4 Constructing the “Usable Past”: the Evolution of the Official Historical Narrative in Post-Soviet Russia

Conventional conceptions of the past are major pillars of the collective identities of modern political communities.Public history, as distinct from professional history, i.e. the former as a set of representations and interpretations of the past that are addressed to the broad audience of non-specialists, is an indispensable element of any identity politics aimed at shaping particular ideas of "us" and mobilizing group solidarity.Of course, the temporal dimension is particularly essential for the nations; it is no coincidence that modern historiography is mainly focused on writing the history of peoples/nations/states.Practices surrounding the political uses of the past are also closely connected with the construction and representation of national identities.After the collapse of the USSR, all the new independent states in the region faced the problem of constructing their national identities within the new geographical and symbolic borders.In the case of Russia, this task was hampered from the very beginning by many obstacles, among which the problem of adapting established visions of the collective past to the new context was one of the most complicated.Three key obstacles of this kind should be highlighted here.First, as the successor to the historical centre of the former tsarist empire, the Soviet Russian Federal Republic lacked both the incentive and the resources for developing a specific "national" identity within the framework of the USSR.Russian identity had historically tended to be associated with the core of empire, and dominant historical narratives confirmed this vision.This situation was further compounded after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, when the Russian Federation had to create a substantially new identity.Of course, there was a large stock of symbolic resources that could potentially be used as building material, but this legacy carried heavy ideological baggage and was hence highly contested.There was no "ready-made" historical grand narrative