Soviet Terror Research Articles

“Actually, they used to pay no notice of”: Soviet Law Enforcement and Gender-Related Violence Problem in Historical Sources

After occupation and annexation of Lithuania, soviet government started to reorganize such institution like police and courts. Repressed former juridical elite, qualified independent jurist were changes by unqualified immigrants or by other loyal to soviets persons. Soviet law enforcement bodies became marionette of system, tool of repressions and one of the institution that generated traumas. Precisely, this process is subject of our research and touches to the complex problem of soviet and nowadays- coersion against women-, let us to understand how subtile and unvisibly soviet terror mechanism worked. It incalcultated atrophy of humanism and civilness and indifferent to others pain.

How Totalitarianism was Reflected on the Life and Work of Women Writers

How many people, when and why became victims of totalitarianism in Georgia instinctively has been exciting the citizens to this day, however, to our surprise, knowledge about the causes of this tragedy and the motivation of the people involved in it is not increasing - on the contrary, becomes more obscure and mythologized; due to the lack of information and stereotypes, the issue often turns into a tool of manipulation in the hands of interested parties. Today's unfavorable reality - when public interest is low and knowledge is saturated with stereotypes, the research of the Soviet past is very fragmented and small-scale. Free access to documents depicting mass repressions carried out by the Soviet totalitarian regime is not possible. In various ways, the National Archive offers the readers to familiarize themselves with the records of the archival funds of law enforcement agencies and courts from 1930 to the present day - where the names and surnames of the victims of the Soviet terror are barcoded and which we would like to share in the present research. The main subject of our research is how totalitarianism affected the life and creativity of Georgian women writers; the object of the research is Marika Mikeladze (1933-2015), a translator and writer and Zaira Arsenishvili’s, a write and screenwriter, work and life full of difficulties in the conditions of repressions and totalitarian regime.

Precarious Commons: Archiving Soviet Terror in Contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT Using the example of Memorial, Russia’s oldest nongovernmental organization, this essay develops the concept of “precarious commons” to describe the continuous and uncertain process of creating an open-access digital resource and maintaining a community around it. In 2022, Memorial became one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long efforts to open official archives, to collect and solicit testimony from survivors and families of victims of Soviet terror, and to promote democratic values and human rights in public life. These activities illustrate precarious cultural commoning: ever threatened by bureaucratic enclosure, political and cultural amnesia, and outright persecution. The organization’s extragovernmental, mostly volunteer-driven work has established an open digital archive of state repressions as well as a vital space for educating a new generation of memory activists and imagining a different collective future.

Павло Ріттер та його переклад “Дгаммапади”

The Dhammapada (c. 3rd century BCE) is one of the most famous texts of Pāli Buddhist canon and Buddhism in general. Its translation into the Western languages started from the middle of the 19th century: D. J. Gogerly (1840), V. Fausbøll (1855), F. Max Müller (1870). During almost two hundred years of history of the translation more than fifty English translations of this book have appeared (there are also translations into more than thirty world languages), which in their turn have already become object of special scholarship in the modern Buddhology. This paper adds to the studies of the world history of the Dhammapada translation a page dedicated to its first Ukrainian translation made by the famous Ukrainian scholar and one of the founders of Ukrainian Indology Pavlo Ritter (1872–1939) who has translated 44 of its 423 verses. In this study, the first publication by Ritter of three verses from the Dhammapada (No. 14, No. 60 and No. 173) in his entry the “Dhammapada” in The Granat Encyclopedic Dictionary (1913) in Russian language are compared with their Ukrainian versions in the book Voices of the Ancient India: Anthology of ancient Indian literature (1982). Special attention is paid to the verse No. 173, Ukrainian and Russian semantic translations of which are different. Also the comparative analysis of a group of five verses (No. 188–192) in Ritter’s translation and translations by F. Max Müller and V. Toporov is done, along with their comparison with the Pāli original text. This excerpt deals with the term dukkha (“suffering”) and demonstrates the importance of understanding of the philosophical problematics of Buddhism for an adequate translation of a Buddhist text, not necessarily being a systematical doctrinal treatise. The Dhammapada verses are the largest excerpt of a Buddhist text among those translated by Ritter (he has translated excerpts from the six Pāli texts – mostly from the Sutta-piṭaka, one text from Vinaya-piṭaka, only the Abhidhamma-piṭaka treatises are not represented in the anthology). It should be also noted that by the date of creation the Ritter’s translation (the first verses were published already in 1913) was considerably ahead of the first Russian translation of the Dhammapada by V. Toporov (1960) and could have been published a long before it, if Ritter had not become victim of the Soviet terror.

