Russian Memory Research Articles

Russia's Historical Memory: Strict-Security or Hybrid?

Russia's Historical Memory:Strict-Security or Hybrid? Sergey Toymentsev (bio) Николай Копосов . Память строгого режима: История и политика в России. Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2011. 320 с. ISBN: 978-5-86793-851-2. Nikolay Koposov's A Strict-Security Memory: History and Poli tics in Russia is an interdisciplinary study of post-Soviet collective memory explored from a variety of methodological perspectives: opinion polls, historiography, legal studies, political science, and memory studies per se. Viewed as one of the long-term effects of the cultural politics of Soviet totalitarianism, the historical consciousness of contemporary Russians is presented in its evolutionary transformation as well as compared to other cases of posttotalitarian collective memory, such as those of post-Nazi Germany and post-Soviet Eastern Europe. As the book's title pointedly suggests, Russian collective memory has always been an indispensable part of the state propaganda, as if it were vigilantly guarded in a strict-security prison. Besides being an invaluable contribution to the newly emergent field of memory studies, Koposov also makes a strong political argument for the liberation of Russian cultural memory out of the shackles of political manipulation and thus publicly positions himself as a purveyor of democratic values. And yet, despite Koposov's argument that the historical memory in contemporary Russia develops under the government's "strict security" control, in this review I hope to show that the contradictory data he presents point to a rather different logic of the collective memory dynamic, which is less monolithic and more hybrid. The book consists of six chapters, each dealing with a certain stage of the evolution of national collective memory and historiography. Chapter 1 generally introduces historical memory research as an international phenomenon that recently gained academic significance as the ex-ploration of collective memory in posttotalitarian societies. Chapter 2 traces the development of Soviet memory politics and historical consciousness from the 1920s to the 1980s. Chapter 3 delves into the dynamic of collective memory during perestroika. Chapter 4 examines yet another turn in Russian memory politics under Putin's regime. Chapter 5 explores the professional aspects of historical science and education in Russian academia as well as their fundamental role in establishing a democratic civil society. Chapter 6 provides a detailed analysis of the "Presidential Commission to Counteract Attempts to Falsify History to [End Page 336] the Detriment of Russia's Interests" created in 2009. Given the circular pattern of the book's composition (it opens and ends with the discussion of the current debates over how the Soviet past should be remembered), Koposov's study effectively demonstrates the urgent political relevance of historical memory research to the so-called memory wars as well as the state's legal attempts to authorize a more agreeable version of history. Even though the author states that the primary focus of his investigation is the historical consciousness of contemporary Russians from the 1980s to the present (P. 12), one-third of the book is dedicated to a preliminary overview of cultural memory practices worldwide as well as the specific nature of national memory politics in Soviet times. According to Koposov, the rise of both memory studies and general interest in the past coincides with the collapse of the "grand narratives" of the future (as well as the cognitive shift from "common" names of universalism to "proper" names of ethnic particularism), which resulted in the proliferation of fragmented subaltern memories where history is largely criminalized and victimized. In this regard, the Holocaust memory as the memory of the century and "civil religion" (P. 56) has become the dominant paradigm of cultural memory in liberal democracies. In his brief excursions into posttotalitarian memory debates in Germany, France, Belgium, and postcommunist Eastern Europe, Koposov points out that cultural memory could still be the object of political manipulation, as was the case with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's legal endeavors to criminalize the denial of the Holodomor of 1932-33 as the Soviet genocide against the Ukrainian nation. Unlike cultural memory in liberal democracies characterized as the memory of victims rather than of perpetrators, Soviet political memory served primarily for the legitimation of the totalitarian regime via systematic institutional control and mythologization of one particular vision of history, which was nevertheless repeatedly modified according to shifting ideological emphases introduced...

Karen Petrone. The Great War in Russian Memory.

Karen Petrone. The Great War in Russian Memory.

