Historical Memory in the Transition to Democracy: the Experience of the USSR and Spain

Abstract

The Spanish and Russian history of the 20th century includes the experience of civil war, mass emigration, changes of intellectual elites, tragic pages associated with repression and terror. Spain in the 1970s and the USSR in the 1980s with a difference of ten years embarked on a large-scale social and political transformation, the goal of which was the transition to democracy. The revitalization of the socio-cultural sphere and the complex interaction with the “difficult past” became an integral part of the political transit of the two countries. The use of comparative analysis allows us to identify the similarities and differences in the attitudes concerning the past, to determine the specifics of approaches to the formation of memory politics, as well as to study the features of “conflicts of memory”. For the Spaniards, the civil war of 1936—1939 and the Franco dictatorship were central to the formation of the memory of the past. As for the Soviet “difficult past”, here the researchers call the Great Patriotic War and mass repressions the “main traumas”. The Spanish and Soviet experience of interacting with the “difficult past” in the context of the transition to democracy demonstrates to us fundamentally different models due to the specifics of the historical stages preceding the transition, specific historical, political and social tasks solved during the transition period, the interest of political forces in matters of interaction with past. The main component of the Spanish model is the “pact of oblivion”, the choice in favor of building the future without solving the problems of the past. The basis of the Soviet model was the policy of glasnost. At the same time, a consensus on the future in the USSR was not formed, for its formation there were neither forces nor conditions.