The Living Legacy of Dictatorship
Digesting the Shadow of Soviet Trauma and its Global Repercussions
Online | English
What will we be exploring in this Lab?
This lab explores the trauma of 20th-century authoritarianism. Using the Soviet legacy of colonization, repression, and forced assimilation as a starting point, we investigate dictatorship as an historical system, how the trauma of dictatorship is transmitted across generations and societies, and how these imprints and traumas continue in the 21st century. We also look for the unresolved collective traumas that lead to authoritarianism as well as shared patterns of dictatorship across times and places, with a special emphasis on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Who is invited to participate?
We invite participants with a range of experiences of dictatorship, from direct lived experience to familial and ancestral memory or resonance with dictatorship globally. In the service of collective healing, we balance witnessing painful histories with methods for grounding experience, resourcing participants, and growing relational coherence. In this way, our work together facilitates greater awareness and resilience, supports individuals in digesting personal and collective trauma, and creates a container for healing and integration.
More about the journey of the Lab
This lab explores the symptoms of dictatorship that live in us long after regimes collapse. Through somatic practices, relational attunement, and shared reflection, participants will learn to recognize the effects of dictatorship in their lives and relationships today. The facilitators’ experiences in Ukraine and Albania help participants connect individual experiences to the collective experience of dictatorship. With curiosity and compassion, we presence and collectively digest the fear, fragmentation, and defense mechanisms that are dictatorships’ living legacies.
When will we be meeting?
Our lab will begin the week of 23 February and run through the last week of December 2026. We plan 15 meetings, meeting approximately every 3 weeks. Once participants are accepted into the lab, we will set specific dates based on what works best for the whole group. Meetings take place via zoom.
