Between History and Religion: The New Russian Martyrdom as an Invented Tradition

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper In the year 2000, during the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, more than one thousand victims of Soviet repressions—people persecuted and murdered by the Soviet regime—were glorified and named the New Russian Martyrs. By presenting the origin and background of the phenomenon, authors demonstrate that the New Martyrdom is a kind of invented tradition. They focus on analysis of the tension that occurs when history becomes religion by highlighting some problematic issues with regard to the New Martyrdom and showing how the Russian Orthodox Church is addressing them. The analysis sheds new light on the political use of religion for the creation of narrative about the past in contemporary Russia.