Sixth conference in Memory of Arseny Roginsky: Archive as a Place of Memory and Form of Resistance

Friday 27. March at 10:00 - Saturday 28. March at 18:30 CET

Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Berlin

Online

March 30, 2026 will be eighty years since the birth of Arseny Roginsky. The Archival Turn which began in humanities studies in Western universities in the late 1960s (some time before the archives of Communist regimes became accessible), dispelled the myth of the archive as guardian of objective knowledge. The Turn revealed how archives, primarily state archives, participate in the production of historical narratives and often become instruments the authorities use to create a convenient picture of the past. At the same time a new concept of what is a historical source expanded to include anything that a person says or writes, anything that they make, anything they touch. All these things must become objects of research in the new archives which the forced dissolution of Memorial International and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine have brought into being. And that includes archives documenting war crimes.

Themes of panels and individual papers:

  • Archive as a Totalitarian and Colonial Practice and its Legacy. The Fate of Totalitarian/Colonial Archives;

  • Statehood, Memory, Identity: The Role of Archives in Shaping Independent Ukraine;

  • Archives under Stalin and for Stalin;

  • The Colonial in Uzbekistan’s Archives;

  • How the question of the centre-periphery appears in archives and their use by contemporary historians; the history of collectivisation and the Holodomor, the history of the peasantry in Soviet agrarian policy in Ukraine 1920–1940s;

  • Ukrainian Archives;

  • How young researchers adapt their work in wartime, post-colonial optics and closing of Russian archives – based on specific documents;

  • What future Memorial team members did in Soviet times;

  • Problems related to the publication and presentation of archives – reading, selection, editing, etc., – using the Ringelblum archive as an example;

  • The presentation of an “integral” collaborative project, which unites the archive resources of different organisations using modern technologies.

Leading specialists from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, USA, Ukraine, France, Czechia, Switzerland will be taking part.

Working languages of the Conference: Russian, English, German.

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Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur • Kronenstraße 5, 10117 Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Google Map of Kronenstraße 5, 10117 Berlin, Berlin, Germany

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