Alain Blum, Jewish Destinies in the Post-War USSR: A Study from the Soviet Police Archives of Lithuania and Ukraine

Pearl and Jack Mandel Lecture in Jewish Studies

Alain Blum (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Jewish Destinies in the Post-War USSR: A Study from the Soviet Police Archives of Lithuania and Ukraine

On the basis of Police and court materials from Soviet archives of Lithuania and Ukraine, we will reconstruct the trajectories of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews who survived the Holocaust but then fell victims of Stalinist violence in these territories. Interrogations, complaints and appeals before the courts and other documents provide rare, if necessarily distorted, details on the lives of survivors and a variety of their experiences, which can be analysed in conjunction with what we know of how Jewish communities were rebuilt in Lithuania and Ukraine after the war.

Alain Blum is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and senior researcher at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). He has been the director of the Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European studies (EHESS-CNRS) from 2004 to 2012. He is the head of “Mobilités, parcours et territoires” Research department at INED.

Demographer, statistician and historian, he worked for many years on the population history of Russia, Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. His current research focuses on the one hand, on the forced displacement of population, in the frame of the question on the relationship between political violence and social and demographic transformations. He is studying trajectories of people deported from central and eastern Europe to the USSR, putting a special emphasis on those who were deported from Western Ukraine and Lithuania. Moreover, within a broader reflection on the social and political history of the USSR, he works on political violence in the USSR during the Stalinist period. Finally he is also working on demographic and social transformations of contemporary Russia, put in perspective with the Russian and Soviet demographic history as a whole.

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This event will be delivered in-person in JHB100 (170 St. George Street) on Monday, March 17, 2025 at 4 PM.