Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire's Legacies 0367332655, 9780367332655

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Post-Soviet Nostalgia

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past. Otto Boele is Associate Professor of Russian literature at Leiden University. Boris Noordenbos is Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Ksenia Robbe is Assistant Professor in African and Comparative Literature at Leiden University.

Routledge Studies in Cultural History

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Post-Soviet Nostalgia Confronting the Empire’s Legacies

Edited by Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos and Ksenia Robbe

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos and Ksenia Robbe to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boele, Otto, editor. | Noordenbos, Boris, editor. | Robbe, Ksenia, editor. Title: Post-Soviet nostalgia : confronting the empire’s legacies / edited by Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos and Ksenia Robbe. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in cultural history ; 76 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020045 (print) | LCCN 2019980216 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367332655 | ISBN 9780429318931 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nostalgia—Russia (Federation) | Popular culture— Soviet Union—History. | Soviet Union—Social life and customs. | Soviet Union—Intellectual life. Classification: LCC DK510.555 .P67 2020 (print) | LCC DK510.555 (ebook) ISBN: 978-0-367-33265-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31893-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Introduction: The Many Practices of Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Affect, Appropriation, Contestation

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1

OTTO B O E L E, B O RIS N O O RDE N B O S, A N D KS ENIA ROBBE

PART I

Affect 1

Journeying to the Golden Spaces of Childhood: Nostalgic Longing in the Online Community The USSR Our Motherland Through the Visual Image of the Soviet Toy

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M A N DY DU I JN

2

Second-Hand Nostalgia: On Charms and Spells of the Soviet Trukhliashechka

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S E R G U E I A L EX. O USH AKIN E

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Village Voice: Peasant Nostalgia in Recent Oral History

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K ATH L E E N PA RTH É

PART II

Appropriation 4

Longing for Fear and Darkness: “Oppositional Grassroots Stalinism” in the 1970s–1980s and Its Influence on Legitimizing Political Elites in Today’s Russia I LYA K U K U L IN

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Contents

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Remembering Chernobyl Through the Lens of Post-Soviet Nostalgia

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E M I LY D. J O HN SO N

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To Be Continued: Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Sergei Miroshnichenko’s Time-Lapse Documentary Series Born in the USSR

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B O R I S N O O R DE N B O S

PART III

Contestation 7

Under the Sign of Nostalgia: The Cultural Revolution in Perm and Its Narrative Representations

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M A R I N A A B ASH E VA A N D VL ADIMIR A B ASH EV

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Nostalgia Inside Out: Re-Addressing Post-Soviet Loss in Andrei Astvatsaturov’s Novels

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K S E N I A RO B BE

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“Perestroika and the 1990s—Those Were the Best Years of My Life!” Nostalgia for the Post-Soviet Limbo

203

OTTO B O E L E

Afterword: After Nostalgia: A Backward Glance at a Backward Glance

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K E V I N M . F. PL ATT

Notes on Contributors Index

235 238

Figures

2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9

2.10 2.11

“Welcome to the Universe of Positive Emotions!” The entrance sign of the Museum of Soviet Everyday Life in Kazan’. Archiving the Soviet thing-system. In the Museum of Soviet Everyday Life in Kazan’. “Painting with things.” In the Museum of Soviet Everyday Life in Kazan’. Representing the Soviet in things: the (post-)Soviet abundance of the mundane. From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Representing the Soviet in slogan and images: “We are Born to Make Fairy Tales Real” (left) and “Let’s Fulfil the Quotas Early!” (right). From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Staging the past-1: A “typical Soviet dining room.” From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Staging the past-2: A “typical office of a party boss.” From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Danila Tkachenko. Part of an unfinished space port. Kazakhstan, Kyzylorda region. From the series Restricted Areas, 2013. Danila Tkachenko. Headquarters of the Communist Party of Bulgaria (the Buzludzha Monument). From the series Restricted Areas, 2015. Rebecca Litchfield, “Young Pioneer Camp, Russia.” From the series Soviet Ghosts, 2014. Danila Tkachenko. “Model of the Headquarters of the Third International, Moscow” (Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International). From the series Lost Horizon, 2016.

43 45 46

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58 59

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Figures

2.12

Danila Tkachenko. “Hotel Saucer. Dombai” (Russia). From the series Lost Horizon, 2016. 2.13 “Burn the damn thing to hell.” From the series Motherland by Danila Tkachenko (2017). 2.14–15 Purging oneself from nostalgia. From the series Motherland by Danila Tkachenko (2017). 2.16 The fiery horizon of Motherland. From the series Motherland by Danila Tkachenko (2017). 4.1 Nikolai Rastorguev and Vladimir Putin. 4.2 Cover of the album Atas by pop band Luibe. 6.1 Sasha’s portrait overlaid with a Soviet birth certificate, as shown in the opening scenes of Born in the USSR: 14 Up. 6.2 “Sasha’s birth certificate,” marked with a stamp and graffiti lettering, as shown in the opening scenes of Born in the USSR: 14 Up. 9.1 Announcement of the TV series Chelnochnitsy (Rossiia1). A.1 Moscow poet Timur Kibirov (an ethnic Ossetian) posing, with irony, at a bust to Stalin, sometime in the 1980s. Gift of the poet.

63 64 64 65 93 97

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to Max Novick at Routledge for his support of this book project and, above all, his patience. We also wish to thank the Willemina E Jansen Fonds for its generous financial contribution, as well as the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) for additional funding. Finally, we are grateful to Thomas Maier for meticulously proofreading and copyediting the manuscript, and to Kalliope Bournias for compiling the index. The editors

Note on Transliteration

In this volume we have used the Library of Congress system (LoC) with a few exceptions. The names of well-known cultural figures and cities are rendered in their more familiar spelling (Perm instead of Perm’). In bibliographical references we adhere strictly to the LoC.

Introduction The Many Practices of Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Affect, Appropriation, Contestation Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, and Ksenia Robbe More than any other recent event, Vladimir Putin’s speeches in the wake of the annexation of Crimea raise questions about the political uses of nostalgia in the post-Soviet context. On March 18, 2014, during a carefully orchestrated festive concert in the Red Square, Putin solemnly declared that “after a hard, long and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!” (Ria Novosti 2014). At first sight, Putin’s rhetoric is a schoolbook example of what Svetlana Boym has called “restorative nostalgia,” with its characteristic mobilization of collective myths and its wished-for return to, or rebuilding of, a “lost home” (Boym 2001). On closer inspection, however, Putin’s interpretation of the events was less clear-cut. The Homeric story of Crimea’s exhaustive journey at sea, and its subsequent sailing back to Russia, allocated the initiative with the peninsula itself, a reading that resonated with the Russian government’s emphasis on Crimeans’ right to self-determination. Yet, in another speech delivered to Duma Deputies on that same day, Putin implied that it was Russia that had returned to Crimea, symbolically reclaiming those Crimean places that were, supposedly, pivotal to Russia’s identity. The ancient Crimean site of Khersones, he emphasized, was the site where Prince Vladimir was baptized in the 10th century; Sevastopol was the birthplace of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; and the peninsula still harbored the graves of Russian soldiers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Flexible as these narratives of “home” and “return” were, a constant factor was their thrust to cultivate a sense of shared belonging. Vladimir’s baptism, Putin posited, was a “spiritual feat” that united “the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus”; and Crimea, “similar to Russia as a whole,” had always been a multi-ethnic region where Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, and other groups had lived side by side for centuries, blending their cultures and traditions over time (Ria Novosti 2014). Through references to a common “home,” nostalgic narratives about the return of (or to) Crimea sought to create political consensus among diverse groups, both on the peninsula and in Russia itself. The grandiloquent celebrations of the Crimean campaign thus testify to not only the political force

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of post-Soviet nostalgia but also its frequent inconsistency and “messiness” (Lankauskas 2014, 41). Let us consider another example of nostalgia, this time with a much narrower appeal and a considerably more prosaic referent. The song “I want to go back to the ’90s” by punk accordionist Rodion Lubenskii and his band “Voice of Omerica” (Golos Omeriki) is not only a wistful recollection of the singer’s happy youth but also a testimony to nostalgia’s subversive power, its ability to provoke and undermine hegemonic visions of the past: Where have the pavilions gone? Where are the knuckles? The VHS tapes with Chuck Norris? I want to go back to the 1990s. (. . .) There’s glossies and glamour everywhere, But no spiritual nutrition . . . Honestly, I have to say: Things were better (pizzhe) back then!!!1 At first glance the lyrics seem to be an expression of what Gary Cross has called “consumed nostalgia” (Cross 2015, 101), nostalgia triggered by the now obsolete commodities and gadgets of our youth; in this case illegal copies of American action flicks that were sold on virtually every street corner in the 1990s. But the song also reflects a more profound uneasiness about the changes that have occurred in Russia since the start of the new millennium. Released in 2008 after Russia had enjoyed nearly a decade of spectacular economic growth, the song fondly invokes the “rowdy 1990s” (likhie devianostye), a time that many Russian citizens would prefer to forget. Instead of aligning himself with the economic success story of the 2000s and welcoming the return of law and order under Vladimir Putin, Lubenskii has the impertinence to embrace the first post-Soviet decade by provocatively celebrating its lawlessness and primitive entrepreneurship (metonymically represented by the knuckles and the commercial pavilions) and suggesting that the decade was somehow more “honest” and “authentic” than the orderliness and shine of the present. In this respect the use of the slang word “pizzhe” “more awesome” is very telling. Supposedly a comparative of the substandard expression pizdets (“fuck”), it emblematizes the rawness of the 1990s, as well as the “inappropriateness” of longing back for it. Together these examples demonstrate that post-Soviet nostalgia is a slippery phenomenon. It has no unified referent, and its political effects are by no means fixed. The term “post-Soviet” in the title of this volume therefore does not simply imply a longing for the Soviet period per se. Rather, it points to a diverse range of nostalgic practices, sentiments, and discourses that are somehow effected by the fall of the Soviet empire

Introduction

3

and express efforts to come to grips with the legacy of its existence and demise. Before exploring and mapping out diverse manifestations of “nostalgia,” however, our understanding of that label must be specified. Recently, criticism has been leveled against the increasing academic interest in the term. According to some, nostalgia has become “a catch-all notion for an array of memory discourses and practices that sometimes share little commonalities” (Berliner and Angé 2014, 5). Others have expressed even harsher objections, arguing that the booming Western academic fascination with Eastern European nostalgia perpetuates deeply engrained stereotypes about the region’s failure to catch up with the progressive and forward-looking orientations of Western modernity (Boyer 2010). As these scholars convincingly point out, nostalgia cannot be taken for granted either as a naturally existing phenomenon or as a self-explanatory analytical concept.

Defining and Locating Nostalgia in the Post-Communist World Order What is nostalgia? Is it a feeling, an affect, a disposition, or simply a rhetorical device? For Johannes Hofer, the Swiss student who coined the term in his 1688 dissertation, nostalgia was a medical condition, a feeling of loss and longing stemming from spatial detachment, not unlike homesickness, but more profound and with severe symptoms. At the beginning of the 20th century, the nostalgic subject was often believed to be detached in time as well as in space. A case in point is the notion of “immigrant psychosis” (Dwyer 2015), a mental state with which Russian emigrants were only too familiar after 1917, especially when all hope of returning to the motherland proved futile. Today we think of nostalgia as an emotional response to a rapidly changing world, a defense mechanism against the fleeting of time that allows us to preserve the continuity of personal and collective identities (Davis 1979). Whereas the second part in the compound “nostalgia” has always been relatively stable (algos meaning longing, pain), the first part of it (nostos—coming home) has become ever more elusive. Precisely because it is located in time, rather than in space, the object of “modern” nostalgia can never be fully retrieved. Should we, then, conceive of nostalgia as a practice of memory, or is it altogether different from processes of remembrance and commemoration? How does nostalgia “work”? What are its effects? Is it mediated intersubjectively or between people and objects? Finally, what is nostalgia’s object? Can we even think of identifying one when, as most scholars agree, “nostalgia (. . .) tells us more about present moods than about past realities” (Davis 1979, 10)? A plethora of studies have responded to these questions emphasizing nostalgia’s positive effects (Davis 1979; Berdahl

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1999; Routledge 2016) and attempting to lend more conceptual clarity to the notion of nostalgia. Even a brief summary of proposed types and aspects of nostalgic expressions—such as “private” and “collective” (Davis 1979), “mood” and “mode” (Grainge 2004; Jameson 1991), “restorative” and “reflective (Boym 2001), “imperialist” and “colonial” (Rosaldo 1989; Bissell 2005)—would constitute a whole chapter. On the one hand, such categories can certainly help nuance our understanding of nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon and provide the tools for approaching a variety of nostalgic practices. On the other hand, they may also obstruct our comprehension of the imbrications between these varied manifestations of nostalgia, or they may, by contrast, simplify very different sentiments and practices by including them under the ill-defined “nostalgia” label. Largely refraining from suggesting yet more categories, in this volume we focus on the aspects of historical change and interaction in nostalgic practices. In other words, our attention is drawn to the working of nostalgia, its interaction with other forms of remembering and its (political) instrumentalization, rather than to expanding existing classifications. For this purpose we define nostalgia rather loosely as a discursive practice stemming from a (shared) feeling of loss and potentially serving any political agenda. This liberal definition can prove fruitful for the study of nostalgia in post-Soviet contexts, especially in view of the scarcity of research devoted to nostalgic practices in this particular part of the world. This gap is constituted, to an important degree, by the peculiar geopolitics of nostalgia research. While theorizations of nostalgia as a prominent aspect of the (post)modern experience originated in research on Western (particularly US) culture, since the end of the Cold War, Eastern Europe (roughly the Soviet Union’s former satellite states) has become the privileged locus for nostalgia scholarship. As a result, existing research has been tainted by an East-West dichotomy prompting Maria Todorova (2010, 3–4) to point out the moralizing tendency of identifying nostalgia in Eastern Europe (usually labeled as “post-Communist”) as the symptomatic inability to carry out a variant of Western European Vergangenheitsbewältigung with regard to the communist past. Even more poignantly, Dominic Boyer has argued that Eastern European nostalgia, and specifically the East German Ostalgie, has been a Western projection—a symptom of West Germans’ displacement of the burden of the National Socialist past upon the Eastern “other” rather than an “eastern longing for a return to the GDR or for the jouissance of authoritarian rule” (2006, 362). These identifications of “orientalism” in popular and academic constructions of Eastern Europe as “nostalgic” have given rise to a project of counter-theorizing post-communist nostalgia. This has been achieved by conducting “thick” descriptions of varied nostalgic practices within national and local (urban and rural) settings (Berdahl 1999; Nadkarni 2007; Hann 2014), as well as through the analysis of alternative imaginations of the future within these practices (Boyer 2010; Mišina 2016).

Introduction

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The most consolidated example of such “postcolonial” theorization of nostalgia in Eastern Europe to date is Post-Communist Nostalgia (2010) edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille. The contributors to this edited volume do much to “de-essentialize” the concept of nostalgia by studying it as an ironic engagement with the past, a counterweight to the dominant discourse of neoliberalism, or a strategy for political mobilization. By highlighting these multifarious uses of nostalgia in the context of Eastern Europe, the authors succeed in demonstrating its emancipatory potential and debunking the retrograde stigma associated with post-communist nostalgia. Yet for researchers in post-Soviet and Russian studies, Post-Communist Nostalgia leaves many questions unanswered. While interrogating the boundaries between Eastern and Western Europe and pointing to the diversity of nostalgic expressions, the editors seem to introduce yet another set of (geopolitical) oppositions when they claim that next to nostalgia’s subversive modalities “[t]here is the post-Communist nostalgia with a certain tinge of imperial and colonial nostalgia (the case of the USSR and even Yugoslavia)” (Todorova and Gille 2010, 8). For all their deconstructive rigor, at this point the editors seem to relapse into the misleading distinction between “good” and “bad” nostalgia, locating the latter firmly in post-Soviet space. Correspondingly, the volume’s only chapter engaging with an example of cultural production in Russia concerns a novel by Alexander Melikhov—a pertinent reading of nostalgia for the futurity of a Soviet Jewish republic, which unfortunately tells the readers little about more general processes and politics of nostalgia in Russia.

Nostalgia in Post-Soviet and Russian Studies One of the first scholars in Russian studies to address these more general trends in discourse and practices of post-Soviet nostalgia was Svetlana Boym, whose seminal study The Future of Nostalgia (2001) has provided essential theoretical groundwork for nostalgia studies in post-Soviet contexts and globally. Boym’s distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia (an unconditional desire to return or restore the days of yore versus a more wistful and ironic attitude that accepts the “pastness” of the past) has proven very productive, especially if one refrains from applying them as two mutually exclusive categories. The processes analyzed by Boym date back to the 1990s, when the common perception of the Soviet period was that of a disappearing civilization which could be reached back to only across the “break” of an irreversible transition. However, when the Russian state embarked on selectively establishing continuities with narratives, symbols, and practices of the Soviet and imperial periods during the 2000s, the meanings and purported effects of nostalgia started to shift significantly. In Kevin Platt’s words, “far from

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being a lost object of desire, the Soviet past has come for many to constitute an important social and political prehistory, a treasure house of timeless elements of a shared identity” (2013, 449–50). Theorizing this change in his reading of the revived late-Soviet popsong competition at Jurmala, Latvia, Platt distinguishes between two kinds of meaning pertaining to its organization and interpretation—an ironic “post-socialist nostalgia” (present in the readings that reconnect the present to the cosmopolitan elements of late-Soviet history) and an earnest “post-Soviet retro” one (ibid.). This latter form of nostalgia elides the subversive elements of the 1980s musical contest to re-create seamlessly an essentially imperial image of different nations’ peaceful coexistence under the umbrella of the Soviet state. This nostalgic technique has also been discussed by Serguei Oushakine in his analysis of “retrofitting” in the popular cultural production of the late 1990s–early 2000s Russia. In his reading, however, he focused specifically on the pragmatics of form in these nostalgic practices (the Old Songs About the Most Important Things [Starye pesni o glavnom] being the most well-known example) rather than on their ideological content. According to Oushakine, more than attempting to restore a Soviet past, such re-creations of Soviet forms reveal “a longing for the positive structuring effect that old shapes [can] produce, even when they are not supported by their primary contexts” (2007, 453–4). Reappropriating the cultural forms of the past, then, should not necessarily be equated to re-imposing the ideology, which they once conveyed. Observing these different, though often interrelated, tendencies in postSoviet nostalgia criticism, we further develop this productive tension in our volume by attending to the dynamics of content in recent nostalgic practices as well as the dynamics of form and its mediation of affect and meaning. In so doing we hope to account for the different and unexpected meanings with which traditional symbols sometimes prove to be invested and for the persistence with which “Soviet” values can manifest themselves in new disguise. This brings us to a distinction that informs most of the contributions to this volume, but particularly those chapters that deal with instances of (state-)appropriated forms of nostalgia: the distinction between nostalgic sensibilities (feelings of longing for or attachment to a past) and nostalgic technologies (discursive techniques that use the language of nostalgia to shape a sense of affective connectedness to a past). In his examination of the uses of nostalgia as a technology behind President Medvedev’s projects of modernization (2008–2012), Ilya Kalinin argued that [w]e are no longer dealing with nostalgia and the desire for a return of the lost object, but with a politics whose objective is the positive recoding of nostalgia for the Soviet past into a new form of Russian patriotism, for which the Soviet lacks any historical specificity, but

Introduction

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is rather seen as part of a broadly conceived and comically heterogeneous cultural legacy. (2011, 156) Such processes of recoding (from vernacular to official discourses and vice versa) constitute one of the most captivating dimensions of contemporary nostalgia; it is these processes and their politics that our volume sets out to examine. Recognizing the co-presence of “restorative” and “reflective” practices, yet moving towards an analytical understanding of this co-presence in terms of entanglement rather than separate existence, forms our point of departure. The extent to which restorative and reflective engagements with the past can co-exist and overlap was demonstrated most compellingly by Maja Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko’s (2004) comparative reading of nostalgic practices in Hungary and Russia during the 1990s by deconstructing the “good” vs. “bad” paradigm that permeates nostalgia studies, a dichotomy that often collapses with “reflective” vs. “restorative” nostalgia. As Kathleen Stewart argued even earlier, “it depends on where you stand” (1988, 228): from one perspective, nostalgia might seem a myth-making strategy (Jameson 1991) and colonizing appropriation (Rosaldo 1989), from another—a tactic of re-creating and re-inhabiting history “from below.” The latter is aptly demonstrated by Stewart’s own research on the coming to terms with the loss of a familiar environment by working class and indigenous communities. Nadkarni and Shevchenko, similarly, observe that “most nostalgic practices tend to fall in-between or, more frequently, function as both [restorative and reflective]” (2004, 505). How they are framed and interpreted is, then, a matter of context and involves, along with the perspective of those who experience and invoke nostalgia, the agency of readers or viewers (in the case of media products) and researchers (in the instances of ethnographic inquiry). This perspective on nostalgia allows for recognizing multiple possibilities of reading as well as the existence of misreadings, such as the common interpretation of the “disaffection and longing caused by the loss of a utopian fantasy [. . .] as a longing for the Empire’s lost greatness” in the nostalgia for the Soviet past expressed by the Russian intelligentsia (ibid., 515). This perspective reveals “how nostalgia becomes an action rather than an attitude, showing how the politics of nostalgia are realized in its applications rather than being inherent in the affective phenomenon itself” (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 937). It is this understanding of contextual entanglement and historical mutability of nostalgia that has guided the setup and perspectives of our volume. If anything, Nadkarni and Shevchenko’s reading of nostalgia in Russia and Hungary provides an excellent example of a rigorous and contextsensitive comparative study of post-socialist nostalgic practices across the borders of Eastern-Central Europe and Russia (and other post-Soviet

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states)—something that the field of Eastern European and Eurasian studies is still lacking more than a decade after the publication of their article. Our volume aims to fill this gap with respect to post-Soviet nostalgia in Russia. While it does not include studies of such practices in other former Soviet republics, several chapters engage with provincial and marginal expressions of nostalgia, both rural and urban, thus complementing the focus of nostalgia studies on metropolitan spaces, works by acclaimed authors, and examples of “high” culture.

Survey of Chapters All of the contributions to this volume in one way or another draw on the distinctions outlined above (restorative and reflective nostalgia, nostalgic sensibilities, and nostalgic technologies) while bearing in mind the fluidity of these categories when applied to concrete case studies. However, in terms of the effects that nostalgia produces and the ways in which it can be instrumentalized, we delineate three major lines of inquiry, three “angles” from which the subject of nostalgia is studied in this volume: affect, appropriation, and contestation. Affect The first part of this book explores the workings of nostalgia as affect. Ever since Johannes Hofer coined the term in the late 17th century, “nostalgia” has frequently been regarded as an incapacitating mood, a sentimental fixation on a lost home or origin, which affects the individual mind as a disease or spreads epidemically across communities. In this paradigm, those afflicted are thought to be blinded to the here and now, their ability to navigate the complexities of the modern world damaged by insatiable yearning for the irretrievable past. In recent decades, sociologists, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists have vigorously criticized the pathologization of nostalgic sentiments, as well as the implicit celebration of the progressive forces of modernity in these pejorative uses of the “nostalgia” label. They have pointed to nostalgia’s beneficial effects as a psychic coping mechanism (Routledge 2016), or to its functions as an identity-shaping practice, particularly welcome at moments when social cohesion is threatened by historical upheaval (Davis 1979). Still, views of nostalgia as a deluded and irrational mood prevail in public debate and political punditry. Investigating discourses of nostalgia in the wake of the Brexit vote and the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, Michael Kenny pointedly asserts that “[t]o have one’s ideas, programme, policies or style labelled ‘nostalgic’ is to be on the [receiving] end of one of the most enduring and non-negotiable insults in modern political discourse” (2017, 258). Following earlier work in post-socialist studies, this volume aims to steer clear of an interpretation of nostalgia as a symptomatic sentiment,

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naturally afflicting those who have been “left behind” by “historical progress.” This is not to ignore, however, nostalgia’s affective dimensions. For many contributors to this volume, post-Soviet nostalgia is a melancholy admixture of warm memories and sore feelings of loss, expressed with varying degrees of self-awareness and ironical distance. This recognition of nostalgia’s emotional aspects need not come with the dualism often encountered in affect studies, by which affective dispositions are seen as detached from cognition, meaning, or intent (Leys 2011, 458). Instead, the volume’s focus on nostalgia’s affective aspects may best be characterized with Raymond Williams’ well-known term “structures of feeling.” Williams used the phrase to describe the evolving communality of experiences and ideas in a particular period: “the affective elements of consciousness and relationships,” as expressed in various forms of cultural discourse (1977, 132). A structure of feeling was never homogenous and always in the process of being articulated. It denoted, moreover, “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling thought” (ibid.). Deviating from a notion of nostalgia as an unhealthy and overly emotional form of retrospection, the chapters in Part I demonstrate how post-Soviet nostalgia, while often being deeply emotional, is by no means devoid of cognitive processes of meaning-making. Also, again in alignment with Williams, the contributors to the first part of this book attest that nostalgia is relational: it acquires its affective force in response to other positions or in the encounter with objects or artifacts from the past. In Chapter Two, Mandy Duijn explores nostalgic attitudes towards late-Soviet toys among the visitors of the internet forum Toys of the USSR. Analyzing the comment section, Duijn shows how visitors mobilize the website’s images of toys for emotional evaluations of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present. The high quality and simple design of Soviet toys are set off against the flashy contemporary toys from China or “the West” that have flooded the post-Soviet Russian market. The significance of Soviet toys thus reaches far beyond the warm memories of (playing with) the objects themselves. Rather, the toys become the occasion for (implicit) criticisms of market-based values, but also serve as mnemonic vehicles for recollections of the Soviet spaces in which these toys were used and of the meaningful, yet vanished, social interactions they enabled. In the next chapter, Serguei Oushakine further explores the emotional resonances of material objects and specifically of what he calls, borrowing a term from the visual artist Danila Tkachenko, trukhliashechkas, the “half-disappeared, decomposing, or abandoned fragments of the past.” Whereas Duijn focused on (internet) communities who cultivated mnemonic relations to objects from their youth, Oushakine is interested in how the tactility of everyday objects from the late-Soviet period enables affective responses among those who have no firsthand experience with socialism. Oushakine analyzes (reactions to) two exhibitions, in Minsk

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and Kazan’, of ordinary (household) items from the late-Soviet period. Organized according to a generic or associative logic, and devoid of an argument about history, the objects in the exhibits work to stir up visitors’ emotional relations to the past, an experience described by older and younger visitors as an “immersion” in the atmosphere of the Soviet Union. Such experiences are often ambiguous in orientation. The objects inspire a desire to overcome “the old” and a concomitant realization of one’s continuing collective dependency on it. The same ambiguous orientation Oushakine discerns in the photographic work of Tkachenko, whose recent photo series creatively reformat the material legacy of socialism. Oushakine coins the term “second-hand nostalgia” for all these open-ended, affective, and imaginative encounters with Soviet trukhliashechkas. Kathleen Parthé’s exploration of the 21st-century legacy of the Village Prose tradition continues the reflections on nostalgia’s affective forces. Towards the end of the Soviet period, Village Prose took on increasingly resentful, conspiratorial, and anti-Semitic undertones. But with the passing away of these original writers, rural nostalgia, Parthé argues, has been detoxified and has been expressed and studied in new ways. While often devoid of the angry discourse of the late-Soviet period, recently published testimonies, ethnographic studies, and memoirs by village dwellers share Village Prose’s fascination with vanished rural traditions, costumes, and values. Through their wistful lamentations about the loss of viable rural communities, these recent village voices repeatedly invoke the malaia rodina, the little motherland or native region, that serves as the prime marker of shared belonging and that implies a different cognitive map than (nationally oriented) urban expressions of nostalgia. Parthé makes a convincing case for extending research on the emotional life of post-Soviet Russians beyond its habitual focus on the metropolitan intelligentsia. Appropriation In the context of late-Soviet and early post-Soviet culture, nostalgia has traditionally been associated with social groups and individuals feeling disempowered and harboring resentment over the seismic changes wrought on the country by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Offering a refuge of sorts to the “losers” of the Soviet collapse, ranging from disgruntled communists and village-prose writers to ordinary citizens whose socioeconomic security was increasingly threatened by the transition to a free-market economy, nostalgia has often been treated in (Western and Russian) popular media as the post-Soviet disease par excellence: the inability or unwillingness to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions in society. The chapters in the second part, however, show that at least since the start of the new millennium these sentiments are no longer the exclusive domain of oppositional forces or marginalized groups. On the

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contrary, these feelings have often been successfully co-opted by the state or actors aligning themselves with its restorative and often revanchist rhetoric, a strategy that seemingly annuls the rupture of 1991 and establishes continuities between the Soviet and the post-Soviet period. Drawing on such different sources as Evgenii Evtushenko’s conformist poetry, the work of emigrant writer Aleksandr Zinov’ev, and the immensely popular TV series The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Mesto vstrechi izmenit’ nel’zia, 1979–1980), Ilya Kukulin shows how late Stalinism exerted a strong attraction on intellectuals annoyed by the “cynicism” and “anomie” in Soviet society during the last years of Leonid Brezhnev’s reign. The difficult years after the war had also been a time of anomie, these intellectuals believed, but one in which a hard-boiled police inspector such as Gleb Zheglov (the fictional hero in The Meeting Place) was still able to bring the worst criminals to justice, even if this required considerable bending of the rules. Although this kind of “popular Stalinism” disappeared with the breakup of the Soviet Union, what remained was the underlying plot structure of a strong personality fighting the glaring absence of ethical standards in society, a “quasi-ideology” that would also inform Vladimir Putin’s popular image as the conqueror of Russia’s anomie during the “rowdy” 1990s. Initially a critical stance vis-à-vis society’s moral corruption under Brezhnev, nostalgia for late Stalinism with its unsentimental treatment of the criminal world eventually morphed into the “tough” governing style for which Vladimir Putin is admired and hated today. Nostalgia’s susceptibility to being exploited in the service of a political agenda is most graphically demonstrated by Emily Johnson in her chapter on the “liquidators cult” of the Chernobyl disaster (1986). A “symbol of everything wrong with Soviet society” in the late 1980s, through various commemorative practices Chernobyl was eventually recast into a “narrative of heroic triumph” in which workers once involved in the cleanup operation came to resemble the familiar heroes of Soviet propaganda. Although this was not a completely top-down process and the survivors had a vested interest in perpetuating the tropes and rhetoric of socialist realism, state institutions were instrumental in the establishment of a thoroughly nostalgic cult that appeared to instill “traditional” Soviet norms of behavior rather than those widely associated with the first postSoviet decade. Boris Noordenbos’ discussion of the long-term documentary project Born in the USSR (Rozhdennye v SSSR) similarly revolves around the possibilities nostalgia offers to posit historical continuity and re-establish collective identities. Charting the lives of Soviet-born citizens from age seven when they were interviewed for the first installment (1990), the documentary creates a poignant contrast between the vanished fatherland the interviewees once shared and their dispersion over post-Soviet space and beyond after the collapse of the Soviet system. Noordenbos

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shows that the notion of a lost “home,” becoming ever more explicit as the documentary progresses, is less important to the participants than to the maker, whose editing and ponderous voice-over serve to conflate the insouciance of childhood with the pre-capitalist “innocence” of the Soviet Union. Born in the USSR is yet another example of how the seemingly apolitical character of nostalgia lends itself for “co-option by the forces supporting political restorationism.” Contestation If nostalgia is considered as a cultural practice (Stewart 1988, 227), as a mode of actively engaging with the past by evaluating it against the present and future, it involves an implicit element of contestation. It has been accepted that longing for a past springs from dissatisfaction with what is perceived as dangerously dominant in the present. As a “social” (Davis 1979) or “historical” emotion (Boym 2001) that accompanied the unfolding of modernity, nostalgia has functioned as a mechanism of survival for communities, of protecting individual and collective identities from historical erasure, and of interrogating ideologies of progress. The active, engaged aspect of this practice, however, is often obscured in popular renderings of nostalgia as a melancholic condition. But nostalgia can be “a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present,” a reflection of the “desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity” (Pickering and Keightley, 921). In post-socialist contexts, instances of critical nostalgia reveal a clash between the currently hegemonic capitalist versions of modernity and their obsolete and discredited socialist counterparts. Under these conditions, nostalgic practices fulfill the function of smoothing the traumatizing effects of the political and socio-economic transitions by “connecting personal biographies to the passing of time and a state” (Berdahl 1999, 203). Although these practices can easily be appropriated by nationalist, imperial, or colonial ideologies, they can also resist the erasure of individuals’ and communities’ earlier experiences and values. Furthermore, as Tanja Petrović shows in her research on nostalgia among the workers at dilapidating factories in former Yugoslavia, such narratives and practices can also be ways of asserting and dignifying one’s place in the changed present by bringing the past experiences and values into it and by resisting their commodification (2010). But are such contestations of power through nostalgic practices even possible in contemporary post-Soviet contexts, particularly in Russia where “official” strategies of memorialization have been actively redirecting nostalgia for the Soviet towards state-supported nationalist projects? It is important to remember that those renderings of the Soviet are often only loosely related to what people who lived through those times (as

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well as the younger generations) find themselves attracted and attached to. As Ilya Kalinin reminds us, within the state-run projects of creating a unified Russian identity, elements of the Soviet past are stripped of any contradictions and merely lumped together with references to earlier periods so that “[e]verything Soviet loses its historical specificity as an ideological or social project or as a political and economic alternative to capitalism” (2011, 157–8). As we are witnessing the success of this “nostalgic modernization” over the past decade, nostalgia, ironically, might also act as an antidote to the mass fascination with Russia’s grandiose past re-invoked in the present. Such alternative expressions of nostalgia recuperate quotidian practices, employ ironic modes, and, perhaps most importantly, center on the perspectives of the “others”—those socially, ethnically, or ideologically marginalized within the regimes that claim to represent the majority and attempt to manufacture an image of a unified nation. These practices of nostalgia in Russia might be closer than is often thought to those that have been described and theorized in Eastern European post-socialist contexts. In these practices, nostalgia figures as “an undetermined, undefined, amorphous wish to transcend the present”— “a retrospective utopia” (Velikonja 2009, 548). However utopian and amorphous, this “desire for desire” (Stewart 1993, 23) can be concretized and mobilized in contestations of hegemonic discourses. The chapters included in Part III explore these possibilities by investigating the dissenting manifestations of nostalgia within cultural expressions that question the nostalgic discourses linked to state ideologies. A revealing example of interrogating the “top-down” attempts at modernization by the local intelligentsia is scrutinized by Marina Abasheva and Vladimir Abashev in their discussion of the state-supported initiative to turn the town of Perm into Russia’s capital of contemporary art. Emblematic of the Medvedev-era projects of “nostalgic modernization,” the “Perm cultural revolution” was initiated by the local government and supported by Moscow as a way of re-branding the town to attract financial investment. The practices of resistance in the heated media debates drew upon local nostalgia that combined quite different elements of Perm’s cultural heritage—the unique wooden sculptures from the 14th–17th centuries and the production of the Soviet military-industrial complex, also referred to as the “gods of Perm” and the “guns of Perm.” These discourses of re-actualizing local identity received a remarkable twist after the publication of Alexander Prokhanov’s novel Star Man (Chelovek Zvezdy) which, the authors argue, misconstrued the local resistance as a fight (and victory) of militant Soviet nostalgia against post-Soviet modernization. This contribution lucidly demonstrates both the possibilities of employing nostalgia as a “weapon” for the defense of local cultural values and the difficulties of sustaining its critical mode. A similar predicament of resisting the nostalgic rhetoric of the (post-)Soviet state, though with a focus on the subversive potential of nostalgia-based

