On New Media, Memory and Identity in Russia by Vera Zvereva

Russia has now become the European leader in terms of the number of internet users. ComScore statistics from September 2011 indicate that there are currently around 50.8 million internet users, i.e. unique visitors aged 15 and above, in Russia. In other words, roughly one third of Russians now use the internet.

Memory Work and Civil Society

Memory Work and Civil Society, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 5 December 2011.

In a paper given at Memory at War’s ‘Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe’ conference in July 2011, Jay Winter outlined the important role of memory in bolstering the growing discourse of human rights in post-war Europe. Undoubtedly, in both Western and Eastern Europe, the attention to memory, versus traditionally authority-centred History, was of huge importance in re-evaluating a continent left in ruins by World War II. The cultivation of memory-based human rights discourse has, as Winter pointed out, been carried out to a large degree by activists operating in the sphere of civil society. Such individuals and groups existed in both Western and Eastern Europe, but the challenges they faced were quite different. In the West, the processes of uncovering and preserving the memories of the atrocities of the war, particularly the Holocaust, were central to official discourse and the basis of the creation of unity in Europe. In the Soviet Union and its satellite states, such groups were decidedly anti-official: memory, whether of those repressed by the state, or of alternative versions of the war, was a key element of resistance against communist ideology. With the fall of communism, such groups did not disappear, but came into the open, grew and developed. Today these movements function as influential non-governmental organisations, continuing to preserve memory and, in many cases, cultivate civil society. A number of these groups gathered in Cambridge in December 2011 to exchange experience with one another, with analogous groups from Western Europe, and with academics at the at the workshop ‘Memory Work and Civil Society’, organised by the East European Memory Studies research group, based at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Katyn Museum as Site of Divided Memory: Warsaw Seminar

On 22 June the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, hosted a presentation by Piotr H. Kosicki (Department of History, Princeton University) A Divided Memory: A History of the Katyń Museum in Warsaw. The presentation was part of the Social Memory Laboratory’s regular ongoing seminar series.

Sites of Forgetting II, by Andriy Portnov

Somewhat unexpectedly for me, my text about how a ‘Death Tower’ of a Nazi concentration camp for Soviet POWs was transformed into a five-star hotel in Lviv, published a week ago at the ‘History Lessons’ portal, in English translation on the 'Memory at War' collective blog, and in Ukrainian at Polit.ua, prompted a broad response. I received a great many letters and comments, and these have shaped the theme of this essay: the problem of reflecting on sites of forgetting.

Karaganov: Russians Must Face Up to Soviet 'Suigenocide'

Sergei Karaganov delivered an extraordinary programmatic speech on the Soviet past at a meeting with President Medvedev in Yekaterinburg on 1 February 2011. In the speech, Karaganov set out his vision for reconstituting the Russian identity through a re-evaluation of the Soviet past, in a series of striking images. He argued that Russian society could not regain its self-respect until it faced up to the 'terrible sin' that was the revolution and the subsequent decades of totalitarian rule. He used the term 'suigenocide' (samogenotsid) to describe the Civil War and the Stalinist terror.

Summer of Memories # 2: Poland - parallel battles

The ongoing fight over whether to remove or keep the makeshift cross, erected outside Poland’s Presidential Palace in Warsaw to commemorate Lech Kaczynski, has been documented elsewhere in this blog (below). Its role in crystallizing discussions about contemporary Polish identity and, broadly defined, the politics of memory, are further highlighted by a comment piece in Gazeta Wyborcza, worth presenting here: ‘Battle of the Cross’ (‘Bitwę pod krzyzem’).

Memory of August 1991 Coup in Russian Politics

Commemorating the anniversary of the August 1991 failed hardliner coup was a key focus of an opposition demonstration in Moscow on 22 August. The rally was held at the site of the deaths of the White House defenders killed during the August days.

Nearly a Century in the Making

Turkey and Armenia signed a historic reconciliation accord earlier today, not without some last-minute drama. Headlines in Turkish media are currently focusing on, among other things, the fact that no spoken comments were made on either side at the time of the signing, but the moment was nonetheless a remarkable achievement that bodes well for the future. The accord counts among its directives the creation of a historical commission to study the events of the World War I era slaughter of over one million Armenians, which the Turkish state still does not recognize as genocide.