Bortko's The Master and Margarita: Adaptation in the Service of Vladimir Putin

As the most widely available medium in post-Soviet Russia, television has become central to both Russian collective memory and the formation of its national identity. This article examines Vladimir Bortko's 2005 television adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Particular attention is given to the series's treatment of political and economic critiques of the Soviet system in order to understand how these subjects are marshaled to downplay the political repression and economic centralization in Russia following the rise to power of Vladimir Putin.

The Great War in Russian memory

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Great War in Russian Memory 2. Spirituality, the Supernatural, and the Memory of World War I 3. The Paradoxes of Gender in Soviet War Memory 4. Violence, Morality, and the Conscience of the Warrior 5. World War I and the Definition of Russianness 6. Arrested History 7. Disappearance and Reappearance 8. Legacies of the Great War Notes Bibliography Index

The Great War in Russian Memory. By Karen Petrone. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xv, 385 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $39.95, hard bound.

The Great War in Russian Memory. By Karen Petrone. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xv, 385 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $39.95, hard bound. - Volume 71 Issue 4

False Identity and Multiple Identities in Russian History: The Mongol Empire and Ivan the Terrible

Anatolii Fomenko, the “New Chronology,”and Russian History*The ludicrous reconstruction of Russian history by the Moscow mathematicians Anatolii Fomenko and Gleb Nosovskii, called the “New Chronology,” has elicited a heated response in Russia from professional historians and other scholars. Fomenko and Nosovskii’s methodology purports to be good natural science (mathematics and astronomy), but it is actually bad humanities (history and linguistics) research. Because its conclusions are worthless, the support engendered by the New Chronology among the Russian public requires explanation and sheds light on the current status of historiography and historical memory in Russia. In addition, more study is needed of the New Chronology’s relationship to Marxism, nationalism, and Eurasianism, its attitude toward religion and possible anti-Semitism.Who Was Not Ivan the Terrible,Who Ivan the Terrible Was NotThe New Chronology’s contention that “Ivan IV” is really a composite of four rulers is science fi ction, but legitimate scholars have also proposed that Ivan had multiple identities to resolve contradictions and shed more light upon Ivan’s reign. However, newer attempts to attribute multiple names to Ivan and to ascribe literary alter egos to him are as unconvincing as earlier theories that Ivan’s reign was divided into “good” and “bad” phases or the more recent contention that Ivan’s writings are seventeenth-century apocrypha. There was one and only one Ivan the Terrible, and one is more than enough.

