(Un)spoken Histories: The Second World War and Yugoslav Jewish Women

This article describes differences between elderly Jewish and non-Jewish women in dealing with the death of an adult child. Dimensions of difference include the meaning of the death to the mother, her expression of grief, and her conceptualization of the future in the face of the loss. Results are based on data from 12 Jewish and 17 non-Jewish women taking part in a larger study examining generativity as a predictor of well-being in women over 60. Data collection included in-depth life histories and quantitative evaluations of well-being, affect, generativity, and personality variables associated with mothering. Qualitatively, Jewish women were depressed and fixed in grief, with the loss remaining central to their lives. Non-Jewish women articulated philosophies of acceptance, putting the death in a perspective that enabled them to move beyond their loss. Well-being, affect, generativity, and personality measures statistically supported the qualitative differences found between the groups.

The topic of the Great Patriotic War remains relevant today and, to a certain extent, has a sacred character. The interest of scholars and researchers in studying the events of 1941-45 is particularly heightened during the anniversary years of the Great Victory Day celebrations. This article examines the historical memory of students regarding the Great Patriotic War. The subject of the analysis is the content of historical memory of the events of 1941-45 among different generations of students (using the example of students in the Altai Territory). Special attention is given to the justification for distinguishing students and school graduates as different generations of students. The article, using a survey method in the form of a questionnaire, as well as the method of comparative analysis and a generational approach, reveals the dynamics of the content of historical memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 among different generations of students. A sociological analysis revealed that young students maintain continuity in both the content of their historical memory of the Great Patriotic War and their assessments of the factors that contributed to its victory. A trend toward declining interest in the history of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 and the knowledge component of historical memory across different generations of young students was also identified. Unlike university students, high school graduates are less interested in the events of 1941-45 and possess less knowledge about the Great Patriotic War. The article describes the role of social institutions involved in preserving the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War. In particular, it notes a declining role for the family in preserving the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War due to a decline in the role of social practices in youth communication with their parents and grandparents. At the same time, it has been established that schools retain their position as a leading social institution in defining the substantive dominant of the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War for all generations of students. The article devotes special attention to recommendations aimed at minimizing the risks associated with preserving the historical memory of students.

This paper employs assimilation theory to examine the experiences of Chinese and Jewish immigrant women at similar stages of their encounters with America. By focusing on the letters in Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (1983), and Dear Diane: Questions and Answers for Asian American Women (1983), and earlier in the century, the letters translated and printed in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (1971), this paper compares and contrasts the experiences of Chinese and Jewish women in America. It concludes that, though they have their own unique characteristics, both Chinese and Jewish women shared many common experiences, such as mother-daughter conflict and identity crisis, and both of them faced a difficult challenge in assimilating into American life.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Alcesti di Samuele (Alcestis, Daughter of Samuel), by Italian writer, painter, set designer, and composer Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), voices the anxiety that surrounds the difficult process of postwar reconstruction. Savinio warns against the dangerous manifestations of nationalism that are ingrained in human nature, arguing that the only solution against future threats of totalitarianism is to take refuge in one's intellect, to maintain a critical detachment and resist propagandistic enticements. As Brecht had parodied the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, (1) Savinio rationalizes past events through a deconstruction of the myth of the dictator as a supernatural being. In Alcesti di Samuele, the former American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt states: Molti cercano la soluzione del fascismo e io questa soluzione l'ho trovata: smettere di pronunciare il nome di Mussolini. In un mese, del fascismo non rimarra, traccia.... La colpa del fascismo e del nazismo si imputa a Mussolini e a Hitler. Errore. La colpa e dei popoli che hanno espresso dai propri visceri questi due personaggi cosi profondamente, cosi pericolosamente, cosi tragicamente espressivi. II dittatore un mezzo, uno strumento, un intermediario, un irrresponsabile, un passivo. Il dittatore e una vittima. (2) (Many people are looking for a solution to Fascism; I have found a solution: to stop saying Mussolini's name. In a month there will be no trace of Fascism.... The responsibility for Fascism and Nazism is attributed to Mussolini and Hitler. This is a mistake. The responsibility lies with their peoples, who have expressed from their own bowels two characters so deeply, so dangerously, so tragically expressive. The dictator is a means, a tool, a middleman, an irresponsible, passive individual. The dictator is a victim.) Set in Munich during the Second World War, Alcesti di Samuele centers on the ultimate sacrifice of Teresa Goerz, a Jewish woman who commits suicide to protect the career of her Christian husband, Paul. Published by Bompiani in 1949, the play received a cold reception when it premiered in 1950 at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan under the direction of Giorgio Strehler. The story of Teresa's voluntary death becomes, in Savinios imagery, a modern echo of the archetypical myth of Alcestis who, in Euripides' homonymous play, chooses to die in her husband Admetus's stead. In Alcestis, Heracles compensates Admetus's generous hospitality by bringing back Alcestis from the underworld after defeating Thanatos, the personification of death. As Teresa's sacrifice replicates the tragedy of Alcestis, the plot requires a new Heracles to rescue her from the underworld. In Alcesti di Samuele, Roosevelt, who helped to deliver Europe from the horrors of the Second World War, is the last representative of a long series of Heracleses, whose task is to conduct periodic purifications of the world, each time having to face different challenges (96). (3) Roosevelt/Heracles is the emblem of libertarianism and democracy, whereas the last embodiment of the Lernean Hydra, one of the monsters defeated by Heracles, is totalitarianism itself. Hence his katabatic mission to retrieve Teresa/Alcestis symbolizes the defeat of the triumphal violence and brutality that nourish totalitarian regimes. …

