After the clash of empires: Women’s stories from Soviet-occupied Karafuto and Lithuania

Abstract

Building on the concepts of mediation and multidirectional memory, this paper offers a comparative analysis of two memoirs written by women who, at the end of WWII, found themselves in Soviet-occupied territories—Sakhalin in the east and Lithuania in the west. The analysis revolves around two questions: how do the authors understand and construct femininity in their texts and how does this shape their narratives of war and Soviet occupation? Even though both were writing at a time when women’s experiences of the (post)war were marginalized, by aligning their narratives with the ideological demands of the Cold War, the authors could speak publicly about sexual violence and other forms of gendered trauma. By focusing on memory and femininity, this article connects the distant stories of a Japanese settler and a Lithuanian partisan, showing how historical actors recall being liberated from one empire only to be swept away by the next.