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tactics, is addressed by Ksenia Robbe in her reading of three novels by Andrei Astvatsaturov, a St. Petersburg-based writer and literary scholar. The chapter uses the metaphor of counterpoint to conceptualize the texts’ employment of nostalgia as a strategy of mimicking and at the same time mocking state-supported discourses that attempt to foster affective links to the Soviet past by using the idiom of “new sincerity.” Drawing on Alexei Yurchak’s seminal study of the “performative shift” in reproductions of authoritative discourse during the late-Soviet period, the readings trace similar inversions of contemporary hegemonic discourses in Astvatsaturov’s novels—a nostalgia “inside out.” The chapter, then, situates these subversive tactics within the paradigm of (post-)Soviet tricksterism, as outlined by Mark Lipovetsky, and defines them as “kynical” resistance to the cynicism of officially sanctioned nostalgia. In addressing the traumatic loss of the Soviet, the analysis suggests, the narratives question the official rhetoric of recovering ordinary people’s dignity and re-invoke the position of “outsideness” as a way of coping with that trauma. Finally, Otto Boele explores an emerging topos of nostalgic resistance to the official narratives of history and memory—the alternative memories of the 1990s that oppose the cliché of the “rowdy” or “cursed” decade promoted by Putin and his administration and reinforced by state-supported cultural productions. By analyzing a range of cultural discourses and representations, the chapter outlines different practices of this growing nostalgia and reflects on their effects. On the one hand, we witness mild or less articulated forms of nostalgia that become vehicles for expressing people’s pride in the resourcefulness of those who survived the hardships of the 1990s. These forms are perceptively analyzed within the viewers’ responses to the TV series Shuttle Traders (Chelnochnitsy), which appear to resist the film’s glossy representations of the period. On the other hand, we see the uses of nostalgia as a “weapon” in contesting the “official” mythologies of the 1990s at the annual “Island of the ’90s” festival organized by the Yeltsin Centre that invites its participants to recall the decade’s atmosphere of freedom. The readings highlight an intriguing conjunction: while right-wing and nationalist critics were quick to criticize the “liberals” for their disregard of the disastrous effects of the 1990s reforms for the ordinary people, some of their discourses (such as an article by poet Marina Strukova) involved a nostalgia very similar in its longing for the 1990s spirit of freedom. *** We started this introduction with the seemingly facile observation that post-Soviet nostalgia is a messy and slippery phenomenon, especially if we consider the different functions it performs (from contesting hegemonic visions of the past to imposing grand narratives of national glory) and the multiple communities it helps identify, ranging from “simple” age

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cohorts and political factions to local groups and the country’s population at large. Does this place post-Soviet nostalgia in a league of its own? Of course, not all of the issues raised in this volume are entirely unique to post-Soviet Russia. For one, the Russian Federation is certainly not the only and not even the first country to “suffer” from “post-empire syndrome” and the imperial or colonial nostalgia that usually comes with it (Haerpfer 2002, 14). But what contributes to the messiness as well as uniqueness of post-Soviet nostalgia is the fact that from an official point of view nostalgia is a relatively young phenomenon. Whereas in the West “modern” nostalgia attracted scholarly attention as early as the 1970s, recognition of its existence in the Soviet Union, with its teleological state mythology, would have been anathema before the “new openness” (Perestroika) under Mikhail Gorbachev. With regard to the ruling elite’s official rhetoric this did not change even in the 1990s when Russia was supposed to be equally forward looking and eager to catch up with the “free and democratic” world. Despite its perceived ubiquity, nostalgia remained something one did not want to be associated with. Adding to the messiness of post-Soviet nostalgia today is the dominance of state-supported media and their persistent engagement in restorative nostalgia, which, as Boym aptly noted, “does not think of itself as nostalgic” (2001, xviii). The restorative nostalgic perceives the present as a distortion of some ideal order and can only envision the future as the reconstruction of that order or its further disintegration. In Russia, this form of nostalgia has translated into a reinvigoration of “aspirations to, memory of, and longing for empire” (Beissinger 2008, 2), whether this is expressed in President Putin’s speeches on Crimea returning to its “native shores” or in media productions retrospectively celebrating the Soviet Union as a country free of nationalist divisions. The fact that such sentiments have lost their once “red-brown” aura and now are “officially” endorsed shows how rapidly and radically post-Soviet nostalgia can transform from a “structure of feeling” into a weapon for expressing dissent, and from a weapon into a tool for national restoration that, in turn, can also be subverted and deconstructed. To bring some clarity to postSoviet nostalgia as a form of action, with all the contradictory aspects this involves, is the main goal of the present volume.

Note 1. Gde stekliashki? Gde kastety? // S Chakom Norrisom kassety? // Ia khochu obratno v devianostye! [. . .] Vsiudu glianets, da glamur—// Net dukhovnoi pishchi . . . // Govoriu, kak na dukhu—// Ran’she bylo pizshe!!! (Golos Omeriki 2011).

Works Cited Beissinger, Mark. 2008. “The Persistence of Empire in Eurasia.” NewsNet: News of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 48 (1): 1–8.

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Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” Ethnos 64 (2): 192–211. Berliner, David and Olivia Angé. 2014. “Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia— Anthropology as Nostalgia.” In Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 1–15. New York: Berghahn. Bissell, William Cunningham. 2005. “Engaging Colonial Nostalgia.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2): 215–48. Boyer, Dominic. 2006. “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany.” Public Culture 18 (2): 361–82. Boyer, Dominic. 2010. “From Algos to Autonomos: Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 17–28. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic. Cross, Gary. 2015. Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. Dwyer, Michel D. 2015. Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties. New York: Oxford University Press. Golos Omeriki. 2011 (2008). “Ia khochu obratno v 90-ye.” www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IX6IjHgivsE (accessed on November 19, 2018). Grainge, Paul. 2004. “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America: Moods, Modes and Media Recycling.” The Journal of American Culture 23 (1): 27–34. Haerpfer, Christian W. 2002. Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe: The Democratisation of the General Public in Fifteen Central and Eastern-European Countries, 1991–1998. London: Routledge. Hann, Chris. 2014. “Why Post-Imperial Trumps Post-Socialist: Crying Back the National Past in Hungary.” In Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 96–122. New York: Berghahn. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kalinin, Ilya. 2011. “Nostalgic Modernization: The Soviet Past as ‘Historical Horizon’.” Slavonica 17 (2): 156–66. Kenny, Michael. 2017. “Back to the Populist Future: Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse.” Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (3): 256–73. Lankauskas, Gediminas. 2014. “Missing Socialism Again? The Malaise of Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Lithuania.” In Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 35–59. New York: Berghahn. Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 434–72. Mišina, Dalibor. 2016. “Beyond Nostalgia: ‘Extrospective Introspections’ of the Post-Yugoslav Memory of Socialism.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 50: 332–54. Nadkarni, Maja. 2007. “The Master’s Voice: Authenticity, Nostalgia, and the Refusal of Irony in Postsocialist Hungary.” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 13 (5): 611–26. Nadkarni, Maja, and Olga Shevchenko. 2004. “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices.” Ab Imperio 2: 487–519.

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Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2007. “‘We’re Nostalgic But We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia.” The Russian Review 66 (3): 451–82. Platt, Kevin. 2013. “Russian Empire of Pop: Post-Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the ‘New Wave’ Competition.” Russian Review 72 (3): 447–69. Petrović, Tanja. 2010. “When We Were Europe: Socialist Workers in Serbia and Their Nostalgic Narratives.” In Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation, edited by Maria Todorova, 127–53. New York: Social Science Research Council. Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. 2006. “The Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology 54 (6): 919–41. Ria Novosti. 2014. “Putin: Krym i Sevastopol’ vozvrashchaiutsia v rodnuiu gavan’—v Rossiiu.” Ria.ru, March 13, 2014. https://ria.ru/politics/20140318/1000079137. html (accessed on July 20, 2018). Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations 26: 107–22. Routledge, Clay. 2016. Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource. New York: Routledge. Stewart, Kathleen. 1988. “Nostalgia—A Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3 (3): 227–41. Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Todorova, Maria. 2010. “Introduction: From Utopia to Propaganda and Back.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 1–13. New York: Berghahn Books. Todorova, Maria, and Zsuzsa Gille, eds. 2010. Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn Books. Velikonja, Mitja. 2009. “Lost in Transition: Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-Socialist Countries.” East European Politics and Societies 23 (4): 535–51. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

Affect

1

Journeying to the Golden Spaces of Childhood Nostalgic Longing in the Online Community The USSR Our Motherland Through the Visual Image of the Soviet Toy Mandy Duijn Author: bota; Date: 1 January 2012 18:27 | I am looking at those pictures, and I simply want to cry, [. . .] these are exactly the toys with which I used to play, during childhood [. . .] Visiting your website was like going 30 years back in time, turning back to that carefree childhood, where my dreams remained, my friends remained (“Igrushki SSSR,” No. 5)1

On August 9, 2008, the administrator of the online community The USSR Our Motherland (SSSR Nasha Rodina)2 posted a series of pictures that depict a wide variety of toys with which children in the Soviet Union used to play: electric models of loggers, shiny dolls with chubby limbs, a miniature windup spacecraft, toy pistols made of iron, tiny Red Army tanks, popular action and animation figures, and a model industrial complex including a halyard and a machine room (“Igrushki SSSR”). The photographs on the page Toys of the USSR triggered a large flow of emotional and nostalgic comments from community members from all over the former Soviet space on their childhood memories. User Ivanych describes how he still remembers the pleasant smell of a new toy when he would open its box for the first time (ibid., No. 1), whilst Sergei (gost' ) recollects the euphonic crunching sound that his old Rubik’s Cube used to make (ibid., No. 2). Many thank the author for providing this “journey” to the golden days of their childhood. The comments of bota and other users provide much food for thought. They demonstrate that the material “relic” of the Soviet toy has mediational features. The images of toys serve as an emotional mnemonic device, triggering memories on the more general features of Soviet childhood, society, everyday life, and public spaces. Moreover, the comments reflect the romantic idealization of childhood as a period of innocence and carefreeness (Wesseling 2017), and beyond that they illustrate that the time of childhood in the nostalgic imagination has spatial features

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(Creighton 2015), as the words “where” and “journey” indicate. The spatial dimensions of these childhood recollections, I argue, act as a specific frame: one that locates, situates, and makes sense of the experience of growing up in the Soviet Union. Even though in recent studies childhood nostalgia is largely discussed as a temporal concept (Wesseling 2017), I would argue that it is of surplus value to focus on the complex relation between the physical object of the Soviet toy and the spaces of childhood they seem to signify. In doing so, I examine how, within the comments section of the page Toys of the USSR, Soviet childhood is remembered, reimagined, and reconstructed as a historically specific trope in time and space. As recent studies of post-Soviet (and post-socialist) nostalgia have shown,3 nostalgic memory discourses and practices are often far more complex than a simple yearning for or obsession with the past. While memories of Soviet childhood are channeled through nostalgic discourses, they signal temporal and spatial displacements of modern social relations, too (Boyer 2010, 23). They represent a “coping behavior,” a way to make sense of and create emotional bridges to a past that is lost, on the one hand, and to face the market-centered realities of the present in which people feel ill at ease on the other (ibid., 17–19). In that sense, it may be seen as an instrumental discourse used to discuss, criticize, or confront the present. Though located in the past, the spatial and temporal “frames” of memories are constantly readjusted through the developments of contemporary everyday life (West 2014, 177). By zooming in on these spatio-temporal structures, we learn more about the users’ perceptions of present-day conditions. The physical object of the Soviet toy is particularly suitable to study such discourses. First, it strongly relates to the realm of childhood, a time and space essential to nostalgic recollections. Second, toys—or consumer products in general—never merely belong to the economic sphere of life only; they are deeply embedded in complex negotiations of ideology and identity (Berdahl 2010, 34). Therefore, the desire mediated through the pictures of toys signals a longing for the objects themselves no less than for the socialist consumption and production rituals that they represent. Finally, the toys could be seen as miniature versions of real-life iconic artifacts from the Soviet era, such as the Red Army tanks, space equipment, and motorized vehicles. Toys can be controlled by their owner: children can wind them up, move them around, and explore the spaces in which they use the toy. As such, the toy triggers bygone feelings of being in control of one’s life. Therefore, these Soviet toys have become vehicles through which the adult users of online communities can briefly reimagine being in charge of memories connected to the time and space of their childhood. The principal aim of this analysis is to investigate which features of growing up in a context that is perceived as intrinsically Soviet are recalled

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and remediated through the visual image of the Soviet toy. By focusing on the spatial dimensions that “frame” these memories, I look beyond the temporal focus that has characterized many childhood nostalgia studies. I will focus on the discourses used in the comments section on the page Toys of the USSR. Of the 212 comments in total, posted between 2008 and 2014, I chose to include a random sample of 28 comments for the sake of clarity.4 In doing so, the aim is to describe how and to what extent these retrospective comments question and challenge present-day conditions and public policies.

The Ideals and Realities of a “Happy Childhood” In order to assess the symbolic meaning that is given to Soviet toys by the users of The USSR Our Motherland, I begin with a few notes on their original value and on the ideals and realities of the context from which they became disassociated after 1991. The experience of being a child is particularly relevant in the Soviet context because of the active promotion of the idealized notion of a happy Soviet childhood as an indication of the success of the Soviet model (Knight 2009, 790). In the 1930s, the term “Happy Childhood” was officially adopted by the Soviet government as one of the main tropes of propaganda. Viktor Govorkov’s poster Thank You, Beloved Stalin, for a Happy Childhood! (Spasibo liubimomu Stalinu—za schastlivoe detstvo!) from 1936 is iconic in this respect. Stalin is portrayed as a smiling father figure wrapping his arms around a group of seemingly happy children that look at him with admiration (Kelly 2007, 94). Even though childhood was seen as “the material of future adulthood, to be disciplined and shaped as early as might be practicable,” children were allowed to enjoy themselves, to engage in childlike games, and to acquire material goods, as long as an ethos of “rational upbringing” was preserved (ibid., 570). Margaret Peacock argues that while the rest of the population was expected to lead a simple and austere life, in the case of the child, according to Soviet rhetoric, abundance was allowed (2014, 25). In reality, however, the majority of children during the Stalin era did not have more than a few manufactured toys such as miniature cars and alphabet blocks (Kelly 2007, 445). Because of the dependence on raw materials from other dominant sectors of the Soviet industry, in combination with the authorities’ ardent efforts to censor ideologically unsound toys, the average household, especially in rural areas, relied on homemade items. This scarcity was also visible in kindergartens and day nurseries (ibid., 406). From the 1960s onwards, in the context of the Cold War, the production capacity of state factories was seen as the manifestation of a successful revolution. In line with the increasing availability of consumer goods, toys appeared in larger numbers in the shops (Peacock 2014, 25). The

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flagship store Children’s World (Detskii mir) in Moscow started to sell a variety of newly produced toys, sometimes even without an educational purpose, such as models of popular fictional characters and fluffy animals. These toys triggered huge demand among the Soviet public despite the fact that they were quite expensive and would absorb a significant share of the average salary (Kelly 2007, 447). The previous ethos of sobriety and rationality was gradually replaced by one of “everything for the children.” Normative publications emphasized that toys should not merely be hygienic and practical but attractive as well, and they argued that every child in the Soviet Union should have “large numbers of special things” at their disposal (ibid., 393). As Monica Rüthers’ research on the visual representations of childhood and consumption in the 1960s illustrates, this renewed focus was accompanied by an intense visual propaganda campaign. Soviet achievements that improved everyday life were systematically documented, and pictures of toy stores with fully stocked shelves and happy customers circulated in the press (2009, 58). These photographs, however, should not be read as a realistic image of consumerism in the 1960s. They rather functioned as a promise or an imaginary space of the radiant future (ibid., 60). Catriona Kelly argues that in this period: the myth of ‘happy childhood’ was readily absorbed by children themselves. [.  .  .] By no means all children had the opportunity to ‘live the myth,’ but those who did came from the most influential sectors of Soviet society, in terms of public opinion, and thus their experience reinforced its dominance. (2007, 423) During the Perestroika, dolls and toys from Western companies such as Lego, Fisher-Price, and Mattel found their way to the Soviet Union, and they became extremely popular among children and their parents. Journalist Tatyana Volskaya remembers how thrilled she was seeing the shiny and feminine body parts of Barbie for the first time when her uncle brought her one from a business trip to Denmark.5 “This was obviously a creature from another world. I don’t know who was more excited—me or my mother. We sat her down on a little doll’s chair, and there she sat— illuminating everything around her with her presence” (2009). This preference for Western toys was encouraged by the large numbers of branded consumer goods that started to enter the Soviet market and by newspaper articles that either exclaimed the superiority of the new and shiny foreign-made products or reported about the defects of Sovietmade items. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the products that embodied socialism were hastily replaced by the fancy packages of Barbie dolls and Lego construction sets. Soviet toys were stored in the back of

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the closet or thrown away, and nearly overnight they disappeared from the shelves of Children’s World.

Recreating Tropes of an Idealized Past During the 1990s, the everyday lives of post-Soviet citizens were subjected to immense change of a political, social, economic, and cultural nature impacting on their sense of selfhood. The chaos and uncertainty that the rapid and simultaneous processes of democratization, privatization, and Westernization caused contributed to feelings of disappointment, disorientation, alienation, and nostalgia towards aspects of socialist life that now seemed increasingly warmer, safer, more human, and more moral (Boyer 2010, 18). The initial desire to draw a sharp line between the Soviet past and the non-Soviet present gradually exhausted itself by the mid-1990s, and people started to retrace their memories in order to diminish the painful rupture between their past and present (Oushakine 2007, 452). This coping behavior, recreating tropes of an idealized past, was both triggered by the touch of the new reality and the perceived loss of the old one. In other words, even though the nostalgic discourses are past-oriented, they signal several very contemporary projects: voicing estrangement from the post-socialist transition that seemed to be steered from outside the former Soviet space (Boyer 2010, 25–6), and signaling a process of reclaiming autonomy and control. The period of childhood is often central to these nostalgic recollections. In times of transition or uncertainty, the idea of childhood “evokes an idyllic past in the minds of many adults, who associate childhood with stability and rootedness” (Shembel 2016, 80). At the individual level, a remembered, reimagined, and recreated construction of childhood memories offers an imaginary space of naive innocence, allowing a withdrawal from the chaos of contemporary adult life (Creighton 2015, 34). This yearning for the innocence of childhood is by no means a distinct postSoviet feature; already at the turn of the 19th century, English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth expressed longings for a lost childhood (Austin 2003, 75–6). A distinguishing feature of nostalgia for Soviet childhood is the fact that the Soviet myth of a “happy childhood” gained a new status after the breakup of the Soviet Union (Shembel 2016, 73). Post-Soviet citizens who individually experience feelings of estrangement, and therefore perceive the rapid changes as a loss of culture or identity, share their memories online to recreate emotional solidarity (Kelly 2007,  6) and to re-establish a sense of collective identity on the basis of a presumably shared past (Creighton 2015, 35). In informant Nina’s words: “I think we had the best childhood you could possibly have, and the best we had was what we had in childhood. And now I’d like my children to have a childhood like that, a cloud-free, happy childhood” (Kelly

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2011, 10; emphasis added). On the basis of this quote, three observations could be made. First, even though the informant is reminiscing about her own childhood, she uses the word “we” three times. This seems to suggest that she is not talking about her own childhood only, but about growing up in the Soviet Union in a more general sense. Second, she talks about a “cloud-free, happy childhood,” which ties in with the Soviet rhetoric of a “happy childhood.” Finally, she uses her retrospective view of “the best childhood you could possibly have” as an instrument of comparison; a sentimentalized image of the past that she evokes in the post-Soviet context of her own children’s. As the comments discussed in the following sections indicate, it is especially the Soviet ethos of “everything for the children,” the accompanying ideas of social cohesion, and the presumed sociality of public spaces that are adopted by the users to discuss the features of the past in the present circumstances.

A Selective Past Before starting with the substantive analysis of the comments section, a few notes on the dynamics and structure of the online community are in order. One of the platform’s main features is interactivity: for the users, it is both possible to respond to the entries themselves as well as to the comments of other users. A visitor has to create a user account from an authentic IP address in order to post a series of pictures or to comment on the pictures of other users (“Obshchie pravila na saite” n.d.).6 S/he has to choose a nickname in order for the registration process to be completed. A quick look at the usernames at the page under discussion suggests that both actual names (Ekaterina, Vadim) and diminutives (Dimka), as well as geographical denominations (Kazakhstan, Western Siberia) and Sovietrelated nicknames (Soviet person, Pioneer), are being used. With gender often being an exception, which can be inferred when verbs are used in the past tense, it is not possible to retrieve more personal information about the users’ ages, backgrounds, or whereabouts (unless it is included in their usernames). A username, in combination with the date of activity, is visible for the other users when participants create a new topic or when they contribute to the thread of comments at one of the pages. The remediated image of Soviet childhood that is evoked within this particular online community is one that predominantly entails the bright sides of everyday life. Positive memories of a shared period (childhood) within a shared place (the Soviet Union) are exchanged. These recollections are often selective and contextual: people do not necessarily deny the shortages, production errors, and queues that were part of their lives as well, but rather choose to emphasize the positive aspects (Todorova and Gille 2010, 5).7 The photographs are used as a mnemonic device to describe how they remember the features of their favorite toys—the materials they were made off, their colors and smells—and the experience

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of seeing, buying, and playing with them. The tone of their recollections is quite emotional, as the abundance of exclamation marks, in combination with the choice of adjectives (“amazing,” “stunning,” “favorite”), suggests (“Igrushki SSSR”, No. 1). Such a selective focus is promoted in the section “regulations,” drawn up by the administrator: “This website is patriotic and devoted to our Great Motherland [.  .  .]. The main task of this website is to preserve the memory on the USSR in all possible forms” (“Obshchie pravila na saite” n.d.). Yet the comments section shows that the few comments that explicitly question the website’s patriotic pathos or the nostalgic comments of other users have not been deleted. Two users argue, for example, that Soviet toys were “ugly,” “dull,” and “clumsy and monotonous,” and that nowadays the quantity and variety of toys has improved (“Igrushki SSSR”, No. 1 and 3). Two other comments seem to neutralize the overtly positive remarks by stating it is “simply our nostalgia” and “childhood desire” that is beautifying Soviet toys (ibid.). In most instances, other users feel prompted to reply to or “correct” these criticisms. Several users argue that the quality of Soviet toys was of a high level or that their availability was widespread; others engage in a more direct discussion by copy-pasting and criticizing the concerning comment.

The Past in the Present While many users focus on personal memories of (playing with) the toys, the visual image of the Soviet toy functions as a means to retrace or even reimagine the features of the historical time and space in which the toy originally occurred. A significant share of the comments, for example, contains less personal recollections, providing the users’ retrospective view on the social and economic features and achievements of the Soviet system instead. Alex 32 refers to a picture of metal toy soldiers in order to discuss the policies of the authorities in the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that in the Soviet Union toys were made for children to play with, “not in order to squeeze out money from their parents” (ibid., No. 3). Furthermore, he mentions that only once did he accidentally manage to break the tip of the spear of one of his soldiers, for him a sign that Soviet toys, in general, were made of “thick metal” and “strong plastic.” In this instance, the author equates his personal memories on the quality of his toy soldiers with the historical frame of the 1960s and 1970s that surrounded this experience; a frame that he perceives as being characterized by the social and economic justice of the late-Soviet system. Another comment that is exemplary in this respect is that of Zapadnaia Sibir' (Western Siberia): Author: Zapadnaia Sibirʹ; Date: 15 January 2009 14:02 | There were all kinds of toys; many of them were simply beautiful. There were cheap ones that cost only a couple of kopecks, and others

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Mandy Duijn that cost rubles. THERE WAS A TOY INDUSTRY! Our [toy industry]. [.  .  .] Model telephones and scales.  .  . . Wooden toys, rubber ones. . . . Ah! That such a country had to be squandered away. . . . And, more importantly, for what!?? (ibid., No. 1)

In this comment, one can read two explicit references to the features that the author connects to the temporal frame of the 1960s, the period in which he “played.” First, he uses the displayed pictures of different kinds of toys, in combination with a description of his own childhood toy collection, to stress that there was a flourishing toy industry in the Soviet Union. The fact that the sentence is capitalized suggests that he feels the domestic production of toys is an important feature of this Soviet era. Second, he directly refers to the temporal and spatial framework of the Soviet Union through the phrase “[t]hat such a country had to be squandered away.” In this respect, it is not necessarily the toys themselves that his nostalgic longing is directed at but rather the geographical and ideological context that framed his memories of playing with them. What these comments indicate is that the posted pictures simultaneously trigger two memory processes: making sense of the past and dealing with the uncertainties of the present (Boyer 2010). Users “return” to their childhood and the imaginary space in which this “time of innocence” took place in order to cope with feelings of remoteness and alienation towards their past (Friedman 2013, 268). The last two sentences of Zapadnaia Sibirʹ’s comment should be seen in this light. The fact that he uses the word “squandered away” (ugrokhali) to refer to the Soviet Union quite literally suggests that he feels it is a space he no longer has access to. This idea of alienation is reflected in the comments of other users as well, albeit not necessarily in a negative manner. Natalʹia, for example, mentions that it was pleasant to see a picture of her favorite doll again after many years and that it felt like a greeting from childhood. “In those far away times we were not rich and there were not a lot of toys, but that is why they were cherished and loved” (“Igrushki SSSR”, No. 2; emphasis added). The “far away times” that she refers to could be interpreted in two ways: the period of her childhood as well as the historical epoch that framed her childhood memories. Her comment illustrates that she tries to fit in its remoteness into her present-day life. Community members use the platform, too, to criticize the uncertainties of the present with its consumerist aesthetics and market-centered mechanisms through mirroring it with the perceived values and ethics of everyday life under socialism. Alex 32 explicitly compares the quality of Soviet toys with that of currently produced goods from China. He argues that nowadays, when he would buy his nephew a new toy, he could throw it away within a week: “Soviet toys are not the same

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as Chinese low-quality goods” (ibid., No. 3). Presumably, he makes this comparison for two reasons: the alleged “unbreakability” of his Soviet toy collection suggests that not only the quality of toys was better during the Soviet era but that they were produced without profit-orientation, too, as the earlier mentioned phrase “not in order to squeeze out money from their parents” indicates. The last two sentences of Zapadnaia Sibirʹ’s comment—“That such a country had to be squandered away. . . . And, more importantly, for what!??”—also show an indirect and unspecified criticism towards the context of post-Soviet society that had replaced the political and social framework of his childhood. Another user, SvetNikol, does not even refer to the pictures of toys at all, but states in a detailed way that in the Soviet Union people cultivated different values—“taking care of all members of society” being the most important one (ibid., No. 4).8 As examples of these values, he refers to the accessibility of the Soviet health care system, the fact that “everyone received a pension,” and the personal example of his grandparents from a small village, who, with an average salary, “earned enough to buy their sons a house in the city.” Again, in his comment one could read an explicit criticism of the ways in which post-Soviet society is organized. He contrasts values of equality and looking after each other—which he perceives as intrinsically Soviet—with values of money and freedom, characterizing contemporary society as one in which the “free ones can be very rich, but also very poor.” SvetNikol’s comment ties in with a view of the present that many Russians share: the idea that the increased materialism and the “Western obsession with money” contributed to a loss of social cohesion (Kelly 2007, 592). It is safe to say that the privatization of the economic sector contributed directly to a privatization of public life, especially in the larger cities. With the loss of ideological and political purposes, in combination with extensive socio-economic changes, the function of public spaces such as the communal courtyard altered. These spaces, previously used for recreational and communal activities, were now squatted by parked cars (Engel 2006, 203). As in the case of SvetNikol, present-day criticisms of users are mainly referring to abstract concepts of Westernization, globalization, and marketization and touch upon the concurrent topic of social inequality. They seldom formulate concrete demands as to what they would like to change, though. There are three main discourses in this respect. First, some users argue that the toys that are produced nowadays are of a lower quality, criticizing contemporary toy imports from China. Petr, for example, exclaims that he would have liked his children to play with the “high-quality toys” represented on the pictures but that all he could find in the stores was “Chinese chemistry” (“Igrushki SSSR”, No. 3). Two comments condemn the influx of these products for having “destroyed” the national toy industry and claim that Soviet toys were prettier and

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of a better quality than the “Lego for Western retards” (ibid.). The fact that they explicitly refer to contemporary toys as being “Western” signals again an estrangement from the economic transition, one that is perceived as an uncritical Westernization of the Russian market. Second, there are several comments stressing that contemporary toys have less emotional value. Alangus considers present-day toys to be “faceless” in contrast to Soviet toys (ibid., No. 4). Especially the word “faceless” is remarkable. It suggests that contemporary toys do not have an “identity”; one cannot associate them with some kind of unique national or collective identity because they are sold all around the world. Therefore, one could read his comment as an implicit critique against the cultural “homogenization” that the recent market-centered changes entail. Third, several users like Dmitrii S argue that the Soviet Union offered toys for everyone, whereas nowadays children of poor families do not have the means to purchase them (ibid., No. 3). Remarkably, on the one hand, many users criticize post-Soviet society’s presumed focus on money, possession, and individuality and hail the alleged inclusiveness and sociability of Soviet society. Simultaneously, their comments focus on individual ownership. A significant share vividly describes the delight and pride of purchasing or owning a certain toy, even though there is an obvious lack of “collective” pursuits in this reminiscing. The comment of willy goose is exemplary in this respect: Author: willy goose; Date: 9 November 2008 18:52 | Among the photographs I found my Planetokhod [a model space exploration vehicle]. [.  .  .] True, it cost almost a quarter of the standard salary of a Soviet laborer and the battery only lasted for approximately 30 minutes. But then the joy of owning goes beyond everything, at least, for me! (ibid., No. 1; emphasis added) The act of consumption, however ironic this may seem, appears to be one of the central features of this kind of post-Soviet nostalgia. Especially the retro-projection of individual ownership is typical in this respect, firmly belonging to the symbolic discourse of capitalism.

The Space of Childhood As mentioned before, in several comments childhood not only becomes a time but also a space that people refer to. Users reminisce about the spaces in which the memories of playing with the presented toys are anchored. A first element that suggests this spatialization is the recurring pattern of the words “journey” and “excursion.” Many users thank the administration for giving them “this wonderful excursion” to their childhood or for this online “journey,” suggesting a movement in space rather

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than in time (ibid., No. 3). In line with this observation, Stas writes: “MANY THANKS for the given pleasure!!!!!!!! It was like I visited my childhood!!!!!!” (ibid., No. 2; emphasis added). Again, the word “visited” indicates a change in location. Millie Creighton argues that collective nostalgic longing frequently denotes a desire to return to the geographical place of childhood. The time of childhood thus becomes the “space” that people perceive as problem free and where security and belonging were assured (2015, 34, 37). The characteristics of the time of their personal childhood are linked to the collective spatial context in which it took place. This “confusion between time and space” contributes to the image of a spatial reality that should be seen as invented rather than necessarily authentic (ibid., 35, 37). Within the comments section, visitors frequently refer to two levels of “Soviet space.” On the one hand, there are users who remember places that played an important role during their childhood, such as their school, the communal courtyard, the local toy store, a (luna)park or the Pioneer Palace. In their comments, there is often—albeit not necessarily—a direct link between one of the toys and the location in which he or she used to play with it. Other users refer to the entirety of the geographical space of the Soviet Union by attaching feelings that they retrospectively experience by remembering it. Within these comments, the users connect their personal biography to the collective cultural topography of the Soviet Union. In the latter cases recollections seem to reflect the official spatial rhetoric omnipresent during the Soviet era. Under Stalin the notion of landscape—or space in the broader sense—was “imbued with remarkable ideological prominence” (Naiman 2003, xiv).9 Because space is considered to be one of the most stable and basic human notions, geographical references attained a great concentration in cultural products “intended for automatic perception” (Dobrenko 2003, 163). Research on postage stamps, tourism, advertisements, and maps illustrates that citizens were symbolically mobilized in various ways to internalize the “imaginary geography” of the Soviet Union (Naiman 2003, xiv). As in the case of the photographs of toy stores, these cultural products could be seen as utopian representations. They portrayed the Soviet Union as a space of “grand economic and cultural construction” (Dobrenko 2003, 166) and as the united “socialist motherland,” where one would be welcomed “like a native son” everywhere, always finding “discreet hospitality” (ibid., 186). This mental map of the Soviet Union also found its way to the recollections of the users. Ksenia, for instance, writes: “How can one forget the LOVE, the happiness, the feeling that the whole country is YOURS?” (“Igrushki SSSR”, No. 4, emphasis added). The fact that she nostalgically refers to the feeling that the “whole country” was hers suggests that, from her adult point of view, she perceives the Soviet Union as a space of widespread accessibility and unity.