Mixed marriages challenge ethnic, racial and religious belonging. However, over the past few decades, there has been an increase in the number of mixed marriages in the Western world, as well as in Israel. The present study focuses on women living in mixed families in Israel – Jewish women who are married to Muslim Arab-Palestinian men. The study examines the negotiation patterns that these women use in order to shape their identities as women, partners and mothers during their daily family life. To examine how these women negotiate their multiple intersectional identity, in-depth interviews were conducted with 13 Jewish women married or previously married to Muslim Arab-Palestinian men, and who raised children with them. Using a multilayered theoretical perspective, we analyze how these women negotiate with themselves and others in their circles of belonging regarding issues related to couplehood and child rearing. The negotiations conducted by these women take place on two levels (the personal level and the level of external-social relations), where different women are placed on the range between a Jewish-national identity, a hybrid identity, and a Muslim-Arab-Palestinian identity, depending on their intersectional locations and resources, including education, employment and place of residence. The intersectional locations of the women may leverage or limit their negotiation. The identification of these multilayered negotiation patterns contributes to the literature regarding the daily experience of women living in mixed families, particularly in deeply divided societies.

All Things Military Phillip Parotti (bio) The Summer the Archduke Died: On War and Warriors by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (University of Missouri Press, 2008. 184 pages. $24.95) The publication of The Summer the Archduke Died demonstrates that, even while in nominal retirement, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., remains one of our most gifted literary analysts, his uncommon critical judgment working smoothly and surely at peak penetration. As a university distinguished professor of English, emeritus, at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and as cofounder of Algonquin Books, Rubin has spent a productive lifetime earning his sterling reputation as an editor, teacher, novelist, essayist, and all-around literary and historical scholar. The Summer the Archduke Died adds to and enhances that reputation by bringing together nine of his essays—some of them previously published, all of them carefully reworked for this volume—in which he studies a host of topics ranging from war and literature to the men and women whose careers have been so closely associated with both. In addition to the pleasure that one derives from watching a fine mind operate, the reader comes away from each essay knowing that he has been offered a new insight into a complex subject and that Rubin has delivered these insights with a compelling style. "A Certain Day in 1939," Rubin's opening essay, functions as a prelude to his book and explains how he first developed his interest in military history. When World War ii began, the fifteen-year-old Louis Rubin jumped on his bicycle and rode straight down to Charleston harbor, half-anticipating that a German merchant vessel might seek refuge from British warships inside American territorial waters, something which had occurred at the commencement of the First World War. After hours of waiting and watching for a development that was not to be repeated, the young Louis rode home disappointed but retained an undiminished interest in all things military, and with time that interest evolved into his lifelong study of military history. In "The Summer the Archduke Died," the volume's eponymous second essay, Rubin presents a compelling examination of how the great powers virtually blundered into the First World War. At various points, Rubin argues, firmer leadership might have reversed the dangerous courses that nations were taking and, in the process, saved at least ten million lives. "What happened to Germany, and plunged Europe and the world into war, was a catastrophic failure of statecraft, a collapse of leadership." World War ii, he suggests, was simply a continuation of the First World War with five times the number of deaths; but, when that war began, no one blundered into anything: nations went to war deliberately, knowing full well what they were getting into and knowing that the war had to be fought. "The Weasel's Twist, the Weasel's Tooth: The First World War as Military History" offers a clear appreciation about why the history of the First World War has been so overshadowed by the history of the Second World War. In the first place, and aside from personal narratives and works of fiction about the war, good military [End Page lv] history requires time to develop: documents must emerge, facts must be uncovered, and historians must have time to reflect and develop perspective. With regard to the First World War, by the time historians were prepared and ready to write it, the Second World War was already in progress, and nearly everyone's attention had been diverted. Furthermore a nagging rhetorical problem also threw up a difficult barrier: to the First World War, one found "no real conclusion other than a chronological one, and to that extent it was deficient in dramatic resolution—a beginning, a middle, but no end." As a result only in the most recent decades have we begun to examine World War i with the thorough attention that it deserves. When last I looked, for example, the official history covering what might have been volume 2 to Military Operations in East Africa, dealing with the period from October 1916 through the end of the war, was still unpublished—the manuscript languishing in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum...

Reviewed by Neil M. Cowan The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. By Marianna Torgovnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 193. $25. Marianna Torgovnick examines our collective memories of World War II and the conflicts that followed. Because questions not easily answered are posed at the beginning, her book is an interesting read. But it has a number of flaws. Torgovnick should have separated the subject of warfare from quite distinct subjects: her personal experiences on September 11, her assessment of various novelists who write about war, Adolph Eichmann and the Holocaust. The War Complex would have been more compelling had she done more than focus on cultural memories of World War II and our "altered state of consciousness produced by large scale war [that] can last beyond the end of hostilities" (p. xxiii). I believe that she could have constructed a stronger narrative had she understood how cultural memories of World War I and how it was fought had a direct impact on World War II and how it was fought. [End Page 834] Torgovnick is correct in saying that our cultural memories of World War II played a major role in shaping our consciousness throughout the cold war. Politicians in democracies and dictatorships captured and distorted that event to suit their own aims, leaving some of their audiences delighted, others in rage. People in Hollywood found out that a carefully crafted story about World War II could make for a fine film while also making them a great deal of money. But such a film can also reinforce a cultural memory of the war that is critically distorted and historically inaccurate. Torgovnick devotes two chapters to Eichmann, the architect of the plan that moved millions to the death camps and the Holocaust, but she should have also considered the man behind the massive bombing of German cities, the Royal Air Force's General Arthur Harris. If she had devoted less attention to Eichmann—simply another German robot—and examined Harris's conscience, her argument could have been taken down some very interesting roads. Harris knew that his bombing campaign killed millions of innocents; it also left a cultural memory of the vast efficiency of air power that carried into the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq, even posing a temptation to use nuclear weapons once again. How we identify with war depends on our cultural background and what we have learned in school and from the media. In shaping the cultural memory of World War II in the United States, the media have deliberately protected Americans from its realities. What sane person wants to see the actual effects of combat and aerial bombing? In her concluding chapter, "Towards an Ethics of Identification," Torgovnick writes that "World War I made polite fictions about death difficult to sustain, World War II made them even more so." Yet if "polite fictions" about death in both world wars are actually the case, why do American politicians so often travel to Normandy to give speeches extolling the sacrifice American soldiers made in June 1944? Why do they continue to ask us for more sacrifices in the name of what they consider to be America's world mission? Neil Cowan is an independent scholar who specializes in oral-history interviewing. Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

