In the past decade, interest in historical, social, and cultural memory has blossomed into a distinct subfield cutting across the disciplines. On the last day of August 2001, a seminar held at the Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki considered how groups remember their past, and what collective remembering reveals about group identity. Entitled, “Selective Memory and Group Identity in Russia and Eastern Europe,” the seminar did not aim at defining “memory” per se, except to acknowledge its partner, amnesia, or act of selectively forgetting certain aspects of the past in order to construct a more relevant myth for the present and future. As is the nature of seminars, assumptions and conclusions occasionally differed, but in the end, four main common points emerged.
The eleven papers presented were divided thematically, the first being “Selective Memory and Myth-Making.” In their examination of metaphors used by prominent figures of the European Union, Bo Petersson and Anders Hellstrüm of Lund University (Sweden) challenged seminar participants to consider identity formation in the European Union as relevant to Russia and Eastern Europe. In their attempts to create a common sense of Europeanness, European Union leaders share certain proclivities typical of nation-states and empires: they divide the world into two camps (we/they, friend/foe), they idealize the past in the service of present goals, they invoke familial terms to explain regional differences, and they stake future unity on territorial enlargement (to include, eventually, Eastern Europe and Russia). In the title of their paper, “Tilling Temporality: Myth-Making and Utopia in the Construction of EU Identity,” Petersson and Hellstrüm allude to the artificiality of forging new identities, a central role of history in creating group cohesion, and the ultimate failure of politicians to understand history as anything deeper than a means to immediate political goals. The heretofore failure of a common European identity, which remains too ambiguous to inspire passionate patriotism, is a key result of this ignorant use of history as a collection of symbols and myths ready to be modified for application. Ultimately, the success of European identity will be assured by the creation of stories that will convince diverse groups of people that they are similar in more ways than they are different.
The idea of Europe and Europeanness, despite its ambiguity, has long served as a point of reference for elites in East Europe and Russia as they developed a sense of identity. This point was underscored in the paper of Eliisa Vähä (Tampere University, Finland). Entitled “Producing Patriots: Heroic Stories and Heroes as Makers of Soviet and Russian Identity in History Textbooks, 1950-1995,” Vähä tracked shifts in the way the October Revolution and its heroes were presented from the end of the Stalin regime until the middle of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Along with Soviet leaders’ self-praise for liquidating illiteracy came an almost painful awareness of Russia’s different path, a fact that took on messianic importance as the idealizations of the first Socialist Revolution served to justify a failing system and expansive imperial designs. As they edited and reshaped key events and personages to suit current ideological needs, history textbook writers honed their skills in the art of selective memory.
The second thematic section, “In the Shadow of Empire,” portrayed Russian imperialism as a variation of other imperialisms in both its overarching goals and its manipulation of myths to subjugate ethnic minorities. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (Brock University, Canada) ventured into the well-worn and controversial terrain of Edward Said’s theory to ask “What Is Russian Orientalism?” While not dismissing the application of Said’s famous thesis to the Russian situation, Schimmelpenninck van der Oye argued that the empire of the tsars took a much more integrative approach to subjugated peoples. Rather than cast native peoples of the East as unequivocal “others,” representatives of the empire from the sphere of politics to culture blurred distinctions to create a more homogeneous imperial portrait.
In their respective papers, Theodore R. Weeks (Southern Illinois University, USA) and Marina Vituhnovskaja (University of Helsinki, Finland) depicted the nuances of the imperial portrait in terms of a mosaic or puzzle, whose pieces, while coming together to create a comprehensive and comprehensible whole, could exist independently. This tension was expressed throughout the empire in triangular struggles between heroes, villains, and victims. Weeks’ “Remembering 1863: Murav’ev as Hero and Hangman” deconstructed the myth of the famous imperial official sent out to quell unrest in Russia’s western provinces. Alternatively depicted as hero and hangman, the historical person of Murav’ev becomes less important than the manipulation of his image to promote either Russian or Polish nationalist interests. Further to the north, an uneasy religious and ethnic mixture in Karelia fell victim to the official Russification policies at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a provocatively entitled paper, “Etnokul’turnyi mif kak instrument imperskoi politiki. Russkie ideology nachala 20 v. o natsional’noi prirode karel,” Vituhnovskaja showed how Russian authorities created and fulfilled ethnocultural myths as one means of imperial politics, in particular, the myth about Karelians as an “Orthodox-Slavic” people. Vituhnovskaja analyzed the meaning of “Russianness” and what appears to be its creation of “great” (national monarchic) and “little” (Karelian) myths of an era.
