Jared McBride, University of California, Los Angeles
Following the Maidan Revolution, the Ukrainian government opened the former KGB archives after years of ambiguous policies. The impetus was mostly political: to show the Ukrainian nation as a victim of Russian/Soviet aggression and to valorize controversial Ukrainian nationalist movements. Former police archives, however, make for poor political props. This live interview with Jared McBride will discuss these archives, the ways scholarly work has often been at odds with the archive as a tool to remake civil society, and place of police archives in the larger contexts of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.