or administrative regulations outside the national
framework (2). I would hypothesize instead that
what we are seeing is in fact an intensification of
partisan memory games in a context where those
responsible for violence, in what were once firmly
closed national frameworks, are increasingly likely to
be called to legal account and criminalized as those
frameworks break apart. It is not only in France that
historians have felt the need to oppose state moves
to define and manage history, though it is in France
that they have organized massively in associations
to defend the freedom to practice the profession of
historian or to monitor political uses of history and
memory. The need for such associations also became
clear in another case when the Russian powers-
that-be decided they could not leave Russian history
to Russian historians, but instead had to keep a
close eye on the country’s image abroad and counter
any efforts to debase it themselves. In May 2009,
in response to EU and Council of Europe initiatives
to establish a kind of official symbolic equivalency
between Stalinism (perhaps communism) and
Nazism—the European Parliament had decreed
August 23 the “European Day of Remembrance for
Stalin and Ribbentrop after the signature of the Soviet-Nazi German pact.
August 23, 1939 | ADN-ZB/Archiv
Victims of Stalinism and Nazism”—then-President
Dimitri Medvedev declared that history was an
attribute of national “sovereignty”. Just before the
seventieth anniversary of the German-Soviet Non-
aggression Pact and the start of the Second World
War, which the EU was preparing to commemorate,
Medvedev declared, “You cannot call something
black something that is white, you cannot accuse a
defender of being an aggressor”. This remark was
swiftly followed by the founding of the Presidential
Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter
Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of
Russia’s Interests. A considerable number of Russian
historians protested against the pressure they
expected the new monitoring authority to exert
under the pretense of “tracking down and countering
erroneous interpretations of history abroad” and
how it would officialise arbitrary political censorship.
The fact is that in a growing number of societies the
state intrudes massively in the field of history.
EUROPE INSIGHT
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