the years since Colombia’s 2016 internal peace treaty, which is now faltering. It also comes less than a year after the inauguration of Vice President Francia Márquez, the first Afro-Colombian to hold such a high office.

Violence against activists and community leaders has reached record levels in Colombia as criminal organizations and armed groups fight to control territories and drug trafficking routes. Gangs threaten, harass and murder local leaders, activists and anyone they see as a threat to their power. Last year, according to government officials, at least 215 Colombian activists were murdered, the highest number ever recorded.

The violence has been especially pronounced along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, where Chocó is located. According to Gimena Sánchez, an expert on Afro-Colombian issues at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy group, a disproportionate number of the 1,200 human rights workers assassinated in the country since 2016 were of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous backgrounds. “Up until now, they’ve respected the space, which is seen as a source of pride,” she told me. But the winds seem to be shifting. In the city of Quibdo, the home of Muntú Bantú, the situation has “turned into a nightmare,” Sánchez said. “There are shootings every day. [Paramilitaries] extort absolutely everybody. It’s out of control.”

And then there’s Márquez, whose ascent has brought increased visibility of Afro-Colombian history, memory and culture in public life. Márquez herself — who before entering politics was an outspoken activist fighting against illegal gold mining — has been a top target of racist trolling, death threats and harassment. In January, Márquez denounced the threats against Muntú Bantú on Instagram, calling the museum a “sacred temple” for the Afro-Colombian community. Mosquera explained to me that this racist backlash has trickled down to the Afro-Colombian community as a whole, reaching public figures and everyday people. The threats aimed both at Márquez and Muntú Bantú seem to be a byproduct of this volatile and historic political moment: an era of increased exposure, and danger, for Afro-Colombian leaders as parts of the country remain locked in conflict. 

All the while, Colombia’s 50-year civil war looms in the background. The conflict between the Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (also known as FARC) left 260,000 Colombians dead and 8 million displaced. It officially ended in 2016, after the two parties brokered a historic peace agreement that was supposed to finally put an end to the bloodshed. The complex and wide-ranging treaty established a ceasefire and created a pathway for FARC militants to reintegrate into Colombian society in exchange for laying down their arms and demobilizing. The deal was also supposed to address the structural issues fueling the conflict — poverty and inequality — by investing in the economic development and security of long-neglected parts of the country that bore the brunt of the violence. But in places like Chocó, this redevelopment never happened.

After the accord went into effect, thousands of guerrillas turned in their weapons and the FARC withdrew from Chocó, bringing several months of relative peace and stability to the region. But in less than a year, it all came crashing down. New armed groups rushed to fill the void left by the FARC’s exit and the ongoing absence of the state, thrusting Chocóans into yet another cycle of violence and terror. 

There are versions of this scenario across the country, where peace remains elusive seven years after the agreement was signed. Critics say the treaty failed to live up to its lofty promises. Various armed factions, from paramilitary organizations to drug cartels and rival guerrilla groups, have muscled their way into territories formerly held by the FARC, holding a vice-like grip on local communities. Experts say these gangs recruit impoverished youth and threaten, harass and kill anyone they believe poses a danger to their economic and political interests, including activists and teachers.

“They’re seen as a threat by illegal groups because they’re educating people, so they [the armed groups] think that they’re educating people against them,” explained Sánchez.

María Fernanda Parra, the museum’s director, believes that Muntú Bantú may have been targeted because of the alternative vision it shares with the youth sought for recruitment by criminal groups. The center, she explained, provided activities to prevent young people from joining gangs. “We are teaching them another path and that there are other choices [one] can make,” Parra said, “So we are a target. But we didn’t think the aggressors would fight against culture. We thought culture was untouchable because it nourishes education and it shouldn’t be censored.”

Muntú Bantú’s closure threatens the fragile preservation of a history that’s long been ignored by the state. “We are paying a huge cost,” Mosquera said, “because our knowledge is not circulating.”

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In the English-speaking world, Dresden has become a symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general, most famously captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Arguments still continue, mainly among historians, about whether it was a necessary military action or a war crime motivated mainly by vengeance. 

For Germans today, talking about Dresden has far more immediate political stakes. One of Germany’s proudest cultural achievements has been its very public process of “coming to terms with the past,” establishing a mainstream political and cultural consensus around collective responsibility for the legacy of Nazi crimes. Where does the bombing of Dresden — a moment of suffering that totally reshaped the city, both culturally and architecturally, and that lives on in many local families’ memories — fit into all that? 

The far right has eagerly adopted the portrayal of Dresden as a senseless war crime, holding an annual “march of mourning.” They use the bombings to draw false equivalencies about the damage of World War II and to suggest that Germany’s apologetic and largely anti-nationalist memory culture has gone too far. More mainstream elements have tended to advocate either for the avoidance of the topic altogether or — as a compromise position — for a policy of dignified “silent commemoration,” hoping to reject any kind of politicization of the date. Left-wing and community organizations, meanwhile, have made a priority of interrupting far-right actions while arguing that any commemoration on February 13 should foreground Dresden’s own Nazi past and the dangers of fascist politics in general. Under public pressure, the city’s major religious institutions and municipal government have begun to move away from silent commemoration, opening up the city to a range of other memorial activities around the date.

Over the past 25 years, the anniversary of the bombings has become a passionately contested date, one that sees clashes in the media and in the streets as the whole city is turned into a chaotic public laboratory for memory culture. The question of how to talk about Dresden becomes a conversation about victimhood and complicity, apology and pride, pacifism and justice — and ultimately, too, about the identity of the city.

Dresden is a gorgeous, captivating, contradictory place. The capital of Saxony, Germany’s easternmost state, it was built up in elegant style from the 15th century onwards. Its reputation as a city of culture and beauty — praised by Goethe, painted by Canaletto, epitomized by the name “Elbflorenz” (Florence on the River Elbe) — was secured during the Baroque-era rule of Augustus the Strong. And, despite the many developments that have shaped the city since — the industrial revolution, Nazi rule, the Allied bombing and its aftermath, 40 odd years of the Communist German Democratic Republic — it is this period of Saxon prestige that Dresden turned to in the 1990s as it sought to rebuild its urban center. Now, thanks to phenomenally expensive renovations, visitors to Dresden can experience the architectural beauty of the original Elbflorenz, provided they do not venture too far from the city center.

For a long while, the bombings hardly featured in any national conversation. The GDR accused the Western Allies, their Cold War enemies at the time, of terror bombing innocents, cynically redeploying a narrative coined by the Nazis, although this remained a relatively minor element of East German national public history. West Germans, meanwhile, were more focused on either reviving their economy or, especially from the 1960s onwards, on acknowledging their own national guilt. How, if you are committed to accepting the collective responsibility of “coming to terms with the past,” can you account for your own suffering? 

The answer has tended to be to not talk about it, a tactic that W.G. Sebald criticized as an “inability to mourn,” citing the lack of literature on Germany’s bombed-out cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne. Yet this national silence, as Gunter Grass and others have warned, risks ceding the terrain of remembering German wartime suffering — not just the bombings but the atrocities committed by Allied and Red Army soldiers, among other things — to extremist right-wing elements.

“For the far right, Dresden is a symbol that can be used to support a different approach to memory about the Nazi past,” said Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims.” According to Petzold, far-right activists and politicians have been drawn to Dresden since the 1990s on account of its symbolic status as a German “victim city.” In doing so, they have capitalized on older mythologies of German victimhood, which flourished in postwar West Germany, in the GDR generally and among German families in private.

The annual far-right “march of mourning” has drawn openly militaristic groups like the neo-Nazi Kameradschaften networks as well as politicians from the extremist NPD party, which peaked in the 2000s before falling away. More recently, the Alternative for Germany, the far more professional far-right party that currently receives 28% of the vote in the Saxon parliament, also participated in the march. The anti-Islam Pegida movement and the Covid-skeptic Querdenker (“lateral thinker”) networks have also been present. These commemorations are openly provocative in a nation whose constitution forbids the relativization of Nazi crimes (one sign seen at the march last year read: “Bombenholocaust,” or bombing Holocaust). But they have never been banned by city or federal governments.

Commemorations grew in size over the 1990s and early 2000s but it was not until 2005, when the bombings’ 60th anniversary was marked by what was then the largest far-right rally in postwar Europe, that Dresdeners began to publicly rally in opposition.

At that time, the municipal government policy had been the avowedly “apolitical” silent mourning, and anything else in the inner city was banned. Dresden’s conservative administration, Petzold said, attempted to position themselves between the far right and antifascists, suggesting that each side was politicizing the date for extremist purposes. Gradually, however, the city’s wreath-laying ceremony began attracting more far-right elements, so much so that the Jewish Community of Dresden decided to boycott the event. Leftist groups began trying to blockade far-right marches. Community organization campaigns pressured the city government to unambiguously resist far-right appropriation of the date and encourage an approach to memory culture that included perspectives from the victims of Nazi persecution and other marginalized groups.

What has resulted since is a wide array of often competing activities around February 13. One of the numerous city-sponsored events is a “human chain” of remembrance, which symbolically encircles the historic downtown as a statement against xenophobia and a gesture of protection against far-right incursion. Many left-wing and civil society groups have gone further, organizing further blockades and counter-protests against the far right in addition to commemorative events around local Jewish sites and attempts to publicly draw attention to the city’s Nazi past.

Petzold explained that Dresden’s historic downtown has become an important element of local memory politics. “The competition over space, over who gets to be visible in public space, is really key,” he said. Far-right groups “were being allowed to use iconic sites like the opera house to create good images of themselves, which also makes them appealing to the media. There’s an appropriation, perhaps, not only of that space but also of those iconic buildings, which have become enshrined in local Dresden identity.”

I walk among these iconic buildings when I arrive in Dresden on February 11, the first day of commemorations. There are helicopters in the air and hullabaloo on the streets. Slipping around a group of police, I join what appeared to be an antifascist block party. A brass band is playing, while rainbow flags and antifa banners billow in the wind. People young and old stay warm by drinking coffee, tea and punch from the nearby kiosk. Right at the front, beside the cordoned-off street, stands a group of old women with a sign reading, “Omas Gegen Rechts,” — Grannies versus the (far) Right. I observe a few gruff middle-aged people, all alone, many small groups of fashionable 20-somethings and five or six clusters of rather hard-looking antifa, all dressed in black and with face masks, including one bloke with a hoodie that boasts of “German Punk Terror Since 1990.” A few people arrive dressed as sparkly unicorns. It is, to put things mildly, a difficult crowd to get a read on. Sensing my confusion, somebody turns to me and says: “We’re waiting for the Nazis.”

After an hour they arrive, on the other side of a police cordon. Most are dressed in black. They carry banners that read “Dresden 1945: Unforgotten” and “350,000 Europeans murdered.” A float goes past playing Vivaldi, with a sign in a Gothic-style font that reads: “That they do not lie in their graves in vain // is solely up to our will // our actions.” There seems to be about a thousand of them. Some wave black flags. I think I can make out a snatch of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the anthem of the Nazi party. A rumor spreads that the police have been confiscating sap gloves.

Here, on the counter-protest side, somebody is handing out whistles. Doja Cat’s “Boss Bitch” comes on over a loudspeaker, effectively drowning out Vivaldi. A number of chants go up: “There is no right to Nazi propaganda,” “Nazis piss off, nobody will miss you,” “German policemen are protecting the fascists.” Suddenly a 20-something with short pink hair and overalls surges to the front and shouts, in a strong Saxon accent: “Your kids are gonna be like us! Your kids are gonna be like us!” The rest of the crowd nearby joins in.

Afterwards, I meet up with Claudia Jerzak. A 43-year-old sociologist born and raised in Dresden, Jerzak has been documenting the far-right protests and counter-protests for over a decade — first for her Master’s degree on the topic and now for a doctorate she is completing part-time alongside her work as a researcher for an initiative on social work with refugees. She also co-wrote a 2012 film, “Come Together,” about Dresden’s contested memory culture. In her writing, Jerzak is critical of the city’s “silent commemoration” policy, which she believes has too easily tolerated the presence of far-right groups and obstructed any discussion of Dresden’s own perpetrator past. 

Jerzak wants to explain everything — she has the enthusiasm and eye for detail of a city tour guide — but on this day she has to rush off to see where the far-right demonstration ends up. We agree to meet again later. Before I let her go, I want to ask her a personal question. How does it feel, as a Dresdener, to see your hometown transformed at least once every year into a political battleground of international interest, a place where various factions squabble over the legacy of a long-past local wound? She gives an ironic laugh. “It’s exhausting,” she says, and then she’s gone.

“We’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said Michael Hurshell, the vice president of the Jewish Community of Dresden. February 13 is a difficult day for the community every year, he explained. “We tell our community members that maybe this isn’t the best day to be out and about in the inner city.’”

Hurshell, an American conductor and orchestra leader born in Vienna but educated in the U.S, moved to Dresden in 2002. Since 2020, he has led this Jewish community of some 700, a majority of whom are Russian speakers from Ukraine. When we met, he invited me to the ostentatious Cafe im Coselpalais, which is housed in a complex that Augustus the Strong built for his mistress. When I arrived, he asked if I had come to report on neo-Nazi protests. That, I said, but also the whole range of rituals and memorials around February 13, the diversity and enthusiasm of which surprised me. “Well,” he said, with a wry smile. “That’s Dresden.”

The city’s Jewish community is based in the New Synagogue, a blocky Modernist building erected on the site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is currently locked behind a fence, undergoing safety upgrades, recommended by the German authorities after a synagogue shooting elsewhere, that may last for up to two years.

Hurshell described the bombings as a “terrible, terrible act of suffering,” but took issue with the myth of victimhood some Dresdeners have adopted on the topic — which the far right has instrumentalized. Only recently did Hurshell learn that Dresden enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime, being among the first cities to engage in public book burnings. “And when it comes to the question of whether bombing Dresden was merely an act of reprisal, with no military significance,” he added, “the Jewish community likes to remind people that a number of our members are only alive because of the bombings.” Hurshell’s late friend Hans-Joachim Aris was one of these people: He and his sister were scheduled to be on a transport headed east days later when the Allied attack saved both of their lives.

A far-right party in 2004 won almost 10% of the vote in a Saxon state parliament election. Hurshell and his Jewish friends got together to discuss what to do: “Does this mean it’s time to get out of here?” Hurshell remembers how, in one of those early years, the far-right demonstrations around February 13 brought people from all across Germany for a march that was scheduled to go over the Carola Bridge and right past the synagogue on its way into town. Dresden’s city government insisted that it could not prevent a legally registered demonstration. Jewish community members had decided to stand in front of the synagogue arm in arm, following the progress of the oncoming far-right march by observing the police helicopters overhead. But the march never made it to the synagogue because a huge crowd of Dresdeners had come to the bridge and simply sat down, even though it was illegal to block a registered demonstration. “And that impressed me. It was an act of solidarity with us, which I hadn’t expected, and it was one of the reasons those demonstrations eventually petered out” Hurshell said. He, of course, decided to stay.

On February 13, 2023, I find myself losing my bearings. What I had expected, in Dresden, was a memory war with two sides: the far right against civil society and the leftists. Instead, as I enter town in the early afternoon, a vast spectrum of arguments and performances are taking place across the city.

At one square, there is a huge “peace” demonstration where several Russian flags are flown. One sign at this protest compares the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck’s call for an “economic war” against Russia to the “total war” of Josef Goebbels. Down by the Kreuzkirche, one of Dresden’s two main churches, there is a memorial plaque for the victims of the Holocaust. By the time I arrive there, seven women are holding a vigil. They are part of the Dresden chapter of the Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Right), which has been holding vigil at the site since 10 a.m.

This year, the Omas Gegen Rechts demonstrators are carrying a banner that reads: “For peace, against violence and war everywhere.” “We are against war,” explains Helga, a long-time Dresdener. I ask if they are saying they oppose Germany delivering tanks to Ukraine. “Well,” Helga hesitates, “we don’t all agree about that.” At the mention of Ukraine, one or two other Omas look over. Helga explains that they often argue about the situation — but always in a respectful manner. A fellow Oma, Christine Weimann, admits that, while her pacifist beliefs are unwavering, she has found herself uncertain in this instance. “I think it’s good that we’re always in conversation,” she adds. “And I wish our group did even more of it, because people need to stay in conversation and not divide people up into pigeon holes. It’s our only chance.”

I meet again with Claudia Jerzak, who has agreed to show me some memorial activities around the city. She describes Dresden on February 13 as a turbulent public stage for memory culture — a big meet-and-greet, almost, for the city and its histories. Dresden, in Jerzak’s view, generally lacks an earnest and thorough engagement with its past. The anniversary offers an opportunity to change that, and the “friction,” she says, is part of the process.

Up at the Neumarkt, the human chain is about to form. Dresden’s mayor and the rector of its main university give speeches about the importance of friendship, peace and solidarity, rejecting outright any switching of the victim and perpetrator roles. When the bells ring out at 6 p.m., people get into position and begin linking arms.

I ask Jerzak if she ever joins in. She says no. “If the idea is to protect the city, then why are we just protecting the historical buildings downtown — wouldn’t it be more valuable to protect the values of the city everywhere, to protect its vulnerable citizens and people of color, on this day and throughout the year?”

Jerzak leads me to a different square, a few blocks south and east, to show me some more explicitly political public memory activities. Here, a far-right rally is expected to arrive in the next hour or so. Since this year’s anniversary falls on a Monday, the “mourning march” has combined with the regular weekly Querdenker protests that lean more Covid-skeptic, libertarian and respectably suburban than the hardcore-looking cadres from Saturday. What is happening now is a counter-demonstration, a Gegendemo, designed to block far-right actors from marching into downtown Dresden. Once again, we are listening to a brass band.

Jerzak gets cold and heads home, while I follow the action to the decidedly un-baroque Pirnaischer Platz. Here a number of anti-right Gegendemos have combined to blockade the rally. The police presence is heavy, with some officers moving through the Gegendemo trying to find someone with whom they can negotiate a withdrawal. 

The withdrawal doesn’t happen, and suddenly the far-right demonstration arrives, separated by a long line of police vans. Unlike Saturday’s solemn procession, this group seems upfront about its desire to provoke. Because the police are now rerouting them, they each have a turn to face the Gegendemo crowd before turning down Saint Petersburg Street. Many of them point and laugh, while others mock-conduct antifa chants. Almost everyone takes a selfie. Some hold up peace flags and commemorative candles — a surreal act of coded provocation.

Later I learned that the blockade went down as a success. The far-right march was rerouted, and its estimated 500 to 1,000 attendees were outnumbered more than two to one by the counter-protesters. The arithmetic stays with me for a long time. If you include the reported 10,000 people in the human chain — plus all the other various community events — then February 13 has, per capita, been a day overwhelmingly defined by resistance to the pull of German victimhood and xenophobia. What the far right has triggered is a very public process of self-clarification for the city: Every year, every February, where do we stand? It must be utterly exhausting, and not just for Claudia Jerzak, but at least it gets everything out into the open.

Back at the Neumarkt, the human chain has ended and people are milling about. The last official event for the day is Nacht der Stille, “the Night of Silence,” to be held in the basement of the Frauenkirche from 10 p.m. onwards. I join the crowds filing in.

“Wars,” says the Frauenkirche’s pastor, Angelika Behnke, “do not begin or end with bombs.” Instead, she intones, they find their roots in envy, resentment and arrogance. Behnke somberly describes how the Frauenkirche collapsed in 1945 from the damage it sustained during the bombing. Yet with the memory of destruction comes hope, she continues: “We cannot do anything about what happened back then, but we can look around at what is happening today.”

For the rest of the evening, interspersed with music, a series of Dresdeners give short speeches about what they are lighting a candle for. We hear from the Jewish Community of Dresden’s Michael Hurshell and then from a Ukrainian-born Dresdener, a young woman from Iran and a Russian university student who opposes the war. The shift in context is surprising, but I begin to see its logic. If Dresden is now an open, multicultural city — if Dresdeners, now, bring with them a whole diverse array of remembered wartime suffering — then surely it’s not just the Dresden of 1945 that belongs to the city’s memorial duties but also 1938’s Kristallnacht, and 2022’s Ukraine.

The same goes for Syria in 2015, when its civil war changed the population of Germany, much to the ire of the far right. In 2017, Damascus-born Dresden artist Manaf Halbouni installed three upturned buses in front of the Frauenkirche, a visual homage to Aleppo civilians’ use of city buses as protective barricades during the Syrian civil war. Right-wing activists responded with outrage, but Halbouni, when we spoke on the phone, said that he was simply building a bridge between two destroyed cities, only one of which had yet had the chance to build back up. As to whether he might be accused of taking the date out of context, of instrumentalizing it to his ends, he replied sharply: “You could accuse anyone of that. Everyone is always instrumentalizing this day.”

When I depart Dresden the following day, I find myself thinking about what purpose memory culture serves. Even the best public monuments run the risk of growing stale, assuming as they do that everyone is on the same page. This anniversary, by contrast, sets the whole thing in motion. It demands a constant trying-out of new contexts and connotations. When the far right wanted to turn the city into a one-dimensional symbol of suffering, Dresdeners have responded with an ongoing public renegotiation of their history — a rowdy play of the past and the present against their ornate, Baroque stage.

At the very least, they’re having arguments. As my train pulls away, one particular image from the anniversaries stands out. It is 9:45 p.m. on a Monday night, the town square is filled with people and two old men are simply standing there and arguing — arguing about Russia, arguing about the bombings, arguing about their city and about what should be done.

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“I will thank him profusely,” Finkel said. “He was the one that prompted me to write this book.”

That GRU agent had posed as a student who Finkel taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. While Finkel had always known that there could be spies at a place like SAIS, last year’s discovery of his student’s real identity as a Russian military intelligence service agent was devastating. Finkel had written the undercover agent a letter of recommendation to the International Criminal Court, where he was seeking an internship with the group that is now investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine. 

“You want to use me to know how Russian genocide is being investigated? That’s how I fight back,” Finkel said, referring to the book he is writing that will examine the origins of genocide in the current war.

A year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has triggered a reckoning at universities in the West over how Russia, the Soviet period and the wider region has been presented and taught across a range of subjects. It has raised complex questions about the outsized role Russia has played, how imperialism, colonialism and histories of violence have, or have not, been addressed and which perspectives and readings have been privileged.

I spoke with 17 scholars to understand the debates raging across academic forums and online publications (and even summarized through memes) that show no signs of letting up. At their roots is the question of whether the university departments need to undergo decolonization, a term that means different things to different people.

The academic debates are sensitive and emotional, especially for many with personal connections to the region. The stakes include what classes and languages are taught, who receives tenure, the names of departments (East European? Eurasian? Slavic? Russian Studies?) and even what photos are posted on departmental websites (should a picture of the Kremlin remain?).

At its broadest, decolonizing means removing Russia from the center of study and instead centering other nations and regions, said Oxana Shevel, an associate professor at Tufts University. Part of the difficulty is that there is no one way to do this or a consensus among scholars on what that should involve. Some scholars argue that they are already taking a critical approach, for example by teaching the violence of the Soviet period, she added.

This questioning of a Russia-centric narrative had been happening before the war in more advanced courses and among scholars, but the average undergraduate student, Shevel argues, doesn’t come away with this perspective and typically doesn’t know much about Ukraine or Central Asia.

For Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University who has written numerous books about Ukraine, decolonization is an imperfect term. “When I’m thinking about Russian history, it’s not about decolonizing per say,” he said. “It’s about de-imperializing Russian studies.” He adds that Russian historiography was never critiqued through the lens of empire like French or British history have been.

The current war started with an imperial argument from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are the same people — a view Plokhy says was held by some of the scholars who pioneered the writing of Russian history in the U.S. nearly 100 years ago.

And while the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to more scholarship on other countries in the region, like those in Central Asia, it hasn’t been enough, he argues. “We are behind as a field in that sense,” Plokhy said.

The questions scholars now ask themselves include whether Russia has received too much attention and emphasis, whether its empire-building has been examined enough and whether countries that have been dominated, occupied and colonized by Russia have been incorporated enough into scholarship, said Maria Popova. Popova is an associate professor at McGill University who is currently co-writing a book about the roots of the ongoing war with Oxana Shevel at Tufts.

Popova says there was a tendency prior to the 2022 invasion to dismiss perspectives from the Baltic states or Ukraine as “Russophobic” or distorted by historical experience. “The debate right now is about how to reincorporate or how to extend the research and scholarship into Russia as an imperial actor in the neighborhood,” she said.

Following the February 2022 invasion, it became clear to Finkel he wouldn’t be able to teach his previous course on Russia and Eastern Europe — it would need an overhaul. So he decided to teach a new class about the war called “Russia and Ukraine in Peace and War.”

Finkel is fully onboard with asking different questions and looking at perspectives from outside of Moscow. But he’s not keen on using colonization as a proxy and worries that it could take agency away from countries. “Taken to an extreme, it will simplify the very complex role that Ukraine played in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union,” he said.

Pushback

Not all scholars think the decolonization debate is needed.

Alexander Hill, a professor of military history at the University of Calgary, believes that attempts to decolonize Russian history could “result in a re-writing of all Russian history from the perspective of the Russian state as ‘oppressor’ — something that doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the development of the Russian, or indeed any, empire and certainly doesn’t do justice to the development of the Soviet Union,” as he wrote in an email to me. He added: “I see a debate as particularly unnecessary where the current growing fashionableness of ‘decolonization’ in Russian history seems to be motivated by pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian political biases relating to the current war in Ukraine.”

Sean Pollock, a professor of history at Wright State University, says scholars have been studying non-Russian territories and places since the 18th century.

“I see a long tradition where others, I suppose, feel the need now to call for the decolonization of the field. And I think it’s crystal clear these calls are a reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said.

Pollock understands the emotional reactions in this moment but thinks it’s important to separate personal views from professional scholarship — a view he knows many will disagree with. He told me he thought twice before agreeing to an interview because he knows people will hear him differently than how he intends to be heard.

“In my area, which is the history of the Russian empire, the field has suffered from those who have brought strongly negative feelings about Russian imperial politics to the study of the subject. I think there are ways to dispassionately approach the imperial dimensions of Russian history, and I frankly feel that it is our professional responsibility as academics to try and do that,” he said.

He also worries that “countless non-Russians [who] played important roles as Russian empire builders” will be lost to history.

Others have argued that the problem of Russocentrism has been overstated and that calls for decolonization are a stalking horse for halting the study of the Russian language, politics, society and culture. Many scholars themselves are wondering if research projects they had planned in Russia will ever be able to take place.

Unsettled debate

“Nobody is canceling Russia,” said Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. “You need to rebalance and give presence and voice to others and continue looking at Russia, but without giving Russian history or culture a pass to the very many problematic aspects it had.”

Chernetsky argues that many Russian literary classics, from authors including Pushkin and Dostoevsky, were given a pass without properly interrogating the colonial, racist or prejudicial views they presented. At the same time, important figures in Ukrainian literature such as poet Taras Shevchenko were read by few outside of the Ukrainian community, he said.

Kristy Ironside, an assistant professor at McGill University, is now teaching the most students she ever had in a class, in both her introductory Russian history course and a Soviet history course, something she attributes to students wanting to understand what’s happening. “We’ve always been a pretty political field,” she said.

When she was hired, Ironside changed the titles of many courses and says she’s never taught Soviet history from the perspective of only Russia. She’s recently added readings from Christian Raffensperger and Serhii Plokhy to give students more context on Kyivan-Rus, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to the medieval state.

Ironside is open to the decolonization discussion and understands the sense of urgency many are feeling as a horrible war continues, but she doesn’t want the work of earlier scholars to be overlooked. “There has been a lot of scholarship that has been done on the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union and I don’t think in this race to decolonize the curriculum…that we should act like that didn’t happen,” she said.

Ironside expects the process and debates around issues such as department names to be messy. “I think there is going to be a lot of trial and error in the next several years,” she said.

For Alexander Motyl, a professor at Rutgers University, decolonization is something he’s been supportive of his entire career.

“All of this is music to my ears,” he said. “How far should it go? Well at a minimum, it needs to increase our collective understanding and appreciation of the various non-Russian nationalities within the Russian Federation and of course those inhabiting states on Russia’s border. They have been historically neglected.”

Motyl is among the academics who have been banned from setting foot in Russia. In November 2022, his name was added to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ list of sanctioned Americans — those who, according to the Russian government, have been accused of promoting a Russophobic campaign and supporting the regime in Kyiv.

“I’ve been waiting for that for years,” he said. “I feel vindicated.”

Motyl expects to see a growing number of courses on non-Russia topics and shifting research agendas for up-and-coming scholars. “I’m not surprised people are resistant. It requires admitting guilt and no one wants to do that. And it requires changing your entire paradigm,” he said, adding it could take as long as 15 years to see a tangible change.

“Academics are being asked and being forced to make a choice,” Motyl said. “When you see a genocide and total war taking place, it’s arguably unethical and immoral not to express some criticism. It’s easier in that sense for Ukrainian specialists. It’s hard for Russian specialists, but they need to do it and not pretend it’s not an issue. This is what happens when you have big crises that impinge on your academic reality.”

Susan Smith-Peter, a professor of Russian history at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, attended the Ukraine Action Summit in Washington D.C. in September 2022. She believes that she was the only Russian historian who attended the event. “I don’t think it’s anti-Russian to want a better Russia or anti-Russian to think the current Russia we have is not the only Russia,” she said.

In many ways, the debates are just getting started. When well over 1,000 scholars gather at the end of 2023 at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, decolonization will be the year’s theme.

Russia’s full-scale invasion brought “long-simmering issues of Russocentrism in the region and in our fields of study” to the forefront, said Juliet Johnson, a professor of political science at McGill University and the president of ASEEES. She chose the theme.

But there are already concerns that all the talk around decolonization won’t lead to any meaningful changes.

“In my view, the changes have so far been largely cosmetic and the field is only waiting to return to business as usual,” said Oleh Kotsyuba, the manager of publications at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Because the conversations around decolonization are time consuming and onerous, John Vsetecka, a PhD candidate in the history department of Michigan State University, fears they could fade or even cause bigger divides between scholars, the longer the war goes on. 

“I’m worried that this decolonization moment for Ukraine and understanding what Ukraine is in the world is a moment and not something that’s lasting,” he said, adding that while the debates have been happening for longer than he’s been alive, he’s not sure how much they’ve been listened to previously.

Vsetecka is on the academic job market. He’ll defend his dissertation, on the aftermath of the 1932-33 Holodomor and the 1946-47 post-war famine in Ukraine, later this year. It’s a topic he says could be seen as political.

“The war in some senses is a litmus test for the job market,” he said. “How seriously will they take me?”

The post The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in universities appeared first on Coda Story.

My colleague at the Calvert Journal, a website that covered contemporary art and culture in the post-Soviet world which I edited until its closure in February 2022, had written a short article about Kazantsev’s protest. In it, Kazantsev compared the risk of speaking out in Russia to Beethoven’s last piano sonata — the strange, existential Op. 111 sonata with which he ended that concert. 

