This podcast is the second event in the REEES Fall Series “The Specter in the Present: Trauma and its Legacies in Eurasia.” Guests: Victoria Smolkina is Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research is focused on religion, atheism, secularism, utopianism, and cosmism in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union. She is the author of A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, published by Princeton University Press. She is currently at work on two projects: “The Wall of Memory: Ukraine and the Impossibility of History,” and “The World of Tomorrow: Communism, Cosmism, and the Fate of Utopia.” Georgiy Kasianov runs the Laboratory of International Memory Studies, Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland. He is an author, co-author and co-editor of more than twenty books on the history of Ukraine in the 19th–20th centuries. His most recent book is Memory Crash: Politics of History in and around Ukraine, 1980s–2010s published by Central European University Press. Music: Buck 65, “The Paradox of Memory,” Vertex.