Replication Data for: Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

Political attempts to control how the past may be represented have flourished in the 21st century. Russia participates in this trend, having taken steps to legislatively and juridically safeguard the legacy of the USSR’s involvement in World War II. This has institutionalized an interpretation of the fight against Nazism that was already widely held in society, making the Russian case a “hard test” for evaluating when the violation of a historical norm is deemed appropriate and what the impact of a memory law might be relative to other factors. Drawing on two vignette experiments conducted in 2021, our article demonstrates both that the discursive context in which a controversial statement about the past is made matters when respondents assess whether the person making it should be punished and that criticism of a historical norm is more likely to be accepted when it emanates from an in-group member. We also find that the state has limited ability to influence societal attitudes regarding history. Moreover, a willingness to defend state-led interventions into how the past is depicted aligns with support for the political system, but does not necessarily overlap with individuals’ historical views, underscoring the multidimensional nature of collective memory.21世纪以来，试图管控历史叙事的政治尝试愈发盛行。俄罗斯亦顺应这一趋势，通过立法与司法举措捍卫苏联参与第二次世界大战的历史遗产。此举将社会上已广泛流传的反法西斯斗争叙事阐释予以制度化，也令俄罗斯案例成为一项“严苛检验”：可用于评估何种情况下违反历史规范可被视为合理，以及相较于其他因素，历史记忆法规（memory law）的影响究竟几何。本文基于2021年开展的两项情境实验（vignette experiment），得出两大核心结论：其一，当受访对象评估历史争议表述的发布者是否应受惩罚时，该表述所处的话语语境至关重要；其二，针对历史规范的批评若来自内群体成员，则更易被接受。本研究同时发现，国家对社会历史态度的影响力较为有限。此外，支持国家主导的历史叙事干预举措，与对本国政治体制的支持态度相契合，但未必与个体自身的历史认知相重合，这一发现凸显了集体记忆的多维属性。