“The Russians’ love for Iosif Vissarionovich is…a manifestation of [their] quest for social justice.” So writes Anastasia M. Ponomareva, in the volume under review” (198). This came as a surprise: I cannot remember any instances in the academic literature of Stalin being so respectfully addressed by his first name and patronymic or considered a democratic, rather than an authoritarian, symbol. Alexei Miller and Dmitrii Efremenko's volume, translated as The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Russia and East European Countries: Actors, Institutions, Narratives, includes twenty-nine chapters that cover an extensive range of topics, from memory laws to the recently-created learned societies and governmental institutions that are tasked with the implementation of official history politics, and from mnemonic activism to historical museums, “monumental propaganda,” popular history magazines, video games, and comics. In addition to the well-researched Russian and Ukrainian cases, the volume focuses on such understudied regions as Belarus, Moldova, Transnistria, North Caucasus, Kaliningrad, Russia's Far East, and the Moscow-controlled Donbass.
It is impossible to do justice in a brief review to all the contributions in this rich collection. The book examines, in particular, the mnemonic conflicts around the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and the monuments to General Yermolov (Amiran Urushadze); the competition between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Memorial Society in defining the meaning of communist repressions (Marlène Laruelle, Ekaterina Makhotina); the ambiguities of identity among the Don Cossacks, whose leaders of the Civil War period (such as Ataman Krasnov) became Nazi collaborators during the Second World War (Olga Rvacheva); and the debates over Cossack memorials on the Russian-Chinese border, which the local populations view as monuments to their colonizers (Alexei Mikhalev).
This reviewer was particularly interested by Elena Meleshkina's comparison between the Russian memory law of 2014 and similar legislation in Europe. Meleshkina agrees with the widely shared opinion that east European memory laws differ significantly from their west European prototypes in that they protect local national narratives rather than universal values (325, 248). She does not point out, however, that the Russian law protecting the memory of the Stalin regime is an extreme case of this east European tendency. And she inexplicably attributes to me the notion of “projective memory” (245), which I have never used.
The emphasis on the diversity of local and group memories is, in my view, the volume's most valuable contribution to the study of Russian and east European history politics. But its weaknesses are, in part, a continuation of its strengths, as its considerable attention to detail obscures the main lines of Russia's memory politics. Several themes essential to the understanding of that politics are touched upon in narrowly focused chapters but are nowhere treated systematically. Such themes include the cult of the Great Patriotic War, which under Putin has become post-Soviet Russia's foundation myth, the politics of re-Stalinization, and Holocaust remembrance. Moreover, as presented in the volume, the Presidential Administration, the government, the parliament, and the political parties appear as relatively peripheral to Russia's memory landscapes. As a result, the goals of the government's history politics remain unclear.
The main exception is Konstantin Pakhalyuk's chapter on the use of history in Russia's foreign policy. According to Pakhalyuk, Putin uses history to present Moscow as a virtuous “foreign policy player” in the context of the value vacuum after the fall of communism (98, 102). He further suggests that this approach differs radically from how western leaders use history to justify universal values (104, 121). This subtle observation falls in line with the opposition between universalism and particularism in the present-day memory politics that I have developed elsewhere (Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia, Cambridge UP, 2017, 309–10). Pakhalyuk, however, ignores the dangerous implications of Putin's anti-universalist stand as well as the discrepancy between the Kremlin's claims to historical “righteousness” and the aggressive character of both Stalin's and Putin's foreign policy.
The tendency to normalize, and at times endorse, Putin's history politics is also evident in several other chapters, including those of both co-editors. Thus, for example, Vladimir Lapin and Viktoriia Kaz΄mina speak approvingly of Vladimir Medinsky's role in Russian history politics and the government-sponsored Russian Historical Society and Russian Military Historical Society, which are deemed Russia's response to the falsification of history by her neighbors (94, 175). Medinsky, a former Minister of Culture and currently an advisor to the president, is one of Russia's principal “mnemonic warriors,” claiming as he does that historians should assess the past from the standpoint of their country's interests.
In contrast to Meleshkina, who suggests that Russian propaganda is in part responsible for east European memory wars (247), Miller (cautiously) and Efremenko and Pakhalyuk (straightforwardly) accuse the east European countries of having launched these wars and position Moscow's memory politics as essentially reactive (10–11, 71–72, 98). The disintegration of the “cosmopolitan consensus” and the re-emergence of “antagonistic” national narratives in Europe are the leading themes of Miller's introductory chapter. In light of his analysis, Putin's war cult is presented as a normal reaction to the west's hypocritical attempts to ignore the political nature of memory and repress discourses that do not comport with the Holocaust-centered narrative (9–15).
Efremenko's chapter dealing with EU history politics echoes Moscow's attempts to build a “coalition of memory” with the west against its east European opponents. He claims that the EU's official Holocaust-centered memory is compatible with the Russian war narrative, while the east European theory of “twin totalitarianisms” makes any dialogue impossible (72). The implication is that the EU should ignore its new members’ commemorative concerns in order to make its peace with Moscow. But Efremenko overlooks the notion that the cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust is based on the nation-states’ repentance for their past misdeeds, while the Soviet/Russian war cult is, in contrast, a self-congratulatory national narrative.
Georgii Kasyanov's chapter offers a competent overview of the situation in Ukraine and the memory war between Kyiv and Moscow. However, he first mentions Russia's involvement in Ukrainian battles over the past after his discussion of the nationalistic turn taken by Kyiv's politics as a result of the 2004–5 Orange Revolution, as if the formation of Putin's authoritarian regime, the reanimation of the Soviet war cult, and the Kremlin's involvement in the 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine had nothing to do with that turn. I perfectly understand a Ukrainian historian being critical primarily of his own government. Yet focusing on the “internal” dynamics of Ukraine's history politics without sufficiently taking into consideration its international context shifts the blame for the Russian-Ukrainian memory conflicts from Moscow to Kyiv. Let me also mention one mistake made by my respected colleague: he claims that the denial of the Holocaust and the Holodomor is a criminal offense punishable under Ukrainian law (501–2). Ukraine's Criminal Code does not actually contain such a provision, although Article 436.1, introduced in 2015, outlaws “producing, disseminating, and publicly using the symbols of communist and national-socialist totalitarian regimes.”
In conclusion, for all its merits, this volume raises, at least for this reviewer, serious concerns about academic freedom in Putin's Russia.
