Month: November 2019

On November 19, Ass. Prof. Per-Anders Rudling will give the paper “History as a political instrument in the Cold War: the 1941 Pogroms, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the CIA”.
When: 15.15-17.00, Nov 19
Where: Niagara building, room C0826

Abstract
The intersection of Stalinist, Nazi, and Ukrainian nationalist violence profoundly, and irreversibly changed the social and demographic situation in Ukraine. The Holocaust, the expulsion and massacres of the Polish minority turned a multiethnic borderlands of what used to be eastern Poland into ethnically highly a homogenous heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. In west Ukraine, the Holocaust started with a wave of massive anti-Jewish violence, in which local nationalist militias played a central role. After the war, several hundred thousand Ukrainian nationalists ended up as political refugees in the West, where they set up intensely anti-communist political communities. A historical memory, centred around Ukrainian suffering while excluding the plight of Jews and Poles came to constitute the basis of the Ukrainian diaspora’s identity. During the Cold War, this memory culture was successfully instrumentalized for political purposes by Western intelligence services, in particularly, the CIA. After the collapse of the Soviet Union this memory culture was “re-exported” to Ukraine. After the “Orange Revolution” of 2004/05 and the “Euromaidan” of 2013/14 a highly selective historical memory was elevated to state ideology, and radical nationalist groups such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its leaders were posthumously rehabilitated. My lecture deals with the difficult legacy of the 1941 anti-Jewish pogroms, their absence in Ukrainian “national memory,” and the migration of memory between homeland and diaspora during and after the Cold War.

Per Anders Rudling
An associate professor of history at Lund University, Per Anders Rudling, currently is a Senior Lecturer in European Studies at Malmö University, and a Research Associate at the Center for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University College. He holds MA degrees in the Russian language and literature from Uppsala University (1998) and in history from San Diego State University (2003). After completing his Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada in 2009, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Universities of Greifswald (2010-2011) and Lund (2012-2014). In 2015, he was a visiting professor at the University of Vienna, and 2015-2019 Senior Visiting Fellow and Coordinator of the European Studies Program at the National University of Singapore.