The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and the end of socialist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe initiated a widespread, but convoluted, process of working through both the legacies of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and those of Stalinism and state terror in the region. While post-Soviet Russia did not break decisively with the Soviet past, in Central and Eastern Europe, the post-socialist period has been characterized on the political level by narratives of victimhood about World War II and the socialist past and by the comparative, and, at times, competitive discourses about Nazism and “communism” that have overshadowed discussion of local collaboration with these regimes and of participation in the perpetration of genocide and the crimes of mass violence. EU enlargement mandated a reckoning with legacies of Holocaust violence, but it also gave Central and Eastern European countries a pan-European platform where they could make their voices heard. While the perpetrators and collaborators have been dealt with in different ways in the context of transitional justice, and there is a growing number of (comparative) historical studies on perpetration and collaboration in Central and Eastern Europe, this forum examines how the questions of perpetration, collaboration and complicity with the Nazis and the Soviets have been raised in various memorial and historical museums and in aesthetic media of memory, such as film. We especially consider how these patterns of reckoning and memorialization (or lack thereof) have shaped and impacted the current war in Ukraine.

Margaret Comer is Research Fellow on “Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage and Compliance in and beyond the Holocaust,” an AHRC- and DFG-funded project, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Currently, she researches portrayals of Holocaust victimhood, perpetration, bystanding, and rescue at heritage sites in the Baltic region.

This article will consider the possible resonances of Michael Rothberg’s “implicated subject” at memorials, memorial museums, and museums related to historic violence and oppression. It will conceptualize this figure’s respective absences and presences at sites dealing with victims of Soviet political repression in contemporary Moscow, Russia. The nature of Soviet repression, especially in the Great Terror era, meant that former perpetrators at all levels of power often later became victims of the same systems of repression. Debate over who “counts” as a victim—e.g., whether previous work for the secret police disqualifies one from being considered a victim of a later wave of repression—is ongoing. Using case studies such as the controversy over the list of names of victims at the Kommunarka shooting ground, a site of NKVD mass killings, and the itineraries of digital tours of sites related to repression in Moscow, this article will examine whether and how different historic actors are considered through the lens of implication at and across sites. It will identify places where a discourse of implication could be presented but is instead absent and will further consider the societal and political implications of not officially reckoning with a past of perpetration, especially as these denials can be used to justify contemporary violence. The article will also introduce a complementary subcategory, the “implicated victim,” in order to better conceptualize the shifting boundaries between perpetration, victimhood, and bystanding, as these apply to the case of Soviet repression and its contemporary memorialization.

Margaret Comer is Research Fellow on “Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage and Compliance in and beyond the Holocaust,” an AHRC- and DFG-funded project, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Currently, she researches portrayals of Holocaust victimhood, perpetration, bystanding, and rescue at heritage sites in the Baltic region.

The problem with the era of victimhood we are currently experiencing in Europe is that acknowledging the crimes committed or supported by one’s own collective is seen as standing in the way of the narrative of “our” victimhood. Self-critically confronting the collaboration with the Nazis and/or economic profit from the Holocaust by the majority population of the respective country is then perceived as a thread for one’s collective and/or individual identity. This special issue argues that in the post-socialist space, the narratives of victimhood in the hands of two totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Stalinism have dominated the politics of memory and that therefore, “until recently, this has left the questions of local perpetration, collaboration and complicity largely unaddressed.” I confront this hypothesis with the findings from my research about post-socialist World War II memorial museums. I analyzed ten memorial museums from Estonia to former Yugoslavia and asked how they changed their permanent exhibitions in the course of EU accession talks as well as most recently when several countries are experiencing an authoritarian backlash. I show that the issue of “our” perpetratorship, collaboration, or implication in the Holocaust as well in socialist or Soviet crimes is addressed very differently in those museums depending on which role the museum played in the respective country’s communication with “Europe.”

Ljiljana Radonić is the vice-director of the Institute of Culture Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and heads a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) on “Globalized Memorial Museums.” She wrote her habilitation on “World War II in Post-Communist Memorial Museums” (De Gruyter 2021) at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, where she teaches.

This article investigates how Estonian cultural history museums display controversies inherent in communist past related to complicity and collaboration, which were avoided and externalized in post-communist nationalist visions of the past. Taking recent theorizations of reflexive and dialogic memory modes as a background, we ask about alternative subject positions in the representation of communism and complicity with the regime in recently opened history exhibitions. As a result, we argue that the general incoherence and indecisiveness in understanding Soviet collaboration in political and cultural memory is reflected in Estonian history museums taking diverse positions when approaching subject positions related to the memory of complicity. At the same time, the availability of different, even contradictory, positions in the public sphere adds to memory culture’s democratization. The analysis shows that the ways how museums deal with the issue of complicity and collaboration arise from the museums’ different definitions of their role in society. Concurrently, the museum narratives negotiate and contest each other. Museums use various methods and approaches to re-politicize Soviet complicity, with different degrees of success in acknowledging nuanced interpretations of the past and applying pluralist viewpoints.

Ene Kõresaaris a Professor of Oral History and Memory Studies at the University of Tartu. She has studied mnemonic processes in oral history, grassroots recognition politics, commemorative journalism, and museums. Her current research project investigates Baltic history museums from the perspective of mnemonic pluralism (mnemus.ut.ee/project).

This article analyzes two feature films dealing with the collaboration of Lithuanians in the Holocaust. Purple Smoke (2019) and Izaokas (2019) represent a step forward along the road of national reckoning with the legacy of perpetration, challenging received narratives of national victimhood and heroism. The ethics of representing the subjective position of the perpetrator are demanding, requiring a degree of empathy to develop understanding, but stopping short of identification. While Purple Smoke enables considerable empathy for the perpetrator, it focalizes history from the perspective of the victim. Izaokas, on the other hand, creates a moral hazard by dramatizing history from the perspective of the perpetrator, and make the Holocaust into a foil for Lithuanian suffering under the Soviets.

Violeta Davoliūtė is a Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History. A graduate of Vilnius University, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has held fellowships at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, Yale, and l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

In 2004, Romania officially recognized the country’s role in and responsibility for the Holocaust. Despite this, there is a tension between the official and the popular mem- ory of World War II and the Holocaust. In the absence of public debates on the mem- ory of the Holocaust in Romania, “Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca bar- bari” / “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (Radu Jude, 2018) (hereafter “Barbarians”) represents an attempt to engage with the memory of World War II and the Holocaust in a popular format, a fiction film with the potential to engage a wider audience than an official report or an academic paper. The film revolves around a shameful historical event, the massacre of Jews at Odessa in 1941 by the Romanian army. By analyzing significant sequences from the film, I show how the spectator as “implicated subject” (Rothberg 2019) is evoked by the film’s Brechtian distanciation (Verfremdung) techniques such as direct address, the unveiling of the cin- ematic apparatus and, most importantly, the re-enactment-within-film. I argue that “Barbarians” emphasizes the characters’ position as “latecomers to histories of perpe- tration” and seeks to illuminate what Rothberg calls “diachronic implication” by fore- grounding the privileged role of the spectator through the re-enactment, but also, much earlier, through direct address. An analysis of the spectators as implicated subjects reveals how “Barbarians” uses spectacle subversively in order to express dissent from and / or complicity with historical master narratives about national identity, especially those espoused through commemorative events celebrating Romania’s national day.

Diana Popa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project entitled: “Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena” based at Tallinn University, Estonia. In her research, Popa explores how historical films remediate cultural memory within local, regional, and transnational contexts.