contributors

Articles by Kevin Deegan-Krause & Tim Haughton

1. Life in Kharkiv A researcher’s diary during full-scale war

   Diary from Kharkiv on impressions of the first two months of a full-scale war unleashed by Moscow.

2. Evacuation from Mariupol during the Russian invasion. A brief diary of a witness

   During the last eight years we have become used to living near the line of fire and the feeling of danger has been lowered: but everything changed the early morning on February 24, 2022. That day the first Russian rockets destroyed Mariupol’s anti-aircraft weapons and next day we observed civilian casualties in the eastern part of the city.

3. My soul was somewhere between Kyiv and Sumy …

   I decided to go to Sumy to support my parents and bought a train ticket. But the train was cancelled due to a Russian attack. So this was my destiny — to stay in Kyiv!

4. The post-communist legacy in the shadow of the Empire

   Professor Andrzej Leder, psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy, in a conversation with Aleksandra Reczuch about the history and social transformations in the region, the threat of Russia, and the historical memory embodied in buildings, symbols, commemorations, and family albums.

5. Manuscripts do not burn. What about unwritten manuscripts?

   According to the databases of Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and of Ministry of Culture and Information Politics in Ukraine, there were 389 crimes against cultural heritage on June 10, 2022. In the conditions of an ongoing war, it is impossible to be certain of any further damage; this general insecurity and vulnerability adds to general losses. In many towns in Ukraine people made efforts to secure their monuments, covering them physically and digitalizing them in databases.

6. The dilemma of memory laws To restore the dignity of victims without feeding into ultra-nationalism

   In most post-communist countries after the breakdown of the USSR, memory legislation often aimed at constructing an identity of suffering under Nazism and the totalitarian Soviet regime, which relativized itself according to a cosmopolitan understanding of victimhood centered on the Holocaust memory. Regulations of memory, in this sense, were considered an indicator of democratic transition and an entry ticket to the European Union.

7. Space nostalgia: the future that is only possible in the past

   I would like to offer this remnant of a futuristic halo of the Soviet space program as a possible way to comprehend why April 12 never managed to become a full-fledged fantasy world of what Boym terms “restorative nostalgia” like May 9th, and to see which alternative ways to understand nostalgia it may open up.

8. Belarus’ relations with Ukraine and the 2022 Russian invasion Historical ties, society, and realpolitik

   Before the war, Ukraine was the main trade partner of Belarus, after Russia. Imports of Belarusian goods to Ukraine in 2021 are estimated at 5.4 billion US dollars. Therefore, Belarus has a great economic interest in stopping the war.

9. War and the academic community in Russia

   The outbreak of the war on February 24, 2022, was a real shock for the Russian science and higher education, and completely turned the situation upside down, even in comparison with the negative trends of the previous years.

10. With Ukraine

    Like Stefan Zweig writing about the sophisticated idyll of Central Europe in the 1930s, I clutch at these memories like straws, at the same time that the Russian army is continuing to attack Ukraine, pulverizing its cities and killing its people. Although I have spent very little time in Ukraine, I have spent a lot of time with Ukraine.

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