Studying the Great Patriotic War in the Shadow of the Current Crisis

Abstract

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has thrown the field of post-Soviet studies into upheaval, as scholars seek to strike a balance between expressing opposition to an aggressive war and maintaining scholarly neutrality and recognition of complexity. Against this backdrop, the study of Russia’s memory of the Great Patriotic War—which has been invoked to justify the invasion of Ukraine—is particularly challenging. In this light, the author reflects on research of one of the most controversial aspects of the Great Patriotic War, the history and memory of the collaborationist “Vlasov Movement,” in the current environment. This exercise reveals some important aspects of the current memory landscape in Russia and the conceptual problems faced by those who study it. In particular, scholars of the war as well as war memory face the difficulty of navigating an information space and scholarship in which history and memory are closely intertwined.