Memory Politics in the Cities of Old Rus’—Regional Capitals

This chapter is devoted to a comparative analysis of memory politics in the regional capitals of the mesoregion. In particular, attention is paid to three dimensions: actors (who are the collective agents of memory politics?); the treatment of specific historical periods (how “dense” or “sparse,” to use Yael Zerubavel’s terminology, are particular epochs? which of them are used, and in what ways, to represent distinctiveness and a certain urban or regional sense of self?); the international perspective (although the study is structured around an examination of the interaction between national and regional historical narratives, in practice there are numerous ways of relating the local to the international dimension, which warrants separate consideration). If one takes seriously the thesis of Russia’s “1,000-year history,” then indeed state and societal institutions have undertaken considerable efforts to articulate and fix an ever-growing number of its individual pages. Regional history remains porous, filtered through the sieve of a nationwide narrative. “Russian antiquity,” an idealized imperial normalcy, and the heroic achievements of the Soviet era constitute the three dominant thematic and semantic frameworks that have received sustained attention. Even at the level of museum exhibitions, attempts to offer a coherent narrative of regional history from ancient times to the present were encountered in only two cities: in Bryansk, such a narrative was created during the Soviet period, and in Yaroslavl in the 1990s. If one seeks cross-cutting themes, the foremost is, of course, the tradition of military service. This inevitably leads to insensitivity toward the fact that Russian history has encompassed fundamentally different wars and divergent understandings of the grounds on which authorities may send citizens (or subjects) to their deaths. The second unifying thread is the experience of life within a single political space, which is largely self-evident given persistent attempts to interpret local history within national frameworks. The third—most clearly articulated in isolated private projects—is the history of industrial production, which makes it possible not only to link the imperial and Soviet periods, but in some cases to extend this continuity into the present. Although individual monuments or museum exhibitions (such as the Water Tower in Vladimir, the Old Pharmacy in Tula, and, to some extent, the museum in Khatsun’) offered relatively alternative models for engaging with the past, a restorative approach nevertheless predominated. This included the reconstruction of “everyday life” fragments, the restoration of destroyed churches, and the marking of urban space with signs of a “local eminent prince.” This was hardly a conscious response to the rhetoric of federal officials about “timeless” cultural and historical values said to unite Russians. However, I am prepared to suggest the existence of a “common ground”: the more the human, contradictory, eventful, and conflictual dimensions are expelled from regional narratives of regional history, the more the subjectivity of local communities is denied—while the resulting image comes to resemble, at least superficially, the desired “historical foundations.”