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This notion of Soviet space as one of unity is also reflected in the comment of Ekaterina: “Many thanks for this website, there is much, that reminds me of our childhood. . . . We had great toys in our native Soviet Union!!!!!!!!” (ibid., No. 2; emphasis added). The term “our” (nashego) indicates that she does not refer to her personal memories only, but rather to the spatio-temporal context in which her generation grew up. She does not specify, however, in which year she was born or in which decade “their” childhood took place. The usage of the words “we,” “our,” and “native” (u nas, nashem, rodnom) in the second sentence illustrates again that the pictures have triggered a memory process that is characterized by the intermingling of temporal and spatial dimensions. Even though the pictures merely illustrate the toys that she may have played with, they signify the broader framework of the Soviet Union in which such toys were produced. The photographs thus function as a synecdoche, indicating the landscape of the past. Whereas Ekaterina and Ksenia refer to the space of the Soviet Union as a whole, other users rather describe the tangible places that played an important role during their childhood or, more specifically, during the activity of play. Ifkotov, for example, mentions how one should remember the numerous modelling sections in the Houses of Pioneers where children were involved in making their own model cars, planes, and ships, emphasizing that everything was free of charge, including the materials and tools (ibid., No. 5). Tamara, on a more personal level, vividly recollects how she was not allowed to play with her favorite game at her grandparents’ place: “The game was kept on the highest shelf of the closet, and only when [my grandparents] went to their distant vegetable garden, I managed to pull it out, standing on a chair and admiring it” (ibid., No. 2). As Kelly has observed, the childhood memories of “many informants from the ‘everything for the children’ generation often involved a trip to the dacha or a toy shop” (2007, 598). The photographs on the website, in this respect, trigger the users’ memories on the spatio-social context in which these toys and games were used. In several instances, this context does not merely function as a background but rather as an active participant in these recollections. A point in case is Sergei (gostʹ), who, upon seeing a picture of a Rubik’s Cube, writes about the tournaments that were held at his school when he was twelve years old and where he achieved his personal record of one minute and twenty seconds (ibid.). There are two spaces of childhood that occur most often in the comments section: the communal courtyard (dvor)—or the central street in smaller villages as its equivalence—and the local toy store. In the case of the former, it is mostly the act of play and sociality that this space is remembered for. Ruslan recollects how during the summer, from morning until evening, the whole street would engage in organized hockey championships (ibid.), and Andrei mentions that he used to play with

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his cousin and his Interkosmos (a miniature tracked space vehicle) in the courtyard, always envying him because it rolled over the grass and branches like a “real [vehicle]” (ibid., No. 1). Alʹbert’s comment, in which he sadly writes that all his toys are “here” on the web page, whereas he cannot “recognize” (uznatʹ) the courtyard, also suggests that his memories of his toys and the dvor are closely intertwined (ibid., No. 5). In the case of the toy store, on the other hand, it is rather a desire of owning that is recalled. User selenulka, for example, mentions that she would like to return “to those toy stores” so badly and remembers the shop displays and “pressing [her] nose against the window” (ibid., No. 2). Natalʹia M also remembers “THOSE counters with toys” from the late 1960s, on which she used to see “almost all the toys” reproduced on the website (ibid., No. 4). While these users remember the toy store in a way that largely coincides with the carefully constructed image studied by Rüthers, two other users take the opposite direction and recall that the most desired toys usually did not reach the shelves of a store. Instead, they associate the store with shortages and the act of waiting. Vzroslaia devochka (Grown-up girl) mentions that she was promised a beautiful and expensive gypsy doll if she would pass her second year with excellent marks. By the time she did, the dolls went out of stock. “I waited for her for two years, but she did not wait for me in return” (ibid., No. 1). Sergei (gostʹ) recollects that his parents got his Rubik’s Cubes at the black market or “through acquaintances” (po blatu) because in the toy stores they were gone even before they reached the shop assistant (ibid., No. 2). The most explicit comment in which the spaces of Soviet childhood are remembered is a poem posted by Giatsynt. The poem seems to indicate that it is not the toy itself, but rather the spatial surroundings in which it was used, that are reminisced about in a nostalgic way. Considering the length of the poem, I have included an extract:10 Author: Giatsynt; Date: 22 December 2010 13:19 | I would very much like to visit the eighties once again. // That the machine with soda cans would stand at the bus stop. // That you could go to the cinema for 10 kopecks, and that, in the courtyard, grandfathers would play domino. [. . .] // That I would spend the Sunday’s with mother in the park, and that the model soldiers would be of the color red. That this all would never stop. [. . .] // That at the parade, the balloons would be high in the sky, and that, in short, everybody would have a blast! // No, darn it, everything will be the other way around: a cool car, the boss is a freak. . . . The glorious times ended a long time ago, now we can only see them in the old movies. (ibid., No. 4) Giatsynt’s comment shows that the material object itself plays a marginal role in his recollections of childhood. For example, he only briefly

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mentions his collection of model soldiers “of the color red” (krasnogo tsveta). I assume that the explicit reference to the color red, in this respect, could be read not only as a description of the actual material but also as a direct hint towards the broader context of Soviet heritage (the color of communism, the Soviet flag, and the Red Army). Another toy he mentions in passing is the game dominoes. Even though children play dominoes too, in this user’s memories the game is linked to old men playing it in the courtyard. The fact that this image has been mediated by so many films and stories, such as Walking the Streets of Moscow (Ia shagayu po Moskve, 1964), might indicate that the “personal” memory of the author is mediated rather than authentic. This would suggest that this common trope of Soviet everyday life was internalized by the author. The spaces of Giatsynt’s childhood, on the other hand, play a central role in the poem. Besides the dvor, he refers to the bus stop, the cinema, the park, and the parade; all of them places that he regularly visited when he was young. These places probably have not disappeared in the material sense. However, they carry other connotations in a different, postSoviet context. The fact that he mentions the cinema in combination with the low price of a ticket (“10 kopecks”) could refer to his experience that during Soviet times going to the cinema was a regular childhood activity. The description of how he recalls the communal courtyard suggests that it gained another function in the post-Soviet context.11 In this respect, what he recollects and what he feels to be lost is the social function that the spaces of his childhood entailed.

Conclusion As the comments on the page Toys of the USSR indicate, the nostalgic memories connected to Soviet toys and childhood are often framed and made sense of by the temporal and spatial dimensions that surrounded them. These spatio-temporal “frames” teach us more—albeit often in a very implicit manner—about the users’ criticisms directed at present-day public facilities and policies. Channeled through childhood memories of toys, they seem to discuss the perceived loss of social cohesion, the growing inequality, the lack of public spaces and facilities for children, and the class-segregated nature of new social spaces. I use the word “implicit” in this context because in most instances the precise object of their criticisms is not directly formulated. It is rather the negative aspects of the more abstract processes of globalization and capitalization that is referred to, possibly, as Boyer has mentioned, because it taps into the intuitively familiar, long-standing historical narratives regarding the relationship with “the West” (Boyer 2006). Despite this implicitness, it is clear that the visual image of the Soviet toy functions as a powerful mnemonic device to discuss the accompanying features of the remembered and reimagined time and space in contrast to

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present-day conditions. The growing body of nostalgic Russian-language online communities, especially on social media platforms such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki (Classmates),12 would provide a fruitful source for future research projects on the complex relationship between Soviet childhood objects and spaces that they have come to signify.

Notes 1. All translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise. 2. The website can be accessed through www.savok.name. The Russian slang term “sovok” (spelled in the web address as “savok,” most probably to indicate the way in which the word is pronounced) is interesting in this respect because it refers in an ironic way to someone or something in post-Soviet society “belonging” to the Soviet era. In 2012, the website changed ownership. Due to disagreements over commercialization and a changed editorial policy, the administrator and some users decided to leave the online community. 3. See, for example, Berdahl (2010), Boym (2001), Kalinina (2014), Todorova and Gille (2010), Yurchak (2006). 4. One more comment was posted on January 9, 2017, but this comment only contains a link to another website. 5. Soviet dolls were usually rather shapeless and breastless, with indefinable gender characteristics. 6. According to the rules of conduct of the website, it is prohibited to create an account with the use of anonymous proxy servers or in a way that the authentic IP address is hidden. When the administrator discovers such an account, it will be deleted in order to bar “clones.” 7. There are several comments on the website that explicitly deny these negative aspects of the Soviet Union, but in the majority of comments, users simply focus on the positive aspects of everyday life. 8. Even though SvetNikol’s comment is predominantly positive when referring to the perceived values of Soviet society, he does mention that these values were mainly cultivated as a result of feelings of fear. 9. Little has been written about the de-Stalinization of the official spatial rhetoric since the 1950s. It is safe to assume that the mentioned notions of landscape were slowly readjusted throughout time but that they remained paradigmatic up until the Brezhnev era. 10. I have chosen to translate the poem as literally as possible, which, unfortunately, meant that I had to let go of the original rhyme scheme. 11. This idea is reflected in Kelly’s research as well; she quotes one of her informants who elaborates on the changes “that had overtaken courtyard life in recent years” and on the rising number of cars in it that had “adversely impacted on children’s play space” (Kelly 2007, 592). 12. Examples include the communities “THOSE BORN IN THE USSR” (88,541 members) and “Nostalgia. Memories of childhood” (8,133 members).

Works Cited Austin, Linda M. 2003. “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.” Studies in Romanticism 42 (1): 75–98. Berdahl, Daphne. 2010. On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Boyer, Dominic. 2006. “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany.” Public Culture 18 (2): 361–82. Boyer, Dominic. 2010. “From Algos to Autonomos: Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 17–28. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Creighton, Millie. 2015. “Nostalgia, Anthropology of.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by James D. Wright, 34–8. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd. Second Edition. Dobrenko, Evgeny. 2003. “The Art of Social Navigation: The Cultural Topography of the Stalin Era.” In The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, 163–200. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Engel, Barbara. 2006. “Public Space in the Blue Cities in Russia.” Progress in Planning 66 (3): 147–239. Friedman, Rebecca. 2013. “Home and Hearth: Representing Childhood in Fin de Siècle Russia.” In Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage, edited by Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe, 257–69. London and New York: Routledge. Kalinina, Ekaterina. 2014. Mediated Post-Soviet Nostalgia. Doctoral dissertation, Södertörn University, Huddinge. Kelly, Catriona. 2007. Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia. 1890–1991. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kelly, Catriona. 2011. “A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Licensed Happiness for Little Ones.” In Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, edited by Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, 3–18. London: Anthem Press. Knight, Rebecca. 2009. “Representations of Soviet Childhood in Post-Soviet Texts by Liudmila Ulitskaia and Nina Gabrielian.” The Modern Language Review 104 (3): 790–808. Naiman, Eric. 2003. “Introduction.” In The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, xi–xvii. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2007. “‘We’re Nostalgic But We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia.” The Russian Review 66 (3): 451–82. Peacock, Margaret. 2014. Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books. Rüthers, Monica. 2009. “Kindheit, Kosmos und Konsum in Sowjetischen Bildwelten der 1960er Jahre: Zur Herstellung von Zukunftsoptimismus.” Historische Anthropologie 17 (1): 56–74. Shembel, Daria. 2016. “Born in the USSR: Children vs. Ideology and the Impact of Database Cinema.” Slovo 28 (2): 69–84. SSSR Nasha Rodina. 2008a. “Obshchie Pravila na Saite.” http://savok.name/index. php?do=rules. SSSR Nasha Rodina. 2008b. “Igrushki SSSR.” http://savok.name/152-igrushki.html. Todorova, Maria and Zsuzsa Gille, eds. 2010. Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Volskaya, Tatyana. 2009. “When Barbie Conquered the Soviet Union.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 9, 2009. www.rferl.org/a/When_Barbie_ Conquered_The_Soviet_Union/1506690.html.

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Wesseling, Elisabeth, ed. 2017. Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture. New York: Routledge. West, Tamara. 2014. “Remembering Displacement: Photography and the Interactive Spaces of Memory.” Memory Studies 7 (2): 176–90. Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. New York: Princeton University Press.

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Second-Hand Nostalgia On Charms and Spells of the Soviet Trukhliashechka Serguei Alex. Oushakine

The bond that ties the individual or the collective to the thing is the most fundamental, the most constitutive among social bonds. Boris Arvatov, Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing, 1923 . . . one could keep digging into this shit, or one could burn it down . . . Danila Tkachenko, a Russian photo-artist, 2017

During the three decades since the collapse of communism, we have witnessed the emergence of post-communist nostalgia. We have witnessed the emergence of its academic equivalent, too. Introducing an edited volume on cultural development in post-1989 Eastern Europe, Maria Todorova pointedly noticed in 2010 that there was a “specter .  .  . haunting the world of academia: the study of post-Communist nostalgia” (2010, 1). This specter has materialized in dozens of books and hundreds of essays, creating an insightful and vibrant field of nostalgia scholarship. Looking back at this first wave of nostalgia studies today, it is easy to notice the key political and theoretical concerns that preoccupied the first wave of nostalgia studies. Obvious (and significant) differences notwithstanding, nostalgia in the post-communist world was predominantly perceived as a coping mechanism, as a defense and reaction formation, aimed to create an alternative to the brutal advancement of neoliberalism or, at least, an imaginary escape from it. In these studies, “Red” or “Communist” nostalgia was frequently linked to memory and remembrance, being called upon to bring back, to revitalize, or to retain in some way the individual and collective experience of socialism. Prosthetic and substitutive, such nostalgic reminiscences, nonetheless, have often been read by scholars as critical commentaries on the present and as demands for a different future (see e.g. Todorova and Gille 2010). Given the generational makeup of these scholars and their interlocutors, it was only natural that the first wave of nostalgia studies was a subcultural creation of “ex-communists.” The studies focused primarily on those who lived through the socialist period, and, equally important,

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this scholarship was produced mostly by scholars who tended to have some firsthand experience of socialism, too. In other words, studies of post-communist nostalgia were an outcome of what could be called an analytical and experiential double vision, in which the direct familiarity with “really existing socialism” was combined with the post-socialist knowledge of socialism’s demise. This doubly-structured positionality activated the lived experience of the past as a material foundation for building various nostalgic superstructures in the present. Or, to quote a recent study with a characteristic conclusion, “[m]emories inherent in the post-communist nostalgic thoughts may [. . .] be based on real common experience of people and are not solely a product of biased memory” (Prusik and Lewicka 2016, 679). Be that as it may, the experience-driven approach of the first wave of nostalgia studies might have run its course as the first truly postcommunist generation is taking over creative industries, social media, and politics. Engaging with socialist themes and symbols, this generation does not shy away from framing such interactions as “nostalgic.” But clearly, this rendition of “Red nostalgia” is not rooted in any direct experience of everyday socialism, making the original double vision of nostalgia studies—with its emphasis on the trauma of transition and the therapeutic effect of nostalgic reaction formations—analytically unproductive and ethnographically inappropriate. In what follows, I make an attempt to approach the second wave of post-communist nostalgia without relying on socialist experience as a key interpretative and explanatory frame. Through a series of cases, I show that the decreasing prominence of the firsthand knowledge of socialist lifestyle is compensated by the increasing visibility and importance of socialist things. I call this type of interaction with the material culture of the socialist period second-hand nostalgia. This description, I hope, retains the somewhat melancholic longing for the times past (typical for any nostalgia) while pointing, simultaneously, to a condition of historical disconnect from originary contexts, which made possible the objects of current nostalgic fascination in the first place. While second-hand nostalgia is not exactly ahistorical, it significantly downplays the importance of stories of origin. Rustem Valiakhmetov, a director of Russia’s first museum of socialist daily life in Kazan’, which I discuss later, described his museum collection as a picture “painted with things.” In this description objects are expressive means rather than encoded messages. Biographies of things are eclipsed here by their faktura, color, or form. What is essential about the objects of second-hand nostalgia is not their ability to communicate or symbolize the proper historical location of these objects’ appearance. Rather, it is their performative capacity to engender various sensations (e.g. tactile, visual, or aural) in their audience: objects are approached not as vehicles of memory, but instead of memory (Oushakine 2018). Danila Tkachenko, a visual artist

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whose work I also discuss here, came up with the term trukhliashechka to describe old “things that stir up.” This made-up word is rooted in the Russian trukha, i.e. a pile of dust left behind by a decomposed object. Literally it means “a little trashy thing” or “a tiny piece of rot.” A term of endearment and a description of something that is rotten beyond repair, trukhliashechka is a material thing in a state of its (playful) afterlife. Despite losing its physical integrity, it continues to reverberate in those who handle it. It is precisely this enticing postmortem agency of Soviet trukhliashechkas that I am interested in exploring here. By foregrounding the analytical and interpretative possibilities of things for studying nostalgic attachments to material artifacts of the past, I follow the current debates among scholars of new materialisms, filtering them through the works of their predecessors—Russian constructivists and formalists of the 1920s. Before I proceed to my cases, I recap a few points from these debates, which are essential for my own discussion. Almost 100 years ago, Boris Arvatov, one of the key cultural theorists in post-revolutionary Russia, insisted that under socialism material culture should undergo a radical reconceptualization. “Thing-systems” (veshchnye sistemy), as he called it, would not be perceived as collections of immobile and inactive objects. Rather, within a new “methodological approach to the world of things,” thing-systems would be treated as constellations of “form-inducing” (formoobrazuiushchaia) agents, each of which would be a labor tool and a collaborator (orudie i sotrudnik) at the same time (1925, 75–6, 79; Oushakine 2014, 200–5). The term formoobrazuiushchaia that Arvatov used to describe the active shaping impact of the thing has no direct equivalent in English. It can be rendered as “formative,” “form-inducing,” or “morphogenetic,” yet these options miss an essential component of Arvatov’s term: -obrazovanie points to creation, education, and image at the same time. In other words, the formoobrazuuishchaia thing is not only a tool and a collaborator. Also, it is a model, an instruction, and a source of inspiration for modeling. Not unlike Tkachenko’s trukhliashechka, Arvatov’s thingsystem sets in motion—stirs up, indeed—a process of creation without over-determining the outline or content of the emerging activity, feeling, or object. More recently, Ian Hodder offered a productive framework for operationalizing the process of entanglement of things and people discussed by Arvatov. For Hodder, the thing’s material qualities (shape, texture, density, weight, viscosity, etc.) delineate and enable a range of possible actions and experiences. These affordances, however, will remain dormant until they generate particular resonances within the individual—in the shape of some sort of embodiment (e.g. an emotion or a desire). It is crucial for Hodder’s model that this “tight skein of humans and things” does rely on a certain form of conceptual abstraction while being ostensibly non-discursive. For instance, the archeologist explains that “the

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resonances of sugar are related to bodily desire,” generating in the end a relatively coherent constellation of associations, practices, and arrangements anchored by the idea of “sweetness” (2012, 136–7). Or in a slightly different way: “Conscious abstraction and bodily coherence work with affordances to produce a particular way of being entangled, in which humans have bodies of a particular kind and things have forms of a particular kind” (ibid., 132). Hodder’s conceptual triangle (affordances–resonance–abstraction) helps understand the resonant quality of trukhliashechka and other objects of second-hand nostalgia. Stirring up the individual, the thing’s materials reverberate in a variety of the individual’s actions, which, in turn, are brought together and semanticized under the umbrella of “nostalgia.” I want to add a fourth, temporal, dimension to this model, though. For Arvatov and his colleagues, the continuous, reverberating impact of thing-systems was not limited to their entangling effect only. Expanding Arvatov’s view about the modeling capacity of the material thing, Nikolai Chuzhak, another major cultural theorist of the 1920s, insisted that the crucial importance of morphogenetic things had to do with their ability to provide examples for “the formation of dialectic models of tomorrow” (1923b, 146). Things were expected to structure the individual’s daily habitus just as much as they were endowed with some programmatic and prescriptive quality. The “unmediated creation” of material things, their “rhythmically organized production,” was supposed to be a major method of zhiznestroenie, or the life-building activity, in the new country (1923a, 35, 37). The nostalgic nature of things that I discuss here requires some modification of Chuzhak’s approach, and I want to reverse his futurist view of material things as models for tomorrow. The redeployment of secondhand things, I suggest, could be just as successful for modeling the life of yesterday (for more discussion, see Kremkova 1926). By looking at three recent nostalgic projects in Kazan’, Minsk, and Moscow, I explore the morphogenetic capacities of Soviet trukhliashechkas, of those halfdisappeared, decomposing, or abandoned fragments of the past, which, nonetheless, continue to exercise their agentive power by capturing, stirring, and charming the individual. What kinds of affordances are being taken up and what configurations of entanglement are established in these cases? What types of order does this system of second-hand things induce? And more generally: how does second-hand nostalgia organize available material archives in order to animate a sensible impact? What versions of the past does it enable?

Painting With Things Museums and exhibitions dedicated to Soviet and, more broadly, socialist, lifestyle became ubiquitous during the first decade of this century. Jonathan Bach argued recently in an essay on museums of daily life in

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the German Democratic Republic that these—mostly private—institutions deploy everyday material culture as a “vehicle for an implicit argument for legitimately representing the past” (2015, 139). Rows of teapots, racks of clothing, and stacks of LPs are supposed to produce an objectivist and authentic display of socialist years uncontaminated by postsocialist revisionist discourses. Encouraging visitors to engage freely in tactile contacts with the objects on display, these exhibitions are decidedly interactive and deliberately non-monumental. Their thing-systems made the past highly informal and ostensibly non-discursive: history is here to be touched, grasped, and handled. For Bach, these museums enable a kind of “antipolitics” that foregrounds— through material remains of the socialist past—the lived experience of ex-GDR citizens in the situation of their current “powerlessness over the rapid dominance of Western political and media institutions” (2015, 136). Cluttered with multiple variations of the same objects, such museums implicitly invited the audience to read the physical excess of stuff as a silent evidentiary support for the idea that life under socialism could not be reduced to a dominant narrative about lack and deprivation in the form of perennial shortages, censorship, political repression, and violence. It is the incompleteness of this picture that makes such museums especially problematic. As Bach rightly points out, the apolitical quality of these object-driven exhibitions risks slipping into “a dangerous trivialization of the [Communist] dictatorship” (2015, 137). But what happens when the spirit of the actually lived socialism, which permeates such exhibitions, is gone—together with the experience of current “powerlessness”? When the indexical nature of (socialist) things is not transparent anymore, do these rooms—flooded with toys, jackets, and communist insignia—still resonate? What kind of cultural values could these trukhliashechkas abstract, then? How do they fit in the mental environment of a visitor who never experienced socialism firsthand? To put it simply, does second-hand nostalgia work at all? In the summer of 2012, I visited the Museum of Socialist Daily Life (Muzei sotsialisticheskogo byta) located in an old historical building in downtown Kazan’, the capital of Tatarstan (Russia). With the help of the city hall administration, the museum was founded by Rustem Valiakhmetov, a professional photographer and designer. Valiakhmetov had been collecting Soviet memorabilia and clothing since the early 1990s, using them as props for his photographic projects. Over the years, he accumulated a diverse archive of late-Soviet material culture: books and LPs, propaganda artifacts, musical instruments, jeans, coats, and children’s toys. During a photo session, one of his customers, Andrei Makarevich, a major Soviet rock star and the leader of a band appropriately called Time Machine (Mashina Vremeni), encouraged the collector to put all these things on display. Thus the museum was born. When

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in August 2011 it was officially opened in a former communal apartment, it branded itself as the first museum of socialist daily life in Russia (Timofeev 2014). On my museum trip, the entryway to the exposition was decorated with a creative sign (Figure 2.1). An old metal washboard was turned

Figure 2.1 “Welcome to the Universe of Positive Emotions!” The entrance sign of the Museum of Soviet Everyday Life in Kazan’. Source: Photo by the author, 2012.

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into a display. Its wavy surface presented a photograph of the first Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, bringing the cosmic and the mundane together. A material relic of socialism was supplied with (a photo of) a human face, combining a symbol of Soviet technological progress with an epitome of the dreadful dullness of the Soviet daily life. At the bottom of the board, a hand-written description enticed visitors with a promise of an affective experience: “Welcome to the Universe of Positive Emotions!!!” The museum itself was a hybrid of a warehouse, an antique shop, and a flea market. A loft-like room with exposed brick walls was filled with a polyphonic, if not haphazard, combination of stuff. As is true with many museums of socialist daily life, the “museum” aspect of the Kazan institution was less than conventional. Very few objects were labeled. Almost none of them revealed their authorship or provenance. The absence of proper attribution certainly increased the informality of the exhibition. It sent a very particular message, too: no prior knowledge was required for understanding or interacting with the objects on display. Things were supposed to speak or, rather, act for themselves, without mediation. The museum, in other words, did not turn things into “representations.” It just provided a platform for their actions. Suggesting no coherent narrative, things were grouped by their function, with little regard to their content or origin. The book of children’s songs Solnyshko (Little Sun) was hanging next to a propaganda booklet called Where Mao Zedong’s Group Leads China (Kuda vedet Kitai gruppa Mao Tsee-Duna) The Soviet pioneer’s headgear was displayed near a Soviet-made Borsalino-style felt hat. The sheer number of things was disorienting. Their juxtaposition was confusing. And yet, there was something fitting and unifying about this assortment of Soviet daily items. Many objects could be touched. Some of them could be tried on. And a few could be even bought—“to support the museum,” as multiple signs suggestively nudged. Certainly uprooted but not quite decontextualized, these artifacts alternated between presenting themselves as museum pieces and as things that could still find a place in someone’s home. Without a message to convey or a story to tell, the museum had to rely on a different strategy of design: a narrative organization was replaced by a spatial one. Things required to be organized for serial clustering. Racks of coats, formations of shoes, or lineups of hats were arranged vertically (in glass cases and shelves on the walls) or horizontally (on the floor and multiple tables). Their display appeared to have no hidden agenda: there was no preferred focus to discover or main viewpoint to assume. Everything seemed to be equally (un)important, and the leveled way of their organization articulated a basic principle of this thing-system: there were no hierarchies in this world of things (cf. Oushakine 2010, 643–4). Instead, colors, shapes, and textures were entangled into a labyrinth of late-Soviet materials. The socialist time (of the objects) and the post-socialist

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space (of the museum) were intertwined and encoded as a haptic and scopic progression. The repetitive exposure of similar objects created visual patterns, transforming these objects into examples of genres and types of the Soviet thing-system, and things’ individual distinctions only reinforced the overall systemic effect by revealing paths of possible “deviations” from the norm. While being similar, artifacts did not appear uniformed, and while being grouped, they were not ordered (by size, color, or shape; Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Archiving the Soviet thing-system. In the Museum of Soviet Everyday Life in Kazan’. Source: Stills from a promotion video by Aleksandr Makarov, 2014. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oLuv-38nsI)

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In one of his interviews, Valiakhmetov compared his curatorial approach to painting, specifying that “instead of colors, he paints with things” (Muzei Sotsbyta 2014). The metaphor seems to be appropriate, provided that Valiakhmetov’s installations are viewed not as three-dimensional versions of the nature morte genre but as an unrestrained variation of mid-century abstract paintings, which similarly privileged the dizzying power of textured shapes over the narrative clarity of figurative depictions. The compositional structure of Valiakhmetov’s “paintings” was purposefully anarchic and multidimensional. Bombarding his viewers with diverse physical stimuli, he maximized the chances for their possible resonance (Figure 2.3). Valiakhmetov’s appeal to aesthetics was not accidental, and the welcoming board’s emphasis on “positive emotions” was telling in this respect. The director clarified in an interview that the museum was not conceived as a storage room for old things (despite what its look might have suggested): We select things for our collection by following one key principle. For us, what is crucial is not the actual object itself but those feelings that it might bring. It is the visitor’s emotions and memories that are central for us. What the visitor can get in our place is already somewhere within him, within his memory. We just help “to fish it out” ( pomogaem dostat’ ), using very simple methods. (Valiakhmetov 2012)

Figure 2.3 “Painting with things.” In the Museum of Soviet Everyday Life in Kazan’. Source: A still from a promotion video by Aleksandr Makarov, 2014. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oLuv-38nsI)

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Correlating things with emotions, the museum channeled affect through material forms. It approached the artifacts as affect triggers and mnemonic objects, counting on their ability to reverberate (Stattford 2007, 23–4). The cacophonic assemblage of shapes, textures, and colors was both a tacit acknowledgement of things’ inherent vibrancy and, simultaneously, a sign of the curator’s incapacity to predict what shape or fabric could spark a reaction. “Fishing out” emotions, Valiakhmetov relied on a wide variety of bait (cf. Abramov 2013, 109). It is hard to tell how successful the museum actually has been in using things for building its “universe of positive emotions.” There are some signs suggesting that Soviet trukhliashechkas have not lost their charm so far and that second-hand nostalgia seems to be a real thing. Sharing the results of his work, Valiakhmetov noticed in an interview that his original idea about the target audience proved to be not entirely correct. Initially, he aimed only at those “who grew up with these things,” expecting that the last Soviet generation (“of the 25–50 year olds”) would use the museum as a pedagogical tool of sorts. “They could bring their kids here and tell them: ‘this is how it was; that’s how we lived’.” But the interest seemed to have gone beyond that. “A younger generation have expressed a lot of interest, too”—Valiakhmetov observed—“they are intrigued. They just could not fathom the fact that these things were actually used in real life” (Valiakhmetov 2017). This interest was strong enough to push Valiakhmetov to expand his universe of positive feelings. In December 2017, he opened a more edited (and much more glitzy) version of his museum of socialist daily life in the middle of St. Petersburg’s tourist district (Muzei 2019).

Real. Soviet. Moving In Kazan’ I could not gather any ethnographic data to support or disprove the validity of the comments made by the museum’s director. However, in September 2014, during my fieldwork in Minsk (Belarus), I had an opportunity to collect responses from visitors of a similar exhibition. Called Back in the BSSR/Znoŭ u BSSR: Posters and Things of the Soviet Epoch, the show was organized by the Union of Belarusian Designers in the Museum of Urban History of Minsk. It ran from May to September 2014, and I attended it right before its closure. I was able to photograph the complete guest book of the exhibit, in which visitors wrote down their comments. Almost 100 pages of comments provide useful information about the ways such exhibitions are experienced and conceptualized by their audience. Granted, these comments belong to a highly formulaic and excessively positive genre: “Thank you for the exhibit. It was wonderful” was one of the most common entries. And yet, these entries do represent a scope of verbal expressions that people rely on to share in public the perception

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of the exhibit that they just saw. Many comments were signed: visitors often indicated their names and hometowns. Sometimes their signatures included occupation and age. Judging by this book, the audience could be divided into three uneven groups: parents with children, school students on organized museum tours, and various tourists—mostly from the former Soviet Union but also from Europe, Asia, and the US (during the first few weeks of the show, Minsk hosted the World Hockey Championship, and the museum evidently became a destination for foreign tourists). Mostly comments were in Russian, with a couple dozen entries in Belarusian, occasional comments in Ukrainian, and several dozen statements in various non-Slavic languages. As the curators explained, the exhibition was meant initially to be just a show of post-war Soviet posters. However, in the process of selecting the posters, the organizers decided to supplement the iconographic materials with material objects of the post-war period. Most objects came from the museum’s own archives and a handful of private collections, but some were actively sought after (and found) through social media (Tut. by 2014). Organizationally, the show had some similarity to the museum in Kazan’. Everyday items were also grouped in rows or clusters with no labels or descriptions: their function and purpose were supposed to be self-explanatory. The excessive number of glass jars, devices for developing photos, or radio- and TV-boxes was used to demonstrate both the qualitative diversity within the limits of various daily life genres and the quantitative abundance of the mundane (Figure 2.4). The spatial distribution of the two media—the posters on white walls and the objects on tables covered with red fabric—created an interesting clash of contents. The pictorial representations of the Soviet period displayed highly stylized, statuesque images of working Soviet men and women. Stressing their industrial achievements, the posters’ slogans encouraged the socialist competition for over-fulfilling the quotas of the five-year plans (Figure 2.5). Meanwhile, the objects on the ground materialized very different aspects of Soviet life. TV sets, portable gramophones, skis, skates, etc. highlighted various leisure activities. In turn, cooking utensils, stoves, flat irons, or sewing machines visualized daily chores. This strictly physical arrangement of posters and things within the space of the museum (overdetermined by their material affordances) resulted in a stunning thematic effect: exaggerated by the official discourse of the time, industrial labor was entirely missing in the actual thing-system curated by the museum. Strikingly, the path “back to the BSSR” did not erase the Soviet officialdom in favor of a “universe of positive emotions.” Yet by limiting the manifestations of the official discourse to the walls, the curators radically leveled its profile and introduced an effective spatial disjuncture (if not a parallelism) between the enveloping verticality of Soviet discursivity (on the walls)

Figure 2.4 Representing the Soviet in things: the (post-)Soviet abundance of the mundane. From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Source: Photo by the author, 2014.

Figure 2.5 Representing the Soviet in slogan and images: “We are Born to Make Fairy Tales Real” (left) and “Let’s Fulfil the Quotas Early!” (right). From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Source: Photo by the author, 2014.

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and the horizontal accessibility of useful things (on the floor and tables). The world of slogans and the world of things co-existed in an almost asymptotic way in the exhibition. Getting close to each other, the two worlds of artifacts stayed side by side, without violating each other’s autonomy. This idea of co-existing but separate domains was developed further in the two thematic rooms of the show. Offering models of actual contexts within which Soviet things were used in the past, one of them was a “typical” kitchen/dining room with the usual array of household objects. The other one reconstructed a “typical” office of a Soviet party bureaucrat (kabinet partnachal’nika) with a heavy desk, mandatory banners, a complicatedly configured telephone, and inevitable busts of Lenin and Stalin (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). The recreations were not historically exact. Very few Soviet kitchens could boast multiple samovars, and even fewer Soviet offices would dare to display portraits of Stalin and Brezhnev at the same time. Yet, these models were structurally valid. Illustrating the emerging dogma in the studies of late socialism, these thematic rooms encapsulated Soviet life as two disconnected spatial universes: the universe of political officialdom vs. the universe of private consumption. It is instructive to see how visitors reproduced this split, albeit in a somewhat less predictable way. In English-language remarks, the propaganda items loomed large, obfuscating other aspects of the exhibition. For instance, a tourist from Glasgow wrote: “It is a really fantastic museum to see some of the history of the country, with a fascinating display of posters

Figure 2.6 Staging the past-1: A “typical Soviet dining room.” From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Source: Photo by the author, 2014.

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Figure 2.7 Staging the past-2: A “typical office of a party boss.” From the exhibit Back in the BSSR, the Museum of the Urban History of Minsk. Source: Photo by the author, 2014.

and propaganda.” Hector from Barcelona remarked, too: “I really love the Soviet propaganda posters. I love socialist agit-prop.” Another, nameless, foreigner left a two-line comment with a similar impression: “Thanks for the interesting exhibition. I have never seen so many images of Lenin in one place.” And a visitor from Poland abstracted well the seemingly common feeling: “Your exhibit allows the contemporary individual to become immersed in the atmosphere of Communist propaganda, to feel its power, to see the discrepancy between words and deeds (slova i dela), and to observe the formation of a new anthropological type of Homo Sovieticus.” Entries in Russian and Belarusian languages did not ignore the official rhetoric. Quite a few visitors praised the posters (e.g. “Thanks for giving me a chance to see the original posters, not just their Photoshopped copies”). Some mocked the slogans. Significantly, though, these vehicles of propaganda were not granted the status of an independent conceptual abstraction. They did not focalize the attention. Rather, visitors integrated them in a larger list, together with other “daily objects and equipment.” What really preoccupied this group of visitors were practical things. The three-dimensional portrayal of palpable icons of Soviet domesticity easily outperformed the literal flatness of the paper-thin Soviet rhetoric.

