Documents Accuse: The Post-Soviet Memory Politics of Genocide

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Holocaust and other charges of genocide have emerged as flashpoints in memory wars between the Russian Federation and the Baltic states. This article examines the Russian government’s revival of the longstanding Soviet practice of publishing archival documents focused on Baltic participation in Nazi atrocities against Jews and other victims. It argues that state officials and historians in Russia and the Baltic countries continue to shape their usable pasts in response to one another. The Russian focus on Baltic collaboration with Hitler’s regime has fueled defensive rhetoric in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that has diminished and denied the role that local perpetrators played in the wartime persecution of Jews. Russia, in turn, has reacted to charges of a Nazi-Stalinist “Double Genocide” in the Baltic region by launching a campaign for international recognition of genocide against the “Soviet people”—Soviet Jews among them. To date, Western political scientists and policymakers have focused on Russia as propagating illiberal movement through disinformation. This study demonstrates how the publication of wartime archival documents contributes to illiberal memory politics both at home and among Russia’s detractors in the Baltic region.