Virtue Russia of the past. Domestic history as a path of moral superiority

Russia saved the world from the Pechenegs and Polovtsy, but some still do not want to love it

Memory wars on Pandemia days: April 3, 2020, the Prague City Hall dismantled the monument to the Soviet Marshal Konev. The Russian embassy expressed “deep indignation”. One of the Czech senators compared the memory of Soviet historical figures with the Pandemia of Coronavirus: “The Earth should be protected not only from infection with viruses, but also from the surviving bacilli of communism.”

The sudden immersion of President Putin into the epic depths of domestic history, which repeated the chronological record of ten years ago (in 2010, the best friend of Russian historians already recalled the Pechenegs and Polovtsy ), only at first glance seems paradoxical. In fact, the comparison of the steppe nomads with a deadly pandemia is completely logically fits into the official historical narrative: any enemies of Russia are an absolute evil, and Russia (embodied in the Russian state) has invariably fought on the side of the good throughout its history.

And he continues to fight: the concept of “historical sinlessness” largely determines official political rhetoric. An appeal to the past “is a moral argument that testifies to the virtue of Russia as a foreign policy player,” writes historian Konstantin Pakhalyuk in the work “ Using the History in the Context of Foreign Policy of Modern Russia” (included in the collective monograph “ Politics of memory in modern Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe” , which has just published in the publishing house of the European University in St. Petersburg ).

The issue of recognition of merits in the past is of fundamental importance, an indication of which turns into a presentation of Russia today.

With the permission of the publisher, we publish an excerpt from the chapter, which is about Soviet and Russian monuments in Europe and the causes of “wars of memory”, which from time to time flare up around these memorial places.

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