Abt. Geschichtswissenschaft

Appropriating History: The Soviet Past in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Popular Culture (2024) by Matthias Schwartz and Nina Weller (eds.)

This edited volume explores how Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian popular culture reimagines and politicizes the Soviet past. Focusing on films, television series, literature, comics, and computer games, the contributors examine how popular media shape collective understandings of history and transform the memory of the twentieth century into narratives of identity, nostalgia, conflict, and power. The book demonstrates that references to the Soviet past are far from politically neutral. In contemporary popular culture, Soviet history can become a source of nostalgia and entertainment, but also a tool for nationalist mythmaking, neo-imperial imaginaries, and the legitimization of present-day political and military agendas. Through a series of case studies, the volume analyzes how cultural producers reinterpret historical events, heroes, and traumas for mass audiences in different post-Soviet contexts. By comparing Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian examples, the collection highlights both shared cultural legacies and increasingly divergent memory politics in Eastern Europe. It offers new perspectives on the complex relationship between popular culture, historical imagination, and political conflict in the region.

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