Hegemonic representations of the past and digital agency: Giving meaning to “The Soviet Story” on social networking sites

Abstract

In 2008, Edvīns Šnore, the Latvian film director, released a shocking and provocative documentary, “The Soviet Story,” which explored some terrible episodes from the Soviet past as well as the collaboration between the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Scholars have argued that The Soviet Story is an effective Latvian response to Russian propaganda, but it also exemplifies the broader problems of post-communist memory politics. This article takes a step further in the discussion of The Soviet Story. It focuses on the idea of how memory work triggered by the documentary got started on social networking sites. In particular, the article deals with the video-sharing website YouTube and the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, both of which are crucial meaning-making sites with respect to history. The article demonstrates transnational memory work in YouTube and Wikipedia as a multidirectional enterprise that both reinforces and emancipates existing hegemonic representations of controversial past.