Preliminary Programme

This paper explores how working class Belgraders understood and navigated the widening gap between socialist ideology and social reality in 1980s Yugoslavia through a focus on (non-) access to the scare resource of housing. As housing for Yugoslavia’s working class was (theoretically) provided by the employer or supported by credits from the workplace, through it one can witness a range of mutually constitutive interactions between the worker, family, the workplace, private initiative and the institutions of self-management in the broader context of late Yugoslav socialism. Through this study the paper explores the broader methodological problem of conducting oral history in a post-socialist and post-conflict context. Oral history research of 1980s Yugoslavia is complicated by a rupture associated with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and state socialism parallel to the outbreak of war in 1991. A number of scholars argue that a sharp rupture occurred in the early 1990s which renders oral accounts of the 1980s problematic. Based on life narratives of 30 workers this paper develops the argument that for working class Belgraders such ruptures were far from singular and were temporally dislocated according to one’s particularly life trajectory. Many workers experienced a destruction of sociability in their workplace and everyday life as early as the mid-1980s. Some attest that this experience equipped them to deal with deeper crisis and change during the 1990s. Contemporary economic crisis in Serbia and social dislocation associated with neoliberal economic reforms since 2000 deeply shapes working class narratives of late socialism. Through linking individual narratives to the scholarly literature on socialist temporalities I suggest that the rupture of state dissolution and post-socialist economic transformation are phenomena which are experienced over the longue durée and have a class dimension that is largely absent in the social history literature on late socialist Yugoslavia. (Show less)

The framework of this paper is how to overcome, remember, and retell Soviet state-sponsored violence as the victim of these events.
Among the participants of a life stories` competition (1996) was Eric Talve, born in 1921. In 1940, the first year of the first Soviet occupation of Estonia, Eric Talve was a high school student. The reason for his arrest was that a politically compromising anti-Soviet flyer was found in his school bag. His punishment was 5 years in a labour camp in the polar region, Vorkuta. Talve was released in 1946, but arrested a second time in 1949. There was no new accusation. The second five-year time he was „resettled“ beyond the Ural Mountains. He returned in 1953. As a youth Talve had been a Boy Scout and acquired basic first aid skills which came in handy the first time he was in the Gulag. When he returned to Estonia, he worked as a pharmacist`s assistant.
The case study of Eric Talve presented in this paper is based on his autobiographical accounts. Talve has written about his life story in more genres and versions than anyone I know: life narrative, diary notes, several plays, short stories. Talve declares that all of his works are autobiographical, explaining that he has shifted from the documentary narrative toward the fictional because he believes fiction is more valuable. Moving back and forth from oral to written form, it seemed that he had found an anchor for his written work in the Tartu Literary Museum`s Life Stories collection..
It often thought that when people narrate their lives, one version of the life story is selected out and „sticks,“ while the others recede or disappear. However, Talve`s writing strategy seems to prove the opposite. His desire to write was activated by finding a addressee—that is, the archive. On the other hand writing and reading his stories out loud helped him to define himself socially, specificallyt as a former political prisoner and survivor of the Soviet Gulag.
In his old age, Talve had an unlimited amount of time to occupy himself with his memoirs. Talve has a characteristic sense of humour; if his first version of an event or episode is in the tragic mode, subsequent rewritings shift into comedy, with more and more of the absurd. Talve`s favourite genre is the anecdote – originally an oral genre, which depends on the performance skill of the narrator. Working in a pharmacy after his return to Estonia provided Talve with enough strange experiences to feed his narrative imagination. His main narrative line, about his experiences in the Gulag is tragic—it could not be otherwise. However, by continuing to explore this narrative material, he surrounds it with small anecdotal stories.
Talve does not want to forget; he wants to keep telling stories. Remembering may reawaken trauma, but Talve neutralizes it with humour .Thus he positions himself at the border between oral and written history, presenting his tale with repetitions and variations. (Show less)

How does space and time affect the ways in which we remember the past? What kinds of a role do current social and collective memory of the past play in personal remembrance? How about the quality of time passed since the memory is made? I aim to find answers to these questions in the context of oral history interviews with Iranian and Turkish revolutionary women who were active in the 1970s and are presently residing in Europe and Turkey respectively.
More than 30 years have past since the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the notorious September 12 coup d’état in 1980 in Turkey. Women who were devoted revolutionaries fighting against the state in the decade preceding these historical events lived varied lives afterwards and ended up in completely diverse settings. While Iranian women had to flee the country soon after the 1979 Revolution and have not been able to return ever since; Turkish women have been able to pursue a life in their own country even though having spent some time in prison or in exile. Given the commonalities regarding their objectives and strategies, as well as the fate of their struggle, the differences and similarities in the ways in which Iranian and Turkish women recall, feel about, and assess their experiences in revolutionary activism are very important. Therefore, in this paper, I compare and contrast how Iranian and Turkish women talk about their past, together with the characteristics of their life histories, in order to understand the extent of influence experiences in the aftermath of the incidents has on memory. In the same vein, I also dwell on the possible effects of social and collective memory of the period on the ways in which these women make sense of their past activism. (Show less)

It is almost known that the Cold War reality and existence of bipolar world meant the real limits in everyday lives of “ordinary citizens” in the Eastern Europe countries (including Czechoslovakia). Than the fall of Iron Curtain meant dramatic “clash” and it caused a radical change in the conditions of traveling. During the 1990s Czech society was looking for coming back to the liberal “traveling regime”, similar to the Western Countries experience. The contours of historical representations are more and more presented also through oral history research, however a little bit in the “shadow” of major study approaches it seems to be a topic of travelling and tourism, seen from historical perspective. This paper is aimed to resume and to compare the main memory frames, the narrating strategies and the relevant topics frequented in the interviews with different groups of narrators concerning generations (e.g. “old” generation born between 1930 and 1955; young generation born in 1980s) or professions (e.g. workers, intelligentsia, farmers, employees in tertiary sector). All analysed and interpreted interviews were realised in the frame of project led by Oral History Center, Institute for Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Science s in Prague (and in collaboration with Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague). (Show less)

An oral history approach redresses the difficulties of representing the Holocaust through the contemporary narratives. The paper studies testimonies of Jewish survivors, who have been evacuated to the South of the former Soviet Union during the Second World War.
With its access to the Black Sea coast to the West and large oil reserves to the East, Nazi commanders considered the North Caucasus to be a strategically important object. Battles for the Caucasus took place between river Don and the foothills of the North Caucasus from July 1942 to October 1943. It was this region, where thousands of Jewish refugees from Central- and North-western Russia (including Leningrad), as well as Ukraine and Moldova tried to hide before the Nazis occupied this region. The civilians were informed about the extermination of Soviet Jews and had, at first glance, enough time to evacuate. However, a sudden attack of the enemy and the limited transportation options for organization of individual flight in this region did not permit many Jews to realize it in summer, 1942.
In my paper I’ll focus on two main topics of studying oral testimonies with the children of the war. First, I’ll study the language of narration and the peculiarities of the children’s memory. Interviews were made many years after the war with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who survived the war in the childhood. What levels of narration we could find in such testimonies? Secondly, I would like to reconstruct the everyday life of Jews in the evacuation at the temporary occupied zones of the South of Russia. The main goal of the paper is to allocate the peculiarities of children’s perception of the war, and peculiarities of the perception of children – Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in particular. (Show less)