Reenacting the Enemy: Collective Memory Construction in Russian and US Memory by Ludmila Isurin
A brief review cannot do justice to the extraordinary depth of the interdisciplinary analysis of collective memory formation from media accounts in Russia and the US given in Reenacting the Enemy: Collective Memory Construction in Russian and US Memory. In this book, Ludmila Isurin considers three processes of collective memory construction, including the deliberate or subconscious reorientation of accepted historical facts, different interpretations of the causes of past conflicts, and the understanding of who should be blamed for these conflicts. To support her analysis, Isurin focuses on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014, the current Ukraine conflict, the Malaysia Airlines downing, the Syrian conflict, the 2016 US presidential election, and the poisoning of the Skripals. She describes three paths for “memory construction.” First, the media (producers) have an effect on the construction of a group’s memory; second, the media also influence the construction of the Other through the dissemination of information about political events involving that specific Other; and third, the way in which information about a political event is consumed by members of the groups targeted by the media influences how the Other is reconstructed in individuals’ minds. While groups often form the basis of history, they are not necessarily a defining condition of that history.
For Isurin, collective memory construction, especially enemy-creation, is emulated by Western populists. In collective memory, enemies are created and also magnified. She contends that “pure fabrication of collective memories happens quite rarely” (21, citing Baumeister and Hastings 1997). It is difficult for me to square this assertion based on what I have learned from Western media sources. It is surprising to me that Isurin, after having produced so much impressive work, could believe that the wholesale fabrication of collective memories does not in fact occur regularly and routinely. Sadly, this process is no longer the prerogative of totalitarian and highly authoritarian states. Today, it does not take censorship to keep out the truth. What we have witnessed in the past two decades in the West is the polarization of news consumers into separate paradigms uninterested in facts and ready to consume the most outrageous news items, to the point that the more perverted the assertion, the more attention it receives through “retweets,” “likes,” or other features of emerging digital technologies. Who knows what AI has in store for us next?
To support her thesis about memory making, the author provides examples of instances in the West when facts were adjusted to influence collective memory. For example, in the US, the Supreme Court falsified history in its 2023 majority ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment was “color-blind” and “race-neutral.” In fact, this amendment was enacted in an explicitly race-conscious manner to counteract racial discrimination, because the Civil Rights Act of 1868 had failed to protect newly freed slaves from continued discrimination. The author also claims that President Obama misled his inaugural audience into thinking the US fought the Civil War to free the slaves. While that was certainly not the case at the war’s start, it was indeed after the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in Union-controlled areas of the Confederacy.
Another dimension the book examines is the role of the media in the construction of collective memory, as the author asserts that what eventually evolves into memory is heavily influenced by initial accounts of specific events in the public media. However, given the vagaries in prevailing morality, what is normalized in the media in one epoch can be demonized in another. The shifts on civil rights for all races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations have been dramatic in the West, just as those about the environment or rightwing populism have. That the disparity in digital media accounts of these pivotal trends is surprising or reminiscent of Cold War patterns is unconvincing. “Through the analysis of media,” the author writes, “it has been fascinating, yet unsettling to see how the two countries [Russia and the US] pushed against each other, thereby reenacting an image of the Cold War enemy” (2). Given the rivalry between the two countries, this behavior is not surprising. Similar disparities in media accounts would presumably exist in other great powers, such as China, where the media are state-controlled, especially regarding events of national interest—Taiwan—and possibly Russia-related events as well.
