ENG / RUS
140×215 (60×90/16) hard cover, ill., 320 pp., 2011 ISBN 978‑5‑86793‑851‑2
World rights available
To what extent is the "battle for history" in Russia connected with the burgeoning culture of memory at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century? How are Russian politics of history connected with politics in other East European nations? As part of his exploration of these issues, Koposov asks whether it is feasible to create legislation defining historical truth, and whether such a "memory law" is necessary or indeed legal.
Koposov analyzes the culture of memory in Russia in the context of memory science and traces the connection between historical memory of the second half of the 20th century and violence, and draws parallels between political appraisals of the past and the evolution of social and cultural memory.
Nikolai Koposov, Ph.D., is the research director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and a professor at the Smolny Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences in St. Petersburg. He is a specialist in French history, intellectual history and historiography, and the author of numerous monographs published in Russia and abroad.
Historians seek the truth in archives, but as soon as the documents they discover become known outside academia, their contents obtain new meanings – often political. What does it mean to talk about the politics of history and the politics of memory? Is the law a means by which society can regulate its relationship with the past?
In his book "Remembering the Brutal Regime," Nikolai Koposov surveys the evolution of collective memory of the past and of politics in Russia from 1985 to 2000. He focuses on the historical appraisal of the Soviet period, and traces the changing relationship to Stalin, as well as the formation and functions of myths about the war (which form the basis of the contemporary "Russian ideology").
Of course, concepts of good and evil change over time. But does it happen to the extent that they lose all commensurability? Not with regards to the history of modern times, at least. ...
The moral reflex with regards to the past begins when we discover a partial incommensurability between our contemporary understandings of good and evil and the moral worlds inhabited by other societies and social groups that permit them to perform acts that are unacceptable, at least from our own point of view. This leads to a better understanding of our own values, and simultaneously to an understanding of the conditions and ideas that might lead us away from them. This is what it means to learn about morality from the past.
