This paper examines how, in politically polarized contexts, people reconstruct the biographies of contested memorialized figures to challenge or reproduce dualistic metanarratives of national history. We analyze two sites of recent controversy in Scotland and Lithuania which have been engaged in struggles over how to memorialize individuals who, at various points in their lives, engaged in acts of both anti-imperial resistance and collaboration in those same empires’ systems of oppression. Their moral liminality—a term we employ to refer to the transgression of moral categories—blurs the boundaries between perpetrators and victims of imperial violence, calling into question binary frameworks underpinning broader national narratives. Based on a comparative media analysis of debates over the legacies of David Livingstone and Jonas Noreika, we find that though some people in both Scotland and Lithuania have embraced these figures’ moral liminality, others have, instead, suppressed aspects of their biographies to uphold traditional distinctions between national “heroes” and foreign “villains.” We argue that such moral binaries are either blurred or reproduced through the manipulation of three aspects of liminal figures’ biographical records: their agency, motives, and social impact.

This article traces the reinterpretation of the Revolution(s) of 1917 in the official historical narrative of post-Soviet Russia. Its construction is an essentially political process, as its discursive hegemony depends on how it fits into the symbolic landscape created by various social actors. The task of reinterpretation of the revolution is complicated by its centrality for two conflicting patterns of memory politics – the critical “working through” the memory of a traumatic and criminal past, and consolidation of the nation/nation-building. There are different coalitions of mnemonic actors behind each of these patterns. The author reveals different strategies of dealing with dilemmas involved in employing these patterns in the 1990s and the 2000s, and argues that until now the Russian imcumbent elites have not succeeded in reframing the Russian Revolution as a great, though tragic, episode of the national past. In the context of the centenary commemorated in 2017, the incumbent elite seem to have come back to the idea of “reconciliation and accord” that was coined by Boris Yeltsin's team in the mid-1990s. However, its integration into the apologetic narrative of “the 1000-year Russian state” totally changes its meaning, as it rejects “working through” the traumatic past.