Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War: Reds Versus Whites

Description

In examining the re-emergence of Russia's White Movement, Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War gets to the heart of the rich 20th-century memory debates going on in Putin's Russia today. The Kremlin has been giving preference to a Soviet-lite nostalgia that denounces the 1917 Bolshevik revolution but celebrates the birth of a powerful Soviet Union able to bring the country to the forefront of the international scene after the victory in World War II. Yet in parallel, another historical narrative has gradually consolidated on the Russian public scene, one that favours the opposite camp, namely the White movement and the pro-tsarist groups defeated in the early 1920s. This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of this 'White Revenge', looking at the different actors who promote a White and pro-Romanov rehabilitation agenda in the political, ideological and cultural arenas and what this historical agenda might mean for Russia, both today and tomorrow.

Marlene Laruelle is Associate Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University, USA. She is the author of several books, including Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (2008), In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (2009), and Understanding Russia: The Challenges of Transformation (2018). Margarita Karnysheva is an independent researcher from Russia working on the Russian Civil War, Soviet military history, and contemporary Russia's politics of memory. She received her PhD in history of Japan and Soviet military history from the University of Kansas, USA.

Engaging with cutting-edge social theory and illustrating [the book's] arguments with examples from Hungary and Lithuania. * The Russian Review * Memory Politics succeeds in being both accessible and authoritative: it can be read with interest by specialists and by advanced undergraduates. It traces the political debates during the Soviet, Yeltsin, and Putin eras around the legacy of the "Whites," who defended Tsarism during the Russian Civil War (1918-21). * CHOICE * The book is very compact and provides a lively and informative overview of memory politics in contemporary Russia, focusing mostly on the period between the late 1980s and 2017. * Canadian Slavonic Papers * What an enlightening and compelling book! Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War proffers a compelling and uniquely rich tapestry of politicized memory that WEAVES together past and present, secular and religious, left and right, in a mix of vibrant narratives that continue to inform the ideological struggle for the "Russian soul" driving the Russian body politic under Putin. * Nina Tumarkin, Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies, Harvard University, USA * Powerful, rich and timely book exploring the collective memory (and political uses and abuses thereof) of one of the most conflicted pages in Russian history - Russian civil war. Laruelle and Karnysheva give us one more key to understanding contemporary Russian identity through the lens of Russia's uneasy relations with its own past. * Elena Morenkova Perrier, Independent Scholar, France * Laruelle and Karnysheva's study of the reception of the White movement in Russia today is a timely and important contribution on post-Soviet memory politics. In exploring inter-connected and sometimes competing varieties of 'memory activism' amongst both state and non-state actors, the authors highlight significant debates concerning conservatism, nationalism and Russian identity. * George Gilbert, Lecturer in Modern Russian History, University of Southampton, UK * This book is much broader than the title suggests. Through the prism of debates over the rehabilitation of major figures once vilified by the Soviet regime, it provides a handy guide and introduction to the knotty problem of defining Russian patriotism today. Compact and lively, it will be of interest to anyone interested in contemporary Russia and will make an excellent text for the classroom. * Eric Lohr, Professor and Carmel Chair of Russian History and Culture History, American University, USA *