This would result in a monumental work listing the sites of memory . The model spread to many countries , notably to Russia , directed by Georges Nivat . The paradigm was implemented everywhere where a social need was felt in bilateral relations driven by the desire for reconciliation . Hagen Schultz and Etienne François also produced a monumental inventory of French-German places of memory . Hans Henning Hanf and Robert Traba co-directed an immense four-book challenge about the Polish- German “ lieux de mémoire ”. However , at that time , that wave of memorial commemorations did not yet intersect with international relations other than in an effort to appease conflicting pasts in bilateral relations .
An examination of state memory policies in the Soviet Union facilitates an understanding of the shift in memory from the 20 th to the 21 st century . Notwithstanding , or because of , the pre-eminence of Marxist-Leninist ideology , Soviet propaganda sought to consolidate a militaristic model in the collective memory . 4 The discourse sources of Putinism , as diverse as they are , are obsessively aimed at two targets : the idea of empire and the apology of war . This is the common background to Sovietism , “ orthodox ” imperialism , Russian conservatism , Pan-Slavism and Eurasianism . But Putin can get on the bandwagon of this ideological mishmash because the collective memory of the Russians who support him was already preformed in the USSR and only then consolidated by the propaganda campaigns under Putin ’ s rule . The education of the Soviet citizen consisted of military preparation ; their life was spent in various military-patriotic associations . The calendar was filled with military holidays , and honouring the fighters of the Great Patriotic War was a civic obligation . It was as if the Russian collective memory had been militarised .
What happened in the 1990s in the relationship between memory , history and politics ?
After the fall of communism and the disappearance of the bipolarity of two ideological blocs , memorial events strengthened and burgeoned , opening up a wide repertoire of actions and a vast space for competition around the painful past of the 20 th century .
Memorial paradigms then intersected with geopolitics , becoming essentially defined by analyses of the reasons for and consequences of the Cold War . We know that the geopolitical axis structuring the Cold War period was East-West . It partially extended beyond this period when the calls for remembrance set European institutions on fire , the European Parliament and other executive bodies of the European Union , but also the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe . The 1990s and the first years of this century saw an escalation in the exchange of blows between the actors representing the interests of national or state groups that considered themselves robbed by the Second World War . In the field of memory , the battle for memorial adjustment between Russia and the countries liberated from the Communist Bloc took place , symbolically illustrated by the debate over the asymmetry of the EU ’ s memorial legitimisation , on the necessary reclassification of communism as a totalitarian regime in the same way as Hitler ’ s “ never again ” regime was . The battle would result in an attempt to enclose singular histories in a single museum narrative towards a transnational vision in a European House of History . It is far from fully satisfying the various entrepreneurs of European memory . Several transnational initiatives , reflecting both the East-West axis and the European Left- Conservative Right partisan divide , would attack the general design of the permanent exhibition in Brussels for being ideological , Hegelian and neo-Marxist . 5 These initiatives highlighted voluntary gaps in
4
Piotr Mickiewicz , Rosyjska mysle strategiczna i potencjal militarny w XXI wieku ( Russian Strategic Thinking and Military Potential in the 21 st Century ), PWN , 2021 , Warsaw , pp . 27-28
5
Pawel Ukielski , Pamiec Polski , pamiec sasiadow , pamiec Europy ( Polish Memory , Neighbours ’ Memory , Europe ’ s Memory ), Teologia Polityczna , 2020 , p . 228 .
EUROPE INSIGHT
19