“Excluded from Memory”: The Question of Passing Down National History

Abstract

This article considers the (partial) “exclusion” or “self-exclusion” of the “complex heritage” descendants from the “inheritance” of the official narratives of national history. As a rule, such discourses rely on antagonistic logic. In the article, the idea of “complex heritage” descendants denotes people whose family history includes both representatives of mutually exclusive groups (from the point of view of different public discourses of memory). When any single discourse is dominant in the public space or in a competition between antagonistic discourses of national history, descendants of “complex heritage” must independently cope with the emerging internal tension and discomfort (if they arise). In this article, in the context of common European trends, the author shows and analyses different options for such reactions with reference to competing discourses of national history in Russia, i. e., “Triumph” (Victory in the Great Patriotic War) and “Tragedy” (the era of political repression), as well as the most massive public practice of memory dedicated to the Great Patriotic War heroes: the civil event known as the “Immortal Regiment”. The analysis refers to forty indepth interviews conducted by the author in 2021–2023 with descendants of the repressed from the third, fourth, and further generations (as well as those who fought and showed themselves differently in the past). The author relies on the concept of antagonistic memory, supplemented by the ideas of Ts. Todorov on the principles of working with the “difficult past”, the theory of post-memory by M. Hirsch and others. As a result of the research, the author draws the following conclusions: first, the experience of “exclusion” from national history due to the lack of blood ancestors that give the right for “inclusion” into the “fundamental myth of the nation” really exists; second, in the conditions of (even unequal) competition of antagonistic discourses, the descendants of the “complex heritage” find themselves constrained between the narrow limits of each of them. At the same time, the need to meet externally set criteria and the impossibility of doing this lead to resistance to the imposed public antagonistic models of understanding the past; finally, those “excluded” from national history in one or different interpretations thereof, the descendants collect, preserve, and transmit their family histories as “heritage” in the full diversity and inconsistency, as life itself, and the circumstances in which their ancestors were placed.