Among numerous studies on the politics of memory in post-communist countries, the problem of historians' involvement into the state politics of memory was yet poorly explored. It was shown in the previous research how authorities use expert status and professional skills of historians to legitimize or discard a particular interpretation of the past which later become a justification for the official memory politics (Miller and Lipman, 2012; Miller, 2015; Mink and Neumayer, 2013; Bernhard and Kubik, 2014; Polyan, 2016; Luthar, 2017, 2018; Koposov, 2018; Kas'yanov 2019). While the goals of politicians and authorities are quite clear, the motivations of historians were not studied yet. Why do historians get involved into the state "memory games"? How does it change their academic careers, behavior, and views?
In my paper, I study the problem of historians' involvement into the state memory politics in Russia. In particular, I want to find out the factors responsible for this involvement. As it was shown in the previous research (Sokolov, 2015) the two main factors responsible for academics' behavior are their worldviews and career motivation. It is obvious that historians as representatives of their societies share common values, attitudes, and believes. Therefore, their support of the statist historical narrative may reflect their understanding of the world. On the other hand, historians' engagement into the state politics of memory can be seen as a pragmatic choice – a collaboration with the state may open a much better career perspective.
I try to find evidence for these hypotheses with the help of the statistical analysis of historians' biographies. For my analysis, I selected historians working at the Russian Academy of Sciences (the main Russian research institution) and studying 20th century history (157 cases). The biographical information was collected from multiple sources – interviews, CVs, official documents, encyclopedias, and handbooks – and organized as a database. It includes information about the current academic status of historians, their academic background and affiliation with the state as well as participation in the state memory politics.
The results of my analysis demonstrate that the administrative factor (historian's administrative position, affiliation with the state agencies, and work experience in the state institutions and bodies of power) makes a significant contribution to the probability of historian's engagement into the state memory politics. At the same time, my analysis does not show a significant difference between historians of different generations as well as with different academic backgrounds. Therefore, the hypothesis claiming that engagement into the state memory politics reflects the historian's career choice finds confirmation.
