The volume is divided into five parts, each comprising three chapters.
Part I: Memories of World War II and Nation Building begins at the national level with an introduction to each of our three national cases. With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus embarked on a difficult process of building new states and consolidating their populations as national communities. While the myth of the October Revolution and the Soviet ideology was relatively easy to give up, the so-called “Great Patriotic War” was deeply rooted in collective memory
, mass culture, and public discourse. Post-Soviet political elites, which in all three countries largely originated from the Soviet nomenklatura
, have been seeking a difficult balance. On the one hand, new national symbols and narratives referring to the pre-Soviet era were initially met with skepticism by significant parts of the population; on the other, the Soviet myth of
the Great Patriotic War served as a familiar and comforting symbol of continuity in the uncertain times of transition. The state has traditionally played an especially prominent role in memory
politics in all three post-Soviet countries, and so these chapters share a particular focus on official memory politics and the role of political actors and institutions such as president and parliament in shaping their agenda. This section addresses similarities and specificities of the three national cases, helping to set the scene for the remaining chapters.
Olga Malinova begins with a survey of post-Soviet-Russian memory politics on the war, tracing the evolution of official attempts to use the war memory for identity-building purposes through from the early 1990s to the present day. She tracks these changes through a detailed frame analysis
of presidential speeches and commemorative ceremonies.
Next, Per Anders Rudling guides us through both the official and the oppositional use of historical myths and narratives. Like Malinova’s chapter, Rudling’s highlights the ways in which the state authorities have sought sources of legitimacy in the past, taking over and adapting Soviet and other narratives for nation-building purposes. Rudling also shows that alternative historical cultures are also present in Belarus, for example in the form of online videos and cartoons presenting nationalist narratives of Belarusian history in pop culture form. Both these first two chapters conclude that the Soviet cult of the war remains a key identity marker, in part because of the limited success that governments and elites have had in finding suitable alternatives.
Finally in Part I, Yuliya Yurchuk traces the history of successive attempts to challenge the Soviet master narrative of the Great Patriotic War in Ukraine from 1991 through to 2016. She focuses on the nationalist narrative of the OUN and UPA
as fighters for Ukraine’s independence during World War II, and demonstrates the impressive career of this narrative from a local “counter-memory” rooted in some regions of Western Ukraine to a new national myth legitimized by the Ukrainian state. Her account takes us through to the post-Euromaidan
period, which has resulted in a bid to monopolize official memory by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance
.
The essays comprising Part II: In Stalin’s Shadow explore the figure of Joseph Stalin
and the paradox of his growing popularity in the post-Soviet era. His role in World War II remains the single most divisive aspect of the Victory cult in Russia. More than any other historical personage or symbol, Stalin
—the commander-in-chief who presided over the Red Army’s
Victory, and the architect of mass atrocities against his own and other peoples—embodies the inseparability of the triumphalist and traumatic elements of Soviet history, as well as the ambiguities and tensions at the core of (post-)Soviet war memory
. Joseph Stalin is far more than just a Russian lieu de mémoire—–for example, Stalin
as a symbol of the Great Victory has been smuggled into the public sphere in Belarus where his figure contributes to legitimizing Lukashenka’s authoritarian regime (cf. Chaps. 3 and 8). The three chapters in Part II deal with the post-Soviet afterlife of Stalin’s cult in Russia and in Ukraine.
Markku Kangaspuro
and Jussi Lassila
begin with a study of the symbolic politics around the renaming of Stalingrad
/Volgograd. They use this case to demonstrate the difficulties faced by various actors in Russian politics and society in handling the relationship between the closely interconnected triumphalist and traumatic associations linked to the figure of Stalin
. They provide a detailed analysis of the Putin-era debates over whether the name “Stalingrad
” should be reinstated. Their account highlights the limits of the Russian state’s power to impose hegemonic control over narratives of the national past, and links this to the “hybrid” nature of state memory politics in Russia, combining both authoritarian and democratic features.
Serhii Plokhy’s chapter examines the role that the cult of Stalin
plays in articulating conflicting approaches to the history of the war in Ukraine, through a close reading of a 2010 incident in which Ukrainian nationalists ritually beheaded a statue of Stalin
that had been erected by the local Communists in the city of Zaporizhzhia earlier that year. This case study demonstrates how the Soviet war myth functions as a force for division in Ukrainian society. It also sheds retrospective light on later developments in Eastern Ukraine known as the “Russian Spring,” as well as helping to illuminate the driving forces behind the current Ukrainian “decommunization” campaign.
