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Memory wars beyond the metaphor: Reflections on Russia’s mnemonic propaganda
... The impact of Russia's war against Ukraine, which began in 2014 and escalated with the full-scale invasion in 2022, has been extensively examined in scholarly research regarding the mnemonic frameworks of Russia and Ukraine (e.g. Belavusau, Gliszczynska-Grabias, and Mälksoo 2021;Dekel 2022;Koposov 2018;Mälksoo 2023;McGlynn 2020;Nekoliak 2022;Noordenbos 2022). However, relatively little attention has been paid to how this conflict has shaped the mnemonic trajectories of major Western European democracies, such as Italy. 1 To explore these dynamics, our analysis focuses specifically on the memory laws enacted or amended following the onset of the invasion. ...
... It continued in 2022 with the framing of Ukrainians as neo-Nazis. From the start of the invasion, Russian propaganda spoke of "another" liberation of Europe from Nazism, and the Soviet "Victory Banner" was displayed on military hardware and government buildings throughout occupied Ukraine (Noordenbos 2022). While official memory politics did not promote a positive view of Stalin, the Great Patriotic War memory is inextricably linked to his name (Klimenko 2021). ...
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.
... This is especially true for a challenging element of recent justifications brought forward by the Russian regime: the outright approval-not-even-denial-of perpetration. The oftentimes "shockingly explicit" (Noordenbos, 2022(Noordenbos, : 1299 statements of violent intent that operate beyond denial and other forms of "non-memory" (Sendyka, 2022) pose one of the crucial "challenges for memory studies" (Saryusz-Wolska et al., 2022) that the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine entails. ...
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 challenges memory studies to analyze transmissions of discourses which justify mass violence and challenge the focus on denial. On the one hand, the Russian regime’s claim to undertake “denazification” and prevent a “genocide” expounds the seminal role of cultural memory in politics. The weaponization of history, international law, and religion is widely accepted in Russian society and by global populisms. On the other hand, the invasion came as a surprise even to many experts because in politics, media, and research, justifications of mass violence are often dismissed as pretexts distracting from facts. Yet, the dismissal entails a major lacuna: we know too little about how justifications travel through societies and have a long-term impact. The article proposes that while acts of mass violence alter political and socio-economic realities, justifications of mass violence establish the linguistic and heuristic parameter for their subsequent juridical, moral, and scholarly evaluation. Normalizations of justifications contribute to perpetuating societal fault lines and set the frame for further conflict. The memory studies focus on transgenerational transmissions of psycho-social sequalae of violence laid the groundwork for understanding longue durée transmissions. However, memory studies have focused on denial as a key psychological and political driving force of transmissions, while, for instance, Russian and Serbian memory cultures are shaped by both denial and outright affirmations—not-even-denial—of past mass violence as model for present politics. Memory studies provide the appropriate conceptual space as a framework for addressing implicit normalizations and explicit affirmations of justifications of mass violence.
This paper seeks to enhance memory studies' conceptual toolkit by reconsidering established perspectives on “memory politics.” The paper theorizes various modes of temporal connectivity cultivated through politicized references to a shared past. Our empirical case is focused on a collection of roughly 5.000 recent articles about the war in Ukraine from major Russian state-aligned news outlets. We analyze and typologize the narrative and rhetorical gestures by which these articles make the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” and the post-Soviet “special military operation” speak to one another, both prior to and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates that even in contemporary Russia's tightly controlled, propagandistic mass media ecology, politicized uses of memory foster diverse temporal structures within the propaganda narratives. We present a typology of these relations, mapping the distinct modes and intensities of connections between past and present. At one end of the spectrum, we identify a mode of temporal organization that presents past events and figures as fully detached from the present, available solely for historiographic reflection. At the other end, we find narratives that entirely collapse historical distance, addressing contemporary audiences as participants in a timeless war drama, with stakes that transcend any specific historical period. We propose that the presented typology may be applicable beyond our specific case. As a tool for analyzing the hitherto understudied organization of time in politicized articulations of memory, it could be employed in various cultural and political contexts. Furthermore, our approach can serve as a foundation for future research into the actual persuasive and affective impact that specific temporal modalities may have on their target audiences.
This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The museums share a stated mission to produce a cosmopolitan mode of remembering based on universal values and empathy for victims with a preventive mission for the sake of the future. The article examines original data from visitor focus groups to understand the emotional impact of these museums. The Moscow museum manufactures the atmosphere of the Gulag through interactive sensory stimulation. We found that this can meet resistance from visitors who sense that their emotions are being manipulated. We found that the Tomsk museum directly elicits strong emotional responses but responses could also include dark tourist titillation. In conclusion, we consider how these findings speak to debates around the tension between cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering.