“You will either get a response from the audience, or it will end badly,” he told me on a call from his home in Germany, where he moved with his wife and two children last summer. “There is a similar feeling” in Beethoven’s Op. 111, one of the few sonatas which has a very special ending. 

Kazantsev’s post-concert remarks were brave and risky. There had been widespread crackdowns on protests across Russia two months prior. But it was his choice of metaphor that moved me most. 

Beethoven’s last sonata is the execution of what the composer had attempted to do with the few sonatas that preceded it. With this arietta, Beethoven broke with the tradition of composition — of sonata form — which had dominated for over a century and in doing so marked the end of the Classical era and the start of the Romantic period. The arietta expresses something that had yet to have a codified language. It was revolutionary, and thus, in part, a farewell. 

Russian art is now largely in exile. Kazantsev is one of the estimated 900,000 Russians who have fled the country since the invasion of Ukraine. The exodus has touched almost every area of Russian society, but especially the Russian cultural world. Author Lyudmila Ulitskaya and theater director Kirill Serebrennikov now reside in Germany. Cult rock singer Zemfira and actress and director Renata Litvinova fled to France. Singer Monetochka left Russia for Lithuania. Pussy Riot’s Masha Alyokhina, who evaded house arrest and left Russia in April, now wanders Europe. 

The scattering has been global, but it’s the countries with relaxed visa rules for Russian citizens that have, inevitably, become hubs for Russians. It was to Tbilisi, Georgia that young filmmaker Kantemir Balagov fled following the start of the invasion. Literary bloggers Zhenya Kalinkin and Daria Kasya only recently left Tbilisi to make a new life in Argentina. Contemporary artist Dagnini, who arrived a few days after the war began, still lives and practices art from her apartment in a Tbilisi suburb.

When ideas are prevented from entering politics, they are often redirected into art, whose abstraction and need for interpretation make them, by definition, harder to police. As a result, culture often ends up as one of the last islands of free thought under authoritarian regimes. When despots turn their attention to artistic censorship, we know things are taking a darker turn. 

The historical precedents for Russian artists working productively in exile are plenty: writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, painters Lidiya Masterkova and David Miretsky, dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. But for those artists whose subject was Russia itself, success was often scarce. 

For the generation of performance artists, those who responded directly to Putin’s Russia and who came to define the last two decades of Russian art, exile will likely look quite different. 

From Voina and Pussy Riot to Pyotr Pavlensky and Elena Kovylina, the most affecting art under Putin were sensational and explicit acts of defiance against the specificities of Russia’s debasement. As a result, these artists entered, perversely, into a kind of symbiosis with the regime. How they recalibrate their confrontation with a Russian state now physically distant from them will be interesting to watch. 

“In the U.K. you don’t have a totalitarian regime, that’s why you can’t see the black and white border,” Pussy Riot’s Masha Alyokhina told me during a recent midnight phone call. “For Russia it’s clear. Either as an artist you’re protesting or you’re decorating the regime. Both exist. An in-between does not.” Alyokhina, speaking to me from Reykjavik where she had just opened “Velvet Terrorism – Pussy Riot’s Russia,” the first overview exhibition of Pussy Riot’s work, was late to our call having just finished graffitiing a blue-and-yellow sign on a wall. It read, “War 3963 km,” with an arrow pointing in the direction of Ukraine. 

“We’ve done these in around 15 or more cities,” Alyokhina said. “Our graffiti imitates a road sign. There’s no name of the city, just the word “war” and the number of kilometers to the Ukraine border and an arrow. It’s a reminder to people that war is not as far away as we think. In Western Europe people think it’s not about them, that it’s far away.”

For their 40-second Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova were both arrested for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in prison. The severity of the punishment was alarming and, considered a decade later, a marker for a new phase of deepening repression under Putin. Performance art became a key battleground. Because it was in culture and the arts that those who had the most to gain from a more liberal government — the urbanite middle class — lived. 

“In a way, I almost feel better now, because before the war there was an illusion of control,” said Zhenya Kalinkin, one half of the YouTube podcast duo “What Would I Do If Not Read,” who moved to Buenos Aires. 

Beginning in 2012, Russian cities underwent beautification projects. While redeveloping parks and widening pavements, this beautification literally laid the ground for slick new galleries and revamped Soviet-era factories financed by the oligarchs. It was here, in the Garage Center for Contemporary Arts, Strelka, and art clusters like V-A-C foundation and Winzavod that the young and liberal came to socialize and shape a burgeoning art scene — all under the support and financial backing of the men that kept Putin in power. The Calvert Journal, too, was first conceived as a platform where edgy young artists could show off their work to the English-speaking world. 

It wasn’t just that this veneer of artistic bohemia masked a lack of fundamental freedoms and dulled the urgency to demand them. It was that it caused a strange kind of displacement. Often struggling with Russian exhibitions, museums relied heavily on imported shows, and international big names like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami made the Russian art world look like the art world in Western Europe — but, in fact, it was far from it.

Art is never objective, and it is only in context that we can hope to understand what it might mean. Subversion, after all, can only exist in the face of repression, rebellion only ever a counterbalance to the presence of control. This Potemkin art scene of the 2010s mimicked the West and so fostered an environment where it was not abnormal to be apolitical, which many wrongly took to represent relative freedom. Putin’s great success during these years was “managed democracy,” a sinister concept that meant Putin would always win. There was a creative offshoot: managed art.

It is now incredible to think that in 2011, the street-art group Voina received a state-funded prize for spray-painting a giant phallus onto a bridge in St. Petersburg which, when risen, faced the local FSB headquarters, erect. Three years later, by 2014, the Ministry of Culture pulled funding from Russia’s largest international documentary film festival, Artdocfest, for the “anti-state” views of its director.

It was then that the artist Oleg Kulik, most famous for his performance impersonating a dog, reduced the artist’s choice either to fighting against the forces of oppression or currying favor with them. The artist, according to Kulik, can choose “to bite or to lick” — not a dilemma that exists in democratic countries.

“It’s doubtlessly the role of art to get through to people in Russia,” said Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina, whose exhibition is giving its proceeds to children’s hospitals in Kyiv. “We cannot assess our impact, not right now. We can continue what we are doing and have a hope that people will see it and something inside them will change. It’s just not the moment to give up.” 

In a way, attempts to define contemporary Russian art is a process of discounting all the things it is not. “Art doesn’t have to be totally understood. What’s important is an emotional response,” said 35-year-old performance artist Dagnini. In her Tbilisi apartment, where she’s been living since moving to Georgia in February 2022, a number of her artworks hang off the walls. 

“In Russia, you’re not taught to be a human. You are taught to be part of something great,” she said. “Literature is part of the issue because it’s part of the imperialistic way of looking at things. We were taught Russian literature as part of a cult of being great.”

“I didn’t leave Russia voluntarily. And I can’t return. So I guess you could call me an exile,” said performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky. Leaning against a white bookcase in his Paris apartment, Pavlensky becomes animated when our conversation turns towards power, which forms the core of his work. During his time in Russia, he was regularly arrested. 

In Pavlensky’s 2013 performance, called “Fixation,” he nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones in Moscow’s Red Square to protest Russia’s transformation into a police state. It launched his notoriety as one of Russia’s most provocative artists. All of his performances, from “Segregation,” where he sliced his right earlobe off outside Moscow’s Serbsky psychiatric center to protest the police’s return “to the use of psychiatry for political goals,” to “Carcass,” when he wrapped himself, naked, in barbed wire, to represent the individual’s position within the legal system, have involved Russia’s state instruments of power: police officers, court judges and prosecutors among them.

“In my acts, I get people of power to participate in my art. I am getting representatives of power to act as part of art. They are participating in my thoughts and the things I’ve thought up. The subject of power becomes the object of art,” he said.

Fleeing to Paris in 2017 following allegations of sexual assault, Pavlensky was, in a way, the acid test for radical Russian artists who are now transplanting their practice outside of Russia. Pavlensky’s first performance in Paris was called “Lighting”: he set fire to the doors of the Banque of France, which “has taken the place of the Bastille, and bankers have taken the place of monarchs,” as he declared at the time. It caused outrage, and Pavlensky was charged with property damage. 

His second project, “Pornopolitique,” was a short-lived website that was to be the first porn resource featuring political bureaucrats and other representatives of power. On the site, Pavlensky posted a video he had procured of a Paris mayoral candidate masturbating. The politician subsequently withdrew from the race, and Pavlensky was charged with invasion of privacy and dissemination of images of a sexual nature without consent. The French media, which had fawned over his work in Russia, turned against him and eventually “stopped talking about my work at all,” Pavlensky said.

For Pavlensky, the key to artistic integrity and freedom is a consistent artistic vision. The question of relevance in exile, of the necessity of reinvention in a shifting environment, is complex. When I argue that the inflammatory artistic language Pavlensky used in his performances in Russia means something else in the French context, he demurs. In his work, Pavlensky says, the context is simply power, no matter the national context or the specifics of its abuse: “There is power here in France too. Power here is no less strong than in Russia.”

For all the Russian artists who thrived pursuing non-political art in exile, there are counterexamples of Soviet dissident artists who, following emigration to the West, changed their practice and lost relevance. It’s the likes of Boris Mikhailov, a trailblazing Soviet Ukrainian photographer whose less provocative work following emigration to the West Pavlensky rails against. 

“As an artist, you need to declare what you do and carry on with it. To change it in the way these artists did is to be a traitor of your own art,” Pavlensky said. 

With how increasingly dangerous it became to voice any dissent in Russia during the 2010s, bravery in the face of oppression became the metric by which the West assessed Russian contemporary art, breathlessly paying attention to any act that incurred a police response. This reaction contributed to a misunderstanding of the influence of this art as a force within Russian society. For Western validation, good Russian art didn’t just have to be independent, it had to be working in opposition to the state.

One of the primary ways in which nations come to terms with their past is through stories, be they told through literature, art, film or some other medium. It is their importance that makes them vulnerable to manipulation, to being warped by authoritarian regimes and re-employed as instruments of control.

The poison of Russian propaganda over the war in Ukraine may have created a facade of denial, but it is precisely that: a facade. Sooner or later, Russia will have to confront the horrors taking place across Ukraine at its hands. It is the artists who will have to find a way to tell the stories that will open their eyes, and ours.  

Sitting in Dagnini’s apartment, there is one work which stands out. It’s a replica of the painting “Rozh” — meaning “Rye” — by 19th century Russian landscape artist Ivan Shishkin. I’ve seen the image before. Its calm, pastoral scene of rye fields is reproduced and hung in homes and buildings across Russia due to its supposed representation of Russia’s quintessence. “This image is important and painful to look at, because it’s the painting every Russian school kid should write an essay about at some point,” says Dagnini. “You’re meant to think of land, patriotism. I found out that the painter himself wrote on the other side of this painting: ‘Freedom, expanse, rye, God’s grace, Russian wealth,’” says Dagnini. “He used these big words that can be lethal when used in propaganda and for a state’s agenda.” 

Dagnini created the replica after the war in Ukraine started, adding the name of the painting over the image with one letter changed. The word that now overlays the wheat fields reads “LOZH”: LIE.

The post Russian performance art in the time of Putin appeared first on Coda Story.

Part 1: Losing home

Madigan Traversi, 17, gives the property tour in Northern California’s wine country like a seasoned real estate agent. We’re standing on top of a hill in Santa Rosa, overlooking a sweep of golden ridges and green oaks. The two-story home is surrounded by redwoods, fruit trees and a carefully maintained vegetable garden. Traversi, in oversized sunglasses and brown leather boots, leads me to an outdoor pool with a panoramic view of the hills, and then to one of her favorite spots on the plot of land, a majestic old oak tree. As a little girl, she used to spend whole afternoons beneath its branches. They were so large she could duck under them and play make-believe for hours, lost in her own world. “I just turned it into this little haven,” she told me. “When I was there, it was my happy place.”

Traversi and I are standing in front of where the tree once stood, staring at the open air. Nothing we are looking at is actually there, not now anyway. The massive oak tree, the garden, the living room with the big glass windows — it was all lost in October 2017, when the Tubbs Fire devoured 36,807 acres of Sonoma and Napa counties, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and killing 22 people. It was the second-most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, and for many people living here, the marker of a new chapter in California’s story: an era bound by flames.

Traversi’s home was among those lost in the blaze, burning down in less than 30 minutes after she evacuated with her mom on the evening of Sunday, October 8. Traversi, who was 12 years old at the time, was still awake when the landline rang just before midnight. A recorded message explained that three homes were on fire eight miles away and urged them to leave. Traversi and her mom evacuated shortly after, taking their dog, Traversi’s school backpack and the bare necessities. They waited it out in a nearby hotel, assuming they would be able to go back home the next day. But the blaze grew bigger, Traversi’s school closed, and they relocated with some friends to a place just outside San Francisco. A few days later, they learned that their home burned down shortly after they fled. Gone was Traversi’s bedroom and the photos, art projects, journals and family heirlooms that anchored so many of her childhood memories.

Even the cherished oak tree did not survive. All of it was gone, engulfed in a roar of flames propelled by 50 miles per hour winds.

Five years later, Traversi walks around the property and can picture everything just as it was, straddling a split screen between the present and the past. Through her eyes, the open air in front of us flashes into a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room with a wall of glass windows. 

She can still see it all, vividly, in color and texture. A home that no longer exists.

The road leading up to the house was transformed, too. The street is now lined with rebuilt  homes. Traversi pointed out the changes as she drove me to the property on a scorching late summer afternoon. “The houses look so different than they did before,” she observed, as we passed an immaculate two-story home with gleaming windows. “You can see how new everything looks.”

Outside our windows, the sky is a bright blue and the vegetation is achingly dry — so parched that it’s hard not to think about when the next spark might ignite. This is what it’s like to live in California in 2022, a golden state blazing red. Fire is omnipresent, and the last seven years have accounted for 15 of the 20 most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. They have left their imprint on the land and our minds. 

A building that burns can be rebuilt. But if fire incinerates a state of mind, can that be put back together? After neighbors move, new homes rise from the ones that burned, and the landscape is marked by the fingerprints of flames – the time before can feel like a past life. It’s the kind of rupture that transcends space and time, shaping our memories, our goals for the future and even our understanding of where we belong. Part of living here now means grappling with apocalyptic scenes and with whether this version of California can still be called home. 

But this is not just a California story. These emotions will spread as the climate crisis intensifies, as biblical floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and drought displace communities from Puerto Rico to Pakistan. 

We are just beginning to contend with these phenomena and how they are shaping our collective well-being. “These losses are enormous,” said Robin Cooper, a San Francisco psychotherapist and the co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a group of psychotherapists focused on the mental health impacts of climate change. It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.”

Cooper’s organization is part of a broader movement of people — activists, artists, psychologists, young people and residents — centering emotions in conversations about climate change. Experts are developing resources, therapeutic treatments and even new language to help people process the psychological impact of climate change. ​​Universities in California and Washington are offering courses for students about navigating the emotional landscape of climate change, including anxiety, hope and grief. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance offers resources and training about the psychological effects of climate change and curates a list of climate-aware therapists. There are also online forums where strangers from all over the world can gather and discuss the emotional toll of climate change and natural disasters, and dozens of virtual and in-person groups across the U.S. focus on processing the grief of the climate crisis.

The Finnish academic Panu Pihkala, whose research focuses on the emotions surrounding climate change, has created a detailed database of peoples’ responses to the climate crisis in what he calls a “taxonomy of climate emotions.” In Finnish, Pihkala has also developed a detailed vocabulary of climate emotions as specific as “winter grief,” mourning the loss of traditional winters, or “snow anxiety,” related to uncertainty about whether it will snow.

lumiahdistus: snow anxiety

talvisuru: winter grief

talvi-ilo: winter joy

lumihelpotus: snow relief

longing for snow: lumikaipaus / lumikaipuu

The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with a word in 2003 to describe a concept he believed language hadn’t yet captured: the psychological distress caused by environmental changes. Albrecht’s term, solastalgia, drew on the meanings of solace, desolation and nostalgia, but deviated from the latter in one crucial way. Rather than describing the melancholia experienced by people away from their home and yearning for it — nostalgia — it referred to the pain felt by those who stayed put.

Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

Solastalgia: Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of nostalgia, solace and desolation. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos — return to home or native land — and the New Latin suffix algia – pain or sickness, and solace from the Latin verb solari with meanings connected to the alleviation or relief of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events.

I relate to this, intimately.

When I read about solastalgia for the first time, I felt unburdened, that particular flavor of psychological relief that comes from having someone else articulate a previously felt, but unidentified, emotional state. Yes, that’s precisely how I felt about living here: solastalgia. Finally, I felt like I had found a single word that embodied my complicated and often sad relationship with California, a place I couldn’t imagine leaving but also cannot bear watching burn year after year.

My journey through solastalgia would probably start in the fall of 2018, when I moved back to California after spending the better part of the decade living unhappily on the East Coast, where everything felt muted, cold and bland. I never felt like I fit in there: I hated the frigid air and prep school energy. Before going to college in Maryland, I went to a big, raucous public high school in downtown Berkeley. The student body numbered in the thousands, and it was diverse and eclectic, including everyone from the children of ‘70s radicals who staged Iraq war protests at lunch to kids immersed in the Bay Area hip-hop scene of the mid-2000s. My most vivid memory of those years is laughing.

In the spring of 2018, I decided to move back to California permanently. For weeks after I moved back, I wandered around with my cell phone camera propped open like a tourist, giddily snapping photos of the Pacific, the deep green forests and the lavish gardens blooming with succulents and fruit. I had arrived.

But shortly after I moved back, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, the Camp Fire, tore through Northern California’s Butte County, killing 85 people, torching the town of Paradise and choking the air with smoke. A friend in D.C. texted me a link to an article with the headline: “Is California becoming uninhabitable?” “I think they’re trolling you,” she joked. It didn’t help when I later drove past a bar throbbing with music, and two men wearing hazmat masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke were in line. It all felt like a slow-motion existential crisis. Staring out my window at the scene in front of me, I had a dawning feeling that my home was changing — quickly, in front of my face — and may never be the same.

The fires have not abated. As I sat down to write this article, there were multiple fires burning at both ends of the state, including one in the Sierra Nevada foothills that, as of publication, burned more than 76,000 acres. Fueled by climate change, the traditional fire season is stretching further beyond its traditional lifespan of spring to fall.

Those who choose to stay must learn to inhabit this unsettling liminal space between our imagined apocalypse and the reality of hazmat masks and smoke-filled skies. To recognize that home can vanish even as we never leave.

After the fire, Traversi’s family decided not to rebuild their home on the hill. 

They moved to a new place about 10 minutes away. Eventually, the chaos unleashed by the fire receded, and life resumed. Traversi went back to school, played piano, hung out with her friends. Traversi didn’t seem too outwardly sad about the aftermath of the fire, and her mother worried about how — or if — she was processing it at all. She went to a therapist. But Traversi was 12 and wasn’t ready to unpack all of that trauma. 

Over time, though, the weight of Tubbs began to sink in. As a teenager, Traversi dealt with anxiety and depression, and as she started peeling back the layers of those struggles, she began to recognize the ongoing toll the fire had taken on her mental health.

Traversi was not alone in struggling with the painful aftershocks of Tubbs: a recent survey conducted by the Sonoma County Office of Education found that nearly 3,000 students in the county, and 400 school employees, are still showing “increased anxiety, stress, depression, behavioral problems, or decreased academic performance as a result of the 2017 wildfire.” One of the educators surveyed pointed to an increase in suicidal threats or attempts in the wake of the fire. “Teachers reported kindergarten children crying and running inside after seeing the smoke while on the playground.” Years after the fire, the county superintendent of education concluded, schools are still dealing with students and staff who have been traumatized.

For Traversi, the grief became acute. Processing the loss felt “very similar to how I felt when I’ve lost family members or close friends,” she told me. The home, the property and everything inside the house had been anchors of stability throughout her childhood. As she began grappling with the toll these losses had taken on her, she got her driver’s license and found solace in going back to the old property. Up on the hill at the site of the blaze, taking in all that had been destroyed and all that was still standing, Traversi’s sadness finally had space to breathe. “I found it really healing to go back and sit there and just ignore everything around me,” she said. “It was the first time that I was really able to objectively think, ‘wow, I went through something huge and I lost a really big part of me.’”

Living through Tubbs also helped lay the groundwork for Traversi’s path to climate activism. In high school, she joined a local climate action campaign run by students and educators. Like returning to the property, becoming involved in the effort helped her process the trauma of losing her home. As part of the campaign, she and another local youth climate activist worked with their congressman to help co-author a resolution introduced in the House last spring, which calls on lawmakers to incorporate mental health into disaster preparation and provide funding to schools for youth mental health support after climate-related disasters.

While working on the resolution, Traversi came across a piece of research that blew her away: a survey of 10,000 people aged 16-25 across ten countries about the mental health impacts of climate change. Nearly half of the youth surveyed said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives and functioning, and 75% described the future as “frightening.” More than half of the 10,000 youth surveyed — 5,566 — agreed with the prompt “humanity is doomed.”

For Traversi, the findings were revelatory. “It was the discovery that kids aren’t stressed because they have this irrational fear that they need to work through with a therapist. They’re stressed because there’s a genuine threat to their futures,” she said.

Part two

The grievers

Over the last several years, as wildfires throughout California have threatened some of the state’s most cherished places, from its splendid redwood forests to its picturesque coastlines, they have unleashed an outpouring of collective anxiety and sadness. It’s the grief of lives lost and iconic landscapes altered and the awareness that the state will become even more unrecognizable.

As this grief becomes ubiquitous, so too are the grievers. They are part of a nascent movement of climate mourners, people who see grief as a central — and overlooked — human response to the climate crisis. They are meeting up in person and online over the climate’s great unraveling, absorbing darkness so that they ultimately may come blinking into the light.

An assured mother of three living in Northern California, Kristan Klingelhofer joined the mourners nearly three years ago. It was the beginning of the pandemic and she was searching for resources that might help her manage her emotions over parenting and climate change. Her children began asking her about mass species extinctions and reading United Nations reports about global warming when they were in elementary school, nearly a decade ago. Klingelhofer was torn on how to appropriately respond. “Do you shelter them?” she asked. “Empower them?” One day, she opened her computer to see if she could find anything that might help and stumbled across The Good Grief Network, a 10-step, peer support program to help people process their climate grief. The program, which was inspired by Adult Children of Alcoholics’ 10-step approach, runs a weekly support group designed for people grappling with climate distress. The organization doesn’t heavily market or advertise its groups on social media, “so if you found this, it’s because you needed it,” executive director Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg told me.

Step 1: Accept the severity of the predicament

Step 2: Be with uncertainty

Step 3: Honor my mortality and the mortality of all

Step 4: Do inner work

Step 5: Develop awareness of biases and perception

Step 6: Practice gratitude, witness beauty and create connections

Step 7: Take breaks and rest

Step 8: Grieve the harm I have caused

Step 9: Show up

Step 10: Reinvest in meaningful efforts

The first class focused on the program’s first step: “Accept the severity of the predicament.” Klingelhofer and her husband emerged from the meeting in tears. “It was like we took our masks off,” she explained. Ten weeks later, they finished the course, and Klingelhofer signed up to be a Good Grief facilitator.

“People come in feeling so isolated, and with such a bottled-up bunch of emotions,” Klingelhofer said. “Whether it’s outrage or panic or numbness or depression or fear,” she said. “There’s always grief at the bottom of it. And it just comes out.”

In 2021, The Lancet, a medical journal, published an investigation into young peoples’ attitudes towards climate change. As part of the landmark study, researchers surveyed thousands of young people globally and uncovered a persistent future-facing dread. From Nigeria to France, respondents expressed sadness, anger and despair. Two-thirds of youth in the 10 countries surveyed reported feeling afraid. More than half said they believe the things they value most will be destroyed, and nearly 60% felt their governments had betrayed them because of how they were responding to climate change.

The study’s authors posited that governments’ failure to address climate change may be contributing to “moral injury,” which they describe as “the distressing psychological aftermath experienced when one perpetrates or witnesses actions that violate moral or core beliefs.” This often manifests in feelings of not just betrayal but abandonment.

The findings underscore what may be a generational gap in expressions of climate grief. For many young people, the heartache of climate change is slanted toward the years ahead. As they contemplate carving out a life amid a series of cascading environmental crises, they wonder: Where will I be able to live? Work? Find community? And in the absence of any certainty, how can I plan ahead? One Washington-based student I talked to, who just graduated college, told me the threat of wildfires in California had thwarted her plans to apply to graduate school there — a decision her parents couldn’t comprehend and found “ridiculous.” She described the process of climate mourning for her generation as “grieving the potential futures we could have had.”

That includes a future with kids. Nearly 40% of the youth surveyed worldwide in The Lancet’s study said that concerns about climate change have made them hesitant to have children. Traversi, whose home burned in the Tubbs Fire, said the subject comes up regularly in her peer group. “Everyone is looking at what they’re going to do after high school. There’s such a huge conversation about, like, ‘I really wanted to have kids, but now I think I don’t want to because of climate change,’” she said.

This is a different flavor of mourning than the nostalgic sadness that has punctuated my relationship with California. Solastalgia is rooted in the past and present, the feeling that your home environment is moving away from you and your relationship with that place has changed because it’s no longer what it was. The younger people I talked to, however, are grieving something different: children they may never get to meet, glaciers melted, species lost, life plans derailed. This is grieving for a future that may never come to be, as opposed to a past that was.

“I think we see that future orientation much more with young people,” Jennifer Atkinson, an associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, said. “So many of them really are mourning the loss of the future, the children they will never have or the security from their parents’ generation that won’t be available to them.”

Atkinson has been a professor at the University of Washington for more than a decade, but about five years ago, she told me, she began to notice a plunge in student morale. People were coming into class telling Atkinson they couldn’t sleep or focus because they were consumed with thoughts of climate breakdown. The future looked too dark. Atkinson observed that her students’ sense of despair was interfering with their ability to learn: they were feeling powerless and despondent, unable to process the material she was trying to teach. So Atkinson decided to create a seminar dedicated to helping students navigate the emotional landscape of climate change. The idea was partially inspired by Good Grief’s 10-step program.

In Atkinson’s class, students study the academic literature on climate emotions while also delving into their personal responses to ecological loss. Her seminar was the first time that 22-year-old Joe Lollo, who took the course last spring, began to explore and later articulate his climate-related feelings and anxieties. That included his sorrow and dread when he visited Mount Rainier, an active volcano looming above Washington’s Cascades, and saw that one of the glaciers draping the mountain was melting, part of a trend that has seen glaciers across the state shrink dramatically as the world warms. Lollo had learned about glacier loss in his high school environmental science class, but coming face-to-face with Mount Rainier’s receding ice mass was the first time he had seen anything like it firsthand. As Lollo absorbed the changes, he began to cry. “I remember this being overwhelming for me, but I kept it inside,” he told me. “I had a lot of emotions that I didn’t know how to express.”

Much of Atkinson’s work in class is focused on making grief acceptable to students. She encourages them to think of grief not as a pathological feeling to run from or bury, but as an emotionally healthy response to climate change. “If we got rid of these feelings, we’d lose so much of the motivation to stay in this fight,” she explained. “The core of all of it is to emphasize that grief is an expression of love.”

Part three

The end of magical thinking

There is another character in this story, hovering over the page as I write. Frustratingly, I cannot interview her. Outside of my dreams, I cannot talk to her. She is gone. And mourning her death taught me how to recognize grief wherever it lurks, including the edges of flames.

When you lose someone prematurely, there is always a before and an after: a moment when life as you understood it disappears abruptly and you are tasked with creating a new one out of the absence that remains. Mine came in May 2018, just before midnight, with a call from my sister. “You need to sit down,” her voice taut on the other line. The next sentence came so quickly that I didn’t have time to process the instruction, or why her voice was cracking. A handful of words that changed it all. Your best friend, she told me, had ended her life.

I bolted up from my bed: What? Through the receiver I could hear my sister crying, my mom sobbing and my dad calmly telling me to buy a flight back to California because her funeral would be in a few days. I was in too much of a state of shock to cry, so I sat at the edge of my bed repeating the same question in disbelief: What? What? What? “But she just emailed me!” I wailed. Indeed, she had sent me a routine email the day before she died — “just saying hi” — and in my rush to meet a deadline I hadn’t responded. I fell forward, my palms smacked onto the ground, and I screamed. I don’t remember anything after that.

Four days later, I was in California, eulogizing my best friend at her funeral, in front of hundreds of people. Everybody was in black, weeping, in shock. I was inconsolable. My right hand wouldn’t stop trembling. Even though I was surrounded by friends, family and community, I had the sensation that the only person who could understand what I was feeling was the person we were all there mourning. I wanted to gossip with her about the people who unexpectedly showed up at her funeral and talk to her about how profoundly alone I felt without her. More than anyone else in my life, I knew she would see what I was feeling in its fullest, truest form. Nothing prepared me for the heartbreak of realizing that could never happen again and the anguishing mental exercise of training myself away from reflexively texting or calling her first when something happened to me.

I’ve never recovered from that call, and I know that I never will. If my phone rings after 11 p.m. my stomach drops and my palms sweat, bracing for the impending news that someone I love has died. She was my oldest friend, the closest person to me outside of my family and partner. We met when I was two years old. She was like an exaggerated version of myself. My hair was big, hers was enormous. I was a silly dog-obsessed kid, but she was way quirkier. She collected handmade tiny mouse figurines dressed up as British royalty from a specialty store 30 minutes away. I was extroverted, but she took it to a whole other level. She would talk to anyone, anywhere, and inevitably find a way to relate. She was also the funniest person I’ve ever known — so charismatic that friends I introduced to her once would ask me about her for years after they met. After she died, laughter was in short supply for a long time. I felt so out of sorts I wondered if my sense of humor had permanently vanished.

The year before she died, she visited me in North Carolina. One weekend, I took her to the local farmer’s market. She decided to wear a graphic t-shirt with a uterus above the expression “Don’t tread on me.” I wandered around the stands for a few minutes and found her deep in conversation with an elderly pig farmer in overalls working at a stand selling meat, talking about the complexities of adult female friendships. He gave her earnest advice about how to handle a conflict with a friend. I was amused, but not surprised. It was so completely her, charming her way into the hearts of the pig farmers of the world in a uterus shirt.

While this recollection makes me smile, it also makes me confused. Lots of my memories with her are that way. I think back to different moments of our friendship, like the afternoon at the farmer’s market, and I wonder if she was unhappy and I had missed it. I wonder how, or if, her missed unhappiness should change how I remember our past. This confusion makes many of my memories with her strangely inaccessible, like childhood photos engulfed in flames.

This is the part of the story I’ve been avoiding writing. Reliving the call is agonizing; the funeral, gutting; the death, nearly impossible to talk about. My ability to mourn was blocked by the way she died. I didn’t see it coming and couldn’t understand it, poring over the last text she sent me (a close-up of a pug’s face with no context), searching for clues about what I missed, what I could have caught and prevented if only I had seen it first. 