This article investigates the developments of public memory of the First World War as it is written into the national narratives of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia on the way to the centennial of the war’s outbreak. The First World War constitutes both a shared and a divided memory in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Though the war was a catastrophe everywhere, to Serbia it also became a triumph on the allied side, whereas in Bosnia and Croatia it was mainly a state collapse. Yet, the First World War also provided the immediate conditions for the creation of the first Yugoslav state, and consequently the history of the war was narrated within a Yugoslav context, echoing the triumphant Serbian narrative. With the fall of socialist Yugoslavia, the memory of the First World War developed quite differently in the three states. Different lessons are being drawn from war history, often with the aim of situating the nation within a European context. In Serbia, First World War narratives remain national and heroic and are framed as a virtuous, pro-democratic, and European legacy. In Croatia and Bosnia, First World War history is being created anew and, at least in the Bosnian case, with an aspiration to present Bosnia’s war experience within a discourse of European reconciliation. Based on analyses of popular history books, history debates in newspapers and media, and political commentary, the article shows how the First World War as public memory has moved from Yugoslav to national narratives with an increasingly European aspiration.

Las conmemoraciones del centenario de la Primera Guerra Mundial en 2014 en Francia se han descrito por muchos comentaristas como marcadas por un nivel de consenso en contraposición al entorno político general y a los recuerdos divisivos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aún así, a pesar de los deseos comunes de honorar el poilu como un símbolo de los sacrificios de todos los soldados franceses, este artículo sostiene que la aparición del consenso enmascara tensiones más profundas entre los recuerdos de la Primera Guerra Mundial y las ideas y valores que sustentan la República Francesa. Durante la guerra y el periodo posterior, los mitos de la nación en armas sirvieron para legitimar la movilización y los inmensos sacrificios del pueblo francés. Las guerras de la Revolución Francesa establecieron la noción de la responsabilidad de los franceses en la defensa de su país, creando una conexión cercana entre el servicio militar, la ciudadanía y la membresía de la nación. Sin embargo, estas ideas se desafiaron por los recuerdos de los motines de 1917 y por los castigos impuestos a aquellos que desafiaron órdenes. Tras haber sido excluidos durante largo tiempo de las conmemoraciones oficiales, en 2014 el gobierno francés procuró rehabilitar la memoria de los soldados que fueron disparados para sentar ejemplo por cometer actos de desobediencia, espionaje y ofensas criminales. El recuerdo de aquellos soldados avivó las discrepancias sobre hasta qué punto habían consentido por voluntad propia a luchar y sacrificar sus vidas. De hecho, las reclamaciones de que los soldados habían sido «víctimas» reticentes socavaron los mitos de la «Unión Sagrada» de 1914 y los mismos cimientos de los conceptos republicanos de la nación.

