The Sighet Memorial is housed in a former Stalinist prison in Sighet that under Communist rule in Romania housed high profile political prisoners. The Memorial provides insight on the repression by communist regimes in Europe throughout the 20th century, including the resultant death and suffering experienced inside and outside the… Read More
On February 27, 2016, several Czech citizens started a petition to rename Prague’s Under the Chestnuts Square, the site of Russia’s Embassy in the Czech Republic, in honour of the murdered Kremlin critic, Boris Nemtsov. The Prague City Council finalised the renaming on February 27, 2020. In response, the Russian… Read More
In late April 2007, a series of violent street protests involving arson and looting erupted over plans to relocate a bronze statue of a Red Army soldier from a park in central Tallinn to a military cemetery on the outskirts of the city. Known as the Bronze Nights, these protests… Read More
The removal of the Stalin statue from the central square in Gori represents a top-down policy implementation approach to a contested historical monument. Such implementations of Georgia’s Freedom Charter illustrate the legal framework under which symbols, monuments and names of sites related to the Soviet past become reconfigured. However, positions… Read More
The Monuments to the Odessa Founders features prominently Catherine II of Russia and the men who assisted in the creation of the Russian Empire’s new southern frontier in Ukraine. The monument was inaugurated in 1894, but the start of communist rule in Ukraine prompted a series of removals and replacements… Read More
The Grūtas Park was created to collect and display Soviet-era monuments that had been removed from public spaces following Lithuanian independence. This case study provides an example of an effective and alternate remedy to destruction or erasure of contested historical legacies, but also shows the political, social, and economic complexities… Read More
In this report, FIDH analyses the human rights situation of historians, NGOs, activists, journalists, and other history producers working on historical memory of the Soviet past in Russia. We do so through the prism of what historian Antoon De Baets calls “crimes against history,” a term denoting a range of… Read More
This lesson plan should be precluded by an overview of the Second World War, and can be used as a supplementary lesson that offers a deeper lens into the war’s violence and its driving forces. Students should have a basic understanding of the historical context of the war, including its… Read More
Legal governance of memory has played a central role in establishing hegemony of monumental history, and has forged national identities and integration processes in Europe and beyond. In this book, a range of contributors explore both the nature and role of legal engagement into historical memory in selected national law,… Read More
The book explores the reinterpretations of Poland’s past which have been undertaken by Polish national and local elites since the fall of communism. It focuses on remembrance practices and traces the de-commemorating of communism to examine the ways in which collective remembering and forgetting shapes present power constellations in Poland… Read More
In this report, a working group explore deeper solutions to the challenges of achieving historical reconciliation between countries divided by deep-seated historical grievances and of breaking through the long-standing impasse in resolving a number of protracted conflicts within the Euro-Atlantic region. Read More
The report aims to present how the Commission intends to play a meaningful role in this process and to provide a basis for further discussion on how the European Union can contribute to promoting the memory of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes. It also aims to answer the request… Read More