We had an audience of 45 last night at Janek Gryta’s lecture.

Dr Gryta’s fascinating and highly relevant lecture closed our year of lectures for 2021-22.  This lecture explored the way History is viewed not only in Russia but in Eastern Europe and has been shaped by the isolation of the Cold War and Communism.  This had led to a focus on a national victimhood/martyrdom view of the “Great Patriotic War” and a search for an enemy in the national narrative.  Poland’s Memory Law in 2016 which had temporarily forbidden saying that any Poles had participated in the Holocaust and Ukraine’s own law in 2015 were given as examples of how legislation had tried to enforce interpretations of the past.  In the main part of the lecture Dr Gryta looked at Vladimir Putin’s (ab)uses of History as an extreme case in the misuse of history.  He explored some of the exaggerated myths around the “Great Patriotic War” which portrayed Russians as the unequivocal saviours of the West.  Events like the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Katyn Massacres or the Holodomor (Famine in 1930’s Ukraine) were written out of the Russian narrative of History except for the brief spell in the 1990’s when the archives were opened.  Anyone who fought as nationalists in the Second World War is depicted as an anti-Communist and therefore a Nazi.  Stalin has now been praised by Vladimir Putin for expanding Russian borders.  The language and culture differences inside many of the former Soviet Republics were also explored and the effect of transporting Russian speakers to these areas. The lecture helped to give a much more sophisticated understanding of why Putin and his troops and TV audiences would accept terms like Nazi being applied to Ukrainians and how the invasion has been justified