Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reinforced the dynamics of decolonization that had already gained traction after the political transformations post-1991. Especially, Ukrainian artists have been creating works that address these traumatizing as well as transformative experiences of the war by keeping records and analyzing the ongoing events at the same time. All over the region, documentary art has become a tool to counter-act the media wars waged. The book reflects on documentary approaches proving to be an interdisciplinary and collaborative artistic tool in politically charged times. This volume discusses documentary film, theater, and literature from the 1960s to the 2020s in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states with a focus on contemporary practices. Methodologically innovative case studies address contemporary “witness art”—for example verbatim theater and spoken word poetry. The contributions expand on the political, medial, and aesthetic developments that shaped Soviet attitudes towards documentary arts. The essays outline how these concepts still influence contemporary practices, but also present new developments in documentary aesthetics in the region.

Johanna Lindbladh is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. Among her publications are “Witnessing War across Borders: Tamara Trunova’s Stagings of Natalka Vorozhbyt’s Bad Roads in Ukraine and Sweden” (2026); “Representations of the Chernobyl Catastrophe in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema” (2019); The Poetics of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narration (edited, 2008).Anja Tippner is professor of Slavic literature at Hamburg University. Her most recent publications are Narratives of Confinement, Annihilation, and Survival: Camp literature in a Comparative Perspective (edited with Anna Artwi.ska, 2019), The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetics of Postcatastrophic Narration (edited with Anna Artwi.ska, 2022).

Introduction
Johanna Lindbladh and Anja Tippner: Tracing the Documentary: The Uses and Abuses of Factuality and Fictionality in Soviet Art and Beyond
Witnessing in Art: Theoretical Perspectives
Johanna Lindbladh: Implicated Witnessing: The Ethics of Documenting Testimonies in Belarusian and Ukrainian Witness Art
Anja Tippner: Documenting as Teamwork: Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin’s Book on the Leningrad siege as a Case Study of Collaborative and Collective Writing
Irina Sandomirskaia: “No Other Certainty in History”: Sergei Loznitsa Constructing, Reconstructing, and Deconstructing the Historical Film Image
Documentary Practices in Theater and Film
Violeta Davoli.t.: The Ethnographic Moment of Lithuanian Poetic Documentary: Last Summer of a Homestead (1971) by Robertas Verba
Jeremy Hicks: Reflections on the Institutions and Sociology of Post-Soviet Independent Russian Documentary Film
Inga P.rkone-Redovi.a: Epics of Held Back: Latvian Film Director Dzintra Geka’s Essays on Genocide
Molly Flynn and Ielizaveta Oliinyk: Ukrainian Documentary Theater in the Context of War
Interview with Natalka Vorozhbyt by Johanna Lindbladh: Ukrainian Witness Theater Before and After the Full-scale Invasion: “Now We Need to Explain Ourselves to the World”
Documentary Practices in Literature
Eneken Laanes: “Looking for a Form”: Testimonial Discourse in Soviet Estonian Documentary Literature
Fiona Björling: The Truth of Literature or Mundane Reality? Ludmila Ulitskaia’s “Novel in Documents,” Daniel Stein, Interpreter
Julie Hansen: Cognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory
Il’ia Kukulin: Looking for a New Access to Reality: Russian Documentary Poetry since 2008
Contributors
Index