Finally in Part II, Philipp Chapkovski’s chapter investigates the phenomenal popularity of neo-Stalinist literature in Russia. He views this partly as an outcome of the state’s reliance on the Victory myth, which makes an unequivocal renunciation of Stalin
impossible. Chapkovski sets out to discover who is writing and consuming this literature, and why. His chapter provides an introduction to the key themes and features of this genre, and places its emergence in the broader context of the historical development of neo-Stalinism
in the late-Soviet period. He also compares neo-Stalinist literature to Holocaust
denial literature, finding both commonalities and important differences. Moreover, he tracks the fates of the leading neo-Stalinist authors in the post-Crimean period, finding that some of them swapped their pens for guns and went to fight in the Donbas
; others still have fallen from grace and now face charges of extremism, while the general trend is towards the emergence of a new “right-wing” version of Stalinism
in the new political context.
13
One of this book’s contributions to memory studies
concerns the proliferation of new groups, agents, narratives and symbols, reflecting the volatility, fluidity, and heterogeneity of the memory landscapes in the region. The essays in Part III: New Agents and Communities of Memory identify and discuss a selection of new memory
actors and communities. We approach memory politics in post-Soviet transitional societies not only as a matter of a top-down policy of nation building and state-led identity construction, but also as a bottom-up process in which new groups, communities of memory, and commemorative agents enter public politics claiming recognition of their particular narratives, and sometimes even representation of their group interests in politics and various forms of compensation. In post-Soviet societies, these grassroots initiatives can be captured, or partially captured, by the state (see Chap. 11). At the same time, pluralization has set certain limits on the state’s capacity to impose a single narrative of the past (see Chap. 5). In fact, it would be misleading to draw neat divisions between these top-down and bottom-up processes. As several of the chapters show, private, state, and social processes of remembering are deeply intertwined. In this sense our volume responds to Mischa Gabowitsch’s
call for post-Soviet memory studies
to move beyond the binaries that have tended to structure the field to date (Gabowitsch 2015).
The chapters in Part III address three different communities of memory constituted in the post-Soviet decades: the Soviet Afghan War veterans in Belarus (Chap. 8); the “children of war
” in Russia (Chap. 9); and former Ostarbeiters (forced labor workers) in Ukraine (Chap. 10). All three communities of memory
are essentially transnational—associations of Afghan war veterans, “children of war,” and former forced labor workers exist in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus alike. However, we can also observe significant differences in their political strategies and forms of interaction with the state, depending on the specificities of the political regimes and nation-building processes in these three countries.
Felix Ackermann approaches the role of the Afghan war veterans in renegotiating Belarusian war memory from a special angle, via a study of two post-Soviet war memorials erected on the veterans’ initiative and connecting the memories of the two wars. While the Island of Tears memorial created in the mid-1990s in central Minsk
reframed the recent Soviet past as national trauma and introduced Christian symbolic language into urban space, the “Stalin Line
” memorial, opened on the western outskirts of the city ten years later, reintroduced the figure of Stalin
and the narrative of the Great Victory, claiming such values as patriotism and heroism for the public education of Belarusian citizens. The two memorials illustrate the evolution of the national commemorative culture in line with the Belarusian political regime’s sliding towards authoritarianism, and the virtual continuity between the Great Victory of 1945 and the Soviet war in Afghanistan
.
Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s
chapter explores another community of memory which constitutes itself in terms of a generation: the “children of war
” in Russia. While the last Soviet war veterans are passing away, those who experienced World War II as children and adolescents now feature as the only living bearers of the memory of this epochal event. At the same time, the “children of war” generation is the most truly Soviet generation as far as their mentality is concerned. Moreover, having entered their “twilight years” in the new capitalist Russia they represent the troubled link between Soviet and post-Soviet history in a society where traditional values of respect for the elderly are in decay. By bringing together issues of generational memory
, social justice and Russia’s welfare state, the chapter analyzes grassroots social initiatives and strategies of the political elites in Russia aimed at the institutionalization of a special status for the “children of war
.”
Finally in Part III, Gelinada Grinchenko recounts the history of the emergence of another “community of memory,” this time in Ukraine: the Ostarbeiters or “Eastern workers,” civilians mobilized for labor purposes in the Third Reich
during the war. She shows how the stories of the Ostarbeiters, which were largely silenced during the Soviet period for their dissonance with the Soviet war myth, were recovered with the arrival of Ukrainian state independence in 1991 and incorporated into new national narratives of Ukrainian victimhood. In a parallel move, Grinchenko demonstrates how Ostarbeiters as a social group were reconstituted through post-Cold War
restitution politics when the German government finally acknowledged moral responsibility for forced labor as a crime of the Nazi regime and started issuing moral compensation for its victims.
