Introduction
In 1931 Salvador Dali introduced his famous painting The Persistence of Memory which depicts three melting pocket watches against the landscape of Cape of Creus in Catalonia. Many critics consider that in this painting Dali tried to show that time is irrelevant: the memory simply persists, even if time fades away.
Dali's surrealist approach resonates remarkably well with Maurice Halbwachs's view on collective memory. Halbwachs argues that collective memory "is a current of continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive". He concludes that time is no longer viewed as a sign of fading memories, therefore time is irrelevant.
Scholars have variously sought to explain the rise of interest in the past, memory, nostalgia, and history in contexts ranging from consumer promotions, popular culture, interior and exterior design, and public space, as well as the rise of reparations, apologies, and other forms of redress in domestic and international politics. Answers have included the decline of the nation-state as a carrier of identity, the end of faith in progress, the rise of multiculturalism, and post-modernity more generally. The French historian Pierre Nora has claimed that we spend so much time thinking about the past because there is so little of it left: "where we earlier lived lives suffused with pastness-the continuities of habit and custom-we now live disconnected from our pasts, seeing ourselves as radically different than our forebears".
In this paper I will examine theoretical overview of collective memory and its interweaving with history. Based on this, I will analyze case study - how the Famine ('Holodomor') has been represented and remembered in Russia, the state - successor of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, the state claiming to be the victim of the Famine, and Western countries. I will argue that Ukraine's elites believe that Russian and Soviet schools of history on the Famine are incompatible with nation building in Ukraine and therefore should be replaced by the myth created by the Ukrainian historians and politicians.
Collective memory
Memory has been a major preoccupation for social thinkers since the Greeks. The first explicit use of the term 'collective memory' was by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1902, who referred to the 'dammed up force of our mysterious ancestors within us and piled up layers of accumulated collective memory'. Contemporary usage of the term 'collective memory' is largely referred to Émile Durkheim, who wrote in 'The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life' (1912) about commemorative rituals, and to his student, Maurice Halbwachs, who published a landmark study on 'The Social Frameworks of Memory' in 1925.
Collective memory is, in Halbwachs's view, a group memory upon which individual memory relies "in order to corroborate and make precious and even cover the gaps in its remembrances". While short- and long-term memories of individuals keep changing due to psychological and biological transformations over time, collective memory assumes and retains permanence. Therefore collective memory is not reducible to individual memories and physical existence.
Ned Lebow observes that collective memory can misrepresent past experience in three significant ways: it is incomplete, selective and inaccurate. First, people remember only part of their past experiences, and their memory usually erodes over time. Secondly, collective memory is selective: not everything is borrowed from the past and retained. And finally, memories are frequently inaccurate in terms of the substance or sequence of what has actually happened in the past.
Memory and history
One of the most contested boundaries for memory studies is its relation to historiography.
Halbwachs argues that "history is dead memory, a way of preserving pasts to which we no longer have an organic experiential relation". He makes a contrast between "history" and "collective memory" not as one between public and private but as one based on the relevance of the past to the present. Both history and collective memory are publicly available social facts-the former "dead," the latter "living." Halbwachs alternately refers to autobiographical memory, historical memory, history, and collective memory. Autobiographical memory is memory of those events that people themselves experience (though those experiences are shaped by group memberships), while historical memory is memory that reaches individuals only through historical records. History is the remembered past to which people no longer have an "organic" relation-the past that is no longer an important part of their lives-while collective memory is the active past that forms their identities.
Recent approaches within historiography, however, have critiqued this understanding of the relations between history and memory. First, as historiography has broadened its focus from the official to the social and cultural, memory has become central evidence. Theorists now recognize, moreover, that memory frequently employs history in its service. Professional historians have often provided political legitimation for nationalism and other more reconstructive identity struggles. This involvement calls into question not only the success of historians in being objective, but the very notion of objectivity itself. Furthermore, postmodernists have challenged the truthclaim of professional historiography by questioning the distinction between knowledge and interpretation, and derivatively between history and memory.
Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. As Pierre Nora argues, "memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic-responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it binds-which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative". History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.
Timothy Snyder argues that neither history nor memory can be studied apart from the other, and yet without separate conceptions the study of neither can proceed. Also, he distinguishes two types of collective memory: 'mass personal memory and 'memoire' rather than 'souvenir'.
By 'mass personal memory' Snyder means personal recollections held by enough individuals to have national significance. If a large number of people of the nation have experienced terrible suffering at the hands of neighboring people, this experience will certainly have an irreducibly vivid character unmatched in the generally shared national memory. The second type is memoire rather than souvenir: the organizational principle, or set of myths, by which nationally conscious individuals understand the past and its demands on the present. It appears generally true that ideal national histories envision an ancient nation, always present in history as a state, morally at least equal to other states, behaving in the past according to the beliefs of present nationally identifying people. If personal memories are the lifelong fate of individuals who have suffered, national memory is the destiny of the dead: to become numbers, facts and events worked into a predictable scheme which 'straightens' the national past and justifies national statehood.
History and nation-building
All states have in the past-and continue to-use national historiography, myths, and legends as a component of their national identities.
Jonathan Friedman talks of a "false intellectual objectivism" because history can never be truly objective. This is "because the politics of identity consists in anchoring the present in a viable past. The past is, thus, constructed according to the conditions and desires of those who produce historical textbooks in the present." Therefore, "all history including modern historiography is mythology" because "history is an imprinting of the present on to the past." The formation of a new national identity that unites populations is impossible without recourse to some myth making. Myths arouse an awareness of the group's common fate, "stressing individual solidarity against an alien force, that is, by enhancing the salience of boundary perceptions." Nationalists look to the past to regenerate and invent the new "imagined community." Anthony D. Smith writes that, "without myths, memories and symbols by which to mark off group members from 'strangers,' and without the cultural elites to interpret and elaborate them, there can be no real ethnie…Myths gave meaning and purpose to cultural entities, and a sense of attachment and belonging to mobilized populations".
Therefore, the revival of memory and national historiography is closely tied to the reassertion of identity vis-à-vis the former "Other." This is because, "the question of who 'owns' or appropriates the past is a question of who is able to identify him or herself and the other at any given time and place." In newly-established states historians are tasked by the ruling elites to claim the right of the indigenous population the privilege of possessing a separate history. Without such a national history they will be merely passive subjects of history.
Without collective memory the nation is transformed into a primitive people which can be used for any kind of social experiment. This would include new myths, 'golden eras', symbols, legends, and the articulations of the traditions of common descent.
The Famine - myth in Ukraine
Historiography, myths and legends have long been recognized as important to nation building. As Anthony Smith argues, "the modern nation, to become truly a "nation", requires the unifying myths, symbols and memories of pre-modern ethnie". Civic states are founded on ethnocultural cores which include national histories.
The writing of history has a direct influence upon national identities. This is especially the case when historical writing and interpretation are contested, as they are among the post-soviet nations. Moreover, history writing is inevitably selective in the facts it highlights.
Regional differences in post-soviet Ukraine include a range of historical, economic, linguistic and ethnic issues. From the late 18th century to the early part of the 20th, people living in the territory of what is now Ukraine, regardless of ethnicity, were ruled by two different states: Russia and Austria. After the First World War and the October revolution in Russia they found themselves split among the new states of Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The regions of Uzhgorod, Galicia and the Crimea were added to the territory of Ukrainian SSR only in 1939, 1945 and 1954 respectively. This means that Ukrainian population in different parts of the country has not common historical memories. In the absence of a clear ethnic identity and an easily recognizable collective memory, the initial problem confronting Ukraine is how to preserve a cultural identity recognizable throughout all of the ethnically Ukrainian territories. The differences across Ukraine are differences not only of language, religion or economic interest, but more importantly are derived from historic experiences and collective memory. The absence of a common collective memory makes Ukrainian identity malleable, giving the regions a freedom to define or redefine the legitimacy of the national government on a scale unknown in most other countries.
