Identity and Memory of the Great Patriotic War: The Role of Russian Islam in Public Consolidation
The instrumentalization of the Islamic factor during the ideological and geopolitical confrontation between the USSR and Nazi Germany in World War II acquires new resonance amid the ongoing reconfiguration of the traditional political architecture of the world. History becomes not merely a political instrument but lays claim to the legitimizing status of political reality. Under conditions in which religion emerges as a defining variable of contemporary politics, the construction of a coherent past for a multinational country possessing civilizational status constitutes a task of national security. The theoretical and methodological foundation of this study draws upon both classical conceptions of the politics of memory (P. Nora and A. Assmann), wherein the latter is understood as a means of identity formation and the management of complex historical experience, and contemporary methodological approaches that conceptualize religious organizations as political actors aligned with the state and transmitting the state agenda. Accordingly, the construction of Soviet political reality as divided along confessional lines contradicts the image of the past currently elaborated by Russia’s official Muslim institutions. The article identifies mechanisms whereby contradictory historical experience is transformed into a consolidating state narrative, while drawing a principled analytical distinction between the properly confessional (Islamic) and ethnonational dimensions of identity-dimensions frequently conflated in the existing literature. The contemporary discourse of institutionalized Islamic organizations in Russia is predicated on a strategy of selective memory, wherein the heroization of participation in the Great Patriotic War serves as an instrument for the legitimation of confessional structures within the system of state-c onfessional relations.