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This paper delves into the ways in which art and cultural expressions have helped to preserve the memory of the Ukrainian Revolution and how the Maidan Museum contributes to this effort. Specifically, the study explores the significance of the Maidan event in Ukraine’s national memory culture and how it is being integrated into the country’s historical narrative as part of the decommunization and decolonization processes. Additionally, the text examines how the politics of memory, as expressed through the museum’s performances and aesthetics, can serve as a tool of collective and national resistance. Ultimately, the article argues that the Maidan event is not fixed but rather dynamic, and Maidan memory plays a critical role in Ukraine’s ongoing transition away from a shared historical past with Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay adds to previous research of Putinism an investigation of the political thought and foreign outlooks of Russia's Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, with a focus on their statements between 2006 to 2020. The paper outlines Patrushev's and Naryshkin's thoughts regarding the United States, Ukraine, and the idea of multipolarity/polycentrism. We then introduce Patrushev's critique of liberal values and color revolutions, and Naryshkin's statements on the memory of World War II and Western institutions. The salience of these altogether seven topics is interpreted with reference to three classical topoi in Russian political thought: the Slavophile vs. Westerners controversy, the single-stream theory, and the civilizational paradigm. Our conclusions inform the ongoing debate on whether to conceptualize Putinism as either an ideology or a mentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage is an integral part of a people's identity, both for future generations and for preservation of historical memory and cultural development. In the face of the aggression of the Russian Federation, preservation of Ukraine's cultural heritage requires the joint efforts of national and international organisations, scientists and cultural experts. The paper compares the loss and damage brought about by Russia's war on Ukraine since 2014 to the loss and damage inflicted by Germany during World War II. Both aggressors have inflicted serious damage with large-scale theft and looting of cultural values on the territory of Ukraine, destroying architectural monuments, museums and libraries, with the aim of erasing national awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politologija is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates collective memory of the Soviet experiment in the narratives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), in the period of 1993–2004. My research finds that ideological differences within the CPRF led to the creation of multiple and contrasting depictions of the Soviet past in the discourse of its leaders. Challenging dominant assumptions, I argue that these differences did not conflict and undermine one another, but were structured to strengthen the public appeal of the CPRF. The paper adds empirical findings to the study of the CPRF and of collective memory at the (so far underdeveloped) level of public organizations. The paper also challenges the prevailing assumption that diverging historical narratives necessarily imply conflict and contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a broad comparative summary of all the cases addressed in the Special Issue ‘Hot and cold ethnicities in post-Soviet space’. The aim of the summary is to pinpoint the major features that have an impact on the ethnic temperatures in the social settings studied. This paper argues that ethnic, national, civic and imperial groups are representatives of the same type (territorial groups) and the collective identity formation which for all of them is principally similar. As the case studies indicate historical narratives and collective memory are invariably used for the formation of the emotional attachment to collective identity. The case studies provide support to an understanding that any territorial group is a project rather than a thing and resulting groupness is a happening which needs continuous enactment to sustain its state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Marshrutka minibuses are in charge of providing daily transport services for millions of passengers in the post-Soviet space. In doing so, they shape the perception of public sphere and contribute to the production of community. In this sense, the interior design of marshrutka minibuses contribute to a number of publicly negotiated discourse formations on collective identity patterns, such as nationhood, memory culture, as well as folkloristic values. Drawing on empirical evidence from Kyrgyzstan and Russia, we try to deconstruct multiple layers of marshrutka signposts. In their heterogeneity and contrariness, the marshrutka semiotics unveil the minibuses as a place of encounter and conflict, where fluid social institutions are consistently calling for negotiation. Triggered by the question how cultural trajectories of identity are performed, we will choose a number of marshrutka messages like official licenses, advertisements or patriotic proverbs and analyse them in the local setting of application. The expected insight of this paper is twofold: firstly, we contextualise societal struggles, which are reproduced in everyday marshrutka encounter and secondly, we contribute to a better understanding of the mobility practice as such, pointing to general deficits in the broader marshrutka enterprise, read out from visualised statements in the social space of marshrutka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stalin's era in Soviet history is one of the darkest. Nevertheless, despite numerous historical research, nonfiction and fiction, movies, and museum exhibitions exposing and discussing Stalin's