War Memory and “Memory Wars” in Modern Memory Studies: the Main Approaches and Key Actors

The article deals the main approaches to the analysis of war memory, that established in Russian and foreign academic researches. It is made an attempt to classify these approaches, and the criteria is the highlighting of a central actor, translating the images of war past, or the recognition of the plurality of such actors. It is showed the specificities of a state and non-state actors in the articulation of war memory. As a result, it is highlighted a state-centred approach, a popular-memory approach and a social-agency approach. It is concluded, that in the social-agency approach the relation between war memory and “memory wars” becomes the most conspicuous, and it gives theoretical and methodological bases to study the category “memory wars”.