Reviewed by: Wednesdays in Mississippi: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change, Freedom Summer 1964 by Debbie Z. Harwell Amy C. Schneidhorst (bio) Wednesdays in Mississippi: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change, Freedom Summer 1964. By Debbie Z. Harwell. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. ix + 256 pp. Students and scholars of Northern citizens’ participation in the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi will be very familiar with Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) student organizers’ commitment and bravery as they lived among, organized, and attempted to register black rural Mississippi residents to vote during the summer of 1964. Until now, little has been known about the network of women allies who channeled resources between Northern supporters and Freedom Summer Projects and who made significant inroads to establishing relationships with segregationist white Southern women in an effort to de-escalate the tensions between the races in Jackson, Mississippi. Harwell deftly recreates, from oral history interviews and a patchwork of archival collections, the previously surreptitious activities of an integrated, interfaith group of mature black and white women who built ties and gained entrée into segregated Southern white society by taking advantage of their common ties with national women’s associations and their performance of respectable womanhood. Black and white; Northern and Southern; Christian, Jewish, and Catholic women participated in the Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), organized by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Teams of Northern women flew into Mississippi communities on short weekly missions to research conditions in Freedom Summer projects. Even more significant long-term, WIMS teams made gains in building a base of support from politically moderate and pro-segregation Southern white women in an effort to reduce resistance to the civil rights workers and [End Page 446] the Freedom Summer project. In the process, these politically savvy and courageous women created unprecedented spaces for potential future support among white Southern women civic leaders for the emerging revolution in civil rights and welfare rights. Harwell spotlights the importance of northern Jewish women and African-American women in continuing a progressive political vision for interracial alliances to further human relations after World War II. The 1963 March on Washington’s organizers’ failure to publicly recognize women’s leadership at that historic event sparked YWCA and NCNW leader Dorothy Height to organize women to assert their unique perspectives and talents within the civil rights movement. Harwell illuminates African American women’s leadership and commitment to interfaith, cross-class and cross-race organizing that nurtured dialogue and built alliances toward subverting geographic and social segregation. Less familiar is the political partnership and friendship between Height and WIMS co-founder Polly Cowan, a wealthy suburban Chicago resident from a secular Jewish family, who became lifelong friends with Height and found a “spiritual home” in the NCNW, an organization that not only advocated for African American women but also committed to creating an equitable society through interracial dialogue (34). Height, Cowen and other staffers were committed to building a cross-race alliance based on the conviction that white Americans, negatively impacted by the isolation and social control, were important partners in dismantling the “Cotton Curtain,” the racial apartheid system. The establishment of interracial spaces and acting interracially were essential to building acceptance for more equitable human relations, initially in the Deep South and later replicated by WIMS veterans in Northern urban communities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Harwell is also sensitive to differences among Southern and Northern Jewish women and how their particular local contexts influenced the perceptions of the potential for social change. Throughout, Harwell cites the prophetic call to heal the world as a basis for Northern Jewish women’s leadership in this human relations movement in the Deep South. Harwell’s book devotes considerable attention to the double consciousness of Southern Jewish women. Many long-time Jewish residents of the South were reticent to publicly support the civil rights movement, socialized enough into white Southern culture to cling to a protection of whiteness and class privilege, and minority enough to fear anti-Semitic backlash from white supremacists. Harwell argues that white Southerners needed neutral...

This article is devoted to the discourse analysis of the comments of regional news sites and public publications about the commemorations of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Based on the application of the methodology of Siegfried Yeager's critical discourse analysis, the peculiarities of the perception of official memorials dedicated to the memory of the Great Patriotic War in the Internet space of the Tula and Tomsk regions were analyzed. The sources for the analysis were comments from users of social networks, Internet blogs and news sites of the two regions in the period 2015-2021, dedicated to Victory Day (May 9), the Immortal Regiment campaign, topical regional commemorations of the Great Patriotic War, as well as mentions of individual pages of family memory and events of war heroes. Despite the fact that sociological surveys of recent years show the preservation of the memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 as the most important historical event and ideological reference point in the mass historical consciousness, the study of the perception of war memorials on the Internet shows a further increase in the devaluation of historical meanings of the Russian memorial culture and the departure to particular versions of historical memory (family, local social group). The tendency of fragmentation and transformation of perception of the past in the regional Internet space was revealed. The analysis of a sample set of comments indicates the persistence of the trend of sacralization of war heroes, veterans and family memory of them in the mass consciousness, as well as attempts to contrast family commemorations of Victory Day and official events and actions of the authorities. In both areas, the fact of using the discussion of the May 9 commemorations and the "Immortal Regiment" campaign as a symbolic framework for criticizing the domestic and foreign policies of the current government was recorded. At the same time, most of the critical comments are situational in nature and are related to topical regional socio-economic problems.

