The Federal Center and the Regions: Dynamics of Interaction

This chapter is devoted to the interaction between the federal center and the regions of Central Russia in matters of public history. The former placed greater emphasis on diversifying the mechanisms that ensure the coherence of memory politics than on ideological development. It is not cultural practices and the “communities of memory” that reproduce them, but rather institutions and memorial objects that constitute the primary focus of interest. This clearly reflects a perception of public history as a rent-generating resource, in the redistribution of which regions may also receive their own—usually modest—share. I have found no evidence that anyone in the capital seriously reflected on what is happening overall in the field of public history in Russia’s regions or on how such interaction might best be structured. From the perspective of the federal center, the mesoregion proved to be in demand primarily as a repository of “Russian antiquity” and “military glory.” This compels partial agreement with Liudmila Parts, who argued that the province, represented as a “storehouse of the Russian national spirit,” is required by official discourse for a highly specific purpose: against the backdrop of growing anti-Western sentiment, it comes to embody precisely what is presented as Russia’s “superiority.”