“And then it was forgotten”: The prerequisites for oblivion of Civil War local events in Krasnovo village

Abstract

The paper discusses one episode of remembering in the late Soviet era the events of the West Siberian peasant uprising. The author focuses on the participants of Civil War events in the village of Krasnovo (Tyumen region) and on their descendants. The paper relies on both archival sources and oral interviews. The case allows us to demonstrate a number of reasons for oblivion of local events of the Civil War. This was the case not only with those local events that did not fit into the prevailing national framework of memory, but also those that fit within it. The author hypothesizes that the fact of inclusion of events of the Civil War in the Soviet foundation myth already in the 1920s interfered with the preservation of communicative memory of local events. The justifying history that emerged from the events of the recent revolutionary past made communicative memory unimportant and contributed to the forgetting of details, because such details were not important and not essential to explain the present within the existing framework of memory. At the same time, local details could seem dangerously discharging to the local rural community. In such conditions, paradoxically, the mechanisms of forgetting were activated both by local consensus and by the conditions of the national framework of memory.