This article addresses the problem of preserving the memory of first-wave Russian emigrants who settled in France between the two world wars. The author is interested in the visual and audiovisual heritage of exiles, in particular, press caricatures and cinema, one of whose functions was to transmit not only current events but also life experiences of Russians in all their forms (various emotions and feelings, sublimations of traumas, memories of the past). The author studies some examples of visual representations of exile and emigrants in cinema and caricature, selected from a large corpus of nearly 1,000 drawings and 50 films preserved today in library collections and audiovisual archives in France.
The process of writing history in Moldova, as in many ex-Soviet countries, is still a source of political conflict on a memorial background. This difficult context presumes the use of sources as a factor of impartiality. However, the picture becomes clouded if the document also participates in differences of opinions that confuse past and present. The history of communism is marked by the Party’s desire to control the dissemination of information, both in the short and long term. Thus, Moldova inherited the Bessarabian archives, the focus of the particularism of Romanian and Soviet communism in the interwar period. As is customary in countries with a communist past, the post-1989-1991 period is representative of slow and complex change. On that account, the Archives of the Party of the RSSM became the Archives of the socio-political organizations of the Republic of Moldova (AOSPRM) in an almost identical image to the Russian archives RGASPI. For to multiple reasons, it is complicated for historians researching Romanian or transnational communism to work on this type of document, and access to the archives remains difficult. Although located in the city center of the capital, the premises keep several marks of the Soviet heritage, which renders the consultation problematic, especially for foreign visitors. The archival funds are also difficult to access because of the bureaucratic formulation of requests. Moreover, the funds have kept the communist inventory of documents, as […]
On the VKontakte and Odnoklasniki networks, communities entitled “Born in the USSR” give Internet users the opportunity to immerse themselves in their lost homeland through the publication of photographic archives from everyday life in Soviet Union. The archives are allusions that can arouse memories of the lived past and engage users into a collective reconstruction of the past. It is a playful activity of recollection: the visitor finds objects and is invited to recognize them by the recurrent addressed question “who remembers that?”. Thanks to the accumulation of archives, the communities also offer a synthesis of Soviet culture. Thus, the archives act as triggers for memory and as representative samples of the disappeared world. This article aims to take an anthropological look at the notion of archive, focusing on how individuals use them to stimulate their memories and to belong to the community.
