An Important Source Collection on Seventeenth-Century Russian History

The article was submitted on 28.11.2015.The reviews of the book: Заметки о России, сделанные Эриком Пальмквистом в 1674 году. М. : Ломоносов. 2012. – 344 с. The observations on Russia made by Erik Palmquist in 1674 are a little known and important source that contains drawings, geographical maps, and city plans with descriptions. All of this makes it an important source for the history of seventeenth-century Russia, providing information on military science, diplomacy, law and order, infrastructure, architecture, technology, industry, and clothing. It is not by chance that such a description was made, since the result of this supposedly ‘diplomatic’ mission was the collection of immense amounts of intelligence on Russia. Kept in the National Archive in Stockholm, the manuscript was translated and published in Russian in 1900; an abbreviated edition was released in 1993. The edition reviewed in this article is the first trilingual version which complies with international academic standards, and thus is suitable for scholarly research. However, we still must wait for a version that will be affordable and have the same format as the original. Moreover, academic commentary on the text, illustrations, and maps has not yet been provided.«Заметки о России, сделанные Эриком Пальмквистом в 1674 году», являются важным, но малоизвестным источником, содержащим множество рисунков, географических карт и планов городов с описаниями. Это делает их ценным источником по истории России XVII в., сообщающим информацию о состоянии военного дела, дипломатии, правовом порядке, инфраструктуре, архитектуре, технологиях, промышленности и одежде. Такое подробное описание на случайно, ведь результатом миссии, декларированной как дипломатическая, оказалось собрание огромных разведывательных материалов о России. Находящийся в Стокгольмском национальном архиве, манускрипт был переведен на русский язык и опубликован в 1900 г., переиздан в уменьшенном формате в 1993 г. Настоящее издание является первой трилингвальной версией, соответствующей международным научным стандартам и поэтому пригодной для использования в научных исследованиях. И все же придется еще подождать окончательной репринтной версии по доступной цене и в формате, соответствующем оригиналу, тем более что работа по аннотации текста, иллюстраций и карт согласно научным критериям должна быть еще сделана

A history of post-communist remembrance: from memory politics to the emergence of a field of anticommunism

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: the anticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes. Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism

Challenging the Notion of the East‐West Memory Divide

Recent scholarly works on memory practices in Europe often appeal to the notion of the East-West memory divide or, more dramatically, to the European memory wars which have been allegedly raging at least since the Eastern enlargement of 2004. These terms are supposed to stand for the heated debate between the East and the West, between the countries on the opposing sides of the former Iron Curtain, about what the appropriate memory for Europe should be. In this article, I challenge this simplistic division and I argue that it completely disregards the role of agency. In contrast, I conduct an agent-centred empirical analysis and show that the social actors involved in the debate are far more diverse, the fault lines are far less clear and the sides of the debate are far more heterogeneous than the carelessly used notion of the East-West memory divide would have us believe.Published versio