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ABSTRACT
Existing analyses of the 1917 Russian Revolution centenary commemorations organised by the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) present the Church as a monolithic institution and argue that its commemorations resulted from a political goal to become the leading expert in Russia’s politics of memory. In this contribution, we propose a more nuanced approach. Using concepts derived from memory studies, we claim that the Church’s centenary commemorations were the result of complex memory processes. First, it was a path-dependent product of two prior commemorations of historical events – the martyrdom of the new martyrs, and the restoration of the patriarchate. Second, it was a result of commemorative activities undertaken by different clergymen who are actively shaping memory of the past but who propose different interpretations of it. Finally, these agents of memory have activated the carrying capacity of different mnemonic representations to support their interpretations of the past, bringing significant change to the Russian Orthodox Church’s official memory of the 1917 Revolution.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our colleagues from the project ‘From the Enemy of the People to the Holy Martyr’, Katya Klimenko, Elena Kucheryavaya, and Marta Łukaszewicz for thought-provoking discussions. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers, the editor of this collection Katya Tolstaya, and the journal editors for their help in improving this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. On the transformations of the state official memory of the Russian Revolution see (Boltunova Citation2017; Kolonitskii Citation2017; Litvinenko and Zavadski Citationforthcoming; Malinova Citation2018b; Torbakov Citation2018).
2. ‘From Enemy of the People to New Martyr’ is an international collaborative research project sponsored by the Polish National Science Centre (2017–2020) and conducted by the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw. It investigates contemporary Russian memory of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and of the Great Terror. The project examines the impact of Orthodox discourse on the official memory of Soviet repressions, illuminating reception of the revolutions of 1917 and of the Great Terror in contemporary Russia.
3. As Irwin-Zarecka points out, memory infrastructures are various kinds of spaces, objects and texts that facilitate contact with the past (Irwin Zarecka Citation1994). For the Russian Orthodox Church’s memory infrastructure based on the history of the Gulag on the Solovetsky Islands, see (Bogumił Citation2018).
4. One of the goals of the state conception is ‘the formation and development in places of mass graves of victims of political repressions of memorial sites that perpetuate the memory of victims of political repressions’. For the text of the policy see ‘Kontseptsiia gosudarstvennoi politiki po uvekovecheniiu pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii’ 15 August 2015. No. 1561-Р. 2015. http://president-sovet.ru/documents/read/393/#doc-1.
5. In 2018, it was published by the Moscow Patriarchate in Russian as The Word of His Holiness the Patriarch. Lessons of the Century (see Kirill Citation2018). This book appeared in the ‘Word of His Holiness the Patriarch’ series, published since 2014. The series discusses the significance of important spaces (the Holy Land), historical persons (Holy Prince Vladimir, Patriarch Tikhon, the Tsar’s family), and historical moments (1917 Revolution). It is the best source for investigating the official ROC understanding of past events, people, and places.
6. For a detailed description of the ‘Under the Star of the Birthgiver of God’ procession and its significance, see (Shevzov Citation2018).
7. This exhibition later became part of the multimedia Historical Park ‘Russia – My History’ (Klimenko Citation2020; Bogumił and Łukaszewicz Citation2018; Laruelle Citation2019).
8. According to Patriarch Kirill, the most important decision of the Council was the restoration of the patriarchate. In addition, he also mentioned other decisions of the Council, among them the recognition of the independence of the church from the state, the introduction of the principle of unity in the management of church affairs, and the introduction of metropolia (Kirill Citation2017d).
9. For how the Russian Orthodox Church perceives traditional values and the meaning of ‘traditional morality’ for the church, see, e.g. (Agadjanian Citation2017; Stoeckl Citation2016).
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Notes on contributors
Zuzanna Bogumił
Zuzanna Bogumił was assistant professor at The Maria Grzegorzewska University until February 2020, when she was appointed an assistant professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences. She works on the religious dimensions of memory. Her publications include Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past (Berghahn, 2018), and co-authored studies: The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (Berghahn, 2015), Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Community, Religion and Historical Politics (Peter Lang, 2019).
Tatiana Voronina
Tatiana Voronina is a research fellow at Zurich University in Switzerland. Her scholarly interests include the social and cultural history of the former Soviet Union, memory studies, and oral history. She is the book review editor for Laboratorium: The Russian Review of Social Research. She is also the author of a monograph on socialist realism and the siege of Leningrad, Pomnit’ po-nashemy: sotsrealisticheskii istorizm v blokada Leningrada (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie Press, 2018).