Russian Social Science Review, vol. 58, nos.

4–5,
July–October 2017, pp. 318–336.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1061-1428 (print)/ISSN 1557-7848 (online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611428.2017.1365546

LORINA P. REPINA

Historical Memory and Contemporary

Historical Scholarship
Postmodernism offers a new appreciation of the complex interplay between
history and the historical memory or consciousness of individuals, groups,
and societies as filtered through oral transmission, fiction, and the media.

Postmodernist criticism has focused sharply on the epistemological problems

that accumulated in historical scholarship during the last third of the twen-
tieth century, leading to a new understanding of the tasks at hand and to
qualitative changes in the choice of subjects, conceptual apparatus, and
methodological underpinnings of historical research. Although devising a
new paradigm for history proved to be a complex and contradictory process,
the one thing that was certain at the beginning of the new century was that the
more encouraging prospects emphasized the category of culture. This trend
indicates the emergence of a new direction in historical scholarship, which
has been called either the new cultural history1 or historical culture studies.2
The shift toward culture studies at the turn of both a century and a
millennium is linked to the cultural turn in intellectual history, earlier
defined solely as historiography. As a result, the sphere of interest of

English translation © 2010 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. [now Taylor & Francis Group, LLC],
from the Russian text © 2004 Russian Academy of Sciences; Institute of World
History, Russian Academy of Sciences; and the author. “Istoricheskaia pamiat’ i
sovremennaia istoriografiia,” novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 2004, no. 5, pp. 39–51.
Translated by Liv Bliss. Translation reprinted from Russian Studies in History,
vol. 49, no. 1, doi: 10.2753/RSH1061-1983490101.
Professor Lorina Petrovna Repina, Doctor of History, is deputy director of the
Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, and president of the
Russian Society of Intellectual History.

318
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 319

intellectual history, previously restricted to creative thought and the inno-

vative ideas of intellectuals, now includes aspects of culture as understood
by anthropologists—categories of consciousness and the myths, symbols,
and idioms through which people conceive of their lives. The basic theore-
tical/methodological principles shared by intellectual history and the new
cultural history acknowledge the active role played by language and dis-
cursive strategies in the creation and description of historical reality. This is
essentially the second crucial qualitative shift to have taken place in world
historical scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century, following
the transition from sociostructural history to the history of mentalities and
the heyday of historical anthropology in Western scholarship in the latter
half of the 1970s and the 1980s.
The contemporary situation in historical scholarship has created an
enormous new field of research into the history of culture. The compre-
hensive study of the integrated phenomenon of historical culture (and
historical tradition) rests on a synthesis of sociocultural and intellectual
history, which assumes an analysis of intellectual phenomena in the broad
context of social experience, the historical mentality, and spiritual life in
society in general—including theoretical, ideological, and everyday con-
sciousness. This is the angle from which to view the mental stereotypes, the
historical myths, the processes of various vintages that transform everyday
historical consciousness, and the mechanisms that shape, convert, and
transmit the future-oriented historical memory of generations—the aggre-
gate of familiar perceptions, notions, judgments, and opinions on events
and outstanding personalities and phenomena of the past and the means
whereby the latter may be explained and conceptualized.
English translation © 2010 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text ©
2004 Russian Academy of Sciences; Institute of World History, Russian
Academy of Sciences; and the author. “Istoricheskaia pamiat’ i sovremen-
naia istoriografiia,” novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 2004, no. 5, pp. 39–51.
Translated by Liv Bliss.
Professor Lorina Petrovna Repina, Doctor of History, is deputy director
of the Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, and
president of the Russian Society of Intellectual History.
The postmodernist program has significantly concentrated attention on
the variability of ideas about the past, on the role of historical theories that
interpret historical texts in light of contemporary preconceptions. It operates
as a force field that organizes chaotic and fragmentary material. The
constant quest for “new paths” in history is inevitably predicated on the
ever-changing questions that we in the present ask of the past. But the sharp
turn in historiography during the last third of the twentieth century also
320 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

gave rise to a new attitude toward documents that included the realization
that texts do not reflect but interpret a past reality. That being so, the
reconstruction of the past is an unattainable goal, and the historian’s task
is, by constructing the relevant portion of the past, to assist individuals and
social groups (especially marginal groups) to acquire their own identity. In
this context, it comes as no surprise that historians are now actively
addressing the problems of memory.
It is very interesting how people perceive events (not only personal or
group events but also those of history writ large) that have occurred in their
lifetimes or in which they have participated, how they assess such events
and preserve information about them, variously interpreting things that they
have seen or lived through. The very subjectivity of the sources under study
reflects the views and preferences, the value systems, of those who
authored these eyewitness accounts and historical documentation. The
subjectivity that freights this information (reflecting views characteristic,
to a greater or lesser degree, of a given social group or society as a whole)
is thus culturally and historically specific to its time. A text that “distorts
information about reality” does not therefore cease to be a historical source,
even after the problem of source interpretation has been recognized as a
problem of interpreting the interpretations.
The extensive and diverse historical materials (texts of the oral tradition,
annals [annaly], chronicles [khroniki, letopisi], “ecclesiastical histories,”
“histories of nationalities,” etc.), as well as journalistic and fictional
accounts, all reflect in some way the persistence of ideas about the past
in the elite or folk culture and their role in the social life and political
orientation of individuals and groups. These materials provide a first-rate
historical baseline for the study of historical culture—including, on the one
hand, the interactive development of ideas about the past fixed in the
collective memory of various ethnic and social groups and, on the other,
in the historical thought of a given era—wherein scholarly knowledge
influences the emergence of collective notions of the past and is in turn
influenced by mass stereotypes. The scope of this study may be substan-
tially broadened by effective use of comparative historical methods in
analyzing the processes under study in countries and regions whose histor-
ical experience, political and cultural traditions, and revelations of analo-
gous and contrasting characteristics of “their own” and an “alien” past
differ greatly.
The famous French historian Bernard Guenée was the first to formulate
the problem and to outline original approaches to the study of medieval
historical culture. He wrote: “A social group, a political society, or a
civilization are primarily defined by their memory—by their history, that
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 321

