The late 1980s-mid-1990s reconstruction of the history of Soviet repressions critically influenced the social formation of Gulag memory in Russia. Amongst those re-narrating the past, 'Memorial' Society and the Russian Orthodox Church most actively shaped the collective memory of Soviet repressions, trying to establish multi-layered explanatory constructs of the Gulag. Their interpretations were crystallized through contemporary memorialisation acts in significant landscapes of the past. Focusing on Solovki, Ekaterinburg, Butovo and Magadan and analysing tensions in their memorialisation processes, we discuss secular and Orthodox interpretations of the Gulag, and their impact on the memory of the Soviet repressions in contemporary Russia.
This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper In the year 2000, during the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, more than one thousand victims of Soviet repressions—people persecuted and murdered by the Soviet regime—were glorified and named the New Russian Martyrs. By presenting the origin and background of the phenomenon, authors demonstrate that the New Martyrdom is a kind of invented tradition. They focus on analysis of the tension that occurs when history becomes religion by highlighting some problematic issues with regard to the New Martyrdom and showing how the Russian Orthodox Church is addressing them. The analysis sheds new light on the political use of religion for the creation of narrative about the past in contemporary Russia.
This book is the product of a long period of cooperation fueled by our common desire to comprehend the crucial influence religious modes of commemoration exert on meaning attributed to the past, and in particular to twentieth-century history. We have repeatedly encountered such religious modes of commemoration over the course of field trips undertaken in Poland over many years. In fact, crosses, memorial stones engraved with religious symbols, churches, and sanctuaries containing epitaphs, commemorative plaques, sacred figures, or stained-glass windows form an integral part of the Polish cultural landscape. These memory markers became such a frequent topic of discussion during the regular meetings we organized to reflect on our research that we eventually decided it would be worth investigating the issue of religious commemoration systematically. We achieved this by developing a project titled Milieux de mémoire in Eastern Europe -the Polish Case Study, which the National Science Center generously agreed to fund 1 . The project was coordinated by Zuzanna Bogumił and administered by the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw. Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper and Marta Karkowska were the main investigators in this project. We would like here to offer our very warm gratitude to Marta Karkowska for the many years she devoted to the project, carrying out research in Kałków-Godów, Michniów, and Markowa, conducting analytical work, taking part in discussions and critically reading each chapter of the book, all of which enabled her to offer us very valuable comments that helped us put the finishing touches to the manuscript. Our analysis of articles that Marta Karkowska published about Michniów 2 and the manuscript she prepared for another article on Markowa were an important point of departure for us when we started writing the chapters of this book devoted to these places. 2 Marta Karkowska. "Międzypokoleniowe Transmisje pamięci. Na podstawie badań we wsiach świętokrzyskich. " [Intergenerational Memory Transmissions. Based on Research in Villages in the Holy Cross Region]
The Author examines the presentation of the German occupation at the Warsaw Rising Museum and in Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory in Krakow. Initially, she studies the space of these exhibitions and demonstrates that the Warsaw Rising Museum has some characteristics of reflective space, while the exhibition at the Schindler’s Factory is primarily a projective one. Then, she points out that both museums treat artefacts as illustrations of their stories, as a consequence of which they are simulations of the past rather than material testimonies of what had happened. Finally, the Author argues that the Warsaw Rising Museum primarily tells the story of glory of the Polish nation, while the Schindler Factory focuses on the social history. In conclusion the Author points out that none of the exhibitions breaks the existing taboos or offers a new approach to the past. Both museum stories perfectly reflect the shape of the Polish social memory of World War II. Differences in the way they present the past are a result of rooting each of the stories in different public debates that were conducted in Poland after 1989.
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