Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.Gelinada Grinchenko is a professor in the Department of Ukrainian Studies at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and the head of the Ukrainian Oral History Association.

‘The volume is an excellent collection of how different researchers address bias in oral history research… It is an excellent source of qualitative data on "less talked-about" experiences of socialism, and an interesting exposition of case study addressing narrator bias in oral history research.’- Sara Rzayeva (Oral History Forum vol 37:2017) ‘The individual analyses of diverse oral testimonies make a compelling case for the value of individual accounts of the critical moments in 20th century history. These personal perspectives bring to light narratives under-represented in official histories.’- Marysia H. Galbraith (Slavic Review Summer 2017) "The varying level of analytical sophistication makes it easy to imagine using Reclaiming the Personal in a variety of graduate and undergraduate contexts and disciplines. For more advanced scholars, the anthology provides useful glimpses of rarely acknowledged tensions within post-Soviet societies…"- Kimberly Redding (Oral History Review) "I recommend this volume to anyone working in the region and interested in oral history and ethnography, and more generally to those interested in historical narratives and unfinished stories."- Frances Pine, Goldsmiths College, University of London (Canadian Slavonic Papers) "The publishing of such an edited volume is definitely timely. The research cases pull back the curtain from the life stories of those people who were unseen, marginalized, and underestimated during the communist era."- Iuliia Buyskykh, The Centre for Applied Anthropology (Anthropology of East Europe Review)

• Introduction. Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe (Natalia Khanenko-Friesen and Gelinada Grinchenko)PART ONE. From Subjects to Agents of History: Political Implications of Oral Historical Research1. Political Changes and Personal Orientations: Germany and the European Remembrance Cultures (Alexander von Plato)2. Empowering Files: Secret Police Records and Life Narratives of Former Political Prisoners of the Communist Era in Poland (Anna Witeska-Mlynarczyk)3. Memory Silenced and Contested: Oral History of the Finnish Occupation of Soviet Karelia (Alexey Golubev)PART TWO. Reclaiming the Personal: Beyond the Collective Vision of History4. Restoring the Meaning: “Biographic Work” in Ostarbeiters’ Life Stories (Yelena Rozhdestvenskaya)5. “We Are Silent about Ourselves”: Discussing Career and Daily Life with Female Academics in Russia and Belarus (Natalia Pushkareva)6. A Commentator or a Character in a Story? The Problem of the Narrator in Oral History (Rozalia Cherepanova)PART THREE. Past Differentiated: Revisiting the Second World War and Its Aftermath7. Experience and Narrative: Anti-Communist Armed Underground in Poland, 1945–1956 (Marta Kurkowska-Budzan)8. Forced Labour in Nazi Germany in the Interviews of Former Child Ostarbeiters (Gelinada Grinchenko)PART FOUR. Locating Other Memories of Late Socialism9. “Renew the Face of the Land, of This Land!” Catholic Culture and the Crises of Sacralization in People’s Poland (David Curp)10. In Search of History’s Other Agents: Oral History of Decollectivization in Ukraine in the 1990s (Natalia Khanenko-Friesen)11. “Where Has Everything Gone?” Remembering Perestroika in Belarusian Provinces (Irina Makhovskaya and Irina Romanova)