Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia

Television, Cinema and the State (Open Access)

Mariëlle Wijermars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351007184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the societal dynamics of memory politics in Russia. Since Vladimir Putin became president, the Russian central government has increasingly actively employed cultural memory to claim political legitimacy and discredit all forms of political opposition. The rhetorical use of the past has become a defining characteristic of Russian politics, creating a historical foundation for the regime's emphasis on a strong state and centralised leadership.

Exploring memory politics, this book analyses a wide range of actors, from the central government and the Russian Orthodox Church, to filmmaker and cultural heavyweight Nikita Mikhalkov and radical thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin. In addition, in view of the steady decline in media freedom since 2000, it critically examines the role of cinema and television in shaping and spreading these narratives. Thus, this book aims to gain a better understanding of the various means through which the Russian government practices its memory politics (e.g., the role of state media) and, on the other hand, to sufficiently value the existence of alternative and critical voices and criticism that existing studies tend to overlook.

Contributing to current debates in the field of memory studies and of current affairs in Russia and Eastern Europe, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Russian Studies, Cultural Memory Studies, Nationalism and National Identity, Political Communication, Film, Television and Media Studies.

1 Introduction

In the Alexander Gardens in Moscow, next to the Kremlin walls, stands a granite memorial obelisk. It was erected in 1914 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, but its intended eternal endurance proved short-lived. In 1918, as the Civil War raged across the territory of the former Russian Empire, the obelisk received a makeover. It was refashioned to correspond to the idols of the fledgling socialist state: the Imperial double-headed eagle at its crown was removed, and the inscribed names of the Romanov tsars were replaced with those of socialist revolutionaries and philosophers. Then, in 1966, it was relocated to the centre of the gardens to make room for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – a symbolic affirmation of the then emerging myth of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. And thus the obelisk stood, as the politically and socially revered idols of the Soviet state ceased to be worshipped and eventually that very state ceased to exist. By then, the names inscribed on the obelisk sounded foreign to the average person’s ear; indeed, many belonged to Western European thinkers and proponents of the socialist cause.¹

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 2013 – a manifestly artificial anniversary that was nonetheless extensively marked – the obelisk was restored to its original state.² On 4 November, the Day of National Unity, the monument was unveiled and blessed by the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill (Gundiaev). In his speech, the patriarch emphasised the symbolic significance of the restoration for the consolidation of national unity and, by extension, the future existence of the Russian state:

We cannot live divorced from our history, we cannot think that our state is little more than 80 years old or, as is sometimes said, little more than 20 years. We are heirs to a thousand-year history, and if we acknowledge this linkage to history, to times past, if we acknowledge our connection with the heroes of the past, then we are imbued with national consciousness and a sense of dignity, without which a nation [narod] cannot exist.

(Samsonova 2013)

A similar sentiment was expressed by Sergei Ivanov, chief of staff of the presidential administration. He commented: ‘In commemorating this date today, and in unveiling this stele, we pay tribute to the Romanov dynasty and return to our roots … . It is the continuity of history’ (Mel’nikov & Mal’tsev 2013).

The history of the obelisk and the significance attributed to its restoration in the statements quoted here is one of countless examples of how, in contemporary Russia, the state has sought to turn the past into a powerful symbolic resource. In the period since Vladimir Putin first became president in 2000, the Russian central government has increasingly actively engaged in such memory politics³: employing cultural memory to claim the political legitimacy of those in power, as well as discredit all forms of political opposition (e.g. Laruelle 2009; Miller 2012; Sherlock 2007; Sherlock 2011; Vázquez Liñán 2010). The rhetorical use of the past has since become a defining characteristic of Russian politics.⁴ The government’s strategy of memory politics has aimed to create a continuous narrative of a Great Russia (velikaia Rossiia) that has been under constant threat from domestic and foreign enemies. Drawing upon both the recent and distant past, it aimed to create a historical foundation for the regime’s emphasis on a strong state and centralised leadership. The Soviet past has become an integral part of this overarching narrative, in which the Putin era is presented as the logical next episode.

Memory politics beyond the Kremlin walls

Yet the Russian government is not the only one who has used cultural memory to spread its ideas about how the Russian state ‘traditionally’ should be governed. Various societal, cultural and religious groups and organisations have put forward their own historically framed visions on Russian statehood. This book examines this societal dynamics of memory politics in contemporary Russia in the period 2000–2012. I analyse a wide range of actors, from the central government and the Russian Orthodox Church we already came across above, to filmmaker and cultural heavyweight Nikita Mikhalkov and radical thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin. In addition, in view of the steady decline in media freedom since 2000 (Hutchings & Tolz 2015), I critically examine the role of cinema and television in shaping and spreading these narratives. Thus, this book aims to, on the one hand, gain a better understanding of the various means through which the Russian government practises its memory politics (e.g. the role of state-aligned media) and, on the other hand, sufficiently value the existence of alternative and critical voices that existing studies tend to overlook.