atrocities, a sizable portion of the Russian population is neutral at best and respectful at worst of Stalin's leadership and personality. This article examines the "dark side" of Russian memories of Stalinism. According to our analysis of pro-Stalin content on TikTok, there are five major themes that users discuss in their pro-Stalin tiktoks: (1) Stalin as a leader in the victory of the Great Patriotic War, (2) a critique of contemporary culture's commemoration of victims of Stalinist repression, (3) a critique of the present, (4) the Stalin regime's achievements in economics and politics, and (5) admiration of Stalin's personality, focusing on his appearance and aesthetics. Furthermore, we hypothesize that social media's design and technological infrastructure can significantly influence which and how memory narratives are broadcast. In particular, "Stalin as a celebrity" is a framework largely overlooked by the researchers due to their focus on different media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medievalism, defined as the use of medieval history to describe and interpret the present, has been seen in Western Europe primarily as a phenomenon of culture, intellectual history and commerce. However, in Eastern Europe and Russia things have been the other way round, for there, right from the start the appeal to medieval history was an important element of ethnic nationalism, and of official historical policy and memory in various systems. The phenomenon of Medievalism will be studied in this paper using the example of the history of the ancient Russian city of Pskov, which has an eventful and glorious past. The paper shows that rather than being comprehended, Pskov's early history was rather constructed, in compliance with the ideological and cultural discourses of later times. Many legends about the city came into existence over the 16th–19th centuries, but were then turned into 'real facts' in historical literature and became incarnated in places of memory (lieux de mémoire). Such places, manifesting the memory of the Middle Ages, became established from the 16th century onwards and were intensively modelled during the 19th and early 20th centuries. In modern times the Middle Ages are mobilized primarily as a period when legends of the origins of people were reified, where their origo gentis may be found. Thus, this paper argues, the mobilization of the Middle Ages acted as an element of nation-building in the Russian Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent literature in cultural, political and social geography has considered the relationship between identity, memory, and the urban landscape. This paper interrogates such literature through exploring the complex materialisation of memorialisation in post-Soviet Russia. Using the example of the statue of General Alexei Ermolov in Stavropol', an analysis of the cityscape reveals interethnic tensions over differing interpretations of the life and history of the person upon whom the statue is based. The existence of a rich literature on Ermolov and the Russian colonial experience in the North Caucasus helps to explain this. The symbolic cityscape of Stavropol' plays an important role in interethnic relations in the multi-ethnic city; it is both an arena through which Russian identity is communicated with people and produced and reproduced, and an arena through which Russian citizens compete with each other for authority on historical narratives that operate at and between a number of scales. People's readings of the cityscape can reveal much about power and space in contemporary Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

How do young Russians relate to World War II and the violence of the wartime period? This article explores the degree to which societal and elite-driven narratives about history converge in the context of a crucial historical anniversary. We demonstrate that the memory of World War II serves as an integrative historical event for an abstract, temporally transcendent idea of Russia. Our analysis draws on focus groups conducted among young people of different political orientation in June 2019, survey data targeting urban youth, conducted over three consecutive years (2018–2020), and cultural artifacts such as film and literature. There is significant overlap between the views that young people express about victory and commemoration and the prevailing cultural, political, educational, and historical discourses. However, there is significant controversy when it comes to the actual ways in which the current political regime remembers the victory, the role of Stalin, and how to understand violence against the civilian population. The shared historical view that the Putin regime has created therefore remains contested. Disagreement limits the extent to which memory can be a foundation for today's political Russia as young respondents differentiate between their support for an abstract ideal of Russia and the existing political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the popular response to Soviet myths in the post-Soviet period through the lens of the complicated treatment of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia. As arguably the most famous Soviet World War II martyr, Kosmodem'ianskaia's image splintered after glasnost' and has been located at the nexus of debate in various media since 1991. This paper poses questions about the fracturing of national memory when a nation has undergone upheaval: about the stability of heroes, about citizens' responses to them, and about heroes' transformation in the new regime. Catriona Kelly has demonstrated that the treatment of a national hero can illuminate the circumstances that produced the hero and the cultural climate of subsequent decades. Building on her work, this article asks "Why and how has the image of Kosmodem'ianskaia remained relevant while other Soviet heroes have been neglected since 1991?" This article posits that Kosmodem'ianskaia's continued