[Discussion] PUBL.- Contents of "NZ" Issue Nos. 39 and 40-41

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: NZ Journal <nz@NLO.MAGAZINE.RU>

PUBL.- Contents of "NZ" Issue Nos. 39 and 40-41

Dear colleagues,

Somewhat belatedly, here are summaries for NZ Nos. 39 and 40-41.

No. 39 is devoted to the internationalization of democracy and civil 
society,
the left and nationalism, practices of social care in the USSR and 
Russia, late
Soviet pop music, and much else.

No. 40-41 is a monumental special issue on the memory of WWII in Russia,
Germany, and Europe, published jointly with the Berlin-based monthly journal
Osteuropa.

Both issues are available online at www.nz-online.ru, although only 
about half
of the special issue is up on the web site so far.

Four articles from this issue (Gudkov, Kukulin, Langenohl, Nora) are 
available
in English translation at http://www.eurozine.com/focalpoint/histories.html.

The print version of this thematic issue is almost sold out. If you want one
(5 Euros plus postage), e-mail real@nlo.magazine.ru stating your postal 
address.

Mischa Gabowitsch, Editor-in-Chief



NZ 39 - Summary:

NZ No. 39 is mostly devoted to civil society, new and old political and 
social
movements, and state-society relations. The immediate context for these 
debates
is provided by the Russian president's recent all-out criticism of NGOs, 
seen by
many as prompting a new crackdown on organized civic activity, and by the
abolition of most non-monetary social benefits in Russia as of 1 January 
2005.

The Liberal Heritage presents an article by German political scientist Claus
Leggewie on Trans-national movements and the question of democracy. Leggewie
analyses the different challenges to traditional notions of democratic
representation and legitimacy posed by the emergence of supra-national
decision-making bodies on the one hand, and NGOs and social movements on the
other hand. In order to overcome the new legitimacy gap, Leggewie 
proposes to
turn over some political decisions to bodies that would be answerable to
trans-national sectoral constituencies rather than traditional territorial
entities such as nation-states. Beside our usual editorial introduction, 
this
section also features three comments on Leggewie by Russian authors. Sergei
Lukashevsky, director of the Demos human rights think tank, argues that 
in the
Russian context, most NGO's activities are sufficiently legitimated by
international agreements that Russia has ratified, notwithstanding recent
campaigns by a number of Russian intellectuals to discredit the very 
notion of
human rights and general human values. However, Lukashevsky concedes that
Russian NGOs need to articulate their causes better than they have so 
far, and
find new channels of communication with society at large. Political 
scientist
Boris Mezhuev thinks that implementing Leggewie's proposals for 
democratizing
trans-national politics would create more problems than it could solve.
According to Mezhuev, the reason why West European intellectuals such as
Leggewie are turning away from more traditional political models such as
egalitarian federalist subsidiarity is that they are looking for ways to 
protect
European influence in the face of the US model of nation-building and 
the Asian
demographic challenge. Valery Tishkov, director of the Russian Academy of
Sciences' Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and former nationalities
minister, proposes an Anthropology of NGOs in which he casts a critical 
glance
on the very notions of "movement" and "non-governmental organization". Using
mainly examples from ethnopolitics and so-called national movements, Tishkov
argues that "movements" are often ex post rationalizations of the 
pronouncements
of isolated intellectuals, while NGOs are sometimes created in order to 
pursue
government aims by other means, and especially as vehicles of a Western
quasi-colonialism that is potentially harmful to existing modes of civic
organization prevalent in non-Western countries.

In Morals and Mores, Alexei Tokarev looks at the media as part of civil 
society.
Based on his recent experience as organizer of a contest where TV programmes
from all over the country were evaluated for grammatical correctness as 
well as
"resonance" with viewers, he shares a number of observations on Russian 
media's
problems with interactivity. Tokarev argues that the linguistic poverty 
of most
Russian TV programmes is partly due to the fact that they decline to 
engage in a
real dialogue with society, preferring to treat viewers as passive 
recipients of
their message.

The Culture of Politics section features a short article by Jordanian
sociologist Fares Breizat entitled What Counts as Terrorism? The View on the
Arab Street, which we publish in Russian translation in order to introduce a
public debate on terrorism sponsored by the OpenDemocracy web site.

Alexei Levinson's Sociological Notes introduce our next topic. Levinson 
reports
new opinion poll data that documents the rise of xenophobia in Russia, and
argues that those who encourage the new search for internal and external 
enemies
for the sake of the consolidation of society will find that they will 
harvest
only fear and apathy, but not the energy required for any kind of national
mobilization.