A Victory for Memorial

The End of the “Case of the Raid” and Some Lessons Learned

A Public Statement from 'Memorial'

On 6 May 2009 the City Court of St Petersburg upheld the decision of the Dzerzhinsky Region Court, which had ruled that the raid on the premises of the Research and Information Centre “Memorial” in St Petersburg on 4 December 2008 was illegal.

On the same evening representatives of RIC “Memorial” (lawyer Ivan Pavlov, director Irina Flige and Tatiana Kosinova, a member of the organisation’s governing body), accompanied by two independent observers (Boris Pustyntsev, head of the organisation “Civic Control” [Grazhdanskii kontrol’] and Svetlana Ekimova, representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman for St Petersburg), arrived at the Prosecutor’s Office to collect the items which the officials from the Prosecutor’s Office’s Investigative Committee had illegally confiscated. These items included twelve computer hard drives, which at the time of the raid contained databases with the results of twenty years of research into the history of political terror during the Soviet period.

The representatives of Memorial made a record of the procedure by which the items were returned, and this record was witnessed by the independent observers. All returned items were then packed into boxes, sealed and taken to “Memorial’s” premises.



On 13 May independent technical experts tested the hard drives for their functionality and the integrity of the data held on them, once again in the presence of representatives of the public. All drives turned out to be functional and data samples confirmed the integrity of the data. The test report states that the drives show no sign of having been read, with the exception of a single drive which was unsuccessfully connected to a computer in the night of 4 December. It seems that during all this time the drives were simply kept at the Prosecutor’s Office, without anyone taking an interest in their content.

A total of four court hearings took place in the five months that passed since the raid, during which RIC “Memorial” demanded that the raid be declared illegal and the confiscated items returned. As early as March the Prosecutor’s Office declared its willingness to return the confiscated items “since they were not needed”, but now it has been forced to do so by court order.

Obviously, the return of the confiscated items does not compensate for the damage done to RIC “Memorial’s” work: as a consequence of the raid almost the entire IT system was put out of service and large parts of the information and reference material held on the confiscated hard drives were inaccessible for five months. Moreover, the issue of the moral damage inflicted on our organisation remains open: investigator M.G. Kalganov’s absurd suspicion that “Memorial” could be involved in funding rightwing extremist publications, publicly reiterated by the permanent representative of Russia at a session of the OSCE, was not refuted during the court proceedings. The court refused outright to address this issue. “Memorial” intends to take further steps in order to defend its good name.

Nevertheless - our organisation’s rights have been rehabilitated and our property has been returned to us. We believe this outcome would have been impossible without the wave of protests and acts of solidarity that began immediately after the raid on 4 December, internationally as well as within Russia. As members of “Memorial” we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the scholarly community in Russia and abroad, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation and the regional Human Rights Ombudsman for St Petersburg, the human rights section of the European Council, the democratic civic and political organisations in Russia, the mass media in Russia and abroad (in particular the information portals Polit.ru and “Human Rights in Russia” [Prava cheloveka v Rossii, hro.org), foreign politicians and many others for the support they offered to us.

Memorial would like to draw attention to the fact that several conclusions can be drawn from the “case of the raid”:

Firstly, despite widespread opinion to the contrary, it is possible in certain cases for non-governmental organisations in Russia to defend their rights in court, if they invest a considerable amount of effort and display insistence. Such a victory does not come cheap: in this case it has cost the staff members at “Memorial” much time and energy – over a period of five months they had to put their main work aside time and again in order to stand up for the rights and the good name of the organisation.

Secondly, public solidarity campaigns are not merely symbolic acts of protest. They can yield practical results.

Thirdly, we have seen that under the present conditions a full triumph of law and justice is unlikely when the case in question concerns official interests. In the “case of the raid” this was evident from the fact that the court refused to address the issue of the illegality of the search warrant itself on the grounds that it was wholly unjustified, limiting itself to pointing out that the decision to carry out a raid is the exclusive prerogative of the investigator. Thus the court in practice confirmed the right of the investigative agencies to take such arbitrary decisions, infringing upon rights of legal persons without having to fear subsequent legal investigation. “Memorial” believes such practice to be anti-constitutional.

