For Russian monarchists before 1917, the existence of the monarchy headed by the Romanovs was a fundamental certainty. For conservative monarchists, this certainty was framed by the official ideology of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’. The 1917 revolution fundamentally shook this certainty – the dynasty and the monarchy as an institution were discredited at that time, and the very idea of monarchism was pushed far into the background. Monarchists faced enormous uncertainty, which they took with them into exile after the defeat in the civil war. Between 1920 and 1945, Russian monarchists in exile had one great certainty: they clung to the idea that Bolshevism in Russia would be destroyed and the monarchy restored. However, there was great uncertainty within the émigré community about how this would be achieved (armed intervention from outside, a domestic uprising, or the internal evolution of the Soviet system?) and what the new monarchy should look like. This uncertainty took many forms and concerned the person of the monarch, the political system, and the resolution of the national question, among other issues. The paper demonstrates how these uncertainties were communicated within the émigré community and how they contributed to the monarchists' inability to agree on a unified scenario. The paper focuses on the debates of monarchists at émigré congresses (Bad Reichenhall, 1921; Paris, 1922, and 1926), the dispute over the succession to the tsarist throne, and alternatives to traditional monarchism in the form of the Young Russian movement. The Young Russians, representing the youngest generation of émigrés, were convinced that it was possible to combine the monarchist idea with elements of the Soviet regime. The Young Russians were a product of uncertainty as to whether Russia could return to its old form of monarchy. At the same time, the veterans of right-wing monarchism, like Nikolai Markov, remained fully loyal to pre-revolutionary conservative monarchism and their faith in the tsar. Although Markov recognised the contribution of new ideologies such as fascism, he was certain that monarchism was the only correct alternative for Russia. He was equally sure that Bolshevism in Russia would soon collapse; the certainty proved to be wholly false and revealed the “mental bubble” in which the émigrés lived. The final variation on uncertainty is the Russian émigré community's debate about whom to ally with in the anticipated campaign against the hated Bolshevism, which resulted in partial collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. The story of Russian monarchists in exile demonstrates that emigration itself represents a significant uncertainty.

This paper examines how older adults acted collectively under conditions of uncertainty in twentieth-century East-Central Europe. It introduces “ageivism”—social activism and self-organization in old age—as a lens for analyzing how older people responded to political, social, and biographical uncertainties produced by war, regime change, and shifting welfare arrangements. By foregrounding age as a category of analysis, the paper contributes to the conference theme “Historical perspectives on (un)certainties.” Periods of transformation (such as 1918, 1938, 1945, 1968, and 1989/90) generated profound uncertainty about care, social belonging, and future security, particularly for older people whose life courses were repeatedly disrupted. Yet historiography has largely treated them as passive objects of welfare rather than as actors who engaged publicly with uncertainty. Drawing on archival sources, petitions, organizational records, and oral history materials from (East) Germany and Czechoslovakia/Czechia, this paper reconstructs how older adults organized collectively, voiced claims, and entered public debate in response to these uncertainties. The paper focuses on care as a key arena in which uncertainty became politically and socially articulated. Older people mobilized within specialized pensioners’ organizations, welfare associations, and local aid communities to address insecure access to resources, ambiguous responsibilities between state and family, and moral uncertainties about solidarity and obligation. These practices often relied on unpaid and voluntary labor and unfolded in spaces that were closely monitored, tolerated, or contested under state socialism and during post-socialist transformation. Conceptually, the paper argues that ageivism emerged precisely from uncertainty—not despite it. Studying older adults’ self-organization reveals public debate as a fragile process shaped by age, care practices, and lived experience of uncertainty, rather than as a stable institutional sphere. This perspective revises dominant narratives of twentieth-century transformation and highlights older people as key actors in negotiating uncertainty and sustaining democratic practices in East-Central Europe.