significance lies above all in the flexibility of her image and the transitional aspects of her body. Her depictions in various contexts represent prominent responses to the authoritarian regime which gave birth to both Kosmodem'ianskaia and her legacy. The variety of her images demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure two decades after the collapse of the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its implications for the study of international relations. It highlights the Eurocentric bias in the field and the lack of understanding of Eastern European experiences. The war has exposed divisions between offensive realists and pacifists, both of whom fail to recognize Ukraine's agency. However, it has also empowered Central and East European states to assert their political independence and challenge Russia's denial of Ukraine's sovereignty. The article explores Ukraine's historical experience as a passive player in international relations and the neglect of Russian imperialism in postcolonial studies. It argues that the war has revealed the difficulty of acknowledging Ukraine's distinct perspective and the need to address Russia's historical memory. The text also discusses Russia's imperialistic ambitions and the need for a comprehensive program to confront its repressive past. It calls for a decolonization of the study of war and international relations, emphasizing the importance of considering the perspectives and agency of smaller states. The author concludes by emphasizing the importance of empathy and understanding for those affected by the conflict. [Extracted from the article]

Japanese people have repeatedly constructed collective memories of Russia on the basis of their experiences and imagination regarding "Siberia." After their experiences of World War Two most Japanese people shared feelings of one-sided victimhood toward the Soviet Union. At the same time, some of them loved Soviet culture, respected Soviet science, or idolized the Soviet Union as the great leader of the leftist movement. Lack of concrete information on the Soviet Union sometimes even caused some people to excessively idealize it. Mikhail Gorbachev greatly improved Japanese people's feelings of closeness to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. However, these trends disappeared rapidly with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Japanese people who witnessed political and economic turmoil in Russia from the early to the late 1990s again came to have a negative attitude toward Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces evolution of political humor in popular Russian television game KVN in 1986-1999. The online survey, which involved 100 KVN fans aged 41-65, helped to figure out what political sketches or gags are the most memorable and might reflect the problems of the period. The author analyzes the show's content taking into consideration the main political and economic events which took place in the USSR during Perestroika and later in the Russian Federation in the 1990s. Having studied KVN's archive video materials (1986-1999), a documentary series History of Russian humor (2012), academic works of Russian and Western scholars, and mass media publications on the game, the author noticed the change in humor modus during those years. Tough criticism of the Soviet system combined with hopes for positive changes in the late 1980s. The teams joked on domestic issues, corrupt politicians, disintegration, territorial losses, and admired the Western lifestyle in the 1990s. The game seemed to be above politics, but indirectly supported Boris Yeltsin during 1996 presidential campaign. KVN players were "homo sovieticus": they had common memories, background, and experience. The game worked as "soft power" uniting teams from the former USSR republics in one cultural territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis, a wave of scholarship resorted to realism and its core assumptions in an attempt to explain Russia's assertiveness. This article challenges these predominant accounts by contending that the co-constitutive link between identity and foreign policy deserves far greater attention to understand Russia's international actions. To this end, it examines the evolution of an underexplored yet central subset of Russia's foreign policy in the post-Soviet space, namely its cultural diplomacy. Concretely, it applies a poststructuralist research design to a textual selection including official documents and Presidential declarations from 2008–2018, semi-structured interviews with policy-makers, cultural operators and experts, and participant observation. The article finds that, between 2008 and 2012, three competing articulations of identity were proposed in Russia's cultural diplomacy, targeting Russian (Russkiy) ethnicity, the country's multi-ethnicity, and its collective memory. However, after the 2012 presidential elections, these were replaced by a new articulation reproducing Russia's identity through a) radicalization of cultural differences (with the West/the EU) and b) negation of alternative identities (within Russia and the post-Soviet space). Amidst increased political contestation with the 2011–12 Russian protests, this hegemonic intervention from the state-level sought to (re-)produce this identity through an antagonistic delimitation of the social and secure the regime's survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Amazonia Investiga is the property of PRIMMATE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores the hegemonic discourse on historical memory in contemporary Russia, in addition to its political implications. Furthermore, the role played by the Russian media system in the dissemination of the memory discourse endorsed by the Kremlin, and its impact, are also described. The analysis is carried out in a theoretical framework that advocates for the need for delving deeper into the intersections between communication and memory studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was not before the end of 2016 that the governing elites of Russian decided how the Revolution should be remembered in the year of its 100th anniversary. According to the official line, the focal point of remembrance should be reconciliation. By the popularization of civil peace and national consolidation as dominant motifs the circles in power clearly favor a postponement of a real discussion about the revolutionary events of 1917. At the same time, there is a variety of controversial attempts in the contemporary Russian society to interpret the Revolution. The paper deals with the three most common views: the socialist, the national-conservative and the liberal one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrei Andreevich Vlasov, a Soviet general who sought to create a Russian Liberation Army under German auspices during World War II, has been the focal point of debates about wartime collaboration that reflect deep divides in memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Stalin era in post-Soviet Russia. Memory entrepreneurs in the literary world, the Orthodox Church and the historical profession have reappropriated Vlasov, inserting him in anti-Soviet historical narratives as a hero, symbol or martyr. Meanwhile, patriotic intellectuals in the Putin years have invoked Vlasov as a figure of national treachery and use him to discredit their political opponents. The debate over Vlasov points to the fractured and unproductive nature of national collective memory in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine efforts to rewrite school history in Putin's Russia, efforts whose precedents in Russia can be traced back to the nineteenth century. I explore this process from the perspective of recent scholarship on 'collective future thinking' and demonstrate how a particular feeling - anxiety - shaped Russian and Soviet efforts to change history textbooks. I describe those created in Russia, focusing on their future component and the emotional message accompanying them. In contrast to some other countries, where narratives may be revised or replaced by new ones in accordance with the development of societies and political regimes, in Russia, there is evidence that previous narrative templates continue to coexist. The state may privilege one or another narrative primary in response to emotional pressures, and in some cases, this pushes people towards aggression and even death. I argue that anxiety about the future has forced the current Russian regime to initiate a school history rewriting in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war, allowing the state to use collective memory to convince people to engage in a brutal conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the horrific experiences of ex-Yugoslavia, the tragedy of Ukraine reveals the terrible consequences of the memory conflicts radicalization. Anticipated by a constant mnemonic war led by the Russia particularly against its Eastern neighbors, it proves "what happens when memory wars turn into real wars". Since the end of Cold War, in the context of the re-nationalization of ideologies, the remythologization of national histories, and the reshaping of memory politics, the European memory games, as part of the struggle for recognition, have often became memory wars. This article provides some relevant insights about the political instrumentation of the "restorative nostalgia"/"retrotopia" in the (post-)Cold War illiberal memory games/wars, against the background of the growing crises connected to the rise of neo-nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research is focused on the image of the Soviet Union and that of its successor – the Russian Federation – in the minds of the Russian student youth. The concept of collective memory, being interdisciplinary and highly debatable, has been used in the given paper in its broad socio-cultural sense meaning the attitudes of interconnected social groups regarding the past and the present. The participants of the poll were 100 students from the leading Moscow universities. They had been born after the Soviet Union collapse, so, the majority of them have a very obscure idea of the Soviet reality, simultaneously feeling nostalgia for the Soviet political past. The results of the research show that the image of the Soviet Union drastically differs from that of Russia in the young people's minds being positive and negative, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article belongs to the special cluster "Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe", guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a "cosmopolitan" memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in "old" continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries' history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Orthodox island monastery of Valaam in Russian Karelia is today a popular destination for Finnish tourists visiting Russia's western borderlands. Many of these tourists are descendants of the Karelians who had evacuated the area following World War II. The monastery's institutionally sanctioned genealogies construct it as the civilizing force, which had brought Christian enlightenment to the local heathen population. This discursive template is played out in the way the place is presented to visitors, with each highlight telling a carefully constructed story that promotes the monastery's significance for the Russian religious and national identity. Yet, drawing on lived experience, as well as on popular culture, family lore and meanings from collective memory, the Finnish visitors break the monolithic official discourse and produce a complex "third-space" in their own measure. This paper is based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted during a homeland visit to Ladogan Karelia in June 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorises the nexus between mnemonical