Memory in politics: The representations of the Soviet past in Russia
Jacques CHEVALLIER - Professor (université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas)
Frédéric CHARILLON - Professor (Université d'Auvergne)
Yves DELOYE - Professor (IEP - Bordeaux)
Marie MENDRAS - Director of Research at CNRS
Georges MINK - Director of Research at CNRS
Géraldine MUHLMANN - Professor (université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas)
The present work lays the emphasis on the dialectic relations between memory and politics by studying the processes of construction, negotiation, broadcasting, adoption and reproduction of the representations of the Soviet past in post-Soviet Russia. Based on various and heterogeneous sources conveying the images of the Soviet past, this work throws light upon the reasons and the mechanisms of the evolution of collective memory in the Soviet past as well as its political and social role.
This work argues that the memory of the Soviet past played an important role in symbolically legitimating Boris Yeltsin's and Vladimir Putin's regimes as well as in forging post-Soviet identity, while strengthening the gradual shift toward an authoritarian regime. Despite numerous oppositions between the successive political regimes, making a political use of the past is an enduring tradition, the Soviet past remaining a major issue for those in office in Russia. Both in the late Soviet era and the early years 2000, the national past was entirely reinterpreted and reconstructed.
However the collective memory of the Soviet past is also a binding framework restricting the institutional choices and the political decisions of political actors. Since collective memory is the expression of political, economic and social references, it produces path dependency effects, thereby fostering the reproduction of political, economic and social frameworks deep-rooted in the Soviet past.