by Ēriks Ralfs Vanags, University of Latvia
On the fifth day of the project, we had a lecture and presentation by Deividas Šlekys from the Institute of International Relations and Political Science. He explained in great detail to us the importance of oral history in preserving the memory of the Second World War and the Soviet era, explicating the struggles and challenges historians face when trying to record this information.
I found it very compelling right from the start as it is a subject very dear to me. My father is an enthusiastic historian and I am naturally drawn to life stories of elderly people. My grandmother is 87 years old and has a mighty fine memory still. My mother’s parents who were born right after the war are very similar. I also worked at a fish market for a couple of years, so you could say I already had some experience in the field.
I must thank Šlekys for his work because he put forth very concise arguments as to why oral history should be recorded. He explained how there is a lack of primary sources and how a lot of documents as well as archives in the Baltics and Poland have been destroyed. Because of the previously mentioned factors, history is becoming weaponized, for example, how politicians engage in historicism. However, most people, at least it seems to me, do not understand this.
That is, so much of history has been physically destroyed, erased from the records, or burnt to the ground because that is what people have been doing since civilization started.
Everyone has done it; even our government at this very moment is knocking down monuments, and in many cases failing to paint the full picture. The Russians in Ukraine are doing similar things. Burning history to rewrite it to gain legitimacy. It’s an awful reality, yet that is the world we live in and since we cannot fully rely on our politicians and institutions to paint us the full picture, we must find another way. What better place to do so than by asking the people who experienced history firsthand.
From my personal experience, I can tell you that there is so much that has been intentionally left out of our history books which I’ve only found out from hearing it told to me. For example, my grandma told me that there were Latvians in her hometown, and elsewhere, that went around and hunted down family members of other Latvians who had joined the Soviet army. I imagine it had been written down somewhere, but I cannot recall this being taught in school.
Šlekys also spoke on the challenges that historians face when recording oral history and how to approach the recording of it, explaining concepts like soviet-two person mentality, the importance of reputation and social standing, how trust is extremely important, and how trauma and stigmatization might raise problems in the recalling of history. It was very informative and an entertaining lecture as well thanks to the professor’s deep knowledge of the subject and enthusiastic attitude.
- This blog is a part of a blog series written by the BAMSE Riga intensive course students. The blog series analyses the concept of resilience from five different viewpoints: democracy in crises, regional responses, social consequences, relevance of history politics and cultural approaches. This blog belongs to the relevance of history politics part of the blog series. Read more about the blog series on Bamse News & Events website.