scholarly journals Historical Memory of the Great Patriotic War as a Soft Power Resource of Modern Russia

Author(s):  
A.O. Naumov

The article is devoted to the study of the role of historical memory of the Great Patriotic War as a resource of soft power of the Russian Federation. The research methods used are the method of historicism, institutional approach and comparative analysis. In this context, the countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) and the BRICS (Russia, Brazil, India, China, South Africa) are considered as objects of implementation of the domestic soft power policy. The author reveals the awareness of the peoples of these states about the history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War, the attitude of political elites to the events of 1939-1945, peculiarity of state politics of historical memory in relation to this global conflict. Based on this analysis, proposals are formulated to optimize the Russian strategy of soft power in the EEU and BRICS countries. The author concludes that the narrative of the Great Victory is potentially a very effective resource of modern Russia’s soft power.

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Natalia Kuzovova

The goal of the paper is to study the activity of the party archives of the Communist Party of Ukraine (the CPU) in 1960-1980, aimed at creating sets of documents about the Second World War - the documents of personal origin and thematic collections; to determine the main principles that guided the archival institutions while conducting the selection of fund-forming agents and documents which in their opinion were supposed to adequately reflect the Second World War events; to characterize the directions of search, archeographic and publishing work of Soviet archivists; to analyse the information content, completeness, and reliability of the created sets of documents, the consequences of the party archives' activity for the historical memory of the Second World War events.  Research methodology. In the course of the research, general scientific and specific historical methods of source and archival heuristics, scientific criticism of sources, diplomatic, textual, and hermeneutical analysis were used.  Scientific novelty. The paper introduces the previously unpublished documents on the history of party archives into scientific discourse and reveals the technologies for falsifying the Second World War history at the level of archival institutions during the specified period.Conclusions. In the course of the research, it was found out that the document collections were made in violation of the principles of archival science, which led to the shaping of the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War. However, as a result of their activities, the archivists accumulated a lot of interesting historical material, which was not made public due to ideological principles and it creates a certain field for contemporary studies on the history of the Second World War.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-105

The article discusses a neglected aspect in the history of the Second World War and the role of Armenians and their motivation to fight against the Nazi Germany. The author suggests that the memory of the Genocide against the Armenians perpetratrated by Turkey in the First World War with connivence from Germany played an important role in the memory of Soviet Armenians enrolled in the Red Army. This is one of the explanations why the present day Republic of Armenia still maintains – from different reasons – the name The Great Patriotic War instead of Second World War, like Russia.


Author(s):  
Elena Krasnozhenova

The Third International Scientific and Educational Conference – “USSR in the Second World War (1939–1945): Historical Memory Issues” was devoted to the 75th Anniversary of the Victory over Nazi Germany and its Allies. The conference became a platform to address topical issues regarding preserving and popularizing the war memories and discussing the role of the USSR in the victory over fascism. The historical events of the Great Patriotic War and Second World War, being both part of historical memory and objects of historical studies, were given consi­deration. The review of the reports, presented at the conference, demonstrates that the authors extensively expand their source base, reconsider the formal concept of war, raise new problems and questions, and apply new approaches to study war memories in general.


Author(s):  
О. А. Mironova ◽  
A. E. Maksimov

The relevance of the problem is that at the present stage of development of public relations between Western countries and Russia, attempts are being made to revise the history of the Second world war and such attempts are becoming more distinct over time. The paper proposes to consider the reasons for such actions and analyze the legal acts that are adopted by countries in some countries in the direction of reviewing the prerequisites, causes and results of the great Patriotic War. The methods used in this work are comparative descriptions of normative legal acts aimed at prohibiting Communist symbols and placing them on a par with Nazi symbols. It is also proposed to understand the reasons for the preparation and publication of such acts on the territory of some countries, using the example of the Baltic States and Ukraine. In the final part of the work, we can draw a conclusion about the similarity of legal acts adopted by these States, their uniform policy in the framework of consideration of historical and legal assessments of the Second world war. The results of the work are recommendations that are proposed to be considered and discussed on these proposals, which are aimed at popularizing Patriotic tourism, preserving historical justice and preventing the reformatting of the prerequisites, causes and results of the great Patriotic War. The value of the work is to collect information from official sources, to structure it and to be able to use it in practice. This work allows us to give our own assessment of the formation of rule-making in some post-Soviet countries in the field of discussing the history of the Second world war. The paper provides recommendations for preserving historical memory and achieving the principles of openness and fairness in the interpretation of the results of the Second world war.


