Genocide of the Soviet People: Trajectories of Legal Culture and Politics of Memory

Criminalisation and victimisation, which characterise contemporary politics of memory, result in the construction of collective traumas as instruments for the political consolidation of society. The political instrumentalisation of genocide occurs in the context of memory wars unfolding between the countries of Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation as part of a process of rethinking their common socialist past. The recognition of historical events such as the famine of 1932-1933 as “genocide” thus becomes not only an important factor in civil nation-building, but also a symbolic instrument of international geopolitical struggle. The historical development of the concept of “genocide” in relation to the crimes of the Nazi regime at the level of judicial decisions and federal legislation can be seen as a response to the use of this concept by Eastern European countries as a justification for revising the post-war international order as enshrined in the decisions of the Nuremberg trials. The submission to the Russian State Duma in 2024 of a bill “On perpetuating the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945” leaves a number of questions unanswered. First of all, these consists in the problem of interpreting the concept of “a people” from the point of view of the ethnic or civic understanding of the nation. In addition, a question arises concerning the correlation of newly developed categories of memorial legislation with concepts already enshrined in existing regulatory acts (victims of the Great Patriotic War).