This book, based on extensive first-hand research conducted between 2020 and 2024, places Russian antiquity in the center of analysis, and addresses memory-making in the regions. The author seeks to examine how public history is managed in Old Russian cities, who the mnemonic actors are, which narratives are institutionalized, how cultural heritage is reinterpreted, and how federal and regional historical narratives interact. How did existing approaches to the past contributed to legitimization of aggressive wars and the federal government's assumed right to arbitrarily initiate conflicts and compel citizens to participate in them? The book focuses on the period from 2012 to 2022, which saw the strengthening of personalist authoritarianism in Russia accompanied by a conservative turn whose roots lie in nineteenth-century nationalism. The book includes case studies of 12 regional capitals founded before 1584 (the year of Ivan the Terribles death, his rule marked the emergence of the centralized Russian state).
Chapter 1 Introduction.
Chapter 2 The Federal Center and the Regions:
Dynamics of Interaction.
Chapter 3 Memory Politics in the Cities of Old
RusRegional Capitals.- 4 Conclusion.
Konstantin Pakhaliuk (born 1991) is a RussianIsraeli historian and political scientist. He earned a PhD in Political Science in 2020. He taught courses in history, political science, and contemporary international relations at MGIMO-University, Russian State University for the Humanities, The European University at Saint Petersburg and others. In June 2024, he was designated a foreign agent by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
Pakhaliuk collaborates with a range of media outlets, including Novaya Gazeta Europe, Republic and The Moscow Times. He has been a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently an affiliated researcher at the Ruppin Academic Center (Israel). In 2025 he got a fellowship from the Mieroszewski Centre to finish a monograph about the Osowiec fortress in WWI.He is the author of more than 90 scholarly publications in Russian, English, German, French, and Spanish, and has edited or co-edited 22 academic volumes (collections of articles, documents, and memoirs). His research interests include the Russian army in the First World War; the Holocaust; memory politics in contemporary Russia; discourse analysis theory; contemporary international relations; and Z-culture and Russias new militarism.
