'The Jewish People Suffered, Suffered in a Way in Which Perhaps No One Else Did Except for the Russian People': Russia's New Populist Holocaust Memory

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Since Putin's return in 2012, for the first time the Russian Federation has started to develop a specific Holocaust memory which emphasises Soviet heroism, the fascist leaning of former republics, and contemporary Russia's supposedly tolerant, multicultural society in which the most painful periods of history are confronted. However, this new phenomenon is often in opposition to what has been described as an emerging global cosmopolitan Holocaust memory in liberal democracies in the West (Levy and Sznaider 2006; Allwork 2015); rather, as in an increasingly authoritarian Hungary and Poland, a very different version of the Holocaust is increasingly politically mobilised by nationalist politicians for reasons both of domestic legitimacy and international soft power. This PhD will address this novel phenomenon by examining the changing ways in which the Holocaust has been mobilised in both the cultural and political sphere in the Russian Federation over the last decade. It will explore how the Holocaust has become a far more explicitly politically instrumentalised memory, represented primarily in those spaces - namely museums, film, political speeches, whether in Russia or outside - where production has been closely controlled by the state.This is an interdisciplinary project, and its methodological framework reflects this, combining political science, International Relations, film studies and cultural history perspectives. It will examine political speeches, domestic and international Russian exhibitions, and Russia's first Holocaust film, Sobibor (2018).Using these cultural and political case studies, this project will first consider the ways in which Holocaust culture is instrumentalised in the domestic field, in order to legitimise Putin's state. It will examine the nationalist reading of the Holocaust within its domestic perspective, considering economic and social developments in Russia, such as the 2014 Russian Economic Crisis, and investigate their link to the promotion of a nationalist Holocaust memory. It will also chart the opposition to this new mobilisation, specifically those activist Holocaust memory groups that emerged prior to Putin's rule and offer alternative perspectives, such as civil movement Memorial and the non-governmental organisation The Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Centre.Moreover, this thesis seeks to place this revival in a broader transnational setting. It will address how the new memorial culture itself is a result of transnational debates, a product both of a newly emerging authoritarian populist internationalism including Poland and Hungary, and as a reaction to the 'liberal' memorial politics of the European Union which has pressurised eastern European states, as new EU members, into equating the Holocaust with Communist crimes - including those committed by the Soviet Union. It will explain why Holocaust memory has been used by the Russian state to combat these attacks on Russian historical memory, and to define Russia as a separate civilisational space to the West. It will then explore how this new Holocaust culture has developed as an instrument of soft power in Russian international relations, and underpins Russia's new geopolitical strategies. Most recently, it was deployed during the Ukrainian crisis since 2014 - to brand their opponents as bearing the legacies of Fascism and as Holocaust perpetrators.