In this book I aim to answer the following set of interrelated research questions:

1. In what way have various actors in Russian society, as well as the state, mobilised cultural memory to legitimise, question or challenge the political regime?
2. Which cultural memories have been employed, by whom and to what end?
3. How have these actors drawn upon existing interpretations and representations of the respective cultural memories to shape their contributions to the debate on history and political legitimacy?

The way that scholars typically approach Russian memory politics – that is, through analysis of how the state employs references to history to support its legitimacy and frame its political course – suggests that the state is a proactive and dominant player in these ‘memory games’ (Mink & Neumayer 2013). These studies allow the impression to persist that there has been no societal, political or cultural resistance to the regime’s claims. However, in every society, state and non-state actors at various levels contest with one another in efforts to provide that society with meaning in the present through representations of the past, and thus, with guidance to determine its political and ideological orientation towards the future. The same applies to twenty-first-century Russia. The state does not act in isolation. It is part of a complex socio-political process of negotiating the contemporary meaning of history and the political implications resulting from that meaning. The role played by non-state actors at the national level, both as accomplices in and as opponents to official memory politics, has thus far been insufficiently addressed. The differentiation between state and non-state actors in today’s Russia is notoriously murky: within the intricate maze of interactions between state officials, state-sponsored and ‘state-aligned’ persons and organisations, drawing a definite line between these two spheres is a near impossible task. In my usage of the terms, state actor should therefore be understood in its most concrete sense as referring to the actions and statements of the Russian government, state officials and so on. Non-state actor, then, refers to the grey zone beyond the state’s official structures and ranges from the ‘state-loyal’ to the outspokenly oppositional. It is the complexity of this grey zone and its manifold connections to and interactions with the state that I aim to explore.

In view of the decline since 2000 in the freedom granted to the media – including television (Hutchings & Rulyova 2009; Hutchings & Tolz 2015) – it is imperative to also examine how memory politics extends into the domain of mass media and popular culture. It is here, in television and cinema, that state efforts to control public opinion are most pronounced; they have been much less stringent, for instance, in relation to literature. To avoid oversimplifying the means through which (authoritarian) political regimes mediate their views, it is essential to critically examine cultural productions about history aimed at a mass audience. To gain strength, an interpretation of history has to be mediated at multiple levels of society. It is precisely the interplay between these levels, official and unofficial, that influences the potential effect of government-supported cultural memories. In this study I seek to address these gaps. My analysis covers the years 2000 through 2012, a turning point after which the state’s memory politics changed substantially (as I will elaborate on shortly), and refers to earlier and subsequent developments wherever relevant.

To accommodate the inclusion of non-governmental actors and the sphere of popular culture, I develop an alternative approach to memory politics. Here, I define the latter concept as the mobilisation of cultural memory to put forward political claims and, in particular, to propagate historically informed visions of what constitutes ‘traditional Russian’ state governance. Memory politics is thus conceived as not just a political but also a social process of negotiating the meaning of the past – a process in which the state, one must add, has a disproportionately large stake. I seek to move away from static conceptualisations of memory politics – such as those guiding studies that chronicle acts of memory politics and explain their meanings – towards a dynamic model: a conceptualisation that includes other societal and cultural actors operating at the national level and that can shed light on the dynamic development of memory politics over time and across the political and socio-cultural spectrum. I offer an alternative approach that, looking beyond the Russian state’s apparent hegemony on memory in the public domain, can uncover divergent or competing voices in the national public discourse.

On the basis of four extensive thematic case studies and one smaller case study, I demonstrate, first, how the state has relied on memories with rich histories of cultural representation and political instrumentalisation to portray itself as traditional. Yet the accumulated meanings of these constellations of memory greatly increase their subversive potential by providing access points for the formulation of a historically framed political critique. Second, I argue that non-state actors have played a highly significant role in memory politics during this period. Moreover, the behaviour of the government in this respect should in some cases be characterised as reactive rather than proactive and shows clear signs of continuous re-evaluation and adaptation.

