Search

The literature on collective memories in the Baltic states often stresses the irreconcilable division between Russian and Baltic official interpretations of the Second World War. This paper seeks to challenge this popular notion of two polemic collective memories – “Latvian” and “Russian”. While there is evidence that Latvia's Russian-speakers are heavily influenced by Russian cultural and political discourses, I will argue that the actual positions taken up by Russian-speakers are more nuanced than a crude Latvian–Russian dichotomy would suggest. Based on survey data collected at the site of the 2011 Victory Day celebrations in Riga, this paper points to the germane existence of a partial “democratization of history” among Latvia's Russian-speakers, typified by an increasing willingness to countenance and take stock of alternative views of history. Through an examination of the data it will be argued that such tentative steps towards a democratization of history are most visible among the younger cohort of Russian-speakers, whose collective memory-myths have been tempered by their dual habitation of the Latvian, as well as Russian, mythscapes. In order to more fully understand this process both bottom-up and top-down pressures will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the formation of place-based war memories in contemporary Japan by examining the Japanese grassroots movements to preserve war-related sites within the local and national politics of “cultural property,” and the developments in which the Ichigayadai Building No. 1 in Tokyo and the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex in Nagano are conserved to recall the memories of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Both places embody the war of aggression carried out by Imperial Japan in the twentieth century. The Ichigaya site was home to the Imperial General Headquarters during the war. The Matsushiro site refers to gigantic underground shelters and tunnels built at the end of the war to relocate the Imperial General Headquarters of the Ichigaya site. Both sites gained social and national attention in the 1990s by raising questions of how to convey memories of suffering caused as well as suffering experienced to the next generation. By introducing the struggles to conserve war-related sites, I argue that contemporary Japan's public memory-making and -remaking processes are shaped by contestants to reclaim places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the core propositions articulated by several public actors in the so-called Bandera debate, i.e., discussions about the usable past and legacy of the wartime Ukrainian nationalist insurgency and its central symbolic figure, Stepan Bandera. In Western Ukraine, popular historical imagery as well as intellectual polemics about the "Ukrainization" of World War II challenged both the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War and the European model of politics of regret. Correspondingly, one of the main ideas conveyed during the Bandera debate in Western Ukraine was the necessity of liberalization of the national politics of memory, i.e., the process of opening the political discourses and public debate to the circulation of diverse voices and narratives concerning the national past, a circulation unrestrained by political pressure. Generally, however, wartime events and figures continue to be presented in line with dichotomous national discourses. As the example of a chain of restaurants exploiting the theme of World War II demonstrates, one-dimensional interpretations of the contentious past suggested to the public by the actors involved in the commercialization of historical knowledge may have far-reaching, unpredictable implications. This is especially true in post-Orange Western Ukraine where politics--including the politics of memory--is increasingly determined by ultra-right forces such as VO Svoboda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]