Topic 1 deals with The Left and Nationalism. Our authors, most of whom share
left-wing views of some sort, report on the debates about nationalism among
the Left in different countries, and analyse the lure of anti-Semitic,
xenophobic and other nationalistic ideas to leftists of various 
persuasions. Ute
Weinmann and Vlad Tupikin discuss The Left and Nationalism in Russia, 
concluding
that virtually all Russian organizations generally considered leftist are
actually crypto- (or not so crypto-) nationalists. The main explanation 
advanced
by Weinmann and Tupikin is that the Soviet Union was an aggressively
imperialistic rather than socialist state, and so xenophobic, 
anti-Western and
nationalist-expansionist ideas became ready rallying points for the newly
forming anti-Yeltsin opposition movement in the early 1990s which has 
continued
to spawn new offshoots, especially through the left-right synthesis 
embodied in
the National Bolshevik Party. Foreign Policy editor Mark Strauss discusses
Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem, analyzing the reasons for the 
pervasiveness of
anti-Semitic rhetoric among many anti-globalisation protesters worldwide.

Washington/DC-based historian Joshua Humphreys reports on The Agonizing 
of the
American Left over such questions as patriotism, religious values, and 
foreign
interventionism in the aftermath of the recent presidential election, and
reviews responses by authors and activists from within the Democratic 
Party and
the radical Left. Finally, Daniel Kulla offers his perspective on left-wing
debates about national identity, Germany's new status as a great power, and
attitudes to Israel and the Jews. In particular, Kulla discusses the 
so-called
"anti-German" strand of radical leftist thought (Redemptive Schisms: On 
Recent
Tendencies Among the German Radical Left).

Yevgeny Saburov's Humane Economics column is devoted to the ways in 
which the
literary canon taught at school shapes pupils' attitudes to life and 
introduces
them to economic principles. He argues that studying early 20th century
modernist literature would be a good antidote to the patronizing effect 
of the
heroic 19th century classics.

Topic 2 offers a fresh look at the Russian or Soviet tradition of 
paternalism.
Yelena Bogdanova demonstrates that Soviet official discourse about 
state-citizen
relations, rather than acknowledging people's rights to social or legal
protection, was permeated by the notion of zabota, meaning care or 
concern. This
term could equally be applied to people, things, and processes, creating
hierarchies and forcing people to "care for" everyone but themselves 
(The Soviet
Tradition of Legal Protection, or Expecting Care). Lev Levinson debunks 
The Myth
of Paternalism: he contends that Soviet citizens did not expect gratuitous
welfare but rightly believed they had a claim to state benefits in 
return for
their labour. Levinson argues that while the Soviet state did not live 
up to its
obligations, the Russian Federation has also made a mockery of the social
guarantees enshrined in its constitution.

The Politics of Culture rubric deals with the recent Russian 
blockbuster, Night
Watch. Cinema critic Dmitry Komm and historian Nikolai Mitrokhin discuss the
social significance of the film's success. Komm argues that contemporary 
Russian
mass cinema is striving to produce a unifying national myth with neo-pagan
aspects that bears an uncanny resemblance to the symbolism of Nazi Germany.
Mitrokhin interprets the movie as an allegory of Russian politics, and
especially of the career of Anatoly Chubais, a once-radical reformer who now
prefers talk about imperialism to concern for democracy.

Topic 3 looks at two examples of officially endorsed music in the 1970s 
and 80s.
Yan Levchenko writes about pop rock bands who benefited from the regime's
cautious concessions to young people's thirst for rock music, though the 
fame of
underground rockers eclipsed theirs by the late 80s (The Roar of the 
Cosmodrome
in the Communication Channel). Nikita Braginsky traces The Path of 
Power: The
Rise and Fall of the Great Children's Choir. Through a "biography" of 
the USSR's
main official children's choir, Braginsky illuminates many aspects of Soviet
politics and society in the Brezhnev era, such as the rejuvenation of 
the Lenin
cult, encouraged to counterbalance the aging of the political leadership.

Our New Institutions section presents the Youth Centre for Human Rights, 
devoted
to combating ignorance about human rights among teachers and school 
children.

After a particularly detailed Journals Review covering periodicals in 
political
and social studies, we publish an exchange between two experts on Russian
Orthodoxy, Anastasia Mitrofanova and Nikolai Mitrokhin, about the latter's
critical review of the former's book, included in our previous issue.