is, yet not the history that was in reality theirs but that which their historians
have made for them… . I am interested in historians but even more in their
readers, in a historical work but even more in its success, in history but
even more in historical culture.”3 In the concept of historical culture,
history that has been made by historians and has become memory combines
with the historical consciousness that accepts that history. To this day,
however, scholars in various countries have been concentrating their efforts
not on a study of the comprehensive phenomenon of historical culture but
on the problems of historical memory.
In late twentieth-century historical scholarship abroad (in France and
Germany, primarily), representative schools of research into historical (cul-
tural) memory formed, and the number of publications devoted to those
problems grew steadily.4 Their visible conceptual and terminological differ-
ences notwithstanding, they have one important feature in common: for them,
the principal subject of history is not the past event but the memory of that
event, the image that has become indelibly present for the participants and
contemporaries who experienced it, has been relayed to their immediate des-
cendants, has been restored or reconstructed in succeeding generations, and has
been “tested” and “filtered” through the methods of historical criticism.5
Historical memory is most often understood as a dimension of individual
and collective (or social) memory, as a memory of the past or, more accurately,
as a symbolic representation of that past. Historical memory is not just one of
the principal channels for the transmission of experience of, and information
on, the past but also a crucial component of the self-identification of the
individual, the social group, and the society as a whole, since the revival of
shared images of the past is a type of memory that is of particular significance
to the configuration of social groups in the here and now. The images of events
(in the form of cultural stereotypes, symbols, and myths) fixed in collective
memory provide interpretive models that allow the individual and the social
group to maneuver in the world and in specific life situations.6 Historical
memory is viewed as a complex sociocultural phenomenon that ties into the
conceptualization of historical events and historical experience (actual and/or
imagined) and simultaneously as a product of mass consciousness’s manipula-
tion of channels of authority for political ends. More than socially differen-
tiated, historical memory is also variable. This constantly renewable structure
is an ideal reality that is every bit as significant as event-driven reality.

***
The historians’ study of the mechanisms involved in the shaping and
functioning of historical memory has drawn its support from the theoretical
322 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

propositions, conceptual apparatus, and methodological toolkit of studies of

social and cultural memory developed in complementary disciplines and
broadly represented in twentieth-century sociohumanitarian knowledge.
The starting point was provided by the works of Maurice Halbwachs,
with their emphasis on collective consciousness.7 In Halbwachs’s concep-
tion, the individual’s memory exists only insofar as that individual is a
unique product of a specific intersection of groups—that is, his memory is
essentially structured by group identities. Underscoring the social nature of
memory (the “social framework” of the present as stipulative of what is
remembered and forgotten), Halbwachs introduced the concept of collective
memory as a social construct and held that collectives and groups, by
specifying and replicating patterns for the interpretation of events, function
to support the collective memory that constructs those patterns.
Like collective memory, the concept of historical memory may be used
in different ways, not only by different authors but also by the same author
in publications written at various times and sometimes even in a single
publication. “Collective memory” is most often glossed as a “common
experience, jointly lived” (this can also refer to generational memory) or
as group memory. “Historical memory” is understood as collective memory
to the extent that it is inscribed into the group’s historical consciousness or
as social memory [sotsial’naia pamiat’] to the extent that it is inscribed into
a society’s historical consciousness. It may also be understood as an
aggregate of prescholarly, scholarly, quasi-scholarly, and extrascholarly
knowledge and as society’s popular ideas about its common past. The
great popularity of the concept of historical memory is largely explained
both by its own lack of rigor and its multitude of definitions and by the
fluidity of the phenomenon conceptualized in the starting concept of
“memory.” The entire terminology of memory is characterized by polys-
emy. Memory may be made to include anything one cares to have it
include, from a spontaneous sensation to a formalized public ceremony.
In the late twentieth century, the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann
produced a theory of cultural memory and formulated the tasks involved in
studying cultural memory within the framework of what he called “the
history of memory.”8 Assmann draws a fundamental distinction between
communicative and cultural memory. Communicative memory is weakly
formalized and represents an oral tradition that arises in the context of
everyday interpersonal interaction. It is the “living memory” that indivi-
duals (immediate participants and eyewitnesses) and groups have of their
immediate experiences or that has arisen in the process of everyday inter-
actions among generations. It exists over the lifetimes of three or four
generations. But “cultural memory” is understood as a particular symbolic
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 323