Author(s):  
David Hardiman

Much of the recent surge in writing about the practice of nonviolent forms of resistance has focused on movements that occurred after the end of the Second World War, many of which have been extremely successful. Although the fact that such a method of civil resistance was developed in its modern form by Indians is acknowledged in this writing, there has not until now been an authoritative history of the role of Indians in the evolution of the phenomenon.The book argues that while nonviolence is associated above all with the towering figure of Mahatma Gandhi, 'passive resistance' was already being practiced as a form of civil protest by nationalists in British-ruled India, though there was no principled commitment to nonviolence as such. The emphasis was on efficacy, rather than the ethics of such protest. It was Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, who evolved a technique that he called 'satyagraha'. He envisaged this as primarily a moral stance, though it had a highly practical impact. From 1915 onwards, he sought to root his practice in terms of the concept of ahimsa, a Sanskrit term that he translated as ‘nonviolence’. His endeavors saw 'nonviolence' forged as both a new word in the English language, and as a new political concept. This book conveys in vivid detail exactly what such nonviolence entailed, and the formidable difficulties that the pioneers of such resistance encountered in the years 1905-19.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how Poland was one of the principal areas where the Nazis attempted to carry out their planned genocide of European Jewry. It was there that the major death camps were established and that Jews were brought from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to be gassed, above all in Auschwitz, where at least 1 million lost their lives in this way. There is no more controversial topic in the history of the Jews in Poland than the question of the degree of responsibility borne by Polish society for the fact that such a small proportion of Polish Jewry escaped the Nazi mass murderers. The primary responsibility clearly lies with the Nazis. However, the recognition of the primary role of the Germans in the genocide has not prevented bitter arguments over Polish behaviour during the Second World War. Jews have harshly criticized what they see as Polish indifference to the fate of the Jews and the willingness of a minority to aid the Nazis or to take advantage of the new conditions to profit at Jewish expense.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Olzacka

Abstract In the aftermath of the violent Revolution of Dignity (2013/2014) and the subsequent war in Donbas (2014–), a heroic story about the new beginning of a “united, Ukrainian nation” began to emerge. Shaping this new narrative are new museum projects devoted to Ukraine’s developing history. This article examines the process of these new institutions’ formation, the content of created exhibitions, and the activities conducted therein. It focuses on the role of the museums in activating, unifying, and integrating both the Ukrainian national community and civil society. This article is based on a qualitative analysis of materials collected during seven research stays in Ukraine, from June 2017 to August 2019, and focuses on four cases–Ukraine’s First ATO Museum in Dnipro; the Museum of the Heavenly Hundred in Ivano-Frankivsk; the Ukrainian East exhibition in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War in Kyiv; and a project of the Museum of the Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. The examined institutions are presented not only as places for gathering artifacts but also as laboratories of civic activism, participation, and dialogue.


Author(s):  
Adalbert BARAN

The present article deals with the comparative analysis of the methodological bases of depicting the authenticity, features, and character of ideological-thematic reflection of the Second World War events on the pages of the novel by Russian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) «Life and Fate» (1960), the masterpiece by the American novelist James Jones (1921-1977) «From here to eternity» (1953) and the work by the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész (1929-2016) «Fatelessness» (1975). The novels' authors did not need to interpret historical events by other people's memories and strive for a documentary. The original document in the novels was the life and unique memory of the writers themselves, and not only in the sense of the artistic reproduction of the true sides of the survived and seen, but also in terms of serious thoughts about the relationship of the past with the present in their moral, social, philosophical and ethical aspects. The article highlights the events and circumstances that predetermined the formation of features of the writers' worldview and led to the writing of the novels on military topics. The novels «Life and Fate», «Fatelessness», and «From here to eternity» can be considered as deeply personal works by the writers who have not declared, magnified the events of the history in context, but through the image system of the novels deeply examined, analyzed their roots. The authors of the novels have shown the history of the 20th century not on the background of exaggerated, politically agitating, heroic pictures, but from the point of view of the true significance of historical events for modern society. Keywords: documentary, historical memory, regime, literary tradition, writer’s consciousness, historical concreteness.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Oeste

<p>Was the evacuation program for British children during the Second World War a success or a failure? This paper analyses how various types of sources, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, provide different answers to this question, and ultimately impact how the evacuations take shape in public memory.</p>


Author(s):  
Molly Pucci

The secret police were one of the most important institutions in the making of communist Eastern Europe. Security Empire compares the early history of secret police institutions, which were responsible for foreign espionage, domestic surveillance, and political violence in communist states, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany after the Second World War. While previous histories have assumed that these forces were copies of the Soviet model, the book delves into the ways their origins diverged due to local social conditions, languages, and interpretations of communism. It illuminates the internal tensions inside the forces, between veteran agents who had fought in wars in Spain and Germany, and the younger, more radical agents, who pushed forward the violence, arrests, and show trials inside Eastern European communist parties in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In doing so, the book traces the role of political violence, ideological belief, and surveillance in building communist institutions in Europe by the mid-1950s.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document