Fourthly, during the court process it became clear that the law enforcement agencies (at least the Centre for the Fight Against Extremism at the Main Administration of the Russian Ministry for Internal Affairs for the North-Western Federal District) consider “Memorial” to be an “extremist” organisation, something that warranted the decision to place our office under “operative observation”, in other words “external surveillance”. All our attempts to establish why our Research and Information Centre in St Petersburg has become the object of operational investigations have been unsuccessful so far. The Centre for the Fight Against Extremism refused to reply to our enquiry, pointing out that the law prohibits disclosing the classified information about operational investigations. However, the very fact that the efforts in the “fight against extremism” are directed against organisations such as “Memorial” throws a specific light on the reasons why real extremism in St Petersburg, as well as in the whole of Russia, is on the rise, while the percentage of extremist crimes solved remains catastrophically low. The story of how RIC “Memorial” was placed under external surveillance ought to serve as yet another stimulus for a serious public debate, during which we need to arrive at an evaluation of the present aims and priorities of the law enforcement agencies with regard to the “fight against extremism”. We expect interested government agencies to join in such a public debate.

Thus the “case of the raid on RIC “Memorial”” is over, at least in as far as the rehabilitation of our injured rights are concerned, but there are certain aspects of this case that still need to be evaluated by society.

International “Memorial” Society

“Memorial” St Petersburg

Remembering Gogol' / Hohol'

"Знаю, что мое имя после меня будет счастливее меня, и потомки тех же земляков моих, может быть, с глазами влажными от слез, произнесут примирение моей тени."  

"I know that after I'm gone my name will be happier than me and that the descendants of my countrymen, perhaps with teary eyes, will make peace with my shadow."

-- Gogol' to Zhukovskii, 12 November 1836 

Are today's descendants of the countrymen of Mykola Hohol' / Nikolai Gogol' making peace with his shadow?  The recent furor over Vladimir Bortko's new film adaptation of Taras Bul'ba, which the New York Times rather oddly called "a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraine's Western-leaning leadership," seems to suggest otherwise.   

Films come and go, but the incorporated practices of ritual commemoration are forever -- or at least they aspire to be.  So how did Ukrainian and Russian political figures mark the 200th anniversary of Mykola Hohol' / Nikolai Gogol's birthday on 1 April?  Below, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko lays a wreath before Hohol''s statue in Kyiv, and Russian Minister of Culture Aleksandr Avdeev pays tribute before Gogol''s grave in Moscow.

The photos offer us two different Gogols. In the first photo, the appearance of Tymoshenko (wearing her trademark zachiska) and those that flank her (wearing colourful Cossack sharovary and other forms of national dress) suggests Mykola Hohol' the Ukrainian auto-ethnographer, the playful author of the early Dikanka stories (1831-32). Bright, bountiful flowers celebrate him. In the second, Aleev and the Orthodox clergy suggest Nikolai Gogol' the Russian sermonizer, the defender of Christian morals of the later Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). Modest candles mourn him.

There are many Gogols indeed. As to the question of whether he is 'Russian' or 'Ukrainian' -- a question given new life with Bortko's Bul'ba -- it's high time we moved away from reductive 'either-or' identitarian vocabulary.  Lest we forget:

«Сам не знаю, какая у меня душа, хохлацкая [украинская] или русская. Знаю только то, что никак бы не дал преимущества ни малороссиянину перед русским, ни русскому перед малороссиянином. Обе природы слишком щедро одарены Богом, и, как нарочно, каждая из них порознь заключает в себе то, чего нет в другой, – явный знак, что они должны пополнить одна другую. Для этого самые истории их прошедшего быта даны им непохожие одна на другую, дабы порознь воспитывались различные силы их характера, чтобы потом, слившись воедино, составить собою нечто совершеннейшее в человечестве».  Gogol' to Smirnova, December 1844