On November 4, 2016, a statue of Vladimir the Great or Saint Vladimir, as he is known in Russian, was unveiled by President Putin in Moscow during the millennium commemoration of Vladimir’s death (958–1015). Known as Volodymyr in Ukrainian, he is a major historical figure in both Russian and… Read More
The Karaganda Corrective Labour Camp (Karlag) was a Soviet forced labour camp located in the Karaganda region, in the central part of Kazakhstan, and operated between 1931 and 1959. The camp covered a vast area, at its largest, roughly the size of France. After its closure, the camp was… Read More
In the Spring of 2020, the Prague 6 Municipality removed the monument to Marshal Konev from Náměstí Interbrigády (International Brigade Square). The statue had a long history of contestation and was eventually removed in 2020 following a successful petition campaign the previous year. During these thirty years, many actors… Read More
In the summer of 2020, a monument to the victims of Stalinist political repression was unveiled in the city of Tayshet in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. On July 4, 2020, the monument was vandalised and defaced, making the inscription illegible. During Soviet rule, the Gulag camp Taishetlag was located near… Read More
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… 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… 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… 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,… 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… 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… 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… 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… Read More