Reviewed by: World War I and Southern Modernism by David A. Davis Sydney Bufkin World War I and Southern Modernism. By David A. Davis. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Pp. x, 234. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1541-5.) David A. Davis's World War I and Southern Modernism examines the role of the Great War on the period known as the Southern Renaissance, arguing that the war and its effects on the region were considerably more significant to the development of southern modernism than has been generally recognized. Much of the book's analysis centers on the distinction between "proximal modernism"—work produced by writers located in cosmopolitan sites of modernity such as New York and major European cities—and "distal modernism"—work produced by writers located outside these centers of modernity and whose contact with modernity was secondary or attenuated, which Davis calls "modernism without modernity" (pp. 6, 7). World War I brought an understanding of modernity to a region that had yet to actually experience any significant modernizing forces, and the resulting literary production was a modernism that was often (though far from always) conservative in nature and skeptical about the disruptiveness of modernity to southern tradition. Davis argues that those figures who had the most experience with proximal modernity—such as soldiers who spent time in Europe and African Americans who relocated to Harlem—were more likely to see modernity as a positive force and to produce work that more closely resembled the fragmentation and disillusionment associated with the modernism of the Lost Generation. World War I and Southern Modernism surveys a range of southern writers and considers the experiences of southerners who fought in the war, those who remained in the South, and those who migrated away from the South as a result of the war's economic effects on the region. Davis examines works by black and white writers; the chapter on southern women's fiction addresses works by black and white southern women and traces the ways race affected southern women's experience of the war, while a chapter on the experience of black southern soldiers functions as a counterpoint to the preceding chapter about the tension between sectionalism and nationalism in writings by white southern soldiers. This broadly inclusive understanding of southern writing—which also attends to class tensions in the region—introduces considerably more nuance into the discussion of a war that had significantly varied effects on different groups of southerners. [End Page 213] While the book draws from a range of sources—both well- and lesser-known southern texts, as well as authors' letters and memoirs—the most extensive discussion of the formal characteristics of southern modernism is confined to the first chapter, which explores the relationship between the contact with modernity that emerged from the war and the forms of modernism produced by southern writers. The subsequent chapters are light on extended close reading, instead pairing a historical overview with a synthesis of critical perspectives before transitioning into a discussion of the literary figures and works. Chapter 2, for instance, surveys historical and literary-critical scholarship on the tensions between sectionalism and nationalism in the transition from the post-Reconstruction heyday of the Lost Cause to the unifying patriotism of the war, before exploring the ways that William Alexander Percy, Paul Green, and Donald Davidson negotiated their sectional and national identities in their writings about the war. World War I and Southern Modernism provides a valuable and multidisciplinary reassessment of the history of southern modernism and the ways modernity unevenly permeated the region, contributing to the scholarly conversation that reevaluates the role of modernity and the relationship between region and nation in the literature and history of the South. Sydney Bufkin Washington and Lee University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Reviewed by: Is Russia Fascist? Unravelling Propaganda East and West by Marlene Laruelle Sarah Gear Is Russia Fascist? Unravelling Propaganda East and West. By Marlene Laruelle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2021. vii+251 pp. $39.95; £32. ISBN 