Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies

9. Divisive Historical Memories: Russia and Eastern Europe

234 Chapter 9 Divisive Historical Memories Russia and Eastern Europe Igor Torbakov There appears to be a consensus among professional historians and political analysts that over the past several decades, the “politics of history” has become a significant aspect of domestic politics and international relations, both within Europe and in the world at large.1 This trend toward politicizing and instrumentalizing of history might take on various shapes and forms in different countries, but there are basically two main objectives that are usually pursued. The first is the construction of a maximally cohesive national identity and the rallying of the society around the powers that be. The second is eschewing the problem of guilt.2 The two are clearly interlinked : having liberated oneself of the sense of historical, political, or moral responsibility, it is arguably much easier to take pride in one’s newly minted “unblemished” identity based on the celebratory interpretation of one’s country’s “glorious past,” which is habitually regarded as “more a source of comfort than a source of truth.”3 It is therefore extremely important to investigate the vital links between history, memory, and national identity. The main objective of this chapter, then, is to explore how the memories of some momentous developments in the tumultuous twentieth century (above all, the experience of totalitarian dictatorships, World War II, the “division” and “reunification” of Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union) and their historical interpretations relate to concepts of national identity in Eastern Europe and Russia. Identities are understood here not as something immutable; by contrast, I proceed from the premise that identities are constantly being constructed and reconstructed in the course of historical process. “As communities and individuals interpret and reinterpret their [historical] experiences . . . they create their own constantly Russia and Eastern Europe 235 shifting national identities in the process.”4 But national “remembering” is a tricky and controversial business. As the late Tony Judt argued, “Memory is inherently contentious and partisan: one man’s acknowledgement is another’s omission.”5 Any interpretation of the past based on national “remembering” would inevitably involve not only the self-image of a given nation but the latter’s relations with the other nations as well. A clash between national memories is thus prone to lead to the growth of tensions between states. This explains, the Estonian analyst Maria Mälksoo points out, why any “national memory” has a “foreign policy dimension and context to it.”6 As states seek to strengthen not only their physical security but also their self-perception and self-image in international relations, while they desire to have their stories reinforced by significant others, it is under the umbrella of memory politics that identity policies and security policies meet. If identity is a security issue, it is often the case that memory also becomes a security issue—or is securitised. In addition to classic security dilemmas, new ontological security dilemmas emerge: the certainty of “our” story undermines the ontological uncertainty of “them”; they consider our interpretation of history to be hostile to theirs, which is why they launch memory political counterattacks against us.7 Why Escalation? All is not quiet on the Eastern (European) front. The past two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union have witnessed an escalation of memory wars in which Russia has largely found itself on the defensive, its official historical narrative being vigorously assaulted by a number of the newly independent ex-Soviet states. Suffice it to recall just the most important episodes of this monumental “battle over history.” Following the Soviet collapse, Museums of Occupation were set up in Latvia and Estonia; one of the museums’ main objectives is to highlight the political symmetry between the two totalitarian regimes that occupied the Baltics in the twentieth century—German national-socialism and Soviet Communism .8 In May 2006, a Museum of Soviet Occupation opened in Tbilisi, Georgia, following the Baltic states’ example. The same month, the Institute of National Memory was established in Ukraine, inspired by the Polish model.9 In November 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a law Igor Torbakov 236 recognizing the Holodomor (the disastrous famine of 1932–33) as genocide of the Ukrainian people perpetrated by the Soviet Communist regime.10 In May 2009 a landmark academic and political event took place in Vilnius —over eighty representatives of European cultural journals convened in the Lithuanian capital to discuss the topic of...