Complicity at a distance: commemorating problematic involvement in perpetration in contemporary Central and Eastern European literatures.

Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in 'the West' from the portrayed violence in 'the East', and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.

Complicity at a distance: commemorating problematic involvement in perpetration in contemporary Central and Eastern European literatures

Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in ‘the West’ from the portrayed violence in ‘the East’, and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.

Memory Ideologies of Two Presents: Aatami Kuortti's Testimonies of the Gulag and Soviet Terror of Ingrian Finns

Abstract This article attends to literary testimonies of the Gulag and Soviet terror by an Ingrian Finnish man called Aatami Kuortti from the perspective of cultural memory. By analyzing two testimonies by Kuortti published in Finland in 1934 and 1964, the article focuses on “memory ideologies,” namely, the underlying conceptions concerning the nature, functions, and consequences of memory reflected in the testimonies. Contextualizing the works with respect to the times of their publication and analyzing differences between them, it will argue that Kuortti's testimonies represent two different types of memory ideologies: instrumental and reflexive. Moreover, the article suggests that the significance of the notion of memory ideology is that it affords systematic analysis of the ways in which memory is conceptualized on various levels of culture in general and mobilized in literary testimonies and memoirs in particular. It is a useful concept for analyzing beliefs, conceptions, and principles that people and societies reflexively associate with memory. The importance of understanding memory ideologies lies in the fact that they regiment the ways in which people and societies use and interpret memory, and in these processes make evaluations with social, political, and ethical ramifications.

«Не делать не в ее характере» (Новые материалы к биографии В. И. Икскуль фон Гилленбанд) [“She’s Not Accustomed to Staying Inactive”: New Materials Concerning the Life Story of Varvara Uexküll von Gyllenband

The article is based on a series of memoirs dedicated to a pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg socialite baroness Varvara Uexküll von Gyllenband (e.g., those of Ekaterina Letkova-Sultanova and Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik). It also specifies the date of a sculptor Prince Sergei Ukhtomsky’s (1886—1921) arrest, and makes public a previously unknown letter from Korney Chukovsky concerning the living conditions of Uexküll von Gyllenband in 1921. Keywords: 20 th -Century Russian History, Bolshevik Revolution, Varvara Uexküll von Gyllenband (1850—1928), Life Story, Russian Emigration, Soviet Terror.

В. И. Икскуль фон Гилленбанд. Из пережитого в 1918 году. [Varvara Uexküll von Gyllenband. My Ordeals in 1918

This is the first publication in toto of a forgotten memoir “My Ordeals in 1918” by baroness Varvara Uexküll von Gyllenband’s. Originally written in 1919, three years prior to her fleeing Petrograd, the memoir tells the story of her three-week detention by the Bolshevik secret police (the Cheka) in 1918. Keywords: 20 th -Century Russian History, Bolshevik Revolution, Varvara Uexküll von Gyllenband (1850—1928), “My Ordeals in 1918” (1919), Life Story, Russian Emigration, Soviet Terror.

Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 by John-Paul Himka

Reviewed by: Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 by John-Paul Himka Ilya Gerasimov (bio) John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2021). 505 pp. Bibliography. Place and Name Index. ISBN: 978-3-8382-1548-8. This book review was to have been written by a different reviewer a year ago. The reviewer eventually decided not to write a review, but never explained the reasons for this. Besides issues of professional ethics, there might be a political reason for such sabotage, at least after February 24, 2022. With the Russian Federation unleashing a genocidal war against Ukraine under the absurd pretext of its denazification, some may see a discussion of the dark pages in Ukraine's past as facilitating Russian propaganda and undermining the Ukrainian cause in general. If so, it is flawed logic. If anything set post-Soviet Ukraine apart from Russia over the past two decades, it was not the rule of law or the level of corruption but a discussion of Ukrainian society's complicity in World War II–era genocides – the Holocaust and the so-called Volhynian massacre of Poles. Even if inconsistent and halfhearted, public debates of these traumatic events in Ukraine were matched in Putin's Russian Federation by a total denial of its own rich genocidal past at the expense of Soviet history's hysterical glorification. Russia's denialism went as far as to repudiate responsibility for episodes that were officially recognized as criminal by Soviet officialdom back in 1990, such as the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners in 1940. Russia's Memorial Society, the main custodian of historical memory of Soviet terror and its perpetrators, was legally and illegally harassed for years until it was required by the Supreme Court to shut down in 2021 and was officially outlawed in 2022. Systematic retrospective populism – the glorification of the righteous Soviet nation in the past – has evolved into full-scale domestic Nazism, as the Soviet has increasingly become identified with ethnically Russian, and a revival of the Russian-Soviet idealized community has become the ultimate political priority. By contrast, a critical or at least skeptical attitude to Ukrainian nationalism of the 1940s has prevented modern Ukrainian society from embracing organicist nationalism, even in the face of Russia's creeping aggression since 2014.1 When Russia unleashed open war against Ukraine in February [End Page 339] 2022, the diverse politics of history in the two countries became a major factor in drawing a clear-cut distinction between the Ukrainian and Russian sides as moral and immoral, humane and inhumane. Therefore, the publication of Himka's book discussing the painful topic of participation in the Holocaust by Ukrainian champions of national independence – the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – is the best testimony to the Ukrainian culture's antifascist potential. The fact that the book by a prominent Canadian scholar was published not by a Canadian university press and especially not by a Ukrainian Canadian academic one, but by the German ibidem-Verlag – regardless of the author's own intentions – is a troubling sign. Likewise, potential reviewers' obvious inclination to shy away from discussing the book tells volumes about the state of the field of Ukrainian history. Namely, it is decades ahead of the history of the Soviet-German war as it is written in the Russian Federation or in America, where almost equally uncritical eulogies of the Soviet war effort are produced. Yet it is decades behind the German history of World War II or the way America's controversial past is treated by historians in the United States. Fully aware of the politically charged potential of his topic, John-Paul Himka, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Alberta, went out of his way to produce an impartial and factually bulletproof narrative. The book's style and composition are reminiscent of early twentieth-century positivist historiography. It is demonstratively empiricist and opens with the chapters "Historiography" and "Sources," which is almost unheard of in modern historical monographs. Given...

Victims of Soviet Terror in the Prose of Sergey Lebedev and Nikolay Kononov: The Prism of Postmemory

This article discusses the prose of the Russian writers Sergey Lebedev and Nikolay V. Kononov, who address state terror and violence. The aforementioned authors take into account the experience of the post-Holocaust European culture of remembrance, which is constituted by the figure of the victim and tends to interpret the tragic events of the Soviet past using the concepts and theoretical frameworks of memory and trauma studies. In this article, Lebedev’s and Kononov’s prose is seen as an integral part of the Russian liberal-oriented memory project, which is based on late-Soviet dissident culture, the perestroika “culture of repentance,” and Western cultural models of “working through the past.” In rediscovering the topic of Stalinist terror, Lebedev and Kononov reassert its ideological and moral significance and attempt to place it on the current public agenda. Both writers proceed from the need to redress injustices against the victims of state violence, whose suffering was long silenced in the USSR. They work with documents, personal testimonies, and family history to tell stories of victims missing from the historical record and thus undermine the dominance of the state-supported heroic narrative. Such an approach brings Lebedev and Kononov closer to the tradition of Soviet camp prose, but this was prose of testimony, created by survivors of camps: the modern novelists have no such experience and rely on their imagination, documents, and previous representations of Stalinist terror. They consider the historical experience of state terror and the figure of the victim from the perspective of postmemory (M. Hirsch), which prompts them to postulate the existence of so-called “inherited trauma” and explore its social and emotional consequences in the lives of different generations. Thus, they observe the “post-existence of the GULAG” and paradoxical interactions between victims and perpetrators through the prism of “inherited” trauma and memory.

Visualizations of Soviet Repression and the Gulag in Russian Museums: Common Exhibition Models

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the conceptual approaches and exhibition designs used by Russian museums for exhibitions on the Soviet terror. Using empirical data from 145 museums researched over 16 years, the author develops a typology of common models of visualization. At the center of this typology is an innovative approach to the representation of the “hero–victim–villain” triad, which is pivotal to exhibitions focusing on humanitarian disasters. The author argues that the way Russian museums use this triad is the main reason for the inadequacy of the majority of Russian museum exhibitions dedicated to the terror.

Performing Exile as an Undercover Agent: The Spy Films of Lilli Palmer

Lilli Palmer’s personal and political status as a Jewish émigré informs her success as a stage and screen actress and later, as a novelist and painter. Like other Jewish émigrés to Britain and the United States, Palmer illustrates the creative opportunities many experienced in voluntary exile or as refugees escaping Nazi persecution. This essay focuses on Palmer’s espionage roles that plunge her into political and narrative jeopardy. Whether her characters are written into British or American productions, or whether they are subject to Nazi or Soviet terror, they occupy a liminal position that generalizes the gendered import of her roles. At the end of each of her spy films, her characters wait for the dubious promises of romance to be fulfilled; they are sacrificed for the Allied cause, reactivating the self-determining choice that first drove her to espionage. Even as Lilli Palmer’s spy thriller roles and performances developed over the course of her career, they continued to echo the cultural and political displacement she experienced.

Ученики и учителя Тенишевского училища (по школьным журналам и архивным документам) [Tenishev School: Its Instructors, Students, School Magazines and Archives

This article results from extensive archival research, and compares information found in Tenishev school magazines to the archival data concerning the school life of the corresponding period. The article’s major goal is to reconstruct life stories of Tenishev school students and the school’s instructors as meticulously as possible, and also to demonstrate the style of communication between the teachers and adolescents. It also reveals some previously unknown information concerning the life story of Tenishev School director Alexander Ostrogorskii (1868—1908). KEYWORDS: 20th-Century Russian History, Osip Mandel’shtam (1891—1938), Viktor Zhirmunskii (1891—1971), Alexander Ostrogorskii (1868—1908), Tenishev School, School Magazines, Soviet Terror, History of School Education in Russia.

СТАЛІНСЬКІ РЕПРЕСІЇ КРІЗЬ ПРИЗМУ ДОЛЬ ЗНАЙОМИХ І ДРУЗІВ І. КРИП'ЯКЕВИЧА (ЗА МАТЕРІАЛАМИ ЙОГО МЕМУАРІВ)

