ACTION UKRAINE HISTORY REPORT (AUHR) #9
Washington, D.C., Monday, February 16, 2009

TO:   HOLODOMOR WORKING GROUP  
  Ukraine: Holodomor, Genocide, Crimes of Communism
DATE:  Monday, February 16, 2009

RE: SEVEN ARTICLES

1.  HOLODOMOR: A CRIME OF UNPARALLED BRUTALITY
This murder of millions will ultimately be understood
OPINION: by Lubomyr Luciuk, Professor of Political Geography
Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 

2.  UKRAINE'S NATIONAL MEMORY INSTITUTE EXPECTS RUSSIA
TO DIVULGE DOCUMENTS DENYING 1932-33 HOLODOMOR WAS 
DIRECTED AGAINST UKRAINE
Olha Bohatyrenko, Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Fri, Feb 13, 2009

3.  UKRAINE:  MY DAY AT THE STATE SECURITY SERVICE 
Ukraines spy agency is opening up the records, impressively so
OPINION: By Jed Sudan, Publisher, Kyiv Post
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, January 28, 2009

4.  JUSTICE MINISTRY OF UKRAINE CREATES INTERAGENCY GROUP
TO IDENTIFY VICTIMS OF THE GREAT FAMINE OF 1932-1933
Maksym Bedenok, Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Thu, Feb 5, 2009

5.  UKRAINE: DATA ABOUT HOLODOMOR 1932-1933 ENTERED INTO
SCHOOL CURRICULA OF SIX COUNTRIES AND CURRICULA FOR
INSTITUTES OF HIGHER LEARNING IN TWELVE COUNTRIES
Ukrinform, Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, February 7, 2009 

6.  PRESIDENT OF POLAND SAYS SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, THE
COMMUNIST REGIME COMMITTED A MASS MURDER AGAINST
UKRAINIANS, POLAND RECOGNIZES THAT MURDER AS IT WAS,
THAT MURDER WAS A GENOCIDE
Office of the President of Poland, Warsaw, Poland, Sat, Nov 22, 2008

7.  THE MEMORY REMAINS: CONFERENCE HELD AT KINGS COLLEGE,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
Ukraine: Stepan Bandera Monument, Commemoration of the Holodomor
By Anthony Johnson, RussiaProfile, Moscow, Russia, December 30, 2008 
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1.  HOLODOMOR: A CRIME OF UNPARALLED BRUTALITY
This murder of millions will ultimately be understood

OPINION: by Lubomyr Luciuk, Professor of Political Geography
Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 

Those who survived knew that the famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine was a deliberate, politically engineered catastrophe whose victims numbered in the many millions. Yet few dared even whisper about this devastation of their nation to others in the generations following. That changed in the late 1980s as the Soviet empire stumbled into the dustbin of history and an internationally recognized Ukraine re-emerged in Europe.

The restored freedom of the independent nation allowed for the truth to be set free. Until then, those who had endured the horror now known as the Holodomor remained trapped in the very place where it could not be spoken of.

Meanwhile, those in the Ukrainian diaspora who had grasped the terror-famines mainsprings and weight found their admonitions largely ignored. They were completely unaware that intelligence reports about conditions in the USSR, compiled by several governments, often corroborated their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of this man-made famine. Yet knowing what they did, those very same Western governments sent no relief and lodged no formal protests with Moscow, even as millions starved.

A British Foreign Office mandarin confided why: The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions and that there is no obligation on us not to make it public [but we] do not want to make it public because the Soviet Government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.

Brave, and few, were the survivors who, just after the Second World War, tried to remind the West of this atrocity, expecting their witness to find fertile soil during the Cold War. They were mistaken. Ukraine's genocidal Great Famine was not accepted as a reality and remained mostly unknown as a subject of historical inquiry until quite recently.

Indeed, those attempting to till its memory were subjected to a barrage of defamation, denounced as embittered emigres either Nazi collaborators or apologists for such miscreants. Echoes of those prejudices persist. Where testimony could be given about the famine, it was usually rejected or ridiculed.

A noticeable resurrection in the debate over the causes and impact of the famine was precipitated by several works: the documentary film, "Harvest of Despair"; the 1986 publication of Robert Conquests book, "Harvest of Sorrow"; the release of the "Report to Congress of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine in 1988"; and the 1990 "Final Report of the International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine."

