Memory wars in postimperial settings: The challenges of transnationalism and the risks of new totalizing mnemonics

Mnemonic agendas have often emerged at the centre of tensions between states when it comes to disagreements over the interpretation of past events and their role in shaping national identities. The Russian aggression in Ukraine has taken the idea of ‘memory war’ from a symbolic field where the struggles over the meaning of the past have been waged, to a literal battlefield where the national project centred on a specific memory narrative has been attacked. The use of the historically loaded argument of ‘denazification’ as a goal to be achieved by military means reveals the crucial role played by the historical imaginary of World War II both in Russia’s assertion of its ‘righteous’ status (i.e. being on the right side of history in the war against the Nazis) and in the justification of the current war presented to the domestic public.

Deploying mnemonic argument as an instrument of neo-colonialism in seeking to control memory and identity politics of the neighbouring nation emerges here as a gross misuse of historical narrative and reveals the risks associated with projecting the virtues of the past onto the politics of the present. These events highlight the need for theorizing the relationship between the collective memory and the construction of sovereignty in the post-imperial and post-Cold War settings. They also demand new ways of thinking about the inter-relationality of national and transnational memory frameworks, which is often overlooked in memory studies routinely divided between those operating within the framework of methodological nationalism and those pursuing the transnational or cosmopolitan mnemonic tropes (Levy and Sznaider, 2002; Rothberg, 2009). The Russian war can be read as a disproportionate counteroffensive to what have been called ‘mnemonic security’ measures undertaken by Ukraine, alongside some other post-Soviet states, as a part of their national emancipation paradigm through the mnemonic estrangement of the Soviet past (Mälksoo, 2021). These measures indicated a major shift from moral remembrance of victims serving to prevent the violence in the future (‘never again’) towards their active deployment in promoting a specific political project and its geopolitical framing.

Memories of political repression in the former communist states have morphed into stories of national suffering and become crucial for the construction of anti-communist national identities after 1989 (Neumayer, 2019). In this way, the instrumentalization of the past by political actors has become effectively normalized while downplaying the complexity of the experiences, moral implications and emotional grievances of the past that run against the grain of the dominant narratives. Paradoxically, the anticipated liberation of personal and collective memories from ideological restraints, which were once imposed by the Cold War thinking and enforced by totalitarian communist systems, has been superseded by a new form of totalizing mnemonics with its enhanced cultivation of useful memories and marginalization of those less convenient (Bell, 2003).

A variety of nationalizing memory regimes, which put interests over values, deploy restrictive measures on history writing and remembering and tend to ignore the internal divisions running along generational, regional, religious, gender, and other lines among the main actors in the memory scene (Olick and Robbins, 1998). They often ignore or downplay the complexity and plurality of interlocking historical accounts in the memory of both recent and distant pasts. Systemic destruction of the Polish memorials dedicated to the victims of Stalinism in Belarus by the Belarusian nationalist memory activists can be seen as an exemplar manifestation of such inherent intolerance of the nationalized mnemonics with their claims of exclusive rights to mandate and curate the remembrance. Paradoxically, this Belarusian self-contained ethno-centric memory narrative is modelled on memory politics in other Eastern European countries and serves to assert the belonging of Belarus to the region, a phenomenon I describe as ‘internal transnationalism’ (Bekus, 2019). In Poland, on the other hand, the monuments dedicated to the memory of the Belarusian victims massacred by Polish anti-communist partisans, who are also recognized as Poland’s national heroes, have been vandalized. Both examples demonstrate how aspiration of ideological absolutization of the national memory frameworks generates irreconcilable differences on the ground.

The transnational memory narratives, on the other hand, have become associated with the memory of Holocaust; partaking in this cosmopolitan mnemonic enterprise, through commemorations and building Holocaust museums and memorials, has been used by post-communist nations as an entry ticket to the global remembrance domain. This global memory script, however, has often appeared in the CEE region in an ‘adapted’ version, either through dissociation of perpetrators from the local agency, or, alternatively, through the conflation of the memory of Holocaust with the competing victimhood accounts and forging parallel genocide narratives that shift the focus towards the victims of communist crimes (Pakier and Stråth, 2010; Sierp, 2017; Subotić, 2021). This development has broad implications beyond political development in Central and Eastern European countries, where the ‘symbolic capital’ of the memory of communism (Bekus, 2021; Dujisin, 2021; Zombory, 2020) has assisted the political struggle and completion of the unfinished 1989 revolution (Mark, 2010). It was also deployed to equate Europeanization with anti-totalitarianism, while de-radicalizing the Western left (Forsdick et al., 2020). Furthermore, this development produced an important effect for the field of memory studies by opening the way for revising the mnemonic hierarchies that had underpinned the international order since the end of World War II. Contesting the concept of genocide, which was legally codified to reflect the singularity of the Holocaust, became one of the manifestations of this change. Eastern European states undertook proactive steps to challenge and to revise it in order to fit the crimes committed under the communist rule (Sagatienė, 2021).

The idea of challenging the existing international order and its mnemonic regime transformed the way in which the ‘remembrance mandate’ operates in the world. Victim-centred memory culture began to expand, thus becoming an emblematic reflection of cumulative ‘rights culture’ (David, 2020), with victimhood narratives replacing triumphalist stories of victors or resisters. Global reverberations of this process could be seen in the series of seemingly disconnected bids to revisit the history of violence and to bring the justice to the victims of past abuses from slavery, colonial violence, cultural genocide of indigenous people and many more across all continents (Akhavan, 2016; Kingston, 2015; MacDonald and Hudson, 2012). And while the post-communist programmes of the restorative justice for human rights abuses served to sustain the project of European reconciliation by equating Europeanization with the anti-totalitarianism directed against the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships, the global accounts of imperial and colonial violence reverted these mnemonic offensives and pushed the process of coming to terms with violence committed by the European states against non-European people. In this way, the idea of moral remembrance shaped by liberal values and human rights discourses after World War II has now been deployed to address mnemonic injustice and silences that the post-World War II international order has previously side-lined.

Recent steps undertaken in Russia and Belarus towards mobilization of the discourse of ‘genocide’ to redress the history of Nazi crimes in occupied territories against the Soviet people provide yet another example of further ideological expansion of the paradigm of moral remembrance and its conflation with political agenda. In 2020, Russia’s Investigative Committee launched a probe into the ‘genocide of the residents of the Novgorod and Pskov regions’ committed by Nazis in 1942–1943 during the occupation; in Belarus, the law on genocide of Belarusian people was adopted in 2021 not only to promote the commemoration of the Belarusian victims of World War II but also to introduce criminal liability for denial of this genocide. The timing of these legal mnemonic undertakings suggests their reactive character and their aim to align the societies’ memory culture with the dominant trends of victim-centred remembering, while weaponizing the gaps in the existing global World War II memory narrative.

Memory studies are facing the need to unravel the convoluted interconnections between the national and transnational mnemonic fields, which tend to be construed in the context of Central and Eastern Europe in a reductionist and compartmentalized manner. The limitations of the moral remembrance paradigm, on the other hand, demonstrate how existing memory tropes have become increasingly prone to misappropriation. The excessive use of historical references in the representations of the current war in Ukraine, from reference to genocide in separatist regions made by Kremlin before the war, to defining the killings in Butcha or Irpien as ‘genocide’, provides examples of how historically and contextually bounded developments become repackaged into familiar mnemonic tropes, which will likely lead to their ultimate distortion.