Ambiguous stories were no stranger to the Ukrainian nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century. In “Cossack Wars of the Seventeenth Century as the ‘Golden Age’ of the Nation in Nineteenth Century Ukrainian Nationalism,” Johannes Remy (University of Helsinki, Finland) concluded that the idealization of the Cossacks lacked essential characteristics of nation and ethnic group. This did not prevent Ukrainian nationalists of different political beliefs from holding up Cossacks as mythical forefathers who struggled against the oppressive Russian imperialists. Even liberally oriented Ukrainian nationalists willingly ignored the dictatorial system of the Cossacks who came to serve the higher need of establishing an independent Ukrainian nation.
Creating memories of the past in popular culture or by those recently stripped of their political power at the beginning of the twentieth century was the subject of the third section of the seminar, “The End of a Golden Age.” Chris J. Chulos (University of Helsinki, Finland) described one aspect of popular memory creation in “Scripting the Past: Cinematic Memory in Early Twentieth Century Russia.” From the moment of cinema’s introduction in Russia during the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896, this new medium of the masses was inseparable from the creation of a new type of group identity that was based on secular cultural images familiar to the rapidly expanding reading public. The moviegoing experience held out the promise of a new collective identity first as a body of cinematic works took shape, drawing its inspiration and story lines from the new genre of popular literature, then as the act of going to the cinema alluded to a new kind of collectivity that blurred distinctions between classes as “everyone” went to the movies. By 1917, the underlying social tensions and political bankruptcy of the regime forever obscured the potentially unifying power of late tsarist cinema. The dissolution of power in 1917 offered an ample reason for former high-level imperial officials to selectively remember the immediate past, especially their role own in the downfall of the autocracy. In “Politicheskaia izbiratel’nost’ pamiati: vysshye sanovniki imperii o prichinakh ee krakha,” Boris Dubentsov (Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg) demonstrated the mechanism of selective memory in the “mythologized” works of memoirs. During his years in emigration, A. N. Iakhontov, a former member of the Council of Ministers during World War I, gradually changed his interpretation of the events. Iakhontov’ explanation of the reasons for the October Revolution gradually evolved from a sober description of reality to a creation of a traditional myth that developed out of his experience as an émigré.
Former imperial officials were not the only ones with a vested interest in explaining their activities after 1917. The fourth seminar’s thematic area , “Constructing Others,” was concerned with the fluctuating category of forbidden memories. According to Timo Vihavainen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Finnish elites from diverse political backgrounds relied on their own selective memory to valorize their past achievements in the name of national independence, and to elaborate idealized theories of Finnish ethnic uniqueness. One consequence of it has been a sometimes bitter and as yet unresolved public debate about the legacy of the Russian sovereignty in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In “‘A Chicken is not a Bird, a Woman is not a Human’: Forbidden Memories and Animal Symbolism in Soviet/Russian Literature,” Arja Rosenholm (Tampere University, Finland) began with a famous proverb to consider how forbidden memories make their way into contemporary Russian literature.
The theme for the final section, “Forgetting the Past,” was centered on the notion of abstaining from remembering the past. In her paper, “On the Art of Forgetting: The Siege Story,” Elena Hellberg-Hirn (University of Helsinki, Finland) touched one of the most sensitive chords in the split identity of contemporary St. Petersburg, the blockade of Leningrad during the Second World War. Properly speaking, the memory of this historical event is about the conflict between public and private memories, about the attempt of official Leningrad to cast the city in the socialist mold of a unified and anonymous identity as opposed to the identifiable memories of individuals who survived the horrific ordeal.
Concluding remarks by Richard Stites (Georgetown University, USA) summarized the papers, using four general observations pertaining to all the presented case studies. First, a distinction must be made between memory and memorialization, or the active remembering of the past and the commemoration of events and people (which may or may not involve memory). Second, triangular struggles were not restricted to areas dominated by ethnic and religious minorities, but were present throughout the empire in the unfolding dramas of heroes, villains, and victims. Third, memory is unique to the conditions of the time in which it is created. Finally, other models of collective identity, especially in ethnically and religiously diverse territories, must be considered if Russia and Eastern Europe are to be understood not as unique or exceptional, but as a variation on similar themes, tendencies, and traits of other empires or multinational entities.