form for the transmission and updating [aktualizatsiia] of cultural meanings

that extends beyond the framework of individual or group experience, is
preserved by tradition, is formalized and ritualized, and finds expression in
a variety of commemorative markers (in sites of memory, dates, and
ceremonies and in written, graphic, and monumental art). Being passed
on from generation to generation, cultural memory retains only the most
significant past, that being a mythological history whose function is orien-
tational, normative, and constitutive.9
The individual’s or social group’s awareness of the past may be based on
oral tradition. It is from oral recollections and the oral tradition that
Herodotus and Thucydides, now deemed the world’s first historians,
extracted most of their information. Medieval annalists and historians also
depended heavily on oral testimonies. The significance of written sources
began to grow rapidly during the Renaissance. When academic historical
scholarship as we know it today emerged in the nineteenth century, the use
of oral sources was, to all intents and purposes, discontinued. At present,
historians employ the oral tradition not as a vehicle of historical informa-
tion but as a means of uncovering the cultural context wherein images of
the past are shaped in traditional societies. Numerous works by anthropol-
ogists who have studied the oral tradition that preserves a people’s memory
of the lives and deeds of preceding generations have shown that an oral
narrative of past events cannot be separated from the mutual relationship
between the narrator and the audience to which that recital is made. But
written communications are, like their oral counterparts, interpretations of
facts from the past that do not exist as independent objects but are a product
of discourse. Be the narrator’s goal ever so modest, those communications
are purposive verbal actions and are in turn interpreted as such by the
listener or reader while allowing for the genre specifics that supply audi-
ences with an appropriate “horizon of expectations.”10
The connection between the individual (personal) and the collective (or
social) memory is exceedingly important. Individuals have not only their
own present and future but their own past. Furthermore, that past forms
them in terms of both individual experience and collective sociohistorical
memory that has been imprinted into the cultural matrix. That image
should, needless to say, be dynamically amplified. The individual experi-
ence grows continuously: with every new day, every new contact, every
new deed, the “contrail” of the memory that creates us becomes longer. The
“matrix” is not ossified; it “lives” and changes over time. Moreover, with
regard to consciousness and thought, that temporal quality is not limited by
an individual life span but extends beyond the bounds set by birth and
death dates and opens out into social space. This openness also allows us to
324 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

speak of the historicity of the individual consciousness. Martin Heidegger

develops this idea: “Since our existence is temporal, it has a history of its
own. That history, far from being trivial or insignificant, constitutes what
we are. We are what we are at the present moment by virtue of the fact that
we are constantly striving toward an individual future and come from a
particular past; our very identity arises from historicity… . Those who
cannot remember the past are condemned, first, to invent it” [retranslated
from the Russian; emphasis added—L.R.].
How is personal identity constructed? Some scholars take as their point
of departure that the “individual memory is nonrepresentational.” But the
reliability of this assessment can go only so far, since it makes no allowance
for the complex composition of an individual memory. The individual
memory is multitiered (containing personal, sociocultural, and historical
levels). Along with a person’s own life experience, it implies an induction
into social experience, the transformation of another person’s experience
into one’s own, and engagement with far distant events. Enormous impor-
tance attaches to what are known as oral family chronicles—old people’s
tales of the family’s past (“before you were born”), which shape the
individual memory to the same extent as do lived events, supplementing
it with the recollections of earlier generations. Such domestic chronicles are
routinely viewed as the foundation of family identity, but at the personal
level those family reminiscences, sporadically or regularly made current,
are verbally lived, are appropriated, and “enter” as an inalienable compo-
nent into individual consciousness. Thus is the family identity constructed
prior to the present generation’s birth and after its passing.
The problem of transition from individual to collective memory ties in
with another serious problem that is not restricted by the frameworks of
study of the mechanisms of transference of family experience. This is the
problem of the transition from the biological rhythm of human life to the
rhythm of social life. The seamless continuity of generational succession is
an inseparable part of social bonding. There is also the concept of genera-
tional memory. In the contemporary social sciences, the concept of genera-
tion usually rests on shared social experiences and activities in a given
group of people, and the content of the collective memory changes as a
result of generational succession. Of fundamental significance is the juxta-
position of the recollections of the “first generation,” which lived through
the events as conscious beings, of the “second generation” (“fathers” and
“sons” in the literal or figurative sense), and of contiguous generations
which perceive and evaluate the same events in differing ways. Whereas the
events are still the “living past” for the “second generation,” the images of
those events become quite abstract for members of the “third generation”
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 325

