Book Launch: Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance
17 September 2026
ABOUT THE BOOK
Throughout twentieth-century Ukraine, letters were lifelines. Under two of history’s most repressive regimes—the Soviet and Nazi regimes—Ukrainians wrote to sustain family ties, affirm identities, and preserve personal and national memory against state surveillance and censorship. Join the book’s authors for a discussion on what it took to write under regime pressure and discover how this book unveils the mechanisms of state surveillance.
Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance: Twentieth-Century Ukraine and Letter Writing is edited by Alex Averbuch, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, and Jelena Pogosjan (McGill–Queen's University Press, 2026)
SPEAKERS
Jelena Pogosjan (co-editor) is a professor of Russian language, literature, and culture at the University of Alberta. Her most recent publication is the co-authored two-volume Lena and Thomas Gushul: Life in Front and Behind the Camera. She is also the author of four monographs on Russian imperial culture, with research interests including religious art, symbolic geographies, and epistolary practices.
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen (co-editor) is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, and director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. She is the author of Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century.
Jars Balan (сontributor) is the сoordinator of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, currently investigating Canadian press coverage of Stalin’s first five-year plan.
Colin Neufeldt (contributor) is a lawyer and a professor of history at Concordia University of Edmonton. He is the author of articles on the history of Mennonites in the Soviet Union and on twentieth-century Poland, among other topics.
MODERATOR
Oleksandr Pankieiev is an associate professor, Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography, and director of the Kule Folklore Centre at the University of Alberta.