In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s classic book about grieving, she writes about her obsession with her husband’s shoes after he passed away. She was unable to get rid of them, because, Didion reasoned, he might need them in case he came home. Although she knew perfectly well that her husband was gone, she clung to the illusion that he might still stroll through the front door as a psychological salve for her grief. The behavior became an example of what she describes in the book as magical thinking: “thinking as small children think,” she writes, “as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

I am very familiar with this chaotic line of reasoning.

My best friend died a few months before my birthday, and a few months after her own. We were planning to celebrate both when I moved back to California permanently, in the fall of 2018. Two months before I was scheduled to drive across the country, she passed away. I couldn’t hit pause on my decision to move home: I had already quit my job and given up my lease, and my partner had enrolled in graduate school in California. I was moving home — back to the place I had grown up with my best friend, where she was living when she died — whether I was ready or not.

My return to our hometown plunged me into a grief deeper than what I had felt when I was living on the other side of the country. To make myself feel better, I came up with an illogical psychological salve. My friend had a habit of sending me eclectic handmade cards on my birthday, and so I convinced myself that a birthday letter would arrive from her posthumously, explaining everything with her characteristic humor and observations. Although this imagined letter would not bring her back, it would at least give me a semblance of closure about why she took her life and leave me with words to revisit when I missed her. I would finally have answers to the questions that kept me up at night.

Of course, a note like this would never arrive. But I felt confident that it would appear in my mailbox before my birthday, this letter-turned-death-Rosetta Stone, giving me a coherent narrative to understand her death. When my birthday came and went without a letter, it marked the end of my magical thinking and the beginning of my painful descent into reality. I recognized that I had to accept that she was gone, and that I would never get the answers I wanted. Sometimes things just don’t make sense. My future wouldn’t include her in the ways I had always imagined, and my childhood memories would now always be imprinted with her loss.

Death, like fire, had upended my past, present and future, as well as my relationship with home — a place that no longer included her. In order to exist in the world as it was, the one that I reluctantly saw in front of me, I finally needed to grieve.

In retrospect, when I moved back to California, I was actually mourning two things at once: the loss of my friend and the loss of my sense of home. It took me years to identify the latter because the former was so all-consuming.

But after I acknowledged my solastalgia and began working on this story, I started to recognize the familiar shape of my California fire heartache. The homesickness, the urge to stay rooted in the California of my past, the despair lurking beneath my nostalgia — that all began to feel like my entry point into mourning. I started to see solastalgia as the first stage of my climate grief.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in the book “On Death and Dying,” laid out the process of grieving the loss of a loved one in five separate stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This doesn’t necessarily describe a linear process, and plenty of people don’t relate to this framework, but I found acceptance to be a transformative stage of my grieving, a process that has left me much more attentive to the quiet pain of so many people moving through the world. While imagining a reality that included my best friend provided me with great nostalgic comfort, it also kept me locked in denial and magical thinking. It left me unable to process and exist in the present, like wearing a jacket of despair lined with silk sleeves. Eventually, I had to accept that she was permanently gone. The world I thought I knew had changed, the ground had hollowed out beneath me, and I needed to figure out a way to find my footing over the fragments that remained.

I’ve been wondering if a similar process is needed to confront the realities of climate change. Maybe our collective fear of descending into grief is sabotaging our ability to emotionally process the depths of the crisis. Grief is generally regarded in our society as a scary and unpleasant emotional state to avoid at all costs, or, if we must, to push through quickly and overcome, not voluntarily submit to. But my process of grieving my best friend was essential. It forced me to digest the depth and pain of my loss. It taught me that some losses are just too big to ignore.

“Every wisdom tradition and psychologist will tell you that sitting with grief is a necessary part of recognizing and internalizing a new reality in the face of a loss,” Jennifer Atkinson, the University of Washington professor who teaches the climate grief seminar, told me. “And one of the things that I’ve encountered in a lot of the research and work and interviews that I’ve done is how valuable and productive grief is in finally shaking us out of this collective denial or disavowal. You don’t have to really be a climate denier, deny the science, to sort of deny the fact or disavow the fact that our lives are truly unraveling and will not be what we thought they were.” Grief, Atkinson argued, “is the opposite of indifference.”

What would it look like to let go of our denial and magical thinking, and instead open ourselves to climate mourning? For people who take part in the Good Grief Network’s course, it means beginning with what, for some, is an emotionally overwhelming task. The program’s first step is to “accept the severity of the predicament.” Acceptance is not the last step of the process, but the first.

Part 4

Ritual

One summer night, I descended down the mountains for a concert in the city of Santa Cruz. I wound down the redwood-dotted hills, watched the surfers bobbing on the deep blue waves of the Pacific, and then made my way to the final stop of my day, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

The evening’s headliner was “The End of Rain,” a multimedia performance reflecting on Californians’ emotional responses to fire and drought. The composer, Scott Ordway, spent more than a year traveling across the state, collecting firsthand accounts of wildfire and drought from more than 200 Californians. He used their words to create a text and a musical score, which was performed by a chorus and accompanied by his own videos and photos taken from visits to different sites of wildfires.

Ordway, a Santa Cruz native who now lives on the East Coast, followed the 2020 Santa Cruz wildfire from his home in Philadelphia. He watched the fire, which was sparked by lightning, descend on his hometown, evacuating his parents’ town and bearing down on places he knew vividly from his childhood. “I knew immediately that I wanted to respond artistically,” he said. So he hit the road, asking people throughout the state about how the wildfires are reshaping their relationship to land, community and self.

That night was Ordway’s composition’s world premiere. The theater was packed, and he stepped onto the stage. “When the lightning struck, I never felt so far from home,” he told the crowd. The lights dimmed and the chorus began to sing the words culled from dozens of Californians, as photos of fire-scarred landscapes flashed on a projector behind the performers. For the next 45 minutes, the audience listened in rapt silence. It felt like a mourning ritual, a public space where a community razed by fire could hear the words of others who had gone through the same thing.

Ordway told me that when he began working on the composition, he thought he would end up writing “a funeral piece for my beloved landscape, for my home, for California.” But in the process of traveling across the state and collecting peoples’ stories, it went in a different direction. Ordway explained that the people he spoke to did not want him to write “a requiem — a sad, somber piece about what was going on” but wanted something that left open even a sliver of room for a salvageable future. He recalled an elderly woman who grabbed him by the shoulders during an interview. “Young man,” she ordered, “don’t you dare put a sad ending on this piece.”

Ordway tried to encapsulate those feelings in the composition’s last two lines of text:

We must change now.

Things will grow back.

Maybe this is where grieving leaves us, suspended between heartache and hope. Staring at an unrecognizable home, with so much left to save.

The post Grieving California appeared first on Coda Story.

Near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, in a two-story home, a group of teenagers watched a black-and-white video projected onto a screen. It was only 8 a.m. on a gray Sunday morning, but the kids, clad in flip-flops and jeans, were rapt with attention.

The video flashed images of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. The classroom walls were decorated with photos of figures from the era. A row of filing cabinets held thousands of pages of Khmer Rouge documents from the surrounding district.

In Anlong Veng, it is widely understood that Vietnamese people — not the Khmer Rouge — were behind the worst violence that devastated Cambodia and that Khmer Rouge war heroes tried to stop them.

When the video ended, the soft-spoken workshop leader Ly Sok Kheang asked the kids: “Do you think Cambodian people could have killed other Cambodians?”

A girl sitting in the back stood up. “No, it’s probably not true,” she said. “I’ve heard that people took on fake identities to kill innocent Cambodian people.” A tall boy in the row behind her agreed: “The Vietnamese faked their identities as Cambodian people. But the journalists all broadcast that Cambodian people killed other Cambodians.”

The journalists had it right in this case. When the Khmer Rouge officially ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, its leaders orchestrated the genocide of roughly a quarter of the country’s population of 7.8 million people. Regime leaders were hyper-focused on exterminating educated people and minorities, leading to mass atrocities that politicians and historians today still struggle to make sense of.

Although the Khmer Rouge movement was considered the “younger brother” of Northern Vietnamese communists and initially received their support, the reality was more complicated. Fearful that Vietnam — a historical enemy — intended to gobble up their land, Khmer Rouge leaders officially broke diplomatic relations with the larger neighbor in 1977 as border disputes escalated.

In most of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 when Vietnamese troops toppled the regime. The Vietnamese occupied most of the country throughout the 1980s, hailed by some as liberators and others as oppressors. But in this remote, 60,000-person district called Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge retained its political power for nearly 20 more years. Today, most families still include former cadres for whom guerilla warfare is a not-so-distant memory. And anti-Vietnamese sentiment, handed down from Khmer Rouge leaders over decades, remains strong.

“It helps to compartmentalize the idea that somehow we screwed up and we did this to ourselves,” said Sophal Ear, a political scientist at the Arizona State University whose family fled the regime when he was a child. “It’s the narrative that permeates anti-Vietnamese sentiment and re-appropriates the whole Khmer Rouge episode of Cambodia as like, ‘No, no, no, this was all Vietnamese-done. We were victims. The genocide was Vietnamese killing Cambodians.’”

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Anti-Vietnamese racism is nothing new in Cambodia, where many resent both France, for ceding contested land to Vietnam in 1949, and the Vietnam-installed government that took over Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. Opposition leaders have long relied on anti-Vietnamese rhetoric for support, even when it has led to violence.

On a national scale, the country has struggled to confront the genocide that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, and formal education about the regime was practically nonexistent for decades. Current Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself who defected to Vietnam, famously said that Cambodians should “dig a hole and bury the past” and has been accused of interfering with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

In Anlong Veng, aging troops aren’t a political party or even a re-emerging insurgency looking to launch a new movement. But their ahistorical telling of the genocide plays into Cambodia’s worst tropes about its old enemy, exacerbating tensions and pushing a confrontation with the country’s own past further out of reach.

But some are trying to provide a counterweight. Ly Sok Kheang works for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an organization that serves as the main keeper of the country’s Khmer Rouge documents and archives, with support from Yale University and both the Cambodian and U.S. governments. A few years ago, the Center launched a program teaching kids in Anlong Veng about the genocide, hoping to spur a more candid reckoning between generations.

When the teens cast doubt on what they saw in the video of the Tuol Sleng Prison, Kheang didn’t correct them. Instead, he gestured towards the thick history booklets he had passed out. It was time to read.

A small country nestled between Vietnam and Thailand, Cambodia spent most of the 20th century mired in a series of power struggles. It was a French protectorate for nearly a century until 1953, when Prince Norodom Sihanouk led a successful bid for independence. Then in 1970, a U.S.-backed military leader overthrew Sihanouk, and American troops invaded the country to fight against alleged Vietnamese strongholds.

Those chaotic years set the stage for the Khmer Rouge to take over in 1975. The movement — led by a Paris-educated man known as Pol Pot — claimed to return Cambodia to “Year Zero,” an agrarian society free from colonialism and foreign influence, which had dominated for decades. 

In reality, well-educated and middle-class people were targeted for torture and killing. Troops ordered everyone out of Phnom Penh and sent them to forced labor camps in the countryside for “re-education” where they dug ditches and toiled in rice fields. Some died from starvation and disease. Others were simply executed.

A zone leader called Ta Mok ruled the country’s southwest. Although he wasn’t in Pol Pot’s inner circle, Mok was both ruthless and charismatic, with a kind of “earthiness” that won the loyalty of farmers, said Andrew Mertha, a Khmer Rouge historian and director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Mok’s troops were responsible for “cleaning up” other zones after purges, including hauling off, interrogating and killing so-called traitors — which came to include just about anyone as the regime became increasingly paranoid and violent. 

“He had a reputation for burning people alive in ovens,” Mertha said. “When he was tasked with eliminating a group of people for a political or material incentive, he was more than happy to do it.”

Mok also hated Vietnam with a passion. In the only known interview with Mok, conducted in 1997 by American journalist Nate Thayer, he defended the murder of another zone leader and his thousands of followers on the grounds that they were secretly Vietnamese. “I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us,” he said.

After the regime fell and a new Vietnam-backed government was established in 1979, Mok fled north to the Thai border and led guerilla warfare in Anlong Veng, then a thicket of jungle at the base of a mountain range. Now, a roundabout marks the town’s center at the junction of two country roads, surrounded by cassava and rice fields that glowed green from rain when our team visited in July.

After Vietnamese troops exited Cambodia in 1989, Ta Mok assumed full political control over Anlong Veng. Even today, his fingerprints are all over the town. Up the street from the roundabout is the town bridge, constructed over the river where tuk-tuks and motorbikes stream toward the central market. Here, Mok oversaw construction of a damming system that feeds into an amoeba-shaped lake — a plentiful source of fish. 

Nearby, the red-roofed hospital and local school were also built under his watch. His grave is marked with a giant glittering mausoleum, and a guesthouse bears his name. 

Residents’ stories about Mok evoke a different leader: Kind, generous and hardworking. One woman remembered knocking on his door when she was heavily pregnant and walking away with fistfuls of cash. Another man said Mok liked to sit with his legs dangling over the riverbank as he directed soldiers in construction projects. Anyone passing by his compound hungry got rice, salt, fish or sugar, no questions asked.

“Everyone here in Anlong Veng thought of Ta Mok as a second father,” one former soldier told us. “He took very good care of them.”

Mok was finally arrested in 1999 and the district was reunited with the rest of Cambodia. When he died in 2006 — before he could be tried for war crimes — hundreds poured into the streets of Anlong Veng to mourn. “He was a direct person and did everything himself,” said another soldier’s son. “That’s why most people in Anlong Veng really love him.”

Out of the roughly 15,000 people held in the Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison in Phnom Penh — now home to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum — only about a dozen survived. Prisoners were electrocuted and waterboarded. They were tortured with metal rods and pliers. They had their fingernails and toenails ripped out and their wounds doused with acid.

Norn Chantha discovered Tuol Sleng for the first time in 12th grade. On a whim, he opened a history book a nonprofit had given his school. “I wasn’t really interested in reading the book because I thought that since I was a Khmer Rouge soldier’s kid, I’d already heard quite a lot about the Khmer Rouge story,” said Chantha, now 29, from the office of the Anlong Veng high school where he teaches English. The book was lined with photos of victims being maimed with long metal wires — the first inkling there might be more to the story than what he had been told. 

“It shocked me,” he said.

Until 2011, the same year that Chantha graduated, Cambodia’s Ministry of Education avoided teaching Khmer Rouge history in schools, in part to skirt criticism from Prime Minister Hun Sen, who ordered that 12th grade social studies textbooks be withdrawn from classrooms in 2002 on the grounds that Khmer Rouge sections needed to be “rechecked.” After defecting from the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese-installed government and has resisted a public reckoning with the regime during his 37 years as prime minister. He has even gone so far as to say that trying Khmer Rouge leaders would lead to civil war. For kids in school today, curricula about the regime are based on a short history volume produced by DC-Cam and vary greatly in their thoroughness.

Many families have come to see their personal histories as the whole truth of what happened. In Anlong Veng, where people still live in villages known by their Khmer Rouge-era numeric military names, those histories are often inverted versions of what other Cambodians believe, with Khmer Rouge soldiers presented as protagonists instead of perpetrators. Until 12th grade, Chantha never thought twice about his parents being soldiers. “It was normal in Anlong Veng,” he said.

Now as an adult, a combination of internet searches and the school’s teaching materials have led Chantha to believe “the entire regime was horrible, because so many people were killed.” But his north star is still his mom’s stories — which tend to come back to the same refrain about why some people suffered while others were spared.

“She said in any places where the Vietnamese were secretly involved, the food and the living situation in that area would be difficult,” Chantha said. “If there were no Vietnamese masquerading as Khmer, people living in the area would live a normal life.”

One example goes like this: In 1977, his mother was helping to build a dam near the Vietnamese border. At a nearby Khmer Rouge hospital that she often passed by, patients were dying so often that it was considered a local mystery among soldiers. Once, when Chantha’s mother visited herself, she saw patients so thin “they didn’t even look human,” she told him.

The deaths were so frequent because the doctors were secretly Vietnamese, she said, and they were injecting Khmer patients with poison or water on purpose to make them sick. When Khmer Rouge leaders “discovered” the charade, they killed or disappeared the doctors for re-education, and the hospital was shut down.

“I think what my mother told me seemed reasonable,” Chantha said as he recounted the tale. “There were spies, and that’s why patients like soldiers and civilians were killed.”

Khmer Rouge hospitals were notoriously plagued by starvation and disease and lacking in basic care. Historian Stephen Heder, who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and is now a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said that while it’s plausible that incompetent medics killed patients either inadvertently or on purpose in some instances, there is “zero evidence” of Vietnamese spies having been involved.

When we asked how Chantha squares his mom’s viewpoint with the facts he’s picked up elsewhere, he said he has decided not to view the regime as entirely good or entirely bad.

“If people weren’t lucky, and they lived in an area that wasn’t good, they experienced bad things,” he said. “For me personally, I can’t differentiate whether Ta Mok was a good or bad person because my parents’ experience was good compared to other people’s.”

But he’s certain of one thing: “If any unit had a Vietnamese spy, people would definitely be massacred.”

Chantha’s mother Mong Tim first met Ta Mok in 1993, when he invited a group of soldiers’ wives to his home. Cambodia had just hosted its first general elections under the United Nations, and the rest of the country was moving on from the Khmer Rouge — but Ta Mok was determined to keep control of the district.

As the women sat in a big circle around him, Ta Mok paced around the living room and drew up  plans to protect Anlong Veng’s borders on a blackboard. He wore a simple cloth and addressed the women in a quiet voice. Afterward, the group ate a lunch of beef and pork together at long tables, sharing tips on how to raise chickens and cows. 

In all, the women spent 10 days like this at Mok’s home, the daily blackboard sessions only interrupted for big meals prepared by a chef.

“He said if we didn’t do our best to protect our land, the Vietnamese would take our land and it would end in misery,” Mong Tim recalled. “What he told me inspired me to survive for my children’s future. I didn’t want to lose our land or have another government to govern us. If we lost the battle with the Vietnamese, they would abuse us.”

We spoke with Mong Tim, now 63, in the living room of her wooden home, where framed photos displayed her six adult children along the mantle and a talking bird screeched out Khmer greetings in the garden. The wives’ meeting sparked a yearslong friendship: Ta Mok regularly gifted her rice and seasonings and even taught her to sew.

In the early 1990s, Khmer Rouge soldiers flooding into Anlong Veng were pulled into his system, working together to raise farm animals and sharing goods amongst themselves. Many soldiers had lost their own parents or families. “Cambodians relocated from every part of the country. We learned to love each other like a family in order to help each other and to survive,” Tim said.

It was a big improvement from her life before. During the 1980s, when Vietnam occupied Cambodia, fighting dragged out in Anlong Veng, even though the Khmer Rouge movement was effectively dead. Tim moved daily between different parts of the jungle, and while she tried to seek refuge in Thailand, “people didn’t allow us to enter their village,” she said. Instead, she built a hut and lived there for a year, surviving off bitter roots. She lost all her hair.

Still, she doesn’t blame Ta Mok or other Khmer Rouge leaders for refusing to capitulate.

“I felt pain when thinking that the Vietnamese invaded us​​ and abused us. I felt pain because we could not settle anywhere,” she said. “We kept running because the Vietnamese army kept chasing us. We ran all the time, and we ran while exhausted and starving. We slept mostly on the ground, anywhere we could.”

“I didn’t suffer with Ta Mok, but I did with the Vietnamese invasion,” Tim said. 

In recent years, Tim has come across Facebook and YouTube videos that say Ta Mok murdered people in the country’s southwest, but that was before she knew him. Under his rule, she told us, people had rice and fish. The forest was protected. He even traded small bits of gold at the Thai border to bring back noodles and rice. 

We asked if her feelings about him have changed at all since they first met, and she said no.

How Anlong Veng residents should grapple with the past has been a point of debate for years. Back in 2003, the government said it wanted to memorialize the district as a tourist destination, prompting local outcry and a slew of articles stereotyping it as the “Wild West” of Cambodia. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia where Kheang works, rejected the plan on the grounds that it would commercialize memory.

Complicating matters was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal that sought to try war criminals through a joint Cambodian and international court. Although the tribunal was only meant to focus on high-level architects of the genocide — and struggled to even do that — it had a chilling effect in Anlong Veng. One researcher recalled villagers physically running from his white car during a visit, scared that a U.N. vehicle had arrived to take them away.

By 2015, the tribunal had stalled, and Youk established the program in Anlong Veng to teach kids about Khmer Rouge history. The sessions bring 15 kids from local high schools to a day-long workshop — led by Kheang — to explain the basic history of the regime and visit historical sites like Ta Mok’s compound and Pol Pot’s grave.

In a Zoom call, I told Youk about Chantha and his mother and asked how he saw the organization’s role in interpreting the older generation’s narratives for young people.

Youk himself straddles seemingly contradictory positions. As a child, he survived being tortured in a Khmer Rouge work camp and eventually fled to the United States. His extended family is from Ta Mok’s home province of Takeo and lost all but two relatives there. And yet to do his work effectively, he must defend the humanity of Anlong Veng to outsiders.

In 2011, researchers found that both soldiers and high schoolers in Anlong Veng tended to view themselves within a victim-hero mindset against the Vietnamese, bolstered by poverty, intergenerational trauma and isolation. All told, this led to “difficulty in observing the emergence of coherent narratives,” they wrote.

That lack of cohesion, along with omissions or outright lies, doesn’t matter, Youk told me, so long as people are talking in the first place. “I don’t expect one narrative,” he said. “The more complex the history, the more we learn.”

Historians themselves are not settled on much of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime and the precise role Ta Mok played. While it is clear that he would have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, his reputation for having orchestrated huge massacres has been exaggerated over the years, Heder, the historian who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, said.

“What we know among us about what happened under this regime is not one thousandth of one percent of what we know about the Holocaust, maybe one percent of what we know about what happened in the Soviet Union, and a hundredth of one percent of what we know about China under Mao,” Heder said. “We’re all wandering around in the dark grabbing onto little beams of light trying to put together a coherent picture.” 

Youk said his long-term goal isn’t to adjudicate specific beliefs or memories in Anlong Veng. Eventually, he’d like to see the district reconnect culturally with the rest of Cambodia — but first that means helping kids talk to their parents and grandparents about why they think what they do. “They have to reconcile within their own family first before they can reconcile with their neighbors, the community, outside,” he said.

Youk said he doesn’t expect that to happen right away, especially through a single workshop.

“In the beginning, I only expect them to learn the word genocide, that’s all,” he said. “If you can just say that, that’s fine.” But when kids grow up, “they have the responsibility to find their truth.”

Not everyone in Anlong Veng is nostalgic for Ta Mok’s rule. An Horn, a slight, wiry cassava and rice farmer who we met outside his wooden home on a winding dirt road, quickly brushed aside the idea that the leader was anything special.

In fact, only the higher-level Khmer Rouge benefited from the food and unlimited handfuls of money that other residents had ascribed to Ta Mok. “I never dared to go near him,” Horn said with a shake of his head. “He was one of the top leaders and I was a low-ranking soldier. I wouldn’t go near him.”

Horn was around 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge swept into his rural province. Troops separated him from his parents and forced him into a camp with other kids, where he was trained as a child soldier. His first job was carrying older boys’ food and drink and then hauling soil to construct dams. “We didn’t have any freedom at all. They forced small kids to work as hard as elders,” he said.

As he became a teenager and started moving between provinces in a mobile unit, Horn’s life consisted of staying up for hours on night watch and stealing sleep on the ground “like an animal.” By 1980, he was sent to the mountain range above Anlong Veng, where soldiers had more clothing and food than he’d ever seen before. But the luxuries didn’t win him over. 

“At that point, I just prayed that the war would end,” he said. “I was so scared I would die.”

Horn remains unimpressed with the things that people often point out as generous acts by the Khmer Rouge regime. Leaders built roads to connect Anlong Veng’s villages and the mountain to move their own supplies, not help residents, he said. And bridges and schools are simply what should be expected from any government. In his own village, “the majority of people prayed the war would end so we could live a normal life, reunite with our family, make a living.”

If that was the case, we asked, why did some people in the district remain so loyal to Ta Mok? “You supported [the] group to which you belonged,” Horn said. “If you were under the shade of a tree, you admired that tree.” 

Sorpong Peou, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who likewise survived the Khmer Rouge, calls this mentality the “politics of survival” that still plagues Cambodia today. Opposition leaders, frustrated with Hun Sen’s longtime authoritarian rule, have continued to trot out anti-Vietnamese racism, using the slur yuon and accusing the prime minister of being a Vietnamese puppet. 

“Cambodian politics is very deeply personalized, not institutionalized. Everything is personal,” Peou said. “The court is Hun Sen’s court, the armies are Hun Sen’s armies. Everything is personal, and because of that, personal attacks are the norm, demonizing your opponent is the norm.”

But it’s also “self-defeating,” he said. “You destroy your country by not being able to move toward reconciliation.”

As the house across the street from Horn’s kicked off an evening karaoke session, we realized it was too late to call a motorbike back to town. Horn said he couldn’t ask his neighbors for a ride because people in the village still don’t trust each other after dark.

We made small talk while waiting for another pickup. Had Horn visited any of the local sites the memory organization was fitting with plaques and guides, like Ta Mok’s old compound? Horn said he hadn’t. He wants kids to know what happened, but the places from the past don’t interest him.

By the end of the Ly Sok Kheang’s workshop, the high schoolers were getting antsy. We had watched them sit through Kheang’s morning talk, a movie and history tour on the mountainside, plus a break to take selfies on the cliff overlooking Anlong Veng’s lush farmland.

Now we stood in a small muddy clearing, where under a mound of dirt, protected by a rusting roof and a sagging wire fence, lay Pol Pot’s remains.

It was an unassuming resting place compared to Ta Mok’s towering shrine. Across the street, a casino with a busted-out window and a graying facade loomed over the mountaintop. As the kids stood around the grave, an elderly woman who works as its unofficial cleaner tottered up the path and started talking. She joined the Khmer Rouge, she told them, because she “believed that it was a good thing to do.”

“If you all persist both mentally and physically to do something like I did in the past — if the next generation persists in expanding and protecting our land from the neighboring countries — I believe we will have a sustainable country,” she said, a hand resting on the wire fence. “If we’re all weak, the neighboring countries will interfere, and we will lose our land bit by bit until it is all gone.”

The kids tossed out questions: How long have you looked after the grave? “Twenty years.” Do people celebrate here? “Sometimes.” As is their custom, the workshop leaders didn’t try to intervene, letting the kids take in as much or as little as they wanted: Kheang, who had swapped his button-down for a T-shirt during the mountainside excursion, said that the cleaner always makes an appearance during visits. “Kids can feel the narrative themselves,” he told me later.

We rode down the mountain to our final destination, Ta Mok’s compound. Overlooking the lake dotted with lilypads, we sat near the storerooms where the Khmer Rouge had once squirreled away records and artifacts, talking to the 17-year-old Phal Rampha as the other kids crowded around.

His grandpa sells palm cakes to make a living, but before that, he was a bodyguard to one of Ta Mok’s right-hand men. Sometimes, a bite of palm cake reminds him of a specific story: Once, Rampha said, his grandpa dodged a bullet that bent the tree behind him all the way back. 

“Before, I thought that the Khmer Rouge regime was rescuing the nation from war,” he told us. “From today’s session I learned that there was torture, which made me sad. It seemed atrocious.”

Rampha said that didn’t think his grandpa would have lied about Ta Mok being a kind person who gave people everything he had to help them. His eyebrows knitted together as he spoke.

“I think he couldn’t have been the one who did all of those brutal things to people,” Rampha said. “I believe there were spies in the government.” But it also seemed clear that Ta Mok and other Khmer Rouge leaders had caused internal fighting and divided people into groups.

“I want to know more,” he said. “How cruel was it? Where were the mass graves?”

I asked if he had specific questions for his grandpa. Not yet, he said. “But I want to tell my grandpa that the Khmer Rouge regime was more horrible than what he told me,” Rampha said.

How would he feel bringing that up?

“Hean,” Rampha said, using the Khmer word meaning “brave enough.” “Hean. Hean.”

The post In the Khmer Rouge’s last stronghold, myths from the Cambodian genocide still reign appeared first on Coda Story.

“No one was allowed in because they were afraid that people would take pictures, protest, and block the work,” said Marek Zaniewski, the vice president of the Union of Poles in Belarus, relaying accounts from people who witnessed the operation in the predominantly ethnic-Polish district. 

A Catholic priest was able to get inside the perimeter but was soon ejected, and authorities threatened people who tried to take pictures with prosecution. Later that day however, photos emerged online showing that the cemetery site had been leveled to the ground.

Zaniewski said when he heard the news, his initial shock soon gave way to despair. 

“Surkonty is a very important place for Poles living in Belarus,” he said. “Its destruction was a very painful blow.”

The history of the Home Army is problematic for Belarusian strongman Aleksander Lukashenko and his pro-Russian regime. While the Home Army’s primary enemy during the war had been Nazi Germany, the fighters at Surkonty had been killed by Soviet soldiers in battle in 1944. 

The destruction of the cemetery at Surkonty came one day after Poland demolished a Soviet-era monument. Western media framed the events as tit-for-tat retaliation, but the cemetery destruction wasn’t the first — at least five other Polish military cemeteries had been desecrated this summer.

The destruction of these Polish grave sites is the latest salvo in a broader, accelerating campaign to rewrite the history of World War II and the Holocaust in Belarus which Lukashenko has been waging since his 2020 crackdown on anti-government protestors, leaving him vulnerable domestically and isolated internationally. Lukashenko’s government has been building a new nationalist narrative that marginalizes minorities in Belarus in favor of a homogenous, Soviet-style national identity, and ties the regime’s challengers at home and abroad to the familiar Nazi enemies of the past.

The Lukashenko government’s relationship with Belarus’s Polish, Jewish, and Lithuanian heritage had fluctuated before 2020 — but now, amid the state’s mounting project of historical revisionism, not only have authorities increasingly been working to erase reminders of these peoples’ history in Belarus, but they have also hijacked the history of the Holocaust in Belarus to frame it as part of a genocide not of Jews, but rather ethnic Belarusians.

In this version of history, Belarusian victimhood is central, and Russia’s victory over Nazism during World War II defines the modern Belarusian state and its relationships to its hostile neighbors. On the ground, Lukashenko’s historical policy has translated into persecution of minority communities, the Russification of Belarusian national symbols, and fears of a dangerous new phase in Lukashenko’s ongoing effort to eliminate threats to his rule.

“They’re trying to create this atmosphere of us against the whole world,” said Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist, describing the government’s motivations. The goal is to arouse an us-versus-them mentality relying on memories of World War II. “There are enemies around us, and they are all trying to exterminate us, and this has happened before. That’s why we have to keep together and support this great leader.”

