NORMEMO spring 2022 guest lecture: Imagined communities of centre and periphery: Regional memory, nation-building and sub-national variation in the Russian Federation

It is commonly accepted that nation-building and national identity narratives have been of foundational importance to the political stability and legitimacy of post-Soviet states. A key problem in the study of memory politics in a country the size of Russia is the level of subnational variation. Kremlin-centred analyses of a state-curated “useable past” rarely consider how memory politics are operationalised in Russia’s diverse regions. In his talk, Matthew Blackburn will approach the challenge of including the regions in memory studies, reporting on fieldwork in contemporary Russia exploring the basic divergences in interview data on identity and WWII memory between European Russian cities (Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg) and a Siberian city (Novosibirsk). The lecture also includes methodological reflections on how to study subnational variation across Russia with regards memory polices, divergent nation-building trends and various types of centre-periphery relationships.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://uit.zoom.us/j/69578737339?pwd=MjFMbEJ0RWE1UHdXUmRVNkZNb05Ddz09

Russiske regionale flagg. Copyright: http://www.vector-images.com

Matthew Blackburn, PhD, is a researcher at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, and an Ulam Visiting Fellow at the University of Warsaw. He completed his doctoral thesis on nationalist discourses and the imagined nation in post-Soviet Russia at the University of Glasgow in 2018. His man research interests are political legitimacy, political use of memory and identity politics in Central Eastern Europe and Eurasia. His recent publications include ‘Parade, Plebiscite, Pandemic: Legitimation Efforts in Putin’s Fourth Term’ (2021); ‘The Persistence of the Civic-Ethnic Binary: Competing Visions of the Nation and Civilisation in Western, Central and Eastern Europe’ (2021); ‘Mainstream Russian Nationalism and the “State-Civilization” Identity: Perspectives from Below’, Nationalities Papers (2021); ‘Political Legitimacy in Contemporary Russia ‘from Below’: ‘Pro-Putin’ Stances, the Normative Split and Imagining Two Russias’, Russian Politics (2020); ‘Myths in the Russian Collective Memory: The Golden Era of Pre-Revolutionary Russia and the Disaster of 1917’, Scando-Slavica (2018).