status anxiety and militant memory laws. Extending the understanding of status-seeking in international relations to the realm of historical memory, I argue that the quest for mnemonical recognition is a status struggle in an international social hierarchy of remembering constitutive events of the past. A typology of mnemopolitical status-seeking is presented on the example of Russia (mnemonical positionalism), Poland (mnemonical revisionism), and Ukraine (mnemonical self-emancipation). Memory laws provide a common instance of securing and/or improving a state's mnemonical standing in the relevant memory order. Drawing on the conceptual analogy of militant democracy, the article develops the notion militant memocracy, or the governance of historical memory through a dense network of prescribing and proscribing memory laws and policies. Similar to its militant democracy counterpart, militant memocracy is in danger of self-inflicted harm to the object of defence in the very effort to defend it: its precautionary and punitive measures resound rather than fix the state's mnemonical anxiety problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017, the draft of the law on patriotic education was submitted to the State Duma. The document clearly signaled that Russian authorities were starting to prepare for long-term resistance to external threats, both military and cultural. This development follows the adoption of five decrees with a similar focus. Exploring this "patriotic turn," our research will focus on how power shapes collective memory and how the Russian patriotic campaign is perceived elsewhere in the post-Soviet space, namely in Kazakhstan. In this way, we want to shed new light on the nexus between historical memory, anti-Western resistance, and the foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and compares the visual images used by Channel One (Ch1), Russia's biggest state-aligned television broadcaster, to justify Russia's intervention in two major geopolitical conflicts in recent history: the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and Syria's civil war. The data reveal that while Ch1's projection of Ukrainian conflict is anchored in compassion to the Eastern Ukraine population speaking the Russian language, the Syrian war is framed to fuel the feeling of national pride by focusing on the Russian greatness as a political and military superpower. This research, thus, extends the theoretical understanding of media representation of war, especially how the changing political context impacts which identities are represented and made potent through different emotional appeals. The article conceptualises visual images as affective anchors that can be used to reactivate collective memory and dominant discourses and construct emotional relationships between the audience and mediated events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative analysis of the national cases of mnemopolitics of Latvia and Ukraine. The authors examine the historical politics of Ukraine and Latvia through the prism of two conceptual approaches - the "nationalizing" state of Rogers Brubaker and the "memory regimes" of Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik. The article demonstrates how two opposite narratives compete and coexist in both countries - the official national-centric and Soviet countermemory narratives. In Latvia, the Soviet narrative was replaced beyond the bounds and acquired a pronounced ethnic shell acting through the Russian-speaking community, becoming completely informal. At the same time, the presence of a significant part of the Russian-speaking population with its own identity and collective memory, as well as the activation of the historical policy of the Russian Federation with its revisionist view of the history of the Baltic states, creates a real threat to the historical memory and identity of Latvia and turns them into security objects. In Ukraine, two narratives until 2014 demonstrated both competition and a strange symbiosis in both formal and informal commemoration. The hybrid war of Russia against Ukraine, in which the technology of manipulating via historical memory was actively used, caused measures to securitize the Ukrainian national narrative (laws of decommunization), its strengthening and updating. However, the volatility of the state strategy in the historical memory, its dependence on the change of power, do not exclude a return to ambivalence and uncertainty in the politics of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's and Ukraine's common and contested past(s) became fundamental in the development of the Ukraine crisis. Not only did the complicated history of Russia-Ukraine relations become a fertile ground for the crisis to break out. Russia's and Ukraine's shared and disputed past(s) appeared crucial during the crisis itself: it played a key role in the attempts of Russian political elites to legitimise and to consolidate the society's support for Russia's annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Eastern Ukraine. The fact that World War II became particularly important in this respect is widely acknowledged. However, what about the other pages of Russia's and Ukraine's (Soviet) past(s)? Were they also reconceptualised during the Ukraine crisis and employed in order to legitimise Russia's involvement? Trying to answer these questions, this article focuses on Stalinist repression, and on the specific ("official") memory of it, as was forged in Russia before the armed conflict in Ukraine broke out and as it developed during the evolution of the conflict. Questioning the concept of re-Stalinisation which is often used to analyse the memory of the repression in contemporary Russia, this article argues that in the wake of the Ukraine crisis - much like in the run-up to it - Russia is moving towards forgetting the repression. The pursuit of (national) unity - at the expense of memory of the repression - remains characteristic for Russia's "official" account of Stalinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the renaming tendencies in Russia of the 2010s and the main stakeholders of the name changing. On the base of the administration websites, online media petitions and other open sources, three cases are examined in detail: 1) Perm, where half of Maksim Gorky street was renamed after the surgeon Sergey Sukhanov in 2015; 2) Kazan, where at the same time Esperanto street was renamed after Nursultan Nazarbaev, causing mass protests for several years; 3) Volgograd, with the discussions about returning to its older name Stalingrad being led for years. Based on the analysis of these cases, the following tendencies are identified: changes of stakeholders motivation for renamings, transfer of power to name from parliamentary institutions to administration, a new perception of the city center and distant districts; and, finally, the appearance of alternative mechanisms of social memory encouraged by the wiping out of older names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with some puzzling features in/of contemporary Russian collective memory. In terms of methodology, the article is based on (1) the idea of the commodification of collective memory and (2) the strong interconnections between memory and national identity. While analyzing popular, historical, and political narratives such as those concerning national celebrations, historical texts, and political declarations, I argue that the Ukrainian crisis produced a new type of historical consciousness in Russia, which is connected with the conservative populist tendency in Russian politics currently. As an element of the cultural "industry," collective memory is connected with an asymmetric exchange that appears in the process of mnemonic commodification. The surplus value of collective memory is caused by the fact that it is used in the process of popular mobilization. I conclude that to maintain the regime and to mobilize support, officials aim to rebuild Soviet images and promote an alternative to the Western model, and that they therefore seek to emphasize traditional values and retro-size Russian contemporaneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's Russia, there is a constant clash of opinions when it comes to perceptions of the past, and to what can be learned from Russia's Soviet experience in general and Stalinist repression in particular. A consensus which seemed just over the horizon between 1998 and 1991 now grows ever more distant. Nearly half of those surveyed in 2017 say that Stalin should not be seen as a state criminal; that the repressions are best discussed less rather than more, and that there is nothing to be gained by dredging up the past. The only way for Russia to pursue a future of democracy and respect for human rights is to leave all of that baggage behind. How has this come to be? What are the roots of these myths of a great and just Stalin that now emerge 65 years after his death? A series of scholars posit that the key lies in Russian society itself, with its tendency towards being ruled with a firm hand and a state that merely takes a neutral position between the liberals and the Stalinists. Others assert that these are successful constructs of the Kremlin, which seeks to inculcate domestic support for authoritarian rule. In order to resolve this disagreement, we studied the book market for Stalin-related literature published within the last twenty years. The study indicates that the market comprises two mostly separate areas: books by Stalin apologists on the one hand, and books by professional historians and recollections by victims of repressions on the other. Quantitative analysis shows that the former receive markedly greater support, which reflects the state's role over the past fifteen years in forming a positive image of Stalin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Russian civil society focuses largely on the repressive legislative side of state policies, to the virtual exclusion of the rise of domestic funding, be it individual, corporate, or public. This article instead contributes to the discussion of state funding for the third sector by looking at the Russian Presidential Grant Fund, a state institution that has disbursed RUB18 billion (approx. $275 million at the August 11, 2019, exchange rate) to the third sector since 2016, making it one of the most influential sources of financial support to Russian civil society. A data-driven analysis of the Fund reveals that, although it prioritizes certain types of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) over others, there is a discernible attempt to address some of the most pressing social ills in Russia today. Whereas some grant directions, such as the "preservation of historical memory" and "development of public diplomacy and support of compatriots," further long-held, Kremlin-sponsored ideological projects, the biggest categories supported by the Fund focus on more classical philanthropic issues, confirming the state's growing delegation of the provision of public services to the third sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-communist memory, including the revitalization of debate on contemporary public perceptions of Josef Stalin. How do Russians and Georgians judge Stalin in the post-Soviet present? What individual characteristics are the best indicators of how someone evaluates Stalin? Scholars have offered various insights into the apparent resurgence of appreciation for the late Soviet leader, including nostalgia for the Soviet period, socio-spatial variables, and political attitudes, but no comparative research on attitudes and their explanations has been attempted. Using nationally representative survey data, this study compares the perceptions of Stalin in contemporary Russia and contrasts it with how people view the Soviet dictator in Georgia, his home country. We conclude that Stalin is alive in the minds of many, both in Georgia