Part IV: Old/New Narratives and Myths focuses on two elements that are fundamental to the creation of meaning: the narratives that shape identities, and the myths spun around these narratives. In this section, we explore different incarnations of narratives and myths of the war, past, present, and emerging, and trace their development over time.
Julie Fedor’s
chapter examines new Russian authoritarian kinship narratives in which the Red Army
soldier is reframed as a mythical progenitor and a shared forefather for all the peoples of post-Soviet space. This reframing is used to connect the official cult of the Great Victory and private family memories of loss and suffering, and also to construct the “Russian world” as a space that is saturated and sanctified by the Red Army’s blood.
Andrii Portnov
reflects on the rivalry and interplay between two prominent narratives of the war in Ukraine: the (post-)Soviet and the nationalist narratives. While these narratives are in most respects diametrically opposed, they resemble each other in one particular aspect: both of them marginalize the memory of the Holocaust
and the tragic fate of the Jewish population in Ukraine. Portnov’s chapter, which traces developments from the early 1990s through to the present, can serve as an introduction for all those interested in the issue of the Holocaust
in Ukraine. It offers a survey of public narratives at various levels, from the official political discourse and school history books to museums and memorials. The author shows not only where Jewish and Ukrainian narratives of World War II clash, but also where reconciliation is possible.
Simon Lewis’s chapter brings together trauma theory and
post-colonial theory in his study of the Soviet myth of
Belarus as the “Partisan Republic,” which he reads as both displaced trauma and colonial discourse. He explores a diverse range of Soviet and post-Soviet Belarusian narratives of the war in fiction, film, art, and popular culture. He shows that post-Soviet cultural production in Belarus consists of diverse narratives of Belarusian partisanhood that compete with each other to rewrite the Soviet narrative, as well as with the Lukashenka regime’s resurrection of Soviet myths about the war.
Finally, Part V: Local Cases zooms in on three examples that bring together the local, national, and transnational dimensions: Sevastopol
, Narva
, and Karelia
.
Ewa Ochman’s work (2009) has highlighted the special potential that commemorative practices have at the local level when it comes to challenging top-down nationalizing narratives of the past. In addition, they can also serve as a laboratory for new grassroots initiatives which later become appropriated at the national level (as Chap. 11 on the Immortal Regiment
initiative born in Tomsk
also shows). The three chapters in this section explore the complex interactions between top-down memory projects, both national and supranational, and local memory
actors. Adding to the complexity of multi-scalar memory politics, all three cases share a border location. Even if not openly contested by neighboring states as is Sevastopol
, both Estonian Narva
and Karelia
bordering with Finland are marginal geographic locations where the core of the new Russian identity has been renegotiated in contestation with various “others.”
Judy Brown’s chapter explores the war mythologies linked to the city of Sevastopol
, and the ways that these have been used in the disputes over the city’s ownership in the post-Soviet period. Based on the author’s fieldwork in the city, the chapter shows how the city’s local commemorative infrastructure, relying on grassroots enthusiasm, has served to promote a Russian imperial identity for Sevastopol’s inhabitants, drawing heavily on the Soviet myth of
the “hero-city.” A snapshot of the city indulged in neurotic obsession with its “glorious past” just a couple of years before the Russian annexation helps us to better understand the dramatic events of 2014.
Elena Nikiforova presents another urban memoryscape
: that of Narva
, which lies on the border dividing Russia and the European Union (Estonia), and the Russian and Estonian national memory cultures. While Narva
is part of Estonia and thus in geographic terms falls outside our region, we have included this chapter because it deals with the Russian war memory
which overlaps national and even geopolitical borders, as this chapter emphatically shows.
Finally, Aleksandr Antoshchenko, Valentina V. Volokhova, and Irina S. Shtykova explore the distinctive memorial landscape of Karelia
and the way that the history of the Finnish past and war memories are negotiated here. This region experienced the so-called “Winter War,” which began with the Soviet offensive on Finland on 30 November 1939. The brutal fighting ended with the annexation of Finnish territories on the Karelian isthmus and in Northern Ladoga region in 1940. The authors show how the official memory of the Great Patriotic War influenced the remembering (or rather, the forgetting) of the Winter War and its victims. They also demonstrate how the end of the Cold War
and the break with the Soviet past in the early 1990s affected the monumental memorialization of World War II in this border region.