and are no longer a part of their own biography but a part of history. After
the last of the “first generation” (i.e., those who personally lived through
the events) has passed on, the collective memory loses its substance and
gives way to blurry concepts.
But how, then, does individual memory become collective and social?
This happens in the process of communication, in the recounting of lived
experience. Recollections shared by one individual with another become
relevant to both. Halbwachs was, of course, correct to say that social groups
design their images of the world by establishing certain agreed-on versions
of the past and that those versions are established in communication.
Memory becomes collective or social on transmission, and for that to
happen it needs to be articulated in speech, ritual, illustration, and so on.
Images may, however, be transmitted only if they are conventional and
simplified: conventional because the image has to have meaning for an
entire group, and simplified because to have a common meaning and to
have the potential for transmission, the image’s complexity has to be
reduced to the barest minimum. The image of an event that is brought
into the social memory is a provisional schema, a general idea, a concept
that interacts with others of its kind.
Of no less importance is the fact that the difference between personal and
social memory is actually relative. Memory is by definition subjective but is
simultaneously structured by language, education, and collectively shared
ideas and experience. This means that the individual memory is also a social
memory. Recollections are also social in that they touch on social relation-
ships and situations that the individual experiences along with others. These
recollections, which simultaneously comprise both personal identity and the
fabric of the surrounding society, are essentially the means whereby social
bonds are propagated. In light of the above, it becomes evident that any
attempt to utilize recollections as a historical source should from the outset
make allowances for both the subjective (individual) and the social nature of
memory. Whatever distorts social memory is not a defect in the process of
recollection but, rather, a series of external limitations that society imposes as
a matter of course and are worthy of special study.
In essence, the past is preserved by dint of being wrested from its
context (of being decontextualized). The transmission of social memory is
a process of change, a process of successive “shrinkage and spillage” of a
memory and of the selection, ordering, and subsequent reordering of facts.
The suppression of social memory to impart a new significance to it is, in
itself, a social process, whose history may on occasion be partially
revealed. The fact of the matter is that social memory is subject to the
laws of supply and demand: to remain intact outside the bounds of the here
326 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

and now, and especially to survive transmission and exchange, the memory
of an event has to be needed. This is where social, cultural, ideological, or
historical factors come into play.
The amount of reliable information that people have about the past is not
important to an understanding of the past’s significance nor does it matter
whether they lived through it directly, were told about it, or read about it in
a book. The correspondence of memory to reality also has little effect on its
social significance. Since the images of social memory often have no
context, there is no way to know if they relate to something real or some-
thing imagined. Either way, the members of any social group will hold that
if their tradition preserves the memory of a particular event, that event must
have happened. In principle, social memory may be viewed as an expres-
sion of collective experience: social memory identifies the group, gives it a
sense of the past, and defines its drive toward the future. In so doing, it
often relies on particular past events. The history of a given community of
people, being a variant of the collective past that is shared by its members,
is the foundation of group identity.11 Sometimes the claims of collective
memory may be verified in documentary sources, sometimes not, but in
either case, the question of whether we (the researchers) ought to deem that
memory historically reliable is less important than the question of whether
they (history’s dramatis personae) believed it to be accurate.
The systems of social and collective memory differ not only in their
interpretation of given historical events but also in the precise events and
the type of events that they view as historically significant. What people
remember about the past (and what they forget) is a key element of their
unconscious ideology. Historical talking points are frequently manipulated in
full accordance with a sincere inner conviction of the virtue of the cham-
pioned cause. Social memory not only ensures the selection of categories
whereby a group unconsciously navigates its environment but also provides
that group with the material for conscious introspection. A group’s attitude
toward its own traditions may be defined by inquiring into how it interprets
and utilizes them as a source of knowledge. This characteristic forces us to
confront the links between history and memory. Pierre Nora has said that, as a
form in which the past is remembered, history, in the guise of orderly
historical knowledge, replaces memory: history is the death of memory,
and memory the death of history.12 Yet there is no such “fatal” choice to be
made here; in fact, between history and memory there is not even a divide.
But we should not forget either the viability of the historian’s own incom-
pletely examined mental stereotypes or sociopolitical motivations to build
“new myths” or the intellectualization of ordinary historical consciousness
(however ambiguous and contradictory those processes may be), because
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 327

professional historians, for all their claims to rigorous scholarship and objec-
tivity (or to the role of “priests in the temple of Mnemosyne,” preserving the
“touchstone of historical memory”), also partake in “everyday
knowledge.”13 They are, each in his or her own fashion, implicated in their
contemporary culture. In addition, there are other “generators” of historical
knowledge—writers, artists, priests, and so on.
Historiography showcases the dual role of historians in shaping, relaying,
and transforming the collective memory of the past. History is inseparable
from memory. The deconstruction of morally obsolete historical myths
entails the creation of new variants intended to replace them. The Spanish
historian Ignacio Olabárri, adamant that historians cannot discharge the
mythical function of memory while refusing to monitor the results of their
own professional activity, has written: “The historian faces the task not of
inventing traditions but rather of studying how and why they are created. We
should formulate the anthropology of our own tribe. But it is one thing when
anthropologists merely feel for the tribal community they are studying and
something else altogether when they become its shamans.”14
In fact, though, we are all in a sense “shamans of our tribe.” In attempt-
ing to dethrone social memory by separating facts from myth, we simply
exchange one history for another that is equally eager to become a new
myth. This does not, of course, mean that memory should be accepted
passively and uncritically: we may engage it in dialogue, testing its claims
against the corresponding facts. But it would be a mistake to maintain that
as a result of this investigation, having ferreted out the “reliable” facts in
historical memory, having verified its arguments and reconstructed the
experience coded in it (i.e., having turned it into history), we are done
with memory. Because the crucial difference between history and memory
is that historians can discover things not found in human consciousness,
things that hark back to “time immemorial” or were simply forgotten. This
is one of the chief functions of historical research.15
Most “theoreticians” of historical memory (including Pierre Nora, with
his thesis that history is the death of memory and his concept of the shift
from “real environments of memory” [milieux de mémoire] to “sites of
memory” [lieux de mémoire]) overlook the spontaneous activity needed to
produce a memory that passes beyond the bounds set by modernist culture
and to conserve it in the form of an unambiguously interpretable historical
legacy. Contemporary researchers working within the postmodernist para-
digm, however, remind us that, given that the function of memory belongs
in reality to the individual and all its other adjuncts are mere metaphors,
collective memory is clearly not confined to “sites” but to individuals with
328 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

the capacity of thinking historically. These may, but just as well may not be,
historians. The American historian Susan A. Crane writes:

