Myths about the past in media environment: theoretical grounds and Russian political practice

This article is examines the issues of constructive use of the myths about the past in media environment. The goal lies in the attempt to align several most significant theoretical models of interpretation of the social myth in order to comprehend constructive use of myths about the past in modern Russian politics of memory. This required referring to the peculiarities of the ontology of the past in media myth, as well as to the trends characteristic to modern foreign and Russian research of the politics of memory. The scientific novelty lies in the detailed analysis of the key categories that reveal the peculiarities of creating ontology of the past in modern media myth, as well as allow analyzing the constructive potential of myths about the past in media environment in the context of the Russian politics of memory (the function of cultural-historical orientation, motivating function, functions of conflict settlement). The author explores myths about the past, which in recent decades have become a crucial instrument for conducting a peculiar type of information warfare – the so-called “memorial” wars.

Contemporary Policy Challenges Identity in the EU

The author of the article attempts to use the theories of the European identity, memory politics, identity politics by placing them in the context of the European (international) security. The author considers it fundamentally important to pay attention not so much to the threats to European identity, but to how identity is used to legitimize foreign policy of the European Union. The article highlights such perspectives of this problem as the confrontation inside the EU on the politics of memory and identity and the justification of the EU foreign policy towards Russia by the need to protect the European identity and European values. The author uses the discourse-analysis and identity research methods. The main emphasis is placed on the competitiveness of identity politics and the possibilities of using it for political purposes, to legitimize solutions to ensure the security of the European Union and the world as a whole.

Forgetting and Remembering the Socialist Past

In the early 1990s, the cultural landscape of Croatia went through radical changes, one of them being the destruction of the monuments built under socialism. Drawing on the author’s research on the monuments in the capital city of Zagreb, and on the existing research on the politics of memory in the broader post-Yugoslav region, this article asks about the disappearance of the monuments to partisan women in contemporary Zagreb. The main research question regards the gender dimension of the under-representation of women in public space. The hypothesis is that egalitarian gender relations, analyzed here through memorial representation, are important for the democratization of post-socialist societies. Additional focus is on ethnic belonging as an influential explanatory category in accounting for the disappearance of monuments to minority women in contemporary Croatia. The article adds a new empirical vantage point to help better understand the comparative framework of how the socialist past is remembered through monuments.

Review of the Book “Historical Memory in Social Media” by Sophia Tikhonova, Denis Artamonov

The subject of review is the book “Historical Memory in Social Media” by Sofya Tikhonova and Denis Artamonov. In the book, the authors focus on the design and specification of the production of images of the past on the Internet and the gaming industry, referring to various materials, from text “fake” messages and memes to computer games. Research is not limited to the description of empirical data. The supporting structure of the research is the author's concept of digital history and digital philosophy of history. Research optics is aimed at determining the status of the digital subject of history, which seems to be an acute anthropological and socio-philosophical problem. The book discusses the issues of modification of the politics of memory, the production of “fakes”, the connotation of historical events, the trend of miniaturization of history and the crisis of great narratives. Considerable attention is paid to the everyday everyday practices of information production, woven into the context of “history making”. The review pays attention to all the main structural parts of the book and reproduces the logical sequence of the key ideas of the text. With references to the original author's text, the reviewer also gives his own interpretations of the conceptual and terminological innovations of the book, and also focuses on some controversial aspects of the research.

The Politics of Russian Memory: The Great War in the European Context

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

The Memory Policy of the Second World War in the Post-Yugoslav Republics: Symbolic and Commemorative Aspects

The paper analyses the politics of memory of the World War II (WWII) in socialist Yugoslavia and compares the corresponding commemorative practices in the post-Yugoslav republics. The focus is on the design of holidays and memorial dates that reflect the symbolic and valuable attitudes of society, as well as the trajectory of nation-building. The formation of the state metanarrative in post-war Yugoslavia was closely related to the monopolisation of the leadership roles of the national liberation war by the communists, who united the six South Slavic nations in their struggle against the Nazi invaders. The state holidays and memorial days were derived from the history of resistance to foreign occupiers and internal enemies in order to legitimise and strengthen the triumph of the new socialist order. Alternative Yugoslavian non-communist movements, especially the Ustash and Chetniks who were potentially capable of competing in the symbolic field, were declared class enemies, reactionary elements, and quislings. As the processes of disintegration increased in socialist Yugoslavia, there were several attempts to revise its ideological attitudes and symbolic heritage of WWII. Nevertheless, as the study shows these attempts became, rather, a marginal phenomenon, and most post-Yugoslav states retained the commemorative, albeit de-ideologised, practices of the previous period.

Politics of Memory in Cities Divided by State Borders: Theoretical and Methodological Framework of Research

In the article the author attempts to outline theoretical and methodological framework used in analyzing the phenomenon of specific history politics in cities divided by state borders – places where sometimes radically different history narrations meet or even clash. The article is composed of three parts. The first one specifies the concept of history politics in nationwide dimension (“history politics”). The second part analyzes history politics in local dimension (“local politics of memory”). With reference to these two concepts – levels of history politics and politics of memory – the author indicates: goals, subjects, methods and tools of history politics/politics of memory. The final section of the paper aims at capturing the specificity of history politics in cities divided by state borders and indicating models of relations between different kinds of politics of memory in cities divided by state borders.