Associate Professor Lilia Ilikova part of editorial team of a Brazilian book on the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory
The book 80 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War: Memory, Reconstruction and Prospects was published in Brazil. The monograph was prepared by a team of Brazilian authors, and the editorial board included three representatives of Russian universities. Among them is Dr Ilikova.
“I was invited to participate in the project by my foreign colleagues, whom I met during my last year’s internship in Brazil – Professor Daniela Vieira Secches of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais and researcher Valdir Da Silva Bezerra of the Group for BRICS Studies at the University of São Paulo,” comments the interviewee.
The project was created to reconstruct the history of the main events of 1941-1945, as well as to study the issue of the significance of historical memory for modern Russia.
“It is noteworthy that experts and the people of Brazil are eager to better understand our point of view and learn more about the history of Russia,” Ilikova notes.
The importance of the book is due to two fundamental reasons, one of which is the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory.
“The second reason is that, according to Brazilian experts and the authors of the book, there has been a movement in the West in recent decades that seeks to rethink and question the Soviet Union’s contribution to the victory over Nazism,” she adds.
The preface of the monograph talks about the impact of this movement on many European countries, where there is actually a process of rehabilitation of figures associated with the ideology of Nazism.
As the associate professor explained, the authors provide historical arguments that testify to the key role of the USSR in the victory as opposed to the revisionist narratives of a number of Western countries.
“It is in this context that the importance of the Soviet people’s contribution to the victory over Nazism and to the formation of the international order we know today must be emphasized,” the Associate Professor believes.