How and for what purposes do states use law to preserve their preferred account of the major historical events that have shaped the polity? In this fascinating and detailed account of West and East European memory laws, historian Nikolay Koposov offers an account of the practice of state-enforced accounts of history across Europe. Koposov's comparative analysis of law from a historian's perspective goes beyond the lawyer's usual inquiry about the origins of legislation. The book examines the role played by memory laws in the politics of history. Koposov sets out to show that current legislation in Western Europe (including supranational European Union law) and its Eastern counterpart (spanning Russia, Ukraine, and beyond to states that have acceded to the European Union, such as the Czech Republic and Hungary) is designed to secure contrasting narratives about the nation state. In the case of Putin's Russia, Koposov argues that memory laws are deployed to preserve the memory of Stalin's regime by criminalizing the dissemination of “knowingly false information” (10) about the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Domestic law enshrines the “Great Patriotic War” (247) and legitimates the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe post-1945. Drawing inspiration from the Gayssot Act in 1990 that outlawed Holocaust negationism in France, dominant political forces in post-Soviet Russia sought to protect their conception of the nation's history in the face of emerging pluralism, which was perceived to threaten the memory of the sacrifice against fascism through competing narratives.

A significant tranche of the book is devoted to the Putin period. Official commemoration of the sacrifices (i.e., victimhood) of the Russian people under Stalin is seen to be buttressed by the criminal law's prohibition of criticism of Soviet politics. This serves primarily to subordinate memories of the Holocaust and the gulags. As Koposov notes, the legal regimes of other East European countries also downplay local populations’ complicity in the Holocaust for similarly nationalistic reasons. Hungary, for example, criminalizes the denial of both Nazi and Soviet bloc era crimes while lionizing the memory of those Hungarian patriots who fought the Soviet occupation.

West European memory laws are the focus of Chapter Two. The author traces the origins of the Gayssot Act in France by reference to the affaire Faurisson (1978) concerning the eponymous professor of French at Lyon University who in Le Monde had denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. In the absence of a specific Holocaust denial law, Faurisson was tried in the civil courts for “improper conduct of historical research” and “causing harm” to the plaintiffs (anti-racist organizations) (83); he was fined the symbolic sum of one franc. Koposov rightly understands the French judiciary, in imposing this sanction, to have been signalling its reluctance to assume the role of arbiter of standards for historical research. It was more democratically acceptable for an elected legislature to undertake reform of the law, especially if, as here, the Gaullist right and communist wings of French politics could coalesce around the need to denounce fascism. French intellectuals—an “overwhelming majority” according to Koposov—also supported “the criminalization of untoward statements about the past” (85).

At a supranational level in Europe in the late 1990s, the expansion of the European Union eastwards into former Soviet bloc countries gave rise to concerns that, unless newly acceded states also developed national memory laws, the cause of anti-fascism would be imperiled. Accordingly, the European Union Joint Action of July 1996 “invited” member states to criminalize “public denial of crimes defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal” (93). This section of the book valuably sets out how various European Union states responded to this encouragement. Unfortunately, the author conflates the distinct supranational systems of law and policy established by the Council of Europe on the one hand (e.g., the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) and the European Union on the other, whereas each played a distinctive role in promoting Holocaust denial laws.

Ultimately, the reader is left somewhat unsure about the author's normative stance. Does he support Holocaust denial laws as a necessary means of shoring up democratic values? At times, Koposov appears dismissive of free speech arguments, yet elsewhere he concludes that deniers need not necessarily be prosecuted. This reviewer found Koposov's tacit support for state-enforced accounts of history (including resort to the criminal law) to pose certain risks for a self-governing democracy. Aside from the undeniable fact that deploying the coercive force of the state makes free speech martyrs of Holocaust deniers, the idea that law can forge true communities of shared values (such as tolerance, empathy, and humanity) is hugely debatable. Transferring this obligation to the state means that civic society need not assume any responsibility. That majorities in democratic states (and the democratically imperfect European Union) might regulate political viewpoints on the basis of the moral correctness of an opinion or the rigor of research appears to confer on elected governments an immense power to silence a range of opinion. Holocaust denial laws and hate speech laws play fast and loose with the democratic imperative of citizens to author the laws by which they live together. Notwithstanding the author's unwillingness to consider more fully the case against memory laws in democratic states, readers will come away from the book with a much richer understanding of developments in Eastern Europe. Koposov has given scholars in the West some fascinating, and no doubt memorable, insights into aspects of state repression of expression.