The New Books section features a detailed survey of the recent international
literature on Russian civil society by Belfast-based social scientist Diana
Schmidt, as well as reviews of books on topics ranging from the history of
Russian liberalism to Islam in contemporary Dagestan.



NZ 40 - Summary:

This double issue of NZ is devoted to the memory of the Second World War in
Russia, Germany and Europe 60 years after the end of recent history's 
greatest
armed conflict. Just like our special edition on Russia as part of Europe in
2003, this issue has been prepared jointly, and is published 
simultaneously in
two languages, by NZ and the Berlin-based monthly Osteuropa. This time, 
however,
the Russian version is more comprehensive, presenting a number of original
articles not featured in its German counterpart, as well as translations 
of a
number of French, German and English texts on collective memory and 
World War
II.

Our first, theoretical section features a chapter from Maurice Halbwachs's
posthumously published book Collective Memory, where he developed and 
revised
the ideas first outlined in his classic The Social Framework of Memory.
Entitled Collective Memory and Historical Memory, the excerpt explains
Halbwach's distinction between historical, collective, and personal 
memory, and
shows how personal memory always draws on collective structures to test, 
correct
and supplement its own recollections of past events. Harald Welzer, 
director of
the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Memory in Essen, provides an
update which focuses specifically on personal memories of the Second 
World War,
drawing on recent work in psychology and neuroscience (History, Memory, 
and the
Presence of the Past: Memory as a Political Arena). We also publish a 
Russian
translation of Theodor Adorno's seminal 1959 lecture What Does 'Working 
through
the Past' Mean?, a critical analysis of collective strategies of guilt 
denial
prevalent in post-war Western Germany.

The next section, Russia and Germany: Remembering and Overcoming the 
Past, is
devoted to general surveys of the public memory of the Second World War in
Russia and Germany. It starts with a detailed interpretive article by
sociologist Lev Gudkov, who draws on survey data collected since 1989 to 
define
the role of the memory of the Great Patriotic War in the structure of 
Russian
identity. Gudkov illustrates the paramount and unrivalled significance 
of the
war among all other events of Russian history, as judged by public 
opinion, and
unveils the mechanisms that block all attempts at a critical reappraisal 
of the
war or at including the grassroots, everyday vision of wartime life into the
official heroic picture, which serves to legitimate the Soviet and 
post-Soviet
political regime (The 'Memory' of the War and Russians' Mass Identity).
Historian Alexander Boroznyak provides a critical survey of the memory 
of the
war in the Federal Republic of Germany and its evolution since 1945. He 
shows
how the debate on WWII and German guilt has developed in waves corresponding
more or less to successive wartime and post-war generations (Waves of 
Historical
Memory in the FRG). Art historians Monika Flacke and Ulrike Schmiegelt 
look at
the other side of the Iron Curtain and describe the ways in which the East
German state built its identity on the idea of antifascism and a denial 
of East
Germans' involvement in Nazi crimes. They make special reference to the 
visual
and symbolic means employed to institutionalize that vision, such as the 
famous
statue in Berlin's Treptow Park, or the Buchenwald memorial (The GDR. From
Darkness to the Stars: A State in the Spirit of Antifascism). After these
general surveys, we continue with critical appraisals of commemorative
traditions in Russia and Germany. Maria Ferretti argues that while in 
post-war
Western Europe, there was a consensus to build the new democratic 
polities upon
a shared memory of democratic anti-fascism, the memory of the Great 
Patriotic
War in Russia served only to prop up the totalitarian regime (Implacable 
Memory:
Russia and the War). Jorg Echternkamp stresses the tensions between views of
1945 as a national catastrophe and as a national liberation that have 
prevailed
in Western Germany ever since the event (A 'German Catastrophe'? On the 
Public
Memory of the Second World War in Germany). In his essay on the 
historiography
of the Great Patriotic War in the USSR and Russia, Joachim Hosler asks, 
echoing
Adorno, What Does 'Working through the Past' Mean?, reviewing the debate 
on the
war among Soviet and Russian historians from the earliest appearance of 
critical
voices in the 1960s through the 'revelations' of Perestroika to new work
published since some state archives were opened in the early 1990s. Finally,
Helmut Konig takes another critical look at the evolution of the memory 
of WWII
in Western Germany, stressing especially how the myth of an untainted 
Wehrmacht
and the idea of Germans as victims of the war for a long time made it 
difficult
to come to terms with collective guilt and responsibility (The Memory of
National Socialism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War in the FRG's
Political Consciousness).

