Bailey Humyn

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Hicks, Barbara

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

This thesis examines the top-down approach to national memory formation carried out by post-communist governments in Eastern Europe. The governments of Russia, Ukraine, and Poland have gone to great lengths to create an official national memory of the Holocaust to the exclusion of the collective memories of others. To study how a state-sponsored national memory is institutionalized in a country, I analyze presidential speeches related to the Holocaust and the ways they are influenced by nondomestic factors and examine Holocaust museums in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. I then examine the creation of memory laws by these countries and analyze how they were implemented. The memory laws studied are: the Russian Law Against the Rehabilitation of Nazism (2014), the Ukrainian decommunization laws (2015), and the Polish Amendment to the Institute of National Remembrance (2018). The Russian memory law has in particular been used by the Kremlin to suppress dissidents against Putin’s process of re-Stalinization, while the Ukrainian laws are used to eliminate monuments of Russian cultural identity primarily in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. The Polish memory law has not been employed yet, but the vagueness of the statute allows for the possibility of the law to be used in a similar fashion to the Russian law. This study finds that the top-down approach to national memory formation has had negative effects on the relationships between the dominant ethnic group and minority ethnic groups, on democratization, and on international relations.

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