1
1 . President of Russia Vladimir Putin at the 2022 Victory Parade in Red Square , Moscow , to mark the 77 th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patrioti . 9 May 2022 . Presidential Executive Office of Russia ( Wikimedia Commons )
Moscow is no longer the “ third Rome ”, but the new Kiev . In 988 , it was the conversion of Vladimir the Great , Prince of Kiev ( c . 955-1015 ), to Byzantine Christianity that sealed the spiritual fate of Russia . One strong hypothesis is that , eleven centuries later , Vladimir Putin ’ s reason for waging war on Ukraine is motivated by an absurd dream : to restore this original empire .
But is it operational enough to make Russians support the idea of reconquest ? Isn ’ t it too abstract a reference point for collective memory ? Later we shall see that Putin ’ s geopolitics needs a historical narrative that is not only based on collective cultural memory ( for example , as defined by Aleida Assmann ), but also on reactive memory (“ communicative ”, as Assmann would say ). It concerns the memories of witnesses , which therefore still live on in the memory of elders .
This hypothesis must be subject to an analysis that addresses the concepts of geopolitics and the uses of history and historical memory . A second question must be asked at this point : can or should we observe a break in the evolution of the uses of memory between the 20 th and 21 st centuries ? A conceptual clarification is also needed here : we cannot speak of memorial geopolitics but rather of a memorial component in the geopolitical strategy .
This observation invites us to explore the meaning of words , their narrative history and their relevance to factual history .
EUROPE INSIGHT
15