Even so, for almost a decade after Ukraine's independence was secured, in 1991, no more than token initiatives were made to commemorate the Great Famine in Ukraine.

Succeeding governments there likewise demonstrated no interest in bringing the perpetrators and enablers of Communist war crimes and crimes against humanity to justice, a negligence sometimes excused by reference to the post-genocidal nature of post-Soviet Ukrainian society. This indifference persisted until Ukraine's Orange Revolution in November 2004, when democracy prevailed as the world watched.

What then also became apparent, however, is just how fragile the countries sovereignty and territorial integrity are. So while Ukraine played no formal role in the 2003 campaign to have Walter Durantys Pulitzer Prize revoked for his mendacious reporting about the famine an effort that harvested extensive and positive coverage internationally by 2006 the Verkhovna Rada had, at President Victor Yushchenkos urging, promulgated a law defining the Holodomor as genocide.

Kyiv has since undertaken diplomatic efforts to build international recognition for this position, achieving modest success when Canada officially acknowledged the famine as genocide earlier this year. Meanwhile, archival evidence about the Holodomor and its initiators began emerging from long-sealed repositories, initiatives all predictably protested by the voices of the Russian Federation.

Contemporary efforts aimed at enshrining the Holodomor as a foundational experience in Ukrainian history and gleaning international sympathy for Ukraine as a victim nation reflect Kyivs gradual awakening to a critical geopolitical certainty: Ukraine may be in Europe, but its place there and perhaps even its right to exist are far from secure. 

Just how many perished during the Great Famine may never be calculated precisely. But that millions were scythed down as Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule was consummated is no longer in doubt.

Even if the victim total was only 2.6 million, and it was likely higher, the intensity of mortality in Soviet Ukraine over a duration of less than a year confers upon the Holodomor the unenviable status of being a crime against humanity without parallel in European history. That is not well understood. But someday it will be, everywhere.

NOTE: Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada [Kingston, Ontario] and editor of "Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine" (Kashtan Press, 2008).

LINK: http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op_ed/34391
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2.  NATIONAL MEMORY INSTITUTE EXPECTS RUSSIA TO
DIVULGE DOCUMENTS DENYING 1932-33 HOLODOMOR
WAS DIRECTED AGAINST UKRAINE

Olha Bohatyrenko, Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, February 13, 2009

KYIV - The National Memory Institute expects that Russia will divulge those documents denying that the Great Famine, Holodomor of 1932-33, was  directed against the Ukrainian nation, reads a statement made by the National Memory Institute press service.

The press service said that the chairperson of the Russian Archives Vladimir Kozlov has said that Russia possesses documents dated 1932 and 1933 that prove that Holodomor of 1930s was not directed against Ukraine but the Russian Archives cannot expose them as those are classified.

The National Memory Institute expressed its inapprehension of the reasons on which Russia cannot make these documents public, since the limiting age for the classified status of documents, as a rule, is seventy-five years.

The Institute stressed, Ukraine had many times applied to Russia for documentary help in the study of 1932-33 Holodomor, Ukrainian scientists have published quantity of essays, collected volumes of documents, numerous volumes of testimonies given by Holodomor eye-witnesses and victims.

"Meanwhile, Russia still has published neither a single collected volume of evidence, nor a special collected volume of documents. The Ukrainian side is expecting Russia at last to proceed from meaningful claims and unsubstantiated objections to real research," the statement says.

The National Memory Institute said hereto, Ukraine has collected 213,000 testimonies and found 200,000 documents.

As Ukrainian News earlier reported, Russia's permanent representative in the United Nations Organisation Vitaly Churkin believes that Ukraine's position on declaring the Holodomor famine of 1932-33 as genocide against the Ukrainian nation stirs up hostility between Ukrainians and Russians.

The Foreign Ministry accused Russia of hampering the UN to consider the resolution on recognizing Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine as genocide. The National Memory Institute is a central body of executive power having a special status.
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3.  UKRAINE:  MY DAY AT THE STATE SECURITY SERVICE 
Ukraines spy agency is opening up the records, impressively so

OPINION: By Jed Sudan, Publisher, Kyiv Post
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I wrote an article a while back about the advertising campaign that set out to popularize the Holodomor. We all agree that the Holodomor was a terrible tragedy resulting in millions of deaths by the sadistic whims of a Communist regime hell-bent on subjugating the Ukrainian nation as well as any independent economic forces outside of their control.

