RUSSIA AT A CROSSROADS
HISTORY, MEMORY AND POLITICAL PRACTICE

Edited by Nurit Schleifman

The changes to which the Russian state and its peoples have been subjected since the disintegration of the Soviet Union have revolutionized not only the political, social and economic system; they have shaken the foundations of national identity. Consequently, a preoccupation with the past has become a dominant factor in the public debate. The meaning of Russia's past, or rather its narrative, is in a process of continuous deconstruction, reshaping and negotiation by various social and political groupings. Of the deluge of group memories which have broken loose, this collection focuses on several new voices which have never been heard in Russia in this way before: women, Tatars, Cossacks, as well as the voices of religious and provincial populations.

In addition, the volume sheds light on the creation of a multi-party system. It was this political change which paved the way for the expression of particular views and interests and generated much of memory's concepts and language.

NURIT SCHLEIFMAN is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Tel Aviv University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Cummings Center. She is the author of Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolution: The SR Party, 1902_1914. Dr. Schleifman is currently writing a monograph on the reconstitution of memory in small, historic Russian towns.

Contents

 Introduction

Nurit Schleifman 

1.The Uses of Memory: The Russian Province in Search of Its Past

Nurit Schleifman

2. A Russian City between Two Continents: The Tatars of Orenburg and State Power

Grigorii G. Kosach

3.From Estate to Ethnos: The Changing Nature of Cossack Identity in the Twentieth Century

Peter Holquist

4. Women Remember World War II

Barbara Alpern Engel

5.The Russian Orthodox Church in a Changing Society

Boris Orlov and Sophia Kotzer

6.Toward a Multi-Party System, 1985_93

Vera Kaplan and Boris Morozov