The XV International Scientific Conference «History of Stalinism» was held at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg from June 21 to 24. Its main theme was 1953 – Summing up and Choosing the Way.
Along with the Yeltsin Center, the conference was organized by Russian Memorial and the State Museum of Gulag History. And the organizing committee included Yan Rachinsky, Vladimir Lukin, Roman Romanov, Mikhail Fedotov and other colleagues and friends of the virtual museum «Perm 36».
The central topic of the participants’ reports and discussions was “the development of the Soviet society and state under the conditions of transition from the Stalinist system to the new political model in the USSR and in a large part of other socialist countries”.
The speakers touched upon the problems of analyzing the legacy of the Stalinist system, the preconditions of the post-Stalinist turn, the political mechanisms of dismantling the Stalinist system, the ideology of the turn, changes in the constitutional and legal system, and many other issues.
In addition, as part of the «History of Stalinism» conference, Ural Memorial, together with the Yekaterinburg History Museum, organized a trip to the memorial complex for victims of political repression, located on the 12th kilometer of the Moscow Route near Yekaterinburg.