But I cast doubts on whether billboards were really the best way to raise awareness of this issue.

In fact, I wrote that if the Ukrainian government really wanted to assist in raising awareness about the crimes of the Holodomor, they would do much to open the archives which contained the real history of the crimes of the Holodomor which had been hidden and denied by the Communist regime for decades. (original blog can be found on http://www.kyivpost.com/blogs/bloggers/jedsunden/5062).

Surprisingly, several weeks later, a letter from the State Security Service of Ukraine -- known by its Ukrainian SBU acronym (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny) -- arrived at our office addressed to me.

Normally, letters from the Ukrainian authorities are not received with enthusiasm around the office. Over the years, we have received warnings about a new tax that would be imposed for using the Kyiv city symbol on our masthead. We have been informed of upcoming fire inspections and requests for private meetings to discuss the new regulations.

Government officials have threatened legal actions of different types for reprinting their words. Members of parliament have taken us to court for printing photos of the rather expensive apartments they received as presents.

To my surprise, the letter was written by Volodymyr Viatrovych, a top official with the state archive of the SBU. While he declined to comment on my opinion about the Holodomor ad campaign, he wanted to respectfully correct the record as to the archives.

Though the archives had been sealed for decades, the new SBU has recently opened up its archives for all to see. A new program to digitize the archives was under way. In fact, there was a new reading room open to the public and perhaps I would be interested in viewing it.

This clearly was too good an invitation to turn down. So the week after that, I met with Viatrovych. He looked much more like a recent doctoral student he turned out to be than my image of an SBU heavy. In fact, his specialty was the history of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in World War II.

He showed me around the archives which, after decades of being hidden away, were being slowly catalogued and digitalized for future use. He
acknowledged one of the big problems of trying to document the Holodomor is the large amount of archival material housed in the archives in Moscow in the central offices of the KGB and the Communist Party, during the years of the occupation of Ukraine.

An additional problem is Ukrainian legislation which grants individuals the right to privacy for 75 years. But he also proudly showed some recent books published in part by the SBU to document some of the crimes committed by the KGB in Ukraine.

Then we went across the street, where he showed me the new digital archive. A row of 10 computers was proudly arranged. We viewed a bunch of documents, listing the dead from the Holodomor as well as information on the murderers.

In describing the program, Viatrovych said it was the work of Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, new head of SBU, who was the locomotive of the drive to make the information free. In fact, Ukraine now has a version of a freedom of information act. Simply write a letter to the archives and they will respond to your query within 30 days.

I left, impressed by the meeting, and with a feeling of optimism about Ukraine. In this area, in reference to its past, Ukraine truly is moving towards Europe, with its government security forces designed to serve its citizens.

The next day, I sent a letter of thanks to the head of archive and included my first freedom of information request to find out why the SBU declared me persona non grata from Ukraine back in 2000.

LINK: http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op_ed/34390
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4. JUSTICE MINISTRY OF UKRAINE CREATES INTERAGENCY GROUP
TO IDENTIFY VICTIMS OF THE GREAT FAMINE OF 1932-1933

Maksym Bedenok, Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Thu, Feb 5, 2009

KYIV - The Justice Ministry [of Ukraine] has created an interagency group for identification of the currently living citizens, who were the victims of the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-1933, the press service of the ministry told the Ukrainian News agency.  The relevant order was signed by Justice Minister Mykola Onyschuk. An Identification will be provided to grant them the status of the famine victims.

The group unites the specialists of the Justice Ministry, representatives of the State archive committee, State archive of the Internal Affairs Ministry, National Memory Institute, and also the representatives of the Culture and Tourism Ministry. As Ukrainian News earlier reported, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 took lives of 3-7 million people.
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5.  UKRAINE: DATA ABOUT HOLODOMOR 1932-1933 ENTERED INTO
SCHOOL CURRICULA OF SIX COUNTRIES AND CURRICULA FOR
INSTITUTES OF HIGHER LEARNING IN TWELVE COUNTRIES

Ukrinform, Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, February 7, 2009 

KYIV - In 2008, information about the Holodomor 1932-33 in Ukraine, has been entered into the school curricula of six UNESCO member countries and the curricula of the institutes of higher learning in 12 countries. Scientific-research work on this theme has been carried out in eight world countries.