The US media have followed similar digital distortions of polarized realities when Donald Trump was elected President of the US in 2016—an ostensibly non-Russian event. It is plausible that Russia aided Trump by providing 80,000 votes in the three states that won him the electoral college majority. The polling data provided to an FSB agent by Trump’s then campaign manager Paul Manafort doubtlessly provided the micro-public opinion data that allowed for a social media onslaught by the Internet Research Agency headed by the late Wagner Group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The same conflict of interests exists over most of the other events mentioned in the book, especially the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, inspired by the Maidan (Independence) Square rebellion against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia regarded this rebellion as a coup, even though the president had fled the country voluntarily after mass murdering peaceful protestors. This rebellion was the second act of mass resistance to Moscow-sympathizer Yanukovych, who had also failed to steal the 2008 presidential election (later known as the Orange Revolution). Differing accounts of these events in the digital media reflect incompatible views of the facts concerning electoral fraud and mass murder. Likewise, asserting that Crimea and the rest of Ukraine were always Russian constitutes prevarication at the service of a neo-imperialist, great power’s aspirations to remain great by diverting domestic attention from its own electoral fraud and directing people instead to falsified foreign claims. These Russian media accounts may echo the Cold War. Even though the USSR, partly through electoral fraud, imposed communism in Romania and Poland after World War I, Putin and his minions are no more willing than their predecessors to admit the truth.
Concepts such as confirmation bias, motivational and cognitive misperception, and cybernetic decision-making have long been studied, as have mass socialization, propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. Another concept, social media, is especially important in the context of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence. Did the mass technologies depicted in Hannah Arendt’s study of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism introduce anything new? The West has not always been truthful; the main difference between an open and closed society is that only the former conducts fact-checking—and even that may no longer be true. Russian athletes and East German swimmers and runners may have used performance enhancing drugs in the 1950-2000 era, but that does not mean all Western athletes were clean. Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler never admitted to lying, and neither has Donald Trump. At the time of writing, the more Trump lies about the 2020 election “theft,” the more popular he becomes. Given how much he has studied Hitler, it is not surprising that Trump cares little about how ludicrous his lies appear. Therefore, while Russian and US accounts of the same events vary because of differing national interests, these interest can change or be confounded with personal interests. As Isurin argues, the politics of resentment by autocrats involves distortion of the Other, who is scapegoated for nearly everything the leader is responsible for, and more.
Isurin reminds readers that Russia’s failure to remain a great power is obviated by the regime’s ability to blame its shortcomings on the West, NATO, and the US. In spite of the possible expansion of NATO to Ukraine, Georgia, and former ex-Soviet Baltic republics, blaming the West for the Soviet Union’s breakup is absurd. While the West could have had an indirect impact, its influence was by no means necessary for that breakup to occur. Moreover, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 on the genocidal premise that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people have never existed. Many Russians believe these falsehoods, in spite of Russia having signed a treaty with Ukraine by which it recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.
This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how collective memory, at least during a transitional period, may foster new myths, whether deliberately or not. This transitional period is based on and can reaffirm and expand national myths at odds with facts, either by omission or commission. Where Isurin and I part company is in her assertion that this myth-making tendency is similar in open Western societies and closed Eastern societies such as Russia. While leaders in the West may not be honest in acknowledging their self-interest and self-misperception, there remains a difference in kind between East and West, Trump notwithstanding. In 2024, The Economist[1] deemed Trump to be the world’s greatest threat. If his electoral politics triumphs in November’s US presidential election, then Isurin’s premise that collective memory fosters myth-making will be proven correct, as the US may become a closed society where the truth no longer emerges out of robust debate but out of false memory creation.
Henry (Chip) Carey has been a professor of political science at Georgia State University since 1998. He is the co-author, most recently, of Legalization of International Law and Politics: Multi-Level Governance of Human Rights and Aggression (Palgrave 2023). He is currently chair of the International Law Section of the International Studies Association and is on the council of the Asylum Representation section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Reenacting the Enemy: Collective Memory Construction in Russian and US Memory
By Ludmila Isurin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Hardcover / 328 pages / 2022
ISBN: 9780197605462
[1] “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024: What his Victory in America’s Election would Mean.”The Economist(16 November 2023) https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/16/donald-trump-poses-the-biggest-danger-to-the-world-in-2024
Published on August 15, 2024.
