Ties That Remind: Known Family Connections to Past Events as Salience Cues and Collective Memory of Stalin’s Repressions of the 1930s in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

Building on ideas of Halbwachs and others regarding how families shape collective memory, we argue that known family connections to past events serve as salience cues. Due to kin preference (humans’ tendency to empathize with family members more than strangers), awareness that a relative participated in a specific past event increases its visibility, moral relevance, and emotional resonance, compared to that of the vast number of other historical occurrences, with intuitive consequences for whether and how the event is remembered in the present. We illustrate this effect of known family connections to the past by analyzing whether and how contemporary Russians recall a controversial episode from the Soviet period: Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. We use qualitative data from focus groups and unusually detailed survey data, collected in 2010, to illustrate this property of recognized family connections to a past mass trauma. We also propose four distinct components of perceptions of past events: awareness, knowledge, importance, and moral valence. Our findings confirm the strong influence of known family ties to victims, which exhibit more consistent connections to memories of the repressions than do other factors, although family socialization through childhood discussions, cohort differences, education, and exposure to official narratives also matter.