The Ukraine crisis and European memory politics of the Second World War

Past Is Another Resource: Remembering the 70th Anniversary of the Victory Day on LiveJournal

“…The latter observation suggests that LiveJournal users seem to differentiate between Second World War remembrance and the instrumental use of war-related memory tropes in the context of the Ukraine crisis. This differentiation can be viewed as evidence that the use of Victory Day as the conceptual framework to interpret the crisis in Ukraine (Siddi 2017) does not necessarily leads to profound changes in Second World War remembrance, which remains a practice in itself. It also poses a question if the use of memory tropes, especially affective characteristics such as "Nazi" or "fascists", does actually rely on cultural memory practices or instead refers to stereotypical negative identities which do not necessarily evoke associations with the Second World War.…”

“…After the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, the Victory Day became instrumentalized by the Russian authorities in the context of the foreign politics. Not only it was reformulated with a more nationalistic rhetoric and used as a conceptual framework to explain and interpret the crisis in Ukraine (Siddi 2017), but also became increasingly used for propagating the state-sponsored ideas of the Russian World (Gaufman 2017). The latter approach was exemplified in the Immortal Regiment movement that started as a grassroots campaign in 2012, but in the later years was monopolized by the state and turned into a means of Russian soft power (Fedor 2017).…”

Historical framing of the Ukraine Crisis through the Great Patriotic War: Performativity, cultural consciousness and shared remembering

“…'Historical framing' here denotes the media framing of events within an historical schema, rather than the history of how an event has been framed. A variety of different approaches have been used to analyse the instrumentalisation of history in the Ukraine Crisis and elsewhere by the Russian media (Edenborg, 2017;Siddi, 2017) but framing provides the approach best suited to analysis of process. I have adopted Cacciatore, Scheufele and Iyengar's clarified approach to media framing (Cacciatore et al, 2016), with renewed emphasis on equivalence framing and the importance of pre-existing schema, often culturally dependent, all of which make framing analysis well-suited to exploring media coverage where familiar -and mythologisedversions of history function as the schema 1 .…”

“…(Cassirer, 1946) Russian media's instrumentalisation of the GPW as a method for interpreting the Ukraine Crisis has been well documented. A number of studies consider the significance of the GPW to political and media discourses on the Ukraine Crisis, and also its purpose as a means of securitisation (Edenborg, 2017;Gaufman, 2015Gaufman, , 2017Kuzio, 2015;Marples, 2016;Pasitselska, 2017;Siddi, 2017;Walker, 2017). Building on the concepts and findings of these works, I aim to contribute new knowledge by focussing on how historical framing erodes the boundary not only between past and present but also between political allegiance and national identity.…”

“…A variety of different approaches have been used to analyse the Russian media’s instrumentalisation of history in the Ukraine Crisis and elsewhere (Edenborg, 2017; Siddi, 2017) but framing provided the approach best suited to analysis of process. I have adopted Cacciatore, Scheufele and Iyengar’s clarified approach to framing analysis (Cacciatore et al, 2016), which placed renewed emphasis on equivalence framing and on the importance of pre-existing, culturally-dependent schema to successful media framing.…”