Events & Calendars Victoria Smolkin: "Kyiv's 'Wall of Memory' In Search of the Soviet Way of Death"

This talk, by Victoria Smolkin of Wesleyan University, tells the story of Kyiv’s “Wall of Memory,” an ambitious aesthetic and ideological project to create a new Soviet way of death—and of what happened when it was built in a place layered with human remains and haunting memories. 

The story of the Wall begins in 1967, when Kyiv’s municipal authorities decide to build the city’s first crematorium, and ends in 1982, when Ukraine’s party hierarchs decide to “liquidate” the Wall. 

The talk will follow how an object of monumental art and architecture came to be seen as the solution to a problem that had vexed the Soviet project from inception—death—and reflect on how monuments and memorials, in grappling with death, inform and transform history, memory and identity.