MEMORIAL LAWS OF CONSTITUENT ENTITIES OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AND THE SPECIFICITY OF REGIONAL HISTORY: TOOLS FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES

Abstract

The study deals with the historical content of the memorial laws of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, its dependence on the specifics of the political history of the territories of Russian regions. A qualitative analysis of the initial data made it possible to identify some trends in the purposeful reflection of regional historical features in the laws, such as emphasizing the uniqueness of the contribution to the development of Russian statehood; the inclusion of events that occurred before the territory of the modern region became part of the Russian state; interpretation of the nature of the inclusion of the territories of national republics into Russia. To conduct a comparative quantitative study, original tools were developed – the index of the specifics of political history (the values of regional indicators vary from ≥ 0 to ≤ 9) and the index of the historical content of memorial laws (the values of regional indicators vary from ≥ 0 to ≤ 8). Correlation analysis revealed a statistical relationship between the specifics of political history and the historical content of the regional “laws of memory” – it turned out to be positive and significant. At the same time, the study confirmed that in the practice of commemoration of historical events, not everything is determined by history itself. The repertoire of the actualized past, which found expression in laws, in each case was formed as a result of the interaction of regional ruling elites with professional historians and social activists. The development of tools for a comparative analysis of scenarios for the interaction of mnemonic actors in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and the quantitative measurement of factors influencing historical policy in terms of the adoption of regional memorial laws is the task of a new study.