Populism and Memory: Legislation of the Past in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.

The uses of victimhood as a hegemonic meta-narrative in eastern Europe

“…The resulting hegemonic narrative is so widespread that, as Holmgren put it, a more nuanced portrayal of Polish complicity 'would be hard for Poles to absorb in the most liberal political climate' (Holmgren 2019, 97). 9 A similar phenomenon can be observed in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, where atrocities by nationalists during World War II have been nearly erased from textbooks and public spaces to celebrate sacrificial victimhood (Stan 2008;Koposov 2021). In Croatia and Serbia, the ruling right-wing parties have portrayed World War II suffering as a prequel and even justification for the 1990s wars, making a continuous succession of national war victimhood (Gordy 2013;Subotić 2019).…”

Memory laws, mnemonic weapons: The diffusion of a norm across Europe and beyond

“…The 1998 Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, in addition to its isomorphic memory law components and the novel specification of communist crimes, established the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej [IPN]) as an official commission for the prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation : a consequential self-emphasis later adopted by Lithuania’s (2010) and Latvia’s (2014) memory laws. Indeed, Lithuania’s law goes a step further in specifying crimes ‘committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany on the territory of the Republic of Lithuania’, thereby ‘whitewashing’ complicity of individual Lithuanians (Koposov, 2022: 280). Here, we glimpse the beginnings of self-protection largely absent in the Traditional and Expanded memory models.…”