Future of the Soviet Past

Anton Weiss-Wendt is Research Professor at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies. He is author of the two-volume Documents on the Genocide Convention from the American, British, and Russian Archives; A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War; The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention; and Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust. He is editor of Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938–1945 and The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration. Nanci Adler is Professor of Memory, History, and Transitional Justice at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies and the University of Amsterdam. She has authored and/or edited, among others, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement, and Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling. Her current research focuses on transitional justice and the legacy of Communism.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Revisiting the Future of the Soviet Past and the Memory of Stalinist Repression, by Nanci Adler and Anton Weiss-WendtPart I: The Present Memory of the Past1. Presentism, Politicization of History, and the New Role of the Historian in Russia, by Ivan Kurilla2. Secondhand History: Outsourcing Russia's Past to Kremlin's Proxies, by Anton Weiss-Wendt3. The Soviet Past and the 1945 Victory Cult as Civil Religion in Contemporary Russia, by Nikita Petrov4. Russia as a Bulwark against Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial: The Second World War according to Moscow, by Kiril FefermanPart II: Museums, Pop Culture, and Other Memory Battlegrounds5. Keeping the Past in the Past: The Attack on the Perm 36 Gulag Museum and Russian Historical Memory of Soviet Repression, by Steven A. Barnes6. Known and Unknown Soldiers: Remembering Russia's Fallen in the Great Patriotic War, by Johanna Dahlin7. Fighters of the Invisible Front: Re-imaging the Aftermath of the Great Patriotic War in Recent Russian Television Series, by Boris Noordenbos8. War, Cinema, and the Politics of Memory in Putin 2.0 Culture, by Stephen M. NorrisPart III: Remembering and Framing the Soviet Past beyond Russia's Borders9. The 2014 Russian Memory Law in European Context, by Nikolay Koposov10. Tenacious Pasts: Geopolitics and the Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Issues, by George Soroka11. The 1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia: Return to the Soviet Interpretation, by Štěpán ČernoušekIndex

Overall, this is a popular topic well handled and essential for students and scholars across several disciplines. The volume provides a good overview of contemporary Russia, and as scholars we should now consider how else these new avenues of research can be unlocked.- James C. Pearce - College of the Marshall Islands (The Russian Review) This volume considers the relationship between the history of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russian culture, exploring how cinema, television, music, education and more reflect historical narratives, particularly in relation to Josef Stalin. The contributors contend that 'Russia's inability to fully rewrite Soviet history plays [a] part in its current political agenda'.(Survival)