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.
Triumphant memory of the perpetrators: Putin's politics of re-Stalinization
Abstract In this article, I explore the interconnection between Putin's politics of re-Stalinization, historical memory, and a specific version of the post-Soviet neo-medievalism. I show that re-Stalinization is a mass movement that is grounded in the unprocessed memory of Soviet crimes and atrocities. The popular myth of the “Great Patriotic War” and the myth of Stalinism as the Golden Age exploited by Putin's memory politics became a gold mine for Putin's kleptocracy. I argue that re-Stalinization and the Kremlin-sponsored ideology of Eurasianism represents two interrelated trends of a complex ideological process. Eurasianism combines Soviet denial of individuality with the idea of a state-dependent patriarchal society and Russian historical messianism. It glorifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. The ‘medievalist’ discourse of Eurasian ideologists, which advocates a return to the medieval society of orders, on the one hand, and the Gothic monsters populating post-Soviet film and fiction, on the other, creates a political language that expresses new attitudes to people in post-Soviet Russia. They depict a new social contract that reconsiders the modern concept of citizenship, and creates a social basis for the criminalization and militarization of Russian society.
Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus
List of Figures and Maps Acknowledgements Chapter 1. Heirs of Antigone: Disappearances and Political Memory Chapter 2. Suppressed Experiences Chapter 3. Testimonies of Fragmentation, Recollections of Unity Chapter 4. The Missing as a Set of Representations Chapter 5. The Martyrdom of the Missing Chapter 6. L'image Juste, or Juste une Image? Chapter 7. Painting Absences, Describing Losses Chapter 8. Antigone's Doubt, Creon's Dilemma Chapter 9. Power, Complicity, and Public Secrecy Bibliography Appendices Index