Scattered memories. A compendium of Soviet deportations
The project aims to create a comprehensive compendium of Soviet deportations – a synthesis of history and memory, presenting deportations as a political process of unprecedented scale.
Between 1920 and 1956, more than 130 deportation campaigns took place in the Soviet Union, affecting over 12 million people. Despite their enormous scale, Soviet deportations as a unique phenomenon of power remain insufficiently studied and have not yet been analyzed in a full, comprehensive way. So far, a number of fragmented historical and memory-based studies have been produced, but they do not create a coherent picture that would reveal the common structures and mechanisms of all deportations.
The project’s aim is therefore to gather scattered memories and diverse experiences into a polyphonic history of this aspect of Soviet terror. The outcome will not only be a chronological presentation of deportations (divided into pre-war, wartime, and post-war phases), but also an illustration of their interconnections and continuity in a meta-historical context, with particular emphasis on issues of memory and forgetting.
