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Soviet history has been the subject of controversial debates in the spheres of history politics and commemorative culture from the moment the world's first socialist state finally collapsed. [...] At the same time, the three countries, which actually had never existed as nation states for any length of time, set out in the early 1990s to search for an independent national history, for a 'national idea'. Particularly anti-communist narratives from the Cold War era circulating among the Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian diasporas in the West, who then longed for a 'liberation' and 'rebirth' of their 'supressed' nations, became very popular among the new elites of the young post-Soviet countries. However, due to the close historical interconnections of the three newly founded states, this almost inevitably led to conflicts. [...] Yet, besides these debates among the political and cultural elites of how to construct their respective invented tradition, therewas also a vivid interest among ordinary people in how to cope with the disruptions and upheavals of history, whose object and subject they themselves had become in the preceding years and decades. And they found possible answers in the then flourishing commercial mass culture, which developed particular appeal in Eastern Europe during the 1990s as a previously unknown phenomenon. [...] 'Appropriating history' does not necessarily imply either critically reappraising and adequately remembering the past or, conversely, ideologically trivialising and relativising it; in popular culture, it means above all presenting dramatic episodes, dazzling figures and stereotypical images, which appeal in an entertaining way to the needs and desires, challenges and conflicts of the respective public. Especially in the nascent post-Soviet nation states, these entertaining representations often do more than government institutions, political parties or public educational organisations to shape ideas about how national belonging is articulated. Ideas about history and historical belonging sometimes have a strong effect in situations of political upheaval by fuelling rebellion and in creasing bellicosity, as well as by exposing national myths or suggesting a retreat into the private sphere.
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