Our PhD researcher, Selbi Durdiyeva has just published ‘Memory production, vandalism, violence: Civil society and lessons from a short life of a monument to Stalin’ in the journal Constellations.
This paper assesses the posts on social media, the official website of the organisation “Russian Spirit,” newspaper articles, and secondary interviews from September 2015 (a date before the erection of the monument), to the present day to examine the qualities of the civil society.
The paper first provides a working definition of the term “civil society.”
It then examines the power dynamics behind memory politics through the history and historiography of memory production and the specifics of Stalinist and anti‐Stalinist attitudes in the Soviet and post‐Soviet Russia.
This paper further outlines the characteristics of “uncivil” civil society.
The work concludes by discussing potential paths of enduring revisionism, elaborating on the possibilities of toleration, resistance, condemning violence, and imposing restrictions through legal means.