The article is based on the materials of the "Biographical Dictionary of My Acquaintances" by a prominent Ukrainian historian, academician I. Krypyakevych (1886-1967), written by him during the Thaw. The source, which is preserved in the Krypyakevych Family Archive, was published by us in 2017. The study highlights the large-scale phenomenon of Stalin’s terror through the prism of the personal dimension of history, "microhistory." The memoirs contain information about the Eastern and Western Ukrainian acquaintances of the Lviv historian, representatives of the national intelligentsia, who were repressed in the 20-40s of the twentieth century. The main stages of repression can be traced to the memoirs: repressions of the 1930s, the victims of which were historians from Soviet Ukraine associated with the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN), representatives of the "Shot Renaissance", victims of the Sovietization of Western Ukraine and postwar persecution. The victims of Stalin's repressions were representatives of the scientific and creative intelligentsia of Ukraine, public and political figures. Among them were participants in such fabricated cases as the Ukrainian National Center, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the Union of Ukrainian Nationalists, and others. Among I. Krypyakevych’s acquaintances and friends were the following well-known repressed people: Les Kurbas, Mykhailo Boychuk, Yuriy Lypa, Mykola Zerov, Mykola Voronyi, and others. The materials of the "Dictionary…" contribute to the coverage of the tragedy of the Krushelnytsky family, which became a symbol of Soviet terror. The fate of many acquaintances of the academician was intertwined with Solovki. Many of them went through the crucible of the Great Terror of 1937-1938 and finished their lives during the mass executions in the Sandarmokh tract. I. Krypyakevych personally helped the victims of the Soviet regime in every possible way. The article considers the problem of Western Ukrainian emigration to the USSR, traces the main circumstances and motives for the emigration of the Galician intelligentsia to Soviet Ukraine.

The identity of an Estonian: we don’t play dirty games such as football and we are proud of it

ABSTRACT The present study discusses the reasons why football, the most popular sport in Estonia between the two world wars became marginalized in the conditions of Soviet annexation. The Soviet sport system set winning medals at the Olympic Games as its priority. Estonia with its population of more than one million could not be successful in football which despite official priorities was the most popular sport in the Soviet Union and that is why Estonia used its resources elsewhere. The changes in the status of football were also affected by the Soviet terror and genocide as well as a considerable immigration wave from the East threatening to leave Estonians a minority in their own land. To make a difference between themselves and the immigrants Estonians identified themselves as a nation that doesn’t play football. At the end of the article, I shall view the marginalization of football using the postcolonial method.

Krajobrazy post mortem. O Sołowkach, Kołymie (i nie tylko) we współczesnej polskiej prozie podróżniczej

Post-Mortem Landscapes: Regarding the Solovetsky Islands and Kolyma River (and Others) in Contemporary Polish Travel Prose The aim of this article is to demonstrate how contemporary Polish reporters describe the areas of former labor camps located in the Russian Federation, especially near the Kolyma River and on the Solovetsky Islands. The interest of Polish visitors is aroused by the “landscapes of death” associated with the Gulag in their geographical, natural, cultural, and mental aspects. The essence of the traveler’s interest lies in the Russian attitude towards the victims and perpetrators of Soviet terror as well as the daily life of the inhabitants of these sites. The source materials include, among others, the works of Ryszard Kapuściński, Mariusz Wilk, Jacek Hugo-Bader, and Michał Milczarek.

Truth-Telling, Trauma Fiction, and the Challenge of Critical Engagement: A Reading of Breaking Stalin’s Nose and A Winter’s Day in 1939

The Great Terror of 1936–1938 and mass deportations of “enemies of the people” between the 1930s and the 1950s are among signature atrocities committed by Stalinist Russia. Claiming the lives of several million Soviet citizens and foreign nationals, these executions and deportations were a silenced topic until the collapse of the Soviet Union. When they emerged in twenty first century children’s literature, stories of Soviet terror and deportations became a subgenre of trauma fiction—a large category predicated on mourning authentic historical traumas and appreciated for its truth-telling value. Recent criticism, however, has pointed at the limits of truth-telling genres in engaging audiences. In A Literature of Questions Joe Sutliff Sanders argued that nonfiction is more productive when texts share authority with their readers and invite critical engagement. What form can that engagement take in trauma genres? How can it be generative of dialogue or new knowledge? This essay offers a reading of Eugene Yelchin’s (Breaking Stalin’s Nose, Henry Holt, New York, 2011) and Melinda Szymanik’s (A Winter’s Day in 1939, Scholastic, Auckland, 2013) to argue that truth-telling need not be antithetical to critical engagement. The argument is that even texts whose authority derives from representations of historical atrocities can communicate their truths in a way that invites readers to interrogate the process by which historical knowledge is generated, articulated and remains meaningful in the present.