Our columnist Alexei Levinson devotes his Sociological Notes to an 
analysis of
recent survey data showing that Russians believe all of Russia's wars 
throughout
the 20th century, with the sole exception of the Great Patriotic War but
including the two Chechen wars, to have been 'unjust'.

Next we turn to Forms of Memory, a choice of articles on the different 
ways in
which the memory of the Second World War has expressed itself in Germany and
Russia. Irina Shcherbakova, the supervisor of a Russia-wide essay 
competition
for schoolchildren organised by Memorial, describes how the Great 
Patriotic War
presents itself to 15-20-year olds today, how the memory of the war is 
passed on
from generation to generation, and what regional and thematic variety is
displayed in the over 15,000 essays that have been submitted since 1999 
(Looking
at the Memory Map). Irina Pruss draws upon the same sources to make more 
general
observations on how the memory of WWII 'functions' with post-Soviet 
teenagers.
She especially stresses the co-existence of an 'official' and an 
'unofficial'
memory of the war, the former always coming to the fore in public 
contexts and
the latter being confined to the private sphere (Soviet History as Seen by
Contemporary Teenagers and Their Grandmothers). Zhanna Kormina and Sergei
Shtyrkov present the findings of their anthropological fieldwork in 
rural areas
of the Pskov region, which was occupied by the Germans between 1941 and 
1944.
Through their interviews with local inhabitants of all generations, they
reconstruct patterns of social behaviour, collaboration and resistance, and
public and private memories of the occupation and subsequent liberation 
(Nothing
is Forgotten, No-One is Forgotten: A History of the Occupation through Oral
Testimonies). Historians of culture Natalia Konradova and Anna Ryleva 
contribute
a richly illustrated piece describing the history and social functions 
of WWII
memorials in Russia and Germany, drawing especially on their fieldwork 
in small
towns around Moscow (Heroes and Victims. Memorials of the Great 
Patriotic War).
In another illustrated article, Natalia Danilova traces The Memorial 
Version of
the Afghan War, 1979-1989, by showing how the commemoration of that 'lesser'
conflict has evolved in the shadow of the 'Great' war, and how veterans'
associations have set up memorials expressing their particular vision of 
duty,
loyalty, and death. Pavel Polian provides a critical examination of the
state-sponsored committee officially in charge of the 60th anniversary
festivities in May 2005, and shows how its activities (or lack thereof) 
express
Russian top-level bureaucrats' view of war veterans and victims of the 
war (An
Anniversary a la Glavpour? The Victory Committee as a Natural Monopoly). 
Georgy
Ramazashvili tells the story of censorship and secrecy in the main Russian
archive for military history, and his struggle against it (The Central 
Archive
of the Ministry of Defence on the Eve of the 60th Anniversary of Victory).
Gabriele Freitag, a research fellow with the German foundation in charge of
paying compensations to foreigners who were deported to Germany by the Nazi
regime to do forced labour, describes the foundation's work and reactions by
some of the recipients (Nazi Forced Labour 60 Years on. The Work of the
Foundation for Memory, Responsibility, and Future). Dorothea 
Redepenning, in a
wide-sweeping comparative essay, looks at how West and East European 
composers
have tried to express the horrors of the Second World War and the 
Holocaust in
their music, and how the rigid dichotomy of 'anti-heroic' dodecaphonic 
music in
the West and large triumphant works in the USSR has slowly softened and 
yielded
to a more pluralistic musical culture (Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in 
Auschwitz:
Music Against War and Violence).

This naturally introduces the next section, entitled The 
Internationalisation of
Memory. This starts with an article by French historian Pierre Nora, 
Reasons for
the Current Upsurge in Memory, which takes the French case as a starting 
point
for general reflections about the replacement of historiography by memory in
public representations of the recent past. Andreas Langenohl describes the
international circulation of symbols of WWII as it is displayed in official
commemorative ceremonies such as the anniversaries of D-Day or the end 
of the
war (State Visits. The Internationalisation of the Memory of the Second 
World
War in Germany and Russia). The other articles in this section are 'country
profiles' that show how the memory of WWII has evolved in a number of 
European
countries apart from Germany and Russia. Vladislav Grinevich writes about
Ukraine (A Split Memory. The Second World War in the Historical 
Consciousness of
Ukrainian Society), Eva-Clarita Onken deals with the Latvian case (From a
History of Liberation to a History of Occupation.  The Perception and 
Memory of
WWII in Latvia after 1945), Sergei Romanenko tackles former Yugoslavia 
(Has the
Second World War Ended on the Territory of Disintegrated Yugoslavia?), and
Alessandro Portelli analyses an episode that mirrors the complexity of the
memory of WWII in Italy (The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine: History, Myth,
Ritual, and Symbol).

