Remembering the Stalinist Past: Post-Soviet Memory Regimes in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine

Studies on transitional justice have traditionally dominated the research on how a society addresses human rights violations. Transitional justice is usually associated with criminal-judicial, political-administrative, and symbolic policies regarding the conviction of perpetrators and the recognition of victims of a former oppressive regime (Winter 2014; Gibney et al. 2008; Buckley-Zistel and Kater 2011; Offe 1996). However, recent decades have shown that transitional justice might be an issue also after a country completes its transition from an authoritarian to democratic regime. Scholars have termed the process of a society’s dealing with the violent past in such countries as eruption of memory (De Brito 2010), post-transitional justice (Raimundo 2013), historical justice (Braun, Herrmann, and Brekke 2014), or retrospective justice (Pettai and Pettai 2015). This paper deals with coming to terms with the Stalinist past in post-Soviet Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, and it investigates the different memory regimes that have developed in these countries. While they share many experiences of the Stalinist terror, these post-communist states have adopted different strategies in dealing with the Stalinist past. The paper explains this variation through a theoretical framework that rests on understanding the relationship between cultural content and form of collective memory (Bernhard and Kubik 2014).