Chairman of the National Commission of Ukraine for UNESCO and Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko stated this while he was summing up the results of the Commission activities in 2008.

Therefore, the world public started the implementation of the provisions of the Resolution “Honoring Memory of Victims of Holodomor 1932-33 in Ukraine”, adopted at the 34th Session of the UNESCO General Conference, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) told UKRINFORM.
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6.  PRESIDENT OF POLAND SAYS SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO,
THE COMMUNIST REGIME COMMITTED A MASS MURDER
AGAINST UKRAINIANS, POLAND RECOGNIZES THAT MURDER
AS IT WAS, THAT MURDER WAS A GENOCIDE

Office of the President of Poland, Warsaw, Poland, Sat, Nov 22, 2008

WARSAW - On 22 November 2008, the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, paid a visit to Kyiv to attend the commemorations of the 75th
anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine. The Polish President was accompanied by Secretary of State at the Presidential Chancellery, Michal
Kaminski, and Undersecretary of State at the Presidential Chancellery, Mariusz Handzlik.

President Lech Kaczynski went to the National Opera House to take part, together with the other guests, in the International Forum 'Ukraine
Remembers - The World Acknowledges'.

During the ceremony, the President of Poland said the following:

"Seventy five years ago, the communist regime committed a mass murder. I represent one of the countries which recognize the reality as it was: that murder was a genocide. Resolutions in this regard were adopted equally by the Senate and by the Sejm of the Republic of Poland in 2006.

But the fight for the preservation of memory, also the memory about those murdered continues to be one of the most pressing tasks for the countries
which have shed communism.

It is not only because in 1932-1933 particularly cruel acts were pretreated in Ukraine, cruel even in categories of genocide. Starvation is a particularly cruel kind of death which befell millions of people, including Poles and Kazakhs inhabiting Ukraine, in particular in the vicinity of Zhytomyr, and also representatives of other nationalities, as President Yushchenko rightly pointed out.

The fight for the preservation of memory is also crucial since communism was capable of perpetrating mass murders on the greatest scale and was very
dexterous in concealing them.

The other totalitarianism of the 20th century: Hitlerism and Nazism which took the toll of so many lives among my compatriots as well as Ukrainians,
Lithuanians and Latvians, as a matter of fact did not seek to conceal its crimes.

Chauvinism, violence, these were the slogans openly preached. Anti-Semitism stretched as far as genocide was not hidden, either, even if the very acts of genocide were kept secret. Whereas, as we all who lived back then remember well, communism sought to present itself as an idea or ideology or science which was almost humanist.

It was shown as a necessary stage in historical development and it was meant to be means of achievement of universal happiness. Such a fallacy was
readily adopted, one could even say "bought", by the considerable part of elites, especially in Western Europe.

Nowadays, admittedly, this fallacy is being removed but it has not yet been entirely done away with. The truth about the genocide in Ukraine in 1932-1933, the truth about other crimes of genocide perpetrated before and after, is forcing its way through only with a great difficulty.

And this is precisely why I would like to express here my great respect and acknowledgement to the authorities of Ukraine and Mr President Yushchenko
personally for their commitment in the fight to restore memory. Also the memory of this genocide.

The Ukrainian nation is choosing its own way and indeed has the right to do so. It is our profound conviction that this road will be leading to the
West. But if it be so, if Ukraine's history just as much as my own country's history is to become part and parcel of the history of Europe, then all the
truths contained therein must be made known.

The history of Ukraine is just as much a European history as the history of France, for instance. And what is happening right now, all those efforts in the international arena, in the United Nations, UNESCO, in the European Parliament go in this very direction. Their relevance is confined to the present-day since unfortunately, we are helpless in the face of the tragedy of those people who perished 75-76 years ago.

The only thing that we can give them back is memory, eternal memory. And our today's ceremony is a proof of that memory which will not fade away, which
will become a part of our common European awareness. And this is precisely the way it should be, in the name of what President Adamkus invoked in his
address a moment ago.

So that totalitarianism does not stand a chance on this soil ever again. For the sake of the future of our children and our grandchildren."