and Russia, although for different reasons. If in Georgia the admiration of Stalin is largely explained by socio-demographic and socio-spatial variables, in Russia it is more closely related to ideological and political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National-Romantic trend in Russian Art Nouveau is characterized by a lyrical approach to the past, including imagery from folklore. This tendency is also identifiable within the global development of Art Nouveau, each country expressing its national identity in highly characteristic forms in design and architecture. Art Nouveau coincided with the zenith of Symbolism and, therefore, transmitted both its universal ideas and the unique creative psychology of the individual artist, who often based personal quest upon local traditions and innate cultural memory. This article analyzes the poetics of this style in Russia. The lyrical and mythological approach towards artistic images, influencing design, form, and meaning, is studied through an examination of the works of artists close to the Abramtsevo circle and the innovative experiments of the World of Art group (1898-1904). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Strength in Diversity: Multiple Memories of the Soviet Past in the Russian Communist Party (CPRF), 1993-2004" in a 2017 issue is presented.

Drawing on the theoretical concept of collective memory and migration, and politics of belonging, this article explores performative belonging enacted in the series of holidays and commemorative rites organized by young Russian immigrants in Israel's major metropolis. Our ethnography is based on 18 months of participant observation at the cultural association Fishka in South Tel-Aviv. As part of our field work, we documented public celebrations of Jewish and Russian-Soviet holidays organized by Fishka as acts of public performance seeking to elevate the prestige of Russian culture in Israel. These events reinforced visibility of Russian Israelis in Israel's cultural capital and helped reach out to other urban communities, both native and immigrant. The article discusses the unique contribution of these bicultural young adults to Tel-Aviv's diverse and dynamic urban scene. Our main argument is about the importance of collective memory in migration, whereby holidays and commemorative rites reinforce feelings of belonging and fortify the immigrants' claim on the respectable place in the receiving society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University and the Kaliningrad State Technical University have come to exert considerable influence over debates surrounding historical memory and identity in the Kaliningrad region. Under the direct control of the Russian Federation, the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad is surrounded by member states of the European Union. While the region’s universities have helped to strengthen links between Kaliningrad and institutions across the European Union, the way the students and staff interact with the Russian state reflects cultural tensions in Kaliningrad society. A detailed examination of the history and identity of Kaliningrad’s universities can therefore provide deeper insights into the region’s balancing act between Europe and Russia as well as the ways in which universities can influence local debates over history and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay critically examines the current duality of Russian-Ukrainian intercultural relations and explores the subject of politics of active and selective memory as the claimed root of current controversies and military tensions. Through rhetorical analysis of historical and contemporary national narratives, it demonstrates how culturally defining experience of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War is remembered, rethought, and reused by respective parties to reinvent the Self and the Br/Other, as well as rethink ones positionality on the world arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I explore the interconnection between Putin's politics of re-Stalinization, historical memory, and a specific version of the post-Soviet neo-medievalism. I show that re-Stalinization is a mass movement that is grounded in the unprocessed memory of Soviet crimes and atrocities. The popular myth of the "Great PatrioticWar" and the myth of Stalinism as the Golden Age exploited by Putin's memory politics became a gold mine for Putin's kleptocracy. I argue that re-Stalinization and the Kremlin-sponsored ideology of Eurasianism represents two interrelated trends of a complex ideological process. Eurasianism combines Soviet denial of individuality with the idea of a state-dependent patriarchal society and Russian historical messianism. It glorifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. The 'medievalist' discourse of Eurasian ideologists, which advocates a return to the medieval society of orders, on the one hand, and the Gothic monsters populating post- Soviet film and fiction, on the other, creates a political language that expresses new attitudes to people in post-Soviet Russia. They depict a new social contract that reconsiders the modern concept of citizenship, and creates a social basis for the criminalization and militarization of Russian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking theoretical cues from the respective works of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Dan Diner, this article has two fundamentally linked goals: to historicize Polish cultural memory of Katyń, emplotting it within a narrative arc encompassing the seven decades separating 1943 from 2015; and to identify individual and collective agency within the history of Polish memory of Katyń. Certainly, the word “Katyń” exists variously as toponym, as metonym, as rallying cry. Yet the historical narratives anchored in that word are the outcomes of actions taken by concrete actors—individuals, states, social movements, international institutions. Although