INTRODUCTION

The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and the end of socialist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe initiated a widespread, but convoluted, process of working through both the legacies of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and those of Stalinism and state terror in the region. While post-Soviet Russia did not break decisively with the Soviet past, in Central and Eastern Europe, the post-socialist period has been characterized on the political level by narratives of victimhood about World War II and the socialist past and by the comparative, and, at times, competitive discourses about Nazism and "communism" that have overshadowed discussion of local collaboration with these regimes and of participation in the perpetration of genocide and the crimes of mass violence. EU enlargement mandated a reckoning with legacies of Holocaust violence, but it also gave Central and Eastern European countries a pan-European platform where they could make their voices heard. While the perpetrators and collaborators have been dealt with in different ways in the context of transitional justice, and there is a growing number of (comparative) historical studies on perpetration and collaboration in Central and Eastern Europe, this forum examines how the questions of perpetration, collaboration and complicity with the Nazis and the Soviets have been raised in various memorial and historical museums and in aesthetic media of memory, such as film. We especially consider how these patterns of reckoning and memorialization (or lack thereof) have shaped and impacted the current war in Ukraine.