978–1–50175–413–5. In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle explores a dichotomy central to the identity of contemporary Russia. Although Russia is regularly accused of fascism by politicians in the West, the country perceives itself as actively anti-fascist. Meanwhile, Russia directs its own charges of fascism towards Europe and the United States. In this carefully constructed study Laruelle critiques populist trends, refuting such accusations against Russia. She contends that the West's indictments of fascism disenfranchise Russia on the world stage, while Russia's counter-accusations allow it to claim moral superiority over the West. For Laruelle, accusations of fascism are a 'discursive struggle' (p. 8) deployed by both Russia and the West in order to define themselves. This interplay between differing ethnocentric perspectives is at the core of Laruelle's work as she contextualizes attitudes towards fascism in both the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, while exploring the Kremlin's tolerance of conflicting ideologies. After considering the main elements of fascism, the first four chapters describe its status in Russia, investigating the association between fascism and Nazism, and the paradoxical Soviet fascination with Nazi culture. Laruelle demonstrates the two cultures' parallel interest in neo-classical aesthetics and physical perfection and discusses how television programmes such as the hugely popular Seventeen Moments of Spring, with its spy hero Max Otto von Stierlitz, tapped into this interest. Laruelle describes anti-fascism as modern Russia's 'foundational myth' [End Page 528] (p. 43), demonstrated by its role in defeating the Nazi regime in the Great Patriotic War. This victory is promoted by Vladimir Putin's government as contemporary Russia's defining moment because it is one of the few instances of the 'usable past' (p. 49) that the population almost unanimously supports. The indisputable anti-fascist status of post-1940s Russia and the Soviet states is emphasized in schools, where textbooks reaffirm Putin's position, creating a society ill-equipped for open debate. Conflicting views held by Russia and the former Soviet states regarding the Soviet Union's role in the Second World War have provoked the current so-called 'memory wars' in Eastern Europe. These have in turn caused Russia to launch accusations of fascism against Ukraine and the Baltic States in response to anti-Soviet sentiment. From Chapter 5 onwards, Laruelle weighs the competing ideologies permitted by the Kremlin, including those of prominent right-wing political figures such as Alexandr Dugin. She also considers Putin's own support for right-wing groups and discusses how this can be reconciled with Russia's anti-fascist self-image. Laruelle suggests this ideological fluidity is driven by the government's desire to control the population: this approach is improvised primarily to prevent a return to the economic and political chaos of the 1990s. Laruelle concludes that Russia is neither fascist nor totalitarian, but rather illiberal. She argues that fascism is not a useful framework for analysing Russia, suggesting instead that any future studies should examine the prevalence of 'hybrid regimes, paternalism and illiberalism' (p. 155). Her penultimate chapter draws a convincing parallel between Putin and Charles de Gaulle, which provides a helpful counterpoint to the more politically charged comparisons between the Russian president and Hitler or Stalin. She concedes, however, that some elements of fascism are present in Russia, evident in the macho 'militia subculture' (p. 138). Indeed, the prominent position of politician, writer, and former National Bolshevik Zakhar Prilepin is testament to the enduring power of macho, bordering on fascist, ideology. But as this nuanced investigation demonstrates, to label Putin's regime as fascist is to obfuscate the political situation in contemporary Russia. Is Russia Fascist? provides a clear, balanced assessment of contemporary Russian politics, serving not only as a sensible dissection of the status of fascism in Russia, but also as a guide to that country's problematic political structures. Laruelle's thorough contextualization of Russian beliefs about fascism, the Second World War, and attitudes towards the...

This chapter examines commemoration across the Anglosphere of the centenary of the First World War, which has drawn attention to the critical ordering and articulation of shared transnational collective memories and historical narratives. Tensions between national and transnational manifestations of war commemoration reveal the legacies of the British Empire, revealing the intersections between post-imperial and post-colonial constructions of history and memory across the Anglosphere and Commonwealth. The chapter argues that although Anglospheric war commemoration is located in remembrance of past conflicts, it is intimately connected with the present and future, thus meaning its context and meaning are prone to periodic reinvention in response to contemporary geopolitical circumstances. Commemoration of the First World War across the Anglosphere highlights the layered, hybridised, porous, and contested boundaries of the so-called ‘CANZUK’ union of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, the ‘core’ Anglosphere which includes the United States, a less well defined Anglosphere, and the Commonwealth. It concludes that a ‘politics of war commemoration’ both binds and divides the Anglosphere and other parts of the former British Empire, highlighting the contentious and contested nature of transnational historical narratives and memory cultures informing diverse national commemorations of the First World War centenary.

The article focuses on the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the victory in t, as well as the practices of commemoration associated with May 9, across the eras of Soviet and Russian history. With the passing of the generation witness of the memory of the Great Patriotic War moves from personal to collective one, and the issue of passing on memory to younger generations becomes relevant. The article uses data from personal diaries of the Prozhito corpus from 1946 to 2012, as well as two empirical projects in which the Centre for Youth Studies team studied the sociopolitical context of growing up, local identity, and patriotism of millennials (18-43 years old) from large Russian cities were studied through in-depth semi-structured interviews. Being the central event of the collective memory of Russians, the Great Patriotic War becomes one of the national identity pillars. Based on the data, we conclude that the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the victory in it remains an axis of solidarity between generations and is transformed overtime, as the importance of passing on memorpthrougP family and vernacular commemorative practices increases. Victory Day is associated with an entire era in the life of the country, city, and family. Perceiving the Great Patriotic War and the victory nn t as an emotionally charged and personally experienced event, young people nevertheless have a critical attitude towards the use of this memory as a tool for controlling patriotic feelings and civic affliiation.