The Empire Strikes Back: Soviet Legacy in Weaponised Memory - Instytut Pileckiego

The panel will explore whether destruction, preservation, or critical reinterpretation offer viable responses to this contested heritage

The Empire Strikes Back: Soviet Legacy in Weaponised Memory

Public debates about Soviet heritage across Europe remain deeply contested. Monuments, mosaics, and memorial landscapes created under the Soviet regime continue to shape contemporary political narratives, identities, and conflicts. Far from being neutral relics of the past, these sites actively structure how societies remember history and understand themselves today. In the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, they increasingly become part of the Kremlin’s broader strategy of hybrid warfare, where historical narratives, symbols, and monuments are mobilised to legitimise aggression and influence public discourse.

16.03, 18:30 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin | Registration: https://forms.gle/wL9NABDxuZPQsVjQ7

This discussion opens a critical debate on contested memory and the political afterlives of Soviet cultural and monumental heritage. How should societies approach artistic and memorial forms created within a totalitarian system? Can these objects be critically reinterpreted and transformed, or do they inevitably reproduce the ideological language of the regime that produced them?

The panel will explore whether destruction, preservation, or critical reinterpretation offer viable responses to this contested heritage.

The event will consist of keynotes followed by a public discussion and Q&A session featuring:

Ksenia Malykh
Program Director of the Promprylad Art Center
Co-Curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 2026 Biennale Arte in Venice
Art historian and curator

Ksenia will explore several case studies, including the current project of Ukrainian pavilion at Venice Biennial “Security Guarantees” by Zhanna Kadyrova. She will invite the audience to consider art as a critical tool for rethinking memory, monumentality, and public space in times of political rupture.

Yevheniia Moliar
Art historian and research assistant at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Monument Conservation and Urban Cultural Heritage, Technical University of Berlin

Yevheniia explores whether destruction, preservation, or critical reinterpretation offer viable responses to this contested heritage. Rather than reproducing the binary between dismantling and conservation, the discussion will consider approaches of re-signification: practices that “disarm” monuments by exposing their ideological construction, recontextualising their meaning, and opening them to plural and multinational interpretations. Such approaches aim to separate Soviet history from its Russian monopolisation and to reposition these objects as sites of critical knowledge rather than instruments of militarised memory.

Viktoriya Feshak
Interdisciplinary analyst and project manager, core member of Vitsche e.V.

Viktoriya Feshak will provide an input based on Vitsche’s civic initiatives engaging with Soviet war memorials in Berlin. Drawing on the organisation’s projects and public debates, the input will explore how civil society envisions the future of these contested sites: as spaces for critical contextualisation, democratic dialogue, and the rethinking of inherited narratives shaped by Soviet and Russian memory politics. Her contribution will also address questions of justice in memory politics, examining how the ways societies remember or fail to remember - become a part of broader processes of transitional justice.

The event will conclude with a panel discussion moderated by Hanna Radziejowska, Head of the Pilecki Institute in Berlin