Russian National Myth In Transition

This volume is part of the sub-series Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia, XIV, and unites scholars from Estonia, Finland, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Canada who belong to the tradition of the Tartu Lotman school. This collective monograph explores the development of national myth on the basis of a variety of materials from Russian culture, beginning from the Late Middle Ages and finishing with the Soviet epoch. The main part of the study is devoted to the Imperial period--the epoch during which the notion of nation arises. Analyzing the mechanisms used to construct national ideology, the authors especially stress the participation of literature and art in nation building: the role of the press, theatre, writers and their works in their dependence upon historical matters and political conjuncture.

Kathleen E. Smith examines the use of collective memories in Russian politics during the Yeltsin years, surveying the various issues that became battlegrounds for contending notions of what it means to be Russian.

The memory of past atrocity lingers like a ghost at the table of democracy. Injustices carried out in the past - from massacres and murder to repression and detention - embitter societies and distort their structures so that the process of establishing and running a democracy carries an extra burden. This volume examines societies at various stages of dealing with the memory of the past, from China, Mongolia, Indonesia and the Baltic States, where bitter memories of death and persecution still intrude, to Finland, where the civil war of 1918 has finally been accepted as a distant national tragedy.

This book examines how civil society engages with transitional justice in Russia, demonstrating a broad range of roles civil society can undertake while operating in a restrictive political context. Based on sociolegal research, the study focuses on three types of civil society groups dealing with the legacies of the Soviet repression in Russia – a prominent organisation that works on recovering historical truth, the International Memorial; a parish of the Orthodox Church of Russia operating at a former mass execution and mass burial site, the Church at Butovo; and contentious groups that could hinder attempts at reckoning and promote state narratives built on the Stalinist and WWII victory myths. This book explores an often-overlooked case of Russia’s transitional justice ‘from below.’ It provides insights into how even in authoritarian contexts, civil society can adopt imaginative, piecemeal, and at times unconventional ways of seeking justice outside and in the absence of official and institutionalised transitional justice measures. This book will appeal to scholars of transitional justice, memory studies, human rights, and democratic and civil society theory, as well as policymakers and practitioners in these fields, and others with interests in Russian and post-Soviet studies.

The 2010s saw an introduction of legislative acts about religion, sexuality, and culture in Russia, which caused an uproar of protests. They politicized areas of life commonly perceived as private and expected to be free of the state's control. As a result, political activism and radical grassroots movements engaged many Russians in controversies about religion and culture and polarized popular opinion in the capitals and regions alike. This volume presents seven case studies which probe into the politics of religion and culture in today's Russia. The contributions highlight the diversity of Russia's religious communities and cultural practices by analyzing Hasidic Jewish identities, popular culture sponsored by the Orthodox Church, literary mobilization of the National Bolshevik Party, cinematic narratives of the Chechen wars, militarization of political Orthodoxy, and moral debates caused by opera as well as film productions. The authors draw on a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies, including opinion surveys, ethnological fieldwork, narrative analysis, Foucault's conceptualization of biopower, catachrestic politics, and sociological theories of desecularization. The volume’s contributors are Sanna Turoma, Kaarina Aitamurto, Tomi Huttunen, Susan Ikonen, Boris Knorre, Irina Kotkina, Jussi Lassila, Andrey Makarychev, Elena Ostrovskaya, and Mikhail Suslov.

A comprehensive overview of the efforts of state and non-state actors in the former Soviet Union to redress the past.

Russian history is first and foremost a history of personalized power. As Russia startles the international community with its assertiveness and faces both parliamentary and presidential elections, Lilia Shevtsova searches the histories of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes. She explores within them conventional truths and myths about Russia, paradoxes of Russian political development, and Russia's role in the world. Russia--Lost in Transition discovers a logic of government in Russia--a political regime and the type of capitalism that were formulated during the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies and will continue to dominate Russia's trajectory in the near term. Looking forward as well as back, Shevtsova speculates about the upcoming elections as well as the self-perpetuating system in place--the legacies of Yeltsin and Putin--and how it will dictate the immediate political future. She also explores several scenarios for Russia's future over the next decade.

This book explores the mythology woven around the Soviet secret police and the Russian cult of state security that has emerged from it. Tracing the history of this mythology from the Soviet period through to its revival in contemporary post-Soviet Russia, the volume argues that successive Russian regimes have sponsored a ‘cult’ of state security, whereby security organs are held up as something to be worshipped. The book approaches the history of this cult as an ongoing struggle to legitimise and sacralise the Russian state security apparatus, and to negotiate its violent and dramatic past. It explores the ways in which, during the Soviet period, this mythology sought to make the existence of the most radically intrusive and powerful secret police in history appear ‘natural’. It also documents the contemporary post-Soviet re-emergence of the cult of state security, examining the ways in which elements of the old Soviet mythology have been revised and reclaimed as the cornerstone of a new state ideology. The Russian cult of state security is of ongoing contemporary relevance, and is crucial for understanding not only the tragedies of Russia’s twentieth-century history, but also the ambiguities of Russia’s post-Soviet transition, and the current struggle to define Russia’s national identity and future development. The book examines the ways in which contemporary Russian life continues to be shaped by the legacy of Soviet attitudes to state-society relations, as expressed in the reconstituted cult of state security. It investigates the shadow which the figure of the secret policeman continues to cast over Russia today. The book will be of great interest to students of modern Russian history and politics, intelligence studies and security studies, as well as readers with an interest in the KGB and its successors.