this article takes seriously the many theoretical frameworks undergirding the academic study of collective memory, its principal focus is the balance of historical contingency and structure that has constituted discrete, identifiable episodes of both commemorating and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the evolution of nostalgic sentiment in Russia over the past 25 years. Unlike in the 1990s, the nostalgic perception of the Soviet past in the 2000s was transformed under the influence of a new government ideology. Leonid Parfenov’s projectNamedniin both its forms – a television program and a book anthology – is an example of reflexive nostalgia for the Soviet period of 1946–1991. Reflexive nostalgia as expressed by liberal intellectuals presumes a freedom of interpretation. Thus,Namednidoes not reflect the official “patriotic” discourse. The article discusses the specifics of the television and book versions, the significance of visual and literary imagery, and the relationship between history and historical memory. BecauseNamedniexhibits signs of an autobiographical text, the article concludes that memory takes a higher priority than historical science in Parfenov’s project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the formation of nostalgic sentiment in contemporary Russia. Nostalgic emotions which idealize the Soviet experience are typical of Russian society today. To a great extent, they are a natural consequence of the forming of historical memories concerning the recent past. However, to a greater extent, they must be viewed as a socio-cultural phenomenon formed in the context of the social catastrophe that accompanied the collapse of the USSR. Nostalgia is amplified by political practices. Nostalgic sentiment is also sustained and cultivated by the mass media, which responds both to consumer demand and to political trends. Nostalgia for what was lost in the aftermath of a social catastrophe transforms a psychological reaction, typical of the older generation, into a nostalgia of catastrophes. It is the particular condition of a society that has lived through complicated historical periods, when dramatic changes resulted in the loss of the behavioural models and values which used to define people’s lives. The nostalgic mindset facilitates the mythologization of certain intervals of Soviet history as a “golden age”, one that is not completely lost. The period of the 1950s to 1970s is particularly actively mythologized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of why some Russian citizens look upon Josef Stalin respectfully today. Based upon the results of an original nationwide survey conducted by the Levada Analytical Center and supplemented by seventy field interviews, this article posits that a considerable number of Russians view Stalin respectfully on account of three factors. First, Stalin remains a somewhat revered historical figure in part because most Russians harbour no feelings of shame about the Soviet past. Additionally, the tendency of some to rationalize Stalin's main policies of the 1930s, by claiming that there was no other way for the USSR to industrialize than according to the course adhered to by Stalin, helps to safeguard the former General Secretary's reputation. That said, the primary reason why some Russians view Stalin respectfully is due to the pervasiveness of nostalgia for the Soviet period, a widespread phenomenon which serves to bolster Stalin's image as a leader whose contributions led to the realization of great achievements. This article contends that feelings of respect for Stalin are mainly grounded in how Russians evaluate the present ordering of society in comparison to the Soviet past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite real problems associated with reconstructing the frontline experience of Russian soldiers during World War I, a study of surviving documents reveals an involuntary modernization among the troops that prepared soldiers for careers in the Red Army and the political police and bred hostility toward the rural population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I offer a brief overview of the role of Soviet and post-Soviet national historical narratives in the ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, including possible strategies of narrative transformation towards reconciliation. I suggest that successful narrative transformations require a process of identifying and reflecting upon the existing patterns of collective memory in the historical narratives that feed the confrontational attitudes of the warring historiographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Georgian historical master-narrative was formed at the end of the nineteenth century, in the era of the birth of Georgian nationalism. In confrontation with Russian imperial policy, Georgian history was transformed into the reconstruction and revival of Georgian ethnic identity. After imposition of Soviet rule in 1921, the Georgian master-narrative was readjusted according to the Marxist methodological framework, although it successfully confronted the official Soviet narrative. In the period of “perestroika” a general process of the revival of national identity was accompanied by growing interest in national history, and the Georgian master-narrative became more ethnocentric. The situation was aggravated by the conflicts of the early 1990s in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It took some time to realize the importance of forming the feeling of national belonging regardless of ethnic, cultural or religious identity. At the end of the 1990s, reconfiguration of historical narratives and collective memories began in the history textbooks for secondary educational institutions. Nevertheless, the trajectory of historical narratives is not simple and the problem of inclusion of ethnic minorities in the history of Georgia still remains a significant issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]