All Ages

Lyudmila Huseynova is a resident of the temporarily occupied Novoazovsk region of Donetsk region where she worked as a safety engineer at a local poultry farm. At the time of her arrest, she had spent the past five years caring for orphans and semi-orphans from the temporarily occupied village of Primorske. She was detained on October 9, 2019 for volunteering, espousing a pro-Ukrainian position (a blue-yellow flag hung over her house in Novoazovsk for a long time), and for her social media activity. Lyudmila was initially detained in the Izolyatsia prison, where she was severely tortured. She was later transferred to a pre-trial detention center in Donetsk and charged with “espionage.” During the three years of Ludmila Huseinova’s imprisonment, the local “courts” never delivered the so-called sentence.
Anna Olsen is a senior combat medic of the chemical and biological protection company of the 36th separate brigade of marines. She, along with her siblings and stepsisters, was at the Ilyich factory in Mariupol. She was captured and spent six months in captivityat Olenivka, undergoing physical and psychological torture, and held with over 3 dozen others in a cell designed for just six individuals.
Tetiana Katrychenko is a journalist, coordinator of Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), and author of the 2019 report Prisoners of War and Civilian Hostages of Donbass. Since the beginning of the armed conflict, her journalistic focus has been on covering the topic of illegally detained persons in eastern Ukraine. Katrychenko later shifted from journalism work to conducting advocacy campaigns in support of detainees’ families and subsequently joined the MIHR’s team. Since February 2020, Katrychenko has been a member of the Commission launched by the Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories in Ukraine, which deals with issues related to the recognition of persons deprived of liberty as a result of armed aggression against Ukraine. Katrychenko manages the Female Face of Donbass Hostages project: she compiles lists of hostages held by representatives of illegal armed groups in Donbas, maintains contact with relatives of hostages, and interviews ex-hostages after their release. She also provides advice to relatives of newly detained persons, as well as to the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies dealing with the issue.

In the past few years there has been a revived interest in how international Communism affected politics and society in the Balkan region during the Cold War. Most importantly, new research has convincingly shown that Soviet control was not uniform in the region and that the cracks that appeared on the surface of the Soviet bloc merit investigation as they expose significant differences at the societal, political, and cultural level. Can we speak of Balkan Communism as a distinct analytical category or is it more pertinent to deal with communism in the region based solely upon its national framework and characteristics? This panel of scholars aims to present to the public new findings on this topic while exploring the residue of that era in collective memory and public history.
10.00 – 11.30: First panel
Elidor Mëhilli, City University of New York
Balkan Communism as a Lesson in Geopolitics
Nikos Marantzidis, University of Macedonia
Stillborn Balkanism: the Comintern, the Balkan Communist Federation and Greek Communism during the interwar

Theodora Dragostinova, Ohio State University
“As Much Balkan as Communist”: Perspectives on Balkan Communism during the Late Cold War

13.30 – 15.00: Second panel
Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland
Balkan Communism as National Stalinism: Reflections on the Romanian Experiment

Emily Greble, Vanderbilt University
Contested Communisms: Myths, Practices, and Experiences of Communism in Yugoslavia

Stefan Gužvica, University of Belgrade
Sickle Without Hammer: a Balkan Perspective on Communism from the Comintern to the Cominform

15.30 – 17.00: Plenary session and concluding remarks (discussant: John Iatrides, Southern Connecticut University)

The presentation will provide a brief overview of the history of former Yugoslavia and focus on its violent break-up, especially on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It will discuss the refugee experience and importance of family relationships, ethnic and religious identities, as well as the issues around returning home and rebuilding their community in Banja Luka.

Jasmina Besirevic Regan is the Associate Dean for Graduate Education at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a faculty member in the Departments of Sociology and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Her academic training is in the sociology of genocide and her teaching and research interests include ethnic conflict, identity, nationalism, human rights, and refugee resettlement. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale having also earned the Master’s degree there. Her dissertation on ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka focuses on the emergence of a Bosnian Muslim refugee community.

Dr. Besirevic Regan has presented papers on the sociology of genocide at a number of professional meetings, and has been invited to speak at international conferences both at Yale and abroad. Before joining the Graduate School academic affairs team, she served as the Dean of Trumbull College, one of fourteen residential colleges at Yale, for twelve years.

Theodora Patrona teaches literary courses at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as special teaching fellow. She has published extensively on Greek American and Italian American literature and film, and regularly reviews for journals and sites abroad. Dr Patrona is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth Century Greek American and Italian American Literature(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), and coeditor of Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Fordham University Press, 2022). Dr Patrona is currently working on two projects, co-editing a volume on the unchartered cultural contribution of Greek American women and another one on the concept of the father in Italian American culture.

Professor Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Briggs’ most recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to the Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends.