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Russia's new-old places of memory, by Jutta Scherrer

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The "Russian Idea”

At a time when there is a boom in commemoration culture and history politics, Russia's search for identity provides exemplary and fascinating material for examination. The way that history is treated in Russia has nothing in common with the way that memory is cultivated in the West. It is presumably not supposed to, since it is simply a matter of reconstructing that self-image of the country as a great power which took such a severe knock with the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the purposes of this myth of memory, every image of history and every portrayal of the past which calls on national feeling, patriotism and imperial ideas is useful. The "Russian idea” (russkaya idea) is mobilised for the national consciousness, for Russia's special path (samobytnost') and for the vocation of the Russian people, which is equally valid for all, according to Putin, whether they are Tartars, Bashkirs or Chechens: "No state can be great without its own idea.”[1]

In a certain sense, the "Russian idea” has taken the place of the old "Communist idea”.[2] That is why the Russian historian, Andrei Zorin, bitterly and cynically regrets the abolition of 7th November: according to him, the living memory of a historic event, "the main cause of all the misfortune which my country suffered in the last hundred years, including in the present restoration by stealth,” has been replaced by an illusion.[3]

The memory of the democratic awakening of perestroika, which began twenty years ago, seems to have gone with the wind. When its spiritual author, Alexander Yakovlev, died last year, the media spoke of him as a historic figure but said nothing about his achievements for glasnost. Neither Putin nor Mikhail Gorbachev attended his state funeral.

Given a political constellation which so far has not articulated any distance from the practices of Communist rule, and which allows Putin still to see the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”[4], the work of the private organisation, Memorial, is all the more remarkable. Thanks to its employees, who are independent of the state, there are now numerous volumes of documents about the system of terror and the Gulag; thousands upon thousands of victims of repression have been listed (recently made available on CD-ROM); and human rights centres have been opened. It is only to be hoped that the existence of Memorial will not be threatened by the new laws on the state control of NGOs. That would be a fatal encroachment onto the most significant attempt so far to reappraise the Soviet past and thus to create a true culture of memory.

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