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Providing substantial support for Valiakhmetov’s intuition, one reader after another responded to the activating power of Soviet things by “fishing out” of themselves long forgotten feelings and thoughts. As one visitor put it: “I spent my childhood and youth among them. I thought that my memory had erased already all the traces of my feelings for these things. But after seeing them, I got my feelings back.” Another visitor traveled down a similar road: “It is as if I went back to my childhood. Without this exhibition, many reminiscences would have never come back.” Of course, there is nothing unusual in the fact that people from different countries would interact with the same exhibition differently, given their different upbringings, life histories, and repertoires of expressions. Yet, these two somewhat incompatible readings of Back to the BSSR— with the proverbial Homo Sovieticus spotted by “the foreigners,” on the one hand, and Homey Sovieticus recalled by “the natives,” on the other— are instructive for understanding the morphogenetic effect of things. Material objects resonate. Moreover, they induce a cohering effect by correlating the experience at the exhibition with a thing-system already familiar from the prior life. The vibrant thing fuses in itself an actual daily life item, a sign of the period, a model for organizing one’s own perceptive activity, and an instruction for future actions. It activates all these elements to bring about a historically specific entanglement of people, objects, and ideas. Where one sees nothing but propaganda, the other rediscovers “the world that was warm and cozy” (as Ekaterina from Minsk put it in her comment). Valiakhmetov was right about another aspect of his museum as well. Things on display in Minsk did end up being powerful affect-triggers. Without usually commenting on things themselves, many visitors did notice their impact in the shape of “a mass” or “a storm” (massa, buria) of “positive,” “kind,” “unforgettable,” or “indescribable” emotions that they experienced. For some, things “brought (prinesli) pleasant memories” and “induced (naveli) many reminiscences.” In others, they “woke up (razbudili) warm recollections.” In such descriptions, things are active, dynamic, and dynamizing (cf. Ushakin 2013). They are “portals to constellations of powerful human sentiments” (Ulrich et al. 2015, 164). They are information guides, too. Acting on the affective and epistemological levels simultaneously, they provoke an embodied resonance in the visitor and, at the same time, open up a path to the visitor’s own knowledge of the past. Visitors’ comments suggest an unusual flexion of this restorative moment, though. Getting back to one’s past is rarely articulated as an operation of retrieval. Instead, the “return” is imagined as an immersive event. For a younger generation, it was all about “dipping (okunulis’) in the atmosphere of the Soviet Union,” for the older visitors it was about “plunging (pogruzilis’) into bright memories” of one’s childhood or youth. Just as often this metaphor of encasing was used to describe the resulting affective state

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as “a sea of positive emotions.” Again, the authors rarely specified actual contents of the “atmospheres” or “memories” that enveloped them; yet, the prominence of spatial metaphors for describing the past is important. For some reason, the past was not gelled into a story: no easily available plots or scenarios resurfaced in the comments. Instead, the past was imagined as a location, as a destination, and as a state: a fluid universe of feelings that could be reached with the help of things. In some cases, this trip to the past turned out to be rather short. “I am shaken up by this exhibit,” a certain Pavel F. wrote in the guest book, “at every point I wanted to say, ‘I had that thing, too’.” Kirill, another visitor, framed the same idea slightly differently: “I have a feeling that half of the exhibit was taken from my apartment.” The discovery of analogs of their daily life in the museum often lead visitors to an important re-evaluation of their own temporal situatedness. The exhibit seemed to suggest that not only did they have “that thing,” but also, they were a part of that history. As a visitor remarked: “you come here and suddenly realize that the life you have lived is history.” Familiar daily objects re-emerged as historical records, integrating the individual’s biography with a larger thing-system. It is this experience of being inscribed—quite unexpectedly—into a history of Soviet materiality, it is this opportunity to imagine oneself easily inhabiting the settings and contexts displayed in the museum that seemed to endlessly fascinate and attract older visitors. Valentina, a 68-year-old retiree from Minsk, shared her impressions: “I thought I was going to the museum of the city of Minsk, but I ended up in my remote childhood instead. ‘Back to the USSR’ again. I liked this so much, that I visited the exhibit twice.” Nostalgic to the core, such comments, nonetheless, reveal the evidentiary quality of things that silently objectify one’s own historical presence. Providing the haptic dimension, they translate bits and pieces of memory into objects that could be put on display. One visitor described the exhibit as a “childhood that could be touched,” nicely bringing together the tactile affordances of resonant things with a temporal abstraction that endows these objects with a meaningful coherence (“childhood”). Surprisingly, the guest book offers no evidence for the tendency to conceive the exhibit as a form of alternative history that Jonathan Bach discovered in the German museum. Visitors of the Minsk exhibition did not seem to be interested in discovering in the displayed things some hidden transcripts, antipolitical or otherwise. Instead, they appeared to be generally pleased to learn that “half” of their apartments actually had some historical significance or that a museum could be a place where they could discover material confirmations for their perceptions of the past: “Real . . . Soviet . . . Moving . . .” (as Nastya and Ramil’ framed it in their entry). Viktor Shklovsky, the leader of Russian formalism, mentioned in one of his later books that during his work in cinema, he constantly struggled

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with the problem of displaying time and space on the screen. After all, Shklovsky concluded, “we could not find any other way except for conveying these notions through things” (1983, 176). The succession of things on the screen created a sense of spatial depth and continuity, while the thing’s gradual aging and decomposition allowed to visualize the diachronic progression. Visitors of nostalgic exhibits seem to default to a similar logic, using things as landmarks that organize their own temporal and spatial movement through life. This approach, however, could work only for those who were ready to re-discover one’s self in this or that thing. Is this device still effective for those who are too young to recognize themselves in such objects? Do things function the same way for the consumers of second-hand nostalgia? As young visitors’ comments from the guest book suggest, they do and they don’t. In many entries signed by younger people, old objects appeared to bear a clear stamp of usability that is very generation-specific. Unlike the older cohorts, younger visitors expressed no desire to discover traces of themselves in the second-hand objects or in the periods that they were to stand for. Old objects were hardly seen as an invitation for a mirrorstage moment. Nor were they approached as tools for demarcating stages of their own life. Instead, things resonated as instruments for mapping out zones of the individual’s non-belonging or, to be more precise, for delineating the zones of someone else’s belonging—not exactly alien but clearly different. To quote Vova, a young visitor: “Despite the fact that I was born when the Soviet time was already over (ne v sovetskoe vremia), I was quite pleased to see all those objects, toys, and other things that our parents and grandparents used.” While describing objects as “looking very homey,” these visitors frequently rushed to qualify their description with an immediate follow up “as if in my grandma’s place (kak u babushki doma),” creating a prescriptive genre of objects, in which space and time collapsed (things from grandma’s place). Things at the exhibition still intrigued these young visitors, but the intrigue seemed to be defined by a lack of familiarity with these objects, not by the unsettling yet pleasant feeling of self-recognition which they stirred up in the older generations. To put it differently, the resonances that ex-Soviet parents and their post-Soviet children embodied in response to these objects were generated at different frequencies. The two generations noticed and reacted to different affordances, too. A mother with a son described their visit to the museum: This is a very interesting exhibit. It cast (navevaet) recollections from my childhood over me. My child was very interested in learning how daily things (a vacuum cleaner, a television, a tape-player) looked back then. When he saw an old TV-set, he said: it has no place for a flash-drive.

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Differently structured, the mnemonic affordances of the thing (important for the mother) and the networking capacities of the object (crucial for her son) point in the same direction, though. In both cases, things are approached as interfaces, as connecting devices that could provide access to one’s data—archived as emotional reminiscences in the mother’s memory or as digital files on her son’s flash drive. In addition to using old objects as navigation devices which could “locate” older generations on the map, the younger visitors also saw in them a way for materializing the connection between different historical generations. Prioritizing connectivity, they “recycled” second-hand things structurally (Oushakine 2013). Not a mnemonic object anymore, the trukhliashecka embodied instead “a tie with our ancestors,” as one visitor put it. And not only with the ancestors. As some comments revealed, things could make history itself much closer, too. To quote at length an entry written by a woman from Minsk: I am a student in cultural studies, and I represent contemporary youth. As many of my contemporaries, I used to think that the Soviet years were somewhere very far, and they had no impact on our current life at all. Today, I discovered that I am surrounded by many things from the last century. A waffle-maker, a suitcase, an enameled metal pot, decorations for the Christmas tree (elochnye igrushki), calendars—these are just a few items from the list of things that I saw in this exhibit and that I have at home (or in my grandma’s home). This is a very useful exhibition. It helps to establish a connection between different times. Of course, the exhibit did not establish a connection between different times. It visualized and brought forward the already existing social ties. It exposed the thing-system that made social bonds possible. And it pushed visitors to pay attention to the entanglements of people, ideas, and things that they had completely internalized. As a result, the previously flattened history became layered. Through things, it acquired depth and duration, as Shklovsky suggested some time ago. The past, which only recently was seen as having “no relevant impact” whatsoever, suddenly laid bare the daily materiality of it surrounding presence. The layered dimension of this nostalgia-induced history should not be overestimated, though. Connectivity does not necessarily imply a sense of direction, and the “atmospheric feeling” at the exhibit frequently mentioned by younger visitors is easy to mistake for the atmosphere of the period itself. “The exhibit provokes nostalgia even in those young people who learned about the USSR and the BSSR only from textbooks,” wrote two visitors in their common entry. A certain Vladislava took the same idea a bit further: “That was a sea of positive emotions. This was

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a true time machine in action: it let me visit the period before the time I was born. It is a pity that I was not born a bit earlier.” Painted with things (and posters), the museum’s picture of socialist life articulated a particular vision of the past. It also offered to the visitors a model and instructions for how to re-construct the past on their own, and the following comment from an unidentified visitor expressed well the attraction, the pleasure, and the danger of such do-it-yourself engagements with history: “My deepest thanks—for a chance to be able to look at the [Soviet] past without a worry but with pleasant excitement and nostalgia. And for an opportunity to fantasize about the ways the life in the Soviet Union was.”

A Dreamlike Wondering For those who visited Back to the BSSR in Minsk, the opportunity to fantasize without worries about the Soviet past was mostly an imaginary one. In my last case, I show what happens when such daydream fantasies get a chance to be materialized. By looking at several recent visual projects of a young Moscow photo-artist, I trace techniques through which iconic things of the Soviet past are relieved (without worries) of their original contexts and reinserted into new—mostly digital—frames. As before, I am interested in understanding how objects of second-hand nostalgia resonate, what kinds of entanglements they generate, and what configurations of thing-systems they enable. In the last few years, the Moscow photographer Danila Tkachenko (b. 1989) produced several highly successful photo series that creatively reworked important material objects of the socialist period. In 2014, his Restricted Areas won prestigious international awards. In 2015, it was featured in National Geographic and The British Journal of Photography. In 2016, the original photo exhibit was adopted for a book format and came out in five languages: English, Italian, German, French, and Spanish (Tkachenko 2016). His latest project—the photo series Motherland (2017)—also generated a lot of interest in Tkachenko’s artistic methods, this time mostly from the Russian-language social media (Razmakhnin 2017). In a sense, Tkachenko’s projects offer a virtual version of the museum exhibitions that I have described so far. Obsessed with Soviet things, Tkachenko puts their images on display, subjecting them to all kinds of visual manipulation. Tkachenko described himself as “a visual artist working with documentary photography” (Tkachenko 2014). While reality in his photographs tends to be augmented, he is careful about the degree and the scope of his interventions. Depicted objects normally retain their shape; what changes is the surroundings that envelop them. Tkachenko mostly works with different levels of the image’s “skin” in order to transform the

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object’s context in the background or foreground. In an interview with LensCulture, the artist explained his approach: I see myself more as a “composer” and creator of a new reality. Photography for me is the way to create new meanings and interpretations— not a method to show the world as it is. I’m using the artistic prism as a way to purposefully manipulate time and weather, and the possibility to unite different places into one visual space. (ibid.) Not unlike Valiakhmetov, Tkachenko “paints” with things and expressive means provided by nature. For instance, the article in National Geographic reported: To capture his vision of the abandoned spaceport and oil field pump jacks littering the land, ‘I needed a lot of snow falling,’ he says. ‘This created a special atmosphere in the photograph, a kind of . . . very diffused light.’ (Silverman 2015, Figure 2.8)

Figure 2.8 Danila Tkachenko. Part of an unfinished space port. Kazakhstan, Kyzylorda region. From the series Restricted Areas, 2013. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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Indeed, his Restricted Areas is a masterful combination of light, things, and snow that offers a tour through a collection of oversized industrial structures suspended in a white-out space: a boiler house of a closed aerodrome in Kazakhstan; an antenna built for interplanetary connection near Arkhangelsk, Russia; an office building of the Communist Party in a Bulgarian province, to name just a few. Striking examples of Communist obsession with science, space, and power (nuclear or otherwise), most of these structures are now abandoned, dysfunctional, half ruined, or even half built. Devoid of their former purpose, function, staff, content, and context, in Restricted Areas these constructions are morphed into compositions, and a layer of snow (or fog) clouds the structures, creating fuzzy, dream-like shots. Surprisingly, even in their minimalist condition, the graphic architectural outlines continue to entice and mesmerize (Figure 2.9). Arvatov’s idea of the dynamic, morphogenetic thing has been taken to its logical end here. Having lost their past functionality, these things could deliver literary nothing except for their purified form, their streamlined outlines, and their sanitized silhouettes (cf. Oushakine 2007).

Figure 2.9 Danila Tkachenko. Headquarters of the Communist Party of Bulgaria (the Buzludzha Monument). From the series Restricted Areas, 2015. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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Tkachenko’s focus on the remains of socialism is not new: photographic portrayals of “socialist ruins” is a booming field in commercial publishing. Not without their own market-oriented sensibility, Tkachenko’s projects occupy a different space, though. Unlike the widely acclaimed recent album Soviet Ghosts: The Soviet Union Abandoned by the photographer Rebecca Litchfield (Evans et al. 2014), Tkachenko does not let the viewer anchor his or her fetishistic fantasies in the material detail of the bygone era (Figure 2.10). Any possibility for a visual intimacy is effectively undercut by his characteristic combination of a bare-bones depiction and long-distant shots: “minimum details and maximum attention to the object,” as he defined it (Tkachenko 2014). Similarly, by radically uprooting the objects of his photographs, Tkachenko productively escapes the temptation to exoticize the eccentricity of Soviet architectural forms, which permeated (unintentionally, perhaps) yet another widely popular photo-representation of socialism-as-ruins: the two-volume series Soviet Bus Stops by the photographer Christopher Herwig (Herwig 2014, 2017). Many of these recent albums offer a one-dimensional nostalgic teleology, presenting Communist utopia as a self-ruining ensemble, as a material structure frozen in space, or as “the lost vanguard,” as Richard Pare, the author of yet another important photo album, aptly called

Figure 2.10 Rebecca Litchfield, “Young Pioneer Camp, Russia.” From the series Soviet Ghosts, 2014. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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it (Pare 2007). Technical choices allow Tkachenko to avoid this retrospective teleology of failure even when he tries to find one. Thus, his Restricted Areas (2012–2014) was supposed to document a “utopian strive [sic] of humans for technological progress”; his Lost Horizon (2016) visualized “half-forgotten traces and ruins” of “the utopia of constructing the ideal world”; and his latest, Motherland (2017), lamented the fate of Russian villages disappearing from the map of the country (see Tkachenko n.d.). These attempts to provide a narrative backbone for his images are hardly effective, though. Just like the exhibits in Kazan’ and Minsk, the virtual Museum of Soviet Things that Tkachenko painstakingly compiles suggests no plot development to follow, no lesson to learn, and no conclusion to make. His series could be endlessly extended, and images could be changed. To put it differently, the thing-system that Tkachenko creates is decidedly non-systemic. Objects co-exist there side by side without being interconnected. Perhaps it is exactly this persistent emphasis on disconnect, on distance, on detachment from the past that Tkachenko tries to abstract and communicate in his second-hand entanglement with Soviet things. The message of second-hand nostalgia seems to share a lot with the logic articulated some time ago by Shklovsky. Summarizing his generation’s approach, the Formalist emphasized by the end of his life, “We created long-term things (dolgie veshchi). We always oppose (otritsaem) the old. But we do not denounce it (ne otrekaemsia)” (1983, 34). “The old” resonates, inspiring simultaneously a desire to overcome it and an acknowledgment of the constitutive dependency on it. Far from being captivated by the enchanting power of decay and abandonment, in his projects Tkachenko tries to reject the old order of longterm things without erasing them from history. Like his peers who visited the Minsk museum, the artist treats the monuments of Soviet technology structurally and negatively—in order to acknowledge them as spaces of non-belonging. Symptomatically, his restricted areas were literally motivated by “things from grandma’s place,” too. Except that there was nothing “homey” about them. As Tkachenko recalled it, the idea for Restricted Areas emerged during a visit to his grandmother who lived in a closed and previously secret city where the first Soviet nuclear bomb was developed. While there, I learnt that in the 1960s, there had been a nuclear disaster but it had been completely classified. As it turns out, a vast territory had been contaminated and the people living there developed a variety of chronic diseases because of the accident. The first shot of Restricted Areas was made in this city. (Tkachenko 2014)

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The melancholy of abandonment seems to be overcome here by a more active desire for a rejection through recognition: second-hand nostalgia operates as a way of getting to know things that should be avoided. Old things, in other words, are still acting as models, but they are models of what Tkachenko called “the perfect technocratic future that never came about” (Tkachenko n.d.). As a detour through the past to confirm the vision of a future which should be rejected, second-hand nostalgia emerges as a strangely balanced affective state in which various trukhliashechkas both attract and repel. Tkachenko’s projects helpfully visualize this double dimension of old things by translating their push-and-pull effect into graphic idioms. I already mentioned the layers of obfuscating snow that he uses to materialize and thicken the distance between the viewer and the object in Restricted Areas. Of course, this snow does not just diffuse light, as Tkachenko explained. It also creates a (visual) barrier that restricts the direct accessibility of the object to the viewer. In his Lost Horizon, the artist adopted a similar technique but changed its tone. In this series, recognizable symbolic objects of Soviet socialism—from a model of the rocket which carried the first cosmonaut into space to a model of the Soviet sputnik; from the spaceship-like building of the hotel Saucer in Dombai to Tatlin’s Tower—are wrapped by engulfing blackness (Figures 2.11 and 2.12). In his introduction to the project, Tkachenko pointed out that this compositional structure was more than a formal play. It was a visual superimposition of two Soviet utopias, in which the contrastive structure of Kazemir Malevich’s Black Square was called upon to frame, to contain, and to present examples of Soviet attempts to conquer space and nature (Tkachenko n.d.). Valiakhmetov used shelves and racks to equalize Soviet things; Tkachenko achieved the same result through the seemingly technical operation of visual framing. To fit differently sized objects within the same frame, he played with scaling. He leveled the objects’ dimensions in such a way that a humongous architectural structure would look no bigger than a fragment of a monument’s bas-relief. Regardless of their original measurements, all objects appeared as fundamentally commensurable. Distancing resulted in a strange historical de-hierarchization: the artifacts emerged as even, while different. Size did not matter in this world of things. But neither did color. Nor texture. The black-and-white scheme of the squared images stripped the objects of their individual detail, retaining only their shapes and structures. Shot at night with the help of a powerful light source, these compositions send a very ambiguous message. Indeed, the horizon is lost, and Tkachenko leaves it for the viewer to decide if these things and buildings of the past are gradually retreating—for good!—into the black nothingness or, alternatively, if these long-term things are re-emerging—finally!— from the darkness to see the proper light of the day.

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Figure 2.11 Danila Tkachenko. “Model of the Headquarters of the Third International, Moscow” (Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International). From the series Lost Horizon, 2016. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Tkachenko’s lost horizon would come back, but at a high price. His latest series Motherland (Rodina) is a visual story about a motherland that he set on fire. Each image of the series depicts one or more objects in flames. Two of these images depict iconic Soviet things: a small bust of Lenin and a radio set from the 1960s (Figure 2.13). The rest of the series, however, portrays wooden village houses burning alone or as a group. Located in the middle of nowhere and shot from a distance, these log cabins are too far removed to convey any individual details. Photographed at night, they look almost identical, being overshadowed, so to speak, by the dynamic dance of the tongues of fire (Tkachenko n.d.).

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Figure 2.12 Danila Tkachenko. “Hotel Saucer. Dombai” (Russia). From the series Lost Horizon, 2016. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Within the narrative of the series, the role that these houses are forced to play is mostly organizational. In some cases, their rectangular shapes provide a necessary geometric contrast to the shapeless chaos of fire. In others, a repetition of burning vertical structures creates a rhythmically organized sequence, punctuating the disarray of the blazing volume (Figures 2.14 and 2.15). As Motherland implies, the incinerated objects have very little to offer apart from their structuring input. Just like in his other projects, any signs that might indicate the location of these log cabins, their internal content, their architectural distinctions, their own history, and the history of their owners have been carefully evacuated in order to foreground in Motherland the formal play of volumes, lights, colors, or shapes.

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Figure 2.13 “Burn the damn thing to hell.” From the series Motherland by Danila Tkachenko (2017). Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Figures 2.14–15 Purging oneself from nostalgia. From the series Motherland by Danila Tkachenko (2017). Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Despite all the flames (and smoke), Tkachenko’s Motherland appears to be rather cool and dispassionate. The unsettling effect usually associated with images of uncontrolled fire is neutralized here by the safe remoteness of the viewer. If anything, Motherland looks like a visual

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documentation of a carefully scripted pyrotechnics show that strategically interspersed moments of darkness with spaces of light. In one of the photographs, this approach is revealed, perhaps, most clearly. The shot captured the moment when the enflamed buildings merged into one continuous row (Figure 2.16). Outlined by burning houses, the fiery horizon divides the photographic space in the middle, separating one form of darkness from another. The image appears to draw the bottom line for the historical period, but it promises neither obvious closure nor future: there are no images in the series that would display the aftermath of the fire. Instead, Motherland is depicted as a permanently burning issue, as a state of the lasting twilight, and as a condition of perpetual elimination: a line of indistinguishable objects of the past set on fire in order to be observed from a safe distance. The profound fascination with the Soviet cultural legacy is inescapable in Tkachenko’s work. But just as obvious is a fundamental lack of any (visual) interest in the historical layers that actually produced this legacy in the first place. Like in other cases that I discussed so far, Tkachenko tears his objects—be it Tatlin’s Tower or a nameless village cabin—out of their original environment in order to showcase their morphogenetic potential. Like many before him, through this decontextualization he

Figure 2.16 The fiery horizon of Motherland. From the series Motherland by Danila Tkachenko (2017). Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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flattened history in order to highlight the objects’ material and volumetric affordances. In a recent conversation, Tkachenko insisted that photography allowed him to “focus on things that stir [him] up (volnuiut).” It is a very particular kind of focus, and it is a distinctive sort of emotion, though. As a technical device, “focusing” usually assists in bracketing off the context in the process of creating a portrait of the thing. However, in Tkachenko’s case, the focus on objects does not bring them any closer: there are no close-up portraits in his series. His “focusing” does not seem to be motivated by a desire to deepen the contact with objects. Instead, it is a device for building and maintaining his distance. As Tkachenko put it, his Motherland was a way of purging himself from “a nostalgia for the old things [. . .] Incinerating that rubbish (khlam) was a way to finalize (rasstavit’ tochki) something inside me” (Tkachenko 2017). Born in 1989, this visual artist is too young to have a nostalgia for the things he burned down. The Soviet utopia officially ended when he was only two years old. So when the interviewer asked him to clarify the nature of his nostalgic feelings, Tkachenko responded with this: Imagine: you end up in a village where people had used to live. You see things that they’d left behind: letters, photos, piles of magazines and newspapers. And this trukhliashechka starts to take you over; it casts a spell on you (ocharovyvaet). You can easily spend days and nights in these houses’ attics. I was there for a long time. . . . So, you sit there, digging through these things for hours, and eventually you find yourself in a strange foggy state, as in a Tarkovsky film. In a state of a dreamlike wondering. At one point, I made a decision to cut this off, in the most radical way. This is a very Russian thing to do, right? To get up suddenly and to burn the damn thing to hell. [. . .] But after two years [of doing this project], this was the most logical thing to do for me. (Tkachenko 2017) The type of nostalgia for the Soviet that Tkachenko spells out here is far from typical: an emotional attachment to places and objects produces a form of daydreaming, which eventually leads to the destruction of the objects of attachment. Neither revivalist, nor escapist, this nostalgia is shaped in the process of an active (and lengthy) interaction with spaces, objects, and structures. Each project envisions a particular form of being entangled with long-term things: his active search for abandoned objects (in Restricted Areas) was followed by the transformation of these things into black-and-white symbols of the period (in Lost Horizon) and was concluded by a strange desire to subject old objects to the test of the perpetual fire (in Motherland). As if performing an act of exorcism, he tries to dispel the power of trukhliashechkas, which do not cease to resonate.

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What this type of nostalgia produces, then, is—to use Tkachenko’s language—“a new reality” created through a purposeful manipulation of old things. This second-hand nostalgia foregrounds objects instead of memory, offering a particular form of affective experience: “a dreamlike wondering” through the material remains of other people’s lives. Tkachenko’s projects and commentaries helpfully bring together the points I have been trying to make throughout the essay. The cases that I have discussed expose the lasting ability of Soviet objects to generate various entanglements of people, things, and ideas. Soviet things structure post-Soviet people’s experience and offer links to the past. Not without its own affective dimension, this second-hand nostalgia seems to be driven more by a desire for connectivity than by a desire for history, though. The scope of this generation’s reactions varies, and Tkachenko described the poles of these responses rather succinctly. As the “composer of new reality” put it, “one could keep digging into this shit, or one could burn it down, leaving behind an open space (ploshchadka) and bringing the historical period (etap) to its closure” (Tkachenko 2017). Yet bringing the historical period to its closure is not an easy thing to do: the scene that Tkachenko has left behind is not an open space but a horizon burning in perpetuity. The spell of trukhliashechkas might be weakened, but the flames of their attraction are still burning.

Acknowledgments I am thankful to Alexei Golubev, Inna Leykin, Olga Shevchenko, and the editors of this volume—Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, and Ksenia Robbe—for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.

Works Cited Abramov, Roman. 2013. “Muzeifikatsiia sovetskogo: istoricheskaia travma ili nostal’giia?” Chelovek 5: 99–11. Arvatov, Boris. 1925. “‘Byt i kul’tura veshchi,’ in Al’manakh Proletkul’ta, 75–82. Moscow: Vserossiiskii Proletkul’t. For an English-language translation see Boris Arvatov. 1997. ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question)’.” October 81 (Summer): 119–28. Bach, Jonathan. 2015. “Collecting Communism: Private Museums of Everyday Life Under Socialism in Former East Germany.” German Politics and Society 33 (1/2): 135–45. Chuzhak, Nikolai. 1923a. “Pod znakom zhiznestroeniia.” LEF 1: 12–39. Chuzhak, Nikolai. 1923b. “K zadacham dnia.” LEF 2: 145–52. Evans, Owen, Neil Cockwill, Tristi Brownett, and Rebecca Litchfield. 2014. Soviet Ghosts: The Soviet Union Abandoned: A Communist Empire in Decay. Darlington: Carpet Bombing Culture. Herwig, Christopher. 2014. Soviet Bus Stops. Vol. 1. London: Fuel Design & Publishing.

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Herwig, Christopher. 2017. Soviet Bus Stops. Vol. 2. London: Fuel Design & Publishing. Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archeology of the Relationship Between Human and Things. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Kremkova, V. M. 1926. “Muzei byta.” In Problemy sotsiologii iskusstva. Vypusk 1, 160–5. Leningrad: Academia. “Muzei”. n.d. The Site of the Museum of Soviet Lifestyle in St. Petersburg. https:// sovietlife.spb.ru/ru (accessed on January 2, 2019). Muzei sotsbyta. 2014. “Direktor muzeia sotsialisticheskogo byta v gostiakh u kanala TBC (Tatarstan Business Channel).” YouTube Video, 28:07, August 5, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TZSx5s2ks (accessed on October 17, 2018). Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2007. “‘We’re Nostalgic But We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia.” The Russian Review 66 (3): 451–82. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2010. “Totality Decomposed: Objectalizing Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles.” The Russian Review 69 (4): 638–69. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2013. “Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History.” Ab Imperio 1: 269–302. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2014. “‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities With No Destination.” The Russian Review 73 (2): 198–236. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2018. “Performative Objects.” In Russian Performances: World, Object, Action, edited by Julie A. Buckler, Julie A. Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson, 54–64. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pare, Richard. 2007. The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922–1932. New York: Monacelli Press. Prusik, Monika and Maria Lewicka. 2016. “Nostalgia for Communist Times and Autobiographic Memory: Negative Present or Positive Past?” Political Psychology 37 (5): 677–93. Razmakhnin, Anton. “‘Szhech’ trukhliashechki’: fotoproekt, vyzvavshii bol’ i iarost.” Pravmir.ru, December 1, 2017. www.pravmir.ru/szhech-truhlyashechkifotoproekt-vyizvavshiy-bol-i-yarost/ (accessed on January 2, 2019). Shklovsky, Viktor. 1983. “Tetiva: o neskhodstve skhodnogo.” In Viktor Shklovsky Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 2, edited by Viktor Shklovskii, 4–305. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Silverman, Rena. “Remnants of a Failed Utopia in the Former Soviet Union.” National Geographic, November 13, 2015. www.nationalgeographic.com/ photography/proof/2015/11/14/remnants-of-a-failed-utopia/ (accessed on January 2, 2019). Stattford, Barbara Maria. 2007. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Timofeev, Mikhail. 2014. “Muzeifikatsiia sovetskogo perioda (sluchai Muzeia sotsialisticheskogo byta v Kazani).” Burylinskii al’manakh 1: 48–52. Tkachenko, Danila. n.d. “Personal Website.” www.danilatkachenko.com (accessed on January 2, 2019). Tkachenko, Danila. 2014. “Restricted Areas. Interview with Danila Tkachenko.” Interview by Alexander Strecker. LensCulture. www.lensculture.com/articles/ danila-tkachenko-restricted-areas-2 (accessed on January 2, 2018).

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Tkachenko, Danila. 2016. Restricted Areas. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Tkachenko, Danila. 2017. “Danila Tkachenko: ‘Net zhelaniia ob’iasniat’, chto takoe sovremennoe iskusstvo.” Interview by Anna Komissarova. Colta, November 23, 2017. www.colta.ru/articles/art/16662 (accessed on January 2, 2019). Todorova, Maria. 2010. “From Utopia to Propaganda and Back.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 1–13. New York: Berghahn Books. Tut.by. “Back in BSSR: v muzee istorii goroda Minska otkrylas’ vystavka sovetskikh plakatov.” Tut.by, May 8, 2014. https://news.tut.by/culture/398057.html (accessed on January 2, 2019). Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Ivan Gaskell, Sara J. Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter. 2015. Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ushakin, Sergei. 2013. “Dinamiziruiushchaia veshch.” Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie 120: 29–34. Valiakhmetov, Rustem. 2012. “Interv’iu s direktorom muzeia sotsialisticheskogo byta Rustemom Valiakhmetovym.” Interview by Alena Martynets. 116.ru, February 2, 2012. http://116.ru/text/gorod/483007.html (accessed on January 2, 2019). Valiakhmetov, Rustem. 2017. “Kulturnyi razgovor: Interv’iu s Rustemom Valiakhmetovym.” Echo Moskvy v Kazani. Interview by Liana Sadykova. www.youtube. com/watch?v=7OER-ssf9wk (accessed on January 2, 2019).

3

Village Voice Peasant Nostalgia in Recent Oral History Kathleen Parthé

The Russian countryside and the last generations to experience traditional peasant life have stimulated cultural retrospection for decades. Between 1956 and 1984, Village Prose writers (derevenshchiki) expressed nostalgia for a “radiant past” in colorfully named settlements next to pristine rivers full of fish and surrounded by vast forests, and for family ties that extended through time (rod). The remaining residents of these villages were few, but their unadulterated national identity was held up as an example for the rest of Soviet Russia. In a 1976 article, Philippa Lewis analyzed twenty years of nostalgia in post-Stalinist literary works, many of them employing the trope of a visit home, during which the narrator became aware of all that the village had meant to him personally and to Russianness, writ large. At the end of these stories, “the pervasive mood . . . is sadness, nostalgia. The narrator has been in a dying world” (1976, 554). Lewis demonstrated how critics used the new rural literature as a springboard for bold discussions about the way that the Russian countryside had been ruined by Soviet mismanagement. During the decade that followed Gorbachev’s rise to power, the ruralists’ reflective emotion, their “longing without ideology,” was transformed into a restorative nostalgia (Boym 2001, xvii; Dickinson and Salmon 2015, 21). With the memory of the village being “the one tradition . . . that could artistically and politically sustain them,” they arrived at “the Russian nationalist narrative: we, Russians, lived peacefully until the enemy oppressed us; now is a time of crisis when we shall vanquish the alien forces” (Djagalov 2010, 29–34, 38). As the mood of writers and critics shifted from regret to resentment over what they saw as a conspiracy, they assigned guilt for the destruction of rural Russia to party bureaucrats, often focusing narrowly on Jewish officials (Slavnikova 1999, 204).1 The angrier these writers and critics became, and the broader their attacks, the more pushback there was both within Russia and abroad. An article from 1992 was forced to consider whether Village Prose was an example of chauvinism or nationalism, or whether it was primarily nostalgia.2 It was difficult to reach a broadly acceptable conclusion, because lyrical-philosophical works from the 1970s

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were judged in light of deliberately provocative political remarks made decades later and against the background of the general uncertainty accompanying the end of the Soviet regime. The significance of the disappearing rural component of Russian identity was being lost in the toxic atmosphere of ultra-nationalism, anti-Semitism, and a longing for the recent Communist past. By following the ruralists into the new millennium, we see, first of all, an attempt at reconciliation within the fractured literary community. When he presented a literary prize to Valentin Rasputin in 2000, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn contextualized Rasputin’s career in a way that influenced further study of the derevenshchiki. He supplied a unifying framework for this group by calling them “moralists” (nravstvenniki), since, he claimed, “the essence of their literary revolution was a rebirth of traditional morality” (Leiderman 2003, 63). In a collective message on this occasion, the staff of Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Newspaper) acknowledged the wisdom of an award for Rasputin, an outstanding prose stylist. They missed the formerly vibrant literary process, with a community of talented writers who read each other’s work, and were pleased that the prize ceremony brought together literary figures from opposing sides for the first time in years (“Premiia Solzhenitsyna,” “Na vruchenii”). A somewhat calmer political and cultural atmosphere brought renewed attention to the significance of rural traditions, especially with the passing of the last important derevenshchiki, each of whose deaths led to tributes, conferences, and memorial volumes. Additional resources for studying peasant life became available, including correspondence, journalism, essays, and stories, works previously unpublished or scattered among newspapers and periodicals. There was also outstanding new scholarship, especially Anna Razuvalova’s Pisateli-“Derevenshchiki” (2015), the most comprehensive and dispassionate treatment of the movement to date. Razuvalova’s approach stands in contrast to the dismissive comments that appeared in Nezavisimaia gazeta (The Independent), where it was claimed that everyone who mentions nature in poetry or prose is a village writer (Shargunov 2003), or, that village prose never existed, only ethnographic sketches full of birch trees, huts, and peasant stoves (Savel’ev et al., 2004). Along with the village writers’ nostalgic voices after the demise of the Soviet Union, the richest new primary material is found in four volumes of oral history by Viktor Berdinskikh featuring the voices of the villagers themselves, whose life stories reflect the 20th century’s civilization-altering events. It is remarkable—and disappointing—that Sheila Fitzpatrick and other Western scholars have chosen to describe nostalgia as something only experienced by urban intellectuals. The present essay disproves that claim by citing some of the many peasant voices recorded during the last two decades of the 20th century.

