ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Soviet Union induced or intensified the processes of constituting nations—understood as imagined political communities represented in the minds of their members as at the same time internally homogenous and distinct from others. Nation-building presupposed “inventing” national histories and constituting “collective memories.” The chapter examines the evolution of the strategies of representation of repressions in the official discourse of post-Soviet Russia as well as various practices of their commemoration. The emphasis was often put on the memories of repressions lived through during the Soviet rule. The historical narrative of a nation as a victim of persecution became a means of constituting nation as such; “ethnicization” of repressions became a mechanism applied in the process of such a constitution. Russia was and is exploiting history as the material for building the nation; narrating the history of repressions may be considered a significant part of this process. During the last 30 years, various strategies of conceptualization of repressions were developed: “accepting the responsibility,” “self-victimization,” “legitimization,” “oblivion.” The postcolonial resentment and the rise of imperial ambitions leading to emphasizing the narrative of “building the powerful state,” as well as the reaction to the “ethnicized” historical narratives of the repressions evolving in many of the post-Soviet countries, may explain Russia’s drift from the attempts to constitute the nation’s collective memory of repressions toward the efforts to suppress it.