In January, Lukashenko’s government passed the Law on the Genocide of the Belarusian People, which proclaims that Nazi Germany carried out a genocide against ethnic Belarusians during WWII, defining Belarusian people as “all Soviet citizens who lived on the territory” of Belarus at the time. Anyone who denies any part of this narrative can face jail time. Israeli scholars warn that describing all victims of Nazi war crimes in Belarus, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, as ethnic Belarusians amounts to Holocaust denial.

“There’s no obvious corroboration for the idea that when the Germans came in they were out to get Belarusians,” said David Marples, a historian at the University of Alberta, who specializes in Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian history and has written several books on modern Belarus.

Yet this has not stopped authorities from trying to establish facts on the ground that support their narrative — Belarusian state media has reported that renewed excavations of WWII-era mass graves sites in the country have already begun, with the aim of uncovering “the whole truth” of the purported genocide against Belarusians. 

According to Veranika Laputska, a Holocaust researcher and the co-founder of the EAST Center, a think-tank focused on the post-Soviet space, the Belarusian state has threatened to begin excavating Jewish grave sites as well, including at the Nazi death camp at Maly Trostenets, in order to inflate the number of victims who were killed there for political purposes.

“If they’re going to start re-digging these mass graves, it means that they will not only be distorting the memory of Belarusian Jews but also European Jews who were unfortunately killed on Belarusian territory,” said Laputska.

Lukashenko has set the stage to use the genocide law’s claims to go after his enemies.  In February, Lukashenko formally tasked General Prosecutor Andrei Shved, who had previously called the Polish Home Army “fascist criminals,” with hunting down alleged perpetrators of this genocide who had escaped punishment, calling it “a matter of historical justice.”

Shved’s office published in April a lengthy manuscript to support the genocide law’s conclusions and presents the purported evidence for Hitler’s campaign against Belarusians. It is a skewed, dubiously-sourced, and “amateurish” perspective on Nazi atrocities in Belarus, according to Marples, the historian, that undermines the realities of the Holocaust, and also implicates the Polish Home Army, Lithuanian forces, Latvian paramilitaries, and others as active parties to genocide alongside the Germans. The document also takes aim at the 2020 anti-government protestors, falsely claiming they wore Nazi insignia.  

This might point to the government’s intentions to launch a future “denazification’ campaign,” said Laputska of the EAST Center, labeling neighboring states as Nazis and fomenting national opinion against countries like Poland and Lithuania. “And then, we don’t know what is going to happen.”

The recent grave destructions may indicate this leap has already taken place, said Denis Kazakiewicz, a journalist and analyst based in Brussels who is from the Polish-Belarusian community.

Vladimir Putin has frequently described Ukraine’s government and people as fascists or Nazis to justify his invasion of the country. “If you think that those people” — the Home Army —  “are Nazis, and the people who come to their graves are Nazis, that means that the state that supports those people are also Nazis,” said Kazakiewicz. “That means that the Russian and Belarusian state has the moral grounds to attack those Nazis as they do now in Ukraine.”

Lukashenko’s most recent hostility toward Poland and Lithuania stems from their support of the 2020 protests against his rule. After the presidential election, that year was deemed fraudulent by the international community, Lukashenko declared himself the victor and violently ended the protests. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the candidate who ran against Lukashenko in the presidential election, fled to Lithuania later that year. Poland, especially, has been demonized by Lukashenko as a bellicose, anti-Belarusian aggressor acting at the behest of the United States.

At least 288,000 ethnic Poles, around 19,000 Lithuanians, and nearly 13,000 Jews continue to live in Belarus, and Poles especially have increasingly become regarded by the state as a fifth column loyal to the West. In 2021, several prominent leaders of the Union of Poles in Belarus were put behind bars, including journalist Andrzej Poczobut and activist Andżelika Borys, on charges of “inciting national and religious hatred” and “rehabilitation of Nazism,” according to the Prosecutor General’s Office. They joined tens of thousands of Belarusian protestors who were arrested during and after the 2020 demonstrations.

While using history to vilify his enemies, Lukashenko is building an ideological bridge connecting Belarusian and Russian heritage. Lukashenko anointed the day the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 a national holiday this year. 

As Belarus has moved closer to Russia, Moscow has helped Lukashenko use history to pursue his political goals. In April, Shved and his Russian counterpart created a joint working group to “establish the circumstances” of the genocide of “the Soviet people.” Earlier this year, Lukashenko not only agreed to let Russia launch attacks on Ukraine from Belarusian territory, but also to host Russian troops and nuclear warheads indefinitely. 

Uladzimir Vialichkin, the head of the local branch of the human rights organization Viasna in the western Belarusian city of Brest who fled the country in 2021, said Belarusian authorities have been chipping away at vestiges of Brest’s Jewish and Polish heritage for years, and although efforts have been made by foreign organizations to preserve evidence of Jewish cemeteries and document desecrated Jewish gravestones in the city, amateur guides who’ve drawn attention to this history have been harassed by authorities.

“The goal of this is singular,” Vialichkin said. “That this is Russian territory, a Russian city, Russian everything.”

In Surkonty, ethnic Poles have erected wooden crosses on the site of the military cemetery several days after it was desecrated. According to Zaniewski of the Union of Poles in Belarus, even these were removed by authorities, and in September another Polish grave was reportedly found destroyed. 

“Destroying a cemetery doesn’t destroy the memory of people,” Zaniewski said. “Those crosses will rise again.”

But as Vialichkin witnesses more graves getting desecrated, memorial inscriptions being altered, and more of the country’s history shifting before his eyes with each passing year, he has doubts.

“The witnesses of these crimes naturally die off, and now there’s no one left to challenge this,” Vialichkin said.

“History is being rewritten. Everything is being rewritten.”

The post Belarusian leader writes Poles, Jews, other minorities out of WWII history in a bid for national unity appeared first on Coda Story.

Northern Ireland

Today’s conflict isn’t waged with submachine guns. But the lack of accountability has allowed the wounds inflicted by the Troubles to fester.

Northern Ireland

The country’s failure to address its past has left room for permissible lies.

Northern Ireland

Families who lost loved ones during the conflict have pushed for answers for decades. Now, the British government may shatter any hope of justice.

Battling History

Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace

On January 3 in 1976, two Catholic brothers — John Michael and Brian Reavey — and two Protestant brothers — Reggie and Walter Chapman — were playing pool at a pub in a small town in South Armagh, Northern Ireland.

The men, all in their early 20s, had been friendly for years. They played soccer together. Amicable relationships between Catholics and Protestants had become increasingly rare, even in a small rural town.

The Reavey brothers went by fake names in the soccer league because they also played sports with the Gaelic Athletic Association, an Irish cultural group that prohibited its members from playing non-Gaelic sports until 1971. 

The Troubles had been raging for several years, and this area, south of Belfast and a short distance from the border with the Republic of Ireland, had been especially hard hit. About 400 people in South Armagh were killed over 30 years — a higher death toll than any other part of Northern Ireland aside from Belfast. 

It’s hard to imagine the violence that plagued South Armagh during the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s until peace was brokered by the Clinton administration in 1998. Northern Ireland is still segregated. Only 7% of children go to schools attended by both Catholics and Protestants. In Belfast, gates in towering walls topped with barbed wire close every evening. The deep wounds left on society by the Troubles still fester, represented by neatly kept memorials on roadsides. If you know where to look, each turn in a narrow country road, each old farmhouse at the top of a rolling hill tells the story of a dark moment in a traumatic history.

On that night in January 1976, the Reavey brothers were having a drink at the local pub when they bumped into the Chapman brothers. At one point, a bomb rolled into the bar, but it failed to go off. So once the police and the army had removed the threat, the men carried on with their game of pool. 

Within 48 hours, all four of them were murdered. 

The next day, on January 4, John Michael and Brian Reavey were at their farmhouse watching the comedy game show Celebrity Square with their 17-year-old brother, Anthony. A gunman barged through the front door and opened fire. John Michael was nearly cut in two by a spray of bullets from a machine gun. Brian was shot in the back trying to get upstairs to hide. The bullet came out through his heart. Anthony hid under the bed, but the gunman found him and filled his abdomen with 17 bullets. 

Somehow, Anthony managed to drag himself up the street to a nearby farmhouse. When the neighbor saw the boy, she called for the ambulance, the police and the priest. Anthony was making a miraculous recovery when he died suddenly 26 days later on January 30 in what the family maintains are suspicious circumstances.

The murder was meticulously planned. Gunmen drove from a farmhouse a mile away. Army checkpoints at both ends of the road ensured nobody saw them coming. After firing off the fatal rounds from a 9 mm Luger pistol, a .455 Webley revolver, a 9 mm Parabellum and a Sterling submachine gun, the gunmen sped away, switching cars, handing off the guns and burning the vehicle they drove to the attack. It took 12 minutes.

“I have done this journey at speed many, many times,” said Eugene Reavey, the older brother of John Michael, Brian and Anthony, as we drove the narrow country roads lined with tall brushes that the gunmen took to carry out the attack. In pursuit of justice for his brothers, Eugene has taken investigators on this route several times in recent years.

The gunmen “traveled these roads with impunity. They were never going to be stopped. Because it’s all Protestant country here. So the police would have recognized all these people, and they just waved them on,” Eugene said, pointing across the fields to the road where an officer would have been standing, shining a light to give the gunmen the go-ahead.

Eugene Reavey, who was 28 in 1976, is now in his mid-70s.

He still gets angry when he talks about how a British soldier harassed his grieving mother at a checkpoint on her way home from the hospital. Or how the soldier dumped his brothers’ bloodied clothes on the road. 

Mr. and Mrs. Reavey never lived in that house again. Their son who discovered the carnage didn’t speak for a year after the attack. Eugene Reavey has known who killed his brothers for 41 years. A friend of his father’s overheard someone boasting about the murder in a local pub. 

Nobody has ever been held accountable. Eugene has dedicated his life to changing that. It has put him on the frontlines in a fight between survivors who want the truth and those who have something to lose from it coming out.

“I want the truth, if I can get it. Then I want justice, but there’s no such thing,” said Eugene.

The small community was still reeling from the violence at the Reavey’s when tragedy struck again the next day. On January 5, 1976, Walter and Reggie Chapman were on their way home from work at the Kingsmill plant when their bus stopped suddenly on a secluded country road. Armed men forced the brothers and 10 others off the bus. The gunmen asked if there were any Catholics among them, and as one man went to step forward, the others pulled him back, thinking he was the target. The Catholic man was allowed to walk away. Eleven Protestants, including Walter and Reggie, were shot in their tracks, left to die on the pavement. Only one man survived. 

The South Armagh Republican Action Force, found to be a cover name for the Provisional IRA, claimed responsibility for the fatal ambush. Many believed it was retaliation for the murders the day before of the Reavey brothers and members of another Catholic family — the O’Dowds — who lived about half an hour away.

The killings at Kingsmill put the Protestant community on edge. Neighborly tolerance turned to suspicion. The carnage of those 48 hours in the early days of 1976 stained South Armagh for decades.

Everybody in Northern Ireland has their own version of what happened during the Troubles. 

The Good Friday Agreement ended the bloodshed. But it did not offer a way to grapple with the history of violence. No one was appointed to look into the killings. The past festered. Later, there were attempts to create a framework to get at the truth of what happened and hold people accountable for their violence. All have failed.

The result is a system where the burden falls on families to push for answers.

Now, even this is under attack. In May, the British government introduced a piece of legislation that would effectively “draw a line under the Troubles,” as outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, granting qualified immunity to perpetrators of crimes committed during the conflict. For many, this would slam the door on any hope for justice.

Raymond McCord has come to blows with loyalist paramilitaries quite a few times. More than once it nearly cost him his life. 

He grew up in a notorious Protestant neighborhood in North Belfast that is intimidating to walk around to this day. Murals of men with balaclavas and machine guns tower over neatly kept houses. “UDA” is freshly spray-painted in red on a utility box, a reference to the Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist paramilitary. All the lamp posts are painted in the colors of the Union Jack — red, white and blue. 

But Raymond has never been one to fall into sectarian divides. When he was a kid, he played soccer on a Catholic team. As the Troubles picked up, Raymond was the last Protestant to stay on it, which counted Bobby Sands, the famous hunger striker, as a player. 

Raymond didn’t join the paramilitaries; he confronted them.

Once, the UDA severely beat him and left him to die with cement planks on his limbs. When he got out of the hospital, Raymond, hobbling on crutches with two broken legs, confronted the brigadier of the UDA at his house.

Raymond’s story, however extraordinary for his resistance, is also typical of the Troubles: a parent robbed of their child. His son, Raymond Jr. was found dead in a quarry beaten to death on November 9, 1997, just months before the Good Friday Agreement.

“People say as time goes by…” Raymond trails off. “It doesn’t get any better. It gets worse.” 

People were arrested for Raymond Jr.’s murder, but they were quickly released and nobody was ever charged. Raymond has blamed a loyalist paramilitary in the Ulster Volunteer Force who was a police informant for his son’s death, and he accused police of protecting him.

“The only thing the police wanted to do was cover Raymond’s murder up,” he said. So Raymond Sr. took the case to the police ombudsman, the watchdog body in charge of investigating allegations of crimes committed by police in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

After a three and a half year investigation, the police ombudsman determined that Raymond was right: a UVF man who was a police informant was indeed a suspect in his son’s murder, but he was never charged.

“I want to see the people charged. I want to see the policemen charged that covered it up in Raymond’s murder too, who were paying these people that were killing,” Raymond told me.

So he sued the chief of staff of the UVF and the men who killed his son in civil court. Days after he launched his lawsuit, police informed him there was a credible threat on his life. He refused to withdraw it.

Raymond McCord may be one of the last people to be able to file a private lawsuit for a murder that occurred during the Troubles. For many victims and survivors seeking truth, justice or accountability, the U.K. is about to pull the rug from underneath them.

The divide feels particularly vast this year. In elections in May, Sinn Fein, the republican party that was the political wing of the IRA during the conflict, won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in history. The prospect of a united Ireland seems closer than ever, something unionists are dead set against.

It is in this context that the U.K. government came up with a plan to close the book on the Troubles. Almost nobody in Northern Ireland — Catholic and Protestant — supports it. Instead of burying the conflict in the past, it’s bringing the anger to the surface.

In July 2021, the British government released the outline for the bill to deal with the legacy of the Troubles which included an amnesty for crimes committed during the conflict. The uproar was immediate and came from all sides. All five major political parties in Northern Ireland came out against it.

The opposition to this bill has become a rare unifying force for groups who still hold a grudge against each other. But there’s perhaps nobody who despises this legislation more than Raymond McCord.

He was already two decades into fighting to bring his son’s killers to court when he heard the news last summer about the U.K. government’s amnesty proposal. He rang a friend whose father was killed in 1992. The two headed to London to protest at Downing Street. Then he gathered nine other victims to form the Truth and Justice Movement. They started calling politicians.

Just a month after the U.K. announced its plans, the group sat down in the Belfast City Hall across the table with politicians from every major political party in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. Raymond circulated a document pledging to reject the U.K.’s amnesty proposal. Every politician signed it. They did the same thing at Westminster. Every political party except the Tories promised to oppose the legislation.

A revised version of the bill was introduced, and it includes substantial changes from the original proposal. Instead of a blanket amnesty, there will be a qualified immunity. The door remains open to prosecution of anyone who does not cooperate with an investigation. The bill creates a commission which will have the power to compel witnesses. There’s also an oral history project that “will allow people to tell their stories and share their experiences.”

Under the new proposed legislation, inquests that have reached a certain point will carry on, and civil action filed before the introduction of the law, like Raymond McCord’s case against paramilitaries in the Ulster Volunteer Force, will be allowed to continue. But other families won’t be able to file new civil lawsuits.

The bill is trying to walk a thin line between aging veterans of the security forces living in fear that they will be the next target of a spurious investigation and the families of victims long denied justice. But to Raymond McCord, the changes don’t make much of a difference. He’s planning to file a legal challenge if the bill does become law.

Francie McGuigan was the first person to break out of Long Kesh, the notorious prison where suspected paramilitaries, the vast majority of whom were Catholic or republican, were held without trial as political prisoners during internment from August 1971 to December 1975. 

He escaped dressed as a priest with an unsuspecting soldier in the passenger’s seat. Francie was driving someone else’s car that he didn’t know how to put in reverse, so he had to ask the soldier to back it up for him as they pulled out of the prison.

Francie grew up in a prominent republican family in Ardoyne, a Catholic working class neighborhood in North Belfast. Nearly every member of his immediate family was interned at one point or another. Francie himself was in the IRA.

In 1971, Francie was sent to prison where he and 13 other men were subjected to “interrogation in depth.” Later, it would be called torture. The 14 prisoners became known as the Hooded Men.

The men were forced to hold stress positions, a hood over their heads, their legs spread apart, fingertips touching the wall supporting their body weight until they collapsed. They were deprived of sleep, food and water. They were taken up in helicopters, told they were hundreds of feet in the air, then pushed out the door, only to learn they weren’t far off the ground.

“There’s no way they let me out of here alive because they’re not going to let me tell the world what they’ve done,” Francie thought at the time.

It was during one of the numerous interrogations that he realized the toll the experience was taking on him. The interrogator asked him to spell his name. He couldn’t spell McGuigan.

The torture lasted seven days. Eventually, the Hooded Men were transported to the jail with other interned prisoners where they wrote down their stories. Francie didn’t think it would make a difference.

“We had no faith or nothing in British justice. We didn’t believe in it, and we didn’t believe it existed. We’ve since proved that we were right,” Francie said.

The Irish government filed a case against the U.K. at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg. There were signs the British would be condemned on an international stage for their treatment of the Hooded Men. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, issued a report accusing the U.K. of torture.

But optimism that there would be accountability was shattered when in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights did not rule that the Hooded Men had been tortured. Instead, the court called the interrogation tactics “inhuman and degrading treatment.”

The United Kingdom was able to wipe its hands of the accusation that officers tortured political prisoners on its own soil. 

When a RTÉ Investigates documentary in 2014 showed new evidence of torture that had not been presented before the European Court of Human Rights, Francie joined forces with the daughter of Seán McKenna, one of the other Hooded Men who was so severely affected that he lived out the rest of his days in a psychiatric hospital before he died in 1975.

They went to court to ask a judge to decide if the police should have investigated allegations of torture by British security forces. After years of appeals all the way up through the highest levels of the U.K.’s legal system, they were vindicated.

On December 15, 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the tactics used against the Hooded Men were “deplorable” and had they happened today, it likely would be considered torture. The court ordered an investigation into the allegations of torture, but crucially, one that was not conducted by Northern Ireland’s police force. The judge in the case did not have faith the police force could be impartial.

When I met Francie in the spring of 2022, the Hooded Men were still in limbo. An investigation hasn’t been opened. The future of that investigation is now even more uncertain.

For days after the murder of his brothers, Eugene Reavey waited for the police to come talk to the family, but nobody did.

“I was expecting something. We got nothing,” he told me.

Decades went by, and the Reavey family tried their best to heal. Along the way, a picture started to form of a secretive murder squad in South Armagh operating in the 1970s. International investigators started to look into evidence that security forces in the army and police had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Known as the Glenanne Gang, they were responsible for more than 120 murders.

An investigation into the Glenanne Gang in the mid-2000s was never completed. Efforts to give victims’ families answers were stalled until, in 2019, a court in Belfast ruled there should be a full report on how the gang operated.

The road to accountability for crimes committed during the Troubles is long, complicated and often stymied by people who have something to lose from the truth coming out. 

For Francie McGuigan and Eugene Reavey, the only way to get closer to that truth has been through the courts, relying on judges to order transparency and accountability that otherwise rarely exists.

There’s a view that “litigation and courts are used as a solution to the problem. And the reality is they’re not. They’re far from a solution, but they are the only solution at the moment,” said Darragh Mackin, a human rights lawyer in Belfast who represents both the Hooded Men and the families of the Glenanne Gang victims.

After the court ruling, the task of investigating alleged collusion by the Glenanne Gang fell to career detective and anti-terrorism expert Jon Boutcher. His team has taken on some of the most politically contentious cases from the conflict, and it has become the gold standard for inquiries into Troubles-era crimes.

“Somebody told me you’re rewriting history,” Boutcher said. “Actually, nobody knows what happened in Northern Ireland because it’s kept behind this curtain of secrecy. I’m setting out what happened.”

For many, Jon Boutcher feels like their last chance to correct the record on what happened to their loved ones. But the future of Operation Kenova may be short-lived. Under the proposed federal legislation, criminal investigations related to the Troubles can only be carried out by a newly created reconciliation commission; its leadership will be appointed by the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland. The work of Operation Kenova would cease. It’s not clear yet whether the new investigative body would take on the Glenanne Gang case.

The door that people like Eugene Reavey fought so hard to open could be slammed shut.

The torture of the Hooded Men and the murder of the Reavey brothers get at one of the most contentious features of the bloody conflict: the role security forces played during the Troubles. Were the army and police keeping the peace, protecting society from terrorists? Or were they active participants? Was it just a few bad apples? Was there a system of impunity or are veterans now the target of a witch hunt?

Tensions have far from disappeared. People on different sides seem to be living in completely different realities, convinced to their core that they are in the right and the other side is evil.

The pervasive narrative throughout the Troubles and into the present is that republican paramilitaries were responsible for the vast majority of violence. You hear the same numbers repeated: 60% of killings were committed by republican paramilitaries, 30% by loyalists and 10% by state security forces. Over half of the people killed were civilians. More than 250 were children under the age of 18.

Brandon Lewis, who was the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland until his resignation in July, has doubled down on this, claiming that “the vast majority of those state-related killings were lawful.”

The breakdown has significant political weight. It has been used to undermine the argument that the British fought a dirty war in Northern Ireland and to bolster the narrative that investigations into state killings are rewriting history in favor of republican paramilitaries by creating the illusion that security officers in uniform were responsible for violent acts to the same degree as groups like the IRA.

Being a policeman or a soldier in Northern Ireland was a dangerous job. I spoke with veterans who were blown up in car bombs and lost limbs or were ambushed and shot, narrowly escaping with their lives. I met one man now in his 80s who drove a school bus and served part-time in the Ulster Defense Regiment, which was part of the British army. He had to be followed by a police car on his bus route because of threats on his life. One day, a bomb under his seat went off. He and the students all survived, but his son later committed suicide due to the trauma.

In all, 1,441 members of the British armed forces, including 197 serving UDR soldiers, were killed during Operation Banner, the deployment that lasted from 1969 to 2007. Another 319 members of the RUC were also killed. Many still live with the scars, either physical or psychological.

But there is a growing body of evidence that there was collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the police ombudsman, the watchdog body tasked with investigating police killings, has found that RUC officers protected members of loyalist paramilitaries and turned a blind eye as those groups armed themselves with weapons later used in sectarian killings.

In 2001, the RUC was dissolved and replaced with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Many of the former officers or soldiers I spoke to see the investigations into members of security forces as a witch hunt coming decades after they risked their lives to keep the peace.

“All the legacy structures are either being designed or are being subverted for the purpose of introducing a false narrative to demonize the police and the security structures and the work that they did,” said Chris Albiston, a former chief constable of the Ulster police.

Albiston is particularly enraged by allegations of widespread collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. Together with his colleagues at the Northern Ireland Retired Police Association, a welfare and lobbying group for former officers, they are using the courts to curtail the power of the ombudsman to release reports concluding collusion occurred.

The police didn’t talk to any witnesses of Paul Whitter’s murder. On April 15, 1981, the 15-year-old boy was walking past a bakery when he was shot in the head by a plastic bullet fired out the window of a tank by the Ulster police in the city that most Protestants call Londonderry and Catholics call Derry. He died 10 days later.

I met his mother, Helen Whitters, exactly 41 years later, around the corner from where he was shot.

“I’ve never spoken to an RUC man. They have never spoken to me, ever, ever, ever,” she said of the government police.

Only once did an officer come to the Whitters’ house.

“They had a black bag with Paul’s clothes, bloodied clothes, and they handed them in and that was it. That was it. Nothing. To this day,” Mrs. Whitters told me.

Paul Whitter’s family is still waiting for answers. The records on his death were sealed until 2059. When the family tried to request them, they were sealed for an additional three decades. The British government released partial files on Paul Whitters’ murder in June, but the rest remain sealed until 2084 — over 100 years after Paul died. Everyone who knew the boy will be gone before the information his mother wants becomes public.

People who are opposed to investigations into crimes that happened during the Troubles sometimes accuse victims of trying to rewrite history. But for decades, the truth was unattainable for many families. Large parts of history were never written.

During the Troubles, there was a system in place to ensure killings by security forces were not investigated. Crimes committed by the army were not handled by the police. Instead the Royal Military Police did an internal review.

Investigations into atrocities committed by paramilitaries were dangerous and difficult. Violent groups were adept at picking up shells and covering their tracks. Authorities risked their lives to go through paramilitary-controlled neighborhoods to examine the scene.

Overall, the rate of investigations and prosecutions during the conflict was dismally low. Only four soldiers were convicted during the Troubles. Even now, only six have been charged.

Investigations that did occur were often heavily flawed. Take, for example, the Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday when British paratroopers opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry on January 30, 1972. Conducted in the immediate aftermath, the report found that soldiers were fired upon first. This was later proven to be false by a public inquiry released in 2010 that took 12 years to complete and cost £195 million, roughly $280 million.

Things only started to change in 2010 when Northern Ireland began to build a judicial system that was not governed by the British one. As Northern Ireland’s first director of public prosecutions that was truly independent from England, Barra McGrory has had a front seat to the decades-delayed effort to write those chapters into history books.

“​​Specifically these British army shootings were never really scrutinized. The odd one was. But by and large, they were never properly investigated. And then all of a sudden, there was a focus on them. And files started to come in,” McGrory said.

Still, the system was overly complex and under-resourced. At the current rate, it will take investigators 20 years to get through the cases in the queue.

For some, transparency would go a long way. As Paul Whitter’s mother told me, “a wee bit of honesty on their part would help, wouldn’t it.”

Eugene Reavey was on his way to the hospital to pick up the bodies of his brothers, John Michael and Brian, on January 5, 1976, the day after their murder at the family’s home.

“And I was coming up that hill. There was a fellow waving his arms frantically,” Eugene told me as we retraced his steps one morning this May.

“I put the window down and he says, ‘Come on up here, quick. There’s been an awful slaughter.’”

Eugene got out of his car and started walking up the hill when he saw it. At first, he thought there had been an accident and a neighbor’s cows were lying on the street. “There was steam rising out of these bodies, you know,” he said. “It was raining.”

It’s as if Eugene can see the bloodied street in his mind’s eye as he described “the smell of death” to me. “It haunts me to this day. And such carnage.”

Almost immediately, the accusations started flying. None of the Reaveys were involved in any paramilitary. But police told people the IRA shot the Reavey brothers because they wouldn’t go along with a plot to kill security forces. Or that Eugene was responsible for the murders at Kingsmill.

“It was the next morning. ‘Eugene Reavey was in the IRA.’ Eugene Reavey was never in the IRA in his fucking life. Or had anything to do with them. And that’s the sort of shit and nonsense that they were coming out with. So we had to put up with that every time they stopped us at a checkpoint,” Eugene told me over breakfast, sipping the second cup of coffee that had gone cold as we talked.

Northern Ireland’s failure to address its contested history has left room for what some historians call permissible lies. In the absence of truth, people fill in their own narratives.

For Eugene, things got worse. For four days after his brothers’ death, police stopped him driving to work, pulled him out of his car and down into a field where they held him on his knees in the river at gunpoint.

“And the water was up to there,” he said, pointing to his chin. “And the big guy takes out a gun and puts it to my head and he says, ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ I say, ‘I don’t fucking know, you needn’t be asking me.’ ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ And that went on five times.”

The rumor that Eugene Reavey was responsible for the Kingsmill killings in which his murdered brothers’ friends, the Protestant brothers Walter and Reggie Chapman perished, persisted for decades.

Twenty-five years later, he was driving home from work when he heard on the radio that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Protestant political party, was going to reveal the killers at Kingsmill on the floor of the House of Commons. Eugene didn’t think much of it until he learned that Paisley had named him as the mastermind of the attack.

“I nearly died. And my wife, god help her, she was nuts.”

Eugene spent years trying to clear his name. It was later proved, after a lengthy legal battle and an investigation by the Historical Equires Team at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that Eugene Reavey had nothing to do with the murders at Kingsmill.

But the damage had been done.

“People I had known for years just turned their back, walked away. Neighbors wouldn’t speak to me,” Eugene said.

“Because no matter where you went. See that man, that’s the man that shot the people at Kingsmill. That went on for years and years and years.”

The area along the Shankill Road in North Belfast, just a few blocks from a peace wall gate that closes at 6pm, is unmistakably Protestant. You don’t have to look hard before you spot the red hand of Ulster, red poppies, the Union Jack.

On one corner, behind a black metal gate, there’s a memorial that has a very different tone from the others that dot the city. It’s not about tradition, history or the bravery of those who fought on one side or another. It’s just angry.

On the walls, there are photos of young children with the captions like “murdered by Sinn Fein/IRA for being Protestant,” or “Sinn Fein/IRA’s slaughter of the innocents.”

Violent images of carnage caused by bombings are intermixed with photos of IRA members who are now in government. I can’t pull my eyes away from one block of photos of terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and an IRA bombing in London: “IRA — Sinn Fein — ISIS no difference,” reads the caption.

The monument is graphic, inflammatory. But it’s only one symbol of the embers of the Troubles that are still burning today.

In Derry, there are indications of the same anger coming from the opposite side. In one mural, two men wearing balaclavas point machine guns. If you stand directly in front of the wall, one of the guns is pointed straight at you. “Unfinished revolution” is written across the top in block letters. Around the city, there are symbols of modern-day paramilitaries, like a sign for the fringe republican group Saoradh with the slogan “salute the men and women of violence.”

These memorials represent the margins. The vast majority in Northern Ireland support the Good Friday Agreement and do not want a return to violence. But these symbols contribute to an ever present uneasiness in the air, a fear that peace is tenuous.

Failing to grapple with the past has kept this anger alive.

“It’s still raw. Every fifth person you stop on that road will know somebody who died, possibly a relative. And that still hurts people,” said Danny Morrison, a former republican political prisoner and former Sinn Fein director of publicity.

“We are, in a sense, captives of the dead.”

The post Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace appeared first on Coda Story.

Many Poles wrestle with 80 years of myths about the legacy of Nazi occupation, believing the country’s “good name” has been betrayed by hostile historians

While the conservative government promotes Polish virtue during World War II and sidelines Jewish victims, some Poles want to see Poland finally reckon with the realities of its 20th century history

Battling History

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic archives of the secret police and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the “IPN law” within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the deportation site on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

“It is vital that such a description and the narrative of the events of German occupation in Nowy Sącz includes an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators of the crime, so that it does not allow for false and inconsistent interpretations.

These expectations are not exaggerated and unfounded, as we, Poles, have been facing attempts to shift the responsibility for German crimes onto the Polish people. Such attempts are particularly disgusting and unjust, taking into account our tragic war and occupation experience in the period of 1939-1945.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” in 2012, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial. 

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S. 

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 military officers and Polish elite by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. 

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemorated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

“The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country,” read a statement from Polish parliament on the opening of the Markowa museum.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Nine urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law. 

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: “I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group. 

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic. 

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down. 

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration. 

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.

[CORRECTION 08/02/2023 10:00 AM EDT]: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed former President Barack Obama’s statement about “Polish death camps” to a 2012 visit to Warsaw. The comments were made in Washington, D.C. in 2012 at a ceremony posthumously honoring Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.]

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To mark the occasion, European Union flags are flying above all government buildings in the capital Tbilisi — the Georgian government, although criticized for its meek response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, did apply for EU membership two years ahead of schedule — and the city spent much of the week preparing for annual festivities. 

But away from all the usual fanfare, a small, privately organized exhibition in one of Tbilisi’s hip venues reflected the lack of historic reckoning that makes Georgia’s independence ever so fragile.

The idea for the exhibition was hatched after a group of Ukrainian journalists contacted their colleagues at Tabula magazine in Tbilisi. The Ukrainians asked them for evidence of atrocities committed by Russians in the early 1990s during the internecine conflict in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, when Georgian troops and paramilitaries, Abkhaz forces, local civilians, as well as fighters from the Russian Federation fought a brutal war strafed by massive human rights abuses on all sides.

“It took the massacre in Bucha for us to dig into our own past,” says Tamara Chergoleishvili, founder of Tabula and the organizer of the exhibition called “Before Bucha there was Abkhazia.” “I was shocked by what we found, but even more so by how little we know and understand.”

Chergoleishvili discovered that in 1994, Georgia had set up a national investigative commission to look into whether atrocities committed against the Georgians amounted to a genocide. The commission interviewed nearly 25,000 victims of the war and identified 800 people, including members of the Russian military, who participated in human rights violations in Abkhazia. Tabula obtained and shared with me a summary of the findings that detail many of the horrific atrocities that took place. In 1999, the Georgian prosecutors office, using the commission’s report, launched an investigation into the war and sent the report’s summary to the UN in Geneva. But nothing came out of either.

Several people featured in the exhibition testify to what happened in 1993 in a village called Akhaldaba, where 300 ethnic-Georgian residents were held hostage in a local school. Militiamen separated men from women and children. Many of the men have never been seen since, while women and girls were tortured and raped.

“I felt ashamed. These people, the refugees from that war, still live among us, with enormous trauma of what they have been through, and yet, we never acknowledge it, never ask them whether they are okay,” Chergoleishvili said. 

The war in Georgia’s Black Sea province of Abkhazia flared up in the wake of the Soviet collapse: ethnic Abkhaz did not want to be part of an independent Georgia, while the province’s predominantly Georgian population did. In villages like Akhalba, situated in the Abkhazia region but inhabited mostly by ethnic Georgians, this brought violent confrontations of the worst kind.

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Moscow promoted this rivalry, fanned the flames of ethnic tensions and — once the fighting began — provided weapons, military personnel and propaganda support to the Abkhaz side.  

In years to come, the Kremlin’s role in Abkhazia would become a blueprint for Russia’s approach to conflicts from Moldova’s Transnistria to Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Donbas in Ukraine. “Remember the little green men in Crimea?” asks Malkhaz Pataraia, a refugee still living in Tbilisi who co-founded “Abkhaz Council,” an umbrella platform for many organizations that represent victims of the war. “I have met them in Abkhazia.”

The “little green men” were Russian soldiers Vladimir Putin sent to Crimea without insignia so that he could unofficially establish (and lie about) Russian military presence in the peninsula. Moscow has always denied their soldiers fought in that war, but unlike Ukraine, Russian disinformation about Abkhazia went unchecked and unchallenged for years.

By the time most international organizations arrived in Abkhazia at the end of 1993, Georgian forces and nearly 250,000 Georgian residents had been driven out and nearly 10,000 people had been killed on both sides. Numerous UN fact-finding missions and international investigations like this one by Human Rights Watch all came to similar conclusions: horrible atrocities were committed by both sides, including bombardment of civilian targets by the Russian air force. In subsequent years, the ethnic cleansing and massacres of Georgians were officially recognized by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conventions during the Budapest, Lisbon and Istanbul summits. 

But unlike the war in Ukraine, which has been meticulously documented and full of compelling human stories delivered straight to our feeds, the narrative around Abkhazia is still weaved with the mind-numbing language of international organization reports.  

The geopolitical mood was also radically different. Until very recently, Western policies towards Russia were underpinned by a belief in a possibility of a democratic, Western-friendly Kremlin. Reluctance to undermine that possibility meant that slagging off Moscow was frowned upon. 

“No one wanted to hear about things Russians were doing to us,” said Pataraia, the refugee from Abkhazia. But his definition of “nobody” includes Georgians — both the government and citizens. While it is today a widely accepted truism that Georgians have not been able to face the terrible atrocities that their side committed in Abkhazia, the war in Ukraine suggests that Georgians also have been unable to face their own trauma. 

Pataraia believes that inertia and Russia both played a role in ensuring that stories of suffering and questions of responsibility remained buried. And today, it is clear how this lack of historic reckoning backfired and played into the Kremlin’s hand. Sweeping the stories of victims under a proverbial carpet and locking memories into the furthest corners of consciousness created a vacuum, an ambiguity that the Kremlin masterfully exploited.

For both Abkhaz and Georgians, the conflict became a wound that oozed instability, crime and violence. As politicians failed, survivors suffered. Many of their stories had been collected but never properly told.

Venera Mishveliani, a Georgian refugee from Akhaldaba, told Tabula that some of those who held her hostage in the school were Russian. In a 2009 documentary called “Russian Lessons” filmmaker Andrey Nekrasov featured both victims from the school and a Russian who claims to have been there. 

In the film, Naira Kalandia, a doctor, describes being stopped by “blonde men” speaking Russian “with no accent” who emptied their magazine into her 17-year-old son. She was taken hostage and held, for nine days, along with others, in a building of a local kindergarten. “They used an electrical wire to hang me upside down from the ceiling in a library room, and underneath they burned children’s books,” she tells the camera. The scenes she describes are horrific: one day, she says, soldiers forced her to swallow an eye removed from one of the corpses. Another, she was forced to watch how militia threw hostages into a deep well.

“We were mostly Russian and Armenian, maybe 20% of us in the unit were Abkhaz,” says a man who describes himself as a Russian soldier, who volunteered to join a unit of “ground troops” because he wanted to “help the small Abkhaz nation.” He says he was quickly disillusioned.

“Seeing people thrown into a well was really unpleasant,” he says “I did not like it. I did not like how naked girls, ages 12, 15 would be brought to our base.”

Akhaldaba is next to a town where I spent much of my childhood. My grandmother was among 250,000 Georgian refugees who eventually fled the war in Abkhazia. To her very last days, she talked about her dreams of returning to her house by the sea, or visiting my grandfather’s grave in the hills above it. But we never spoke about the horrors that took place in villages we both considered home. There was an awareness of them, but never a conversation — not in my family and not in the larger society. “Everyone deals with trauma differently, we buried it,” Chergoleishvili said. 

This burial, Pataraia told me, brought the horrors of the war back in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, slicing away more territory both in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Georgia has pushed for justice for the victims of the 2008 war, filing and winning a case in the International Criminal Court. They also fought and won a case in Strasbourg Court of Human Rights over forcible deportations of Georgians from Moscow in 2006. But the search for justice for the victims of the Abkhazia war has not even begun. 

Could the war in Ukraine jumpstart the process? Pataraia’s organization is campaigning for the Georgian parliament to adopt a declaration deeming abuses against Georgians in Abkhazia a “genocide” just like Ukrainians have done. He also wants the prosecutors office to resume an investigation into the war crimes committed in Abkhazia and then, eventually to push for international justice.

 “We owe it to the victims,” he says.

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This was not part of the Russian Federation’s renewed assault on the Donbas and eastern Ukraine, but rather the extensive rehearsals for the May 9 Victory Day parades. This year the Russian state has invested its annual commemoration of Soviet victory in the Second World War — its statement of military might — with additional significance. Video clips of the rehearsals in Moscow and St. Petersburg circulated on social media. Spectators posed for photographs and videos, Russian press agencies circulated videos and details of the rehearsals on their telegram channels, western news outlets shared footage. Preparations for Moscow’s parade began much earlier. By April 19 soldiers were already pounding the parade ground in Albino, a small rural town outside Moscow.

In the late Soviet era details of Victory Day parades were closely guarded secrets. But in 2022 the Russian Ministry of Defense released detailed plans of the parade order, including the units, weapons, and aircraft involved. Victory Day preparations can be followed more closely than ever before.

The centrality of May 9 in the Russian national calendar and consciousness seems well established, an almost inviolable moment in Russian public life. In April 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, preparations for the 75th anniversary of the Second World War’s end continued. The rehearsals of nearly 15,000 soldiers tightly packed on the Albino military proving ground were memorably captured in a video, featuring some expressive Russian swearing, which went viral on social media. The parade was not canceled but rather postponed for two months.

It is testimony to the power of the public ritual and its propaganda value that they have been understood as a sacred element of national war memory with deep historical roots. May 9 and Victory Day commemorations, however, were at heart an invented tradition, a carefully choreographed statement of memory politics with a long and complicated history. It might seem, at least superficially, that Putin’s regime continued a Soviet tradition, but the reality as many historians have demonstrated was more complicated. Victory Day parades invoke history and exploit historical symbols, but they have also shaped history and its meaning.

According to the Ministry of Defense, 11,000 soldiers, 131 units of military hardware, and 77 aircraft have been involved in and will participate in Moscow’s parade. The RIA Novosti press agency has reported that a group of MiG-29 fighter jets will overfly Red Square in a Z formation, “in support of members of the special operation in Ukraine.”

There has been speculation for weeks that Vladimir Putin required decisive military breakthroughs and tangible victories to present before the people at the May 9 parades; that Putin will formally declare war on Ukraine in a May 9 speech on Red Square, dismantling the notion of his “special military operation” and issue a general mobilization; and even more recently that Russia will include 500 Ukrainian Prisoners of War, a clear contravention of the Geneva convention. These predictions may turn out to be true, but they all attest to the enduring importance of Victory Day in the Russian, and indeed to the western, political imagination.

Whereas Europe marked Victory Day on May 8, 1945, the Soviet Union’s announcement of victory came one day later, on May 9. It became the date on which the anniversary of the war’s end in Europe was marked, overshadowing the end of the war in the Soviet East in September 1945. The celebrations in 1945 that marked May 9 were spontaneous and unscripted. People gathered on the streets to sing, dance, and drink, celebrations independent of the Stalinist party-state. The first Victory Parade took weeks of planning and was scheduled for June 24, 1945. 40,000 soldiers from specially selected regiments marched across Red Square, as Stalin and other party leaders watched from Lenin’s mausoleum.

As befitted a closely choreographed propaganda spectacle, it was filmed and photographed for posterity. It signaled a return to a more regimented post-war politics, society, and culture, reinforcing the Stalin cult. All subsequent victory parades were in dialogue with this occasion. It is no coincidence that the website giving details of the units participating in the 2022 parade also publishes documents from Ministry of Defense archives detailing preparations for the first victory parade.

The June 24, 1945 parade was a dramatic moment in Stalinist public culture, but this effort was not sustained. On May 9 of the following year, in 1946, the day was not marked by a military parade. Indeed, May 9 was recategorized as a normal working day in late 1946, with the result that victory day in May 1947 was afforded less attention. This is often understood as the beginning of a more repressive phase of memory politics. It was not that the state encouraged forgetting; much about the war was too painful and divisive to be confronted. For nearly two decades Victory Day was marked by informal get-togethers of old comrades, political meetings, and firework displays, not grandiose military parades.

It was not until 1965 and the 20^th anniversary of the war’s end, that another parade was organized. They were reserved for landmark anniversaries in 1985, 1990, and only becoming an annual fixture after the 50^th anniversary in 1995. What seems like a deeply rooted historical ritual is relatively new.

Common elements, for example the prominence of the Victory Banner, remain. Yet throughout the post-Soviet period the dynamics of memory on display were in flux. The commemorations of the 1990s were more modest than Soviet parades, a product of economic crises, restricted budgets, and the collapse of the Soviet symbolic repertoire.

Under Vladimir Putin, however, a slicker presentation has signaled a more assertive Russia, trumpeting its military might and great power ambitions to domestic and international audiences. Putin’s first parade in 2000 was just two days after his first presidential inauguration. Since 2005 the media management of victory parades has become increasingly sophisticated. Clever camera shots and polished productions have turned the parade into a media event, choreographed for viewers at home. 

It has become the most important holiday in the civic calendar, commemorating a moment in the national past that all citizens are told they can proudly celebrate. There was a time when foreign politicians, statesmen, and diplomats attended Victory Day parades. In May 1995, for example, Bill Clinton and John Major both attended. But, since 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, foreign, particularly western leaders, have ceased attending.

As the number of remaining veterans of and eyewitnesses to the Second World War dwindles, Russian war memory has ossified, becoming as clunky as the T-34 tanks that have become a commemorative prop. Approaching war memory through the prism of a sacred victory has long served to justify the sacrifice and loss of life in war but creates difficulty with the multiple stands of the Soviet and Russian war experience that sit uncomfortably with this framework. So much of the horror of war, the pain, suffering and human costs are excluded from this sanitizing celebration of victory and heroism.

The set-piece parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg frame Victory Day through the priorities and objectives of the state. War memory has long been harnessed for political purposes. But people do not always operate within the official structures of memory. Since 2011, when its popularity grew, some Russians have participated in Immortal Regiment parades, where citizens carry photographs of deceased relatives who participated in the Second World War. 

Others might watch a Soviet war film on television, visit a relative’s grave, or finish a bottle. Beyond the Red Square pomp, local war memories and commemorative practices abound. A recent volume of essays has examined how Victory Day celebrations are marked in cities, locales, and spaces across Russia, in formerly Soviet occupied territories in eastern Europe, and beyond. It demonstrates how commemorative activity can be local and regional, how these have changed over time and frequently depart from official scripts.

Outside Russia, diasporic communities have long structured their own Victory Day commemorations around Soviet war memorials in their cities and communities. In 2015 Immortal Regiment parades were organized in over forty countries, many of these with significant Russian communities.

On May 9, 2022, eyes will be focused on Red Square, ears on Vladimir Putin’s words.  However, a better indication of changing memory politics and the importance of the cult of the Great Patriotic War to Russian political culture may be apparent in how Victory Day is marked in Russian occupied Ukraine.

Putin made a surprise visit to Crimea on Victory Day in 2014. And since 2015, Victory Day parades were unfurled in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s republics, which frequently featured military equipment in contravention of the 2015 Minsk agreements. What happens in Kherson, Melitopol, and Berdyansk, all Russian occupied cities, may be as instructive as the ceremony on Red Square.

Regardless of where Victory Day is marked, the use and abuse of history and war memory is likely to be intermingled with Russian nationalism, militarism, and wider geopolitics. It will be a toxic combination.

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning book brings readers into the lives of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Holocaust survivor, and his rebellious cartoonist son, Art. The novel unspools two parallel journeys: Art’s attempts to document, understand and ultimately write a graphic novel about his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Vladek’s terrifying odyssey from pre-war Poland to Auschwitz. 

As the novel flashes between past and present — from Art’s experiences pleading with his father to tell him his story, to Vladek’s path to the camps — two figures hover like ghosts over its pages. There is Art’s mother, Anja, who survived the Holocaust with Vladek but took her own life decades later, and Art’s older brother Richieu, who died during the war at the age of six, before Art was born. Throughout the text, Anja and Richieu are ever-present reminders of all that was lost during, and after, the war. 

Maus explores how those traumas haunt the two survivors of the nuclear family — Art and Vladek — whose relationship is both tender and deeply tumultuous. Vladek admonishes Art when he shows up at his home late; Art shuts down his father’s appeals for a closer relationship. In one scene, Art explodes at Vladek when he learns his father burned Anja’s diaries after her suicide. 

“God damn you!” he fumes. “You murderer!” Vladek recoils. “To your father you yell this way? Even to your friends you should never yell this way.”

The novel’s experimental qualities are not limited to Spiegelman’s fluid use of present and past. He also famously depicted all the characters in the book as having human bodies, but the heads of other creatures: Jews are drawn in the book as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Brits as fish, Americans as dogs and Swedes as reindeer. This device, which has fueled decades of controversy about the book, carries with it a subversive playfulness, giving readers some emotional distance from the story while simultaneously reappopriating the antisemitic trope of Jews as vermin, which was common in Nazi propaganda. The cover of the book also prominently features a swastika looming above Vladek and Anja.

But when the McMinn County school board convened, its members were not there to dissect the book’s family psychodrama or its characters’ emotional complexities. Instead, they voiced their objections to a handful of swear words in the book and a partially obscured cartoon image of a topless woman.

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” one board member argued. “We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

After some back and forth, the board voted unanimously to withdraw the book from the curriculum. Minutes from the discussion were later published on the district’s website. Local media soon reported on the ban, and it quickly snowballed into an international news story, unleashing a flood of headlines and editorials.

“They’re totally focused on some bad words that are in the book,” said Spiegelman, in a CNN interview about the ban. “I think they’re so… afraid of having to defend the decision to teach Maus that it led to this kind of daffily myopic response.”

But was it really just swear words and nudity that made the board uncomfortable? Another person who spoke at the meeting referred to the book’s depiction of Nazi violence, pointing to an image from the novel showing four mice, representing Polish Jews, who were executed in the town square where Vladek lived. 

“It shows people hanging, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he asked. “It is not wise or healthy.”

“I can understand why people would feel cautious about that kind of violence,” said Hillary Chute, an English professor at Northeastern University who co-authored the 2011 book MetaMaus with Spiegelman, which describes Spiegelman’s process and explores the public reception of the text. 

“But the idea that this school in Tennessee is promoting it by showing it seems wrong to me. If they want to use the Holocaust in their eighth-grade curriculum, they’re going to have to figure out what they want because there is no kinder, gentler Holocaust. And that’s part of the power of Maus as a book.”

“Maus doesn’t wrap up the trauma narrative,” she added. “The book is very much about Vladek’s experience and not a watered-down version of it. And part of his experience is the swastika. Its horror and its power.”

Chute suggested the school board’s real objection to the text has much more to do with the horrors it depicts. She compared the charge of promoting violence with concerns about the book’s use of swastika imagery. In both cases, critics decontextualize these images, and portray the text as promoting — instead of testifying to — the violence and Nazi propaganda that Vladek witnessed.

The McMinn County school board’s response to Maus follows a longstanding American tradition of paranoia around comics, and in some cases, all-out censorship. In the McCarthy era, fears of the genre’s “corrupting” influence on youth ushered in a moral panic that was on full display at a 1954 congressional hearing on the links between comics and juvenile delinquency. This gave rise to a set of rules known as The Comics Code, which sought to eliminate objectionable content like sex and violence from comic books and similar media. The Code was finally shelved in 2011.

Biz Nijdam, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia whose research explores the intersection of comics and history, said peoples’ comic-related anxieties, born out in censorship and banning efforts, speak to the medium’s unique ability to engage readers at the visual level. 

“The way that visual media can articulate things that we can’t express with words scares people,” she told me. “And really conservative readers are afraid of what it will do to our children, because of the emotional response it creates in its reader. People can’t really do the work of ensuring that readers are reading things correctly, so instead, they just censor it.”

McMinn County is not the only place where the pioneering text has struck a nerve. While the book has been translated into at least thirty languages and is celebrated as one of the most influential graphic novels in history, it has also courted controversy all over the world. In its earlier days, Maus was scorned in Israel. It has been censored in Russia, and narrowly escaped the same fate in Germany. In Poland, Maus was subject to a staged book-burning, and its publishers were formally accused of “defaming” the nation.

The cover of Maus, which we cannot show here due to copyright protections, depicts the large face of a cartoon cat, at the center of a massive swastika. Two mice wearing long coats huddle beneath the startling symbol. The book’s depictions of swastikas, on the cover and throughout its pages, have been a top target of censorship threats outside the U.S.

Maus was taken out of bookstores in Russia in 2014, after the Duma passed a law forbidding Nazi propaganda and insignia, including swastikas. Russian booksellers had little choice but to remove copies of the text from their shelves, effectively erasing a work of Holocaust survivor testimony — under the auspices of rooting out Nazi propaganda. 

The cover of the book also caused problems after it was sent to a publisher in Germany, where it is illegal to display the swastika. The publisher asked Spiegelman to remove the swastika from the cover, but he refused. It was only after Spiegelman’s editor found a loophole in the law that allowed for the publication of Nazi imagery in works of serious historical research, a designation given to Maus, that the book was published.

In an eerie twist, Germany’s publication of the book, swastikas and all, made it a desirable object for at least one neo-Nazi who couldn’t find the image elsewhere. In MetaMaus, Spiegelman recalled watching a documentary about Germany’s skinheads and unexpectedly catching a glimpse of a Maus poster in a neo-Nazi’s bedroom. “It was the only swastika he could get, poor fella!” he joked.

Once it was published in Germany, Spiegelman wrote in MetaMaus that its reception was “intense.” He described being confronted by a reporter at a book fair in Frankfurt, who asked him if he thought a comic book about Auschwitz was in “bad taste.” Spiegelman told him no. 

“I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste,” he replied. 

A few years later, Spiegelman traveled to Germany to accept an award for the German edition of the book. “It’s a strange thing for a mouse to receive an award from a gathering of cats, for telling a story of how cats killed mice,” he told the audience. “Giving me this award could be seen as the result of a guilty conscience, a kind of War Reparations to a child of a survivor.”

In Israel today, Maus is largely heralded as a groundbreaking work of historical testimony. But when it was published decades ago, the book’s reception was not so warm. Spiegelman’s Israeli publisher was threatened with a libel suit by the descendant of a character in the book, who Spiegelman depicted as a Nazi-installed Jewish policeman in Poland. At a 1997 lecture about the novel in Tel Aviv, Cornell University linguistics professor Dorit Abusch was met with boos, cries of protest and even a walkout. 

“[The audience] found it very insulting, the combination between comics and the Holocaust,” Abusch told me. “Because comics are perceived as low art, funny, vulgar. And the Holocaust is a very serious and tragic subject. So, the combination kind of disturbed them.”

But opinions have shifted in the country over the years. The website of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, now includes a page about Maus and its educational value. Spiegelman’s exploration of transgenerational trauma and his fraught relationship with his father also inspired a new genre of the graphic novel dealing specifically with Holocaust testimony. 

“If you look at the small library of Holocaust memoirs to come out after that, they’re really all in dialogue with Maus,” the comics scholar Nijdam explained. 

One example is the Israeli illustrator Michel Kichka’s graphic novel, Second Generation: Things I Never Told My Father, which was published in Hebrew in 2013 and reflects on the formative moments in his childhood with a survivor father. Kichka told Haaretz the idea for his book was born out of reading Maus for the first time. 

“I felt a strong connection between myself and Spiegelman from the very moment I sat on a bench in the street and read it from cover to cover,” he said. “It wasn’t just the fact that we’re both cartoonists, but also the similarities between our stories and our father’s stories.”

Spiegelman’s book was also hugely influential for comic artists who didn’t share his family’s Holocaust past, but sought to explore their own cultural histories and identities through the graphic form. Gene Luen Yang, the cartoonist who wrote the 2006 graphic novel and National Book Award finalist “American Born Chinese,” told the Washington Post he first read Maus in his late teens. “Art Spiegelman set the standard for the rest of us… He gave us something to chase after.” 

Since the publication of Maus, memoirs have become a beloved subgenre of graphic novels, establishing a new medium for authors and readers to engage with history and memory.

The book’s most dramatic reaction came from Poland. Spiegelman’s decision to portray non-Jewish Poles as cartoon pigs was met with widespread anger and offense inside and outside of Poland, and continues to be a source of controversy today. 

Maus was translated into Polish and published by Polish journalist Piotr Bikont in 2001. Soon thereafter, an angry crowd staged a protest in front of Bikont’s office and set the book ablaze. During the demonstration, Bikont donned a pig mask and waved at the protestors from his office window. 

“As he described it to me, he said he felt like the King of Denmark who wore a yellow star out of solidarity with the Jews,” Spiegelman recalled in MetaMaus. “He put on his pig mask in solidarity with the Poles who were burning the book.”

Even outside Poland, the pig metaphor and the novel’s portrayal of Polish people have generated pushback. They made it all the way to Pasadena, California, where, about a decade ago, a Polish American asked the city’s public library system to take Maus off shelves over its depiction of Polish people. “Maus made him uncomfortable, so he didn’t want other people to read it,” explained an employee of the library in a 2012 article. It’s a criticism that lingers even today. 

Of the Polish reaction, Spiegelman suggested in MetaMaus: “There seems to be something deeply problematic about the Polish ability to assimilate the past. It proves that the book actually hit something alive, a nerve that needs to be cauterized.”

Tomasz Lysak, an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Warsaw, shed some light on that same sensitivity.

“The official line of Polish commemoration is the Holocaust was a great tragedy, but we couldn’t really do anything about it,” he explained. “We were trying to help but couldn’t do too much.” 

Lysak believes part of the response is rooted in a feeling that Poland needs to defend itself and its reputation abroad — it reflects a discomfort with stories that contradict nationally sanctioned narratives around the war and the Holocaust. Critics of the book’s pig metaphor, he added, “could be offended by the fact that most Poles are represented in a way that doesn’t show them in a good light. But we have to take into consideration the fact that this is a Holocaust survival story. And Vladek Spiegelman ended up in Auschwitz because of some actions of Polish characters in the past.”

In MetaMaus, Spiegelman reflected on the different cultural responses to Maus he saw while promoting the book and conducting interviews for it at various points in time. In Sweden, Spiegelman described feeling othered — but in a good-natured way — recalling the time a journalist cheerily compared him to Woody Allen. In France, which has a rich tradition of comic art, the book’s graphic form was embraced and taken seriously, with small-time newspapers analyzing the novel’s artistic choices and illustrations. In Italy, interviewers seemed more interested in the book’s tumultuous father-son relationship than in its narration of the Holocaust and Second World War.

It can be hard to parse through the parallels between these objections at first blush. Some people are mad about cartoon pigs. Others are upset about comic nudity. Many are plainly uncomfortable with the book’s depictions of Nazi violence and propaganda, even though they were a central part of Vladek’s experience of the Holocaust. But among those people who criticized the text in the U.S. and Poland especially, you can see a pattern emerge, in which peoples’ discomfort with the history Spiegelman presents is displaced onto the comic form.

Polish critics who rejected Spiegelman’s work seemed unable to see themselves in this story of a Polish Jewish man who survived the Holocaust and encountered both kind and cruel Polish people along the way. For some, the simpler response was to reject the cartoon image of themselves. As Nijdam put it, “Instead of being upset about the history, they’re upset about the pigs.” 

The McMinn County school board’s rejection of the book can also be seen as an expression of unease with a form of storytelling that does not offer redemption through suffering or make heroes out of its protagonists, but rather, presents the history, and its characters, without sentimentalization or embellishments. 

Spiegelman’s honesty, ambiguity and lack of satisfying resolution run counter to the very American (and Hollywood-esque) impulse to search for heroism, or redemption, out of pain. He refuses to refract the horrors of the Holocaust into a cathartic moral takeaway and is untethered to the need to present the Jewish experience in the war with a neat and tidy resolution.  

Spiegelman himself may have said it best in MetaMaus when explaining his decision to present Vladek in all of his complexities: “It had never occurred to me to try to create a heroic figure, and certainly not to create a survivor who’s ennobled by his suffering — a very Christian notion, the survivor as martyr. And that meant a warts-and-all relationship that included being really unpleasant.”

The post Banned, burned and critically acclaimed: Global reactions to a Holocaust survival story appeared first on Coda Story.

Otherwise, the 47-year-old knew plenty about his roots. He grew up steeped in his family’s stories, and fears, about Mississippi. He knew his ancestors were enslaved on a sprawling plantation about twenty miles outside of the picturesque town where William Faulkner grew up, and some of them were buried in a nearby cemetery lined with weathered headstones. He knew the slave owners of the plantation were Irish, and he knew, through a DNA test, that he had some Irish heritage, too. And he knew, from a story passed down from his grandmother, that a white man thrust a double-barrel gun in his great-grandfather’s mouth and stole his land. 

He just never knew about the lynching. Until he saw the photo.

The first time Tarrell caught a glimpse of the plantation, a chill came over his body. “You could feel it,” he recalled, winding down a lonely road in Mississippi. It was a stormy day in mid-December, and we were driving to the property where his ancestors were enslaved. The sky was dark and moody, and tall weeds shivered in the wind. The weight of it all hung in the air. “It’s heavy,” he told me, pulling up to a white house overlooking an open field.

Tarrell led me to a tangle of brush at the edge of the house’s lawn. He crouched down, scanning the earth for a budding rosemary plant. When he found it, he gave me a nod. “Here’s where we did it,” he said, pointing to the dirt. We were looking at the de-facto grave of William Steen, whose lynching was swallowed up by more than a century of silence.

Growing up, Tarrell knew nothing about Steen’s death, or that they were related. Nobody in his family did. Like many lynchings of that era, there are few public accounts of what happened. What we do know comes from two short newspaper articles published in the days after the killing: Steen, a former employee at a railroad shop, was hung by a mob on July 30, 1893, near Paris, Mississippi, about 30 minutes down the road from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “He boasted of being criminally intimate with an estimable white woman,” explained an article published the day after the killing. A second article described Steen as a “negro of ill-repute.”

It’s unclear if Steen was buried, or when the memory of his death began to fade. By the time Tarrell learned about it, nearly 130 years had passed. “I feel like I’m the voice for the dead,” he said.

Tarrell found out about two years ago while scrolling through his Facebook newsfeed. That’s when he came across a picture from America’s national lynching memorial of a rust-colored rectangular column inscribed with the names of seven lynching victims from Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Tarrell lived. He clicked on the photo and glanced at the names. When he saw William Steen, he paused. He knew he was related to a line of Steens from the same part of Mississippi. Could he have ties to this one?

Tarrell messaged the author of the Facebook post. She told him the lynching took place near the plantation where his family was enslaved, and the general area where they later lived. Tarrell reached out to a few family genealogy experts, and they began investigating the connection. Eventually, they concluded that Steen, the lynching victim, was the brother or cousin of Tarrell’s great-great-great grandfather.

Tarrell shared his findings with the members of the racial justice group documenting local lynchings, and they decided to arrange a long-overdue memorial for Steen in May 2021. Tarrell chose the property of the former plantation because of its proximity to his family’s ancestral cemetery. About 60 people showed up, including many of Tarrell’s relatives.