Confronting the Stalinist Past: The Politics of Memory in Russia

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This article draws on interviews and research conducted in Russia from 2008–2010. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of the U.S. Army or the U.S. government. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Institute for National Security Studies. Notes 1. Alexey Miller, Georgiy Kasianov, Robert Traba et al., “The Politics of History,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Pro et Contra 13, no. 3–4 (May-August 2009), http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/?fa=24797&lang=en#politics. 2. Simon Shuster, “Rehabilitating Joseph Stalin,” Time, December 22, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949500,00.html. 3. According to a recent poll, 35 percent of respondents born before Stalin's death in 1952 said that family members had been victims of Stalinist repressions. Alexei Levinson, “Uses and Abuses of Stalin's Image,” Open Democracy Russia, http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/alexei-levinson/uses-and-abuses-of-stalin%E2%80%99s-image. 4. For this general point, see Chris Lorenz, “Towards a Theoretical Framework for Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations,” in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 34. 5. Dmitri Trenin, “Russia's Spheres of Interest, not Influence,” The Washington Quarterly 32, no. 4 (October 2009): pp. 3–22, http://twq.com/09october/docs/09oct_Trenin.pdf. 6. A.V. Filippov, Noveishaya istoriya Rossii. Kniga dlya uchitelya (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2007). 7. A.A. Danilov, A.I. Utkin, A.V. Filippov, eds., Istoriya Rossii. 1945–2008 (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2008). 8. A.A. Danilov and A.V. Filippov, eds., Istoriya Rossii. 1900–1945 (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2009); and A.A. Danilov and A.V. Filippov, eds., Istoriia Rossii. 1900–1945. Kniga dlya uchitelya (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2008). 9. Filippov, Noveishaya istoriya Rossii, pp. 91–92. 10. Sophia Kishkovsky, “Russian Archbishop Hilarion Calls Stalin ‘a Monster’,” Presbyterian Outlook, August 4, 2009, http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2009/08/07/russian-archbishop-hilarion-calls-stalin-a-monster/. 11. Dmitry Medvedev, “Speech at meeting with Russian ambassadors and permanent representatives in international organisations,” July 12, 2010, http://www.eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/610. 12. “Blame for massacre of Poles cannot be put on Russians – Putin,” RT.com, April 7, 2010, http://rt.com/Politics/2010-04-07/katyn-poloes-massacre.html. 13. “Dmitry Medvedev's Article, Go Russia!” September 10, 2009, http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/298. 14. ITAR-TASS, December 3, 2009. 15. Dmitry Medvedev, “Memory of National Tragedies is as Sacred as the Memory of Victories,” October 30, 2009, http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2009/10/30/1218_type207221_222423.shtml. 16. For the order, dated September 9, 2009, of the Ministry of Education and Science mandating the compulsory assignment of Gulag Archipelago, see http://mon.gov.ru/press/reliz/5691/. 17. Dmitry Medvedev, “Interview with Der Spiegel,” November 7, 2009, http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2009/11/07/1230_type82916_222598.shtml. 18. Dmitry Solovyov, “Gorbachev Warns Russians Against Rise of Stalinism,” Reuters, September 26, 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL268062220070926. 19. Interview with a member of the group, March 14, 2010. 20. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Soviet Nostalgia: An Impediment to Democratization,” The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Winter 2005–06): pp. 83–96, http://twq.com/06winter/docs/06winter_mendelson.pdf. 21. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation,” The Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring 2008): pp. 131–150, at pp. 131–132, http://twq.com/08spring/docs/08spring_mendelson.pdf. 22. VCIOM, “Russians About Perestroika: Are They Becoming Less Negative About It?” March 9, 2010, http://wciom.com/news/press-releases/press-release/single/13379.html. 23. VCIOM, “Stalin: Was He a Tyrant or a Hero?” March 5, 2008, http://wciom.com/archives/thematic-archive/info-material/single/9770.html?no_cache=1&cHash=5028e83c70. 24. VCIOM, “Do We Need Another Stalin?” December 18, 2009, http://wciom.com/news/press-releases/press-release/single/12922.html. 25. ITAR-TASS, December 21, 2009. 26. Levinson, “Uses and Abuses of Stalin's Image.” 27. Anna Malpas, “Stalin casts long shadow ahead of Russian parade,” AFP, May 8, 2010, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jsYHT4ILSVWS2zlCTQaPa-v6wvqQ. 28. Levinson, “Uses and Abuses of Stalin's Image.” 29. Medvedev, “Memory of National Tragedies is as Sacred as the Memory of Victories.” 30. VCIOM, “Do We Need Another Stalin?” 31. VCIOM, “Stalin: Was He a Tyrant or a Hero?” 32. Levada Center, September 4, 2009, http://www.levada.ru/press/2009090404.html. 33. Levada Center, December 21, 2009, http://www.levada.ru./press/2009122101.html. 34. “A Conversation with Vladimir Putin,” December 16, 2010, http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/russia-putin-q-a-transcript-dec-496.cfm. 35. VCIOM, “World War II,” April 27, 2010, http://wciom.com/news/press-releases/press-release/single/13539.html. 36. “Patriotism is remedy to stop race-hate violence says Putin,” RIA Novosti, December 27, 2010, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101227/161953303.html. 37. Sergei Karaganov, “Russkaya Katyn,” Rossiiskaya gazeta, July 22, 2010, http://www.rg.ru/2010/07/22/istoriya.html. 38. For further discussion, see Thomas Sherlock, Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 39. For perceptive analysis of this issue, see Miller, Kasianov, Traba et al., “The Politics of History.” Additional informationNotes on contributorsThomas SherlockThomas Sherlock is Professor of Political Science at the United States Military Academy at West Point and the author of Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Memory of the Revolution as a trauma inflicted on contemporary social conscience in Russia