It should not be an exaggeration to tell students (or any audience)

that they become historians the moment they begin to think about
history—that part of their learning experience constitutes participa-
tion in the transmission of historical memory, which they translate
into personal experience, as soon as they begin to speak and write
of it. Perhaps the practice of history, redefined as the active
participation in remembering and forgetting within collective mem-
ory by each member, can become characteristic of historical con-
sciousness, rather than simply reference to the knowledge of
history.16

What
' is this if not ego history or an absolutized version of history from the
bottom up, a logically consistent model through which to realize the
postmodernist conception of multiplicity? But there are other approaches
in addition to this conspicuously postmodernist approach. I shall attempt
now to describe two differing approaches to the history of historiography
and the problem of historical memory, both in personalized form: the
socialscientific approach (as conceived by the well-known British historian
John Tosh) and the culturo-anthropological approach (as conceived by the
equally well-known German historian Jörn Rüsen).
Tosh centers his attention on the various dimensions of social memory
and the difference between what the historian does and other musings on
the past. His initial premise is the inadequacy of simply addressing the past
and the need for confidence in the importance of reliably representing the
past.17 As a branch of scholarship, history strives to support the broadest
possible definition of memory and to render memory as precisely as
possible to prevent our knowledge of the past from being limited to what
is relevant at any given moment. Whereas social memory continues to
create interpretations that meet political and social needs, in historical
scholarship the past has an intrinsic value; the scholar should rise, insofar
as possible, above considerations of political expediency. It was not until
the nineteenth century that historicism (historical consciousness in the strict
sense) became a hallmark of professional historians that was embodied in
their scholarly practice and was universally acknowledged as the proper
method to be used in studying the past. Historical consciousness, as under-
stood by adherents of historicism, is founded on three principles. The first
and most fundamental of those principles is the recognition of the differ-
ences between the contemporary era and all those that preceded it: any
scholarly study will foreground the distinctions between past and present.
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 329

The second component of historical consciousness is context: underpinning

the historian’s work is the principle that the subject of study most not be
detached from its setting. The third fundamental aspect of historical con-
sciousness in historicist form is the understanding of history as process.
The historicist program widened the gaps between the elite and popular
views of the past, which persist to this day. Professional historians urge the
need for long immersion in primary sources, a deliberate rejection of
current views, and high levels of empathy and imagination. Popular histor-
ical knowledge, in contrast, is characterized by a selective interest (defined
by contemporary views) in vestiges of the past and only incidentally by a
striving to understand the past from within. Tosh identifies three traits of
social memory that have a particularly distorting effect. First there is the
appeal to tradition, when actions taken in the past are held to be an
authoritative guide to action in the present. This factor plays a positive
role in societies that have not experienced and do not expect to experience a
period of change (which are, not coincidentally, defined as traditional
societies). But in any society distinguished by dynamic sociocultural
change, an uncritical attitude toward tradition becomes counterproductive
by promoting the conservation of obsolete forms. Appeals to “basics” that
have existed “from time immemorial” bear no relation to historical scholar-
ship; and this kind of nationalism, which silences difference and change to
reinforce national identity, is based on allegiance to traditions, not on
historical analysis.
Traditionalism is a coarse distortion of historical consciousness, since it
excludes the crucial concept of development over time. Other forms of
distortion are more subtle, and one of them is nostalgia. Nostalgia also
reaches backward but, while not denying the fact of historical change,
glosses it only as a change for the worse. It manifests with particular
power as a reaction to the sense of a recent loss and is therefore very
typical of societies undergoing rapid change. In the nostalgic mode, the past
—generally portrayed in the most attractive light—is not merely preserved
but, as it were, acted out repeatedly (rendering current the concept of
legacy). The role of such a past is less that of history than of allegory.
Whereas nostalgia reflects a pessimistic view of the world, faith in
progress is an expression of optimism. It connotes not only the positive
nature of changes in the past and the superiority of the present over the past
but also the continuation of perfection into the future. Changes over time
are always flagged as positive and ascribed a moral content. The conception
of progress over the last two hundred years was the West’s foundational
myth and the source of its sense of superiority in its relations with the rest
of the world. Allegiance to the idea of progress or tradition and nostalgic
330 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