The realization bowled Tarrell over. He couldn’t believe that if he hadn’t checked Facebook, the whole story would have been wiped from his family’s memory. But he also didn’t think any of it would have been particularly surprising to people in Mississippi. The first time Tarrell drove to the former plantation, about a decade ago, a white friend told him to call her in two hours or she would alert the local chief of police. “They’re still active out there,” she warned. “The Klan.”  

When I traveled with Tarrell to the site of the former plantation and Steen memorial, about thirty minutes after we arrived, Tarrell led me to a tall cluster of weeds along the side of the road. He wanted to show me a historical marker identifying the nearby cemetery as a burial site for Black families after the Civil War. “Somebody shot bullets in it,” he said. But as Tarrell sifted through the brush, he realized the historical marker was nowhere to be found. He turned to me, incredulous.

“Somebody took it,” he said.

Steen was one of about 6,500 Black Americans lynched in a cluster of Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Mississippi was home to more lynchings than any other state in the country. Its legacy of violence stretches right up to the modern day — haunting family histories, memory, and behavior. When Tarrell’s grandmother learned he was quietly courting a white girl in high school, in the 1990s, she had an immediate, angry response: You could get lynched. “Those goddamn white folks gonna hang you,” she fumed. She wanted to protect him from the Mississippi she knew.

Lynchings weren’t hidden. They were often a deliberately public spectacle, drawing throngs of cheery white spectators who posed, smiling, in photos in front of the brutalized bodies, or brought home pieces of the victims as mementos. Like the Black man burned at the stake in 1899, dismembered, and sliced “into pieces, bones crushed into small bits and disposed of as souvenirs,” according to a newspaper account from the time. To deepen the terror, mobs would occasionally deposit victims’ mutilated bodies in Black neighborhoods and communities. In 1917, thousands sung Confederate hymns as they watched a Black man burned alive and decapitated in Tennessee. His severed head was then thrown onto Memphis’ Beale Street, the epicenter of the city’s Black business district. Such public, brutal displays of violence were intended to send an unambiguous message to Black Americans: Stay in your place, or else. 

The federal government tried, and failed, to step in. By the 1950s, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, but not one of them passed; they were often thwarted by Southern white Senators. The consequences of inaction were deep and long-lasting. “More than the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching helped regulate and restrict all aspects of Black advancement, independence, and citizenship in many small towns for half a century,” wrote Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in “On the Courthouse Lawn,” an examination of lynchings in the 1900s. Even today, research has found that the Southern counties with the highest rates of lynching also have the lowest rates of Black voter registration.

Lynchings were so traumatizing that some witnesses stayed silent about them their entire lives.

Tarrell belongs to a movement popping up from Arkansas to Alabama attempting to awaken the country’s memory of these dormant histories, by marking the landscape with echoes of its violent past. 

Despite thousands of documented lynchings, America’s first national lynching memorial did not open until 2018 – in Alabama, where an estimated 300 Black Americans were lynched from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and Confederate Memorial Day is still an official state holiday.

After more than a century of failed attempts, the U.S. Senate — for so long an obstacle to federal anti-lynching legislation — finally approved a bill designating lynching as a hate crime punishable up to 30 years in prison. On March 29, 2022, President Biden signed the historic bill into law. Still, as the country tiptoes toward a truth, it remains disabled by the long tail of its silence.

Silence distorts memory in various ways. It can happen when a nation, collectively, refuses to engage with the realities of its past, opening up space for revisionist histories and feel good counter-narratives that gloss over the horrors of the past. Sometimes national silence is summoned as an act of avoidance; other times, to serve a political or ideological agenda.

But silence also flows from the collective to the individual. A society can forget on a mass scale, not when the government imposes amnesia as a political project, but when people refuse to look within — to dig into the messy and complex family biographies that turn memory into a landmine, and forgetting into a psychological salve. Even the country held up as the global exemplar of historical reconciliation, Germany, is still haunted by the ghosts of family memory and perpetrator guilt. 

When it comes to facing the past, Germany is often praised as the poster child of success. The country even has a specific term for the painful process of reconciliation that unfolded in the decades after the Holocaust: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.

The word, which has no equivalent in English, means “working off of the past.” It is occasionally used interchangeably with the English phrase “memory culture” to describe Germany’s wide-ranging and layered approach to Holocaust memory, which includes literature, education, art, popular culture, and physical memorials. I first learned the term in an email with a German historian while preparing to travel to Berlin. I began to use it almost obsessively when I arrived, and not just because there was absolutely no way I could pronounce Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. The idea of a collective, nationally sanctioned culture of remembrance intrigued me, maybe because it felt so impossible to imagine in America, a country perpetually at war with itself over how to remember the past (see: Critical Race Theory).

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung did not unfold easily or quickly, however. Most Germans were not particularly eager to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust after the war. Although the Allies imposed a denazification program in West Germany, its government was still chock full of former members of the Reich a decade after the war; in 1957, nearly 80% of senior officials in West Germany’s Justice Ministry were former Nazis.

Meanwhile, narratives of victimhood were pervasive across Germany. There was a widespread feeling among Germans that they suffered tremendously during the war, and were its real victims. In the late 1960s, a wave of youth activism began to challenge some of these attitudes, as a younger generation moved to confront the country — and their parents — over its Nazi past.

A decade later, the release of the 1978 American  television miniseries “Holocaust” had an enormous cultural impact across Germany. Nearly 20 million West Germans tuned in to watch the show about a fictional Jewish family. It brought many viewers into the lives and stories of victims for the first time, and is widely seen as catalyzing the country’s reckoning.

In the 1990s, another crucial shift occurred when Germany reunified and memory culture became absorbed by the state: “In order to become accepted globally, a lot of money was put into mastering one’s past, putting up commemoration sites and museums,” Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, a German historian and the director of Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism, told me. Public memorials and museums later popped up across the country, including the famous Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

Since then, Germany’s atonement has been invoked as a global success story: an example of a country that bravely dealt with its past and became a model for other countries’ long overdue historical reckonings.

In America, scholars and journalists have increasingly begun to talk about Germany’s process in conversations about race and reconciliation, poring over Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung for clues about how the U.S. can meaningfully confront its history of slavery and racial violence. Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student.

The Atlanta-raised, Berlin-based scholar Susan Neiman wrote an influential book about what the U.S. can learn from Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, inspiring an outpouring of articles in magazines and newspapers dissecting Germany’s reckoning in an American context. One of the most recognizable figures in America’s lynching memorial movement, the pioneering American civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, has often contrasted the two countries’ versions of remembrance, comparing America’s South “littered with the iconography of the Confederacy” to Berlin, awash in Holocaust memorials. Stevenson, the founder of America’s first national lynching memorial, said his initiative drew inspiration from Germany’s landscape of Holocaust memory and homages to the victims of Hitler’s killing machine.

“When you go to Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed next to the homes of families that were abducted during the Holocaust,” Stevenson remarked. “There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Germany.”

On a rainy morning in October, Gisela Martin placed a rose on top of a freshly polished gold stone. She stood outside of her mother’s last residence, an apartment building in a busy Berlin neighborhood, before she was murdered by the Nazis in the late 1930s. Martin was joined by her nephew, son, and a handful of locals, to lay a memorial stone in the sidewalk in front of the building. The brass block, roughly the size of a CD case, is inscribed with Martin’s mother’s name, birthday, and the dates she was deported and murdered by the Nazis. Rain and wind pelted the group, and Martin — petite, in a dark peacoat — stood quietly next to her nephew as volunteers placed the stone in the ground. It was jarring for Martin to see the truth of her mother’s murder, a long-guarded family secret, on the pavement for anyone who walked past it to see.

There are more than 75,000 of these memorial stones, called Stolpersteine, across Europe, making the project the largest decentralized Holocaust memorial in the world. 

“What really works are these little stones,” Michael Naumann, Germany’s Culture of Secretary from 1998 to 2000 as the government finalized Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, told me: “Because these are individual names. The only way you can actually teach the Holocaust is to grab you by your heart.”

In Berlin alone, the streets are studded with roughly 8,500 gold squares, which are impossible to miss once they’ve been pointed out. They glisten off some of the busiest avenues in the city and quiet side streets, in front of apartments, restaurants, cafes, and commercial buildings. For people who choose to read what they say, the individual stories within each stone force the kind of intimate, and personal, confrontation with Germany’s past that can get lost in the larger and more abstract memorials.

Gisela Martin’s mother was the casualty of a little-known Nazi extermination program called Aktion T4, which claimed the lives of about 300,000 people with disabilities between 1939 and 1945. The “euthanasia campaign,” as the Nazis called it, sought out to eradicate German society of people with mental and physical impairments. The victims were among the first targets of the Nazi regime, described as the Holocaust’s “trial run.” The medical establishment was involved in every step of the murder campaign, beginning with identifying victims and ending with overseeing and carrying out the killings. By 1941, the T4 program had exterminated some 70,000 people in death centers across Germany by lethal injection and gassing.

Gisela Martin’s mother, Hedwig Daum, was forced from her home and taken to a psychiatric hospital in December 1937, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Daum’s relatives are skeptical of the diagnosis, but say she was under a considerable amount of stress at the time and may have had a nervous breakdown). The following year, officials involved with the program forcibly sterilized her — another feature of the T4 program — and brought her to a psychiatric hospital. She was released, and then shortly thereafter brought back to a psychiatric unit, where she remained imprisoned until she was murdered on May 29, 1939.

Martin, who is 88-years-old, was four when Daum died, and her recollections of her mother are fuzzy. Memories come in abrupt flashes: sitting on her mom’s lap while food simmered on the oven, filling the apartment with rich scents, or waving to her through the window of the psychiatric ward. But a memory of her last glimpse of her mother when the authorities came to take her away is intact. “She fought and screamed like crazy, and my sister held me in her arms,” she told me. “It was terrible.” Daum’s only wish, according to medical records later obtained by her grandson, Reiner Lenz, “was to return to her children.” 

The circumstances around Daum’s death were kept for decades by only Gisela Martin, her siblings, and her father. Even among themselves, the topic remained a source of silence. “It was simply not discussed,” Martin said. The stigma and shame surrounding mental illness were so deeply rooted that Martin even kept the truth of her mother’s death from her husband. “I was afraid that if he heard about the psychiatric clinic, he would think that I’m also not right in the head if I lost my temper,” she explained. “It was kept secret.”

Martin watched solemnly as a volunteer cemented the plaque into the pavement and rinsed it off with water, leaving a gilded block nestled inside the street’s drab row of gray cobblestones. Then she crouched down, gingerly set a rose on top of the stone, and wiped away a tear. For Martin and her family, the unveiling of the marker served as a corrective against the country’s legacy of postwar amnesia about the Nazis’ crimes against the disabled. After so many decades of silence, Martin told me she was “finally ready to talk about what happened.”

The next in line to place a rose over the stone was Martin’s nephew, Reiner Lenz, who spent years researching Daum’s biography and tracking down her medical files to find the official record of her death.

“After the war, nobody talked about people like my grandmother,” he recalled. “They said, ‘forget it.’ But we shouldn’t forget. The death of my grandmother has left a gap for her children and grandchildren that has never been closed.” He believes the stone represents a quiet rejection of the country’s rising tide of right-wing nationalism. “It is intended to commemorate all the sick and denounced sick who need special protection by society,” he said. “It should be a reminder to all of us never to allow such an injustice again.”

Visiting concentration camps is not mandatory in Germany, but it is encouraged and in some schools required. One morning, I joined a class of about 20 high school students on a tour of Sachsenhausen, a Nazi death camp outside Berlin. Nobody in the class had visited a concentration camp before. They gathered quietly around their guide, a German history buff in her early thirties. She carried a black tote bag with “it’s a beautiful life without Nazis” emblazoned across the front in bubbly pink letters.

In recent years, Germany’s sites of remembrance have become a flashpoint among figures associated with the country’s far-right movement, who bemoan the country’s memory culture as a source of national shame and guilt. In 2017, a politician with the country’s main far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, assailed Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame in the capital.” The party grabbed headlines the following year when a group of its constituents interrupted a tour at Sachsenhausen, questioning the existence of gas chambers, and an AfD politician called on a local mayor to ban Stolpersteine, those gold memorial stones, calling the country’s remembrance culture “a dictatorship of memory.” In their narration, the act of remembering is akin to an assault on the German identity, and nowhere are the country’s memory efforts more visible than in its memorial sites.

I decided to join the high schoolers as they toured Sachsenhausen because I wanted to understand what Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung meant to a generation that was further removed from its history than their parents or grandparents. The students passed under the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and walked into the camp, somber as the guide led them around its grounds, through the reconstructed barracks where prisoners slept and the gas chamber and execution site where tens of thousands were murdered from 1936 to 1945.

About halfway through the tour, the guide paused and withdrew two photos from her tote. She asked the class to describe them. The first was a black and white picture taken from the camp’s watchtower in 1941, looming over a neat row of prisoners with the edge of a machine gun in the frame. She explained that it was a propaganda picture of the camp used by the Nazis to convey a message of order, intimidation, and control. The second was a fuzzier snapshot of an inmate kneeling in front of a group of SS officers, including one who was laughing. This photo, she said, made the officers look cruel and arrogant, and the prisoner sympathetic. She then asked the students if they thought the picture was a propaganda photo. The class agreed that the picture portrayed the soldiers in a negative light, and therefore was not used in Hitler’s propaganda machine.

The guide told me the goal of the exercise was to show students how to distinguish between propaganda and reality — and to challenge the myth that everyday Germans didn’t know what was really going on at the time. “It’s important to show that ideas of the concentration camp were distributed very widely.”

At the end of the tour, one of the students approached me and struck up a conversation. I asked her about what she took from the guide’s photo lesson. “It was amazing to see the actual faces of the people and to see who they were because they look like normal people,” she said. “But you imagine them as monsters.” How did she talk about this history with her parents? “We don’t talk about it at all, actually,” she replied. As we chatted, a handful of her classmates migrated over, and within a minute, I was surrounded by 10.

The students told me that visiting the camp was different than reading about it. But then the conversation drifted into what it meant to learn about the Holocaust as Germans, and how they believe the rest of the world views them. “When you go to other countries, they go, ‘Oh, the German guys, they are the people who started the wars and everything. They have stereotypes,” one girl said. “We are a new generation.” Another student chimed in: “We cannot be blamed for this.” In the exchange, I saw edges of the emotions exploited by the far-right in its weaponization of memory politics.

As the two were talking, one of their peers made a face. Germans are still voting for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, he pointed out. Doesn’t that factor into the conversation about blame? He pointed to Sachsenhausen’s gate, visibly agitated. “Doesn’t everybody have at least a basic understanding of history?” He asked. “There’s still people who openly say they are Nazis.”

I asked the tour guide how memory is integrated into Germany’s educational system. “It is very victim-focused, which is important,” she answered. “But I think now it would be a good idea to focus more on perpetrators. Everybody agrees that the Nazis were evil. But, we have to see them as people, so we can understand that normal people are capable of doing these things.”

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“It’s a wall of silence and denial, and also a wall of threat,” Dominik, a playwright, told me over Zoom from his home in western Germany, describing the process of trying to untangle his family’s past. He hoisted a black photo album in front of his screen, opening it up to a page of World War Two-era photos. 

The pictures, he told me, were from his grandfather’s time in the Nazi’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht, and the album was one of just a few family remnants from that period of time (the other: a certificate affirming his grandmother’s Aryan lineage). The first time Dominik leafed through the pages a few years ago, he focused entirely on his grandfather’s face. He had a powerful urge to see if he looked unhappy. The second time he looked at the album, he noticed something startling. In the background of the photos, he saw burning villages and what appeared to be Russian prisoners of war. Somehow he completely missed the horror in the pictures when he saw them the first time around.

To Dominik, who asked to be identified by his first name because he has been targeted by neo-Nazi threats, the omission revealed a longing to see his grandfather as he wanted, not necessarily as he was. “I was looking to find proof that my grandfather was innocent,” he told me. Towns on fire and prisoners muddied that conceptualization, so “I completely kept them out of my mind.” He doesn’t believe he’s alone in that urge. “I think many people have a desire to deal with the past, but they also have a desire to say: not my parents, not my grandparents. They were fine. They helped the Jews. They were resistance fighters or victims of the Nazis.” 

Dominik belongs to a cohort of Germans who are interrogating the country’s reputation as a champion of remembrance and pointing to the gaps within it as symptoms of deeper amnesia. He’s 39, with a dark sense of humor, and wary of the country’s memory worship. I mentioned some Americans’ invocation of  Germany’s process as a possible model for the U.S. He chuckled. “This is like the new export product of Germany,” he told me, wryly. “After the cars, we also make this ‘great’ memory culture.” 

In early November, Dominik, along with the other two members of his theater collective, screened a movie, which they will adapt into a play later this year, about how the descendants of perpetrators engage with their family histories. I attended the screening in Berlin along with a few dozen Germans who quietly sipped beverages and watched the film, which occasionally felt like a fever dream. The movie dealt with the emotional toll of silence within families and was based on interviews between the collective’s members and their parents. For each of them, confronting family narratives of the war and Nazism meant coming up against a “wall,” as Dominik told me, of shame, anger, and denial, from their parents. 

The trio sought out to make the film after recognizing, as a group, that the country’s celebrated Holocaust reckoning had stopped at their own doorsteps. Dominik’s grandfather was in the army and joined the Nazi party when he was 19; the grandfathers of the other two collective members were SS officials. Growing up, their family discussions of the war focused on German — not Jewish — suffering: “about how grandfather was freezing in the Soviet Union, and he was such a victim,” Dominik explained. “These narratives are there all the time growing up. There’s no conversation about the Shoah. There’s a lot of conversation about how cruel the war was.” 

Over time, Dominik grew to reject the narrative he absorbed as a child about wartime suffering, opting instead to research the parts of the story his family and so many others left out. These interrogations, and subsequent discussions with family, formed the basis of Dominik’s contribution to the collective’s film.

At first, the members’ parents were supportive of the movie, which they were told was about family memory and the war. But as the conversations grew deeper and closer to their families’ behavior in Nazi Germany, Dominik said there was a moment for each person where things took a noticeable turn. Their parents “got angry and their faces changed and they started insulting us.” For Dominik, that happened after he asked his father if he knew the history of the shop where his grandfather worked, which had been run by a Jewish family until the Nazis expropriated it. “He was like, ‘OK, now I want to know, what is this project actually about? Do you want to play police and say your family is all Nazis?’” Dominik recalled. “Then, he lost himself in the worst antisemitism I’ve ever heard in my family.”

Dominik said he was shocked and disgusted by his father’s antisemitic screed. But it also revealed to him an internal conflict. Even though he was furious, something unexpected came up: “I had the feeling that I must protect him,” he explained.

“From what?” I asked.

“From the shame I feel. He exposed himself. And it is him, not me, that I want to protect.”

I traveled to Germany to try to better understand the lessons of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and to unpack the narrative that I had consumed in America about Germany as a champion of memory. But during my reporting, I kept coming up against a particular strain of silence that I couldn’t move past, and I wondered if I had been thinking about the reckoning in the wrong way. Maybe the story was actually about the conversations the country couldn’t have.

Shortly after I arrived in Germany and began talking to people about the past, it became clear that there was a notable gulf between collective and individual memory: the way the country processed memory on a national level and how individuals confronted their own family histories. It didn’t take long for me to pick up on this distinction. I noticed that many appeared comfortable talking about the Holocaust in an abstract way, synthesized more or less under the umbrella of: “the Nazis were evil,”  but withdrew altogether when I tried to nudge them into more personal territory. A common set of answers to my questions about what took place within peoples’ families and communities was: “We didn’t talk about it;” or, “I don’t know.” A level of detachment I found perplexing, given what I had read and studied about Germany’s textured and successful reckoning. 

The lack of interrogation into peoples’ family histories I encountered seemed to stand in stark contrast to national culture of memorialization I saw throughout the country: the shrines and museums; the class field trips to concentration camps; the declarations of public officials on important dates, such as the anniversary of Kristallnacht. So, after attending the screening, I ran my observations past Dominik. Was I being too harsh, or was there a genuine gap between the individual and nation’s ability to process the country’s history?

“This is not just your impression,” he replied. “There is this official culture of remembering and some people are quite cool in talking about it, but there’s not a connection to your own person or to your identity or what actually happened.” 

He added: “The vast majority of Germans grew up with horrible mass murderers as their closest relatives. Or let’s say, to be kind, they grew up with people who were completely callous and indifferent towards mass murder and mass murderers. And then you have these people as your parents or grandparents. The thought that your grandfather, the man you love, who kissed you, who hugged you is such a monster, is actually too painful for many Germans.” 

In 2019, researchers with Germany’s Bielefeld University surveyed more than 1,000 people across the country about their understanding of their families’ roles during the war. Specifically, the researchers asked the subjects to choose if their ancestors were perpetrators, victims, or “helpers” who assisted victims during the war. Nearly 70% of Germans surveyed said their family members were not perpetrators. More than half said they were victims.

I’ve often wondered about the psychological source of a person’s aversion to digging into the dark areas of their family history. Is it rooted in a fear of learning the truth? Or, is it about how to hold on to two contrasting stories of someone you love?

Maybe no one is better positioned to mull over these questions than Peter Pogany-Wnendt, a Hungarian-born Jewish psychotherapist living in Germany. The 68-year-old son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Pogany-Wnend works both with the descendants of perpetrators and survivors in his therapeutic practice.

Over cappuccinos in a quiet Berlin cafe, Pogany-Wnendt told me he sees the country’s emphasis on public memorials as a national form of displacement from individual guilt. “Because we are making a memorial public, we don’t need to look in our families. That’s not right. Because a public memorial is only as good as it is anchored in the personal story.”

Pogany-Wnendt believes that when feelings of shame and guilt remain repressed and unaddressed, they pass along to the next generation, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. But he also believes that the emotions transmitted from parent to child come with an “impossible task” for the descendants of both survivors and perpetrators. For the descendants of survivors, the impossible inherited task is to mourn the suffering of their parents and grandparents; for the descendants of perpetrators, to atone for their descendants’ guilt and repent.

“Their parents were not able or willing to do this emotional work,” he explained. “As it is neither possible for the children of the victims to mourn the suffering and the losses of their ancestors, nor is it possible for the children of the perpetrator to atone for the guilt of their fathers and mothers, both sides have to give the original feelings back to their ancestors. This is an individual inner-soul process that liberates the descendants from their emotional heritage, pain or guilt, and from the impossible tasks.” 

In Pogany-Wnendt’s case, that meant realizing he could not mourn for his father, whose parents were both murdered in the Holocaust, and whose deep grief left a lasting imprint on him while he was growing up. Pogany-Wnendt realized he couldn’t grieve his dad’s losses for him. He had to give that pain back.

“My father, he was always very sad,” Pogany-Wnendt explained. “And I felt as a child that I had to make him happy. I always felt responsible for his sadness and thought I had to mourn for my father. I tried to identify with his sadness and to put it on my own shoulders. But then I realized that I can’t mourn for my father or work through his pain. I have to leave it with him.”

Pogany-Wnendt’s recognition that he could not mourn his father’s losses for him, or resolve his grief, helped him feel more compassion towards him. He sees how the descendants of perpetrators, too, can undergo a similar process. 

“It’s not the guilt they’re inheriting, but the guilt feelings,” he said. “Because you can’t inherit guilt.”

“But there is a responsibility to remember what they did.”

Like the cobblestoned streets of Berlin, there are pockets of the American South coming alive with long-suppressed memories. But the reckoning is far from settled. In some places, two versions of history inhabit the same space. In others, the urge to remember is overwhelmed by the desire to forget.

In November 2015, Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney, issued a memory challenge to Memphis, Tennessee.

At the time, Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, was a few years away from opening America’s first lynching museum in Alabama, and was at the forefront of the country’s lynching memorialization movement. Stevenson gave a speech to a crowd in Memphis, imploring them to honor the county’s thirty-plus lynching victims.

Recalled Margaret Vandiver, a retired criminology professor who became involved in the effort: “A couple people who were in attendance looked at each other and said: Yup.” A multiracial, intergenerational coalition calling itself the Lynching Sites Memorial Project of Memphis, or LSP, came together shortly after, and set out to begin marking the landscape. The group has installed three memorials and hopes to have another in the ground soon.

The Memphis memorial group is one of a dozen like-minded organizations that have sprung up across the U.S. in the last few years, especially in the South. There are now lynching memorialization coalitions in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, South Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Oregon, Colorado, and Florida.

Vandiver, who published a book about lynchings in Tennessee, told me she has been surprised by the sustained interest in the group’s work. 

But where there’s support, there’s also opposition. One morning in December, Vandiver picked me up at the local library to show me a few of the city’s lynching markers. She brought me to a green sign installed in 2018 memorializing Lee Walker, who was lynched in 1893 after he was accused of attempting to rape a white woman. A mob of 3,000 people broke into the jail where Walker had been held, hung him on a nearby pole, and then burned and mutilated his body.

As we pulled up to the stop, Vandiver warned me to keep an eye out for an “angry-looking” man. “If he approaches us, just go back to the car and I’ll handle him,” she instructed. The man, she explained, used to own a nearby business, and was enraged after the memorial went up, claiming it loomed over the parking lot. We didn’t see him, but it wasn’t the only story I heard of the business community or local leadership pushing back against markers that unearthed the brutality of lynchings for passersby — including shoppers — to see.

Others would simply prefer to avoid the ugliness of America’s racial violence as a matter of emotional self-preservation. Fred Morton, an 82-year-old volunteer with the Memphis group, told me the predominant sentiment towards this kind of history among white people in his blue-collar, middle-class community is: “Let’s just not talk about it. This is unpleasant, this is unseemly, this is disconcerting.” 

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Vandiver brought me to a grassy field in an industrial, gentrifying neighborhood in Memphis. The plot of land marks the spot where a white mob killed three Black businessmen in 1892. The murders profoundly affected Ida B. Wells, a crusading investigative journalist who was a close family friend of one of the victims. The killing led Wells to begin collecting data that would ultimately debunk the widespread myth that lynchings were a form of punishment for Black men sexually assaulting white women. Wells found that the lynchings were instead “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” 

Despite the significance of the lynching in the city’s history, there are no markers or signs noting what happened. The lot where the men were killed, in fact, now sits on the grounds of a hip new brewery.

Later that afternoon, I met up with Wayne Dowdy, a Memphis historian. Morton and Vandiver joined me, as well as two other local volunteers with the Memphis lynching memorial group, Randell Gamble and Laura Kebede. I intended to talk to Dowdy about Memphis’ history of lynching, but our conversation quickly veered into the personal. Gamble and Kebede are Black; Vandiver, Dowdy, and Morton are white. 

Vandiver, who grew up in Florida, recalled singing the de-facto national anthem of the Confederacy, Dixie, in school. Dowdy explained how he grew up in Tennessee in the 1970s, steeped in the narratives of the Lost Cause, one of the most enduring revisionist mythologies in American history. The story Dowdy absorbed about the Civil War, in school and his community, was “the Confederate soldiers were noble, brave heroes who were fighting to maintain a way of life which had nothing to do with slavery. It was regurgitated at home, in the neighborhoods. It was like the air and water. No one who was white questioned it.”

Vandiver added that her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, and regaled his grandson — her father — with vivid tales of it while he was growing up. “So there’s that one generation between someone who fought for Confederacy and me sitting right here,” she said. “That’s how close this all is.”  

“See, for me, I don’t hear these stories from whites,” Gamble interjected. “I hear about the violence from slavery, Jim Crow, with African Americans. But from whites, I don’t hear these stories you’re telling about their families.”

There’s not a lot of talking happening in Arlington, Tennessee. 

That’s one of the first things Cynthia Myers tells me when she greets me in the middle of the small town square, about thirty minutes outside of Memphis. It’s a quaint and small plaza, with a Christmas tree and an old-fashioned red brick store hosting a steady stream of weekend shoppers. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from the courtyard, however, is any mention of the man who was shot to death and castrated right there, in broad daylight in 1939.

“It’s a taboo conversation,” Myers, 59 years old, told me wearily. “People don’t want to talk about it.”

Myers grew up with the story because the lynching victim, Jesse Lee Bond, was a cousin. And she was close to his brother, Charlie Morris, who spent years trying to bring the lynching to light. He died a few years ago, after successfully lobbying the state legislature to pass a cold case bill reopening investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era. 

But Arlington remains silent on Bond’s lynching. There’s no sign in the town square marking the site of the killing or stone marking Bond’s grave. According to Memphis lynching memorial members I spoke with, some of the descendants of the alleged perpetrator still live in town but have not spoken up publicly about what happened. “Some of them are in this place of denial, the past is the past,” one Arlington resident told me.

Jesse Lee Bond was a sharecropper who bought his seasonal planting supplies from Arlington’s general store, S.Y. Wilson & Company. The owners tracked the debt of farmers who bought their supplies on credit in a private notebook, and, according to some accounts, Bond was suspicious of how much they claimed he owed them. One day in April 1939, Bond asked for a receipt after buying something on credit, a request that was seen as out of the ordinary for a Black sharecropper in the Jim Crow South, and reportedly infuriated the white store owner when he found out. He ordered Bond to come back to the store, and his aunt accompanied him. When he arrived, the store owner and his employee started shooting, according to the Memphis lynching memorial group. 

“They shot at him and shot him. He ran out to the outhouse. They riddled the outhouse,” Morris said Bond’s aunt later told him. “And when he staggered out of the outhouse, they threw him down and they castrated him and dragged him to the river.” County records reported the cause of his death as an “accidental drowning.” The store’s owner, Charles R. Wilson, and his employee were charged with first-degree murder but later acquitted by an all-white jury. 

Charlie Morris was at school when he found out his brother had been murdered. “It affected me very much,” he recalled in an oral history recorded before he died. “My mother had three sons. And when she passed away, I was six. And the last thing that she said, on her deathbed, was ‘keep my boys together.’ And this was broken when they killed Jesse.” 

On the 79th anniversary of Bond’s lynching, the Memphis lynching group hosted a memorial ceremony and vigil in the Arlington town square. But since then, efforts to install a memorial in the square or a marker on Bond’s grave have been unsuccessful. “Arlington is this little town with this nice cute square, and that’s the icon for the town,” Gordon Myers, a local Reverend, told me, over lunch in town. “There’s a lot of energy towards preserving this facade within the administration of the town and the politics and real estate development.” Placing a lynching memorial in the center of it all would complicate the image the town markets to itself and others.

But Myers wants to see just that. From her perspective, the town’s ongoing silence feels like an acceptance of the lynching itself. “It’s like they’re still supporting what happened. To not want to engage with it, deal with it, or even discuss it, she told me. “Even if you don’t apologize, just open up about it. That would make a difference. It would give some closure about what happened.” 

On one of my last days in the South, I stopped by the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, with Tarrell and some members of the local lynching memorial initiative, the Lafayette County Community Remembrance Project.

