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Conférence / Recherche
Le 10 mai 2022
Saint-Martin-d'Hères - Domaine universitaire
Intervention d'Olga Davydova-Minguet qui portera sur les enjeux mémoriels de la frontière russo-finlandaise dans le sillage de la guerre en Ukraine. Cette conférence s'inscrit dans les activités de l'axe transversal Migrations, frontières et relations internationales.
Russian sociologist Grigory Yudin in one of his recent talks proposed that Russians’ support for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has its roots, among others, in the post-Soviet resentment and feelings of victimhood. The production of the image of Russia as a victim of the “West” had started step by step already in the 1990s, but enhanced especially in 2010s in the “memory wars” with Baltic states, countries of Central Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine. Finland has remained on the sidelines of these memory conflicts, but there are several smoldering memory conflicts that are being developed in the confrontational direction.
The presentation analyses how Second world war’s time concentration camps organized by Finnish military administration have been present/ed in public memory of Russian Republic of Karelia. These camps were organized for so called non-national (i.a. Russian) population during the occupation of Karelia in 1941-1944 by Finnish military administration. Approximately half of the population which remained in the republic after the evacuation in autumn 1941 didn’t belong to ethnicities which were considered by the occupants as close to Finns, such as Karelians and Vepsians. During the occupation, about 24 000 Russians were imprisoned, and about 4 000 died in the camps. After the war, the concentration camps and their prisoners were “forgotten” in the official public memory, and the first memorial appeared only 25 years after the war. Still, during the Soviet time, this memory remained “peripheral”, as well as the image of Finland as an occupant.
In the post-Soviet period, this memory became an asset of the organization of former juvenile prisoners of the camps. Through making memory of Finnish concentration camps visible in the city of Petrozavodsk, the organization participated in the “post-Soviet moral economy of guilt and debt” (Zhurzhenko 2018). The organization opposed neoliberal social reforms by bringing forward its members’ sufferings as victims of both Fascism (simultaneously equating Finns to Fascists) and Soviet and Russian state (which didn’t recognize their “feat of survival” during the war). Since 2014, this memory entered official, state-controlled spaces and places, such as museums, exhibitions and state-aligned media. In 2017, the flamboyant memorial to the victims of concentration camps was constructed on the cemetery where they were buried; in 2019 a movie about the children of the camps was issued, and after that the scenery of the movie was erected in one of the Karelian villages as children education centre. In these activities, the “ownership” of this memory shifted from the organization of juvenile prisoners to the actors conveying state memory politics, where Russia and Russians are presented as victims, not only as winners.
The presentation analyses how Second world war’s time concentration camps organized by Finnish military administration have been present/ed in public memory of Russian Republic of Karelia. These camps were organized for so called non-national (i.a. Russian) population during the occupation of Karelia in 1941-1944 by Finnish military administration. Approximately half of the population which remained in the republic after the evacuation in autumn 1941 didn’t belong to ethnicities which were considered by the occupants as close to Finns, such as Karelians and Vepsians. During the occupation, about 24 000 Russians were imprisoned, and about 4 000 died in the camps. After the war, the concentration camps and their prisoners were “forgotten” in the official public memory, and the first memorial appeared only 25 years after the war. Still, during the Soviet time, this memory remained “peripheral”, as well as the image of Finland as an occupant.
In the post-Soviet period, this memory became an asset of the organization of former juvenile prisoners of the camps. Through making memory of Finnish concentration camps visible in the city of Petrozavodsk, the organization participated in the “post-Soviet moral economy of guilt and debt” (Zhurzhenko 2018). The organization opposed neoliberal social reforms by bringing forward its members’ sufferings as victims of both Fascism (simultaneously equating Finns to Fascists) and Soviet and Russian state (which didn’t recognize their “feat of survival” during the war). Since 2014, this memory entered official, state-controlled spaces and places, such as museums, exhibitions and state-aligned media. In 2017, the flamboyant memorial to the victims of concentration camps was constructed on the cemetery where they were buried; in 2019 a movie about the children of the camps was issued, and after that the scenery of the movie was erected in one of the Karelian villages as children education centre. In these activities, the “ownership” of this memory shifted from the organization of juvenile prisoners to the actors conveying state memory politics, where Russia and Russians are presented as victims, not only as winners.
Date
Le 10 mai 2022
Complément date
de 14h00 à 16h00
Localisation
Saint-Martin-d'Hères - Domaine universitaire
Complément lieu
Salle G203 (bâtiment Stendhal)
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