Mnemonic War
(War of Memory)
Author:
Yaroslav Motenko
Translation from Ukrainian: Viktoriia Grivina
Editor: Clemens Poole
- mnemonic warriors – those who consider themselves carriers of the only correct historical visions, and try to delegitimize or even destroy all alternative versions of the past;
- mnemonic pluralists – those who recognize plurality of visions of the past and the right to different visions;
- mnemonic abnegators – those who are either disinterested in memory politics, believing their country has an established, generally accepted vision of the past, or, wish to avoid this question, and try to avoid cultural confrontations and wars of memory;
- mnemonic perspectives – those who oppose any kind of appeals to the past.
Mnemonic wars are used by political actors (states, political parties, religious organisations, business structures) in order to mobilise potential electorate in support of mass political actions. In their political activity they resort to both legal and latent methods of mnemonic war. Legal includes, in particular, public commemorative practices aimed at transmitting important worldview-forming information about the past, as well as the creation of shared memories by developing rituals of honouring or celebrating something, and creating places of memory. We are therefore talking here about legal activities in the framework of the current legislation, though if needed, the same mnemonic practices may also have destructive informational components, aimed at discreditation of a certain political regime, encouraging political persecution, provocation of interethnic and interconfessional conflicts, etc. The most aggressive methods of mnemonic war capable of provoking negative long-term consequences include silencing and limiting information, formation of dogmatic thinking, falsification of historical primary sources, political mythologization of mass consciousness, artificial activation of collective conflict memories in order to provoke civil or international conflicts, and using destabilisation of the internal political situation, or the state of international affairs, to resolve contradictions by force.
Various aspects of the theory and practice of mnemonic war on Ukrainian territory in recent times have been uncovered in the works of I. Bohinska, V. Holovko, O. Hrytsenko, P. Dolganov I. Kovalska-Pavelko, V. Masnenko, Y. Prymachenko, V. Tarasova, V. Telvak, L. Yakubova. These and other scholars state that for the period from the late 20th century–early 21st century, Ukraine has witnessed a struggle between supporters of three local models of historical memory: Eurocentrist, Russian (Eurasian), and Sovet (communist). It is worth noting that the difference between the Russian and the Soviet models are purely ritual in nature, in most key points they are identical.
The unfolding of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014–2024 showed that it is the Russian society as a whole that is as a collective mnemonic warrior, suffering from a recurrent totalitarianism, and dreaming avenging the defeat of its country in the Cold War. The Russian Federation is trying to act as the heir to the Russian Empire and the USSR. The key goal of its expansionist project is the liquidation of Ukrainian statehood. One of the ways to achieve this goal is an aggressive mnemonic war, involving the entire information space of the Russian Federation and the territories temporarily occupied by it. The features of this mnemonic war include:
- The beginning, in 2014, of an information war during the "Russian Spring" campaign in the south-east of Ukraine, aimed at forming subconscious positive reactions in individuals to everything Russian, and an automatic negative reaction to all things Ukrainian. Russian propaganda used the Russian language as a cultural code, and St. George's ribbon as a visual marker.
- The use of ideological cliches, typical for WWII Soviet propaganda (preserving the title “Great Patriotic War” in Russian historiography, equating the Ukrainian national liberation movement — the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) — with the ideology of Nazism).
- The blocking of objective studies of the WWII period within the Russian Federation (in 2014 the Criminal Code of Russia was supplemented with article 354.1 threatening punishment for "spreading deliberately false information about the activities of the USSR during WWII", and extending the terms of secrecy of the NKVD archives until 2044).
- The use of humanities in the system of secondary and higher education as a tool for promoting the Soviet way of life (starting in 2012, the Russian Military-Historical Society (known by its Russian acronym, RVIT), a state propaganda organisation, has been engaged in the creation of memorials, the drafting of school textbooks, the organisation of military-historical festivals and patriotic tours for school children). RVIT publications identify the so-called “special military operation in Ukraine” with the German-Soviet war of 1941–1945, and perpetuate Kremlin narratives using manipulative justifications for the "denazification of Ukraine''.
- State support for the scaling up of post-memory rituals (The Immortal Regiment campaign in 2022 in Moscow and St.Petersburgh gathered about 1 million people).
- In schools of the so-called “Donetsk People's Republic”, in Local History. Donetsk Region, a 338-page textbook for the 5th graders, the word "Ukraine" is mentioned only a few times in passing, without any explanation of its origin. The authors of the textbook Pages of the History of Donbas: The Modern Times (14-18th centuries), for the 8th grade, avoid the ethnonym Ukrainians, instead imposing the ethnonym Cherkassy or refer to "the population of the Dnipro province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth".
Thus, in the beginning of the 21st century Ukraine has become the scene of an aggressive Russo-Ukrainian mnemonic war. The core idea of this memory war is to identify the so-called “special military operation” of the Russian Federation with the German-Soviet war of 1941–1945, and to foment a readiness among the Russian population to approve its armed expansion. At the same time, this model of mnemonic war can be characterised, on the Russian side, by the complete rejection of the existence of a Ukrainian ethnic group and Ukrainian statehood.
For further reference
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Author
Yaroslav Motenko
About the authors