Alina Zubkovych

This fascinating book analyzes the socialist past as represented in the national history museums of the majority of the former Yugoslav states. While traveling to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia, the study elucidates the strategies of constructing the national narratives that maintain and legitimize the particular vision of the common past. The cross-national comparison allows to extract the main tendencies in visual interpretation of the socialist past. The existence of the diverse opinions with the further possibility of displaying them in the public space has tremendous importance for the democratic development of the state and, consequently, the analysis of the exhibitions representing the socialist past in multiparadigmatic ways is the promising tool for the identification of both the memory politics in the region and the extent to which political actors are interfering in the given field.

Alina Zubkovych, PhD, Non-Resident Associate Fellow of the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation (IEAC) at Kyiv. Her research focuses on the dynamics of collective memory of the Eastern and Central Europe and Balkan region, analyzed through the cultural public spaces. Zubkovych was a Visiting Researcher at the Central European University, Hungary, and University of Technology, Cyprus. She was also nominated for the Carnegie Research Grant for studying the transformation in Eastern Europe and a Junior Scholar Grant provided by the European Sociological Association. She has published a number of books and articles, including Multi-faced Transformations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, with E. Danilova and M. Makarovic).