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Fitzpatrick’s 1994 book on peasants during the Stalinist period refers primarily to Socialist Realist authors, when derevenskaia proza would have been a logical place to turn to.3 A comprehensive view of the emotional life of the post-Soviet Russian population requires one to venture out into the countryside.

The Rural Writers’ Final Bow After the angry discourse of the late-Soviet period had quieted down, how did Village Prose writers in their later years address change and loss?4 Some of their newly published work had been written earlier and was held back by the censor or the author himself. A reissue of Vasilii Belov’s book Harmony (Lad, 1982) in 2000 under the title Everyday Life in the Russian North included a section called “An Inseparable Pair” (i.e. the everyday routine, or byt, plus nature). The feeling of “nostalgia” was understood because every page of Belov’s study of “folk aesthetics” honored beauty that had vanished or was being lost as he wrote. Harmony was partly a recollection, but Belov’s “memories” went beyond what he could have known personally. In the newly issued pages of what he called his “writer’s credo,” he spoke of the religious foundation of life in the countryside, how fasts and holidays provided structure and spiritual significance to the struggle for survival (Belov 2002, 6). For example, because of the obligation to confess at Eastertime, villagers approached each other with a heartfelt “Forgive me, a sinner!” and a deep bow. The response was: “God will forgive you” (ibid., 141). Belov sketched in loving detail an annual cycle of intertwined holy days, agricultural tasks, and life events without specifying at what point this perfectly designed system had been damaged beyond repair. The title of the book is a reminder of a lost value in national life, as harmony gave way to disharmony (razlad). The book has been praised—and criticized—as an idyllic view of the past, although one of the less harmful of Belov’s illusions, unlike the series of novels blaming Jews for the excesses of collectivization and the need for national repentance (Slavnikova 1999, 202). A nostalgia that goes beyond toska (sadness, longing) emerged in essays written by Belov after 1991, in which he spoke admiringly of the country’s self-sufficiency under Stalin, when there was sufficient fuel for the new tractors and every bit of land was planted each spring. “They sowed, they harvested, and they built things!” (Belov 2013, 155). He regrets publicly criticizing the authorities because, even under Stalin, the Soviet state was a normal kind of power, “and the people adapted to it” (ibid., 115, 212). The “demonic disharmony” of post-Soviet Russia is contrasted to the spiritual unity of earlier times, when simple people accomplished amazing feats, like the construction of the churches in Kizhi (Belov 2002, 6). A trip to Valaam stimulated thoughts about the loss of the original meaning

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of “archipelago.” Without openly criticizing Solzhenitsyn, Belov longs for the time when this word referred to a group of islands, like Valaam in Lake Ladoga, blessed millennia ago by a visit from the Apostle Andrew.5 Because “the fate of Valaam is the fate of Russia,” the signs of a renewed Christian faith in this place allowed him to feel somewhat encouraged about the future (Belov 2013, 305–6, 316). Throughout Belov’s 2002 memoir of Vasilii Shukshin, he spoke fondly of the time the writers spent together and the free-flowing conversations they had about positive (icons, churches, monasteries, Cossacks) and negative (women, dissidents, Jews, cities) forces in Russian life. Although Shukshin was the earliest of the major rural literary figures to die (in 1974), his words and ideas figured prominently in post-Soviet discourse with the aid of newly available material (notebooks and letters) and fresh appreciations of his contributions to Russian national identity.6 In praising Shukshin, Vladimir Sigov claimed that the government, both before and after the break-up of the USSR, treated traditional Russianness as a decorative museum display; for Shukshin, however, such values as spirituality, pravda (moral truth and justice), volia (elemental freedom), eccentricity, inspired foolishness, and a fierce rebelliousness formed the core of the nation’s identity (1999, 166). These values are what led Shukshin to his hero, the 17th-century Cossack Stenka Razin, and attracted other writers to the Siberian explorer Yermak, the schismatic Archpriest Avvakum, and to Pushkin and Dostoevsky in their more prophetic moments (ibid., 256–64, 292). Sigov believes that “Shukshin’s epic contains the signs of a new age,” and he quotes from one of the writer’s notebooks that “we must break through to Russia’s future” (ibid., 235, 297–8). This transition from nostalgia for a past Eden to utopian hopes for the future is not new to village writers; if the roots of traditional Russia have not been entirely destroyed, then one can believe in—and advocate for—a continuing rural component to national identity (Parthé 2004, 96–8). Viktor Astaf’ev is widely acknowledged to be the greatest stylist among the derevenshchiki, and his literary gifts continue to be missed, but in many ways he was an outlier. Proudly anti-Communist, he ridiculed the Party’s alliance with ultranationalists and for seeking to restore the Soviet “radiant past” (Astaf’ev 1996, 3–10). The 2009 publication of his correspondence reveals a man who privileged human relations over other aspects of village life and who was nostalgic for friends and family members, who by the 1990s had almost all died. “All of Russia is a cemetery,” he lamented, and preferred to mark Victory Day alone with memories of fallen comrades rather than take part in official activities (Astaf’ev 2009, 536, 562, 616). Astaf’ev cherished time spent writing in his hut (izba) with a vegetable garden, forest, taiga, and river nearby, working on large projects (about the war) and much smaller ones that he called zatesi

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(ibid., 485).7 Most of the settlements’ older dwellings had been replaced by summer homes for people from the city. Looking at the village from the Yenisei, everyone tries to guess which one of these fine houses is mine, because they cannot imagine that a writer could live in a hut; however, it is one that I love more and more, and that I miss terribly in the winter. (ibid., 578) During the summer of 2001, illness prevented him from traveling there, and he wrote to a friend that “I can’t live without the village, and I don’t want to” (ibid., 683). Astaf’ev had no illusions that there was any future for “the sacred Russian village,” except, perhaps, in returning to spirituality and a respect for nature (ibid., 552, 615).8 Since his death in 2001, commentators have praised Astaf’ev’s portrayal of peasants whose links to God were never broken; the author himself is seen as a “spiritual guide” (orientir) for those who wish to understand Russia (Khomiakov 2012, 4–8). The key theme of his work has been identified as loss—of brotherly unity, kindness, and compassion—that characterized The Final Bow (Poslednii poklon), King-Fish (Tsar’-ryba), and The Sad Detective (Pechal’nyi detektiv). The latter story is said to express “the author’s nostalgia for a more godly life, which seems a utopian goal for modern man” (ibid., 66–72). Astaf’ev’s correspondence emphasized that these values, now in steep decline, could only be restored with a sustained effort (Martazanov 2006, 95, 104–5, 120). An interview from the mid-1990s that was fully published only in 2008 includes a description of life from the point of view of a child discovering the world of the izba and what surrounds it. “Every rural house resembled its master, the person who built it”—all had the same basic elements, yet with an individual touch (Astaf’ev 2008). Children were given age-appropriate tasks, starting with watering the garden and naming the animals, learning early on to respect their elders and contribute their labor. In Astaf’ev’s last interview, he spoke of the countryside as a macrocosm, “a universe in miniature, a universe destroyed by man” (Astaf’ev 2002). The last of the great rural writers, Valentin Rasputin, passed away in 2015.9 His attitude toward change evolved from enthusiasm for Soviet development, to an elegy for disappearing Siberian villages, to a diatribe over destruction, and finally to quiet nostalgia for the past in the 1997 story The Apparition (Videnie), praised for its “autumnal sadness” (Slavnikova 1999, 207). The same year he wrote The Origin of My Books (Otkuda est’—poshla moi knigi), tracing a line from his birthplace through all of his writing. At first I ‘walked’ along Atalanka’s shoreline, while the village was still next to the Angara; then I ‘said farewell’ to it, when it was moved

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to a new location [. . .] and I watched [. . .] as it tried to set down new roots—that’s what led to my story ‘The Fire.’ (Rasputin 2007, 503–4) His birthplace was gone, as dams changed the Angara’s shoreline, and he wondered if being the last person to sing its virtues is a reason for pride. His small corner of Russia gave him subjects for a lifetime. “Part of the Russian people lived in this unprepossessing village—maybe it was only a small part, but they had the same bones, the same spirit, of more populated places, and it had been better preserved.” (ibid., 505) Upon receiving the Solzhenitsyn Prize in 2000, Rasputin called literary descriptions of patriarchal life a storeroom, not a cemetery, but still spoke of being on the losing side of Russian history and literature, standing with like-minded writers on a constantly shrinking ice floe, which served as a kind of ark. Gazing at the horizon, they hoped to see the shore and a new Mount Ararat rising above the floodwaters (Parthé 2004, 91–2). In a 2013 monograph, the Russian village he portrays is called “that particle of divine creation which has still been preserved, amidst the worldwide flood of mediocrity and the rejection of God” and Rasputin himself is referred to as “virtually the last warrior in a spiritual battle for the moral foundations of Rus” (Goreslavskaia and Chernov 2013, 58, 174).

New Voices on Village Literature and Village Life The broad scope of Razuvalova’s scholarly examination of Village Prose provides a rich background for the study of nostalgia. She discusses critics who evaluated the writers who described the peasants—providing a many-layered view. In Chapter 3, Razuvalova introduces one of the book’s most productive themes, continuity (preemstvennost’, nepreryvnost’), which reflects the broad consensus that Village Prose preserved the memory of a way of writing, as well as a way of life. The village was, in several senses, the “landscape of tradition” (2015, 130), and its readers were nostalgic for the kind of lyrical-philosophical prose that had flourished in Russia from the 1830s until the advent of Socialist Realism.10 Each work of Village Prose provided information about life in one region of Russia, and its best examples filled the need for lively narratives that respected traditional values (spiritual, cultural, and emotional), something absent from Socialist Realism, the modernism of the 1920s, and the post-modernism of the 1990s. The derevenshchiki created a safe space for nostalgia in the future-oriented Soviet society. Post-Soviet studies of rural writers are often nostalgic for the literary school itself as much as for the reality it represented; Village Prose was literature that Soviet Russian readers could be proud of and that critics enjoyed discussing. The introduction of new methods for the study of rural nostalgia is largely due to the work of ethnographer and historian Viktor Berdinskikh, a professor at Viatsk State Humanities University, whose

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publications are based on thousands of taped testimonies collected in his native Viatsk region from people born between 1900 and the mid1920s and interviewed in the 1980s and 1990s before their memories and way of speaking were gone forever. Peasant Civilization in Russia (Krest’ianskaia tsivilizatsiia v Rossii) states that Russia has ceased to be a country of peasants, but that witnesses remain to the centuries-old way of life, and that their stories have been recorded by Berdinskikh and his students according to rules and methods he devised for a type of historical research new to Russia (2001, 6–7). Twelve years later, he reissued this book as The Russian Village: Daily Life and Customs (Russkaia derevnia: byt i nravy), minus a lengthy section on “The People and State Power.”11 Voices of the Silent. The Everyday Life of the Russian Peasantry in the 20th Century (Rechi nemykh: Povsdevnaia zhizn’ russkogo krest’ianstva v XX veke; 2016a) and Russians at Home (Russkie u sebia doma 2016b) continue to mine these testimonies for insights about how Soviet peasant life reflected an earlier age, as well as adding the scholar’s own memories of a rural childhood. Berdinskikh did not set out to elicit specific comments from his subjects, hoping that what they said would be relatively unscripted, in harmony with traditional oral histories; in general, he separates his summation of taped testimony from his own feelings about rural life. As John Berger said of French villages in Pig Earth, each village constructs “a living portrait of itself . . . everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays,” and when it ceases, the village disintegrates (1979, 8–11; original italics). However, since people who have lived a long, hard life were asked about an earlier time, one expects the theme of loss to come up often, although what they remember fondly and what they miss are not always predictable. The trope of a radiant childhood, familiar from Village Prose, is fully represented here: “The world seemed like a fairy-tale, endlessly interesting” (Berdinskikh 2016a, 114). Russians at Home begins with the researcher’s reflections on his own early years (he was born in 1956) and memories of walking through the village with his mother and learning the story of each family living there (2016b, 11).12 In Solovyovo, an on-site study of a small northern village in the 1990s, anthropologist Margaret Paxson found that “the world that is spun after the utterance of ran’she (“before”) almost inevitably includes [. . .] descriptions and analyses of what people were like, what groups were like, and what leaders were like when life was good” (2005, 91). The word ran’she is definitely a key word for Berdinskikh’s informants, as they articulate what it was they valued most from the past. What was different about the behavior of people living in villages? “People were uneducated, but so courteous, their manners came naturally” (Berdinskikh 2016a, 84). Formerly, people always exchanged respectful greetings; men tipped their caps and largely refrained from swearing. Peasants link an increase in swearing to a decrease in happiness as people have become bitter about

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life. “They’re not happy, and that is why they curse. There used to be a lot more polite, welcoming words. People made a greater effort to express respect for each other in how they spoke.” (2016b, 86) Respect was shown not only towards neighbors but towards pagan and Christian spirits; during the early decades of Soviet power, old women visiting the village soviet would cross themselves in the direction of what would have been the icon corner, although the icons were now portraits of Lenin and Stalin (ibid., 19). The villagers’ language was poetic, colorful, and specific to their malaia rodina (native region), whose history and local place-names they knew. Not surprisingly for a specialist in oral history, Berdinskikh is most impressed by the improvisational verbal talents of rural Russians, the nicknames, anecdotes, and jokes, as well as the chastushki, four-line, rhymed comments on one’s fellow villagers sung to a rapid tempo and immediately matched by another person’s rhymed response (ibid., 37–40).13 While Russian peasants had virtually no say over the changes visited upon them, there was still some sense of control that came from the ability to read the signs, e.g. when it was time to sow and reap or whether very good or very bad events could be expected, based on both deep local knowledge and a belief in providence. Guessing the future (gadanie) was another localized practice that distinguished peasant life from one area to the next. One of Berdinskikh’s informants described simple methods that women employed up until World War II; listening to the water in a hole cut in the river ice, finding recognizable forms in melted wax, or putting certain items under your pillow and then interpreting that night’s dreams (2016b, 55). Fortune-telling generally took place during Yuletide and maslenitsa (the week leading up to the great Easter fast) and most often concerned finding a husband, but in times of crisis, answers might be sought about war, famine, or the fate of loved ones. People helped each other to bring in the harvest, build houses for newlyweds, recover from misfortunes, and celebrate weddings and holidays. Wandering beggars were treated with kindness, and warm hospitality was shown towards friends and relations. Close branches of a family spent Sundays together, even in the 1960s, and a “nostalgia, a longing for the joy of human contact, as free and easy as in the past, can be sensed in every conversation, without exception” (2013, 44). Along with the decline of a fulfilling social life (obshchenie), “there is no longer enough compassion: it’s vanished into thin air” (2016b, 91). Having money played almost no role in the villagers’ lives; what counted into the 1960s were a good, firm character and the adherence to an unwritten code of behavior. By the 1970s, what mattered was a level of success that could only be achieved in a city (ibid., 40–1). In the past, there were fewer crimes and less drunkenness. In warmer weather, people sat outside and talked through the evenings, remembering the past, a habit that persisted until the late 1960s. When possible, peasant homes were built with a

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good view of the nearest body of water, and a bench was placed in front of them for the purposes of obshchenie (ibid., 37–8, 63–6, 91). During the winter, women passed the time together inside, singing as they went through the lengthy process of turning flax or wool into clothing, performing these age-old tasks for several decades after the revolution. Clothing was a precious commodity, and great care was taken to save the best that they had for holidays, and even then, almost every item was homemade. Young people of marriageable age from surrounding villages gathered to dance to the sounds of an accordion (garmon‘), sing, and play games under the watchful eyes of their elders; there were still positive, steadying, remnants of the patriarchal past. Nature was respected, even revered, and, to use a modern expression, food was “locally sourced” and tasted better. If you possessed what Fedor Abramov (in The Priaslins) called lesnaia gramota (forest literacy) and knew where to go for mushrooms, berries, and wild honey, there were ways to supplement one’s diet; overhead, cranes flew by every spring, something they no longer do (Berdinskikh 2016a, 45). In using the Berdinskikh transcripts, the reader finds narrative turning points that are not always what one would expect; there is no absolute drop-off in traditional rural ways after 1917 or even 1929, when collective farms were introduced and the New Economic Policy gave way to five-year plans. Berdinskikh’s informants may conflate time periods; they are old and have no records to consult; to them, almost any form of living and working together had its positive sides. “The village collective was a complete (tselostnyi) living organism,” and there was strength and peace to be gained from a life in common (2013, 208). There are some good memories of the 1930s; building a new society was interesting and attractive to younger peasants. Berdinskikh says that nostalgia for their youth makes some of those who were interviewed “mild” Stalinists, with an idealized view of the revolution and the new “tsar” (2001, 389–90) In the retelling, the 1920–1940 period was preferable to wartime and the post-war decade that followed, with its sole focus on survival amid terrible loss. An atmosphere of hope and belief in a radiant future nourished many in the 1930s, not only in the cities but also in the countryside. Many remember the atmosphere of joyous expectation, despite all the deprivations. “That world was rich in all respects. Everything was new, everything unfolded before us, everyone hoped for and anticipated a good life” (E. P. Popova, b. 1907; Berdinskikh 2001, 366–7). These are, after all, the people who survived dekulakization, although those interviewed express respect for the work ethic of many who did not. In the early 1930s people still derived satisfaction from meaningful labor because they were still able to choose tasks for which they were best suited (2013, 55). Although they missed having their own animals, the peasants gradually settled into a new version of collective life, and,

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when it brought together neighboring villages and members of extended families, some customs from the past were preserved (ibid., 325). There are fond memories of the joking, singing, and balalaika playing that accompanied their walks to fields for which they still had a sense of pride and ownership before the feeling set in that what belonged to everyone had become what belonged to no one (ibid., 28). People still courted, got married, and had children. “Village holidays (truthfully, not all of them) began to be called kolkhoz holidays, and for a while they retained the high spirits of the former spontaneous merry-making,” and the timing of holidays still informed decisions about when was the best time for spring sowing (2001, 366). Families continued to grow—or make—most of what they needed in the traditional way. Each man had a specific skill unrelated to fieldwork, e.g. wood carving, which gave him something to barter or to earn money, which was always in short supply. Not all the villagers interviewed had been particularly religious, but they still visited the parish cemetery on holidays and regretted the destruction of Orthodox churches, even if they kept that sorrow to themselves for decades afterward. One woman lamented that “the bells were thrown on the ground, the houses of God were broken up . . . and for what, I ask you?”, while another said that at first the changes did not make them fear the future, but when the church was destroyed “the old women sobbed and began to speak of the end of the world” (2016a, 44, 136). The church was central to village life, a source of beauty, comfort, spiritual relaxation, and sociability, and the clergy were their longtime neighbors. In areas reached by arrests, there was a noticeable reduction in sociability due to fear of denunciations, which were attributed to envy rather than ideology (ibid., 360–1, 402–5). The war years of 1941–1945, sacred in official Russian culture, brought a welcome reduction in arrests, but few of Berdinskikh’s informants mention a patriotic rise in their own spirits, which provides a contrast to rural writing about the home front. The war was the final blow to village life and assumes a more negative role than the revolution or collectivization. Before 1941, the village was a pleasant place to live, with fresh air, and during the growing season “every house was fragrant with clover and lilac.” Life was interesting, but “the war consumed everything” (2016a, 137, 270). Wartime meant starvation, the absence of even basic supplies, and the demise of family members and village traditions, including respect for old people. That loss of a role for village elders is something about which the voices from Viatka are most nostalgic; the way of life in which they were an essential component no longer existed (2016b, 40). Berdinskikh used real-life material as his source, bypassing Village Prose, but the way he structures his books is clearly inspired by Vasilii Belov’s non-fictional work Harmony. While Berdinskikh organized his subjects’ statements under broad topics in order to craft a coherent whole from a thousand parts, Belov was free to present a comprehensive view of

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traditional peasant life in a single voice, his own, so that the harmony is not only in a view of peasant life seen whole but in a volume as well. In honoring his rural forebears, one senses that Belov was seeking to influence readers who had long dwelt in urban areas, to make them understand the trauma that the nation had undergone at the hands of those with no feeling for Russian national identity. Berdinskikh had access to the memories of informants primarily from one region, while Belov took the Russian North as a paradigm for rural Russia. Having previously focused on a specific malaia rodina, in 1991 Rasputin published Siberia, Siberia (Sibir‘, Sibir’) as a tribute to an area that encompasses more than ten million square kilometers.14 He traveled to the far north of Sakha (Yakutia) to learn about Russkoe Ust’e, which was settled in the 16th century by people from Novgorod, experiencing little change until it was reconnected with the rest of Russia in the 1920s. While Siberia was a hellish place for dissidents before and after the revolution, for Rasputin it is a spiritual land where the past and future are “embodied” in locations like Tobolsk and Irkutsk that “automatically” live within the Russian people (Ogden 2004, 559–63). In this sense, Rasputin’s view was in harmony with Jean Starobinski’s characterization of a personal village past that is “interiorized” (1966, 103).

Solovyovo, Seen up Close Margaret Paxson focused on a small northern village that she came to know well during her research. Largely avoiding political analysis, she concentrated on the “topography” of memory (2005, 11), how villagers’ recollections were shaped by the setting in which they and their ancestors (predki) spent their lives; when speaking of their rodina, “descriptions would ring with nostalgia” (ibid., 65–6). Somewhat like Belov’s Harmony, the widespread use of the present tense can leave the reader with the impression that this is an ongoing enterprise, but from time to time Paxson reminds us that what her subjects feel is nostalgia and that age had finally caught up with her beloved hosts, as it had with many of the remaining inhabitants of Solovyovo, and keeping even a single cow is now beyond their strength (ibid., 1–9, 65). The radiant past that Paxson found is localized, confined within an area where the familiar ty is used and where one’s dead are buried (ibid., 65–6). This is a place that encompasses svoi (one’s own) and rodnoi (related, native)—house and garden; woods, fields, and river; relatives and neighbors. It is place where everyone knows if you are lying.15 There were various levels of community organization—village, obshchina (the rural, self-governing collective), and prikhod (a parish that often encompassed several villages), and one voiced regret concerns the official abandonment of smaller settlements by the early 1970s (ibid., 67, 83, 113). “In the small kolkhoz, the peasants had been able

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to preserve to a large extent the sense of intimacy and solidarity of the old village that has helped them to survive the difficult war and postwar years” (Brudny 1998, 41). Until then, village ways and aspects of Soviet life had been to some extent compatible, for instance, the idea of equality among villagers and work done in common, as villagers dreamed of the radiant future promised by the propaganda that reached even their remote locations. By the 1990s, that promise had also become a memory, and there were no new beliefs to replace it (ibid., 96–101). The people of Solvyovo, despite their modest resources and limited education, knew a great deal, like determining when to plant potatoes by walking the earth in bare feet to find out if it was sufficiently warm (Paxson 2005, 6). They had access to protections that lay outside the government’s purview: there were ancestral spirits who lived behind the icons of Christian saints and a healing power that came from knowing the right words and appropriate herbs. Villagers lamented that “before, there was much of the miraculous” (chudesnogo bylo mnogo; ibid., 193), but now much of the unseen power had been dissipated, and the secret knowledge had not been passed down to the next generation. Still, well into the Soviet era, the peasants celebrated holidays joyously and collectively, especially the spring observance in honor of the Trinity (Troitsa), which had always combined folk and religious elements (ibid., 263–343). Ancient village ways that could be preserved intact, or amalgamated with Soviet practice, still had meaning and value, as opposed to strictly Soviet innovations like the clubhouse (ibid., 337).

Challenging an Intelligentsia Monopoly on Nostalgia In one of her many studies of Soviet history, Sheila Fitzpatrick examined the Stalinist era’s “emotional repertoire,” in particular, feelings of happiness (schast’e) and melancholy (toska). To her surprise, she found toska “to be almost omnipresent, and intimately linked with some of the most common expressions of happiness,” especially in recollections of childhood (2004, 369). Working with “available sources . . . diaries, autobiographical statements, letters, memoirs, novels and plays” (ibid., 357–8), Fitzpatrick concluded that the “trope of nostalgia for an idyllic past” is to be found in the writings of the intelligentsia, including Russian émigrés; she cites a book of 1990s-era interviews (by Engels and Posadskaya) with eight elderly women, four of peasant origin, that contains “no such memories” (ibid., 360–1). Fitzpatrick cites similar results in Yuri Slezkine’s study of the camp memoirs of intelligentsia women, whose Arcadian childhoods ended with the arrest of their parents (Fitzpatrick and Slezkine 2000, 30). For historians whose goal is to foreground women’s voices, the presence of colorful, loquacious, and often righteous women is a widely acknowledged feature of Village Prose.

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It is understandable that Fitzpatrick and Slezkine would have missed Berdinskikh’s early publications, but the literary evidence has been available for decades creating a strong counter-argument to the claim that nostalgia is the sole property of the intelligentsia, unless one is prepared to discount the historical truth of derevenskaia proza as well as the accuracy of scholarly research about this genre.16 Slezkine’s nostalgia-filled summary of an intelligentsia childhood—including a specific rural area, mushroom picking, late-night talks, Christmas festivities, friendships, and first loves—is completely familiar to readers of derevenskaia proza and is confirmed by Berdinskikh’s thousand rural voices. The new evidence from oral history can educate contemporary readers about a segment of the population whose world never revolved around European Russia or the two capitals, although rural-born Russians who spent time in Moscow during the 1950s–1970s appreciated the remnants there of a pre-revolutionary “big village” that soon gave way to urban development (Kabo 1998, 89–105). Rural Russians have a different “cognitive map” of their nation than urban dwellers. For villagers, the national territory has no single center; each malaia rodina, each region— like Viatka or Vologda—constitutes its own center, which does not have to compete for importance on a broad scale (Parthé 1997b). Its value lies in being svoi (one’s own), and that makes it the real Russia for its native children, past and present (Berdinskikh 2016b, 102–3). The transcripts of peasant voices now available has validated, to a great extent, descriptions of the painful losses and luminous remnants of rural life found in Village Prose. It is also a reminder that there can be a moral, sociological, and aesthetic discussion of nostalgia for Russian village life without descending to the depths that such discussions reached during the decade after Mikhail Gorbachev freed up public discourse—this is no longer a zero-sum game. The passage of time, bringing with it the deaths of writers and an increased distance from a viable rural society, has detoxified the topic to the point where derevenskaia proza can rejoin the literary canon and be judged for its continuation of 19th-century literary traditions as its writers and real-life subjects reacted to the many challenges and losses of 20th-century life.

Notes 1. For a basic poetics of the movement see: Parthé 1992a, Russian Village Prose. The Radiant Past, with an extensive update on interpretations of the genre in Parthé 2004, Russia’s Dangerous Texts. 2. This article (Parthé 1992b) was based on a talk given at the 1990 Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies in Harrogate, where a panel on derevenskaia proza drew a large and agitated audience. 3. Fitzpatrick’s book Stalin’s Peasants includes an entire chapter on “Malice” and generally treats any positive emotions from Stalinist-era peasants as a manifestation of a carefully constructed “Potemkin Village,” the subject of another of the book’s chapters.

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4. Vladimir Soloukhin died in 1997, Viktor Astaf’ev in 2001, Vasilii Belov in 2012, and Valentin Rasputin in 2015. 5. In his speech in 2000, Rasputin wondered whether there could once again be “a single archipelago of literature in Russia” (V poiskakh berega, 209). 6. The legacy of other rural writers who died before 1991 (e.g. Fedor Abramov, Vladimir Tendriakov, and Nikolai Rubtsov) is discussed on anniversaries of what would have been significant birthdays. 7. Astaf‘iev defined zatesi as marks or signposts made on trees in taiga that helped hunters and others find their way to the nearest road or hut, and gave this name to short works that emerged from his notebooks (Parthé 1992a, 17). For students of Russian history, the word “signposts” evokes Vekhi, a 1909 collection of essays by and about the intelligentsia. 8. While Astaf‘ev rejected the political side of the Communist-nationalist ideology, his letters contain numerous comments that criticize, in crude terms, Jews and their role in Russian history. 9. Vladimir Lichutin (b. 1940) and Vladimir Krupin (b. 1941) are still publishing. 10. Critics fiercely debated the fate of classical Russian literature in the 1977 free-for-all that came to be known as “Klassika i my” (The Classics and Us). A transcript was published in the journal Moskva in 1990, with a fuller record appearing in book form in 2016. 11. This commentary on the Soviet era marks an insertion of the researcher’s voice absent elsewhere. It has been reprinted as the second half of the deeply personal 2016 book Russkie u sebia doma. 12. Parthé (1992a) explores the trope of the radiant childhood years at length. Berdinskikh’s and Paxson’s subjects, especially the older ones, cover much of the same territory, especially the passing on of specific knowledge by grandparents about subjects like medicinal herbs and fishing. The specific location of these memories is highly significant, and Starobinski’s view of nostalgia (1966, 94–5)—by way of Kant—that it is about time and not place does not hold for the majority of writers and informants cited in this essay. 13. In Harmony, Belov devotes a chapter to the art of folk speech, which includes numerous genres and a description of the individual touches added by every speaker. 14. When Rasputin wrote about Siberia, he expressed interest in non-Slavic groups who learned to survive in an unforgiving setting and thought he might be part Tungus on his father’s side (2007, 503). His view of Siberia stands “in conscious opposition to centralized imperial or Soviet power,” and he longs for “close-knit communities that are rooted in strong families and are unhindered by the demands of a rapacious state” (Ogden 2004, 648, 651). A study from 2014 identified a post-colonial approach in Rasputin and Astaf‘ev, who saw the forcible integration of Siberia into the empire destroy its primordial natural setting. For Rasputin, distress over the effects of “colonial” rule coincided in later years with a patriotism that sought to preserve the Russian state (Anisimov and Razuvalova 2014, 90, 95; Parthé 1997a, 1–9). 15. “In the village, in that small community, you couldn’t lie to yourself or others. A lie might come across on the television screen but it wouldn’t work in face-to-face encounters” (Igor Chubais, in Billington and Parthé 2003, 88–9). 16. Berdinskikh’s research disproves part of Svetlana Boym’s claim that “the nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal” and that toska evokes a “claustrophobic intimacy of a crammed space from which one pines for the infinite” (2001, 12). Sadly, Boym is no longer around to engage in a spirited discussion, which is reason enough for nostalgia.

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Works Cited Anisimov, Kirill, and Anna Razuvalova. 2014. “Dva veka—dve grani sibirskogo teksta: oblastniki vs. ‘derevenshchiki’.” Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiia 27 (1): 75–101. Astaf’ev, Viktor. 1996. Tak khochetsia zhit’. Povesti i rasskazy. Moscow: Knizhnaia palata. Astaf’ev, Viktor. 2002. “Interview with Gennadii Sapronov.” Moskovskie vedomosti, June 11, 2002: 22. Astaf’ev, Viktor. 2008. “I vechnaia moia bol’ za Rossiiu.” Literaturnaia Rossiia, April 4, 2008: 14. Astaf’ev, Viktor. 2009. Net mne otveta. Epistoliarnyi dnevnik, 1952–2001. Edited by G. Sapranov. Irkutsk: Izdatel’ Sapranov. Belov, Vasilii. 1982. Lad. Ocherki o narodnoi estetike. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Belov, Vasilii. 2000. Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo severa. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Belov, Vasilii. 2002. Tiazhest’ kresta. Shukshin v kadre i za kadrom. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Belov, Vasilii. 2013. Kogda voskresnet Rossiia? Moscow: Algoritm. Berdinskikh, Viktor. 2001. Krest’ianskaia tsivilizatsiia v Rossii. Moscow: Avtograf. Berdinskikh, Viktor. 2013. Russkaia derevnia: byt i nravy. Moscow: Lomonosov. Berdinskikh, Viktor. 2016a. Rechi nemykh. Povsdnevnaia zhizn’ russkogo krest’ianstva v XX veke. Moscow: Lomonosov. Berdinskikh, Viktor. 2016b. Russkie u sebia doma. Moscow: Lomonosov. Berger, John. 1979. Pig Earth. New York: Pantheon. Billington, James, and Kathleen Parthé. 2003. The Search for a New Russian National Identity: Russian Perspectives. Washington, DC: The Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/portals/static/about/about-the-librarian/images/perspectives.pdf. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brudny, Yitzak. 1998. Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dickinson, Sara, and Laura Salmon, eds. 2015. Melancholic Identities, ‘Toska’ and Reflective Nostalgia: Case Studies From Russian and Russian-Jewish Culture. Florence: Firenze University Press. Djagalov, Rossen. 2010. “Pamiat’ vs. Memorial: Rasputin, Aitmatov and the Search for Soviet Memory.” Studies in Slavic Cultures 8 (August). www.pitt.edu/~slavic/ sisc/sisc8/docs/djagalov.pdf. Engels,Barbara Halpern,andAnastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck.1998.A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. Translated by Sona Hoisington. Boulder: Westview Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1994. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 2004. “Happiness and ‘Toska’: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-war Soviet Russia.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 50 (3): 357–71. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Yuri Slezkine, eds. 2000. In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women From 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Goreslavskaia, Nelli, and Viktor Chernov. 2013. Valentin Rasputin. Russkii genii. Moscow: Knizhnyi mir. Kabo, Vladimir. 1998. The Road to Australia: Memoirs. Translated by Rosh Ireland and Kevin Windle. Canberra: Aborignal Studies Press. Khomiakov, Valerii, ed. 2012. Viktor Astaf’ev i dukhovnoe vozrozhdenie Rossii. Omsk: Izdatel‘stvo Omskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Khomiakov, Valerii. 2016. ‘Klassika i my’—diskussiia na veka. Compiled and edited by S. S. Kuniaev. Moscow: Algoritm. Leiderman, Naum, and Mark Lipovetsky. 2003. Sovremennaia russkaia literatura 1950–1990-e gody v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 2. Moscow: Akademia. Lewis, Philippa. 1976. “Peasant Nostalgia in Contemporary Russian Literature.” Soviet Studies 28 (4) (October): 548–69. Martazanov, Arsamak. 2006. Ideologiia i khudozhestvennyi mir ‘derevenskoi prozy’” (V. Rasputin, V. Belov, V. Astaf’ev, B. Mozhaev). St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University. “Na vruchenii premii Solzhentisyna Valentinu Rasputinu.” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 17, 2000: 19–20. Ogden, Alexander J. 2004. “Siberia as Chronotope: Valentin Rasputin’s Creation of a Usable Past in Sibir’, Sibir’ . . . .” Ab imperio 2004 (2): 647–64. Parthé, Kathleen. 1992a. Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parthé, Kathleen. 1992b. “Village Prose: Chauvinism, Nationalism or Nostalgia?” In New Directions in Soviet Literature, edited by Sheelagh Duffin Graham, 106–21. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Parthé, Kathleen. 1997a.“Russia’s‘Unreal Estate’: Cognitive Mapping and National Identity.” Occasional Paper #265 (1997) of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies: 1–30. www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/list-kennan-instituteoccasional-papers. Parthé, Kathleen. 1997b. “The Utopian Side of Russian Village Prose.” In Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A. Moser on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, edited by Peter Rollberg, 415–25. Columbus: Slavica Publishers. Parthé, Kathleen. 2004. Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines. New Haven: Yale University Press. Parthé, Kathleen. 2016. “The Afterlife of Russian Village Prose: A View From 2015.” In Dalla provincial remota. Riflessioni su tesi cultura russa dal XVIII al XXI secolo, edited by Claudia Scandura and Ornella Discacciati, 95–106. Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura. Paxson, Margaret. 2005. Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. “Premiia Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna prusuzhdena Valentinu Rasputinu.” Literaturnaia gazeta, March 1, 2000: 9. Rasputin, Valentin. 1991. Sibir’, Sibir’ . . . . Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Rasputin, Valentin. 2007. V poiskakh berega. Irkutsk: Izdatel’ Sapronov. Razuvalova, Anna. 2015. Pisateli-“Derevenshchiki”: literatura i konservativnaia ideologiia 1970-x godov. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Savel’ev, Denis, et al. 2004. “Grabli dlia Paganini. Est’ li budushchee u ‘derevenskoi literatury’?” Nezavisimaia gazeta, May 27, 2004.

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Shargunov, Sergei. 2003. “Derevenshchina.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, June 5, 2003. Sigov, Vladimir. 1999. Russkaia ideia V. M. Shukshina. Kontseptsiia narodnogo kharaktera i natsional’noi sud’by v proze. Moscow: Intellekt-Tsentr. Slavnikova, Olga. 1999. “Derevenskaia proza lednikovogo perioda.” Novyi mir 1999 (2): 198–207. Starobinski, Jean. 1966. “The Idea of Nostalgia.” Diogenes 14 (54): 81–103.

Part II

Appropriation

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Longing for Fear and Darkness “Oppositional Grassroots Stalinism” in the 1970s–1980s and Its Influence on Legitimizing Political Elites in Today’s Russia1 Ilya Kukulin

Nostalgic Counterculture: The Aesthetic Appeal of Late Stalinism During Perestroika 1989 was a big year for news, especially in the Soviet Union, and it seems no one paid any attention to a coincidence between two events, which was not surprising given that neither of them was particularly sensational. In January of that year, the pop band Liube, which had recently been started by the composer Igor Matvienko, recorded its first album. For several months, the band toured the country without much success, but suddenly shot to fame in December, when they were invited to perform as part of the televised Christmas Meetings (Rozhdenstvenskie vstrechi) concert produced and hosted by the Russian pop diva Alla Pugacheva. At her suggestion, Liube’s frontman Nikolai Rastorguev went onstage in a World War II-era Soviet army uniform. He performed two songs, one of which, “Atas!” (lit. “Look out!”), did in fact call for military getup. The song’s melody is glaringly primitive, but the lyrics, written by Aleksandr Shaganov, are rather more complex. The subject matter, if we can call it that, pertains to the late-Stalinist period. Allusions to the 1946–1947 famine and the deprivations of the postwar period are mashed up with triumphant intonations, a sprinkling of criminal slang, and, toward the end, an idyllic scene that could have been lifted directly from Stalin-era songs: Raspberries explode in crazy color, Critters of all kinds kick into gear, There’s no bread, but plenty of shoe polish [gutalin] And the hunchbacked bigwig jeers . . . Look out! Chins up, working class! Look out! Keep dancing, boys—love those girls! [. . .] When the mild workday is done, Be at peace, my dear motherland!2

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The song was intended for audiences who could recall that “Gutalin” (shoe polish) had been an ironic folk nickname for Stalin, already in use during his lifetime; the nickname came from a perceived physical resemblance between the “Father of Nations” and an Assyrian (Volkov 2012, 25). Shoeshiners in large Soviet cities were typically Assyrian men with dark, Middle Eastern complexions and luxurious black or grey mustaches. In Shaganov’s lyrics, this allusion to the “Gutalin” era appears alongside invitations to sing and dance, which resemble the shouts of a DJ. The song presents the era of “full-blown totalitarianism” as an object of nostalgia by paradoxically transforming the lack of bread and omnipotence of “Gutalin” into a historical and semantic “frame” for anarchic self-affirmation. The song became a huge hit. In 1990, it was named song of the year in the USSR. Shaganov, Matvienko, and Rastorguev quickly seized on the formula that had made it a success, playing on the same paradoxical (for that time) combination of aesthetic registers they had used in “Atas!” Soon after the release of their 1990 debut album, also titled Atas,3 the band recorded a follow-up album; this one, from 1992, was titled Who says we didn’t have it good? (Kto skazal, chto my plokho zhili?). The album was a success and was the first project to be released by Igor Matvienko’s own production company. The title comes from the song “Sha!” [lit. “Zip it!”], which alludes to various moments in Soviet history from the 1930s through the 1970s. It mentions DneproGES (the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station—trans.) and BAM (the Baikal-Amur Mainline— trans.), but the majority of allusions refer either to the Second World War (“The country battles day and night / Some don’t give a crap, others get medals . . .”) or to the late 1940s; in fact, the latter period features more prominently than the former: A jacket cut from a service coat, A cigarette quietly puffs out smoke. Stop, halt, what’s the rush? Stop, halt, what’s the rush? Stop, halt, what’s the rush—hey, I’m talking to you! [. . .] I’m striding along in a baby-peaked cap With a hole in the top of my head. The song’s not bad, so unfurl, my soul. Who says we didn’t have it good? Zip it!4 As many have pointed out, a newsboy cap (kepka-malokozyrka) was commonly worn in the 1920s–1950s by street thugs, pickpockets, and other petty criminals as a mark of their profession. Meanwhile, a jacket cut from a service coat most likely refers to the postwar period. In other words, the song is written from the point of view of a drifter, possibly a

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street thug, who remembers the late 1940s as a period of freedom and happiness. The exclamation “sha!”—a demand to shut up—is evidently aimed at those who were writing about the social problems and political repressions of the Stalinist period. But back to 1989—in November, the literary magazine Znamia, known as a liberal publication, printed Eduard Limonov’s novel We Once Had a Great Era (U nas byla velikaia epokha).5 This novel meticulously reconstructs—somewhat in the spirit of Proust and his imitators—the childhood impressions (roughly from ages 3 to 10) of a boy who grows up in the family of an NKVD officer in Kharkov and plays with other officers’ children in the city’s courtyards. However, there is one crucial difference between Limonov’s narrative and the French modernist tradition: Proust’s novel constantly juxtaposes young Marcel’s worldview with that of the adult narrator, whose understanding of his youthful impressions differs from what he actually thought in childhood or adolescence. Limonov, on the other hand, uses a “minus device”6 throughout the book; his narrator almost always refuses to intervene in the narrative with his “adult” knowledge and point of view. As a result, the young protagonist’s worldview excludes the Stalinist repressions, along with all other social upheavals. Furthermore, the narrator uses this refusal to contextualize in order to justify young Eduard’s social milieu. In his descriptions, the officers from the Internal Troops of the NKVD and their families come off as ordinary people with their own sorrows and joys; at the same time, these officers indirectly serve as models of “real” manliness. Limonov’s novel was intentionally polemical. In the preface, the author writes: I see things not through the eyes of an era’s victims or—God forbid— its intelligentsia, but from the perspective of the common crowd. My version of a historical era is, in some sense, folkloric. This is a documentary novel in the broad sense, because along with the true story of my ordinary family it also preserves the mythology of that era. It also preserves the deliberate mistakes of the collective popular consciousness; mixing up dates, for example, or including among the common people those whom the common people liked. [. . .] In these pages, the reader will discover a large quantity of boots, foot wraps, shoulder loops, riding breeches, and rifles. As the grandchild and nephew of soldiers who lay down their lives, and as a soldier’s son, I have given these trappings of manliness their due, even though today’s citizen does not hold them in high regard. A burning inferiority complex compels the modern man to enthusiastically revise the past—including the Great Era. It is blamed for too much spilt blood, too many corpses. So it goes: some historical eras resemble tragedies, others—operettas. For my part, I favor [Marshal]

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Ilya Kukulin Zhukov’s army in the Battle of Berlin over The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I vastly prefer “heroic” man to the one who lives only for his dinner. (Limonov 1989, 4)

This statement of purpose is based on an obvious substitution. The people who blamed the “Great Era” for “too much spilt blood, too many corpses” weren’t pacifists or Marshal Zhukov’s enemies7 (the few adversaries Zhukov did have would not appear in Russian public life until considerably later),8 but anti-Stalinists discussing the victims of the Soviet regime. Limonov implies that information about the repressions undermines the aesthetic appeal of that era, leading to the rise of the man “who lives only for his dinner” and is afflicted with a “burning inferiority complex.”9 Limonov, who until then had lived in France, was famous in unofficial literary circles for his innovative poetry and shocking novels, such as It’s Me, Eddie (Eto ia—Edichka) and The Executioner (Palach). As a result, We Once Had a Great Era was seen in these same circles as marking a radical shift in the author’s political and aesthetic positions. There is a rather striking similarity between Limonov’s emotional appeal and that of early Liube. Unlike Liube’s songs, however, Limonov’s novel did not gain a cult following or receive considerable critical attention. The strange combination (at least, for those years) of a non-aggressive, analytic prose style with the glorification of masculinity and the imperial ideal was unlikely to find sympathetic readers who weren’t already fans of aesthetic provocation as such, or of Eduard Limonov specifically.10 Both We Once Had a Great Era and “Atas!” represented a polemical countercurrent to the main ideological and political trends of 1988–1989: in those years, the press was mainly focused on discrediting the totalitarian regime. “As new information about the dictator’s crimes was made public, Stalinism came to be seen not as an ugly growth on an otherwise healthy body, but as the foundation of an entire social order” (Koposov 2011, 121). In 1988–1989, the magazine Daugava published—for the first time in the USSR—Evgeniia Ginzburg’s memoir Journey into the Whirlwind (Krutoi marshrut) which talked openly about the repressions of both the late 1930s and late 1940s. On September 25, 1989, Dmitry Shostakovich’s cantata The Antiformalistic Raree-Show (Antiformalisticheskii raek) was performed in Moscow, also for the first time in the USSR (the piece was begun in 1948 and finished in 1968). The cantata was a satirical response to the 1948 public denunciation of Soviet musical modernism by Stalin and Zhdanov (Yakubov 1993, 98). Also in 1989, another literary magazine, Novyi Mir (New World), ran the first Soviet publication of selected chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULAG; Issues 7–11). Strong ideological polarization was typical of the Perestroika period. On March 13, 1988, the newspaper Soviet Russia published a hardline

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communist article by Nina Andreeva, titled “I Cannot Abandon My Principles”; around the same time (1989–90), Aleksandr Nevzorov, a television journalist who until then had been considered relatively liberal, began expressing radical Russian nationalist views. Those same months saw the founding of the United Laborers’ Front, an organization whose mission was defending the Soviet order; its inaugural conference was held in Leningrad on July 15–16, 1989. Gradually, an ideological alliance between neo-Stalinists and radical Russian nationalists began to take shape in the public sphere—a movement which liberal journalists in the early 1990s dubbed the “red-brown alliance.” However, Liube never presented itself as an oppositional group, and its 1989 publicity campaign pursued strictly commercial aims. I propose that the similarities between Liube and Limonov attest to a phenomenon that has yet to be described because it was overshadowed by the neo-Soviet proclamations of the late 1980s. This phenomenon can be summed up as aesthetic nostalgia for the late-Stalinist period, one that served as a kind of “backdrop” for a cult of the “strongman”—someone who could stand up to social anomie. This cult gained traction throughout the 1990s, eventually becoming a crucial component of the ideology professed by Russia’s current political elite. According to the press, Liube is one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite bands (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Nikolai Rastorguev and Vladimir Putin. Source: Kremlin.ru [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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The fact that Limonov and Putin differ on various ideological and political points in no way changes the fact that both of them never tire of demonstrating (albeit in different ways) their masculinity, along with their nostalgia for the Soviet past. In this sense Limonov, who calls himself a radical oppositionist, is in fact extremely close, both ideologically and aesthetically, to the current Russian regime. There are several underlying causes for the coincidence between Liube’s professional debut and the shift in Limonov’s ideology, and they require careful reconstruction. One such cause is the “golden myth of Stalinism,” which, according to Nikolai Koposov, remained in force even during the fiercest debunkings of the late 1980s. “This myth concerns honest, hardworking, sympathetic people who lived during Stalin’s rule but had nothing to do with his crimes” (Koposov 2011, 123). This articulation of the “golden myth” strikes me as both apt and precise. It is telling that in 1989–90, both Liube and Limonov appealed to symbols of collective community by using the pronoun “we”: “We once had a great era”; “Who says we didn’t have it good?” The prevalence of words such as “popular” [narodnyi], “simple,” and “folkloric” in the preface to We Once Had a Great Era is also part of this collective rhetoric, although they occur far less frequently in the main text of the novel. However, Koposov does not describe (since it is outside his purview) the origins of this “golden myth,” the social and psychological elements that comprise it, or the discourses and cultural practices that helped shape it. The goal of this article is to retrace the origin and evolution of a key component of the “golden myth” and thus to further develop the concept he proposes.

Flirting With Totalitarianism: An Imagined Compensation for Late-Soviet Alienation A mythologized nostalgia for the late-Stalinist period emerged in the 1970s and early 1980s as a combination of two different tendencies: the aesthetization of the postwar era by the cultural elite (for which there was a whole complex of reasons), and a passively oppositional attitude among non-elite (“grassroots”) groups, which the dissident Viktor Sokirko identified as early as 1979, calling it “popular Stalinism” (Sokirko 2015). Limonov’s novel and Liube’s early music belong to different cultural strata, yet they respond, directly or indirectly, to the same two tendencies and were some of the first attempts to synthesize them. I will examine each of these tendencies separately. From its very inception, Liube has drawn on a broad spectrum of images of exaggerated masculinity. It seems that Matvienko, talented producer that he was, saw right away that for all his musical abilities Rastorguev didn’t really look like the “classic” image of a 1980s rock star: he was fairly short, compact, and muscular, with a broad chest and bull

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neck. However, Rastorguev did correspond to the stereotypical image of the “real Russian man [muzhyk].” It is significant which narratives Matvienko and Shaganov chose to emphasize in their staging of this image. Both the name “Liube” and the band’s first single, “Liubertsy,” refer explicitly to the “Liubery,” a Soviet subculture that initially came out of the city of Liubertsy near Moscow before gradually spreading to other cities as well, particularly in the Moscow region.11 The “Liubery” were almost all young men who worked out, led healthy lifestyles, typically held conservative views, and were aggressively anti-Moscow, which they saw as “stuck up” and “degenerate.” They constantly got in fights with members of “imported” Western subcultures such as punks and heavy metal fans, as well as hooligans from other cities who would drive over to beat up Muscovites. The song “Liubertsy” is an ironic portrayal of a young patriot who takes Gorbachev’s rhetoric of “acceleration” (uskorenie) to heart while also adhering completely to Soviet values: I get up early to work out, Kick your teeth in for détente. Pump iron till I’m tough as nails— Hey capitalism, watch your ass! [. . .] I’m gonna live a brand new life, We’re gonna live a brand new life, Hey Liube-Liube-Liube Hey Liube-Liube-Liube Hey my Liube-Liubertsy! That same year (1989), narratives of anomie began turning up in Liube’s songs. These narratives pertained to the Civil War (“Old Chief Makhno” [Bat’ka Makhno]) and to postwar Moscow—in the latter case by alluding directly to the cult TV miniseries The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Mesto vstrechi izmenit’ nel’zia), directed by Stanislav Govorukhin and first broadcast in 1979.12 The song “Atas!” begins with a direct reference to the show’s two main characters: “Gleb Zheglov and Volodia Sharapov / Didn’t linger at the table for nothing . . .” The show’s protagonist, detective Gleb Zheglov, was played by Vladimir Vysotskii. Zheglov is portrayed as a hero, ready to flout moral and juridical norms in order to defeat a gang of dangerous criminals in late-1945 Moscow. The show was adapted from a novel by Arkadii and Georgii Vainer, titled The Age of Mercy (Era miloserdiia, 1975); the novel, meanwhile, was based on the history of an actual gang led by Ivan Mitin, which was active in Moscow in 1950–1953. Both the Vainer Brothers’ novel and Govorukhin’s adaptation are premised on the same socio-psychological mentality, but they interpret it differently. Both depict postwar Moscow as a space of anomie, where social

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conventions have been destabilized and every inhabitant is constantly at risk. Such a depiction was unusual for Soviet art of the 1970s, which typically portrayed the Stalin era as a time of hard but dignitable life; both onscreen and in novels, the 1930s–1940s were shown as full of hardship but not anomic per se. Neither the Vainer Brothers nor Govorukhin mentioned the NKVD’s extrajudicial repressions. The only types who can stand up to this anomie are macho loners who reject social conventions—much like the criminals themselves—yet act in society’s best interests, and those who carefully follow the letter of the law and hope that the criminals, too, will have a change of heart. In the Vainer Brothers’ novel, this latter position (embodied by Sharapov) is shown to be just as valid and effective as Zheglov’s, but in Govorukhin’s adaptation its significance is eliminated. For all his flaws, Zheglov-Vysotskii is the show’s main positive character, and his shady investigative methods (such as planting a wallet on a known pickpocket known as Brick [Kirpich]) appear morally justified. The policeman who flouts legal norms in favor of an intuitive sense of “justice” is a fairly common heroic type in crime fiction, literary and cinematic, of various countries. The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, however, contains significant variations on the genre: the action is transposed onto the historical past, and the policeman is presented as wholly justified in his actions (unlike in the Vainer Brothers’ novel). In 2018, a website devoted to Soviet film erupted in heated discussion after one commenter called Zheglov a “gopnik,” i.e. a hooligan: “[H]e became a cop by force of circumstance; in different circumstances, he would have been a gangster just like The Hunchback [Gorbatyi]” (one of the main criminals from the miniseries) (Kino-Teatr 2018). A significant number of the website’s visitors jumped to defend Vysotskii’s character. The intensity of the ensuing discussion indicates that Zheglov embodied ideas about agency and forms of social behavior that have continued relevance in today’s Russia. Vysotskii had wanted to play Zheglov as soon as he read the Vainer Brothers’ novel (Bakin 2011, 555). A recurring theme in his own songs is the outcast’s way of life as the only possible form of agency in Russian and Soviet society. This theme is given its most radical expression in “The Outlaw’s Song” (“Razboinich’ia”), the video for which was also shot in 1979. In Govorukhin’s miniseries, Vysotskii combined the images of the outcast and the agent of state violence in a single figure whose contradictory nature is the main reason for his charismatic appeal.13 In 1989, Matvienko, Shaganov, and Rastorguev alluded to and vulgarized this gesture of paradoxical synthesis, and Alla Pugacheva gave it a final aesthetic and ideological flourish by suggesting that Rastorguev wear a military uniform. This aligned the singer with the onscreen images of both Police Captain Zheglov and his archnemesis Fiks, a gangster who wears an officer’s jacket in postwar Moscow in order to gain people’s trust (Figure 4.2).

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Figure 4.2 Cover of the album Atas by pop band Luibe.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vysotskii’s portrayal of Zheglov, and Govorukhin’s miniseries more generally, came to be seen as social criticism directed at everyday reality. The form this criticism took can be inferred from two poems by Evgenii Evtushenko—“Meditations at the Back Door” (“Razmyshleniia u chernogo khoda”) and “Lament for a Communal Apartment” (“Plach po kommunal’noi kvartire”). Both were published in the Soviet newspapers in September 1983: the former in Komsomolskaya Pravda (September 2) and the latter in Pravda (September 12).14 The second of these poems was made into a song that remains popular to this day;15 the first, it seems, has been largely forgotten. And yet their almost simultaneous appearance in print seems far from coincidental, as together they have some parallels.16 “Lament for a Communal Apartment” describes the era of communal apartments—specifically the 1940s, which coincided with Evtushenko’s

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(1932–2017) adolescence—as a time when people allegedly trusted each other and knew how to make do with less: Into the phone that ruled over the hallway we shouted all our secrets in one voice. We didn’t know about the admonition “This isn’t a phone-friendly conversation!” We didn’t find communal life demeaning; the grub, the snoring, and the clothes—‘they’ll do.’ And money somehow wasn’t as upsetting, I guess because it was communal too. (Evtushenko 1983a) “This isn’t a phone-friendly conversation” was an oft-repeated phrase in the 1970s used to hint to the person on the other end that, since the phone lines were tapped by KGB agents, it would be better to avoid certain topics or name certain names. Evtushenko, of course, would have known this, but he skews the facts on purpose, as though “pushing aside” his nonconformist implied reader to make room for a myth of nostalgic collectivism. The poem “Meditations at the Back Door” (the title alludes to an 1858 poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, “Meditations at the Front Door”) is a ballad which tells the story of a provincial girl, “Zina Priakhina from Kokchetav,” who gets rejected by the State Drama School in Moscow,17 finds a job as a street cleaner, and watches as famous singers and doctors exit “a certain delicatessen [gastronom] of note” through the back door, carrying scarce commodities obtained through their connections. The speaker addresses the heroine directly, calling on her to “raise her voice” against these modern-day profiteers (nepmany): In what ill-starred year did you put down roots in our era, mindset of the backdoor deal and reign of the underground nouveaux riches? Sovereigns of pickling and smoking, riff-raff of groceries and knick-knacks, they would gnaw their own black passage through the red banner, like worms. [. . .] Zina Priakhina from Kokchetav, do you remember how the windows shook at Drama School? You never finished reciting Nekrasov. Don’t be shy now. Raise your voice. (Evtushenko 1983b)

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Evtushenko describes Soviet reality in 1983 as a time when cronyism and the new bourgeoisie prevailed, a time inimical to the “ordinary person”; and for this imaginary “ordinary person” the 1940s, for all their impoverishment and collectivism, seemed like the good old days. Mikhail Pavlovets rightly notes that by this point Evtushenko was unquestionably part of the Soviet cultural elite and that such anti-elitist pronouncements on his part were therefore, at the very least, odd (Pavlovets 2014, 305). For the purposes of this article, however, what is important is the conceptual link: nostalgia for late Stalinism as a form of theatricalized protest against pervasive cronyism and the cult of consumerism. Evtushenko was expressing such views in a period when Yuri Andropov, the new head of the Communist Party, and, in fact, of the Soviet Union, proclaimed the determined attack against corruption—simultaneously with harsh anti-American and anti-Western invectives and quick escalation of the Cold War. Evtushenko’s “laments” were obviously close to the new anti-corruption agenda; the poet skillfully combined the support of the official political line with sentimentalist narratives addressed to his sympathizing audience. The year 1983 also saw the publication of a book titled The Wings of Our Youth (Nashei iunosti polet)18 in Switzerland. The author, the sociologist, logician, and satirist Aleksandr Zinov’ev, had emigrated from the USSR in 1978. Here, after the anti-Stalinist passages of his previous books, Zinovyev suddenly proclaimed the Stalin era a watershed moment in human history: The Stalin era was a terrible and tragic time during which countless crimes were committed. But, on the whole, it was not in itself a crime. And the society of that era, bad though it may have been, was not criminal either. The tragedy of the Stalin era was that in those historical conditions, Stalinism was the logical outcome of the Great Revolution, and the only means by which the new society could survive and affirm its existence. (Zinov’ev 1983, 9) Zinov’ev’s protagonist, a nameless engineer and penitent anti-Stalinist— referred to as “He” throughout the book—fears the future more than anything: Back then, we protested against Stalinism because we saw, in our dayto-day lives, something that did not correspond to our revolutionary ideals or our notions of ideal communism. Later on, our understanding of the Revolution and the society it engendered changed. But we could not longer change our mindsets. So what happens now? There is no place for us [. . .] in a post-Stalinist society. There is no place for us anywhere. We are the past. (Zinov’ev 1983, 28)

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Zinovyev articulates the same conceptual link as Evtushenko: catastrophic existence during the Stalin era was preferable to the self-alienation people experienced in the early 1980s. Not only in the USSR but in Western Europe as well, the atmosphere of the late 1970s and early 1980s provoked grievances over pervasive cynicism and lack of opportunity—it is enough to recall the beginning and end of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1981). But the conceptual link discussed here—a former dictatorship as imaginary compensation for present-day alienation—is very important to late-Soviet culture in particular. It provided the latent impetus for the historical imagination in Govorukhin’s The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed. As far as we can tell, Govorukhin had professed a cult of the “strongman”— in the spirit of a somewhat vulgarized Nietzscheanism19—even in his earliest work, but for Evtushenko and Zinov’ev, two former “men of the sixties,” nostalgia for Stalinism was, to all appearances, a paradoxical reaction to seeing their hopes for social change dashed. In 1980, Zinov’ev published a somber book titled Communism as a Reality (Kommunizm kak real’nost’) (Zinov’ev 1980) in which he treated Soviet society as immutable and incapable of evolving. Soon after, he switched to justifying revolutionary hopes (even if they were never realized) in The Wings of Our Youth. In Evtushenko, the same emotional complex drives the glorification of the “red banner” and the denunciation of “profiteers” in “Meditations at the Back Door.” While Zinov’ev’s justification of Stalinist society was mostly theoretical, in Evtushenko’s case it was based on an aesthetic mythology, namely the image of a communal apartment—one that is touching and endearing rather than frightening. Evtushenko’s mythology was aestheticized to the same degree as Govorukhin’s and, later, Limonov’s and Liube’s. Zinov’ev, Limonov, and Evtushenko’s justification of totalitarian society is grounded in psychological relativism and can be summed up as follows: “If at the time the era had seemed stirring, and human relations authentic, then it must have been so, and it is pointless to judge these things by today’s standards.” The paradox of this psychological relativism is that it is based not on actual testimonies from the 1930s–1950s but exclusively on the speaker’s own memories. A similar rhetorical move can be found in the song “Sha!”: “We,” here and now, remember that, “back then,” “we” had it good. Thus, in Soviet culture at the turn of the 1980s—and even, to some degree, in émigré cultural circles—conditions ripened for the aesthetic and moral legitimization (glorification, for all intents and purposes) of Soviet society during the Great Terror and Second World War, and above all during the postwar period.

Popular Stalinism as Passive Opposition Behind all these highbrow cultural experiments lays a particular sociopsychological orientation, one that was fairly common in the 1970s and

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which can be termed popular Stalinism. Studying this orientation can prove rather difficult, since it was not publicly voiced.20 Furthermore, in the 1970s sociologists were unable to ask respondents about their views on Stalin (there would have been several control points in place to prevent this on Party, administrative, and KGB levels). Even if they could have asked, they probably would have gotten unsatisfactory responses. It seems the only person to describe this orientation as a form of passive opposition was the dissident journalist Viktor Sokirko (1939–2018), who published in samizdat under the pseudonym K. Burzhuademov (derived from the term “bourgeois democracy” in Russian). In 1979, Sokirko wrote the essay “On the Possibility and Vital Necessity of an Alliance between Stalinists and Dissidents (On the Centenary of I. V. Stalin’s Birth).”21 According to Sokirko, “the main reasons for the persistence and, perhaps, the growth [. . .] of the Stalin myth” can be summed up as follows: Dissatisfaction with growing economic turmoil and moral turpitude, and the ineffectiveness and devaluation of labor [. . .]. This has given rise to the myth: “Under Stalin there was order and everybody worked.” Dissatisfaction with shortages and constant price increases— creeping inflation that hits the lowest-earning groups of the population hardest. This has given rise to the myth: “Under Stalin everything was available in the stores, and prices only went down.” (Sokirko 2015, 171) Sokirko also mentions “exasperation at the growing dependence on the black market [. . .] e.g., the worsening antagonism between the relatively impoverished lower classes and the thriving black marketeers,” which gave rise to the myth: “Under Stalin thieves and speculators were kept in line, and honest people enjoyed prosperity and respect” (ibid.). The main reason for the Generalissimo’s phantasmatic popularity, Sokirko argues, was a “deep dissatisfaction with present-day society, which was threatened by immorality and economic collapse” (ibid., 172).22 Two points are worth dwelling on here. Sokirko acknowledges—in passing, and seemingly unaware of the significance of his own assertions— that late-Stalinist society, as people described it in the 1970s, was by no means an exact recollection, but rather a myth, which was imagined in contradistinction to the widespread social disillusionment of the Brezhnev era. Furthermore, Sokirko suggests that the aesthetic and psychological link that can be traced in the works of Evtushenko, Zinov’ev, and Limonov—the myth of the “glorious” past and utter disillusionment with the present—was echoed by popular sentiment. In fact, it was this popular sentiment that made Govorukhin’s The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed such a cult favorite: it imbued the miniseries with an imperceptible “surplus value” that resisted articulation,

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no matter what questions were put to its viewers. Vysotskii’s performance validated these viewers’ expectations, even if they were subliminal. The Soviet leader Yuri Andropov appeared to be moved by the same popular sentiment when he began his brief (late 1982–early 1984) term in the spirit of neo-Stalinism, with calls for modernization and, simultaneously, a crackdown on corruption and loose workplace discipline. Corrupt officials were given harsh sentences, while police officers conducted sidewalk raids targeting “truants,” e.g. women who skipped work to wait in line for scarce commodities for their families. Andropov was probably well informed about this popular sentiment and counted on winning support from those who shared in it. It seems that Evtushenko’s poems of 1983 were written, at least in part, to express support for Andropov’s program. After all, the poet had always shown himself to be highly attuned to the political situation throughout his life under Soviet rule. To my mind, in discussing the “golden myth of Stalinism” Nikolai Koposov does not sufficiently account for the fact that this myth emerged in the 1970s and that it retained an aura of passively oppositional sentiment. Its aim was not to bolster solidarity between “ordinary citizens” and Soviet elites, but to provide psychological compensation for people experiencing self-alienation and a lack of paternalistic social support; or, as it was called back then, “disregard for the ordinary person.” These forms of phantasmatic nostalgia for Stalinism are neither a cultural movement nor a self-sufficient ideology. Collectively, they constitute a particular type of sociocultural construct, which, borrowing a term from Michel Foucault, we can call a dispositive, or an apparatus (Foucault 1980, 194; on the history of this term in Foucault’s works, see: Podoroga 2008). Building on Foucault’s idea, Giorgio Agamben defines the apparatus as follows: a.

It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and non-linguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements. b. The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation. c. As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge. (2009, 2–3) Within the apparatus of “protest nostalgia,” there is a narrower movement— a sub-apparatus—exemplified by the miniseries The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, Limonov’s novel, and the band Liube. This sub-apparatus describes the Stalin era as a space of anomie, which is withstood by a “strongman”—not the great leader himself, but an “ordinary” man whose

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natural abilities and determination lead him to a crossroads. Such a hero could just as easily become either a criminal or an agent of state violence, or he can embody elements of both. The appearance of this sub-apparatus was prompted by historical trauma; namely, the mass repressions of the Stalin era, the famine of 1946–1947 (which millions of people living in the late 1980s could still remember), and the everyday humiliations of Soviet life. There was an urgent need to reconcile the “golden myth” of Stalinist society—its compensatory nostalgia—with feelings of pain and fear caused by deprivations and helplessness before state power. What emerged was a hybrid, phantasmatic vision: a society rife with anomie where only the “tough guys” and “alpha males” could survive, men who worked for the government but were not necessarily bound by its laws and conventions—just like the government itself. In his novel, Limonov constantly bemoans the fact that his father’s hands were tied at his job (managing a club for internal military forces) by an excess of bureaucratic norms and limitations. Shortly after completing the novel, Limonov moved to Russia, where he immediately began traveling around sites of conflict, fighting—as he supposed—for the interests of Russia and “the Orthodox Slavs” but without publicly affiliating himself with any intelligence agencies, let alone the post-Soviet Yeltsin administration (for some details, see: Rogatchevsky 2018). In We Once Had a Great Era, Limonov wrote that he felt himself to be his father’s heir, but in subsequent works he invented a distilled “macho” persona, one who fights for the collective community but is himself a combination of maverick adventurer and soldier.

