The local organizer is Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, the other Carnegie Council fellow studying reconciliation issues in Eastern Europe. I will present an overview of my research on the three Baltic states and participate in discussions of how Lithuanians are portrayed in Polish history textbooks. Very few scholars have analyzed the impact of these demographic changes on the Baltic states and elsewhere in the post-Soviet sphere. Yet few would dispute the depth of feeling still associated with memories of displacement and planned migration amongst survivors and their descendants. For my Carnegie Council study, I plan to write a book on interethnic reconciliation in the Baltics since the restoration of independence, using the research I did for my Ph.D. on this topic as well as the findings of some recent fieldwork.
Reconciliation is defined as the process by which the historial wounds of nations are addressed.
It involves constant revisiting of history. Specifically, I will focus on the shapes and forms reconciliation can take. My working hypothesis is that the historical memory of deportations and other forms of displacement have significantly shaped the politics of the post-Soviet world. For example, Latvia and Estonia adopted citizenship laws that disenfranchised Russian residents. Tellingly, the debate over citizenship in these two nations centered on bitter memories of deportations carried out by the Soviet Union.