The group was about half white, half Black, and mostly over the age of 50, although there were a few younger people there. They wanted to show me the memorial dedicated to the county’s seven lynching victims that was installed on September 17, 2021 in front of the county courthouse after a years-long, messy approval battle with the County Board of Supervisors.

The group included people with deep ties to the town and its violent history. 67-year-old Oxford native Effie Burt told me her grandfather, a sharecropper, left town after he was threatened with a lynching for refusing to work. “That could have been him on that sign,” she said, motioning to the marker. His sons fled to Missouri in the middle of the night to escape the specter of violence. “That destroyed my family,” Burt added. “I grew up without my uncles.”

As we were talking, I couldn’t help but fixate on the visuals of my surroundings. We stood next to the lynching memorial, at one edge of the town square, near the county courthouse. A stone’s throw away, an enormous Confederate statue loomed over the front of the square. Calls to remove it have been unsuccessful, so the statue now uneasily skirts the lynching memorial. It’s almost too perfect of a metaphor for America’s relationship with its past: the tensions of the current moment in the country’s historial reckoning carved in miniature, between these two memorials, on this town square. 

As I reflected on the contrasting iconography, I thought of something Dominik, the German playwright, told me when I explained the fractured state of American memory politics. “To some extent, it’s not that bad,” he replied. “At least you have a fight. A fight about history and ideas and the future of the country.” 

A clash is also a sign of life. Not a calcified, collectivized consensus on the past, but a living organism, being worked out right in front of you — on the Oxford square, or downtown Memphis, or in the minds of white Americans as the country spars over how to narrate the truest version of its history to the next generation. 

“When you move the conversation from the larger historical systemic to the personal, I think that’s what people are afraid of,” Dr. William Horne, Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University, who has written on his family’s role in slavery, told me. “Sometimes I wonder — is the best we can do to have a systemic conversation about systemic wrongs?”

In Mississippi, Tarrell recently learned about a family in the area where Steen was lynched with the same last name as the white woman he allegedly had a relationship with. He told me hasn’t been able to get in touch yet, but he’d like to meet up. He’s not interested in blame. He just wants to get closer to understanding what happened on July 30, 1893, and why.

“I’m not trying to disgrace anyone,” he said. “I just want to know what happened. If I had the opportunity to talk to one of them, they might say something that could help me learn more about my ancestors. I’m just trying to find the truth. And have some closure for the family. That’s the only thing I want to do.”

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But 34 years ago, there was another seismic protest in Almaty. In December 1986, Almaty — then called Alma-Ata — was the site of some of the first large demonstrations protesting communist rule. When Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, installed an ethnic Russian with no connection to or knowledge of Kazakhstan to head the Kazakh Soviet Republic, students took to the streets.

Moscow sent in armed forces to violently suppress the crowds. Estimates range widely from 10 to 170 casualties. Over 2,000 people were wounded. The tragedy came to be known as Zheltoksan, which means December in Kazakh.

Then the whole thing was swept under the rug.

For years, Zheltoksan was not talked about — in Kazakhstan or anywhere in the former Soviet Union. Like scores of other rebel acts and repressive countermeasures in the Soviet Union, Zheltoksan pixelated into visual fragments, shards of aging memory hidden from history.

But amid the current unrest, the 1986 protests have been mentioned over and over on social media. Coda Story spoke to historians, sociologists and local journalists to understand Zheltoksan’s significance, how the trauma of suppressed historical memory impacts the thinking of protestors battling Kazakh and imported Russian police on the street’s of Kazakhstan’s far-flung, freezing cities.

In 1986 Kazakhstan was one of the first places where anti-Soviet protests started. Why there? What does it tell us about the political climate in Kazakhstan at that moment in history?

In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made a big mistake, explained Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg. He replaced the ethnic-Kazakh leader of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan with Gennady Kolbin, an ethnic Russian, who knew nothing about the country. This triggered the youth and intelligentsia.

“Kolbin didn’t spend a day in Kazakhstan, didn’t know Kazakh language, and he wasn’t familiar with Kazakh culture and politics. Ergo, his appointment was perceived as an insult by many Kazakhstanis. For by 1986 this country played an important role in the Soviet Union: it was the second republic by size, fourth by population, and its industrial and agricultural input was enormous,” said Shelekpayev.

One of the reasons anti-Soviet protests first erupted in Kazakhstan comes as a surprise to many is the false stereotype that Kazakhs are political conformists reluctant to upset the status quo.

“Kazakhs protested many times during the 20th century. They protested before the communists — let me remind you about the Central Asian revolt of 1916, which anticipated the 1917 Revolution, and they also protested after 1991. There were many worker’s protests in the 1990s, for example,” Shelekpayev said, pointing to a dearth of media coverage. 

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Back then the protests were violently put down. The country’s independence followed just five years later. What significant impact did they have? 

For many people in Kazakhstan, the protests in 1986 are considered the first blow to the Soviet Union’s hold over the republics, said Aitolkyn Kourmanova, the senior editor of Central Asia Analytical Network at George Washington University. “That was the first display of the fact that the Soviet Union was not so uniform and the fact that the republics really wanted independence, which they achieved in five years.” 

The legacy of the 1986 protests has continued to shape political protests in Kazakhstan to this day. “In one way or another, they all go back to December 1986. It was a very defining moment in our history,” said Diana Kudaibergenova, who researches nationalism and political art in Central Asia at the University of Cambridge. 

She points to the civil rights movement Wake Up, Kazakhstan, which invoked December 1986 in their own protests. In 2019, when the group first emerged, activists gathered at Republic Square, formerly called Brezhnev Square, where the 1986 protests took place. They raised hands wrapped in red cloth to symbolize the blood they said was on the regime’s hands.

But the memory of the 1986 Zheltoksan protests is severely fractured.  

“We never know what to call these things,” said Kudaibergenova. “We still call the 1986 protests as events. Or in Russian, uprisings sometimes. But in Kazakh or in English, every time we write it, it’s always events because we don’t know what kind of vocabulary to use. It’s a traumatic event, but also it’s one that people are still trying to make sense of.” 

Zheltoksan is tremendously important yet never discussed. Why? 

Zheltoksan is omitted from Kazakhstan’s history books. It’s not by mistake, said Kudaibergenova.

With the power of the Soviet Union waning and the cracks in the relationship between Moscow and the republics starting to show, Gorbachev tried to keep the protests in Kazakhstan from spiraling. 

“They tried to silence it. They tried to forget about it. That erasure is very important,” Kudaibergenova said.

The protests were kept under wraps. Students were branded as hooligans, drunks and drug users. People who participated in the protests and survivors of the violent crackdown were silenced.

The Soviet leadership in Moscow also tried to pass off the protests as a provincial issue. “They tried to localize this conflict so that it wouldn’t grow further to some bigger conflictual situation.”

It worked. Many people across Central Asia don’t remember 1986, when in fact it was a defining moment in the  Soviet Union’s crack-up. Kudaibergenova is unsure how much fault lies with Soviet historical suppression and now much to blame Kazakhstan’s failure to recapitulate its own history. 

“It’s very much telling that we’re still trying to formulate that particular history and that particular discourse. For me, it’s still very unfinished business.” 

How has the Kazakh regime framed the protests of 1986?

The 1986 protests bolstered the power and influence of Kazakhstan’s founding dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a towering figure in Kazakhstan’s politics, who in 1986 held the position of prime minister of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. He became the first president of Kazakhstan in 1990 and ruled until 2019 when he was replaced by his handpicked successor, the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

Nazarbayev attempted to fit Zheltoksan into a self-serving narrative, while ignoring his own role in the events that precipitated the protests and what he could have done to prevent the violent response directed by Moscow. It’s a tricky line to walk. 

“For the political system at this moment, which is a continuity of Nazarbayev rule from the 1990s, it’s inconvenient to discuss Zheltoksan as it was because some current or past leaders of the country were either part of the government in 1986 or participated in the repression against the protesters after the events,” said Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg.

From the outside, it appears as if these latest protests came out of nowhere. The official cause is the rising liquid gas prices, but very quickly people demanded the government resign. What are these protests really about? 

“To be honest, I understand why many people had the impression that it was sudden because there has never been anything like that in the history of modern Kazakhstan,” said Assem Zhapisheva, a journalist based in Almaty and founder of Masa Media, a digital newsroom.

In reality, tension has been building amid pandemic mismanagement, rampant corruption, wealth disparity and social stratification. 

The rising gas prices were not just an economic reason behind the uprising, but also a political one, said Aigerim Toleukhanova, a journalist from Kazakhstan and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Kazakhstan is so rich in oil and natural gas, but clearly people do not benefit from these things. So I think it just shows that it reached this point where people would say that enough is enough.”

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The 1852 novel, written by Harriett Beecher-Stowe, for which the station is named occupies a fraught place in the annals of American literature, recognized both for galvanizing public opinion against the brutality of slavery and for reinforcing reductive racial stereotypes with the servile depiction of its main character. 

Pölking, whose parents are German and Cameroonian, spoke of his discomfort passing the station. “It woke up a lot of bad emotions,” he told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle, arguing that it is way past time for it and a nearby street to be renamed.

So far, Pölking’s petition has not succeeded. The station’s name greets visitors on a large sign outside, emblazoned in white letters against a bright blue background. 

A few minutes down the road lie Onkel Toms Hütte stable and horseback riding school, a restaurant called Uncle Tom’s Burger and the Onkel Toms Hütte kindergarten. In fact, the entire area pays homage to a book once described by the Black American writer James Baldwin as a “catalogue of violence.” 

The existence of this neighborhood in modern-day, multicultural Berlin can be traced back to a surprisingly durable national fascination with America’s antebellum South, which first took hold in the mid-19th century. 

Soon after publication, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” became a global sensation and the only book in the 19th century to outsell the Bible. It made Beecher-Stowe Germany’s most beloved American author and had a profound effect on popular culture, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin-themed beer gardens and campgrounds springing up across the country. Berlin’s Onkel Toms Hutte subway station opened in 1929, near an Uncle Tom’s pub and a sprawling housing development of the same name. 

These literary-themed homages tapped into a fantasy with the American South that sanitized the brutality of chattel slavery and characterized plantation life as bucolic, simple and comfortable for thousands of “loyal and happy” slaves. 

Heike Paul, is an American Studies professor at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg who has written extensively about Germany’s obsession with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She describes this inaccurate interpretation of a brutal and shameful period of American history as the “pastoralization of slavery” and a “total disconnect” from Beecher-Stowe’s text, which was written to expose the horrors of the practice.

Similar ideas are also central to the “Lost Cause,” a revisionist account of America’s past that surfaced after the defeat of Confederate forces in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Romanticizing plantation life and depicting slaves as the faithful servants of benevolent owners, the mythology of the Lost Cause also insists that the war was fought over state’s rights, not whether or not white people had the right to own and place other human beings in chains. 

While Beecher-Stowe was a staunch abolitionist, the unquestioning subservience of her central character reinforced stereotypes and a variety of racist ideas. According to Sanders Isaac Bernstein, a Berlin-based PhD student at the University of Southern California, whose work has included analysis of German nostalgia for the Confederate South, this archetype “was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization.”

Bernstein holds up as an example the introduction of a 1911 German translation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which states that “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

While living in the South, I encountered ideas rooted in the Lost Cause repeatedly. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Civil War casually referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or the myriad revisionist narratives I came across while covering North Carolina’s debate to remove Confederate statues from public spaces. Most people who opposed the idea argued that taking down or altering the monuments amounted to historical erasure, advancing the falsehood that the war was fought in response to northern “tyranny.” In reality, however, the defense of these symbols, included, at its core, a glorification of the Confederate cause and antebellum life.

Coming across these ideas in the contemporary South may be unpleasant, but it is not surprising. I did not expect to find traces of them in Berlin, though. Wanting to understand how this contentious American myth gained such a following in Germany, I asked Bernstein to meet me at Onkel Toms Hütte. He arrived, dressed in black. We both took photographs of the station’s sign and then moved to a nearby bench. 

Outside of the neighborhood of Onkel Toms Hütte, most of Germany’s homages to Beecher-Stowe’s book are no longer visible. The nearby tavern shut down in 1978 and the campgrounds disappeared decades ago. But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not the only example of Southern storytelling that resonated in Germany. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind” became an immediate bestseller under the Third Reich and its 1939 movie adaptation, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is said to have been a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Revisionist interpretations of the Confederacy persisted under the Nazi regime, which had developed its own Lost Cause narrative to cope with the national humiliation that resulted from Germany’s defeat in the First World War. According to an account by the ex-Nazi leader Hermann Rauschnin, Hitler believed that the “American people themselves were conquered” when the South lost the Civil War. Since then, he argued, the United States had slid into a state of political and racial “decay.” 

You can still see clear signs of this strange love affair lingering in the Germany of today: Civil War reenactments in which the majority of participants want to take the losing side; Confederate flags flying at anti-lockdown protests, at country music festivals, or hung in the back of Berlin drinking establishments. In many instances, the Stars and Bars can be seen as a convenient alternative to the Nazi swastika, the display of which has been banned under German law since 1945. 

The cultural resonance of the Confederate war manifests itself in subtler ways, too. Bernstein, who is American, said: “Sometimes I’m surprised by the way in which one can still encounter people being like, ‘You know, the real America is in the South.’ I think it comes back to a particular idea of the city being somehow part of the world capitalist system, but the country is where a nation’s cultural life truly exists. I can’t help but think that part of that is the remaining power of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and ‘Gone with the Wind.’”

Of course, Germany is not the only country in which Confederate iconography can be seen. In recent years, the Stars and Bars has become a common touchstone for the far right from Ireland to Brazil. However, it is especially jarring in a nation that has, for decades, made rigorous efforts to confront the violence and prejudice of its past. 

Germany’s long and painful process of reckoning with the Holocaust, known within the country as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, is often hailed as a global model of historical reconciliation. According to Bernstein, it includes a deep suspicion of wistful longing for an imagined past, an emotion fostered and exploited by the Nazis to advance their ideas of antisemitism and volkisch nationalism. 

However such messaging remains powerful to this day. In a recent campaign, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland called for a return to a “normal” Germany. While, at least on the surface, about the country’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic, one video juxtaposes grainily nostalgic cinefilm of a white family with contemporary footage of burning barricades, anti-fascist protesters and lockdown signs. At one point a garden gnome makes an appearance in a neat suburban garden, presumably owned by a clean-cut white, middle-class family — a bizarre symbol of the party’s cozy, quaint and culturally homogenous vision for the nation.

That these ideas still have a following in Germany may explain why Pölking’s campaign to rename Onkel Toms Hütte has, as yet, not been acted upon. After all, preserving the name allows people to cling to a German identity rooted in an illusory version of the past, far away from the complexities and tensions that exist in today’s world.

For Bernstein, that raises a worrying question: “Shouldn’t Germany, of all places, be aware of the trap of nostalgia?”

Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington, DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

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My former colleagues are in prison. For many months my friends and I have found it difficult to get any attention from world media. Now something has happened that caught the attention of the biggest news agencies — but I wonder how long it will last. Is there any way to hold the attention? I feel like we’re all hostages here — and it’s scary. Now everything, any crime, has become possible here.”

I received this message from a friend in Belarus this summer, a couple of days after the nation’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko used a MiG fighter jet to ground an international commercial flight as it crossed “his” airspace and hauled off a Belarusian journalist and his girlfriend who had been living in supposed safety in Lithuania. A few days later the captured journalist, Roman Protasevich, appeared on state-run TV with visible marks of torture and confessed to treachery in scenes reminiscent of Stalinist show trials.

There was some outrage in what we like to call the international community; the words “hijacking” and even “terrorist act” were used. And then, as my friend feared, all was forgotten. Lukashenko faced mild consequences, such as a ban on the Belarus state airline flying into Europe. His message to anyone who dared to oppose him was more potent: I can do what I want to you, anywhere you might be.

I struggled to answer my friend’s plea. For a single event to be remembered it needs to be sustained by a bigger story that it flows into. Anyone who has played a memory game will know that you remember discrete things by putting them into a sequence where they take on significance as part of a larger whole. Likewise in media and politics, one scene only has power as part of a larger narrative.

But Lukashenko’s outrageous crimes haven’t clicked into a greater chain of meaning. And it’s not just Belarus. From Burma to Syria, Yemen to Sri Lanka, we have more evidence than ever of crimes against humanity — of torture, chemical attacks, barrel bombings, rape, repression, and arbitrary detention. But the evidence struggles to compel attention, let alone consequences. We have more opportunities to publish; we aren’t limited by geography; our audience is potentially global. Yet most revelations or investigations fail to resonate. Why?  

A connected narrative breaks apart

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have spurred introspection and encouraged us to exclude no one from the greater story of human rights against political repression. And, for a moment in the 1990s, this seemed possible. As the wave of democratization overturned both pro-Soviet and pro-American dictatorships across the world; as the International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 1998; as humanitarian interventions were waged successfully from the western Balkans to East Africa, it seemed that justice would be meted out more equitably. 

But then something different happened. Instead of letting more characters into the human rights story, the whole story collapsed. A situation where some victims got more attention than others was replaced by a situation where no victims got any sustained attention. The horrors of World War II had compelled the world to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at least in principle, and the post-Cold War catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda had encouraged humanitarian interventions and created a momentum towards a “right to protect.”

In previous crimes against humanity, ignorance was always an excuse. From Auschwitz to Srebrenica to Rwanda, leaders could claim that they were either unaware of the facts, the facts were equivocal, or that events unfolded too quickly for them to act. But now we have access to omniscient media that often brings us abundant and instantaneous evidence — yet it means less than ever before. The tableau of crimes remains a mess of broken images.

This felt different in the Cold War. Then there seemed a connection between the arrest of one, single Soviet dissident and a larger geopolitical, institutional, moral, cultural, and historical struggle. Media, books, and movies of that time told the stories of discrete political prisoners and human rights abuses as part of a larger, joined-up tale in the great battle of freedom versus dictatorship, a battle for the soul of history. And the whole story made the public in democracies feel better about themselves, was part of an identity: we are on the side of freedom versus tyranny. There were institutions that supported this narrative and identity. Political prisoners would feel less vulnerable when information about their arrest was announced on the BBC or Radio Free Europe, taken up by Amnesty International, announced at the UN, raised by U.S. presidents in bilateral summits with Soviet leadership.

Together all these elements sustained attention. And when the West’s own sins were revealed, such as the CIA’s program of Cold War covert assassinations and coups in the 1970s, it meant there was an existing framework through which to capture the attention and outrage of the Western public.

There was what one might call a “grand narrative” that informed and enveloped everything from the behavior of states to literature and art to how people understood themselves. It was bound up with enlightenment ideals of “progress” and “liberation,” where facts and evidence were something to be respected, confirmed or refuted by rational argument or verifiable evidence. Even the Soviet regime was locked into a language and worldview where rights – the rights of colonized peoples and the economically oppressed primarily — could at least matter theoretically. They even signed human rights pledges, which allowed Soviet dissidents to demand the Kremlin’s leaders “obey their own laws.”

In this contest of grand ideas, with each side proclaiming its ideals as superior, space was opened for dissidents to demand that the powers live up to the ideals; in the periphery, these ideals were invoked to demand support by liberation movements, colonized by one camp or the other.

The grand narratives, of course, had their problems. They often privileged victims of rival ideologies while leaving continent-sized blind spots. Priests murdered in Poland by the Communists would get more attention in Western media than priests killed by U.S. allies in El Salvador. The Red Army crushing rebellions in Budapest and Prague was covered with infinitely more intensity than the crushing of British anti-colonial rebellions in Kenya.

Yet, “the checks written out in 1945 to the most vulnerable people in the world —marked ‘international humanitarian law’ — are bouncing” says David Miliband, the former British foreign minister and present head of the International Rescue Committee. We have entered what he calls the Age of Impunity: “A time when militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, and because they can get away with anything, they do everything.”

The collapse came partly from within. The language of rights and freedoms was hollowed out by leaders who misused it, leaving husks empty of meaning. The Soviet regime shredded the language of economic justice and equality — so that even today the mere mention of the term “socialist” is anathema to many in the former Communist bloc. In the West the lofty language of freedom and tyranny was deployed in the service of unprovoked wars and was sullied by war’s inevitable consequences. In 2003, President George W Bush had deliberately connected the battles of the Cold War with his vision for the Middle East ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq promising that “democracy will succeed” and “freedom can be the future of every nation.” Instead, the invasion brought civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths; it enhanced Iran’s power and turned Syria into the fulcrum of a new authoritarian axis. Among people in rich democracies, it engendered cynicism, souring them on their own self-identity. Words imbued with powerful meaning in East Berlin and Prague lost their purpose in Baghdad. Images did too.

Along with this rot from inside was the attack from outside. The great leitmotif of contemporary Russian and now Chinese propaganda is that the desire for freedom and the fight for rights leads not to prosperity but to misery and bloodshed. Russian propaganda channels like to splice shots of people-powered revolutions in Syria or Ukraine together with images of the ensuing conflicts in those countries, as if the war was the inevitable product of revolts, rather than the response by dictatorships to crush them. Unlike democracy — the not-so-subtle message goes — dictatorship is strong and stable.

From grand narrative to a cohesive story

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was shared by two journalists: Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, from Russia. And if we look at their work closely, we see something interesting emerging.

Maria Ressa’s plight could have been utterly esoteric to the world. She is a journalist under attack from the Philippine government for criticizing the extrajudicial murders committed under President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalists are attacked every day across the world, and in the Philippines are regularly killed without drawing much attention overseas. Even the mass killings Maria (who serves on Coda Story’s board of directors) reported on, with thousands killed by pro-government gangs, rarely merit a global headline. Yet Maria’s story held attention. How?

When she dug into what was happening to her, Maria saw that there was something in the form of Duterte’s attacks, his use of troll armies and cyber militias to intimidate, besmirch, and break his opponents, that was both new and universal. He was not merely imposing censorship, he was overloading social media with noise, so the truth was blotted out, distorting reality. Maria made the issue not just about the Philippines but also about Facebook, the harms of social media, the lawlessness of digital disinformation. Her campaign, and the way she told her story, led not just to the Presidential Palace in Manila, but also to Silicon Valley, to every election distorted by online manipulation, to every conflict fueled through digital hate campaigns, to every woman or minority bullied or harassed on social media, to any parent worried about what’s happening to their kids online. Her story became vital for any lawmaker and civil servant thinking about how to regulate this new frontier. It updated how we think about freedom of expression in the digital dimension, forcing tech companies to at least admit that inauthentic coordinated campaigns were not legitimate speech but a form of censorship. One real person saying one unpleasant thing is fine. But when a handful of trolls pretend to be thousands of non-existent people saying the same thing, that is something different.

And Maria’s research joined up countries that had never been put into the same sequence. No one has ever thought about Russia and the Philippines together. Their dissidents don’t meet. They were on different sides in the Cold War. But now these two capitals of online manipulation became part of one coherent story. Maria looked to investigations by Russian journalists to understand what was going on in her own country, began to see Russia and the Philippines as one frontline of digital authoritarianism.

And Russia was one of the birth places of another seemingly local issue that became a global narrative. When Russian activists and journalists first tried to tell the world, in the early Putin era, about how their regime was based on stealing money from state assets and laundering it in Western countries, most shrugged. Who cares? It might be bad for Russia, but it made London and New York richer, and the Kremlin weaker. It took a decade of slow, painful arguments and evidence-gathering to show that corruption in Russia and Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East was not just a local tragedy. It affected us too. It was also a way to infiltrate and undermine democracies, compromise our foreign policy, suborn politicians, fund far-right politics. It created an elite that used the influence and leverage to start wars and get away with it, because Western countries were now dependent on the corrupt investments. It was creating a world where the global rich were living with another set of rules, free of domestic justice anywhere, and that, in turn, was fueling the inequality and anger that undermined people’s faith in democratic institutions. And the enemy was not just in the Kremlin, but also among the middlemen and money launderers in respectable offices in New York and London.

It was a challenge to show that the tragedy of a hospital in northern Russia, pillaged by bureaucrats buying property in London, was also something that people in the Pentagon should care about. Today corruption (or to be more precise kleptocracy and money laundering) has become a central security agenda for the new U.S. administration. But it took years of work to unearth the links that lie buried beneath the noise of news and the narcissistic gaze of social media, and to make something seemingly tangential a story that runs through all our lives. 

So that is the task: to unearth the interconnecting tendrils of issues, intertwining roots of problems that crisscross the world more intensely than ever, and whose larger significance is yet to be discovered. Before, the grand narrative of democracy used to pass over us, like a plane that you could board from a platform called “human rights.” Now we work with shovels. Prodding on a mound that seems just an anomaly in one corner of the garden, but upon excavating and pulling, its rhizomes lead us to the garden next door. This is a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you. To find the sudden intersection between countries no one ever thought about as part of a single map before. Because these new lines are there, they don’t need to be created — they need to be unearthed. And then one discrete event can have meaning for many, one newspaper article can resonate across borders. New publics, who never even thought of each other as having anything in common, can be brought together. And this new journalism needs to do more than just draw new lines and connect new audiences — it needs to dig out the contours of the discussion which offers the solution to the issues it unearths, offering its audiences a chance to transform from passive players to participants in the formulation of a future.

For though the old story of “waves of democratization,” of easily defined and relatable “declarations of human rights” has faded, people still risk their lives and livelihood to protest and fight for….well, for what? We have had, in recent years, seen more protests across the world as at any time for decades. From Hong Kong to Tbilisi, Sudan to Chile. And, of course, Belarus. Belarus which was always dismissed as happy with its degenerate dictator, satisfied with the compromise between stability and rule of a single man. And then suddenly, impossibly, the whole country rose up. Not just urban liberals but pensioners and factory workers. 

But unlike in 1989, we don’t think of all these protests across the world together. Don’t see them as part of one inevitable, coherent History. The rights they demand are very different. The regimes they fight against don’t necessarily abide by old distinctions between democracies and dictatorships. And yet something still itches away at people. Some sort of underlying urge, a need that can’t be satisfied. What connects all these different movements? What will we find in our process of excavation? Maybe, lurking underneath is something coherent, all the tendrils leading to a whole, something alive, huge, all-remembering, global, terrible — preparing to give the epic troves of evidence, the terabytes of data recording crimes against humanity and abuse, a purpose, and a meaning.

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Back in June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government began revising nationwide curriculums to reduce student workloads. The move was announced as a way to mitigate challenges posed to educational institutions by Covid-19 restrictions. Since then, individual Indian states have taken additional steps to pare down examination requirements and accommodate remote learning.

But the material being excised from syllabuses and classroom resources suggests that the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using the pandemic as an opportunity to further an ongoing project to redefine the country’s history.

In July, the Central Board of Secondary Education removed chapters from high school political science textbooks focusing on federalism, citizenship, secularism, diversity, caste and gender. This prompted some 500 historians and academics to petition for their restoration.

Last week, the northeastern state of Assam trimmed down its examination requirements for political science and history, focusing on a number of sensitive topics. The cuts included three chapters on Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and a leading architect of the secular nationalist ideology.

Also axed from the Assam curriculum are sections on the Gujarat anti-Muslim riots of 2002 and the Ayodhya dispute, a decades-long conflict between Hindus and Muslims over a contested religious site.

While the pandemic has presented new opportunities to act, these latest moves are just part of a long-running program of revisionism. In 2002, the previous BJP government faced criticism for cuts made to textbooks on Indian history, including the removal of material related to caste oppression and other inconvenient historical facts.

For Vinay Sitapati, a political scientist at Ashoka University and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of the BJP, reshaping perceptions of India’s past in the classroom is a logical strategy for Modi’s party. 

“Since learning lessons from history is a key component of Hindu nationalism, influencing how it’s taught is a key component of their ideology,” he said.

Following Modi’s election in 2014, the BJP’s drive to reshape education gathered momentum once again. That year, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — a nationalist paramilitary group closely affiliated with the BJP — set up a committee to draft suggestions to “Indianize” the education system. Since then, Modi’s administration has amended syllabuses at both national and state levels.

Changes have included rewriting the outcome of a historical battle to claim that a Hindu king defeated the Mughal emperor in 1576, and downplaying the importance of independence movement leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru.

Pankaj Pushkar, an opposition-aligned member of the Delhi legislature, was a member of the committee that created the political science book to which cuts were made by the Central Board of Secondary Education. In a telephone conversation, he lamented that “textbooks are seen sometimes as a political weapon rather than as a pedagogical tool.”

Pushkar added there is a consensus among academics and researchers that politicizing education in this way jeopardizes “children’s right to discover knowledge for themselves.” He also said that the committee’s members were not consulted regarding which sections should be removed.

Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, the minister responsible for the cuts, has stated publicly that he spoke to educationalists about the changes. However, after filing a recent Right to Information request to determine who he had consulted with, activists have been told that no record exists of any such meetings.

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Were we too late? This was our first question at Coda when we began thinking about tracking down the remaining Gulag survivors. Why were we doing this now?

From the very beginning our goal was not to create another oral history project about the Gulag. A library of documentary and nonfiction work on the Gulag already exists, though by no means extensive enough weighted against the scale of Soviet repressions. I was interested in a story happening now, in this era: I wanted to hear from the eyewitnesses of Soviet authoritarianism on what it is like to see their past being rewritten today. No one has ever been held accountable for running the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps integral to Soviet economic planning that imprisoned or exiled over 28 million people from 1918 to 1987. Instead, the Russian government is now airbrushing and glorifying its Soviet past.

This is a time of democratic backsliding around the world. A new generation of authoritarian leaders are interested in re-defining national identity and making sure history books serve their new political narratives. In China, the government campaigns to erase Uyghur people and their culture. In India, a punitive populist movement recasts India as a Hindu, rather than a secular, nation. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan eulogizes the country’s Ottoman history as he deploys troops to former Ottoman provinces like Libya and northern Syria. 

In fact, no country is immune to instrumentalizing its history. In the UK, the legacy of the British empire is linked with Brexit politics. In the U.S., the violent attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia stoked fears that old Confederate monuments could become new flashpoints for violence, with some removing statues in the dead of night under emergency orders.

As a newsroom we’ve tracking rewriting history stories around the world to better understand how distorting the past is serving regimes today as part of our disinformation coverage.

That’s what brought us to Irina Verblovskaya’s living room. As we set up the lights and cameras, Irina told us what Gulag survivors would repeat to our team during shoots across Russia and Crimea, Belarus, and Latvia. They described the intense interest in their Gulag stories in the eighties and early nineties when the Soviet Union fell. Many documents from the defunct KGB were made available to the public almost overnight. Publishers were printing camp manuscripts and new textbooks were selling out.

But then state police forces began reassembling into a new agency, the FSB, in the mid-nineties. As its influence grew, archives closed and interest waned. Vladimir Putin, elected in 2000 after heading the FSB, brought along a cadre of security officials propelled into senior cabinet positions. Today, many are still in government or have transitioned to powerful positions in finance and industry.

