Korine Amacher / Andrii Portnov / Viktoriia Serhiienko (eds.) Official History in Eastern Europe. Osnabrück: fibre 2021. ISBN 978-3-944870-71-7

 

Table of Contents: https://www.fibre-verlag.de/images/EV-40-Inhaltsverzeichnis.pdf

Introduction: https://www.fibre-verlag.de/images/EV-40-Leseprobe.pdf

"Official history" is generally understood as the state-sponsored and ideologically-inclined construction of the past which serves the particular political aims of mostly non-democratic regimes. The optimistic belief that it would end up with the collapse of the Soviet Union has proved rather naive. As Pierre Nora argued, over the last thirty years we have experienced a “general politicization of history” – the process of transforming what historians produce into an ideology.

How are the intellectual choices made by historians today influenced by the long twentieth-century experiences of Eastern Europe? What could “official history” mean for a stateless nation or a self-proclaimed “republic”? How did Ukrainian historiography become or how was it forced to become Soviet? What spaces for individual research initiatives or even for modest disagreement with obligatory planned research existed in the official history institutions of Soviet Ukraine and socialist Poland? How were Russian textbooks on history re-written during the post-Soviet years? What role do literature, film, monuments, holidays or rituals play in the politics of history? How have memories of the Second World War been instrumentalised in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict and how have images of the ongoing war in the Donbas influenced memory debates in neighbouring post-Soviet states?

All those questions are reflected in the interdisciplinary contributions to this volume by scholars from Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland and Ukraine. The majority of research papers were developed within the research project Divided Memories, Shared Memories. Ukraine/Russia/Poland (20th–21st centuries): An Entangled History (supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation) at the University of Geneva, and were first presented at the conference Official History in Eastern Europe. Transregional Perspectives at the German Historical Institute Warsaw in June 2018.

KORINE AMACHER, Prof. Dr., is Professor of Russian and Soviet History and the director of the M.A. Program “Russia - Central and Eastern Europe” at the University of Geneva.

ANDRII PORTNOV, Prof. Dr., is Professor of the Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder) and Director of PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin.

VIKTORIIA SERHIIENKO, Dr., is a Senior Researcher at the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Source Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv.