War, Politics and Memory: Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II
The myth of the Great Patriotic War, including the role of the USSR in the origins of World War II, continues to be a key element in the national identity of the Russian people. Previously, Soviet authorities mandated a narrative depicting the Soviet Union sincerely and unambiguously working for peace and against Nazi expansionism in the prewar years. This interpretation criticized the Western Powers for their alleged complicity in Hitler's aggression. After the collapse of the USSR, several competing views have appeared. The Putin and Medvedev administrations, as well as the popular "national-patriotic" school, maintain much of the former Soviet interpretation. Other Russian historians, many of them politically liberal, indict Stalin for mishandling the prewar crisis or even for promoting the onset of war for imperialistic or revolutionary purposes.
The Government’s Remembrance Policy: Five Theoretical Hypotheses
Remembrance is a powerful instrument of social mobilisation, identity construction and political competition. Its impact on individual and shared beliefs or attitudes makes it an object of government’s interest, because remembrance can be used to legitimise ideologies or policies. Theoretical considerations of a government’s role as a narrator lead us to the general definition of the government’s remembrance policy, which we understand as a complex of narratives and interpretations presented to influence citizens’ attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and identities. The paper develops the definition with five theoretical hypotheses on the effectiveness of remembrance narratives. It argues that the government’s remembrance policy is myth-motoric, non-scientific, emotional, based on commitment and that it is a type of social influence. The study is an initial verification of theoretical approach, and I believe that my arguments will motivate other researchers to investigate different aspects of a government’s desire to narrate past events.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.