sentiments are the basic components of social memory. Each in its own way
responds to a profound psychological need for security; they seem to
promise either change for the better or a lack of change or hold out a
spiritually more congenial past as a safe haven. Social needs thus mold a
distorted image of the past. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that
one of the historian’s crucial tasks is to counter socially motivated and
bogus readings of the past. Not one nationalistically or politically partisan
reading of history can pass scholarly muster. Even so, Tosh stipulates that
history and social memory cannot always be wholly separated, since
historians do fulfill several of the tasks of social memory. History and
social memory feed off each other, but for all their points of contact, the
distinction drawn by historians between their profession and social memory
remains significant. Historical scholarship is, of course, not immune from
considerations of practical utility, but where most historians do diverge
from the keepers of social memory is in their allegiance to the principles of
historicism: historical consciousness must prevail over social need.
The most interesting theoretical elaborations from the viewpoint of
cultural anthropology have been produced by Rüsen, who examines
changes in collective self-awareness resulting from a crisis of historical
memory.
Unlike social-science theory, cultural anthropology moves historiogra-
phical research beyond familiar notions of historicity as an attitude toward
the past that only professional historians can form. Historicity is instead
understood as an anthropological universal that regulates the mental opera-
tions various historical actors (individuals, social groups, and society) and
relies on historical memory. A central place in the study of the history of
historiography thus belongs to nothing less than the concept of historical
memory.
Rüsen examines the crisis of historical memory, which comes when
historical consciousness collides with experience that fails to fit within
the framework of the familiar historical notions, thus threatening the exist-
ing foundations and principles of identity.18 Rüsen proposes that crises be
typed as normal, critical, and catastrophic, depending on their depth and
severity and the strategies defined to overcome them. A normal crisis may
be overcome by the inner potential of current historical consciousness, with
only inconsequential changes in the mode of rationalization [smysloobra-
zovanie] that characterizes a given type of historical consciousness. A
serious crisis places in doubt the possibilities for perceiving and appro-
priately interpreting past experience fixed in historical memory in a manner
consistent with contemporary needs and tasks. Such a dilemma causes
radical changes in historical consciousness and the formation of what is
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 331

essentially a new type of historical consciousness. The result is a change in

historical memory, which comes about not only through the formation of
new modes of rationalization but also through a change in the bases and
principles of identification and of the mental forms that preserve historical
memory. Finally, a catastrophic crisis prevents the restoration of identity by
casting doubt on the very possibility of historical rationalization. This kind
of crisis creates a historical trauma for those who live through it, who
perceive their own experience as a catastrophe, since they cannot endow it
with meaning. Alienating oneself from “catastrophic experience” by way of
silence or falsification does not solve the problem, for the experience
continues to influence contemporary reality, and the refusal to consider it
makes it more difficult to set appropriate goals and select the correct means
to achieve them.
Trauma makes it entirely impossible to interpret an experience in a way
that focuses human activity. historicization offers itself as a cultural strategy
for overcoming the destructive consequences of traumatic experience.
When “historical” meaning and significance are ascribed to an event, it
will no longer traumatize: “history” combines the present-day situation with
the experience of the past in such a way that a future perspective for human
activity may be traced from the course of changes from past to present. “In
this respect historical research is by its logic a cultural practice of detrau-
matization. It changes trauma into history.”19 The way to overcome crises
of historical consciousness is therefore a narrative that shapes past experi-
ence, fixed in the memory as discrete events, into an integrated framework
that imparts meaning to those events. We are speaking here less of the
written texts produced by historians than of the diverse forms of historical
memory (oral tradition, customs, rituals, monuments, and memorials).
Historical memory is mobilized and updated during complex periods in
the life of a nation, society, or social group when that entity faces a new and
difficult task or a real threat to its existence. Such situations have arisen
repeatedly in the history of every country or ethnic or social group.
Although historical research first emphasized such problems only during
the last decade of the twentieth century, there were pioneers and trailblazers
here, as in every sphere of knowledge. For example, in 1944, the first
edition of the englishman and his history, a modest book remarkable in its
content and wealth of ideas, was published by the outstanding British
historian and philosopher Herbert Butterfield. Butterfield offered the fol-
lowing thought-provoking ideas:

In the crisis of 1940, our leaders continually reminded us of those

resources of the past which can be drawn upon to fortify a nation at
332 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

war. While plunging into a sea of changes, novelties, and inven-

tions, England resumed contact with her traditions and threw out
ropes to the preceding generations, as though in time of danger it
was a good thing not to lose touch with the rest of the convoy. It
may seem strange that, though the past is over, it is at the same
time here—something of it still remaining, alive and momentous
for us. But the past, like the spent part of a cinematograph film, is
coiled up inside the present. It is part of the very structure of the
twentieth-century world.
Some nations have had a broken and tragic past. Others are new or
have only recently arisen after a long submergence. Some have
been torn by a terrible breach between past and present—a breach
which, though it happened long ago, they have never been able to
heal and overcome. We in England have been fortunate and we
must remember our good fortune, for we have actually drawn
strength from the continuity of our history. We have been wise,
for we have taken care of the processes which serve to knit the past
and the present together; and when great rifts have occurred—in
the Reformation or the Civil Wars, for example—a succeeding
generation has done its best to play providence upon the tears
and rents that have been made in the fabric of our history.
Englishmen in the after-period have actually thrown back the
needle, seeking by a thousand little stitches to join the present
with the past once more. So we are a country of traditions and there
remains a living continuity in our history.20

