In this deeply researched, carefully argued, and incredibly timely book, Nikolay Koposov provides a thorough—and first of its kind—analysis of a variety of “memory laws” that have been implemented across Europe over the past three decades. “Memory law” is an umbrella term for a great diversity of legislation that, in some form, tries to organize, discipline, and order acceptable and unacceptable renderings of the past.
While we often think of memory laws as laws designed to criminalize Holocaust denial or negation of other genocides, Koposov traces the very first law that addressed the acceptable interpretation of past events to the Allied Joint Declaration of May 24, 1915, condemning the massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (60). However, the real boom in memory laws, Koposov shows, truly begins in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when first France, and then Germany, followed by Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain also passed laws that criminalized Holocaust denial (87).
What explains the emergence of these laws at that particular time? Koposov, correctly, situates this development within the “memory boom” of the period. This was the time of increasing awareness of and concern with momentous events from the past, most notably, the Holocaust. It was the period when the Holocaust emerged as a central event of European 20th-century history (certainly in Germany, much of Western Europe, but also Israel and especially the United States, which has made the Holocaust central to its own history and understanding of its participation in World War II). It was the time when popular culture (novels, TV shows) as well as academic historiography began to systematically deal with the Holocaust as a unique event of modern history, and separate it from the broader narrative of World War II, under which it laid dormant in the first few decades after the war.
For Koposov, this historical contextualization is critical because it explains how the idea that history—as well as remembrance of that history—needs to be legislated by the state came to be, and what political and narrative purpose it served at the time. The mid-1980s, and then especially the early 1990s following the collapse of communism, were also a time of great expansion of the idea of international human rights, and with that, the idea of acknowledgment of past crimes, respect of victims, and proper remembrance. The memory boom then elevated certain critical historical events from the nation’s past “that serve as sacred symbols of various communities of memory” (59).
Memory Laws persuasively demonstrates that the “memory boom” of the 1990s also coincided (although, I would suggest, in many ways also contributed to) a particularist nationalist revival (14), where the focus on the past was politically instrumentalized to be the focus of the nation’s victimhood, itself a very potent building block of national identity. Focus on the past, in other words, was really a focus on the present.
And here Koposov makes a bold claim. While in Western Europe, he argues, memory laws were passed to construct a shared European memory (with the memory of the Holocaust at its core), with the purpose of integrating Europe on the basis of antifascism, in Eastern Europe and in Russia memory laws serve a very different nation-building project. There, legislating the past is a political tool that post-communist states use to create their national identities in opposition to both the West and to communism, and in doing so they glorify their own victimhood, ignore the history of their own complicity in atrocities (particularly the extensive local complicity in the Holocaust), and use the past as an instrument of foreign policy (10).
Treading on this territory is incredibly treacherous, not least because some of the countries Koposov analyzes (Poland or Lithuania, perhaps most directly) have passed memory laws that would make even this very book problematic! The moment of historical revisionism we are living in today (as witnessed in outright denial of extensively documented local complicity in the Holocaust in occupied Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, independent Croatia and Slovakia, and beyond) is so alarming precisely because it is no longer on the margins (as it was for years in the West), but has become official state policy, legislated by memory laws. It is to this book’s great credit that it confronts these trends head on, and exposes them for what they are—attempts to create post-communist national identities on “good memories” (of national victimhood) while completely ignoring, obfuscating, or delegating to others “bad memories” (of collaboration, complicity, and direct participation in the Holocaust, but also in communist crimes).
East European states have, in fact, directly used already existing memory law initiatives designed in the West to delegitimize fascism and Holocaust denial to now delegitimize communism and Soviet history. Koposov does history and memory studies a great service by analyzing, in detail, memory laws in all the countries that adopted them, and then presenting the political context that explains their instrumental use.
Particularly useful is the careful investigation into the dynamic relationship between Russian and Eastern European memory politics. With his deep knowledge of Russian politics and Russian historiography, Koposov is able to demonstrate the subtle changes in Russian mnemopolitics since the collapse of the Soviet Union—the somewhat Europe-aspirational Yeltsin era and the radical nationalism and anti-Westernism of the Putin era. Russian memory politics, Koposov shows, is in direct dialogue with memory politics of Eastern European states. With each anti-Soviet memory law an Eastern European country passes, Russia responds by delegitimizing East European memories as pro-fascist. With each pro-Soviet memory law Russia passes (especially laws designed to solidify the myth of Soviet heroism in WWII or the “Great Patriotic War,” as it is referred to in Russia), East European states respond by dismissing all criticism of their own nationalist memory laws by painting the critics as “pro-Russian.”
And so it goes. These memories are tied together, they pull at each other, they do not exist without one another, and are both using the truly horrific history of the 20th century in Eastern Europe to position themselves on the opposite poles of contemporary Europe. The European Union, Koposov shows, has been somewhat complicit in these memory wars by uncritically accepting East European claims of leveling the crimes of communism with the crimes of the Holocaust, and providing these claims cover with a series of high-profile resolutions, the most significant of which was the 2008 Prague Declaration. By providing such a detailed, nuanced, and contextual understanding of memories at war, Nikolay Koposov has written a book that is an indispensable reference for understanding the mnemonic moment we live in, and how we got here.