Social Chaos and The Strongman’s Discipline: The Persistence of a Quasi-Ideology The larger apparatus of compensatory nostalgia for Stalinism disappeared with the Soviet regime in the early 1990s, but the sub-apparatus of “anomie vs. strongman” was preserved in the culture, as a space where a new quasi-ideology would develop. By “quasi-ideology,” I mean a sum of mental attitudes that function to “explain” social reality in a purely subjective way, rendering it “understandable” (even if this understanding is discomfiting) but never taking the form of a consistent narrative the way “ordinary,” traditional ideology would. As for the attitudes that make up a “quasi-ideology,” they are formed and sustained by means of cultural resources such as media texts and works of “high” art and popular culture. The impact of the sub-apparatus described here can be seen from the results of the television contest Name of Russia (Imia Rossiia) conducted in 2008 by the VID media company and the “Russia” channel. In its concept, this contest was similar to 100 Greatest Britons, conducted by

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the BBC in 2002, and Great Ukrainians, conducted in 2007 by the Ukrainian television company Inter. On May 7, 2008, a list of 500 historical figures was released to the public,23 after which people could vote for their favorite on the “Russia” channel’s website. The contest was presented as a state-sponsored initiative: the promotional video featured the recently elected president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev. Beginning in October 2008, the “Russia” channel aired a daily hour-long talk show, with each episode devoted to a different front-runner. On December 28, Alexander Nevsky (1221–1263)—considered a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church—was declared the winner.24 In early July, however, the standings had told a different story: Joseph Stalin was in first place and Vladimir Vysotskii in second.25 Vysotskii soon dropped to fourth, and the last emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, took his place. On August 14, the network released a statement claiming that the previous results had been the work of flash mobs and cyberattacks; these results were declared null and void, and voting started again from zero. The network then obtained the “correct” results. The July polls were a shock to many, but only because Stalin was in first place, not because of the (at first glance) bizarre proximity of Stalin and Vysotskii, who had made no secret of his anti-totalitarian views. (See, for example, Viktor Erofeev’s vitriolic rant “In Praise of Stalin” (“Pokhvala Stalinu”), which deals almost exclusively with Stalin, while Vysotskii is mentioned only in passing at the end of the text (Erofeev 2008)). The sub-apparatus described here explains why Stalin and Vysotskii temporarily shared the top two spots in the voting. The “quasi-ideology” that formed around the “anomie vs. strongman” sub-apparatus was the result of targeted efforts by individual cultural actors. In 1990, Stanislav Govorukhin (the very same who directed The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed) released a documentary with the similarly prohibitive title We Cannot Live Like This (Tak zhit’ nel’zia). The latter film, which featured songs by Vladimir Vysotskii (!), portrayed Soviet everyday reality in the late 1980s as a space of total anomie, a combination of the worst aspects of the 1940s and 1970s, including rampant crime and an utterly corrupt police force. Only a “strongman” could stand up to this anomie, and it was Govorukhin’s opinion at the time that Boris Yeltsin was the right man for the part. As Sergei Stankevich— then one of Yeltsin’s most fervent supporters—recalled, We Cannot Live Like This was used to stir up support for Yeltsin’s 1990 campaign for Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation. According to Stankevich, Mossovet (the Soviet equivalent of the Moscow city council) “recommended” (which in the Soviet context basically meant “ordered”) that high school students be sent to screenings of We Cannot Live Like This in place of their regular classes on recent Russian history. This made all the more sense, given that the ideologically driven Soviet

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textbooks were quickly losing their relevance in the rapidly changing political situation: In May 1990, when Yeltsin was having difficulty getting elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (on several occasions he was just two or three votes short), a screening of Govorukhin’s film was arranged for the People’s Deputies of Russia. Mossovet sent several dozen buses over to the Kremlin. As soon as their session was over, the Russian deputies were driven over to “Mos’film” and led into the screening room. The film left the deputies—especially those who represented distant parts of the country—completely stunned. The very next day, Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR by a fairly wide margin. (Stankevich 2011) In the early 1990s, the Russian media was saturated with narratives of anomie and decline. Nostalgia for anomie did not make sense in this context, since nostalgia depends on a contrast between the subject’s previous and current conditions. Therefore, nostalgia for the Stalin era radically changed in its modality; now, the Stalin era was depicted as a postmodern idyll. On New Year’s Eve 1995–96, the major Russian television channel ORT premiered the musical Old Songs About Main Things (Starye pesni o glavnom; directed by Dmitry Fiks, produced by Konstantin Ernst). Fiks’ musical was an ironic remake of Ivan Pyryev’s 1949 film Cossacks of the Kuban (Kubanskie Kozaki), in its own way a classic work of Socialist Realism. Old Songs is set in a fictional village in the late 1940s/early 1950s, depicted as a place of comfort and plenty, just like the village in Cossacks of the Kuban. Fiks and Ernst’s film was based on popular songs of the Stalin era. Nostalgia for the Stalin era continued to proliferate in post-Soviet Russian popular culture in numerous variations and modalities (whose study is outside the scope of this article). Here, I want to stress that the subapparatus described above endured, both in politics and in culture. It no longer alluded explicitly to the late 1940s but survived as a concrete framework organizing the relation between power and knowledge. A key component of this framework, the “strongman versus anomie” motif, was reproduced throughout the 1990s and was foundational to the political campaigns of General Aleksandr Lebed’, of the entrepreneur Anatolii Bykov (who was apparently connected with organized crime), of Eduard Limonov, and by the late 1990s, Vladimir Putin as well. Already in 2005, Michael Gorham pointed out that one of Putin’s language masks was the image of a muzhik (Gorham 2005, 391–5), or a “tough Russian guy.” In May 1999, two sociological research companies, ROMIR and VTsIOM, conducted a survey in which they asked Russians which movie

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character they most wanted to see leading their country. The survey was commissioned by the magazine Kommersant-Vlast’, and its actual purpose was to monitor the political situation leading up to the elections. In 1999, the Kommersant publishing house had been jointly purchased by the businessmen Boris Berezovskii and Badri Patarkatsishvili; at the time, Berezovskii was one of the leading kingmakers in Russian politics (Aven 2018, 357–511). In those months, Berezovskii was giving a lot of thought to who should succeed Yeltsin as president, as well as to how this successor should behave in order to be truly popular. The results of the VTsIOM survey showed Peter the Great in first place, followed by Marshal Zhukov (in both cases, as characters from historical films), then Gleb Zheglov (Smirnova 2000). The ROMIR survey had Zhukov, Zheglov, and the fictional SS Standartenführer Max Otto von Stierlitz (the name assumed by Maksim Isaev, a Soviet spy working undercover on the Nazi home front, in Tat’iana Lioznova’s miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring [Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesni, 1973]). Mark Lipovetsky has written brilliantly about the reasons for Stierlitz’s popularity in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (Lipovetskii 2007; cf. Dashevsky 1998); for our purposes, the crucial fact is that Gleb Zheglov showed up in both sets of survey results. When Smirnova wrote in her article that “Putin has every opportunity to pick up where Zheglov left off: [.  .  .] after the war in Chechnya his new hobby-horse will likely be cracking down on corruption” (Smirnova 2000), she seemed to say out loud what Kremlin political strategists of the time were thinking. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Russian propaganda has consistently portrayed Putin as someone who “triumphed” over anomie and the “tumultuous (likhie) 90s” (a phrase that became popular during the Russian legislative elections in 2007). Meanwhile, Putin’s communist opponents have insisted not that this was a fundamentally inaccurate description of the situation but only that Putin had been unsuccessful in his battle against anomie. On December 15, 2010, the Khamovnicheskii District Court of Moscow was scheduled to pass sentence in the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Platon Lebedev. Khodorkovskii and Lebedev were accused of stealing all the oil produced by Khodorkovskii’s company, Yukos, between 1998 and 2003 (Russian representatives in international courts insist to this day that the oil was not stolen but sold [Luk’ianova 2018]). However, on December 15 the sentencing hearing was moved to December 27; the next day Putin, then the Russian prime minister, led a live call-in show—a propagandistic question-and-answer session with a preselected group of “regular people.” Asked about Khodorkovskii’s trial, the prime minister replied: “Like a certain character played by Vladimir Vysotskii, I believe that a thief ought to be in prison, and it is the judgment of the court that Khodorkovskii is guilty of embezzling a considerable sum.” Khodorkovskii’s lawyers saw this statement as a blatant attempt to

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pressure the court (Anoshin 2010). For some reason, only a few journalists noted the context in which Zheglov delivers the line quoted by Putin: he tosses a stolen wallet to someone he considers a pickpocket, arrests him, and then explains to Sharapov: “A thief ought to be in prison. And it couldn’t matter less how I get him there” (see, for example Karp 2010; Travin 2010). Thus, by quoting Govorukhin’s miniseries, Putin—whether intentionally or not—declared that the very principle of presumption of innocence was irrelevant. The current Russian president bases his approach to rule on the same paradox that underlies Zheglov’s character (as created by Govorukhin and Vysotskii): a combination of disciplinary force and readiness to be “a denizen of anomie”. Today, these two aspects of Zheglov’s character correspond to distinct functions within Russian propaganda: in his domestic policies, Putin is above all a disciplinarian, while in his foreign policy and dealings with prominent businessmen (at least while the cameras are rolling) Putin plays the part of a “macho” facing off against the chaotic “jungle,” who is therefore entitled to violate conventions and international treaties. Khodorkovskii struck back by attempting to deconstruct the very apparatus by which Putin legitimizes his power. On December 24, 2010, soon after Putin’s television appearance, Khodorkovskii—then a political prisoner—published a piece in Nezavisimaia Gazeta, in which he shared his New Year’s wishes with the Prime Minister and the newspaper’s readers: ‘Everyone is afraid of you’—a terrible compliment resounding from the screen. Do we really need Russia to be founded, once more, on cruelty? Do we really want our children proving to us what we should have been afraid of all along? [. . .] I wish Putin well, and I wish him to be tolerant. I wish for no one to be afraid of him, and for him to be loved. Maybe not by everyone, but sincerely, unselfishly, and not only by curs. And that will be true happiness for him. As for our country, we will put it in order ourselves. Without spite or teeth-gnashing. Without imaginary enemies or a sordid “vertical.” Together. For our children and grandchildren. (Khodorkovskii 2010) Khodorkovskii’s rhetoric (its presumably propagandistic character aside) is founded on the substitution of utopia for ressentiment. More importantly, Khodorkovskii proposes an alternative conception of agency: in place of a “strongman” facing off against anomie, he advocates a principle of cooperation and solidarity. From a political standpoint, there is a fundamental, even proverbial, difference between these two types of agency: they allow one to distinguish between an authoritarian and democratic society. But in Russia, authoritarianism is touted as an essential element of political culture, thanks in large part to the

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media. The development of other, non-authoritarian paradigms takes place within cultural projects whose aim is not to propagate abstract slogans about the value of cooperation but rather to describe the current situation, or different periods of Soviet history, without resorting to the “anomie-discipline” dichotomy. These historical periods are presented as a dynamic multiplicity of practices, lifestyles, and forms of organizing knowledge and power. As a result, the agency of the “strongman” is subjected to deconstruction. In September 2015, the Muzeon Park of the Arts in Moscow hosted a festival called “Nineties Island” (“Ostrov devianostykh”); the theme that kept repeating was that “the nineties were different for everyone,” and the festival featured performances of everyday “practices of freedom” from that decade, in all their diversity (Slobodchikova 2015). Happenings such as this are met with official outrage. Reporting on the “Nineties Island,” the state television channel accused the organizers of being “liberals who want to rewrite history,” and the far right progovernment journalist Ul’iana Skoibeda stated that the festival organizers wanted “to bring everything back. Ruin, chaos, rampant crime. War, famine” (Skoibeda and Sazonov 2016). The reason for this frenzied reaction is that the sub-apparatus described here legitimizes the government’s rule in contemporary Russia; therefore, to challenge the sub-apparatus is to challenge the legitimacy of those in power. One question that remains is how the current version of this subapparatus relates to the historical imagination. To describe this relation, I will circle back to my analysis of the song “Atas!” For all its simplicity and eclecticism, the song contains an idea that is not obvious at first glance: the reason the “boys” and “girls” can happily dance is that the “strongmen”—“Gleb Zheglov and Volodia Sharapov”—are, either at present or in the past, catching crooks: “When the mild workday is done/ Be at peace, my dear motherland!” This idea contains the entire mechanism of the sub-apparatus in embryonic form: it readies people to lose control over the circumstances of their social existence (without necessarily entailing such a loss). This loss of control is followed by its transfer into the hands of “strongmen,” giving rise to widespread feelings of distress, which moral philosophers of the 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Scheler) would call ressentiment. For the ressentiment mentality—of the type described here—history always figures as a source of moral compensation in response to continuous frustration. In this sub-apparatus, anomie can be found in the past or the present; what remains constant are the figure of the “strongman” as the main bearer of agency, distress at the lack of one’s own agency, and an attempt to compensate for this lack by turning to historical phantasms instead of attempting to cooperate with likeminded people. Svetlana Boym wrote about the ways in which restorative nostalgia attempts to reconstruct a primordial “home” that is besieged by

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“enemies” (Boym 2001, 43). The sub-apparatus described here does not even need to invoke an actual historical “home”: instead, it relies on the specter of the past so that a “strongman” can prove, over and over, his ability to overcome chaos and restore an idea of “us” that seems to slip away before our very eyes—a loss that is only made possible because the subjects of this “us” are locked inside the sub-apparatus and refuse to imagine any other form of social existence.

P.S. When I had already finished writing this article, the Russian satirist Vasia Oblomov26 published a YouTube video for the song “Things Are Looking up” (“Zhizn’ nalazhivaetsia”).27 Together, the video and song constitute one of the first coherent attempts to deconstruct the myth of the “real Russian man” promulgated by the Russian media. Moreover, it implicitly subverts the sub-apparatus described in this article. The hero of Oblomov’s song presents a man who, to judge by the lyrics, either runs a small business or works as a company manager. He relates how he used to be a “security guard in a parking garage” and a “taxi driver stuck in traffic jams,” a typical career path for men without college degrees in Russian provincial cities. These days, however, our protagonist’s “horoscope is A-okay,” and he has “become the man he wanted to be.” However, the song’s optimistic catchphrase, “things are looking up,” undergoes an unexpected semantic shift: “Year in, year out, no end in sight/Things are looking up.” The protagonist vaunts his endless adaptability, but the end result of this adaptability is a closed loop: our protagonist is pleased with himself and everyone around him and incapable of social action, social or political reflection, or solidarity with anyone outside his immediate circle of acquaintances. All this is echoed by the plot of the video, which features a man—played by Oblomov himself— who discovers a time capsule among the ruins of a demolished house. This time capsule had been buried in the house’s foundation 50 years earlier, in 2018, and contains a message to posterity. The message, as it turns out, consists of some seed husks and a piece of paper with “dick” written on it. The video ends with an image of a ruined church and the caption “It was the year 2068 . . .” The entire clip is preceded by an epigraph from George Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As we learn from the video, “controlling the future” means that the future will be identical to the past. The way Oblomov’s clip deconstructs the myth of the “real Russian man” forestalls any possibility of nostalgia for a “strong personality”; not only is the song’s protagonist unable to stand up to chaos, he is himself an agent of chaos, in that he is unwilling to change anything. Oblomov’s song gives us hope

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that the aforementioned sub-apparatus, while deeply entrenched, is not eternal. In time, it may be criticized and debunked by other authors as well. Translated from Russian by Philip Redko

Notes 1. Research for this book chapter was supported by the Foundation “B.N. Yeltsin’s Presidential Center” as part of the research project “Social History of the 1990s” implemented at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. I am grateful to Alexander Dmitriev for his invaluable comments. 2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOHaVALnUa0&start_radio=1&list=RDfOH aVALnUa0&t=0. All lyrics quoted in this article were transcribed from YouTube recordings by the author. 3. When it first came out on tape, their debut album was called Now things are going to be different, or Rock about Liubertsy. The title was changed to Atas slightly later. 4. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaDwjiIj1FU. 5. The title is in iambic pentameter and is almost certainly an unintentional allusion to Aleksandr Galich (hardly someone Limonov would admire): “The Great Era commanded us / To glorify this fact in song and verse . . .” (from the song “Glory to the Heroes!” 1961; the first two stanzas are by Gennady Shpalikov) (Galich 1999, 99). 6. “Minus device” is Yuri Lotman’s term denoting a significant absence of some elements in literary work—elements that are habitual for some genres or literary traditions and whose presence is usually awaited by a potential reader (Lotman 1970, 66–7). 7. In the same issue of Znamia, Limonov’s piece was followed by the latest installment of a book by the official high-ranked Soviet writer Vladimir Karpov, titled Marshal Zhukov, His Brothers-in-Arms and Detractors in Times of War and Peace (Marshal Zhukov, ego soratniki i protivniki v gody voiny i mira). As a result, the entire issue took on the appearance of an unintentional (?) apology to the Soviet general. Meanwhile, the title of Karpov’s magnum opus inadvertently reproduced the title of a well-known anti-totalitarian and anti-Stalinist article by Vladimir Lakshin about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Ivan Denisovich, His Friends and Foes” (“Ivan Denisovich, ego druz’ia I nedrugi”). The resulting discursive and aesthetic “total mix” was typical of Russian “thick journals” during Perestroika. 8. In the 2000s, Marshal Zhukov’s chief detractor was the well-known author of popular history books Viktor Suvorov; among his works, there is a fierce anti-Zhukov philippic titled The Shadow of Victory (Ten’ pobedy; see Suvorov 2002). 9. In this, he follows directly in the tradition of Maxim Gorky’s “heroic ideology”; tracing this genealogy, however, is beyond the scope of this article and has already been done by others (Carden 1990, 228; see also Limonov 1992). 10. In the winter of 1990, Maria Rozanova delivered an impassioned monologue in defense of Limonov at the MGU literary studio “Ray” (“Luch”), arguing that We Once Had a Great Era was not a return to Socialist Realism, but rather “a kind of modernism” (moderniatina; I was in the audience for her talk, and quote her from memory). In this she was basically correct, if we ignore her erroneous definition of the problem. Even then, intellectuals tended to take issue with the novel on moral, rather than aesthetic, grounds.

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11. In 1989, this subculture started breaking down, and the band’s subsequent “allusions” to it seem to have lost their point. 12. The miniseries, or “multi-episode film for television,” was a particular genre of late-Soviet television. Whether these cultural products can be labeled “TV series” does not seem particularly important. The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed contains five episodes. The enormous popularity of this series is proven by the fact that there are no fewer than four monuments to its main characters in the post-Soviet landscape: in Russia (Moscow and Volgograd) and Ukraine (Kiev and Mariupol). Three of these (Moscow, Volgograd, and Kiev) are situated near municipal or national police departments. 13. One of Vysotskii’s closest friends, the filmmaker Ivan Dykhovichnyi, proposed an explanation for why Vysotskii changed the conflict in the Vainer Brothers’ novel for his onscreen portrayal: “Volodia simplified it because he really, really wanted to. You know how when kids are playing around—the ones who play fascists always give it their all” (www.svoboda.org/a/24204519. html). 14. “Lament for a Communal Apartment” was published together with the poem “My Universities” (“Moi universitety”). 15. It was set to music by Luiza Khmel’nitska and became famous in Gelena Velikanova’s rendition. It was also performed by Iosif Kobzon. 16. Mikhail Pavlovets was the first to compare these two poems (Pavlovets 2014). 17. The plight of a young woman who does not get into drama school is also a major plot point in Tat’iana Lioznova’s film Carnival (Karnaval, 1981), written by Anna Rodionova. There, the main character overcomes many obstacles and ends up a famous singer with a striking resemblance to Alla Pugacheva. Kokchetav then was name of a city in Kazakhstan, in the postSoviet period its name has been changed to Kokshetau. 18. The title alludes to a line from the Soviet song “Before our broad beautiful Motherland” (1938), by Matvei Blanter, based on a poem by Aleksei Surkov. 19. Certain aspects of Govorukhin’s worldview seem to align him with rightwing German directors of the 1920s, whose films formulated the imagery of the Nazi movement. Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag described the role of “mountain films” in the development of the Nazi imagination and in the personal evolution of Leni Riefenstahl, the most important propagandistic director of Nazi Germany: The mountain climbing in Fanck’s pictures was a visually irresistible metaphor of unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Führerworship. [.  .  .] As usual, the mountain is represented [in Riefenstahl’s film] as both supremely beautiful and dangerous, that majestic force which invites the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self—into the brotherhood of courage and into death. (Sontag 1975) Govorukhin’s first film was characteristically titled Vertical (Vertikal‘, 1967); the plot revolved around mountain climbers. There, an attempt to scale the forbidding Hor-Tau peak is represented as an excruciating spiritual effort. One of the lead characters was played by Vladimir Vysotskii. Govorukhin was probably not familiar with the “mountain film” tradition; nevertheless, the aesthetic correspondences between Vertical and German cinema of the late 1920s are hardly accidental. The likeliest explanation is that Govorukhin’s film drew on similar mechanisms of aesthetic imagination.

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20. Neostalinists from the magazines Molodaia Gvardiia and Nash Sovremennik did not share this worldview (although they acknowledged it in their arguments); instead, they expressed the more elitist—or rather anti-elitist—view that Stalin had turned the USSR into a Russian nation state, which was a good thing for Russian ethno-nationalists. 21. The Soviet view was that Stalin’s centenary should be observed on December 21, 1979, but according to information available today, Stalin’s date of birth had been falsified in Soviet sources. In fact, he was born on December 6, 1878 (December 18 in the European calendar). In 1980, having been arrested, Sokirko admitted that his dissident activity could be “caused by a delusion” and was blamed by other dissidents for cowardice; however, in the post-Soviet epoch, Sokirko returned to the position of civil activist, defended the businesspeople who had been illegally sentenced to prison, took part in the pacifist piquets, etc. 22. Semibold font of the original publication is maintained. 23. The official version was that the list had been compiled by historians, but in fact it seems to have been compiled by PR managers from the think tank “Foundation for Effective Politics,” which had close ties to the Russian government at the time (“Istoricheskii proekt” 2008). 24. On the Russian cult of Nevsky and its political implications, see Schenk (2004). 25. These were the standings on July 11, 2008, when 1,705,896 votes had been submitted through the website. 26. Real name Vasilii Goncharov; his jocular scene name is based on the fact that the Russian classic writer Ivan Goncharov was the author of a novel called Oblomov. 27. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K5Fd0l-RGs.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anoshin, Ivan. 2010. “Kto dolzhen sidet’ v tiur’me.” Interfax Information Agency, December 16, 2010. www.interfax.ru/business/169514. Aven, Petr. 2018. Vremia Berezovskogo. Moscow: AST. Bakin, Viktor. 2011. Vladimir Vysotskii bez mifov i legend. Moscow: Eksmo, and Algoritm. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Carden, Patricia. 1990. “In Search of the Right Milieu: Eduard Limonov’s Kharkov Cycle.” In Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Jane Gary Harris, 227–37. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dashevskii, Grigorii. 1998. Mundir i sviter. Ekspert, no. 32 (148), August 31, 1998. Erofeev, Viktor. 2008.“Pokhvala Stalinu.” Ogonek, June 20, 2004. www.kommersant. ru/doc/2301083. Evtushenko, Yevgenii. 1983a. “Plach po kommunal’noi kvartire.” Pravda, September 12, 1983: 7. Evtushenko, Yevgenii. 1983b. “Razmyshleniia u chernogo khoda.” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, September 2, 1983: 2. Foucault, Michel. 1980 (1977). “‘The Confession of the Flesh.’ A conversation with Alain Grosrichard, Gerard Wajeman, Jaques-Alain Miller, Guy Le Gaufey,

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Dominique Celas, Gerard Miller, Catherine Millot, Jocelyne Livi and Judith Miller.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper, 194–228. New York: Panteon Books. Galich, Alexander. Sochineniia. 2 vols. Moscow: Lockid, 1999. Vol. 1. Gorham, Michael. 2005. “Putin’s Language.” Ab Imperio 4: 381–401. Iakubov, Manashir. 1993. “Ochishchaiushchii smekh.” Nashe nasledie, no. 28, 1993: 97–100. “Istoricheskii proekt telekanala ‘Rossiia’ shokiroval istorikov.” Lenta.ru, May 12, 2008. https://lenta.ru/news/2008/05/12/nameofrussia/. Karp, Poel’. 2010. “Kto dolzhen sidet’ v tiur’me?” Grani.ru, December 28, 2010. https://graniru.org/blogs/free/entries/184903.html. Khodorkovskii, Michail. 2010. “Vlasti ne khvataet dobra i terpimosti.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 24, 2010. www.ng.ru/politics/2010-12-24/3_kartblansh. html. Kino-Teatr. 2018. “Mesto vstrechi izmenit’ nel’zia: Obsuzhdenie.” www.kinoteatr.ru/kino/movie/sov/3840/forum/f10/. Koposov, Nikolai. 2011. Pamiat’ strogogo rezhima: istoriia i politika v Rossii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Limonov, Eduard. 1989. “U nas byla Velikaia Epokha.” Znamia, no. 11, 1989: 4–77. Limonov, Eduard. 1992. “‘Nechistyi’ Limonov i ego ‘chistye’ kritiki. Interv’iu avtora s samim soboi.” Den’, vol. 46, no. 18, May 3–9, 1992. https://ed-limonov.live journal.com/189828.html. Lipovetskii, Mark. 2007. “Iskusstvo alibi: ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny’ v svete nashego opyta.” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 53 (3): 131–60. Lotman, Iurii. 1970. Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Luk’ianova, Elena. 2018. “Piatnadtsat’ beskonechnykh let . . . .” Ekho Moskvy, July 2, 2018. https://echo.msk.ru/blog/elukyanova/2232992-echo/. Pavlovets, Mikhail. 2014. “Sovetskii byt v poezii L’va Loseva.” In Poetik des Alltags: Russische Literatur im 18.–21. Jahrhundert, edited by A. Graf, 299– 306. München: Herbert Utz Verlag. Podoroga, Valerii. 2008. “Vlast’ i seksualnost’. Tema dispositiva u M. Foucault. Nabroski i kommentarii.” Sinii Divan, no. 12, 2008: 34–48. Rogatchevki, Andrei. 2018. “Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and the Nazi Legacy: Titular Nations vs Ethnic Minorities.” In Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin’s Russia, edited by Niklas Bernsand and Barbara TörnquistPlewa, 63–82. Leiden: Brill. Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. 2004. Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger—Fürst—Nationalheld: eine Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedächtnis (1263–2000). Köln: Böhlau. Skoibeda, Ul’iana and Evgenii Sazonov. 2016. “Napishem pravdivuiu istoriiu 90-kh!” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, October 24, 2016. www.kompravda.eu/daily/26435.7/ 3306369/. Slobodchikova, Ol’ga. 2015. “Likhie’ ili ‘raznye’: pochemu v Rossii snova sporiat o 90-kh?” BBC Russian Service, September 24, 2015. www.bbc.com/russian/ society/2015/09/150924_90s_argument_russia. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred. Foreword by Andreas Huyssen. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press.

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Remembering Chernobyl Through the Lens of Post-Soviet Nostalgia Emily D. Johnson

Don’t call these the “wonders of Soviet heroism” when you write about it. Those wonders really did exist. But first there has to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Disaster, 2005

At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which took place on April 26, 1986, near Pripiat’, Ukraine, stood in East European collective memory as the ultimate example of the Soviet state’s dishonesty and indifference to the fate of ordinary citizens. The accident spewed fallout over much of Europe, left significant swathes of Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian territory contaminated, and by the end of a year had led to the evacuation of well over a hundred thousand people. Soviet citizens recalled with rage the May Day parades that had gone forward days after the disaster despite elevated radiation as well as failures to distribute prophylactic iodine. Stories circulated about officials who fled their posts, Party bosses who evacuated their own families before radiation levels were publicly acknowledged, and planes that seeded clouds to ensure that fall-out rained down on Gomel’ instead of Moscow. Many of the approximately 600,000 citizens from all over the Soviet Union who served as “liquidators,” charged with containing and cleaning up contamination in and around the plant, also recalled their experiences angrily. When interviewed by the oral historian Svetlana Alexievich for her book on the Chernobyl disaster, which appeared in Russian in 1997, such cleanup veterans remembered their lack of safety equipment and non-functional dosimeters as well as the non-disclosure agreements that they had to sign at the end of their service (Alexievich 2005, 41, 45, 48, 143). They cynically recounted attempts to recast their often-compulsory efforts as an example of Soviet-style heroism, dismissing the medals they received and dubbing the bands of soldiers sent to

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install Soviet flags over the ruined reactor “live sacrifice[s]” to “Soviet paganism” (ibid., 43, 91). After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, both Western and postSoviet authors identified Chernobyl as a key instigating event: the disaster eroded confidence in the Party and state and convinced many Soviet citizens that elites could not be trusted to communicate truthfully or manage critical installations (Remnick 1994, 244–7; Volkogonov 1998, 475). Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, although introduced before the disaster, grew more important in its wake, but greater openness and reform failed to restore trust. Freed from censorship by the end of the 1980s, the Soviet press released more damaging revelations, including about Chernobyl, leading to new questions about the system’s health. Although, even today, memories of the misinformation and bumbling that followed the Chernobyl accident persist in former Soviet territory, in Russia itself, commemorative activity in connection with the 20th, 25th, and 30th anniversaries of the disaster (in 2006, 2011, and 2016 respectively) has gradually recast Chernobyl from a symbol of everything wrong with late-Soviet society into a narrative of heroic triumph that recalls the texts of Soviet Socialist Realism. Books and films released in connection with anniversaries often gloss over mistakes made after the disaster, assigning blame for any failings to Gorbachev, his closest henchmen, and a handful of derelict bosses at the atomic energy station itself. Treating the rest of late-Soviet society as healthy, they focus on the contributions of the liquidators. Many commemorative editions include photographs and full-page bios of individual heroes. Such portraits often highlight Party membership and service to the security organs or military and cast their subject’s participation in cleanup work as voluntary and enthusiastic. In commemorative texts and films as well as in ceremonies staged at Russian Chernobyl monuments, liquidators emerge as the last generation of Soviet heroes and as models for contemporary citizens to emulate. Such an approach to remembering the late-Soviet period is, of course, from many perspectives nothing novel: in discussions of “mistakes of the past,” post-Soviet and, indeed, even Soviet elites have often tried to cast problems as the result of the character or judgment flaws of individual leaders and thereby shore up their own legitimacy and discourage lines of criticism focusing on systemic failings. Khrushchev employed this approach in his 1956 “secret speech” on the Stalinist cult of personality. Similarly, Gorbachev-bashing today allows post-Soviet elites to cast the obvious failures in the 1980s as isolated mistakes, made by individual bad-actors, and hence clears the way for the nostalgic embrace of the late-Soviet past as a whole. This article considers both grassroots efforts to commemorate the Chernobyl disaster in Russia and the Russian state’s attempts to consolidate

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and co-opt these memorial practices. In places, I contrast these Russian commemorative efforts with similar undertakings in Ukraine and Belarus, which are less nostalgic in their orientation. I take as my starting point the concept of post-Soviet nostalgia as elucidated by Svetlana Boym, Maya Nadkarni, and Olga Shevchenko. “Outbreaks of nostalgia,” as Boym notes, often follow periods of social upheaval in part because this symbolic practice so beautifully expresses longing for “a community with a collective memory” and also for “continuity in a fragmented world” (2001, xvi, xiv). Nostalgia’s power in postcommunist Eastern Europe, Nadkarni and Shevchenko suggest, stems, in part, from “its susceptibility to being co-opted into various political agendas” and used to signify different things: “apparently identical memory practices”—for example in two distinctive cultural contexts— can sometimes reflect very dissimilar “public values” and “patterns of public memory.” As a result, “the meaning and logic of nostalgic practices reside within specific social contexts in which they are embedded” (2004, 489, 518). For example, nostalgic rhetoric that, in early Soviet reports on the Chernobyl disaster, compared liquidators to the waves of brave communist volunteers who immediately signed up to fight Nazi invaders in 1941, thereby justifying mass call-ups and individual sacrifices, might years later resurface in the leaflets and speeches of grassroots organizers as part of a plea to provide more robust benefits to those who had participated in the cleanup efforts: after all, the World War II veterans had received special pensions and privileges. Even later, the same nostalgic tropes might find their way into the rhetoric of Putin-era regional and national officials who, even as public benefits declined, sought to use the liquidators as a symbol of the strength and selflessness of the Russian people and the principles of mutual aid and “friendship of peoples” that had supposedly characterized late-Soviet culture. Pragmatic and even cynical efforts to mobilize nostalgic sentiment for concrete political ends are not unusual. In Russia specifically, as Nadkarni and Shevchenko note, “nostalgic practices continuously face the danger of generating political capital for popular and imperialist projects” precisely because certain aspects of the socialist past, including Russia’s great power status, do not necessarily seem “irretrievable” (ibid., 516). Nonetheless, many of the nostalgic practices we see in post-Soviet Russia today retain an open-endedness that belies any effort to reduce their significance solely to questions of political intent or co-optation. Like Russians who nurse a Proustian affection for Soviet-era comestibles or sing along enthusiastically with retro musical shows set in the era of collectivization, those who reprise the rhetoric and rituals of Soviet heroism may not always themselves be acting with political intent. In some instances, one can argue that nostalgic forms emerge partly because the post-Soviet world offers no clear replacement for them. As Serguei Oushakine notes,

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in a period of “radical semantic rupture,” speakers can revive old speech norms, aesthetic patterns, and symbols because “of the inability of existing forms to communicate a relevant content” (2007, 453). How exactly would one, in post-Soviet Russia, pay homage to a group of heroes or request benefits for them without falling back on tropes of public remembrance from the Soviet past, including those associated with World War II, an event that emerged as a central focus of public memory in both lateSoviet and post-Soviet culture, as multiple scholars have demonstrated (Tumarkin 1994; Oushakine 2013b, 277–8)? Does an alternative postSoviet mode of acknowledging bravery and self-sacrifice even exist? As Nadkarni, Shevchenko, and Oushakine all argue, paying attention to the way in which forms are enframed is particularly important (2004, 492, 2007, 453). In this article, I consider how a liquidator cult replete with nostalgic elements emerged as a result of both agitation by cleanup workers and the actions of the post-Soviet Russian state. I will argue that, for both agitators from below and for state institutions, this symbolic practice, which nostalgically reworks patterns borrowed from the Soviet period, served in important—though different—ways to build community and establish, at least in terms of rhetoric, ritual, and aesthetics, a kind of continuity between the Soviet and contemporary periods. Victory over radiation at Chernobyl is often equated with the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany: in both cases, cultic texts suggest, popular enthusiasm helped overcome initial setbacks and isolated cases of incompetence and achieve a lasting victory. The ages in which these heroic feats took place are often juxtaposed in Chernobyl texts to the early 1990s, which are cast as a time of selfishness and disorder. In this respect, these commemorative works echo several key elements in the revisionist historical narrative that has gained traction in Russia under Putin: an increasingly nostalgic assessment of late-Soviet society that dismisses any failings as the work of Gorbachev and his closest associates and a largely negative appraisal of the chaotic Yeltsin period. Both these elements serve to legitimize the Putin regime, which is often depicted as a return to the “best” aspects of the late-Soviet era, such as popular enthusiasm, order, and self-sacrifice for the common good. Many Chernobyl texts exhort contemporary Russians to take the liquidators as models and selflessly work to rebuild Russia’s glory, emulating supposedly Soviet— as opposed to early post-Soviet—norms of behavior. In this sense they differ from texts memorializing veterans and those lost in post-Soviet Russia’s wars in Chechnya, as described by Serguei Oushakine, which read more as stories of “individual perseverance” than as a source of models for later generations to emulate (2009, 7, 154, 240–1). This difference may reflect the fact that it is easier to frame the cleanup efforts at Chernobyl as a noble endeavor than the politically ambiguous Chechen wars.

