The glorification of the Soviet victory over Nazism is the focal point of Russia’s politics of history and an element of the ideological offensive that aims to legitimise Russian great-power ambitions. The narrative centred on the victory has a strong religious, not to say, messianic dimension. It aims to whitewash the dark chapters of Soviet history and legitimise the wars Moscow waged after 1945. According to the contemporary neo-Soviet interpretations, these wars were always defensive and justified by external circumstances. At the same time, distinctly anti-Western rhetoric is becoming more and more perceptible in Russian propaganda. The repeated accusations of “eternal” attempts by the West to destroy Russia and destabilise the global order are intensifying. The official discourse is marked by the nostalgia for the lost empire and the “concert of powers” that was established at the Yalta conference; it also seeks to justify violence as a tool of foreign policy. Its overriding aim is to legitimise the authoritarian regime and Moscow’s contemporary strategic goals, such as the hegemony in the post-Soviet area and the reshaping of the European security architecture. The official narrative is promoted by the state institutions, the educational system, the Kremlin-controlled media outlets and a network of social organisations subsidised by the state. It is also safeguarded by the administrative and criminal law and the apparatus of repression.

Abstract: The Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests (Комиссия при президенте Российской Федерации по противодействию попыткам фальсификации истории в ущерб интересам России), established in 2009, was intended to serve as Russia’s response to similar attempts at institutionalisation in the Central and Eastern Europe region (such as the historical commissions in the Baltic states, and the Institutes of National Remembrance in Poland and Ukraine). At the same time, its activities showed a multidimensional approach, combining elements of security policy with education, culture and media, public and non-public memory policy, and formal and informal activities. Although the official emphasis was mainly on the external (foreign) determinants of the Commission’s genesis, it also became an important element of domestic policy. The Commission only operated for three years (2009–2012), but its importance as a tool of Kremlin policy cannot be overestimated. It turned difficult historical issues into “historical weapons”; introduced international public discourse to the Russian narrative, which was constructed in a spirit of confrontation with the memories of its neighbours; coordinated the activities of formal state organisations, as well as those which operated as nominally non-state bodies but were financed by the state; expanded the community of expert research which argued the Russian narrative while undermining others from abroad; and examined the options for transmitting the desired attitudes and opinions to wider audiences, creating systemic mechanisms of what has been called “counteracting the falsification of history.” The aim of this article is to show the institutional and organisational aspect of this phenomenon.

Respect for the achievements of the USSR was one of the foundations of Belarusian politics of history even before the rule of Alyaksandr Lukashenka; this was also reflected in the identity of most Belarusians, who perceived themselves as “Soviet people”. A special place in the narrative about the Soviet period was occupied by the Great Patriotic War, which was also presented from the perspective of the enormous demographic and material losses that affected the territory of today’s Belarus. The timid attempts undertaken in the early 1990s to demythologise the cult of the war period did not lead to any significant changes in the narrative, especially since Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s rise to power in 1994 effectively blocked any further efforts to revise Belarusian historiography. For President Lukashenka, who has ruled ever since then, the Great Patriotic War was and continues to be one of the key periods defining the history of Belarus and its contemporary domestic and foreign policy. At the same time, in response to Russia’s interference in Ukraine in 2014 and Moscow’s desire to subjugate Minsk fully, the Belarusian president began playing World War II “memory card” that had hitherto been excluded from the current disputes, in order to strengthen his and his country’s own historical narrative as something separate from that of Russia.

Being borrowed from the Soviet historical narrative and successfully adapted to the needs of the Belarusian state, the memory of Victory in the Great Patriotic War has become the ideological basis for the authoritarian regime in Belarus. This article is aimed at addressing the celebration of the Victory Day in Minsk in 2020 and, through the analysis of this particular case, identify the main frames for the ideological image of Victory in the Belarusian authorities’ politics of history as well as the mechanisms for population involvement and ideological mobilisation. The year 2020 has become critical for Belarusian politics as for the first time since 1994, mass democratic protests challenged Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s complete control over Belarusian society.

This article is an original attempt to define the main features of the myth of the Great Patriotic War in post-Communist Russian cinema. By combining historical, cultural and film studies, the author defines the reasons for the appearance of the above-mentioned myth and its popularity, and indicates the effects of the ideologisation of an event which has been important for politics of history during the rule of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. The article will cite examples of films containing repetitive narrative elements that appear with varying intensity and regularity in the Russian political and public discourse on the Great Patriotic War. The author will also refer to how such films have been received, and will define a potential perspective for the further development of this theme.

The article focuses on the examples of Ukrainian historical feature films set in World War II and the so-called “war after the war” in Ukraine. The images considered evade rigid categories, and show the diversity of cultural representations of the period in question, which constitute a field of negotiation between the narrative of the Great Patriotic War and World War II. Film images will be analysed as a historical sources for study of the perceptions of history. The article’s main goal is to answer the question of “whose history” is presented there. The text is intended to present the films as the result of the activities of the various actors involved in politics of history in its broad definition.

In 1939–40, in the agreements imposed by the Soviet Union by force on Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, these nations were forced to withdraw from the Baltic Entente, and in the agreements of 1940 and 1944, it forbade Finland from joining the Scandinavian states. It also rejected the right of “small states”-Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as Yugoslavia and Greece (1942)-to join plans for regional integration supported by Great Britain. It should be recalled that in the interwar period, the Soviet Union had opposed Aristide Briand’s plan (1929) for a united Europe, which Soviet propaganda called “the holy capitalist alliance”. The Soviet Union policy believed that as a socialist state it resolved national, economic and social problems in the spirit of brotherhood and cooperation between nations. Capitalist states were allegedly incapable of equal unions of states. The Soviet Union described itself as a union of republics which were formally independent and equal states. In fact their independence was superficial, and the republican institutions were strictly controlled by the Communist party and the Soviet secret services. In foreign policy, the concept of Soviet federalism served to justify the successive annexation of neighbouring nations as republics “liberated” by the Red Army. The Soviet goal was to unite Europe, and even the whole world, on the basis of Communist ideology.

This article critically discusses the publication entitled Sovietisation and violence: the case of Estonia, edited by Meelis Saueauk and Toomas Hiio, published in 2018 by the University of Tartu Press as the first volume of the Proceedings of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory series. The author of this article refers in detail to several of the studies and articles published in the volume, most of which were written by researchers associated with its publisher, the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. In terms of content, as the reviewer notes, the publication’s aim is to introduce the international academic reader to the topic of the forced Sovietisation of Estonia in the 20th century. The author will attempt to assess to what extent the discussed volume lives up to the hopes placed in it. Overall, he concludes that despite all the errors and omissions noted, the publication’s desired aim was achieved, while also showing the above-named institution’s potential as a scholarly research unit with ambitions reaching beyond the local academic market.