This paper examines how Ukrainian postwar émigré communities engaged with the memory of the Holocaust from the late 1940s through the end of the Cold War. Focusing on a stateless diaspora in exile, it analyzes how narratives of violence, collaboration, rescue, and Jewish-Ukrainian relations were constructed, silenced, contested, and revised outside the framework of a nation-state. Drawing on extensive archival research, the study uses a wide range of sources, including émigré newspapers and journals, organizational and institutional records, correspondence, and oral histories from archives in Germany, the UK, the USA, Canada, as well as materials related to diaspora communities in France, Australia and Argentina. The analysis adopts a transnational and comparative approach to trace how Ukrainians responded to the legacy of the Holocaust within their host societies and evolving international memory cultures. Particular attention is paid to the role of political ideologies, generational divides, and varying degrees of proximity to Jewish communities in shaping these responses. While early postwar émigré discourse often avoided or marginalized direct engagement with the Holocaust, significant shifts occurred over time, influenced by broader public debates, new historiographical paradigms, war crimes trials. The paper explores how nationalist organizations frequently sought to minimize, reinterpret, or defensively counter evidence of Ukrainian involvement in anti-Jewish violence, whereas democratic and left-leaning intellectual circles were more open to dialogue with Jewish scholars and to addressing questions of historical responsibility. These debates intensified at key historical moments, including the trials of Oberländer, Eichmann, and Demjanjuk, the Arab-Israeli wars, and discussions of Soviet antisemitism, as well as through the interventions of the CIA and the KGB. Conceptually, the study contributes to scholarship on Holocaust memory beyond the nation-state by examining the diaspora as a distinct site of “memory production.” It highlights how exile institutions, religious actors, print culture, and intellectual networks mediated Holocaust knowledge and shaped competing interpretations of wartime violence. At the same time, it addresses the tension between narratives of Ukrainian victimhood, instances of silence or complicity, and documented acts of rescue, solidarity, and postwar cooperation with Jewish communities, often framed against a shared adversary – the Soviet regime. Ultimately, the paper argues that Holocaust memory in the Ukrainian diaspora was neither monolithic nor static. Instead, it constituted a complex and contested field that both reflected and influenced broader memory conflicts. By tracing how these Cold War-era diaspora discourses were transmitted across borders and generations, the study demonstrates their lasting impact on debates over the Holocaust and historical responsibility in Ukraine after 1991.

The revolutionary period of 1917–1918 in Russia was defined by the radical uncertainty of political authority and social order. This paper examines how this profound instability was negotiated in the critical arena of war disabled welfare, focusing on the embattled relationship between the nascent state and the mass of First World War “mutilated warriors”. The collapse of the imperial regime dissolved existing certainties of care, replacing them with a contested and chaotic landscape of overlapping institutions – Provisional Government committees, emerging Soviet welfare departments, public organizations, and the veterans’ own Union of Mutilated Warriors. This institutional multiplicity, marked by unclear hierarchies and competing jurisdictions, created a fluid system of aid in which disabled soldiers were forced to navigate. Drawing on archival materials from state institutions, the Union, and pioneering Medical Rehabilitation Institutes in Petrograd (including petitions, medical reports, and institutional protocols) this study investigates the complex dialogue between an unstable, “invalid” state and a heterogeneous veteran community. It vividly reconstructs the material uncertainties that defined lived experience: overcrowded dormitories, competition for sanatorium access, and chronic underfunding. Yet, paradoxically, the same period witnessed ambitious attempts to manufacture certainty through new rehabilitative institutions, concentrated mostly in Petrograd under the supervision of leading medical experts. The paper analyzes how the war disabled strategized within this volatile ecology, both collectively through the Union and individually through petitions, to secure prosthetics, further treatment, and pensions. Simultaneously, it highlights the pivotal yet ambiguous role of medical experts operating within (semi-)state structures, who acted as mediators between top-down policy goals and bottom-up “mutilated warriors” demands. By examining the establishment and operation of Petrograd’s Rehabilitation Institutes, the research reveals how hierarchies were contested, discourses of entitlement were articulated, and fragile practices of state-citizen interaction were forged. Ultimately, the short-lived experiment of the Union, dissolved during the Bolshevik centralization of late 1918, epitomizes a fleeting moment when the certainties of Soviet social policy remained open to negotiation. The paper thus illuminates how periods of extreme political rupture and institutional uncertainty turn welfare into a battlefield, where the management of broken bodies becomes a primary site for constructing, and resisting, a new state order.