The article analyzes the curation of the history of Soviet repressions at the temporary exhibitions organized by the International Memorial NGO in Moscow from 2011 to 2021. Compared with other Russian museums, Memorial relies mainly on family archives and family memories. The repressions are treated as a collective experience that affected not only victims, those executed or imprisoned, but also their relatives and descendants. Seen from this perspective, the carceral past is directly linked to today’s population. The article explores the various ways in which Memorial draws on families’ memories of repression to create a museum statement.

During the centenary of the First World War in Russia, museums in Moscow and Saint Petersburg organised numerous exhibitions. This article investigates the impact on museums of the "sacred memory regime" typical of that centenary. The efforts of the Russian state to emotionalise the event and the efforts of the Orthodox Church to become an essential partner of the state in the field of war memory explain the massive use of religious ceremonies, symbols, and expressions. In this context, public museums have responded in different ways. Some museums, in continuity with the Soviet museological tradition, have adopted a secular, scientific approach to the display of cult objects. Others, combining the Soviet tradition and the new museology, presented their exhibits in a "sacred-secular" way, using some visual elements that recalled the debt of memory and in a way that was likely to evoke an emotional response. The third group, especially the war museums, presented their institutions as "sacred spaces" by displaying icons, using images of Christ to decorate the space, organising prayers and staging the religious mentality of the people who lived through the war. As a case study, the new museum 'Russia in the Great War' in the Martial Chamber in Tsarskoe Selo, is described in detail to analyse this trend.

Книга Дональда Рейли рассказывает о том, как советские люди 1950-го года рождения воспринимают свою жизнь в СССР и в постперестроечной России. В период между 2001 и 2008 годами Рейли провел шестьдесят глубинных интервью с выпускниками 1967 года двух спецшкол с углубленным изучением английского языка в Москве и Саратове. Автор использует «поколенческий подход для изучения социальных изменений» и «ищет связи между биографиями и историей», чтобы через отдельные истории жизни «понять постепенное разрушение системы». «Как история Вашей жизни может помочь понять участь Советского Союза?», – спрашивал он информантов (с. 23–30). Конструирование объекта исследования автору удалось: среди выпускников двух школьных классов представлены разнообразные гендерные и социально-профессиональные траектории – от ученых до сотрудников КГБ, от удачно эмигрировавших до несчастливо спившихся. Всем им дан голос и все они вносят свой вклад в создание целостной картины поколения, вынесшего на своих плечах рыночные реформы. Не хватает, пожалуй, лишь контрольной группы из выпускников обычной советской школы. Текст на русском языке DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2019-11-3-148-151

En Russie, le centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale a été organisé et financé par l’État. Pour la première fois depuis la fin de la guerre, la commémoration a été organisée à l’échelle nationale. Les pouvoirs publics ont tenté d’imposer une nouvelle interprétation ambivalente du rôle de la Russie dans la Première Guerre mondiale. La Russie est représentée à la fois comme une victime et comme un pays fort ayant une armée victorieuse. Le contexte contemporain du conflit ukrainien a contribué à accentuer des tendances déjà très présentes dans la politique culturelle russe : l’anti-occidentalisme et le « patriotisme ». Une étude sociologique a été menée en 2014 dans les musées pour comprendre dans quelle mesure le contexte commémoratif influence les activités de ces institutions et la perception des expositions par les visiteurs. La recherche a montré que la plupart des musées atténue le message idéologique de l’État en complexifiant la présentation de l'histoire de la guerre. Le rapport au passé et à la guerre chez les visiteurs est très influencé par les médias. En revanche, l'appréciation de chaque objet est toujours en lien avec leur expérience personnelle, leur histoire familiale et leurs lectures.

