Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe eds. by Natalia Khanenko-Friesen and Gelinada Grinchenko (review)

This anthology highlights scholarship from an interdisciplinary conference titled In Search of One's Voice: Oral History as Theory, Method, and Source, that the book's editors, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen and Gelinada Grinchenko, organized in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2009. One unifying thread within the edited volume is the authors' conscious efforts to wrest memory from the controlling grip of state-sanctioned institutions, sources, and narratives. Whether Belorussian, Finnish, Ukrainian, Polish, or German, the interviewees—like the authors themselves—seem intent on conceptualizing social categories other than class and party and breaking apart the mythical uniformity of life within the Soviet bloc. Although the eleven chapters vary significantly in terms of methodological approach, subject matter, and theoretical sophistication, they go beyond simply demonstrating the breadth of recent research. Rather, the authors emphatically argue that, even three decades after the peaceful revolutions, multiple socialist pasts and competing memory cultures deeply impact contemporary institutions and societies in Eastern Europe.

Postsocialist Eastern Europe includes what some readers will find to be a bewildering array of personal, local, and national memory cultures. The editors' solution is to group the papers thematically. Thus, the first three chapters showcase oral history as a tool for sociopolitical change. Chapters 4-6 explore tensions between collective and individual narratives. The case studies of the next two chapters tackle the agency of the region's double occupation (first by Nazi Germany and then the USSR), while chapters 9-11 explore how memories of the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties inform postsocialist (and post-Soviet) historical narratives. This structure seems somewhat arbitrary, so rather than replicate it, I will highlight the multidimensionality of this collection by suggesting an alternative grouping.

Not surprisingly, researcher/narrator relations constitute one central theme; this is particularly foregrounded in chapters 4, 5, and 6, all of which focus on the ways narrators and researchers alike attempt to impose order on an inherently untidy past. In chapter 4, sociologist Yelena Rozhdestvenskaya argues that Russian forced laborers (Ostarbeiter) use three basic strategies to align their Nazi-era pasts with Soviet-era norms: social compensation, anonymization, and hypercompensation. While this makes sense, it is less clear whether the argument derives more from the oral history narratives themselves or the theoretical lens through which Rozhdsetvenskaya reads them.

Natalia Pushkareva's essay (chapter 5) on women in the Belarusian and Russian intelligentsia is somewhat less sophisticated. Pushkareva argues that the "gendered symmetry" between narrators and researchers lets them "share the conversation as equals" (106). While this may be true, it is not clear that respondents themselves perceived this shared status as significant to the relationship. Likewise, there is little evidence to support the claim that strong personal relationships contributed to narrators' professional success.

Chapter 6 offers another way to tame unacceptable personal experiences. Historian Rozalia Cherepanova suggests understanding narrators as authors of—rather than participants in—their past; she observes that when narrating moments of incongruity, members of the Russian intelligentsia often dismiss questions of personal or institutional agency. While such depersonalization rarely aligns with archival documentation, identifying it as a rhetorical strategy creates analytical space in which to consider individuals and institutions as complex characters rather than victims or perpetrators.

Chapters 1, 8, and 10 comprise another set of essays, as all highlight how regionally specific factors shape oral history research. In a useful review of German remembrance cultures, Alexander Plato argues that the politically expedient quest for a unified historical narrative is not only futile and undesirable, but also pushes aside more important analytical issues. Chapters 8 and 10 illustrate how scholars of twentieth-century Ukrainian history are grappling with many of these very issues. Thus, Gelinada Grinchenko argues that former Ostarbeiters' self-identification as either rebels or conformists blurs what other narratives describe as critical differences between German and Soviet occupation. Chapter 10 provides another example of such personal detachment from national narratives. Natalia...