Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Marlene Laruelle, publishes her next book with Dr. Margarita Karnysheva via Bloomsbury Academic on December 11, 2020.
In examining the re-emergence of Russia’s pro-Tsarist White Movement, Rediscovering Russia’s White Movement gets to the heart of the rich 20th-century memory debates going on in Putin’s Russia today.
The Kremlin has been giving preference to a Soviet-lite nostalgia that denounces the 1917 revolution but celebrates the birth of a powerful Soviet Union able to bring the country to the forefront of the international scene after the victory in World War II. Yet in parallel, another historical narrative has gradually consolidated on the Russian public scene, one that favours the opposite camp, namely the pro-Tsarist White movement defeated in the 1920s. Marlene Laruelle and Margarita Karnysheva strongly argue that the latter has found traction as it benefits from some nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia and a fascination with the cultural and intellectual legacy of the interwar emigration. This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of this ‘White Revenge’, looking at the different actors who promote a White movement rehabilitation agenda in the political, ideological and cultural arenas and what this historical agenda might mean for Russia, both today and tomorrow.
