Official History in Eastern Europe
herausgegeben von Korine Amacher, Andrii Portnov und Viktoriia Serhiienko“Official history” is generally understood as state-sponsored and ideologically inclined construction of the past which serves certain political aims of mostly non-democratic regimes. The optimistic believes that it will end up with the collapse of the Soviet Union proved to be rather naive. As Pierre Nora argued, over the last thirty years we have experienced a “general politicization of history” – the process of transforming what historians produce into an ideology.
How are the intellectual choices made by historians today influenced by the long twentieth-century experiences of Eastern Europe? What could “official history” mean for a stateless nation or a self-proclaimed “republic”? How did Ukrainian historiography become or how was it forced to become Soviet? What spaces for individual research initiatives or even for modest disagreement with obligatory planned research existed in the official history institutions of Soviet Ukraine and socialist Poland? How were Russian textbooks on history re-written during the post-Soviet years? What role do literature, film, monuments, holidays or rituals play in the politics of history? How have memories of the Second World War been instrumentalised in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict and how have images of the ongoing war in the Donbas influenced memory debates in neighbouring post-Soviet states?
All those questions are reflected in the interdisciplinary contributions to the volume by scholars from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland and Ukraine. The majority of research papers were developed within the research project Divided Memories, Shared Memories. Ukraine/Russia/Poland (20th–21st centuries): An Entangled History (supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation) at the University of Geneva, and were first presented at the conference Official History in Eastern Europe. Transregional Perspectives at the German Historical Institute Warsaw in June 2018.
How are the intellectual choices made by historians today influenced by the long twentieth-century experiences of Eastern Europe? What could “official history” mean for a stateless nation or a self-proclaimed “republic”? How did Ukrainian historiography become or how was it forced to become Soviet? What spaces for individual research initiatives or even for modest disagreement with obligatory planned research existed in the official history institutions of Soviet Ukraine and socialist Poland? How were Russian textbooks on history re-written during the post-Soviet years? What role do literature, film, monuments, holidays or rituals play in the politics of history? How have memories of the Second World War been instrumentalised in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict and how have images of the ongoing war in the Donbas influenced memory debates in neighbouring post-Soviet states?
All those questions are reflected in the interdisciplinary contributions to the volume by scholars from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland and Ukraine. The majority of research papers were developed within the research project Divided Memories, Shared Memories. Ukraine/Russia/Poland (20th–21st centuries): An Entangled History (supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation) at the University of Geneva, and were first presented at the conference Official History in Eastern Europe. Transregional Perspectives at the German Historical Institute Warsaw in June 2018.