LINK: http://www.president.pl/x.node?id=2011993&eventId=24527858
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7.  THE MEMORY REMAINS: CONFERENCE HELD AT KING'S
COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Ukraine: Stepan Bandera Monument, Commemoration of the Holodomor

By Anthony Johnson, RussiaProfile, Moscow, Russia, December 30, 2008 

Memory, in itself, is a thoroughly personal matter; it is a temporal record of our individual remembrance of the past. But memory, as cultivated and shared by a mass of individuals, is something more potent: it can transcend the passage of time and solidly provide the foundations of a nation's culture and identity.

Memory, as a prevailing, instructive device in Russian and post-Soviet society, was at the center of scholarly debate at the two-day conference "Cultural Memory in Eastern Europe: Research Methods in East European memory studies" (December 18 & 19) held at King's College, University of Cambridge.

The diversity of those attending - historians, literary critics, sociologists and anthropologists from Russia, Europe and the United States, as well as postgraduate students and journalists - very much corresponded to the multihued and at all times complex issue of the session - cultural memory.

As implied by its almost indescribable yet limitless components ('culture' + 'memory'), the term "cultural memory" is evidently connected with the idea of remembering something of cultural importance. Times of war, trauma and social upheaval, for example, are culturally significant; they force us out of our daily routines and compel us to use our newly-found physical, intellectual and moral endurance – for survival (the Holocaust being a standard example of such period).

Alexander Etkind, the conference's organizer and a scholar at Cambridge University, sees how the chronology of events in 20th century Eastern Europe - for example, Russia's Great Terror, Poland's Katyn, and Ukraine's Holodomor - provide a necessary basis for discussion and examination of commemoration and collective trauma, and their role in collective identity, in the new field of "East European memory studies."

Etkind added that such examination comes alive through the "actual material which memory is made of – monuments, museums, books, legends, films, artifacts, textbooks, etc." When using materials or objects for signifying memory, as you look at the grand stages in history, nothing is left bereft of political - and thus, perhaps, expedient - circumstances; a means of reshaping and recreating memory by political actors is at work here.

The recent attempts of historical revisionism and reconciliation of Stalin and the Stalinist period - through positive accounts in school textbooks (Alexander Filippov’s New History of Russia: 1945-2006: Teachers’ Handbook) and television programs (the Name of Russia), point to the psychological notion of positive disavowal in the face of progress, as well as the image of a stable, patriarchal leader, as highlighted by Kevin Platt of the University of Pennsylvania and Jana Howlett of Cambridge respectively.

This recognition of Stalin is supported by a "lack of distinction between victims and perpetrators, [resulting in a] self-inflicted trauma in the collective imaginary," as Platt described. Howlett has underlined the following: in contrast to the "Body Natural" of Stalin - one of inept, oratorical and intellectual skills - the "Body Politic" of Stalin - through the careful editorial work within Soviet mass media - is one of erudition and physical strength.

These assessments point to the notion of cultural memory as ‘cultural propaganda’, an almost explicit attempt by state authorities to skim over a leader’s incongruities and dedicate themselves in amplifying a positive yet feigned interpretation – and thus, memory – of a leader within the public domain.

'Cultural propaganda' doesn't stop with Stalin. In the former Soviet satellite states, namely in Poland, Estonia and Ukraine, various ethnicities and political forces have competitively jousted for official ascendancy through the manifestation of monuments representing one cause or another, or their symbolic iconoclasm.

Christoph Mick, a historian at Warwick University, described how different political regimes in post-WWII Poland promoted, through statues and monuments, different and often conflicting causes - and therefore, different memories.

MONUMENT TO STEPAN BANDERA
Mick also highlighted how, for example, the monument to Stepan Bandera, a celebrated nationalist leader of the interwar group Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), would be an affront to the Polish people, whose relatives died at the hands of the OUN at the massacre of thousands of Poles in the region of Volhynia (present-day Ukraine) during World War II.

Maria Malksoo, a researcher at the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, views the controversy surrounding the Bronze Soldier statue, a Soviet World War II memorial in Tallinn's city center, as a moment when "[Estonia] and Russia seek more recognition from Europe of the Europeanness of their [respective] efforts in WWII, while, at the same time, denying the Europeanness of the other."

Estonians see the monument as a symbol of Soviet occupation and repression and its removal as a gesture of liberation and espousal of European values, while ethnic Russians see it as a marker of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, their claim to reside in Estonia, and their contribution to the outcome of European history.