In Russia the centenary of the First World War was state-organized and state-sponsored. This was the first official nation-scale commemoration ever since the end of that war. The ambition of the officials was to impose a new vision of the role of Russia in the War. Russia is ambivalently presented as a victim and as a victor. The conflict in the Ukraine contributed to accentuate anti-occidental, “patriotic” and militaristic trends that had been already manifest in the cultural policy. A sociological research was conducted in museums in 2014 in order to understand, to what extent the commemorative context determined the activities of cultural institutions and the perception of the events by the public. The majority of museums’ activities contributed to complexify the presentation of the war history and the message of the state. If the perception of the war history by the visitors is greatly influenced by mass-media, their appreciation of each museum exhibit is mediated much more by their personal experience.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 forced museums and other guardians of the nation's cultural heritage to reassess their priorities and develop new, nonideological missions in presenting their collections to the public.

In contemporary Russia, nongovernmental organizations are in charge of the museification of the former Gulag camps and of the commemoration of the victims of Soviet-era repressions, while the state's action in this sphere is barely present. The exhibition The Right of Correspondence is organized by the International Memorial Civil Rights Society in Moscow. It is devoted to the communication of Soviet political prisoners with their relatives and friends in the 1920s-1980s. The uniqueness of the exhibits is attested by the fact that they were kept in family archives during the Soviet period and then were donated by the families to Memorial. The first part of the exhibition is devoted to the camps of the 1920s and to Stalin's Gulag (1930-1956), the second part to imprisoned dissidents of the post-Stalin period (1956-1986). This essay analyzes the contribution of this exhibition to contemporary historical and sociological discussions about the Gulag. The organization of the correspondence shows the dysfunctions of the Soviet penitentiary system. It also brings to light the long-term influence of the Gulag on the lives of the families of political prisoners and on society at large. The message of the exhibition is different from the dominant trend of the politics of history in contemporary Russia, which is increasingly normalizing the Stalinist period.

Pendant la perestroïka, le fonctionnement des musées d’histoire et de la littérature soviétiques a été critiqué par les médias et par l’intelligentsia. L’article étudie l’impact de la libéralisation de la vie politique et économique, de l’abolition de la censure, de la crise budgétaire et de l’ouverture à l’international sur ces établissements. Forcés de se reconvertir pour attirer les visiteurs, ils ont modernisé leurs salles d’expositions; les relations avec le public sont devenues leur préoccupation principale. Ces anciennes institutions idéologiques ont délaissé les interprétations macro-historiques totalisantes au profit des détails et ont mis l’accent sur la vie quotidienne, les vies privées et l’histoire locale.

The transition from state socialism to capitalism brought changes to the Russian cultural sector. Previously entirely sponsored and controlled by the patron state, the cultural organizations had to cope with dramatically reduced budgets. While the state remained the principal sponsor and patron of cultural organizations, the new actors—foreign foundations—provided additional possibilities of funding and introduced a new discourse on arts administration. The foreign concept of “cultural management” became an alternative to a Soviet-type “cultural bureaucracy” and found its partisans among the active part of arts administrators who effectively profited from foreign grants and scholarships and tried their best to integrate into the international community. They are now promoting cultural economy and innovation and are striving for further liberalization of the cultural sphere. But the organization of culture inherited from Soviet times persists. This article provides analyses of interviews with Russian cultural managers devoted to their professional trajectories in the 1990s and 2000s.

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La quasi-totalite des anciens nobles, femmes et hommes, restes en URSS ou ayant emigre en France apres la revolution d’Octobre 1917, ont tente des reconversions, de fait sous la contrainte ; les recits recueillis par entretiens approfondis ou dans les archives privees font apparaitre des parcours chaotiques. Ainsi avons-nous tente en developpant une approche sociologique, de suivre la logique pratique qui guide les efforts et les investissements personnels de ces nobles, en prenant surtout en compte les representations du temps et les differentes ressources convertibles et en nous interessant aussi a la genese des transformations de la noblesse russe depuis les annees 1880. En URSS, les anciens nobles ne se sont pas seulement plus ou moins « adaptes » a la societe sovietique, mais ont aussi contribue a la formation de la structure sociale de l’URSS, notamment du milieu de l’« ancienne intelligentsia », compose des descendants des familles cultivees d’avant la revolution. En France, l’identite russe est pour beaucoup devenue plus importante que l’identite noble, mais les hierarchies de l’ancienne societe russe ne s’en sont pas moins souvent reproduites, avec toutefois quelques distorsions.