From the editor

When choosing the name for this OZ issue, we were aware that the word “appropriation” can mean a variety of actions - too different to leave it without any comment. Of course, people in one way or another have used and will always use their own history: this obvious fact is explained by the fact that they want, both individually and as a whole world (“nation”, “humanity”), to settle as comfortably as possible not only in space, but also in time. The methods of such arrangement—and, accordingly, of appropriating the past—are extremely varied. What is especially striking is the appropriation, to put it mildly, pragmatic, and to put it harshly, selfish, often fraudulent and cynical. This, of course, is the primary sin of market barkers (“our common forefather Noah tasted this wonderful drink in the ark”), but they are, in essence, not so terrible. Political shills are much more dangerous. We are all too familiar with this: it is rare that a Russian politician neglects references to “historical traditions,” drawing, however, ideas about these traditions mainly from the film production of the Stalin and Brezhnev eras...

However, the authors we invited are interested not only in selfish manipulations of historical images. What is more important is that all of us, quite well-intentioned people, are constantly reconstructing and rethinking the past. We are simply forced to do this under the influence of newly discovered circumstances. These circumstances should not include exclusively archival finds: on the contrary, the latest social and political cataclysms, first of all, push us to reassess the past. A society experiencing “rupture” faces a difficult task: it needs to restore the coherence of its own existence, to connect the present with the past. Along with the understanding of the new state, the view on the previous ones also changes.

To some of our readers, turning to the problems of perception of the past may seem untimely. Meanwhile, this matter is of far from academic interest. A painful obsession with one’s own past (inseparable, by the way, from the most fantastic ideas about it) fetters society and leads to deformations of the national psyche. Many countries have been affected by a similar neurosis, and now it is tormenting our fatherland with particular force. Can the national memory be considered at least somewhat healthy if for fifteen years we have been watching demonstrators marching in one column, waving portraits of the proletarian leader and the sovereign he killed, red banners and banners?

The reasons for the current exacerbation of historical neurosis, apparently, must be sought in the bad extremes that characterize today's attitude towards history. On the one hand, from school, the image of history as a purposeful process, taking place according to certain, albeit not yet fully understood, laws, is firmly hammered into our heads. History is likened to fate. They still look at it through Karamzin’s glasses: as a “sacred book of peoples,” “a tablet of revelations and rules.” But the old tablets that prophesied the greatness of the empire and the triumph of world communism are shattered, and what is hastily glued together from the fragments cannot - fortunately! - replace them. On the other hand, mass cultural “history” is creating its own ghostly world, rejecting all intellectual hierarchies and rankings. The past in her hands becomes pliable material for a television game, the arbitrary sculpting of new and completely absurd meanings.

The most effective cure for various forms of historical neurosis, in our opinion, should be considered (with all possible reservations) positive scientific knowledge. There are many countries where scientific history, having experienced several “Copernican revolutions” over the past half century, has recognized the limitations of its capabilities and abandoned its claims to possessing the absolute truth about the past, “as it really was.” Historians have focused primarily on how things are perceived by people, since people act and make decisions according to their own perceptions of reality. By abandoning claims to infallibility and the desire to create an inspiring national myth, history has benefited. In this new, more modest capacity, relying on verification procedures recognized by the professional guild of historians, she humbly does her main task: she carefully influences the formation of national memory.

It’s time for us to move from mythologizing history, which depicts the fate of a nation chosen for a great mission, to a different history - the collector and custodian of a rich, complex and inevitably contradictory cultural heritage. We hope that the articles that the reader will find in this issue of OZ can to some extent contribute to solving this problem.