Spinning the past: Russian and Georgian accounts of the war of August 2008

Efforts by national media and political leaders to ‘spin’, or shape the public interpretation of events, are examined from the perspective of collective memory. It is argued that top-down analyses of such efforts overlook essential aspects of how shared national narratives shape collective interpretation and memory. Political leaders’ efforts to manage public discourse about important events provide insight into the existence and structure of ‘deep memory’ and the ‘narrative template’ that mediates it for a mnemonic community. Using the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 as an illustration, two different national narrative templates are outlined and used to account for radically different views of the war and its causes.