DANYLIW RESEARCH SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE

The paper asks why wartime rescue work – an act that might seem to constitute self-evident moral capital – proved insufficient, and at times irrelevant, to protect certain Ukrainian rescuers from Soviet postwar persecution for “poor” wartime conduct despite shielding others whose wartime conduct was far more ambiguous. It aims to clarify the political rationale behind the persecution of these rescuers, and the extent to which Soviet memory politics rendered their wartime heroism irrelevant in the face of broader campaigns against perceived “unreliable” elements.

 

Raisa Ostapenko is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris.