This session explores a burgeoning area of historical scholarship—something Lucy Bond calls “analogical memory,” or the recourse to historical reference points to make sense of national cataclysms. The panel posits that Russia and the Soviet Union are ripe for such an investigation. The USSR’s revolutionary character and ostensible novelty—Khrushchev famously cast Soviet society as a wholly “new historical community of people”—coupled with its political ruptures and bouts of iconoclasm, necessarily limited the range of historical reference points political elites could draw upon to frame particular national events or upheavals. As a result, those elites often reached across the revolutionary divide into the rich historical material and symbolism of the Old Regime—as during the Second World War—or looked to other societies for appropriate analogues, as the Bolsheviks did with the French revolutionary experience. Post-Soviet Russian elites have likewise faced difficulties in their search for “usable” reference points in the past, given the more troubling legacies of the Soviet era. In this context, the way the Russian state has couched relations with the outside world in rhetoric invoking the Second World War, while not surprising, is instructive.

The session’s presenters each focus on a particular case study to shed light on the differing ways analogical memory operated at different times in Russian and Soviet history. Laurie Stoff examines late-Russian imperial analogies between the thousands of women who served in combat roles in the Russian military during the First World War and the French warrior-heroine Joan of Arc. Adrienne Harris focuses on the changing meaning of the Crimean War across time in Russian cinema to help better understand present-day Russian-Ukrainian tensions. Finally, Jonathan Brunstedt looks at the roots of the “Vietnam analogy” as it came to dominate public discourse on the Soviet-Afghan War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Through these disparate case studies, the panelists highlight the uniquely central role analogies have played in shaping, reinforcing, and contesting Soviet and Russian political culture. By doing so, the papers draw attention to what is a universal impulse to frame the present by way of an often-invented past.

The session should appeal not only to scholars of memory, Russia, and the USSR, but to anyone interested in the way analogies are so frequently invoked to make sense of our everyday lives and the world around us.