Between Social Utopia and Totalitarian Reality: “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna

The paper considers the novel “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna in the context of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora’s literary process. The focus is on the issues of relations between fiction and documentary writing, the individual and collective experiences. The literary Kyiv, being one of the central images in Dokiia Humenna’s novel, appears not only as a page from individual or national histories, a sample of the Kyiv text in the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose, but also as a generalization based on such texts and made due to various forms of intertextuality, which absorb the history and atmosphere of the Kyiv 1920s. The problem of interrelations between the writer and government, art, politic, and ideology is one of the most essential in the novel: Dokia Humenna reveals various aspects of the writer’s life and work in conditions of the totalitarian state and culture – from suicide to madness, from resistance to adaptation and collaboration. A future person and society in “Children of Milky Way” are represented in a commune. The histories of the two characters-antipodes Taras Saragola and Seraphym Carmalita are connected to its progress and decline; in the world of totalitarian repressions and control they choose different life strategies and roles. The memory about Soviet terror and repressions, as well as the Holodomor-genocide, “killing the Ukrainian peasantry as a foundation of the nation and destructing intellectuals as a brain of the nation” is important in the novel. The history of collectivization is related to the traumatic memory of the serfdom times, which affects the second and third generations and deepens the trauma caused by disintegration of a family, destruction of the patriarchal peasant world. This process was accompanied by desacralization of the Father’s figure as a personification of power, by infantilization of masculinity. The writer associates totalitarian reality with the metaphor of Night, which acquires different ambiguous meanings in the Ukrainian anti-totalitarian discourse.

Confession of Victim and Intonation of Vengeance: Famine, Terror and Writing

The paper considers repressions and Holodomor as a kind of literary practice and traumatic experience in the works and biography of the Ukrainian diaspora writer Olha Mak. The analysis covers fiction, memoirs, and journalistic texts, in particular the memoirs “From the Time of Yezhovshchyna”, the essay “Capital of Hungry Horror”, and the story “Stones Under Scythe”, considered in the context of the fi ction and documentaries of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora. In this case, the writing appears to be a vital natural resource for recreating the memory, where one’s own individual experience becomes a material, an object for self-refl ection. The process of writing is associated with moral and ethical duty of witnessing the past; it has a powerful therapeutic meaning and protects from immorality integrating individual experience and history into collective, social, cultural, etc. The memoir “From the Time of Yezhovshchyna” by Olha Mack, dealing with the theme of Soviet terror and repressions, is a peculiar form of re-experiencing a personal tragedy associated with the arrest and deportation of the author’s husband. It shows the self-denial of the Soviet human, the wife of the ‘enemy of people’, and records her traumatic experience and memories.The Holodomor theme, elaborated by Olha Mack in various genres and forms, was not only a material, an object of research, but also a part of her personal biography and family history. The Holodomor in the perception of Olha Mack symbolized the threat to social, national (spiritual) life connected with various social, cultural, and mental illnesses; hence, it involves the idea of eliminating Ukraine not only as material and spatial entity, but also as abstract and spiritual one. The story “Stones Under Scythe”, dedicated to the memory of the Holodomor, is considered as a kind of the classical bildungsroman genre’s variation. Its conceptual fi gures are images-archetypes of the child-victim, the female martyr, the great mother. The Holodomor (both physical and spiritual, which destroys the foundations of national dignity, national solidarity and so on) in the story by Olha Mack is not only the topic, but also a continual metaphor and key motive.