AbstractMany painful ideological problems existing in contemporary Russia are determined by the inadequacy of perception of the country's revolutionary past. This misperception stems from both the consequences of the decades-long mythologization of the October Revolution and its leaders and from the more recent attempts to get rid of the dependence on Bolshevik propaganda. Contemporary historic memory in Russia is beset with one major contradiction: the desire to part with the myth, and the inability to do so. Although, traditionally, images of the past are usually adapted in order to suit the needs of modernity, this task has become much easier in contemporary society with its powerful mass media fitted with visual networks. Historic memory, previously shaped by legends, folklore, rites and rituals, now comes under relentless fire from the dilettantes pretending to have discovered some "true" vision of the past, and illustrating this vision by incongruous video footage. As a result, images of the past inevitably lose their former edifying role and become a means of inculcation by propagating political and moral stereotypes advantageous to the authorities. The wave of discussions on the Russian Revolution, which rose in connection with its current anniversary, was yet another indication that today's ideologists, with their inept denunciations, are only aggravating the trauma inflicted on social conscience.

From Hope to Escape: Post‐Soviet Russian Memory and Identity

Drawing on letters written by citizens of the USSR to US Congressman James Wright following his 1987 congressional visit and Soviet television appearance as well as follow‐up interviews conducted by this author with many of the same individuals in 2002–2004, this paper will recount the memories of several Muscovites and argue that although the western collective memory of the Cold War is one of victory, the individual accounts of Russians reveals a created memory of the Soviet past which, when confronted with the dire socioeconomic conditions that exist in post‐1991 Russia, leads to a crisis of identity.

Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, 396 pages.

Catherine Merridale's first well reviewed and much appraised book “Night of Stone, Death and Memory in Russia” (Granta, 2000) examined the culture of suffering in Russia during the Soviet period. One key chapter in this previous book detailed the ordeals undergone by the Russian Armed Forces and the people at large, during the Great Patriotic War. Five years later, the British historian brings her expertise to this topic in Ivan's War. At first glance, the topic of suffering and endurance o...

Does Empire have Memory?

Does Empire have Memory?

Oh, That! Myth, Memory, and World War I in the Russian Emigration and the Soviet Union

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.

Memory of Russia

The Memory of Russiaprogram of the Russian State Library is a digital preservation and access project. It is affiliated with a number of regional projects within Russia and with UNESCO's Memory of the Worldand the Russian-American project Meeting of Frontiers.Being digitized are fragile books, maps, manuscripts, posters, popular illustrations (lubki), etc. They are being made accessible via the Internet and on CD-ROM.

Le stalinisme entre histoire et mémoire : le malaise de la mémoire russe

Maria Ferretti, Stalinism between history and memory : the malaise of Russian memory. The article studies the memory of Stalinism in Russia, from the age of perestroika to our own time. It distinguishes between dif ferent stages of Russia's conflict with her past, the obstacles that have hampered it, the temptation to repress it and the refusal to assume traumatic past. The article shows how, during the Yeltsin years, there was an attempt purely and simply to efface the Soviet past - as if it were a bad parenthesis - and to construct an idealized image of Tsarist Russia. But the disillusionment provoked by the brutal introduction of capitalism and the failed promises of neo-liberalism have caused a massively impoverished population to take refuge in nationalism

