Dissecting Post-Soviet Memory Politics

Abstract

Founded in 2018, the Center for the Study of Cultural Memory and Symbolic Politics—part of the History Department at St. Petersburg’s European University—has already produced an impressive output of original and translated monographs as well as collections of articles. This anthology, compiled by Aleksei Miller and Dmitrii Efremenko, is probably its most significant contribution to date, and certainly the most voluminous. It attests to the increasing institutionalization of memory studies and related fields such as public history in Russia, which have come a long way since an earlier wave of publications in the 2000s that was dominated by translations from other languages.1 The bulk of the volume is made up of empirical studies of different mnemonic actors, contexts, themes, and genres in Russia and several neighboring countries. Almost invariably well researched and amply documented, the chapters present up-to-date insights on a large variety of topics. Some of these have long been objects of international scholarly attention, such as the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in memory politics, discussed by Marlène Laruelle. Others are only beginning to attract serious interest. These include the Last Address initiative to commemorate victims of Stalinist terror,