At the beginning of the war in the Donbas , in early June 2014, long before Russia had filled the region with weapons, pro-Russian separatists in the small town of Konstantynivka in the Donetsk region told journalists that the tank they were using against the Ukrainian army had been taken down from the plinth of a World War II memorial in a local park, repaired, refueled, and “brought back to life” (Segodnia 2014). Regardless of whether the story is true, the metaphor is powerful—it suggests that the ghosts of a war that ended seventy years ago are easily evoked.
This edited collection contributes to the current vivid multidisciplinary debate on memory politics in Eastern Europe, focusing on the re-narration and political instrumentalization of World War II memories in the post-Soviet context. At the same time, our book has a distinctive geographic focus: we concentrate on the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eastern Europe—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Together they comprise the epicenter of Soviet war suffering, and the heartland of the Soviet war myth. In all three countries, memories of the war have been central in post-Soviet identity making; yet they demonstrate very different trajectories of nation-building and memory regimes. Contributions to our volume give insight into the persistence of the Soviet commemorative culture of World War II and the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the post-Soviet space. Yet the volume also demonstrates that due to various geopolitical, cultural, and historical reasons the political uses of World War II in post-Soviet Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus differ significantly, with important ramifications for future developments in the region and beyond.
The enduring prominence of World War II as a key theme in the national narratives of our target countries is unsurprising given the special intensity and scale of war suffering in this part of Europe. The war experience was especially traumatic here, where the population experienced unprecedented human losses, the destruction of the basic infrastructure, repressions under two occupational regimes, mass murder, deportations and ethnic cleansings. In this part of Europe, which (together with Poland ) Timothy Snyder (2010) called the “Bloodlands,” the brutalities of the war itself can hardly be separated from the mass crimes of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes. Although the scale of suffering was highest in Ukraine and Belarus, where the entire territory was occupied and devastated, in the Western optic these two countries tend to be subsumed under the sign of “Russia” and disappear from view. In this volume, we set out to offer a corrective to this view by broadening the lens beyond the Russian perspective.
The contributors to this book document the explosion of new memory practices, agents, symbols, and narratives that is currently underway in the Russia–Ukraine–Belarus triangle. At one level, these should be read in the context of an important event that we are presently witnessing: the passing of the last living World War II veterans. Stephen M. Norris has described how the 2010 Victory Day was framed by some Russian media as “The Last Parade” of the veterans and the end of the “living memory” of the war (Norris 2011). With the passing of this generation, the war memory is making the transition from the realm of communicative memory to that of cultural memory , to use Jan Assmann’s influential terms (2008). Assmann distinguished between communicative memory , based on an exchange of direct, biographical experience, and cultural memory, which is “a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent” (116–117). It is precisely this moment of transition that is reflected throughout the contributions to the book, documenting as they do the compulsive search for new forms of remembering, manifested in the war theme’s renewed prominence in mass culture, and in both public and private life, and in the production of new and reconstituted myths. At this moment of anxiety, as the direct bearers of World War II memory pass away, the memory of the war becomes if anything even more ever-present, and in many ways more unstable, in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
The proliferation of new war monuments , and of public calls to keep the memory of war “alive,” hide a widespread anxiety related to the current moment of generational change and to entering a new world without the “war generation” whose moral authority was almost univocally accepted in fragmented and politically polarized post-Soviet societies. Many of the new practices explored in the book can be seen as part of what Elena Rozhdestvenskaya has called the “hyper-exploitation of the past Victory” which “leads to the constant making-present of the war experience, to the unending search for new methods of commemoration, so as to further extend the life of this event” (Rozhdestvenskaya 2015). 1 David R. Marples (2014: ix) has asked: what consequences will the passing of the last veterans have for the ongoing viability of state reliance on the war myth? These consequences are still unfolding, but the contributors to this book go some way towards answering this question.
The book is a late fruit of the international research project Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland , Russia, and Ukraine, led by Alexander Etkind and based at the University of Cambridge in 2010–2013, and draws on the international symposium “Narratives of Suffering in Post-Cold War Europe: The Second World War in Transnational Contexts,” organized by the Helsinki team of the project at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki in September 2012. 2 The production of this volume coincided with (and was delayed by) dramatic events in our region, as discursive memory wars merged with and fueled a real war in Ukraine, following the events of the Euromaidan (2013–2014). These events reconfigured lives, societies, identities, and politics in our region, first of all in Ukraine and Russia. These changes have also reconfigured the field of our research. The book does not focus on these recent changes, although most chapters do address them (and we discuss them in a dedicated section of this introduction).
Instead, the book offers a deeper and broader contextualization of the politics of war memory within the Russia–Ukraine–Belarus triangle. We present here a collection of empirically rich case studies exploring political, social and cultural dimensions, and on multiple scales, from the local—Sevastopol , Narva , Karelia ; to the national; and through to the transnational, since the cultures of remembrance analyzed here are not limited by state borders. 3 Several of the chapters trace back the evolution of these memory cultures and narratives since the early 1990s, and some go back further still. In this way we set out to add historical depth to our understanding of the present situation in the region, and also to offer a more differentiated view on history and memory politics in the different countries under discussion.
In this introductory essay, we begin by discussing World War II memory in our region in light of the war in Ukraine that is ongoing at the time of writing (2017). We outline the main contours of the interplay between “memory wars ” and real war, and the important “post-Crimean” qualitative shift that we see in local memory cultures in this connection. Next, we sketch out a brief overview of the specifics of the war memory landscapes of the region, and then of each of the three individual countries, before moving on to introduce the book’s key organizing themes and findings.
From Memory Wars to Real Wars
The post-Soviet “memory wars ”—the ongoing struggle to define and narrate the past as a foundation for present and future identities—and the real war currently underway in the Donbas , are deeply interconnected on multiple levels. Memory politics have shaped and driven the current violence in Ukraine in important and complex ways. The ideological justification for Russian aggression against the fledgling Ukrainian state has been based heavily on claims about the memory of the past, and the current war in Ukraine is routinely imagined, narrated, and justified as a continuation of World War II. Pro-democratic forces in Ukraine have been systematically demonized in the Russian media as “neo-Nazis,” intent on erasing the historical memory of the Soviet Victory and perpetrating genocide against Russian and Jewish minorities. The “fascist” label is routinely applied not just to Ukrainians, but to a diverse range of objects at home and abroad, from Russian schoolchildren researching their family histories (Pavlova 2016), 4 to Western human rights activists (Obukhov 2016). 5
At one level, this is nothing new. For decades now, the past has been a key battleground in the struggle for the present and future in our region. Memory activism played a prominent driving role in protest movements in the twilight days of the Soviet bloc, and ever since, symbolic politics surrounding the past have been a crucial site of contestation, reflecting and shaping post-Soviet evolution in important ways (Miller and Lipman 2012; Tismaneanu et al. 2010; Stan 2008). In particular, debates over how to commemorate victims of state violence in the past have been closely intertwined with debates over human rights in the present, as they have elsewhere in the world. (On the linkage between human rights and remembrance, see Huyssen 2003; Winter 2013.)
But with the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we can talk about a new quality of post-Soviet memory politics, or perhaps even a new phenomenon that goes beyond the usual ways of instrumentalizing the past. In the current Russian–Ukrainian conflict, we are witnessing the emergence and in some cases the cultivation of what amounts to a new temporality in w...