The next section, Partial Amnesia, starts with an essay by historian 
Ilya Altman
which traces The Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Russia: Past, 
Present, and
Perspectives.  Starting with the tragic story of the Jewish Antifascist
Committee's Black Book and ending with the creation of the Holocaust 
Centre in
Moscow and a range of Holocaust museums in the former Soviet republics, 
Altman
reviews the stages of the difficult and unfinished process of making the
Holocaust a part of the collective memory of WWII in the USSR, Russia, 
and the
other successor states.  Journalist and director Richard Chaim Schneider 
casts a
highly critical glance at commemorations of the Holocaust in Germany, 
which he
portrays as a highly self-centred and hollow practice that takes no 
notice of
Jewish concerns (German Rituals of Coping with the Past, the Return of 
the Dead
Jews, and the Disappearance of the Living Jews. An Analytico-Polemical 
Essay).
Wolfram Wette tackles the most tenacious German myth about WWII, the 
idea that
the Wehrmacht wasn't fought a 'clean war' and wasn't involved in 
Hitler's crimes
against humanity (Hitler's Wehrmacht: Stages of the Debate on a German 
Legend).
Two articles deal with the role of female soldiers on both sides of the 
Second
World War: Franka Maubach presents her research on The Wehrmacht's 
'Helpers': A
Paradigmatic Figure of the End of the War, while Olga Nikonova provides 
a survey
of recent work on women in the Red Army (Women, the War, and 
Preterition). Beate
Fieseler recalls another neglected minority: 'Poor Winners': The 
Invalids of the
Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union. Finally, Jorg Ganzenmuller draws
attention to A Secondary Theatre of the Memory War: The Leningrad 
Blockade in
German Memory. This is a followed by an interview with a survivor of the
blockade, Nikolai Viktorovich.

In his Humane Economics column, Yevgeny Saburov reflects upon the economic
equivalents of concepts such as love, hope, and memory, and argues that the
memory of Russia's former greatness acts as an obstacle to investment 
into its
future.

There follows a section on literary reminiscences of the war. Ilia Kukulin
provides a detailed survey of reflections of the war in Soviet official and
unofficial literature, quoting from a range of works that have only 
published in
recent years (Regulating Pain: Preliminary Notes on the Transformation 
of the
Traumatic Experience of the Great Patriotic / Second World War in Russian
Literature in the 1940s-1970s). Volker Hage looks at German writers' 
treatment
of the bombings of German cities in the final years of the war (Buried 
Feelings:
How German Writers Coped with the Bombings). Klaus Stadtke contributes a 
short
essay on Vassily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, which he portrays as a 
theory
of totalitarianism comparable with the work of Hannah Arendt.

Our final thematic section, The War on the Screen, opens with the 
transcript of
a debate on Russian media and WWII that took place in October 2004 at a
conference organised by NZ. Journalists Yelena Nemykh, Konstantin Eggert and
Sergey Parkhomenko, as well as Alexei Simonov, president of the Glasnost
Foundation, discuss a documentary radio and TV interview series called 
The Birth
of Victory, as well as wider issues of the post-Soviet Russian media and 
their
treatment of the Great Patriotic War. As a counterpoint, German media critic
Volker Hage analyses a recent German documentary on the Holocaust, and 
shows how
the mediatic dramatisation of the Holocaust at the hands of German TV 
guru Guido
Knopp leads to a dangerous trivialisation of this difficult topic (Full Moon
Holocaust: Theoretical Notes on the Genre of a ZDF Documentary). 
Finally, cinema
historian Neya Zorkaya analyses the Images of the War that were presented in
war-time Soviet movies and shaped cinematic representations of the war for
decades to come.

Our New Institutions section presents the Holocaust Centre, an institution
devoted to promoting awareness of the Holocaust in Russia.

Two very detailed Journal Reviews cover Russian periodicals in both 
political
and social studies and culture, dwelling specifically on a number of special
issues devoted to memory and the Second World War.

The New Books section contains reviews of over a dozen recent Russian 
and German
books on memory and history.




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