Oct 29, 2016 | 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM | STUDIO THEATRE

Ms. Aliide Naylor, BA (Hons.) History

A Soviet tyrant rethroned: Stalin's image in contemporary Russia

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is being written back into Russia’s history as one of its “good guys”. In recent years, statues devoted to the leader have been erected and museums honoring him opened, while negative associations are being slowly erased. The Russian Ministry of Defense has been planning to create a “research” organisation to combat the “falsification of history” in the midst of its own kind of falsification which it continues to promote. Among other examples, I will focus on how last year, the Perm 36 prison camp, which once commemorated the victims of the gulag, was brought under new management and now serves to promote its contribution to Soviet victory in WWII rather than to honour those who suffered on its grounds.

This degree of state-imposed selective memory is taking place as part of a broad governmental attempt to encourage its own version of the past in order to consolidate its power in the present after a deteriorating grip on power became increasingly identifiable from 2011 onwards. This paper will explore the extent to which it has been successful in diminishing the importance of Stalin’s victims and expunging the evils of Soviet wartime dictatorship.

I will demonstrate how the state structure has attempted to retain its resilience through the manufacturing of historical memory and why it has chosen this specific method. I will also explore present-day popular beliefs about the Stalinist era. Data has been collected in the form of oral testimonies and newspaper reports.

Dr. Shih-chieh (Jay) Su, PhD

How Historian Manufactured the Historical Truth: the Case of Leopold von Ranke

The conception of historical scholarship, as Leopold von Ranke advocated, was embedded in the nascent development of the historical discipline, which sought to empower professional historians to restore the “truth,” or the “objective reality” within the parameters of a nationalist historiography.  In his “unstable narrative” of the German past, the tension was apparent: while Ranke, as a professional historian, employed a rigorous scientific method to pursue historical objectivity or truth, as a public intellectual he acknowledged his inability to conceal subjective sympathy toward the monarchy and his abiding support of the Prussia-led German unification. To mitigate this probable conflict, Ranke practically proposed a normative procedure of historiographical forgetting that entailed deliberately selecting and arranging historical materials while conducting objective inquiries.  He professionally believed that the universal truth would promptly reveal itself, if he were able to retrieve, restore and represent the past in its authenticity.

In this formulation, the truth essentially transcends the distinctive boundaries of time and space.  To extract the pure facts and to restore the studied past with authenticity, he needed to discard (forget) all the possible subjective elements of imagination from the documented and archival artifacts, and to subordinate the remaining actual facts to the discursive elements, which aimed to support his objective reconstruction of the national past within the context of universal history. Yet, Ranke’s reconstruction of a “truthful” version of the German past unavoidably intersected with subjective political preferences, selective memories and an imagined continuity of historical time. 

Therefore, the scope of historical truth was limited to the significant events that could be historically correlated with his subject matter and validated by the perspective of “future past.”  This notion of temporal continuity enabled him to disclose elements of universal significance and future-looking benefits, and to stabilize the changing perceptions of historical actors in time.  His pursuit of the historical truth did not seek to restore the past with complete authenticity, but rather to imbue the past with meaning, whose transcendence was defined by current perceptions of historical time.  Namely, Ranke imagined a harmonious synthesis of the historian’s subjectivity with an ideal of objectivity “out there” as the truth to be discovered in reality.  As a result, his creation of a realistic picture of a selected past and his rationalization of a fantasized reality essentially empowered his choice of model or moral act regarding how humans ought to live, which served conclusively as the founding principle of the modern historical discipline.

Dr. Lana Wylie, PhD

Selective Memory in the US-Cuba Relationship

This paper will investigate how Cuban and American identities and foreign policies have been shaped by historical memories. Through a process of their mutual construction the enduring memories of the other in both countries have constructed the two identities and contributed to a long term hostile relationship. The paper investigates the current process of normalization in the relationship and considers the degree to which these memories have been selected, reshaped or otherwise overcome in this process.

Biographies

Aliide Naylor

Aliide Naylor is completing an MA in contemporary Russian cultural history at the European University at St. Petersburg. She has worked as Arts and Ideas editor at The Moscow Times and as a contributor to Russia! Magazine. Her writing has also been published in post-Soviet journal Transitions Online. She holds a BA (Hons.) in History from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Author profile http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/authors/474646.

Sweeping up History: Stalin and Memory Politics in the Midst of Victory http://readrussia.com/2015/05/18/sweeping-up-history-stalin-and-memory-p...

Dr. Shih-chieh (Jay) Su

Dr. Shih-chieh (Jay) Su is an Assistant Professor of History at Delaware Valley University in Pennsylvania, U.S.A.  His primary area of research has focused on analyzing the problematic relationship between the emergence of professional historians and the promotion of national identities in nineteenth-century Europe.  His another area of research concentrates on exploring the Rankean paradigm to the global development of the modern historical discipline in modern Japan, China, and Taiwan, the new nation-states of the former Soviet bloc, and the postcolonial nation-states of the non-Western world. Dr. Su is the author of Modern Nationalism and the Making of a Professional Historian: The Life and Work of Leopold von Ranke (Palo Alto: Academica Press, 2014), “The Image of Leopold von Ranke in Taiwan: A Survey on the Effect of the Introduction of Historicism in Taiwan,” [in Chinese] Contemporary Monthly 163 (March, 2001), 48-77, and “Chang, Shih-Chai and ‘Historicism’,” [in Chinese] Shih Hsüeh 14 (1993), 33-49.

Dr. Lana Wylie

Dr. Lana Wylie, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, McMaster University. She received her Doctorate in Political Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2003. She held a Postdoctoral fellowship at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University in 2003-2004.. She is a member of the editorial board for Canadian Foreign Policy Journal. Her previous roles include the 2013-2014 president of the ISA, Canada, executive board member of the Latin American Studies Association, Cuba section, and executive board member of the Canadian International Council, Hamilton branch.

Dr. Wylie has extensive research experience in Canadian and American foreign policy, Latin American and Caribbean politics with a concentration on Cuba, and international relations. Recently, she has published three books (two edited volumes and one monograph) and has another in process on topics relevant to this current project. These are Perceptions of Cuba: Canadian and American Policies in Comparative Perspective (University of Toronto Press, 2010); Our Place in the Sun: Canada and Cuba in the Castro Era, (with Robert Wright) (University of Toronto Press, 2009); and Canadian Foreign Policy in Critical Perspective (with J. Marshall Beier) (Oxford University Press, 2010).  She has also published journals articles, book chapters and policy papers. For instance, she was the guest editor of an issue of Canadian Foreign Policy Journal focused on the Canadian-Cuban relationship (2010), published a chapter entitled “Othering in the ‘Exceptional’ U.S.-Cuba Relationship,” in Portraying the Other in International Relations: Cases of Othering, Their Dynamics and the Potential for Transformation (2012) and has a co-authored article in the International Journal of Cuban Studies (2013). She is currently working on another volume (with Luis René Fernández Tabío and Cynthia Wright), Other Diplomacies, Other Ties: Cuba and Canada in the Shadow, (forthcoming University of Toronto Press).