This working group addresses a variety of issues related to the ways the Soviet past is negotiated in post-Soviet Russia: it is still ambivalent whether the “post” in this name means break or continuity. Our group intends to understand what it means exactly, given the complex repulsion/nostalgia attitudes we can observe towards it. Religion is one of the major factors in this memory work. It has to do with a moral and theological assessment of the sovietness as clenched between the images of heroics, power and the catastrophe of GULAG. Religion conceived as a chain of memory, is central in negotiating the place of the Soviet past within the longue durée history of Russia, since it is involved in the debates around the content of tradition. We invite to this working group all those who study various aspects of how religion is engaged with the memory and legacy of the Soviet past: it includes groups or individual of any confession, secular state-sponsored, public or private associations.
Chair:
- Marianna Napolitano (Fscire)
- Katja Tolstaya (INaSEC. Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern-European Christianity / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Panelists:
- Katja Tolstaya (INaSEC - Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern-European Christianity / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) - Theology after Gulag: Pros and Cons. Learning From Other ‘Theologies-after
- Paul Gavrilyuk (University of St. Thomas) - A Theological Interpretation of Holodomor: State-Sponsored Famine in Ukraine (1932-1933) and the Problem of Evil
- Michail Suslov (University of Copenaghen) - A variety of Messianisms in the context of Russian Orthodoxy
- Sergey Shtyrkov (European University in Saint Petersburg) - Spiritual Meanings of the Soviet History: Russian Orthodox Writers and Methods of Religious Historiography
Discussants:
- Stella Rock (The Open University)
Language: English