Major social shifts and political cataclysms act as a powerful impetus

toward change in the perception of images and the evaluation of the
significance of historical personages and historical events. This causes a
transformation of collective memory, which encompasses not only “living”
social memory, the memory of what contemporaries of and participants in
the events in question lived through but also the deepest layers of society’s
cultural memory which is preserved by tradition and addresses the remote
past. In discharging its social function, professional historiography natu-
rally does not stand aloof from that process; instead, it creates new inter-
pretations that are potential elements of a future national mythology. As is
wholly to be expected, contemporary historiography pays special attention
to the role of ideas about the past and to historical myths as elements of
political, ethnoconfessional, and national identity.
Abuses of history are not limited to authoritarian and despotic regimes.
They occur also in societies that do not drastically repress heterodoxy in the
knowledge of the past and generally permit wide-ranging freedom of
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 333

thought but do have at their disposal a particular regulatory system, includ-

ing hidden mechanisms to restrict and to encourage certain specific views.
The political manipulation of historical memory is in general a powerful
tool to be used in directing human and social consciousness.
The struggle for political leadership not infrequently manifests as a
contention between diverse variants of historical memory and diverse
symbols of its grandeur, as a dispute over the episodes in its history on
which a nation should pride itself. A different approach characterizes
certain left-leaning contemporary historians. Richard Rorty, for example,
in achieving our Country, asserts, “Those who hope to persuade a nation to
exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well
as what it should be ashamed of.”21 The configuration of acceptable
versions of historical memory preoccupies not only the official authorities
but also oppositionist forces and various social movements.
In that connection, attention is drawn to the shaping of historical myths
and prejudices and their anchoring in mass consciousness. The prominent
French historian Marc Ferro has demonstrated convincingly that academic
texts used to teach young people in various countries often interpret the
same historical facts in different ways, depending on national interests.22
Even more delusional versions of historical myths are created by contem-
porary nationalist ideology. On that score, much interest attaches to the
research done by the home-grown ethnologist Victor Shnirelman, who, in
his analysis of some extremely ethnocentric contemporary versions of the
distant past, demonstrates the role played in the composition of new myths
by pseudoscholarly notions.23 A contemporary historical myth performs an
important social function: the invocation of a remote past, of a distinctive
historical path, and of a concept of the national character intimately linked
thereto permits sitting politicians and bureaucrats to acquit themselves of
guilt for their inability to remedy the state of affairs and even for their abuse
of power. Shirelman emphasizes that those who study the ideology of
contemporary nationalism must not forget that the infamous “genetic mem-
ory” is not at issue here. Rather, we are dealing with a society of literate
people who derive their knowledge of history from school textbooks,
fiction, and the media, and all such productions are created by the profes-
sional intelligentsia.
Historiography lacks a sufficiently stable immunity against pragmatic
considerations. It is no simple matter for historians to abstract themselves
from ideology or group interests. When all is said and done, purportedly
scholarly works manipulate images of the past culled from mass conscious-
ness or made to order for it. In many respects, history and memory
334 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

constantly feed off each other; history is torn between the logic of memory
and the imperatives of scholarly knowledge.
Here we would do well to quote an uncommonly precise and pithy
statement made in that regard by Christopher Hill: “We are shaped by our
past, but from our favorable position in the present we constantly ascribe a
new shape to the past that shapes us.”24 The content of the collective
memory changes in accordance with the social context and practical prio-
rities. For many groups, both large and small, restructuring of or change in
the collective memory during transmission signifies the constant invention
of a past that matches the present or the equivalent invention of a present
that comports with the past.

Notes
1. For further details, see L.P. Repina, “Vyzov postmodernizma i perspektivy
novoi kul’turnoi i intellektual’noi istorii,” odissei-1996 (Moscow, 1996), pp. 25–38.
See also M. Dinges [Martin Dinges], “Istoricheskaia antropologiia i sotsial’naia
istoriia: cherez teoriiu ‘stilia zhizni’ k ‘kul’turnoi istorii povsednevnosti,’” odissei-
2000 (Moscow, 2000), pp. 96–124.
2. See O.G. Eksle [Otto Gerhard Oexle], “Kul’turnaia pamiat’ pod vozdeistviem
istorizma,” odissei-2001 (Moscow, 2001). That said, Oexle does not speak of the
emergence but of the “return of the concept of ‘culture studies’” (p. 179), of a “new
reception of historical culture studies” (pp. 192–94 [emphasis added—L.R.]), and
dates that reception to the beginning of the twentieth century.
3. B. Gene, istoriia i istoricheskaia kul’tura srednevekovogo Zapada (Moscow,
2001), p. 19 [Bernard Guenée, histoire et culture historique dans l’occident medieval
(Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980). This quotation retranslated from the Russian—
Trans.].
4. This relates not only to empirical historical studies but also to theoretical
treatments and programmatic discussions. See esp. Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre
Nora, vols. 1–7 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92); Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth,
eds., mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen erinnerung (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch, 1991); Jan Assman, das kulturelle Gedächtnis:
schrift, erinnerung und politische identität in frühen hochkulturen (Munich: C.H.
Beck, 1992); and Eksle, “Kul’turnaia pamiat’ pod vozdeistviem istorizma,” pp.
176–98.
5. The point at issue here is a memory with “verified” authenticity, a memory
that has been “transformed into history.” A commentary on the conception of
“memory become history” is provided, in particular, by François Hartog: Fransua
Artog, “Vremia i istoriia,” in annaly na rubezhe vekov: antologiia (Moscow, 2007),
pp. 157–59.
6. Although both historical knowledge and social memory actually perform an
orienting function (including in moral/ethical terms), one of the functions of
historical knowledge is the organization of social memory, social consciousness,
and social practices.
 JULY–OCTOBER 2017 335

7. Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de

France, 1950); Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1952). Assmann, das kulturelle Gedächtnis.
9. Ibid., p. 21. For Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, see also Eksle,
“Kul’turnaia pamiat’ pod vozdeistviem istorizma,” pp. 179–80.
10. A more detailed familiarization with most of the topics touched on in these
general propositions may be obtained by reading the wide-ranging introduction to a
book by the anthropologist Elizabeth Tonkin: narrating our Pasts: the social
Construction of oral history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.
1–17. For a Russian translation, see “Sotsial’naia konstruktsiia ustnoi istorii,” in
evropeiskii opyt i prepodavanie istorii v postsovetskoi rossii [Moscow, 1999], pp.
159–84.
11. See G. Liubbe [Hermann Lübbe], “Istoricheskaia identichnost’,” Voprosy
filosofii, 1994, no. 4, pp. 108–13.
12. Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire. La problématique des lieux,” in Les lieux
de mémoire, vol. 1, pp. xv–xlii; Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de
mémoire,” representations, vol. 26—special issue on “Memory and Counter-Memory”
(Spring 1989), pp. 7–24 [“Between Memory and History” is available in Marc
Roudebush’s translation at www.sfu.ca/media-lab/archive/2007/487/Resources/
Readings/Nora_between%20memory.pdf. Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of a
longer version of the same piece is in realms of memory: rethinking the French Past
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 1–20.—Trans.]
13. S.A. Ekshtut, “Bitvy za khram Mnemoziny,” in dialog so vremenem: al’ma-
nakh intellektual’noi istorii, pt. 7 (Moscow, 2001), pp. 27–48.
14. Ignacio Olábarri, “History and Science/Memory and Myth: Towards New
Relations Between Historical Science and Literature,” paper presented at the
Eighteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Montreal, 1995. [This
quotation retranslated from the Russian.—Trans.]
15. “The historian can rediscover what has been completely forgotten, in the
sense that no statement of it has reached him by an unbroken tradition from
eyewitnesses. He can even discover what, until he discovered it, no one ever
knew to have happened at all. This he does partly by the critical treatment of
statements contained in his sources, partly by the use of what are called unwritten
sources” (R.Dzh. Kollingvud, ideiia istorii. avtobiografiia [Moscow, 1980] [R.G.
Collingwood, the idea of history (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), quoted here from
www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Collingwood/1946_2.html —Trans.]).
16. Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,”
american historical review, vol. 102, no. 5 (1997), pp. 1384–85.
17. See John Tosh, the Pursuit of history: aims, methods, and new directions in
the study of modern history, 3d ed. (London: Pearson Education, 2000). For a
Russian translation, see Dzh. Tosh, stremlenie k istine. Kak ovladet’ masterstvom
istorika (Moscow, 2001), ch. 1: “Istoricheskoe soznanie,” pp. 11–32.
18. Jörn Rüsen, studies in metahistory (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research
Council, 1993). See also I. Riusen [Rüsen], “Utrachivaia posledovatel’nost’ istorii
(nekotorye aspekty istoricheskoi nauki na perekrestke modernizma, postmoder-
nizma i diskussii o pamiati),” in dialog so vremenem, pt. 7 (Moscow, 2001), pp.
8–26.
336 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

19. I. Riusen, “Krizis, travma i identichnost’,” in dialog so vremenem, pt. 13

(Moscow, 2004) [quoted from “Trauma and Mourning in Historical Thinking,”
Journal of interdisciplinary studies in history and archaelogy, vol. 1, no. 1 (2004),
p. 15—Trans.].
20. H. Butterfield, the englishman and his history (London: The University Press,
1944), p. 5 [quoted from pp. v–vi in the 1945 reprint (London: Cambridge
University Press)—Trans.]. Semen Ekshtut develops this idea: “History has its
points of discontinuity, points of oblivion, points at which historical memory is
dislodged. Along with the unstudied and the mysterious, its pages contain so much
that is unexpressed and unassented to. Lacunae alternate with paralepsis, and both
attest to holes in memory, which professional historians are not always able to sew
together. In fact, they are sometimes the ones who, by resorting (consciously or
otherwise) to lies and distorting historical events, strengthen the discontinuity and
facilitate the definitive dislodging from the world of undesirable remnants of the
recent past” (Ekshtut, Bitvy za khram mnemoziny, p. 34).
21. R. Rorti, obretaia nashu stranu: politika levykh v amerike XX veka (Moscow,
1999), p. 12 [Richard Rorty, achieving our Country: Leftist thought in twentieth-
Century america (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Quoted from
Robert S. Boynton’s review at www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_
id=44/—Trans.].
22. M. Ferro, Kak rasskazyvaiut istoriiu detiam v raznykh stranakh mira
(Moscow, 1992) [Marc Ferro, the use and abuse of history, or how the Past is
taught to Children (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984)—Trans.].
23. See, in particular, V.A. Shnirelman, “Natsional’nye simvoly, etno-istoriches-
kie mify i etnopolitika,” in teoreticheskie problemy istoricheskikh issledovanii, pt. 2
(Moscow, 1999), pp. 118–47.
24. Christopher Hill, history and the Present (London, 1989), p. 29 [quotation
retranslated from the Russian.—Trans.].
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