PARAMONOV V.N. Interpretation of History of the Crimean War as a Tool of Historical Memory Manipulation
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu4.2016.6.3
Vyacheslav N. Paramonov
Doctor of Sciences (History), Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
Samara National Research University named after S.P. Korolev
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Moskovskoe Highway, 34, 443086 Samara, Russian Federation
Abstract. The article notes that historical memory represents a set of successive historical reports, myths, subjective reflections on the past events, as a set of pre-scientific, scientific, quasi-scientific and non-scientific knowledge and society’s mass ideas of the common past. The Russians perceive the past from the viewpoint of Russia-centrism and fragmentary nature. The fragmentary representations of the past, poor knowledge of the actual past events create preconditions for manipulating the historical memory and falsifying the events andphenomena. All anti-Russian propaganda campaigns of the 20th-21st centuries are rooted in the earlier period and are nothing more than the development of Russophobian ideas of European intellectuals of the 19th century. The Crimean, or, as it is often called in the West, the Eastern War, became one of the first severe information collisions in the modern history. The author defines the techniques of historical memory manipulation: withdrawal from the context; concealing the real picture of military actions; manipulations around the historic value of certain events or personalities; tendentious demonstration of military actions only through the prism of historians’ works and memoirs by one of the parties’ representatives; the use of anonymous statements; representation of views as facts; creating negative associations, underlining negative aspects; repetition of false claims over and over again until they are perceived as the truth; manipulation of statistical data; fabrication of sensational materials; incomplete information; information imbalances; disproportionate use of sources; false description of the sources as objective and neutral; juggling of the facts; false claims and accusations; demonization of individuals; humiliation and racism; embellishment; labeling, when Russian participants of the Crimean War are shown violent, aggressive, intolerant, and the military coalition are depicted as peaceful fighters for civil rights and victims; expression of one party’s opinion; exaggeration; reliance on primary sources of misinformation.
Key words: historical memory, mind control techniques, history of the Crimean War, Russophobia, Westerners, Slavophiles, historiography.
Interpretation of History of the Crimean War as a Tool of Historical Memory Manipulation by Paramonov V.N. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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