Entangled histories in Eastern Europe: complementary occlusions and interlocking extremes in Baltic-Russian memory conflicts

ABSTRACT

Eastern Europe is the scene of multiple memory conflicts, especially between the Russian Federation and other regional states. Typically, analyses of these conflicts examine contradictions between opposed accounts, critique distortions of the historical record, and attempt to establish corrected narratives. Instead, the present article examines how seemingly incommensurate accounts may be elements of larger structures of entangled mutual reinforcement. Analysis is directed toward Latvian and Russian documentary film accounts of World War II, and reveals how alternate regimes of truth may operate not to destabilize one another, but rather to reinforce opposition and to support symmetrical occlusions in memory discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory war
• fetish narrative
• World War II
• Latvia
• Russia
• Šnore
• The Soviet Story
• Chertkov
• Nazism
• Baltic Style

Acknowledgments

Versions of this essay were presented at the symposium on “Fake News? Post Truth & Politics of Authenticity Since the Cold War” at the Institute of Arts and Humanities, University of California, San Diego; at the conference “Film Diplomacy in the Digital Age” at the University of Pennsylvania; and at the conference “War As a Figure of Speech and Form of Thought” (Small Bathhouse Readings, 2015), co-sponsored by Smolny College of the University of St. Petersburg and the journal Emergency Ration. The author wishes to express gratitude to the organizers of and participants in those discussions, in particular Amelia Glaser, Ilya Kalinin, and Serguei Oushakine, as well as Kristen Ghodsee, for their questions and interventions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Old Europe, New Europe,’ remarks at the Leipzig Book Fair, Sandra Kalniete, 24 April 2004 (Kalniete 2004).

2. ‘Comments of the Department of Information and the Press of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Connection with the Most Recent March of Legionnaires of the “Waffen-SS” in Riga, 16 March 2018’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation 2018).

3. Other, similar documentary films produced before in the Russian Federation include: (Gasanov 2007; Chertkov 2009).

4. Alfrēds Rubiks is a Latvian politician whose career culminated with service as a Member of the European Parliament for the Harmony Center coalition (2009–14). His career has been shaped more than anything else by his participation in the Latvian ‘Committee of the State of Emergency’ during the August 1991 attempted overthrow of Gorbachev, which led to his conviction and prison sentence during the 1990s for organization of an attempted coup d’état.

5. As the Presidential Commission of the Historians of Latvia notes, of the more than 15,000 deportees, close to half were women, and 15% were children under the age of 10 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia 2006); to this may be added that the deportation included a significant contingent of Jews.

6. To be sure, these phenomena are not unconnected. Following the disbanding of the Sonderkommando Arājs in the last phases of the war, its members were transferred to the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS. Yet Nazism, Baltic Style, following its conflationary logic of montage, renders the two organizations – the former of which at its peak included some 1,500 members, all volunteers, and the latter of which numbered close to 100,000 men, largely forcibly conscripted – as practically equivalent.

7. Šnore has since 2014 been an elected MP for the National Alliance, the forerunner of which, TB/LNNK, was one of the UEN parties that helped finance and promote The Soviet Story at the EU level.

8. Information about the film’s sponsors and premiere was presented on the official website of the film, which is no longer accessible, but still may be viewed via the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20080407040931/http://www.sovietstory.com:80/about-the-film/(Accessed 5 May 2020).

9. The program aired on 18 March 2014. A clip of the discussion, posted by Šnore, is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJai1x4paMk (Accessed 5 May 2020).

10. Mälksoo (2018) offers an extended discussion of Šnore’s intervention in The Soviet Story into the memory politics of the European Union and of the film’s renovation of the umbrella category of totalitarianism, encompassing both Nazism and Stalinism (I echo her reference to Hannah Arendt as foundational to this school of thought). On this topic, see also, Neumayer (2018, 206–8).

11. For discussion of the larger landscape of contested memory concerning the Katyń massacre, see (Etkind et al. 2012).

12. Curiously, Šnore chose not to show images of President George W. Bush, who was present at the same parade, in an expression either of political identification with the Bush administration’s policies or a reluctance to offend American sensibilities. Ten years later, in 2015, European leaders refused invitations to attend Victory Day celebrations in Moscow in a reflection of the climate of tension in European-Russia relations resulting from the ongoing Ukraine crisis.

13. The quotation in the cited material refers to a separate publication by the same author. It is interesting to note that in the English translation of this document available on the site, the slippage between ethnonational and political designations of the Soviet occupier has been eliminated: ‘By referring repeatedly to resolving “the problem,” be it the Polish or the Baltic problem, they insinuated clearly what lay behind such terms’ (Feldmanis 2015b).

14. For examples of official Russian statements concerning Russia’s place in a united Europe in the early 2000 s, see Putin (2001, 2003).

15. Curkurs’s case is complicated by the fact that he was assassinated and never brought to trial, allowing his defenders to claim that his heinous criminal acts are only alleged. For a convenient index page of press coverage on the Cukurs musical, see LMT.lv (n.d.); for Israeli condemnation see JTA (2014); for the official Latvian rebuke see Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia (2014); for official Russian condemnation see Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2014).

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Kevin M. F. Platt

Dr. Kevin M. F. Platt is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been the recipient of grants from IREX, NCEEER, Fulbright-Hays and other programs, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-12. Platt works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian cultures. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin, 2006), and the editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin, 2019). He is currently completing a monograph on contemporary Russian culture in Latvia.