CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Akhmedova, Selem |
|---|---|
| Title | Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: Constructing the Memory of Soviet Political Repression in Russia in the 1990s-2000s |
| Summary | Levashovo is the mass burial of the victims of Soviet political repression in the region of Saint-Petersburg that was discovered in 1989. Later, Levashovo became a memorial cemetery of the repressed and experienced political changes, determined by the interchanging political courses of destalinization and restalinization during and after the Soviet period. Despite the ambiguity of new Russian historical policies, shaped by searching for a new Russian identity, Levashovo had a chance to become a common space for the construction and development of the memorial culture about Soviet political repression. Notwithstanding the lack of attention of Russian politicians to the enhancement of Levashovo as a memorial cemetery, Levashovo became an example of how the complex and diverse Russian memorial culture about repression can be represented in its materiality. No monument dedicated to the repressed could absorb and reflect the multiformity of this memory. However, Levashovo, discovered, organized, and designed by bearers of multiple memorial cultures about the repressed, presents the memorial that offers such consent. In this thesis, by tracing how Russian historical policies of the 1990s-2000s affected the narrative about Soviet political repression, I look at how those changes influenced the commemorating communities in their remembrance practices, which during the last thirty years were forming Levashovo as the memorial cemetery we know today. |
| Supervisor | Shaw, Charles |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/akhmedova_selem.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University