COMMEMORATION OF THE HOLODOMOR
The discrepancy over memory has also influenced the commemoration of the Holodomor, the 1932-1933 famine which struck Soviet Ukraine and other regions of the Soviet Union.

Rory Finnin of Cambridge University argues that the excessive, retrospective perception, a building up of a particular vision of the Holodomor as genocide through diaries, memoirs and historical texts of the event (supported by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America) contrasts the nullifying or "making [the event] invisible," as well as reducing the free speech and scholarly, public discourse surrounding the event, thus putting pressure on reaching a true understanding on Holodomor.

These interpretations of cultural memory as 'propaganda' are indeed politically saturated, embedded in Soviet, Post-Soviet, or Russian state-led ideology – implying that society and its citizens and memories fall under the fulcrum of the "superstructure," as Cambridge historian Chris Ward has attested at the conference. Nevertheless, to what extent does all cultural memory fall under the political gaze? Looking at the processes of how memory is created and transmitted puts into question the idea of cultural memory as a universal and permanent vehicle of ideology.

Harald Wydra, a social scientist at Cambridge, reflected upon the notion of how generations, and their different time periods of "social initiation" (the developmental stage in an individual's life (from age 13 to 25) when he becomes aware of the general political trend characteristic of that time period), each have their own memory of the age; in Wydra's words, "your generation is defined when you enter or are initiated into your political consciousness." And so, your generation is "the inter-individual nature of memories," not necessarily bound by tendencies from other generations.

Nevertheless, conventions, particularly ones from family members, and with it, the impossibility of forgetting a traumatic event, are transferred from generation to generation. In this way, a cultural memory can be maintained outside of state surveillance, and into the realm of the private domain.

In the case of Poland following World War Two, one interpretation and meaning of the war sympathetic to the Polish nationalist forces (Armia Krajowa) was carried on generationally, in contrast to the meaning of the war received from the Communist government; in other words, you can recreate and reshape a new memory, but the old memory will still be remembered.

Naturally, many cultural artifacts evoke a humanistic sense of nostalgia and pathos, rather than anything intrinsically political. Jukka Gronow, a sociologist from Uppsala University, notes that the prevalence of memory on a sensory level, in the form of nostalgia for consumer products, has not diminished in many areas since the Soviet period, with the popularity of, for example, Soviet cultural icons as Sovetskoye Shampanskoye and singer Alla Pugacheva an established part of Russian cultural life today.

Feelings of nostalgia and pathos emerge from Cambridge anthropologist Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov's examination of how members of the public reacted to the 2006 exhibition "Gifts to the Leaders", an exhibition at the Kremlin Museum in Moscow showcasing over 500 gifts specially crafted and given to the Soviet heads of state.

Ssorin-Chaikov, who developed the show along with museum curators, collected the guestbook, and reading through the comments left by the exhibit's visitors discovered that the show's artifacts evoked a strong sense of remembrance, a return to childhood, nostalgia and sentiment in the Soviet past, but not one consisting of a sense of deference to leadership.

One comment read as follows: "The exhibition aroused nostalgic memories [...]; this has nothing to do with leaders." In a wholly poignant documentary, filmmaker Katya Krausova reinforces that heartrending and humanistic power of empathy and compassion in the ability to remember, as she films photographer Yuri Dojc journeying and meeting Slovak Jews who survived the Holocaust. In seeing Dojc's photographs of these survivors, the viewers are compelled to recall and remember that these people achieved survival through the utmost trauma.

Sometimes, difficult truths can only be uttered through fiction, while the most ineffable ones require the most fictive fiction. Dina Khapaeva, a historian and sociologist from St. Petersburg, described how in contemporary post-Soviet fiction, authors, such as writer Sergei Lukyanenko of the cult fantasy novel and movie Night Watch, wish to encapsulate "the transformation of attitudes, values, customs and social relations" in the post-Soviet space using the most fantastical genre - horror and science-fiction.

With all these discussions, whether it is interpreted as a tool of state authority, or a genuine, heart-felt, personal sentiment, the notion of cultural memory is governed by an apprehension that the heritage of the past can disappear or be forgotten. But its fading can be diminished through appropriate discourse and reconciliation.

Website www.russiaprofile.org