The history of the memorial obelisk and the framing of its recent renovation exemplify the three aspects of contemporary Russian memory politics that are central to my argument in this study. The first aspect is the emphasis on the continuity of Russian history. In direct response to the definite break with the past favoured by Boris Yeltsin’s regime during the 1990s, to which I will return shortly, Putin’s memory politics in the new millennium has sought to reintegrate the Russian Federation into an extended historical narrative. Second, the memorial obelisk illustrates the palimpsestic layering of this memory politics – how contemporary memory culture (implicitly and explicitly) engages with and builds upon previous symbolic practices and their visual, narrative and material traces. In this particular case, the act of restoration was actually presented as an ‘un-layering’ of memory, as a correction of the (supposedly unrighteous) Soviet appropriation of the monument. In the words of Patriarch Kirill, by restoring the names of the Russian tsars to the obelisk, ‘the most historically unjust action [was] corrected’ (Samsonova 2013). The patriarch’s phrasing brings me to the third aspect, namely that, in contemporary Russia, memory politics goes beyond claiming the existence of a state-oriented tradition to legitimise the current political regime. It is equally preoccupied with reclaiming lost traditions of remembrance. By framing essentially new symbolic acts as the continuation of commemorative practices that were forcibly abolished in Soviet and post-Soviet times, the state pretends to undo past damages rather than impose its own memory regime.

Two important media domains fall beyond the scope of my investigation. With regard to television, I have chosen to exclude television journalism. Journalistic coverage of historical topics, for instance concerning exhibits or special events, or around commemorative dates, is controlled from the top down to a fairly large extent. Therefore, I only note when coverage deviates in important ways from the state-supported narrative. Moreover, the relation between the Kremlin and national media outlets during this period is extensively covered in the literature (e.g. Oates 2006; Arutunyan 2009; Beumers et al. 2009; Hutchings & Rulyova 2009; Burrett 2011; Schimpfossl & Yablokov 2014; Hutchings & Tolz 2015). The role of non-journalistic television in memory politics, such as the television series and documentaries analysed in this study, has largely been neglected. Yet these programmes’ characteristics – their longer playing time, which allows for the development of an argument, their rich associations of genre, their extensive use of stylistic devices and an emotionally persuasive soundtrack to support particular interpretations of historical events, and so on – make them particularly adept at creating lasting memory images. At the same time, these precise characteristics can introduce ambiguities and make it difficult to control the exact meaning of their messages. This merits in-depth examination. Second, my analysis of online memory discourses is limited. I use online forums to (retrospectively) assess audience reception of the cinema and TV productions that I am analysing. Yet since my research is focused on the competition between the state and the various non-state actors that operate at the national level – the political and cultural elite, if you will – rather than with local or grassroots developments, a comprehensive examination of these online memory discourses lies beyond the scope of this study.

In what follows I will first sketch the development of memory politics as the Russian state has practised it since 1991. This brief discussion of the main trends in governmental policy serves as a necessary introduction and background to the multi-actor analyses in the case studies. Then, I will summarise the most important trends in historical programming for both the big and small screens, as well as key developments in state policy regarding television and film production. The final section describes this study’s methodology and outlines the book’s structure.

Governmental memory politics in post-Soviet Russia

The dissolution of the Soviet Union made suddenly obsolete the Communist meta-narrative that had previously guided all aspects of political, economic, cultural and personal life. State collapse created a rupture between the Soviet past and the still unknown path to the future. The historic events that the population had commemorated and the Soviet myths that had guided their interpretation of the world and themselves were rejected, but the search for viable substitutes proved a complicated process. For many Russians, their newly acquired democratic freedoms were scant consolation for the loss of state-sponsored services, overall stability and societal solidarity. Having lost its Soviet empire, Russia found itself still at the beginning of the process of building a nation. That the Communist meta-narrative was essentially a historical narrative, based on the assumption that communism was the final stage of historical development, intensified the cultural impact of its being disavowed (Yurchak 2006). The loss of Communist teleology occasioned an acute search ‘for its substitute, for another convincing plot of Russian development that will help make sense of the chaotic present’ (Boym 2001: 59). During the 1990s, political and cultural elites proved unable to fill this void with new coherent narratives of national identity (Tolz 2001; Smith 2002). The regime of Yeltsin, in fact, based its political legitimacy on historical discontinuity by rejecting the Soviet period in its entirety. With a lack of historical examples to draw on (the autocratic tradition represented by tsarist Russia was thought to be as unsuitable as Soviet communism), the government framed the extensive reforms of the 1990s within a narrative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Memory politics and the remediation of cultural memory
• Case studies
• 3. Petr Stolypin: The making of a cultural memory
• 4. Aleksandr Nevskii: The saviour of Orthodox civilisation
• 5. The Time of Troubles: The cyclical return of chaos
• 6. Ivan the Terrible and the Oprichnina: Subversive histories
• 7. The Trial of Time
• 8. Conclusion
• List of interviews
• References
• Index