The purpose of this article is to explore potential avenues for the forthcoming “fourth wave” of memory studies, building upon existing theories of temporality in the field. By focusing on relative duration, particularly short-term versus long-term perspectives, it argues for the differentiation between objects of remembering, such as events and conditions, and modes of remembering, such as commemoration, legacy, and heritage. The article argues that our present moment is characterized by the proliferation of temporalities of various scales and the complex interplay between forms of memory and the scales against which it is constructed. This argument is illustrated by the different forms of the Chernobyl disaster remembering in Russia as well as Putin’s strategic use of historical analogies from the distant past. Finally, the article proposes an agenda for the politics of time, expanding the scope of the “politics of memory” to encompass the social construction of past, present, and future on different scales and their use by existing systems of power.
There are many research studies on the functions and background motives underlying belief in conspiracy theories (Douglas et al. 2017) and also the negative consequences of conspiracy theories (Douglas et al. 2015; see also Chapter 2.7 in this volume). However, we so far only have a limited knowledge of the most practical implications of conspiracy theories: How they can be changed, debunked and modified. This chapter tries to systemically overview and summarise the most important research so far concerning the possibilities of changing conspiracy beliefs via targeted interventions.
I do not take it for granted that there is a consensus over the need for interventions. In the beginning of the chapter, we take a look at the epistemological, moral and democratic arguments on whether, and when, we need to use interventions to reduce conspiracy beliefs. Then we briefly overview some psychological obstacles in the way of interventions. In the next section, we propose a matrix as a theoretical framework for categorising the possible interventions and overview the available academic literature as well as some practical experiences concerning efficient ways of reducing conspiracy beliefs. In the final section, we identify a broader avenue for future research.
This article examines how Second World War memory is circulated, reproduced, and challenged in the transnational space of digital media by Ukrainian and Russian Internet users. Using as a case study one episode of the war on the Eastern Front—the capture of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, by the Red Army in 1943—it investigates how this event is commemorated through YouTube, which is a popular online platform for uploading, viewing, and commenting on audiovisual materials. This article employs content analysis to assess audiovisual tributes to the Battle of Kyiv from two perspectives: that of representation (how the event is presented on YouTube) and that of interaction (how YouTube users interact with memory of the event). This article concludes that although YouTube is frequently used for the propagation of nationalistic interpretations of the past in Ukraine and Russia, it still has the potential to democratize collective remembrance of the Second World War.
Analysts of the post-Soviet memory wars in Ukraine have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the ways in which Ukrainian memory is shaped by regional differences. The regional dimension is certainly important here, but approaching Ukrainian memory exclusively through this lens can serve to obscure other aspects of the landscape. In this chapter, I aim to shift the perspective, with a view to emancipating the rich social reality of Ukrainian memory from the pressures of normative and essentializing schemas and one-sided reductive assessments. Focusing on the changing politics of memory during the presidencies of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2004) and Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), I will show that this politics, far from having been structured and predetermined by rigid and entrenched regional fault lines, has in fact been deeply contingent and deeply contradictory. The search for a strategy that would legitimize the new independent Ukraine and its post-Soviet elite without provoking national, linguistic, and/or religious conflict, while all the time with an eye to Russia, was all about improvisation.
This collection links the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus in particular is on mediation and remediation as two fundamental aspects of media use, and on the dynamics between them. Key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered? This book first appeared as a hardback volume in the De Gruyter series Media and Cultural Memory Studies. With the present book the original articles are reissued in an affordable paperback edition for graduate students and scholars in the field of Media and Memory Studies.
In this paper I seek to challenge the dominant modes of conceiving the relationship between memory and national identity, and in so doing offer analysts of nationalism an improved understanding of the dynamics of national identity formation. The concept of collective memory is invoked regularly in attempts to explain the pervasiveness and power of nationalism. I argue that the concept is misused routinely in this context, and instead I employ a 'social agency' approach to theorizing, whereby memory is conceived in a more limited and cogent manner. I argue that it is important to distinguish clearly between memory and mythology, both of which are essential to understanding national identity, for not only are the two concepts distinct, they can also act in opposition to each other. Following from this I introduce the notion of a 'mythscape', the temporally and spatially extended discursive realm in which the myths of the nation are forged, transmitted, negotiated, and reconstructed constantly. Through employing the idea of a mythscape we can relate memory and mythology to each other in a theoretically profitable way.