How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia

A gripping, unsettling, and highly original book that turns the making of a Soviet socialist-realist classic--Azhaev's Far from Moscow--into a detective story, and sheds as strange and ambiguous a light on the Stalin era, from gulag to Writers' Union, as one could hope for. Lahusen is a disarmingly low-key scholarly virtuoso who performs simultaneously as an archive-based historian, an interpreter of texts (including Azhaev's own self-organized archive), and a gently relentless biographer whose stalking of his prey is reminiscent of Nabokov. The final chilling paragraph typically economical and understated, is a reminder that the author/investigator, too, is a collaborator in the multiple reworkings of Azhaev's text, and of his life, that How Life Writes the Book has so finely analyzed.--Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago This is a wonderfully original work: a history of a book, a literary analysis of an age, a montage of a life. Lahusen writes with a postmodern sensibility but without the postmodernist jargon.--Yuri Slezkine, University of California, Berkeley Thomas Lahusen has written an imaginative and archivally grounded book that presents the most fascinating picture to date of the literary process that produced canonical works of Socialist Realism and the people who wrote them. How Life Writes the Book is alternatingly chilling and funny as it demonstrates the interpenetration of literary institutions, massive construction projects and the Soviet system of prison camps and slave labor. With this study, as with his earlier Intimacy and Terror, Lahusen continues his own project of revolutionizing our understanding of the Soviet subject and Soviet subjectivity.--Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley Lahusen's case study marks a new genre of inquiry into the very nature of socialist realism, a genre which became possible after archives and memory in Russia regained their voice. It shows how life is transformed into Soviet myth.--Hans Gnther, editor of The Culture of the Stalin Period

The Emergence of the Duel in Russia: Corporal Punishment and the Honor Code

The first third of the nineteenth century stands out in Russian cultural memory as a period that saw the largest number of duels in the history of duelling in Russia. At that time, a passion for duelling permeated all segments of polite society and the duel became a working mechanism for resolving all kinds of conflicts, both serious and trivial-from quarrels over official business, to confrontations caused by social inequality within the nobility, to clashes brought about by sexual rivalry, cheating at cards, an awkward word, a joke, a scowl, a frown, and so on. The bretteur, a special type of reckless duellist, ready to fight at the slightest provocation, emerged and proliferated not only among the favored military youth but also among the intellectuals. The best representatives of the early nineteenth-century Russian nobility found it necessary to engage in duelling, maiming and killing their contemporaries and risking being maimed or killed themselves. The number of duels diminished toward the middle of the nineteenth century, but duelling did not disappear even when its original proponents, the nobility, had forfeited the cultural foreground. The duel's high status, established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, survived almost intact until 1917 and, in a certain sense, until the present.1 Nineteenth-century Russian literature, which reflected the duel's prominence in contemporary life and its importance as an ideological issue, frequently portrayed and discussed duels. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, literature, espe-

Rumania and the Belligerents 1914-1916

As the intention of Austria-Hungary to utilize the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for a reckoning with Serbia became increasingly evident during July I9I4, the Rumanian government manifested corresponding concern. It was widely believed in Bucarest, and not without reason, that an Austro-Serbian conflict would lead to the aggrandizement of Bulgaria, thereby threatening Rumania's aspirations in the Balkans and her security as well. Even more disquieting was the possibility that the Austrian action would touch off a general European war in which Rumania might become merely a battleground for the great powers. But for King Carol I, a prince of the South German branch of the Hohenzollern family, an Austro-Russian conflict was especially unwelcome. His personal inclinations and a secret alliance of more than thirty years standing linked him to the Central Powers. Until recent years at least, Rumania's isolation and traditional Russophobia gave reasonable justification to Carol's association with the Triple Alliance. But in the decade before I914 the memory of Russia's past iniquities and even the indignation over the treatment accorded the Rumanian minority in Bessarabia had been eclipsed in Bucarest by resentment over Austria's support of Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars, and especially by anger over the plight of the larger Rumanian minority 'languishing under the Magyar yoke' in Transylvania. The latter, together with the Austrian province of Bukovina, now became the prime object of Rumanian irredentism. The role of Vienna in championing Bulgaria's cause at the Peace of Bucarest (1913) unleashed an outburst of Austrophobia which was still re-echoing in the Rumanian press the following summer and which prompted the first steps towards a rapprochement with Russia. Carol became acutely conscious of this contradiction between his personal inclinations and the interests of his adopted land when