The Politics of the Past: Polish-Soviet and Polish-Russian Efforts at Historical Reconciliation

Soroka, George

doi:10.1080/10758216.2020.1844023

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The late Soviet period was characterized by a self-reflective examination of Stalinist-era violence, most prominently embodied in the establishment of Memorial, an NGO that focused on documenting Stalin’s repressions. This introspective approach to the recent past persisted throughout the early post-Soviet years, a time when dialogue with other European partners on controversial historical topics was not perceived as a zero-sum game (e.g., Soroka 2021). But with the Great Patriotic War now occupying a sacrosanct status in the Russian commemorative calendar, the need to defend a sanitized version of history that exalts both the nation and the state has gained importance.…”

Section: Context and Position In Russian Society: Multivariate Analys...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

Krawatzek¹,

Soroka²

2023

Perspect. polit.

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Political attempts to control how the past may be represented have flourished in the twenty-first century. Russia participates in this trend, having taken steps to legislatively and juridically safeguard the legacy of the USSR’s involvement in World War II. This has institutionalized an interpretation of the fight against Nazism that was already widely held in society, making the Russian case a “hard test” for evaluating when the violation of a historical norm is deemed appropriate and what the impact of a memory law might be relative to other factors. Drawing on two vignette experiments conducted in 2021, our article demonstrates both that the discursive context in which a controversial statement about the past is made matters when respondents assess whether the person making it should be punished and that criticism of a historical norm is more likely to be accepted when it emanates from an in-group member. We also find that the state has limited ability to influence societal attitudes regarding history. Moreover, a willingness to defend state-led interventions into how the past is depicted aligns with support for the political system but the latter does not necessarily overlap with individuals’ historical views, underscoring the multidimensional nature of collective memory.

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Section: Context and Position In Russian Society: Multivariate Analys...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

Krawatzek¹,

Soroka²

2023

Perspect. polit.

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“…However, as Soroka's longitudinal analysis demonstrates, some of the mnemonic dynamics in the region extend back further, like the contention that still exists regarding the 1919-1921 Polish-Bolshevik War. But even when these commissions operated with a high level of professionalism and managed to produce encouraging results, their ability to affect societal attitudes was constrained by the prevailing political climate (Soroka 2021b).…”

Section: Studying Memory In Russia and The Post-communist Neighborhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The circulation of historical narratives is not a frictionless endeavor; it is difficult to penetrate an alien mnemonic space, as Soroka (2021b) illustrates in his study of bilateral historical commissions. Nonetheless, even though each nationalpolitical sphere has its own logic that governs remembering, the legitimacy of Russian historical narratives must be recognized therein if they are to be effective.…”

Section: Circulation Of Alternative Mnemonic Norms: the Russkii Mir And Diasporic Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…And given the differential Gerber and Laruelle (2020) observe in how young people react to history based on their personal histories, we can add families to that list as well. Soroka (2021b), meanwhile, focuses on institutional actors and the relationships between different groups of elites, mainly academics who worked on the historical commissions and the politicians on whom their success depended. As he points out, these bilateral bodies met at the behest of state, but their findings frequently did not comport with official interpretations of the past, historians having more room for discursive maneuver than politicians.…”

Section: Actors and Their Claimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When the Past Is Not Another Country: The Battlefields of History in Russia

Soroka

Krawatzek

2021

Problems of Post-Communism

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“…Despite facing an obvious political agenda and stalling on the part of Soviet authorities, the Polish side made headway, providing their colleagues with a report contesting the Burdenko Commission's findings in May 1988. 22 But while the advent of glasnost loosened the fetters of censorship, it also reinforced the need for carefully managing Katyń in the minds of Soviet leaders, the massacre having come to be seen as a potent tool in the hands of the Poles. as edward Shevardnadze, Valentin Falin, and Vladimir Kriuchkov wrote in a 22 March 1989 brief to the Central Committee of the Communist Party:…”

Section: Glasnost "Blank Spots" and The Search For An Anti-katyńmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recalling Katyń: Poland, Russia, and the Interstate Politics of History

Soroka

2021

East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures

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This article explores the role played by the 1940 Katyń massacre in structuring foreign relations between post-communist Poland and Russia. In so doing, it offers a theoretical model through which to understand the combative politics over history that have burgeoned in Eastern and Central Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Tracing how political discourse over the massacre has evolved from the late 1980s to the present, it examines the impact of exogenous influences and changing geopolitical realities on how this event is recalled within these two states, which exhibit markedly different relationships to their shared past. Questions of regime type, relative standing within the region, and how—as well as by whom—interstate discourse over contentious historical events is initiated are all central to the model of dispute origination developed herein, as is the presence of various institutional factors, chief among them membership in the supranational European Union (EU). A shadow study of Polish–Ukrainian relations concerning history, focusing on the mass killing of ethnic Poles that took place in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in the period 1943–1945, is also undertaken in order to illuminate the significant differences in how the past has been politically activated in relations between the respective post-Soviet dyads of Poland–Russia and Poland–Ukraine.

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The Politics of the Past: Polish-Soviet and Polish-Russian Efforts at Historical Reconciliation

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

When the Past Is Not Another Country: The Battlefields of History in Russia

Recalling Katyń: Poland, Russia, and the Interstate Politics of History

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