Iida Simes

SUN 30.5.2010 14:20-14:40, Amazon Stage, Railway Square, Programme in English

According Dina Khapaeva, post-Soviet society is seriously ill with a partial amnesia that makes its historical memory strangely selective. She explores contemporary fiction to study how suppressed memory of Stalinism manifests itself in the consciousness of contemporary Russians. Khapaeva is former director of the Smolny Collegium, working at the moment as a researcher in the Helsinki University Collegium.

Exiled writer of the PEN programme, Oksana Tshelysheva is familiar with the dangerous consequences the testing of freedom of speech has in Russia. Anna Politkovskaya, Igor Domnikov and Yuri Shekochihin were colleagues of hers at Novaja gazeta newspaper, and were assassinated due to their investigative journalism.