Anikin Daniil Alexandrovich

The article looks at the issue of the role of political actors as subjects of historical responsibility. Based on the communicative approach elaborated by H. Arendt, the authors provide a distinction between the event, which is the subject of historical responsibility, and the act of establishing responsibility in the public space. It is suggested that such an act can be only the result of democratic procedures. Consequently, historical responsibility as a social phenomenon is possible only in a democratic society, even though attempts to establish it may take place under non-democratic regimes. Furthermore, the article claims that the case of Germany as an example of the establishment of negative responsibility cannot be characterized as universal. Indeed, it is also possible to speak about the establishment of positive responsibility as a duty of the community to preserve the memory not of guilt, but of the merits of the collective subject. Therefore, as a rule, the affi rmation of positive responsibility takes place in a context following a political crisis and the consolidation of moral resentment. An example of the constitution of a positive responsibility is the cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War within the Russian society of the 1990s, which followed the experience of the collapse of the USSR and the need for moral compensation. The characteristic features of historical responsibility include performativity, representativeness, normativity, manipulativeness. The role of political actors is not qualitatively shaping diff erent forms of responsibility, but rather aff ecting the specifi c procedures that consolidate it.

The article defines the specifics of the actor approach in the context of the study of memory policy, and also analyzes the specifics of political parties as mnemonic actors. The collapse of the Soviet Union is used as a historical event demonstrating the difference between the symbolic trajectories of political parties. Based on an analysis of party election programs, the dynamics of ideas about the collapse of the Soviet Union among the parliamentary parties of the VIII convocation was analyzed. The LDPR and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation turned out to be the most active in terms of the implementation of the memory policy, while the rest of the parties showed a weak interest in updating and interpreting the collapse of the Soviet Union as an element of the party’s memory policy. Such differences may be related to the desire of parties to increase their political status by including their own history in a more significant political context, so those parties that arose in the 2000s are not interested in the symbolic use and appropriation of images of the Soviet past. In addition, it is worth considering generational changes in party elites, due to which the traumaticity of perception of the collapse of the Soviet Union gradually decreases as changes in the composition of governing bodies.