Under the title “Erasing the Memory of Stalin’s Repression: Human Rights, Power Politics and Historical Narratives”, international experts discussed these questions before a large audience on site and online via livestream.

Opening
Barbara Stelzl-Marx, Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War (BIK) and Professor at the University of Graz, opened with the image of the past as a “seismographic early warning system.” Three decades of research into Stalin’s last victims, including Austrian citizens, have shown how unresolved questions of history continue to shape the present.

Michael Lysander Fremuth, Scientific Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights (LBI-GMR) and Professor at the University of Vienna, introduced the Human Rights Talks as a forum that connects academia and the wider public. He underlined the cooperation with the BIK, which brought the Talks to Graz for the first time. With regard to the evening’s theme, he stressed: “States without history are inconceivable, but history without a culture of remembrance remains silent and offers no lessons for the future.”

Elvira Welzig, CEO of the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, warned that authoritarian systems rewrite history to serve political interests – a process exemplified by current developments in Russia. This deliberate distortion and erasure of memory, she argued, is not only a historical phenomenon but an ongoing political practice that weakens democratic discourse and threatens it in the long term.

Joachim Reidl, Vice-Rector of the University of Graz, made a plea for universities as spaces of plurality, diversity and inclusion. In the face of increasing restrictions on critical voices in Russia, he noted, it is the responsibility of science and education to keep memory open, diverse and accessible.

Keynote
The Russian historian Nikita Petrov, Deputy Chairman of the Research and Information Centre Memorial, dedicated his keynote to the Great Terror of 1937–38. He explained that these repressions are increasingly framed not as crimes committed by Stalin against his own people, but as a kind of “collective sacrifice” in the face of historic challenges, often blamed on external foes. This narrative, Petrov warned, is deliberately cultivated to legitimize authoritarian politics today. Archives are becoming inaccessible, the Gulag Museum in Moscow remains closed, and history textbooks glorify war while downplaying state violence. “We have a right to history,” he concluded.

Panel Discussion
In the subsequent discussion, Sofiya Lipenkova, Project Manager at the LBI-GMR, movingly described her own family history: up to eleven relatives fell victim to Stalinist repressions, her grandfather was born in a Gulag camp, her great-grandmother sentenced to ten years of forced labour, her great-grandfather executed. Attempts to reconstruct the family’s story remain difficult, as surviving letters and documents are fragmentary. “I don’t think that this generational memory can be erased; stubbornness and resilience are now engrained in our DNA,” she said.

Anatoly Reshetnikov, Assistant Professor at Webster Vienna Private University, examined how the official interpretation of history is used as a political tool in Russia today. State narratives formally condemn extreme violence, yet justify it as necessary under exceptional circumstances. Russian schoolbooks devote hundreds of references to Stalin and idealised portrayals of war, while mentioning the Gulag only in passing and almost never as terror. Such selective remembrance, he argued, constructs a historical framework that legitimises present-day repression.

Anna Graf-Steiner, Postdoctoral Researcher at the LBI for Research on Consequences of War, turned to the 1960s and 1970s, showing how Cold War human rights debates diverged. While the West centred on individual rights, the East stressed collective rights. This divergence also shaped the Helsinki Final Act, which bore the imprint of this ambivalence – a legacy that still influences political discourse today.

Nikita Petrov returned to the panel discussion to share his personal experience as a researcher in the late Soviet period. Anyone requesting newspapers from the 1930s in state libraries would automatically attract the attention of the KGB. “We had to reconstruct our history ourselves, because it was not prepared for us,” he explained. History itself, he insisted, is a human right – one that must be defended again and again.

Pavel Kogan, activist and member of Memorial Friends Austria, finally reported on his first protest experience at the age of twelve against Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Today he is active in the project Returning the Names, which restores the memory of Stalinist victims. He also described the situation facing young people in Russia today: “In schools there is fear – parents are afraid of what their children are being taught, and afraid that they could be punished for opposing it.”

Q&A
The discussion continued with an engaged Q&A session, both on site and via the livestream chat. Questions touched on whether Russia could ever develop a genuine democratic culture without a judicial verdict against Stalin, and on what role international institutions might play. Others asked how family histories can be reconstructed when archives remain inaccessible, and what responsibility educational institutions bear when historical narratives are steered by political authorities.

Conclusion
Moderator Wolfgang Mueller, Deputy Head of the Institute for East European History at the University of Vienna, concluded that dealing with Stalinism is not solely Russia’s task: “It is not about shifting blame onto others. It is about a debate that every society must have.”

The Human Rights Talks are a platform for social discourse on current topics with human rights relevance. The events present top-class speakers to the interested public and analyse human rights challenges and socio-political trends in a differentiated manner and with professional expertise, but at the same time in an accessible way and with practical relevance. An important component of the format is the interactive audience discussion.