Practices of the Politics of Memory: The Park-Museum "Russia - My History" in the System of Institutional Contradictions

The aim of the article is to reveal the features of the practices of memory politics in the implementation of the "Russia - My History" park-museum project and the practices inclusion into the system of institutional contradictions of the public consciousness in modern Russian society. The research is based on an analysis of the exposition of the historical park-museum "Russia - My History" in Moscow and in its regional branch in Novosibirsk. Publications about this project in the media and in specialized scientific journals have also been used as sources of the research. The analysis was carried out to determine the correspondence of the museum representations of the past of Russia to the modern scientific understanding of the historicism principle. Evaluating the project, the authors of the article rely on the general basis of the "memory studies" approach. The network of historical parks is researched as an instrument of the politics of memory. Initially, the project was conceived as a missionary one. The patriotic spirit of the representations, as one of the bases of the Orthodox concept of national history, turned out to be convenient for the use of the historical park by the power holders for their electoral purposes. This led to a significant increase in the project scale and to an inclusion of regional politicians and officials. The complex motives and beliefs of the subjects involved in the project development resulted in contradictions in the representations of national history. Thus, the correspondence of historical representations to the modern level of scientific historiography is declared. However, in fact, the historical concept of the park was built on the basis of works of the classic authors of the 19th - early 20th centuries mostly presenting a conservative approach. The current exposition, both in Moscow and in its regional variants, represents the history of the country from the point of view of the capital city, in the conservative logic of the sequence of "glorious" reigns of the "great" princes and kings. At the same time, there is no attempt to show Russia as a country in a variety of regional, ethno-cultural and confessional differences. The whole national history is presented without a comparison with a qualitatively different development experience. Representations are made out of the context of understanding the basic differences in the mentality of people from different epochs. The exposition does not show competing developmental paradigms. The outside world is represented in the park in two versions: as a source of hostile influence or as an object of expansion. The way of presenting history in the exposition of the park-museum discredits historical science and, in general, by its "clip organization" of historical content, contributes to the further destruction of the rationality of mass historical consciousness.

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