Putin’s government wasn’t interested in reckoning with Soviet-era crimes or setting up Nuremberg-style courts.

“They want it to become part of the tapestry of the past that has no special significance, no special meaning and no special lessons,” Anne Applebaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gulag: A History,” said to me.

“And they certainly don’t want anyone drawing lessons from history or looking at the past and saying, ‘We don’t want to repeat that so how do we avoid it in the present?’ They don’t want people thinking like that.”

In Russia there’s strong evidence this campaign has succeeded: close to half of young Russians say they have never heard of the Stalin-era purges, known as the Great Terror. And Stalin himself has never been more popular: in 2019 70% of Russians responded that they approve of Stalin’s role in history — a record high.

One of Russia’s only museums located at a former Gulag camp — Perm-36, the last camp Gorbachev closed down in 1987 — was labeled a “foreign agent” and taken over by local government officials in 2015. The museum’s new head curated an updated exhibition focusing on the prisoners’ contribution to timber production in the WWII war effort rather than on the horrific camp conditions or absurd charges which landed people there.

The process of rewriting Gulag history most often takes the form of de-emphasizing the horrors of Soviet authoritarianism, and deflecting with patriotic WWII stories. It’s happening at the highest levels of the Russian government: such as Putin’s complaint of  “excessive demonization” of Stalin as “an attack on the Soviet Union and Russia.”

It’s also happening on the local level, such as the bizarre case of police officers dressing up in KGB uniforms for a photoshoot in southern Russia last year celebrating local “heroes.” There are more sinister incidents, such as Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriev, aged 63, held in police custody for over three years on what human rights activists say are trumped up charges of child abuse being used to terminate his tireless work uncovering mass grave sites.

Applebaum, who met with Dmitriev while researching her book, called his arrest “appalling” and a “profound reversal” in attitudes towards Gulag history. “This is somebody who should be a local community hero,” she told me.

The silencing of voices who call for a closer examination of the Soviet past is happening in parallel with a broad crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Russia. As our team filmed and edited the episodes in Generation Gulag, Coda was also covering stories of journalists, activists and peaceful protestors arrested in Russia last year. Moscow saw some of the largest protests in a decade against fraudulent local elections and the mass arrests of protestors. These were the events forming the context of this series for our Moscow-based production team. They intentionally chose a different series name for our Russian-language audiences, which translates to “The Repressions Don’t End.”

Oksana Baulina, Coda’s journalist who interviewed the majority of the survivors for the series, told me that she directly links the “unraveling of democracy and return to authoritarianism in Russia” to the lack of “national realization and repentance” for Soviet crimes.

Irina was only kidding about our tardiness. As we set up the equipment she quietly chuckled to herself at her own joke, adding how she would have been far more attractive on camera ten years ago. But she understood very well why we were there, speaking to her now:

“Human individuality isn’t valued here. Human life isn’t valued here. We’re counted in numbers and in masses and not as individuals.”

During our interview for the episode “Love at first sight,” survivor Galina Nelidova was emotional when describing her disgust at watching the legacy of the Soviet Union rehabilitated today on Russian state television: “I find it shameful that people still don’t know the whole truth,” she told us. “Even when I hear [a Russian politician] saying, ‘What can you do, a few thousand people were arrested back then.’ But we know that it was millions.”

She also specifically referenced one of Moscow’s most notorious prisons called Butyrka which is still in use and holds a number of political prisoners arrested during the 2019 protests. “To this day in Butyrka there are unmarked mass graves of people killed by firing squads,” she reminds viewers.

Another survivor, Olga Shirokaya from “An officer’s daughter,” spoke to Coda’s Oksana about the challenges of holding people accountable decades later for crimes committed under Soviet rule. How does a nation organize trials if there were also “millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards,” asked Shirokaya. “These millions were also our people.”

Latvia is a perfect example of what that process could look like, though on a smaller scale. Last year the government suddenly declassified KGB documents listing 4,141 people as Cold War-era informants. This sent shock waves across the country of just under two million as prominent figures and relatives were publicly outed. A number denied their involvement on social media, others threatened to file defamation suits, some accepted that this was simply a time when people faced terrible choices.

From my childhood memories visiting relatives in St. Petersburg, there were always stories. I remember the gossip about a neighbor who was a former camp guard, stories told about a family friend who worked as a conductor on a train which offloaded prisoners in Siberia at a stop simply named “Winter.” 

But even after months of work on this series, I still struggle to wrap my head around the sheer magnitude of the Gulag experience. While researching and traveling in the region for Generation Gulag I was struck again and again by how many lives were touched by the system.

In one way or another, “we all have the Gulag in our homes” my colleague Semen Kvasha would tell me. It’s not uncommon for families to be split between relatives who did time in the Gulag and those who helped administer the massive camps. Over seven decades of communist rule the perpetrators also became the victims and vice versa. 

Gulag survivor Azari Plisetsky, featured in the episode “The Dancer,” spoke directly to this: “Everyone must know the truth about these terrifying repressions, about the genocide of our own people which happened during our lifetime, especially the younger generation.”

Over the course of several months, our team interviewed more than twenty survivors. We felt a sense of urgency to find people and speak to them before their stories slipped away. Sometimes, we didn’t make it in time: two of our interview subjects, Vladimir Rodionov and Petr Meshkov, passed away just days before we were scheduled to film with them. “When I was searching for people to interview, I constantly felt that we were running behind,” our reporter Oksana Baulina said. “I feel guilty about the two of them: that their stories remain untold; that we were too late.”

The survivors we managed to interview for Generation Gulag — Irina, Galina, Azari, Olga, all of them — understand why especially now their stories matter.

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The emotions sparked by this intimate exhibit grow more intense as the viewer stands in front of a handwritten quote stenciled on one of the green walls, repeating the text that thousands of Soviet mothers and wives received years ago:

”With great sorrow and grief we inform you about the death of your son.”

On the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, reminders of that brutal war are largely confined to out-of-the-way places like the Afghan Exhibit Hall in Petrovo, opened and staffed by a group of Afghan war veterans who don’t want their sacrifice and patriotism to be forgotten.

In today’s Russia, where the Kremlin is flexing its geopolitical muscles, lawmakers are campaigning for a reinterpretation of the Afghan conflict, recasting it not as a tragedy of human and political proportions but part of a valiant and glorious past.

In today’s Russia, where the Kremlin is flexing its geopolitical muscles in foreign lands, lawmakers are campaigning for a reinterpretation of the Afghan conflict, recasting it not as a tragedy of human and political proportions but as part of a valiant and glorious past.

In 1979 when the Soviet Union ordered scores of armored divisions across the farcically named Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, the nation was at the height of its power. Over the next decade, the war killed an estimated 1 million civilians, 90,000 Afghan fighters and more than 14,000 Soviet soldiers.

In 1979 the Soviet Union ordered scores of armored divisions across the farcically named Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. Over the next decade, the war killed an estimated 1 million civilians, 90,000 Afghan fighters and more than 14,000 Soviet soldiers.

When the final Soviet soldiers retreated across the same bridge in February 1989, the nation was on its knees, economically and emotionally. The vast majority of Soviet leaders and citizens criticized the war as a disaster, marking a turning point in Soviet history. Mikhail Gorbachev, as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, signed a resolution of “moral and political condemnation” of the invasion, a position backed by the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Thirty years later, the mood in Moscow has changed significantly.

Duma deputies are planning to call a vote Friday, the anniversary of the withdrawal, to overturn this resolution and redefine the Afghan war “on the basis of political impartiality and historical truth,” according to a draft law approved in November by a majority of lawmakers from the ruling United Russia parties and the Communists.

Col. General Vladimir Shamanov, the head of the Duma’s defense committee, says this new law is necessary to preserve the honor of those who served in the war.

“Thirty years have passed, but all of us still ache in some way from those events not only because we did not expect such an end to [the military operation] but also because of the assessments that were made too fast.” Shamanov said in astatement. “Neither the leadership of the state nor servicemen and civilians deserve such assessments.”

Revising this painful chapter comes at a time when Moscow is again seeking influence in the war-torn country. Last week, the Kremlin hosted peace talks between leading Afghan political figures and the Taliban, men who were among the anti-Soviet resistance fighters that helped push the Red Army out of their country decades ago. Some in the delegation have been linked to terrorism and war crimes as well.

For people like Igor Erin, a retired sergeant who served in Kunduz, Afghanistan, who is now the director of the Afghan exhibit hall in Petrovo, the Duma move smacks of cynicism.

Igor Erin, a veteran who runs a small Afghan war museum, says nobody actually wanted to fight. Even so, he says he owes it to his fallen comrades to prevent the tragedy of war from being forgotten.

He and his former comrades at arms have struggled for years to keep open their small memorial. Created by volunteers in 1993, it now receives funding from the state, while most other museums of the Soviet-Afghan war are private.

Most of the 7,000 visitors each year are Moscow children, who are taught at school that the war was part of a benign foreign policy. Erin says his fellow citizens are not taught about the human cost of the war to the Afghan people and the Soviet veterans like himself who have lived with trauma and disability, largely without support from the government.

Some political analysts see the Duma initiative to reshape the legacy of Afghanistan as part of a larger campaign to burnish their Soviet past, and they doubt such a move has any popular backing. It is unclear if the Kremlin will approve the new resolution or not.

”The political establishment do not perceive the invasion as a success. So why are they pretending? Their views about the Afghan war are almost eye to eye with the majority of the population,” said Alexei Malashenko, a leading Moscow-based Middle East expert, the chief Research Director of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute.

In Petrov, Erin and his volunteers on Friday will be holding their own commemoration of the anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal.

He says Afghanistan was a war that nobody actually wanted to fight. Even so, he says he owes it to his fallen comrades to prevent their deaths and the tragedy of war from being forgotten.

”We want a bigger museum. We need more money but the government has other priorities,” Erin said.

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Moiseyev is the chair of the local prisoner of war association in Rostov-on-Don, and he had come to a military base in this southern port city that was previously a Nazi-run POW camp. It was the international day marking the liberation of POWs from German-run concentration camps, and he was preparing to pay tribute to the thousands of Soviet prisoners who died here.

Moiseyev was himself a prisoner at the base, when he was just 15 years old, witnessing a catalogue of horrors, including mass starvation and even medical experiments on some of the Red Army soldiers held there.

Yet, as he made to go inside, the guards blocked his way.

“How can this be happening?” said Моiseyev, addressing fellow veterans and a group of schoolchildren who he had invited to come in with him. The guards looked uncomfortable as they explained that these were their orders. “This isn’t right,” Moiseyev countered. “We were imprisoned here, waiting for our deaths and they won’t let us through.”

Moiseyev had come up hard against the Russian government’s policy of trying to block out moments in the country’s history that it regards as embarrassing or shameful. The story of the nearly three million Russian and other Soviet POWs held in German camps during the war is one of them. He had come up hard against the Russian government’s policy of trying to block out moments in the country’s history that it regards as embarrassing or shameful.

Even though many were captured during celebrated moments like the Battle for Stalingrad, they are seen as a stain on the otherwise glorious narrative of victory. Stalin himself denounced them as “traitors,” sending hundreds of thousands to the Gulag prison camps.

Today, the base is a major training center for the Russian air force, where at least 10,000 personnel work. But there is nothing to indicate that it was once a camp for Soviet POWs, and Moiseyev has been fighting to keep their memory alive. It’s been a long and dispiriting battle.

As he argued with the guards, Moiseyev, who is now 91 years old, grew increasingly agitated. And then he fainted.

There used to be a small memorial inside the base complex to the 9,000 soldiers who died there — even though the state didn’t want to acknowledge the POWs. And Moiseyev and his “Society of Former Russian Prisoners in Rostov” regularly came to pay their respects.

During World War II, the Germans reportedly told local people that the complex was a hospital, when in reality it was a concentration camp for thousands of Red Army soldiers and anyone else the Nazis captured. Doctors drew blood from prisoners to send to wounded German troops elsewhere. They kept wounded prisoners in rotting bandages for months. The camp complex was lined with trenches for mass graves.

However, in the late 1970s, the base expanded, and the memorial was demolished. City officials promised that the remains of any prisoners that were found would be reburied in a nearby cemetery.

But years later, there was still no sign of any grave being set up to mark them. Whether by design or neglect, the authorities had in effect managed to hide the memory of the POWs.

The truth, though, if anything, was worse — and it was the authorities who helped reveal it. When they announced a new round of construction at the base in 2011 — to turn it into a pilot training school — they admitted that the remains of prisoners who had been found in the 1970s had actually been dumped in a mass, unmarked grave inside the grounds of one of the city’s prisons. The authorities admitted that the remains of prisoners who had been found in the 1970s had actually been dumped in a mass, unmarked grave

“I want to assure you that all soldier remains were moved to a different cemetery,” said the head of the city’s veteran committee Valentin Gerbach. “This whole, unpleasant story has surfaced only to benefit some obscure people trying to blacken the work of our committee.”

Moiseyev and other local activists were furious. “It turns out that the remains of the prisoners of war were just thrown out along with some dirt to where criminals serve out their sentences,” said retired Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Shevkunov, a member of a local patriotic organization.

But they still didn’t believe what they had been told. For years, Shevkunov and other activists have been finding bone fragments in parts of the base that are no longer in use. Shevkunov sent some of the remains off to a laboratory, which confirmed they dated from the years of World War II.

Neither the base nor the city administration have yet acknowledged his findings. “We do not have war graves,” said unit commander Alexander Pankin. And from talking to officers training there, it seems clear that most have no idea that this was once a Nazi-run POW camp.

Nationwide, it’s a similar story. While monuments to victory over Hitler’s Germany are eagerly funded by the state, efforts to memorialize other less-glamorous chapters of the war’s history, including the treatment of POWs struggle to receive any official support.

When Moiseyev collapsed outside the base last year, the police were called. He had regained consciousness by the time they arrived and they asked him for identification.

The elderly veteran told me how he rolled up his shirt sleeve and showed them a tattoo on his left forearm. “‘This is my camp number 75,949,’” he remembered telling them. “‘I didn’t have a name. Only a number.’”

When the policemen arrived, they reported to their superiors that Moiseyev was now conscious but stood back and avoided approaching the veteran and his school-age supporters.

“We were tortured in German camps,” Moiseyev continued, “And now they are torturing our memory.” But that incident at the camp gates was such a shock that this past April he couldn’t face going there again on the day of remembrance.

“By what right have they usurped our memory?” Moiseyev said when we met. A small group of people decides for all of us how to interpret the events of the Great Patriotic War,” Moiseyev said. “Politicians have seized the ideological memory of our generation.”

Moiseyev continues speaking out for greater recognition for the camp and its former prisoners but local journalists who report on his activity have been threatened with legal action by Gerbach’s Committee of War Veterans.

Former Lieutenant Colonel Shevkunov puts it another way. “It’s easier for our country’s patriotic organizations to deal with fireworks and songs,” than handle the legacy and stories of Soviet POWs. “It’s easier for our country’s patriotic organizations to deal with fireworks and songs,” than handle the legacy and stories of Soviet POWs. Lieutenant Colonel Shevkunov

And yet the stories and memories of base have not vanished entirely. One young officer at the base, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while doing repair work at the base his team had found fragments of blood-stained bandages. When he told his superiors, he was reprimanded.

“Even though I am a military man, I had a strange feeling when I visited these barracks,” he said. “There was some kind of presence, then the doors opened by themselves. And when you told me about this terrible camp, I understood everything.”

Images by Polina Efimova, Alexander Olenev, and the Archive of the Academy’s Veteran Committee.

This article first appeared in Russian on Coda.ru

The post The unwanted history of a Russian base appeared first on Coda Story.

Their gleaming onion domes are positioned overlooking the Volga River in the model Ulyanovsk, which was renamed for its most famous son. He was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, and then changed his name to Lenin before spearheading the Bolshevik Revolution that led to the creation of the atheist Soviet Union superpower 100 years ago.

Yulia Skoromolova, head of Ulyanovsk’s state-run tourism board, looks down at this miniature idyll. For a moment, her eyes soften. “Lenin was educated and he came from a good family, from a good city.” Like other exhibits in the sprawling Lenin memorial complex which she oversees, the diorama has been carefully put together. But then she sighs: “Why did he lead this revolution?”

The self-described Lenin devotee is not the only one conflicted by 1917. The whole country seems at a loss over how to mark the events, from the October revolution through to the bloody end of the Russian monarchy the following year, with the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by firing squad.

In Soviet times, the anniversary of the revolution — which falls on November 7 in the post-tsarist calendar — was marked with military parades through Moscow’s Red Square. But the Kremlin is not organizing any official events for the centenary. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to speak — it would be remiss if he didn’t — but if previous mentions are anything to go by, the revolution will not get any special treatment. A week before, he referred to the centenary with unease, saying “we must never again push society to the dangerous precipice of division”.

On the one hand, the Soviet Union forged Putin and gave Moscow enormous global influence. The Russian leader has famously described its collapse as the “geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” But on the other hand, he fears dissent, especially revolution, and his administration has worked hard to put down any youth-oriented opposition.

The modern-day Kremlin is also concerned about keeping the Russian Orthodox Church on side, which takes a dim view of the revolution and the murder of the last tsar. Nicholas II — who has been canonized as a saint — has many adherents who are preparing to mark the centenary of the royal family’s deaths next year. And it has been notable how cautious the government has been in its reaction to protests over a new film about the last tsar.

“The government has this strange ideological combination of forcefulness and fuzziness,” said Maria Lipman, an independent analyst in Moscow and editor-in-chief of George Washington University’s Counterpoint journal. “The official rhetoric is ‘Russia is great’ and has an unblemished historical record, and questioning this is unpatriotic, or even worse.” As a result, she adds, Putin’s position on 1917 has become “one of obfuscation and oblivion.”

This may have worked. The country itself appears divided in how to view the revolution: in a March poll published by the independent Levada Center, 38 percent of Russians said they saw 1917 positively; 25 percent negatively. A third said the country should not dwell on what happened, while 44 percent viewed the revolution as an opportunity to learn from its mistakes.

More than a thousand miles east of Moscow, in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, the mood is one of outright rejection towards Russia’s revolutionary past. Despite having a prominent Lenin Avenue and an accompanying statue, the city where Russia’s last tsar was killed in 1918 is now becoming almost a shrine to his memory.

Two current exhibits, including on the spot where the Romanovs were shot — now home to a church — feature quotes by imperial army generals alongside tsarist medals and lapels. The White Army, the adversary of the Red Bolsheviks, is glorified, a rare sight in Russia. “The revolution is not relevant here, and you won’t find anyone who’ll raise the subject,” said the city’s mayor, Yevgeny Roizman, in an interview.

Since Putin gave the Ministry of Culture the task of marking the centennial last year, some events have popped up across Russia. St. Petersburg, the cradle of the revolution, is staging a huge exhibition at the Hermitage. But other countries are doing much more, in direct recognition of the revolution’s impact. London, Paris, New York and Hong Kong, for instance, are all putting on major events, including gala concerts, theatre performances, art shows and films.

The Russian media has taken on the subject, though without stirring much debate or controversy. The state-run Tass news agency has a splashy new site dedicated to the events leading up to the revolution. RT, the Kremlin’s English-language channel, has been live-tweeting the revolutionary year. The network has set up more than 40 Twitter handles, including for Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II, using original photos, newspaper clippings and quotes in many of its posts. At the time of writing, the tsar was lagging behind his nemesis, with Lenin boasting more than 17,000 Twitter followers.

RT continues to target Western viewers, even as its pro-Kremlin propagandizing has come under close scrutiny in the U.S. The revolutionary social media campaign was designed with that audience in mind, according to the head of online projects there, Kirill Karnovich-Valua. The revolution “may not be widely understood in the West,” he said.

Journalist Mikahil Zygar, a former editor-in-chief of Russia’s only independent news channel, TV Rain, has said he wants to do the opposite. He has set up an interactive site called 1917: Free Story, which he hopes will debunk Russian conspiracy theories about Western meddling and interference that have been resurfacing in contemporary Russian politics.

Television channels Rossiya 1 and Channel One, the country’s state-run heavyweights, have both commissioned a series about the revolution. Significantly, both vilify the revolutionaries Alexander Parvus and Leon Trotsky, who are widely considered as outsiders because they were Jews.

In Soviet times, the narrative of the country was explicit, whereas today “we have no official origin story,” said Maria Lipman, the analyst.

She pointed to Putin’s end-of-year address in 2012, as evidence of what she meant. “Russia did not begin either in 1917, or in 1991,” the Russian leader said at the time. “We have a single, uninterrupted history spanning over 1,000 years.”

This piece is produced by Coda Network — a collaboration of independent newsrooms. Its partners include Coda Story, Ukrayinska Pravda, Spektr, Kloop and Hetq.

The post The Kremlin’s 1917 revolution problem appeared first on Coda Story.

His father joined him for what was a deeply personal journey. His great-grandfather, Vasily Ostryakov, lived in the village during World War II and was then convicted there, on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. And for several years now, Ostryakov has been trying to uncover the full story — and whether he was really guilty, or not.

But what started as an interest in his family history has turned into an extraordinary battle with the Russian authorities, who refuse to release the criminal case files they hold on Vasily Ostryakov, even though they are now more than 70 years old. Dmitry Ostryakov has come up hard against what critics characterize as the government’s determination to bury anything that conflicts with its glorious version of Russia’s past.

The cornerstone of this narrative is the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany when Joseph Stalin was leader. And in stressing that victory, many say the mass killings and political terror he is also famous for are being deliberately played down. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has all but admitted it, warning in an interview earlier this year that “excessive demonization” of Stalin was being used as a way to attack Russia.

The files are held by the FSB, Russia’s domestic security agency, and the courts have repeatedly taken its side against Ostryakov. In Kafkaesque fashion, Russian law says that the documents can only be shown to parties involved in the criminal case — which was in 1943. It was the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, who opened the case. The files were then inherited by its successor, the KGB, and then in turn by its post-Soviet successor, the FSB.

Dmitry Ostryakov has been interested in his family history since he was 10 years old. But the now 33-year-old teacher knows little about his great-grandfather’s fate other than that he was convicted of Nazi collaboration after the Red Army retook Gotovye. He was then sentenced to seven years in a Gulag prison camp, in Russia’s Far East, and died there just 18 months later. Vasily Ostryakov has no known grave.

“I would just like to know the details of this case,” says Dmitry Ostryakov, who has also investigated other branches of his family’s history. “Did my great-grandfather collaborate in forms that I find acceptable, or not?” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin warned in an interview earlier this year that “excessive demonization” of Stalin was being used as a way to attack Russia.

There is a “myth that there were only heroic people during the war and that we only need to talk about them,” says Ostryakov. “But it wasn’t like that. There were different people, different human stories, different situations.”

The courts have backed the FSB’s circular argument that such files can only be shown to parties to the criminal case.

An exception can be made for relatives if the individual in question was rehabilitated — a legal procedure introduced after the end of the Soviet Union for victims of Stalin’s repression. And Dmitry Ostryakov tried that approach. But in 2015, a court in Belgorod, the main city in the region where his great-grandfather lived, threw out his petition.

There are no definite figures on the number of people who have not been granted rehabilitation, but Ostryakov says it is likely to run to hundreds of thousands.

The little information he does have about his great-grandfather is from a short document handed to him in 2015 by prosecutors. Vasily Ostryakov, born in 1897, worked as a secretary for a local collective farm in Belgorod region for the six months it was under Nazi control from July 1942. In his trial, he pleaded not guilty of collaboration and said he was elected to the role and because he was trusted by fellow villagers.

“He was an ordinary peasant,” says Dmitry Ostryakov. “He was a civilian who worked as an intermediary between the occupying power and the local population.”

And in Dmitry Ostryakov’s view, the fact his relatives were able to live in the same village for years after his death without being shunned by locals, suggests his great-grandfather did nothing wrong. But he admits he is speculating. This is “fantasy,” Ostryakov says. “In order to speak more objectively I want to see the criminal case materials.”

When Dmitry Ostryakov arrived in the village Gotovye — his first ever visit — he found his great-grandfather’s house. He also tracked down the grave of another person who was convicted of collaboration at the same time. But unlike his great-grandfather, this man served his sentence and returned to live out his days in the village.

Many thousands of people were sentenced to death, or long prison terms on flimsy or fabricated evidence during Stalin’s brutal rule. And during and after World War Two, which Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War, those suspected of cooperating with the Nazis were treated with particular severity. That included hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers captured by the Nazis, who were sent to prison camps once they were liberated by the Red Army.

The situation the family now find themselves is not unusual, according to Ivan Pavlov, the head of Team 29, a Russian NGO and law firm working with Ostryakov on the case. The court rulings are in line with an “obvious trend towards secrecy” in modern Russia, he says.

After losing their bid to rehabilitate his great-grandfather, Dmitry Ostryakov and Team 29 turned to a St. Petersburg court for permission to see the documents last year. But the judge there also ruled in favor of the FSB. They are now considering taking the case to Russia’s Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

In a small ray of light, the St. Petersburg court threw out a legal attempt by the FSB to compel Ostryakov to pay the 26,000 rubles ($434) expenses of one of its staff members who had traveled by train from Belgorod for the hearing. “I should decide whether to tell other people the story of my great-grandfather. Not the state.” Dmitry Ostryakov

But they are rowing against a strengthening tide. Several new statues to Stalin have been erected in recent years, including a bust unveiled by Russia’s Culture Minister last month. And historians and rights activists say that highlighting the Soviet dictator’s crimes, or his wartime mistakes, is becoming increasingly risky.

Those objecting publicly to the state’s preferred narrative have faced losing their jobs, or even criminal prosecution. Yuri Dmitriev, a 61-year-old historian who spent his life uncovering the mass graves of victims of Stalinist repression is currently being tried in the northern city of Petrozavodsk on charges of pedophilia, which friends and supporters say are fabricated.

Ostryakov says the publicity around his legal battle has not just generated bureaucratic brick walls, but also letters of support from people in similar situations. He wants to change the law, to give relatives of those who have not been officially “rehabilitated” access to documents about their cases.

“I should decide whether to tell other people the story of my great-grandfather,” he says. “Not the state.”

The post Russia’s lock on family history appeared first on Coda Story.

Three crooked, concrete pylons represent the fence posts that once ringed the camp. A dozen emaciated human figures, also fashioned from concrete, huddle below, representing the thousands of Soviet prisoners incarcerated here in World War II — in front of a pyramid of human skulls.

It is known as the memorial to Dulag-100, the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp that once stood here. But this place is also a tribute to one man’s struggle to preserve this memory in the face of years of institutionalized disinterest and denial.

Aleksandr Manachinsky, devoted most of his adult life to constructing the memorial, in Russia’s north-west region of Pskov. But it was his son Vladislav who completed it. Manachinsky senior, a St. Petersburg architect, died six months before it finally opened last June — and thanks to private rather than state support.

At least three million Soviet POWs died in Nazi-captivity, most of them Russian. Yet across the country, there are just a handful of monuments remembering them — because both the Soviet Union and the Russian government of today treat them as a source of shame.

“The attitude of the state, the army and former soldiers who weren’t captured hasn’t changed,” says Pavel Polian, a historian at Russia’s Higher School of Economics and an expert on World War II prisoners. Soviet POWs, he adds, are still seen as “traitors and collaborators.”

Other less glorious episodes of Russia’s wartime history – such as the behavior of its own troops as they took over Germany — are similarly played down, or simply erased altogether, critics say, in the Kremlin’s efforts to create a unifying historical narrative.

Aleksandr Manachinsky’s interest in Dulag-100 began while he was working in Porkhov, a town near the site, in the 1980s. When he heard what had happened to the prisoners at the camp, it “touched him very deeply,” says his son, Vladislav, a sculptor.

Some Russian media reports have said as many as 85,000 people perished here. Experts suggest that figure is inflated, but no one doubts there was huge suffering here. And Manachinsky felt the small memorial stone he found at the site did not reflect the scale of what amounted to a forgotten atrocity.

So he set about designing a vast memorial complex, and looking for funding. “It was the most important work of his life,” says his son.

Dulag is short for “Durchgangslager”, the German term for “transit camp”. And Dulag-100 was one of dozens set up the Nazis in Russian territory they occupied. They were usually built next to railway stations, serving as both transport hubs to send forced labor to other parts of Germany-occupied territory, or as killing sites in themselves. Jews and Soviet officials were often executed in such camps.

Starvation, disease, exposure and mistreatment claimed the lives of many more.

Dulag-100 was based around a Red Army barracks, but this didn’t give POWs much shelter, according to local historian Mikhail Tuk. “During the day they had to be outside regardless of the weather,” he says. At times the camp was so full many prisoners had to sleep outside, even in the harsh Russian winter.

Official Disdain

Many of their experiences have only come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union, as surviving former POWs have been able to speak publicly about their incarceration. Some war archives were opened too in the 1990s. And yet official disdain for Soviet citizens captured by the Nazis hasn’t changed.

That meant it was hard to drum up support for the Dulag-100 memorial. Manachinsky ploughed on through the 1980s, but what funds he had dried up in 1992, before he could finish the project. By contrast, any event or monument celebrating victory in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War is virtually guaranteed to get official support. Manachinsky tried that route, writing to leading Russian political figures begging for money, but to no avail.

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Locals dubbed the unfinished edifice the “hockey sticks”, or the “three boots.” Motorcyclists used the area as a practice ground. Farmers brought their cattle to graze around the monument. “The soldiers were without heads and it was tragic,” says his son Vladislav Manachinsky, “even a cause for shame.”

It was local people who were the key to getting it finished. Laborers working on a nearby road raised money to re-start the work in 2015, and as word spread donations came in from road-workers nationwide. A special charity was set up to receive donations.

But when work resumed, Aleksandr Manachinsky was too ill to oversee it and had to hand over to his son.

The 42-year-old Vladislav Manachinsky, who knew the monument from summers he had spent helping his father as a student, says he simplified the original design, scrapping some side panels and adding a bell. But, he says, his father would have approved.

It was a “double responsibility,” he says. “On one hand, it was my father’s work. That was very important. And then there was the social significance.”

More than three decades after Manachinsky first conceived of the Dulag-100 memorial, it finally opened last June. Several top officials came to the ceremony, including one of Putin’s advisors, a government minister, and the Pskov Region governor. But none mentioned the words “prisoner of war” in their speeches.

The Dulag-100 memorial is a rare challenge to the official narrative – its awkward, angular structure poking above the landscape almost a metaphor for the battle to preserve a more balanced reading of Russia’s history.

There are a few other exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A statue has been set up for the POWs of Dulag-184 in Vyazma in the Smolensk Region – but it was thanks to a campaign initiated by relatives of the dead and human rights groups.

The Soviet Union’s prisoners of war have yet to be fully remembered. But Vladislav Manachinsky is clear their history cannot be forgotten.

“They are our citizens and they died for the motherland,” he says. “A lot of people ended up as prisoners not because they were cowards, but because that’s just what happened.”

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