Peter Ruzavin

Peter Ruzavin is a Russian journalist, who has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion. Peter conducted several interviews with Russian prisoners of war in Ukrainian captivity. Fully aware of the ambiguities of the interview as a genre and complexities of having interviews under prison conditions, he believes that the conversations he had are important in giving a sense of: Who is fighting in the Russian army or rather who are the people who ended up killing others and risking themselves to get killed, wounded and maimed? To what an extent are Russian soldiers aware of the results of their actions?

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, one centralized state view of history was replaced by fifteen different interpretations of the past. Many of the newly independent states developed their own concepts of history from scratch. Over the next 30 years, those differences served as a cause or pretext to countless diplomatic disputes, political games, and wars. Fifteen Shades of History is an attempt to analyze the politics of how post-Soviet states manage history, comparing and contrasting the approaches to memory across fifteen countries.