ARCHIVES Danyliw Seminar 2017
ARCHIVES Danyliw Seminar 2017
Program Committee
Program Committee
ARCHIVES Danyliw Seminar 2018
Orysia Kulick
University of Toronto (Canada)
Orysia Kulick received her PhD in History from Stanford University and is currently undertaking the Petro Jacyk fellowship at the University of Toronto. Prior to this, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. Her dissertation analysed local Ukrainian bureaucracies and the personal networks that shaped Soviet Ukrainian relations with the Kremlin.
PRESENTATION
Abstract
A Microhistory of Mittelbau-Dora
Orysia Kulick
The 1943 construction of a missile construction site in the Harz Mountains of Germany precipitated the founding of a new subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, codenamed Dora. Using the personal biography of a Ukrainian Dora survivor and former member of the OUN, this paper uses microhistory as a means of identifying gaps in the history of OUN, and more broadly across multiple historiographies related to Soviet and Ukrainian history. This unique personal account intersects the vast world of the camps and weapons-production complexes. Furthermore, this story intervenes in two central themes of Ukrainian history—the interrelationship of nationalism and ethnic cleaning as well as Ukraine’s prominent role within the Soviet Union’s vast weapons industry. Looking at microhistory within larger historical contexts, this paper weaves into the same analysis the science and politics of weapons production alongside the devastating human cost of such an enterprise.