The Routledge Handbook of Memory in Post-Socialist Europe

This handbook shows how memory operates simultaneously as lived experience, institutional practice, geopolitical weapon, and resource for imagining the future. It explores decolonial and postcolonial approaches, memory laws, oral history, nostalgia, testimony and digital memory-making.Spanning the aftermath of the Second World War, the socialist and post-socialist periods, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the volume covers post-socialist Europe and relevant diasporic and transnational contexts. Its case studies include the Holocaust commemoration in Belarus, museums in the former Yugoslavia, the Holodomor, Crimean Tatar cultural diplomacy, Poland’s Museum of the Second World War, Russia’s Memorial society, and Ukrainian virtual war museums. The thirty-two chapters gathered here collectively demonstrate that memory in the region is not a secondary reflection of politics but a constitutive dimension of political life itself.The book will be of interest for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and scholars working on topics related to memory in the region, while remaining accessible to non-specialist readers.