Russia's politics of memory

isras.ru

Once upon a time a Russian and a Pole laid the foundations for modern sociology. Their names were Pitirim Sorokin and Florian Znaniecki. After years of 'dependent development' of Polish and Russian social sciences it is high time we came back to the forgotten classics. A joint study of memory cultures and politics of history is a very good point to start with.

Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society, 2022

This chapter examines how different political actors in Russia deploy historical memory as a political concept to articulate their concerns about national politics and build public support for their political positions and initiatives. With the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, and again with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the politics of memory in Russia acquired even greater importance. The visibility of new narratives and commemorative initiatives during the Yeltsin era was so prominent that one scholar even hailed “the loss of the war cult” that allegedly opened possibilities for an “authentic” memory to emerge. The concept of historical memory has proved itself a useful tool for the epistemic control of Russian society, as it enables Russian politicians to circumvent the scholarly community in the production of truth-statements about Russian history. The imperial Russian and Soviet historical legacy provokes powerful affective responses among many Russian political actors and audiences, such as pride for past achievement, nostalgia for imperial power, and others.

Ab Imperio, 2013

Problems of Post-Communism, 2021

In this introduction to our special issue on the politics of memory in the post-Soviet space, we present a four-part analytical framework through which to evaluate recent developments in the region. Specifically, we focus on: 1) the circulation of memories across space and time; 2) the factors that condition the recall of the past; 3) the actors involved in these processes; and 4) the logics that guide how the past is represented and interpreted. This framework provides a means through which to conceptually order and discuss the individual contributions to this issue, as well as to evaluate the wider relevance of Russia's 2020 Victory Day commemoration, which marked the 75th anniversary of World War II's end. A central claim advanced in this article is that researchers need to distinguish not just between the nationalized remembering we increasingly see being manifest across the former communist states of East-Central Europe and the more universalistic appeals of the cosmopolitan memory regime that predominates in Western Europe, but also contemporary Russia's attempts to promulgate an "empire memory" that represents a competing set of generalizable norms for how the past should be depicted. The latter is significant because it directly challenges the specificity and contextual embeddedness of national recall as well as key mnemonic precepts of the post-national-meaning largely spatially and temporally unbounded-attention that has been accorded to victimhood and suffering in recent decades.

2011

Once upon a time a Russian and a Pole laid the foundations for modern sociology. Their names were Pitirim Sorokin and Florian Znaniecki. After years of 'dependent development' of Polish and Russian social sciences it is high time we came back to the forgotten classics. A joint study of memory cultures and politics of history is a very good point to start with. It seems there are some lessons we can draw from the noble sociological ancestors. First is quite straightforward: we should communicate with one other, as they did. There is no intellectual creativity without constant cooperation. In a long exchange of letters, both scholars expressed great interest in one another's 'theory, their growing friendship, and a deep and grave concern with the general development of sociology' (Vaitkus, 1994. P. 230). Thus-and this is the second point-rather than imitating Western theoretical perspective we should try, drawing on it, to develop our own independent standpoint, which will combine both theory and research. Third, following in Sorokin's and Znaniecki's footsteps, we should look at society in its entirety. On this view, memory is not some self-contained phenomenon, but a part of broader social processes. Accordingly, in our paper we present a general research-program to analyze memory cultures. In this, we begin by sketching possible approaches to study phenomena in question; we go on, then, to construct a perspective, which will allow us to define and explain memory culture and politics of history in Poland and Russia. Approaches to memory In analyzing social practices connected with a national past, social scientists can employ a wide range of approaches. In the first place, they can make use of sociology of memory and memory studies in general, the field that exploded in the early eighties (

2010

Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive, 2023

Russia’s aggressive policies have increasingly drawn greater focus on the part of the United States and other Western states. Putin’s aggressive behavior does not occur in a vacuum but has a multitude of catalysts. One of the factors shaping his decision-making is historical memory, or the narratives a society tells itself. This thesis analyzes how historical memory influences Russian nationalist narrative and impacts the choices of the Putin regime. My research contributes to our understanding of what guides the internal decision-making of the Putin regime by exploring how narrative and ideology have shaped how Putin’s regime sees Russia’s place in the world. Through case studies of the Russian invasion of Georgia and Ukraine, this paper proposes that historical memory has had an influence on the choices and outlook of the Kremlin.