History has played a pivotal role in the formation or disintegration of national identities. To promote group cohesion and give citizens a sense of self-esteem, political institutions emphasize common ancestry and experiences, and even exaggerate the significance of certain historical events to such an extent that these assume mythical proportions. Given Ukraine's considerable linguistic and religious differences, it is not surprising to find the present-day authorities turning to history to enhance national unity. As J.Janmaat notes, the Ukrainian government clearly considers history to be a vital tool for the nation-building project. Therefore publishing and distribution of new history textbooks are among its priorities. The content of these books provides a version of the national history which differs from the Soviet version on many occasions and aims to construct (and sometimes even create) a uniform history for people from different regions. As an example we can examine how the history of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Union is interpreted nowadays by independent Ukrainian historiography comparing to Soviet and Russian schools.
In the Ukrainian-Russian disagreement over the causes of the Famine different arguments are used by the two sides. The Russian side stresses that the Famine ('Holodomor' in Ukrainian) was part of a wider Soviet famine of 1932-1933. By the end of 1933, millions of people had starved to death or had otherwise died unnaturally in Ukraine, as well as in other Soviet republics (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan). Russian historians argue that the Famine was a consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization, and that the associated resistance to it by the Ukrainian peasantry exacerbated an already-poor harvest.
In contrast, the modern Ukrainian historians have argued that the Soviet policies that caused the Famine may have been designed as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and therefore fall under the legal definition of genocide.
In 2007, President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko declared he wants "a new law criminalising Holodomor denial," while Communist Party head Petro Symonenko said he "does not believe there was any deliberate starvation at all," and accused Yushchenko of "using the famine to stir up hatred." Public opinion polls' results in Ukraine that time showed that few in Ukraine share Symonenko's interpretation of history and the number of Ukrainians who deny the famine or view it as caused by natural reasons is steadily falling.
The Western countries agree that the famine took place, but affected other nationalities in addition to Ukrainians. On November 10, 2003 at the United Nations twenty-five countries including Russia, Ukraine and the United States signed a joint statement on the seventieth anniversary of the Holodomor with the following preamble:
"In the former Soviet Union millions of men, women and children fell victims to the cruel actions and policies of the totalitarian regime. ... Honoring the seventieth anniversary of the Ukrainian tragedy, we also commemorate the memory of millions of Russians, Kazakhs and representatives of other nationalities who died of starvation in the Volga River region, Northern Caucasus, Kazakhstan and in other parts of the former Soviet Union, as a result of civil war and forced collectivization, leaving deep scars in the consciousness of future generations."
Now, on April 26, 2010, newly elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych told the Council of Europe that Holodomor was a common tragedy that struck Ukrainians and other Soviet peoples, and that it would be wrong to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation. He stated that "The Holodomor was in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was the result of Stalin's totalitarian regime. But it would be wrong and unfair to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation."
Conclusion
The Council of Europe stated that "virtually all political systems have used history for their own ends and have imposed both their version of historical facts and their defense of the good and bad figures of history". The rewriting of history and myth making has always been evident within establishing nation-states. Historical myths arose an awareness of new collective memory, stressing individual solidarity with it.
The connection between nationalism and collective memory appears to have been especially important. The memory may give expression to a mythic and patriotic sense of national identity. Therefore, the formation of a new national identity that unites populations is impossible without recourse to some myth making.
The re-claiming of the past, the revival of national history and collective memory is central in legitimizing newly-independent states, giving them an independent national identity. In post-Soviet Ukraine the Soviet school of history was rejected, new myths were created to replace traditional Soviet historiography. The case with the Famine and its representation in Russian and Ukrainian historiographies clearly shows that the selective borrowing of certain past memories into a collective one is not a natural and spontaneous process: it is heavily political.
