This article discusses the political trajectory of the Nizhnii Novgorod region from the beginning of the 1990s until the present; from the first democratic experiences to their repudiation. The author traces the main cycles of region's political developments and defines the specificity of its political system and relations with the federal center. The article looks at the evolution of the political landscape in the region from the first post-Soviet years to mature Putinism, and then explains how political controversies are reflected in the regional identity debate. It proposes an alternative to the binary vision of the 1990s as a struggle between liberal reformists and authoritarian retrogrades, rather approaching the 1990s, with Boris El'tsin's presidency and Boris Nemtsov's governorship in Nizhnii Novgorod, as a period that encompassed many of the non-democratic trends that under Vladimir Putin's regime became dominant.

The remote location of Beshankovichy's mass grave for Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide reflects the exclusion of local Jews during the German occupation of Soviet territories and limits their memory to a few knowledgeable survivors and witnesses. In contrast, local commemorative practices focus on memorials for Soviet soldiers, partisans, and their aides. The paper reveals an incongruence of the place of historical experience on the one hand, and the locale of popular commemoration on the other, highlighting the impact of the Holocaust in Belarus to destroy Jewish history and its memory. The spatial division reflects the trauma of loss as much as shame for local participation in the mass murder. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and field visits, the study builds on a growing field of scholarship on the role of space and place in the construction of memories and identities in the aftermath of atrocity and trauma to discuss the geographical dimensions of memory and amnesia.

This article argues that apart from a couple of cases, there were no situations where the Russian imperial government would have supported Lithuanian national culture as a counterbalance against Poles, and more generally, that the policy of “divide and rule” was in principle not applied on the empire's western periphery regarding other non-dominant ethnic groups. A more general reason for not implementing such a policy was related to many officials’ belief that the government should seek integration, acculturation, or even assimilation of non-Russian ethnicities. At the same time, on the Russian mental map, the Northwest Region was understood not just as part of the empire, but as part of Russian national territory. In such a territory, most of the government subscribed to a discourse of nationalism that permitted no means of support for the strengthening of non-Russian nationalisms. Finally, social radicalism of the Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian national movements was another obstacle for tsarist officials to support these “peasant” nationalities.

Much of the literature on post-Soviet ideology interprets ideology as the content of state-sponsored doctrines or measures it via persistent strands in public opinion. This paper relies on a different notion: we think of societal and state perspectives as engaged with each other in a contentious dialogue that is constitutive of ideology. With this dialogic conception of ideology, this paper provides a map of Russia's ideological terrain through an analysis of the debates surrounding Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2014 film Leviathan. We show that the film and the debates it provoked engaged with state-sponsored narratives and highlight three key themes of ideational contestation in contemporary Russian politics: authority, agency, and authenticity. An examination of these ideational battles in which provocative and resonant societal critiques challenge dominant narratives provides an original account of ideology in contemporary Russia. It also speaks to debates on civil society that have increasingly become interested in ideational politics.