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Initial Responses to the Disaster The roots of the Russian liquidator cult lie amidst Soviet media coverage in the weeks following the disaster. The earliest Soviet reports on the accident at Chernobyl, which appeared after elevated radiation readings surfaced in Western Europe, aimed to minimize the crisis and reassure audiences at home and abroad. The first brief announcements on April 28, 1986, admitted only that an accident had occurred and measures were being taken. More substantial reports appeared on April 30, a full day after Western media sources had begun devoting substantial attention to the disaster (Friedman et al. 1987; Rubin 1987). These articles reported two deaths and claimed that radiation levels were stabilizing. By May 1, countering alarmist “rumors” in the Western press emerged as a focus of Soviet coverage. Soviet newspapers warned that “certain foreign wire services and all sorts of ‘voices’ on the radio” were trying to sow panic while shamefully “taking pleasure” in the Soviet Union’s misfortune (Gubarev and Odinets 1986a, 6). Indeed, because Soviet sources released so little information initially, early Western reports sometimes included exaggerated casualty numbers (Geist 2015, 120). With the aim of dispelling such alarmism, initial Soviet reports on cleanup efforts emphasized their organization and implied that the Soviet nuclear industry and Soviet society were well prepared and could calmly address any contamination. On May 1, Pravda informed its readers that “specialized units” with “up-to-date equipment” and “effective work methods” had been brought in for the cleanup (“Ot Soveta” 1986, 2). Later coverage emphasized the absence of widespread panic and noted that evacuations were “well-organized” (Gubarev and Odinets 1986a, 6). Newspaper reports stressed that life in Kiev and other cities near the reactor continued unchanged. On May 6, Pravda cited the May Day parades that had taken place in Kiev and Minsk days after the disaster as evidence that the accident was not as serious as suggested in the West (Zhukov 1986, 4). “Kiev. Right now its gardens and parks are all in bloom. Ukraine’s capital is living a tranquil, confident, and very full life. All its enterprises are at work,” noted a TASS correspondents’ special report on May 7 (Zhukovskii et al. 1986b, 6). Other language in early articles, however, cast the cleanup in more heroic terms, presaging the emergence of the liquidator cult. Such rhetoric suggested that the accident was an occasion for self-sacrifice and a proving ground that would reveal the health of Soviet society. Soviet newspapers assured readers that, instead of running from the disaster, many local residents, including Party and Komsomol members, sacrificed themselves to mitigate it (Gubarev and Odinets 1986a, 6). Politicaleducation work acquired, reporters noted, exceptional importance in these “extreme conditions.” Applications for Party membership soared

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among early responders and were “immediately reviewed” as required in such a “critical situation.” Reports equated the cleanup operation with a “combat situation” and noted that Young Communists volunteered “like in wartime” (Zhukovskii et al. 1986a, 4; Dologopolov and Polozhevets 1986, 2). Those few individuals who abandoned their posts were cast as deserters and social outliers. G. Revenko, first Secretary of the Kiev Province Party Committee, noted at a press conference, “There are hundreds of examples of heroism. [. . .] No one questions the courage and selflessness of our people” (Gubarev and Odinets 1986b, 6). Explicit equations to World War II were common. Commentary cast Chernobyl—like the battle against the Nazi invaders and the industrialization campaign of the 1930s—as an obstacle to attack with shock troops and enthusiasm, and a victory for which Soviet heroes might make ultimate sacrifices. In Soviet reporting in 1986, however, heroic rhetoric co-existed alongside more sober reflections. By late May Soviet newspapers were acknowledging that delays in releasing information had fueled rumors at home as well as abroad. Articles debunked rumors that vodka cleansed the blood of radiation and discouraged citizens from drinking straight iodine in an effort to protect their thyroids: such self-treatments had resulted in hospitalizations (“Profilaktika” 1986, 4; Podgurskaia and Sharov 1986, 10). Moreover, newspapers detailed the botched experiment that caused the accident and reported on bungling during its aftermath, providing examples of early Glasnost coverage. For instance, Pëtr Polozhevets described a conversation at a state farm that had been evacuated to Zagaltsy in Borodianka District: “Don’t write about the difficulties,” said a man who was clearly not from the state farm, suddenly breaking into our conversation. “Show their heroism! These people were out planting potatoes and gave no thought to any radiation. They did their job, and that’s all there was to it!” I didn’t go on to write about heroism. That wasn’t heroism, it was criminal bungling. Given that the [atomic power] station was the farm’s neighbor, just km. away, its director should have possessed the rudiments of nuclear literacy. (1986, 13) Amidst all their talk of heroism, Soviet press reports from summer and fall 1986 never acknowledged the scope of the cleanup, its often compulsory nature, the extent of the supply shortages faced by liquidators, or the fact that areas outside the 30-kilometer exclusion zone had received significant fallout. Such revelations emerged only in 1989 when Glasnost extended further: after November 1986, when the preliminary sarcophagus encasing the ruined station was completed, coverage of Chernobyl died down for a time (on 1989, see: Marples 1993, 40).

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Pressure From Below to Compensate and Memorialize the Chernobyl Liquidators Although the Soviet government handed out a few awards to Chernobyl heroes in fall 1986, the disaster’s association with bungling initially discouraged broader efforts to memorialize it. Eighteen months after the disaster, Komsomol’skaia pravda printed a letter from staff at the Chernobyl atomic station, noting that efforts to build a memorial to the 26 station employees who had died of radiation sickness and were buried at Moscow’s Mitinskoe cemetery were being blocked. Although wreaths adorned the graves of the six Chernobyl fire fighters buried at the cemetery, letter-writers noted that the plant employees’ graves were so bare that they seemed like “poor relations.” Reflecting on the letter, the newspaper’s reporter, O. Dmitrieva noted: “But there is another view that also shouldn’t be dismissed: what is there to memorialize? Should we pay homage to the bungling and negligence? [. . .] Should we remember (they saved us!) or forget (the mismanagement!)?” (1986, 4). Pressure from below gradually helped shift rhetoric on Chernobyl and encourage the emergence of a memorial cult. In reaction to Dmitrieva’s short piece, letters poured in to Komsomol’skaia pravda calling for transforming April 26 into a Memorial Day and the construction of a monument at Mitinskoe cemetery. Such discussions paved the way for the announcement, in early 1988, of a competition to design a monument for the cemetery (“Nasha byl’” 1987, 2). Nonetheless, Party and state organs remained suspicious of broader efforts to commemorate Chernobyl. For example, in 1988, the Executive Committee of the Kiev city Soviet banned a rally marking the two-year anniversary of the accident proposed by local environmental activists (Beletskaia 1988, 2; Dawson 1996, 73). Frustration with the official silence surrounding Chernobyl fueled more rumors. On September 4, 1988, Izvestiia reported that central newspapers were receiving letters from Chernobyl veterans inquiring about rumored “secret” benefits such as priority in queues for housing, telephone installation, and automobile purchases. No such benefits, the newspaper clarified, existed; in fact, most veterans had already received their due while serving: a few leave days, increased wages, and extra food for working in hazardous conditions. Both the secrecy surrounding Chernobyl and false promises by recruiters during the cleanup campaign, reporter S. Taranov speculated, probably inspired the rumors (1988, 2). Official rhetoric equating liquidators with World War II veterans perhaps also played a role: if cleanup workers accomplished similar feats of bravery, why should they not expect equivalent benefits? World War II veterans enjoyed considerable privileges in late-Soviet society even relative to other groups of veterans. As early as the 1960s, they received, in addition to health care and tax privileges, access to special stores, free passage on

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public transportation, the right to bypass certain lines, priority access to newly constructed housing, free telephone installation, and in some cases even free automobiles (Danilova 2007). Associations of Chernobyl liquidators, which, according to some reports, began to emerge in cities such as Kharkov several months after the disaster, played an important role in pushing for similar compensation, public recognition, and privileges for cleanup participants as well as specialized medical services for radiation exposure (Diomidova 1989, 3). Conferences in Kharkov, Kiev, and Moscow in 1989 brought together representatives from dozens of cities to coordinate such efforts (Zaikin 1989, 2; D’iachenko 2006, 325). By the early 1990s, NGOs representing Chernobyl survivors existed throughout the former Soviet Union (Stepanov 2010, 75–84; D’iachenko 2006, 325–87). Such organizations pressed for resources for those affected by the Chernobyl accident, which proved a popular cause. In this period, newspapers regularly reported on hunger strikes by liquidators over health care and benefits and on supportive statements by writers, USSR People’s Deputies, and local Party leaders (Salimon 1990, 6; “Bol’shaia lozh’” 1989, 8–9). In response to the growing dissatisfaction, the Soviet state belatedly announced plans to create a program of benefits for radiation victims and cleanup workers. The most significant result of these efforts, the Russian Federation’s law “On the Social security of citizens affected by radiation as a result of the accident at the Chernobyl power station,” came into force in May 1991. It provided liquidators and evacuees with monthly compensation payments, priority access to housing, and slots in kindergarten for their children and grandchildren, protection from layoffs, extra vacation benefits, and other privileges. Although obtaining compensation required braving significant bureaucracy and the law had shortcomings, it profoundly affected liquidators, encouraging their emergence as a broad class with legal protections and self-awareness, much like World War II veterans in the late-Soviet period. Later amendments to the legal act granted liquidators and their families additional rights, including free insurance and free passage on public transportation. By the late 1990s, Russian Federation laws and regulations provided Chernobyl victims with 70 separate privileges (Chernobyl Forum 2005, 39). Some of these, it is true, remained largely paper promises, and the controversial monetization of disability benefits in 2005 (Federal Act 122-FZ), which replaced privileges such as free passage on public transportation with payments that were swiftly eroded by inflation, had the effect of eliminating others (Shlykova 2012, 190–7; D’iachenko 2006, 347–52). Nonetheless the benefits that liquidators receive remain significant. In fact, some international experts have complained that Chernobyl compensation payments in Russia, and even more notably Belarus and Ukraine, constitute an economic drain and have fostered a culture of “victimization and dependency” in affected

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areas. A 2005 report released by experts from a variety of international agencies noted: The extensive system of Chernobyl-related benefits [. . .] has created expectations of long-term direct financial support and entitlement to privileges, and has undermined the capacity of the individuals and communities concerned to tackle their own economic and social problems. The dependency culture that has developed over the past two decades is a major barrier to the region’s recovery. (Chernobyl Forum 2005, 37) Chernobyl liquidators seem sensitive to this criticism. In a 2013 interview with Radio Liberty, Vladimir Monakhov, the chairman of the Moscow branch of the Chernobyl Union (Soiuz Chernobyl), the most significant network of organizations for Chernobyl survivors, noted that one of the most significant problems faced by liquidators concerned their public image: The social security organs and our other organs of executive power for some reason always present us liquidators of the Chernobyl accident as victims. This is an incorrect formulation. We don’t call participants in World War II and those who participated in military actions “victims of World War II and military action.” When are people going to start to look at us liquidators of the Chernobyl accident as defenders of the fatherland as opposed to some kind of wretched beggars? (“Zashchita prav” 2013) Such concerns may have fueled the emergence of Chernobyl memorial texts, rituals, and monuments that cast liquidators as heroes rather than “victims” and that equate them to veterans of World War II. One might perhaps contrast this effort to escape perceived powerlessness and victimhood with forms of Soviet postcoloniality, in Belarus, for example, that, as Serguei Oushakine describes, seem to embrace exactly such a disenfranchised position because it renders unimportant hard truths about complicity and casts all horrors as the result of action by outside occupying forces (2013a). Within the Russian Federation, particularly for individuals of Russian ethnicity, Soviet-era victimhood as a subject position holds less appeal and offers fewer potential benefits than heroism.

The Liquidator Cult and Chernobyl Anniversaries Books about the heroism of the Chernobyl liquidators began to appear in significant numbers as censorship restrictions on discussion of the disaster lifted at the end of the 1980s. Soviet military, fire-prevention,

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and security organs published many early examples, most of which were directed at professional audiences. Such editions generally focused on the collective contributions of cleanup workers from specific service branches, praising them as exemplars for later service members to emulate (for example, Shkoda 1989). The 1997 volume Ministry of Internal Affairs: Heroic Exploits in Chernobyl’ (MVD: Podvig v Chernobyle), which was produced by the Academy of the Administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia and the Association Shield of Chernobyl (Shchit Chernobylia), a liquidators’ association for Ministry of Internal Affairs personnel, represents a slightly later example of this trend. The book, as its copyright page notes, was meant to serve as a textbook for those studying in Ministry training programs and to inspire them as they fought contemporary battles. An address by Minister of Internal Affairs Anatolii Kulikov that introduces the volume notes that the “spiritual, moral, and professional lessons of Chernobyl” have become “relevant” to the Ministry’s personnel as it struggles against a different kind of contamination, the “radiation of criminality, the fatal rays of which have penetrated all spheres of society.” Kulikov suggests bringing Chernobyl liquidators, like World War II veterans before them, to service units for educational presentations, thereby allowing them to serve as “models of faithfulness to one’s oath and duty as a serviceman” desperately needed in a post-Soviet age in which old standards were perceived as in decline (Demidov 1997, 5–7). Although the volume acknowledges mistakes in the initial response to Chernobyl, it focuses on the heroism of ministry personnel. The two-volume set Chernobyl: Duty and Courage (Chernobyl’: Dolg i muzhestvo), which was released by Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy for the fifteenth anniversary of the disaster, strikes similarly triumphant notes in its description of the cleanup, presenting it as a victory made possible by the unified efforts and self-sacrifice of the Soviet populace. In the preface, Academician V. N. Mikhailov notes: Without any exaggeration one can say that the entire population of the Soviet Union responded to this tragedy. The finest people were first to answer the call. They fulfilled their civic duty to the end, demonstrating bravery and heroism in this great conflict with an invisible and treacherous enemy [. . .] The names of the heroes who accomplished this exploit will be forever inscribed in gold letters in the chronicle of the Russian state. (D’iachenko 2001 vol. 1, 3) A. A. D’iachenko’s introduction to the collection expands on this idea, noting that, like World War II, “the Chernobyl accident provided a serious test of the preparation and capabilities of government, party, economic, and military organs” and that, despite shortcomings in some

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areas, “this harsh exam was passed.” D’iachenko emphasizes that military servicemen, security personnel, and the border patrol took on the most difficult tasks, implying, because he does not mention call-ups, that most volunteered (D’iachenko 2001 vol. 1, 11, 7). Other materials in the volume describe monuments to those who died in the disaster, note the use of Chernobyl-themed awards in contemporary service competitions, and emphasize the importance of memorializing the contributions of liquidators and thereby inscribing them into contemporary social life and landscapes (ibid., 550–4, 127–33). The second volume of the collection provides stories of individual liquidators, but most materials focus on well-known individuals and military leaders as opposed to ordinary soldiers. Chernobyl memorial volumes published by local enterprises, scientific institutes connected with the nuclear power industry, and liquidator networks, which appeared slightly later than the first publications by state ministries, generally place a greater emphasis on honoring ordinary liquidators through the inclusion of biographical notes; photographic portraits, often with the subject in uniform; and also family snapshots and poetry written by the cleanup workers themselves or a relative. Beginning in the late 1990s, local branches of the Chernobyl Union began producing many such publications, sometimes with financing from non-governmental organizations or organs of local government. The 2006 volume edited by A. A. D’iachenko, The Chernobyl Catastrophe: Twenty Years Later (Chernobyl’skaia katastrofa: Dvadtsat’ let spustia), which was released with the support of the administration of the Vykhino-Zhulebino region of Moscow, is a typical example. It features some background information on the disaster, but reminiscences of local liquidators and eulogies for the dead fill most of the volume. Many Chernobyl volumes resemble true “memorial books” (knigi pamiati), with little more than lists of liquidators from specific towns and regions and pages of photographic portraits and biographical notes (For example: Polikarpov 2016). In many locally produced or narrowly focused Chernobyl editions, nostalgia for the Soviet period emerges in introductory material that frames individual biographical entries. For example, Elena Kozlova’s 2006 Unknown Heroes of the Soviet Period (Neizvestnye geroi Sovetskoi epokhi) offers portraits of personnel from a Moscow reactor-design institute who participated in liquidation efforts at Chernobyl and also at the Maiak plant near Kyshtym, where a nuclear accident took place in 1957. In an introduction prefacing these sketches, Arsenii Larionov, the director of the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel’, brands Gorbachev “the primary state criminal of the Chernobyl tragedy that began the incinerating destruction of Soviet life and the brotherhood of the Soviet Union,” denounces “the democracy of Gorbachev and his ‘agents of influence’” as a path to “impoverishment, bankruptcy, and the loss of prestige and grandeur,” and speculates uncertainly about how contemporary Russia

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might fare if faced with an equivalent disaster. The recent Kursk tragedy, Larionov notes, “does not inspire much optimism.” Throughout his statement, Larionov laments the loss of what he sees as the positive values of the late-Soviet period: “In 1986 our people’s souls were full of shared pain at the misfortune that had befallen our nation. We all felt compassion and both collectively and individually wanted to take part in saving our fatherland” (Kozlova 2006, 5–6). Here again, a discussion of the cleanup that followed the Chernobyl disaster acquires a nostalgic tone because these feats of self-sacrifice are contrasted with the contemporary period, which is associated with selfishness and criminality. In other local Chernobyl editions, the formatting of the volume itself encodes the edition as nostalgic and patriotic. For instance, the 2016 Soldiers of Chernobyl (Soldaty Chernobylia), a memorial volume put out by the Vladimir regional branch of the Chernobyl Union and supported by regional organs of government, opens with a photograph of Vladimir Putin and a quote from a statement that the president released on the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy—much as Soviet editions often opened with photographs of and quotes by Party leaders. A preface by the governor of the Vladimir oblast’ immediately follows. Titled “Thanks for Your Heroic Exploit!” (Spasibo za podvig!), it praises the album, which contains information about every liquidator from the Vladimir oblast’: The significance of such an edition is obvious. It is a valuable contribution to the general heroic history of Russia. It is a message to future generations through time. And it is a true lesson in neighborliness, which is particularly pertinent now in connection with the wellpublicized events in Ukraine. Contemporary young people can learn a lot about the peaceful exploits that their fathers and grandfathers performed on brotherly Ukrainian soil before things were divided up into “ours” and “theirs” and when people still breathed the same air and contemplated a common future. (Polikarpov 2016, n.p.) The editors’ introduction that precedes the lists, photos, and biographical notes about individual liquidators echoes this idea somewhat more subtly: the volume aims to preserve the legacy and memory of the “heroes” who, like the veterans of World War II, saved “not only our country but also a number of European countries” from the consequences of the disaster; the volume therefore represents an important contribution to the “patriotic education” of the younger generation (n.p.). Such an idealized vision of the Chernobyl cleanup as a heroic model and an expression of brotherly cooperation among Soviet peoples clashes with the way that the disaster is most frequently remembered in Ukrainian and Belarusian memorial editions. Although these, too, often honor

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liquidators, they focus more on lasting damage from the disaster and rarely strike such triumphant notes (see, for instance: Paton and Pavliuk 2000; Prus 2005; Galkouski and Lazuka 2016). Moreover, in Ukraine particularly today, Russia/Moscow/the Soviet center often appears in Chernobyl narratives as a perpetrator concerned with hiding its own negligence or malfeasance as opposed to as a source of neighborly assistance. The 2015 Western-made documentary film The Russian Woodpecker, which was directed by Chad Garcia, provides a glimpse of such attitudes and the conspiracy theories they sometimes inspire. It depicts the efforts of Fedor Aleksandrovich, an eccentric Ukrainian artist, to prove that the disaster was intentionally precipitated to cover up the failure of an expensive new Soviet military installation located nearby, a Duga overthe-horizon radio antenna. Just as specialized institutions and regional liquidator organizations in Russia have spawned Chernobyl memorial editions, they have also played a leading role in creating monuments to local cleanup participants and organizing commemorative gatherings at them on April 26 each year. Over the last fifteen years, Chernobyl monuments and Orthodox chapels dedicated to deceased liquidators have sprung up in many Russian cities and villages, mirroring in their spread the network of sites honoring local participants in World War II that extended across Russia during the late-Soviet period (Tumarkin 1994, 125–57). Photographs of local Chernobyl monuments and memorial ceremonies often appear in regional memorial publications (for photos of monuments in Novosibirsk, Belorechensk, Khakasiia, and Morka village: Mikheev 2003, 200–5 and Gromenko 2006, 158, 254–5). Some, like the central monument that opened at Mitinskoe Cemetery in 1993, rely on elaborate symbolism to show the battle to contain contamination. For example, the monument that opened in Rostov-na-Donu in 2016 shows a soldier atop a globe stamping out a fire that threatens to consume his combat boots as a peaceful atom whirls beside him. A bell supported by human hands that rises out of the earth symbolizes the contributions of the 24,000 city residents who served as liquidators (Gavrilenko 2016). Other monuments, particularly in small towns and villages, are simpler: memorial boulders with plaques or modest laser-etched tablets (Tulactive). Memorial gatherings at such local monuments attract, in addition to liquidators themselves and their descendants, representatives of local and regional governments and the Orthodox Church. Covered in the news, these events and monuments are not linked to a particular political party or tendency: instead reporters generally highlight the initiative of liquidator organizations, the financial contributions of unnamed “donors,” and the backing of the church and local government, as demonstrated by the presence of priests and officials at memorial events. In this way, these undertakings appear popular in origin and yet also in harmony with the aims of church and state authorities.

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The Putin State and the Liquidator Cult What then is the role of the Russian state in Russia’s thriving Chernobyl cult? Clearly many of the books, monuments, and rituals discussed here came into being at least partly thanks to local Chernobyl-survivor organizations. These are often modest and deeply personal undertakings. Veterans clad in faded uniforms with medals on their chests pay respects to fallen comrades as wreaths are laid and regional politicians read speeches (35 TV 2017). An NGO for widows of deceased liquidators assembles volumes of memoirs about their husbands (Sotskova 2001). Dilapidated houses of culture host memorial concerts that combine slide shows, songs, modern dance, and earnest dramatic readings— all dedicated to the town’s liquidators (Antonov 2017). Such projects draw together liquidators and their families into identifiable communities, help them maintain support networks, and lend weight to their appeals for respect and assistance. The Chernobyl cult recognizes real sacrifices and helps redress obvious wrongs: the failure of the Soviet state to honor, medically support, and compensate cleanup workers in the late 1980s. In this sense it represents the culmination of grassroots efforts that began in the Glasnost period and initially were associated with anti-state protests. And yet, in recent years, the role of the Russian state in the Chernobyl cult has also increased even as financial support for Chernobyl veterans has declined in connection with the monetization of pensions and other budgetary initiatives. Growing state investment in the cult was evident as early as 2006 in the goose-stepping honor guards of soldiers that emerged as regular features at memorial ceremonies and the documentary films about forgotten liquidators that crowded the schedules of state-controlled television stations in late April. Like the memorial volumes discussed above, Russian films and television programming about Chernobyl often contrast the self-sacrifice of the liquidators with the negligence, cowardice, and deceit of Gorbachev and his politburo. One 2006 program, which ran as part of a sensationalist documentary series, Secrets of the Century: The Liquidator (Tainy veka: Likvidator), went even further, suggesting that academician Valerii Legasov, a prominent early responder, was murdered to prevent him from exposing Gorbachev’s malfeasance. State involvement in the Chernobyl cult was particularly evident in 2011, the year of the 25th anniversary. Russian president Dmitrii Medvedev received a group of liquidators in the Kremlin on April 25, delivered a speech about the state’s commitment to leave no worthy cleanup veteran unrecognized, and awarded medals. The next day, he traveled to the ruined power station to participate in the memorial ceremony alongside Ukrainian president Yanukovich, lay the foundation for a monument to the liquidators, and attend an Easter service that was led by the

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Patriarch of Moscow and the Metropolitan of Kyiv. A year later, April 26 was added to the list of official Russian Federation “memorial dates” as “The Day of Participants in the Liquidation of Radiation Accidents and Catastrophes and for the Memory of Victims of these Accidents and Catastrophes,” which made Chernobyl commemorative efforts eligible for increased federal funding as well as local support (“O dniakh”). As a result, each Chernobyl anniversary now brings more films, monuments, commemorative publications, and ceremonies, often with some participation by local and national officials. Although President Putin does not regularly appear at Chernobyl ceremonies, he issues statements each April 26 thanking the liquidators for their sacrifices and periodically distributes medals. In this way, efforts to honor and compensate liquidators that grew out of grassroots organizing and protests in the late 1980s and 1990s are gradually being co-opted by the Putin state, which, as Nadkarni and Shevchenko suggest, has often manipulated and benefited from even seemingly non-political forms of nostalgia, encouraging Russians to connect those aspects of the past that they appear to long for (stability, sociability, patriotism) with current domestic politics (2004, 514). Recognized with an official day of remembrance, annual telegrams from the president, medals, monuments, and ceremonies, Chernobyl veterans, for better or worse, now increasingly play the role of heroes as opposed to victims on Russia’s public stage. Like World War II veterans before them, they stand in fading uniforms, receiving the gratitude of the nation. Simultaneously, Chernobyl itself has been recast in Russian patriotic narratives from a devastating blunder to a battle won through sacrifice and heroism. It is certainly appropriate that the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who participated in cleanup efforts receive recognition. However, it is also true that efforts to craft a heroic narrative around the Chernobyl disaster have larger implications for the historiography of the late-Soviet era. In praising the liquidators, Russian commentators also often memorialize and nostalgically yearn for late-Soviet society: they describe the Soviet Union in its last years as healthy and unified, a country that could conquer devastating problems thanks to the initiative of its citizens, a place potentially better and more resilient than the divided post-Soviet states that followed it. In this sense the emerging Russian cult of the Chernobyl liquidator reads as an example of what Svetlana Boym termed “restorative nostalgia.” In it, we see a nostalgia that seeks to “rebuild” the largely imagined “lost home,” that engages in “the antimodern mythmaking of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths,” and abhors “patina, ruins, cracks, imperfections” and arguably also missteps and mistakes, preferring instead “total restoration,” the creation of a past that is more about heroism than it is about victims and trauma (2001, 41, 45).

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Works Cited Alexievich, Svetlana. 2005. Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Disaster. Translated by Keith Gessen. New York: Picador. Antonov, Aleksandr. 2017. “Den’ pamiati likvidatorov avarii na CHAES.” YouTube Video, 30:55, June 9, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5MKZG4qPyw. Beletskaia, L. 1988. “Sochli netselesoobraznym.” Komsomol’skaia pravda, June 8: 2. “Bol’shaia lozh’. Kto otvetit za istinykh prichin i posledstvii Chernobyl’skoi tragedii? Kruglyi stol ‘MN’.” 1989. Moskovskie novosti, October 15: 8–9. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Chernobyl Forum: 2003–2005. 2005. “Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts and Recommendations to the Governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine.” Second revised version. www. iaea.org/sites/default/files/chernobyl.pdf. Danilova, Natalia. 2007. “Veterans’ Policy in Russia: A Puzzle of Creation.” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 6/7. https://pipss.revues. org/873. Dawson, Jane. 1996. Eco-nationalism: Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Demidov, Nikolai. 1997. MVD: Podvig v Chernobyle. Moscow: Akademiia Upravleniia MVD Rossii. D’iachenko, Anatolii, ed. 2001. Chernobyl’. Dolg i muzhestvo (Nauchno-publitsis ticheskaia monografiia). K 15-letiiu katastrofy. Moscow: 4-ti filial Voenizdata. D’iachenko, Anatolii. 2006. Chernobyl’skaia katastrofa: Dvadtsat’ let spustia. Moscow: Akademiia. Diomidova, G. 1989. “Chtob ne propast’ poodinochke, ili zachem sozdan Chernobyl’skii komitet Estonii.” Sovetskaia Estonia, June 3, 1989: 3. Dmitrieva, O. 1986. “Pomnite.” Komsomol’skaia pravda, October 15, 1986: 4. Dologopolov, N. and P. Polozhevets. 1986. “Komsomol. Pokolenie v litsakh: Shagnuli pervymi.” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, May 11, 1986: 2. Friedman, Sharon M., Carole M. Gorney, and Brenda P. Egolf. 1987. “Reporting on Radiation: A Content Analysis of Chernobyl Coverage.” The Journal of Communication 37 (3) (Summer): 58–67. Galkouski, A. A., and B. A. Lazuka. 2016. Zakhavanaia pamiat’ strachanai ziamli. Minsk: “Belarus’. Gavrilenko, Aleksandr. 2016. “V Rostove otkrylsia pamiatnik likvidatoram— chernobyl’tsam.” Rossiiskaia gazeta, April 26, 2016. https://rg.ru/2016/04/26/ reg-ufo/rostov-pamiatnik-likvidatoram-chernobylcam.html. Geist, Edward. 2015. “Political Fallout: The Failure of Emergency Management at Chernobyl.” Slavic Review 74 (1) (Spring): 104–26. Gromenko, A. A., ed. 2006. Kniga pamiati geroev-chernobyl’tsev. Orel: Trud. Gubarev, Vladimir, and Mikhail Odinets. 1986a. “Stantsiia i vokrug nee.” Pravda, May 6: 6. Gubarev, Vladimir, and Mikhail Odinets. 1986b. “Vesna trevog i muzhestva.” Pravda, May 9: 6. Kozlova, Elena. 2006. Neizvestnye geroi sovetskoi epokhi. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Marples, David. 1993. “Chernobyl’s Lengthening Shadow.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 49 (7) (September): 38–43.

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Mikheev, Dmitrii, ed. 2003. Eta Gor’kaia polyn’ Chernobyl’: Stikhi Likvidatorov. Novosibirsk: Fond pomoshchi invalidam radiatsionnykh katastrof. Nadkarni, Maya, and Olga Shevchenko. 2004. “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices.” Ab Imperio 2: 487–519. “Nasha byl’ i bol’.” 1987. Komsomol’skaia pravda, November 25, 1987: 2. “O dniakh voinskoi slavy i pamiatnykh datakh Rossii.” 2005. http://pravo.gov. ru/proxy/ips/?docbody=&nd=102034625&intelsearch=%EF%E0%EC%FF %F2%ED%FB%E5+%E4%ED%E8. “Ot Soveta Ministrov SSSR.” 1986. Pravda, May 1, 1986: 2. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2007. “‘We’re Nostalgic, But We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia.” Russian Review 66 (3) (July): 451–82. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russian. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2013a. “Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space Between Stalin and Hitler.” In Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson, 285–314. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2013b. “Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History.” Ab Imperio 1: 269–302. Paton, Boris, and Stepan Pavliuk. 2000. Chornobil’—poruch: eiforiia, katastrofa, podolannia, pustka, pamiat’/Chornobyl Concerns Everyone: Euphoria, Disaster, Overcoming, Waste, Memory. Kyiv: Dnipro. Podgurskaia, G. and V. Sharov. 1986. “Poznaetsia v bede: interv’iu spetsialista.” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 21, 1986: 10. Polikarpov, Iurii. 2016. Soldaty Chernobyl’ia: Kniga o chernobyl’tsakh Vladimirskoi oblasti prinimavshikh uchastie v likvidatsii posledstvii katastrofy na Chernobyl’skoi AES s 26. 04.1986 g. po 31. 12. 1990 g. Vladimir: Kaleidoskop. Polozhevets, P. 1986. “The Soviet Character: When the Storks Return.” Sobesednik 26 (June): 4–5 as translated for The Current Digest for the Soviet Press 38 (33) (September 17, 1986): 13. “Profilaktika v eti dni: Sovety glavnogo sanitarnogo vracha respubliki.” 1986. Pravda Ukrainy, May 11: 4. Prus, Elena Viktorovna. 2005. Belarus’: 20 let protivostoianiia chernobyl’skoi katastrofe. Fotoal’bom. Minsk: Belta. Remnick, David. 1994. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Vintage. “Rovno 20 let nazad proizoshla avariia na Chernobyl’skoi AES.” 2006. TV 1 Novosti, April 26, 2006. www.1tv.ru/news/2006-04-26/224546-rovno_20_let_ nazad_proizoshla_avariya_na_chernobylskoy_aes. Rubin, David M. 1987. “How the News Media Reported on Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.” Journal of Communication 37 (3) (Summer): 42–57. Salimon, L. 1990. “Osobaia zona meditsiny: Eshche raz o zdorov’e chernobyl’tsev.” Izvestiia, February 1: 6. Shkoda, V. G., ed. 1989. Soldaty Chernobylia: sbornik statei. Moscow: Voenizdat. Shlykova, Elena. 2012. “Social Security Policy for the Chernobyl Clean-up and Rescue Workers: Crisis Chronology and Lessons.” In Crises in Russia: Contemporary Management Policy and Practice From a Historical Perspective, edited by Boris Porfiriev and Greg Simons, 177–204. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Sotskova, N. K., ed. 2001. Ne gasnet pamiati svecha . . . Vospominaniia rodnykh i blizkikh o moskvichakh-uchastnikakh likvidatsii avarii na Chenobyl’skoi AES. Book 2. Moscow: Izdat. Stepanov, Andrei. 2010. Politika Chernobylia v Belarusi v 1986–2008 godakh: formirovanie i proiavleniia diskurs—koalitsii. Doctoral dissertation, Litovskii tsentr sotsial’nykh issledovanii, Vil’niusskii universitet, Evropeiskii gumanitarnyi universitet. Vilnius. https://epublications.vu.lt/object/elaba:2016649/2016649. pdf.Tainy veka: Likvidator. Taranov, S. 1988. “Slukhi i fakty: O l’gotakh chernobyl’tsev bez sekretov.” Izvestiia, September 4, 1988: 2. The Russian Woodpecker. 2015. Directed by Chad Carcia. Roast Beef Productions. Tulactive. “Pamiatniki likvidatoram avarii na Chernobyl’skoi AES v Tul’skoi oblasti.” http://tulactive.ru/radioactive/monuments (accessed on October 16, 2018). Tumarkin, Nina. 1994. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books. Volkogonov, Dmitrii Antonovich. 1998. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Political Leaders From Lenin to Gorbachev. Edited by Harold Shukman. New York: Harper Collins. YouTube Video, 51:50, October 29, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOFw PNIJme4. Zaikin, V. 1989. “‘Soiuz Chernobyl’’ ob”ediniaet neravnodushnykh.” Izvestiia, November 8: 2. “Zashchita prav likvidatorov AES.” 2013. Interview conducted by Mar’iana Torocheshnikova. Radio Svoboda, May 1. www.svoboda.org/a/24971313.html. Zhukov, Iurii. 1986. “Nevol’noe samorazoblachenie: kto i zachem razduvaet antisovetskuiu shumikhu.” Pravda, May 6, 1986: 4. Zhukovskii, Vladimir, Vladimir Itkin, and Lev Chernenko. 1986a. “Srazhenie bez linii fronta.” Sovetskaia Rossiia, no. 109 (9060), May 8: 4. Zhukovskii, Vladimir, Vladimir Itkin, and Lev Chernenko. 1986b. “Trevogi i nadezhdy.” Sovetskaia Rossiia, no. 108 (9059), May 7: 6. 35 TV. “V Vologde pochtili pamiat’ likvidatorov Chernobyl’skoi avarii.” YouTube Video, TV-RU 35 News Report, 2:58, April 26, 2017. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AqFLJLeQcg4.

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To Be Continued Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Sergei Miroshnichenko’s Time-Lapse Documentary Series Born in the USSR Boris Noordenbos

The documentary series Born in the USSR (Rozhdennye v SSSR 1990–) is the Soviet/Russian variant of Michael Apted’s celebrated Up series. In 1964 Paul Almond directed a documentary for British television that depicted the lives of 14 seven-year-old British children from different socio-economic backgrounds; although the first program was not filmed with a sequel in mind, Michael Apted developed it into a documentary project in which the lives of these individuals are revisited every seven years (some of the original participants have dropped out either permanently or for extended periods of time before rejoining the project [Barnouw 1993, 324]). Since its start in 1990, the Soviet and later Russian variant of the franchised Up project (a RussianBritish coproduction) has released four films. The first installment from 1990 (Age 7 in the USSR) catered to a Western audience, with its English voiceover being dubbed into Russian for the Russian edit. In the subsequent films the celebrated Russian director Sergei Miroshnichenko not only conducted the interviews but also provided commentary on the children’s fates. While the first releases went largely unnoticed by the Russian public (even though the second film was the co-winner of the 1999 Emmy Award for Best International Documentary), part four (Born in the USSR: 28 up) premiered on prime-time Russian television and garnered overwhelming media attention both for the film and its Russian director. Apted’s original documentary project set out to explore the influence of the participants’ diverse class origins on their subsequent lives, citing the Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” (Bruzzi 2007, 9). The Soviet/Russian project, set in what was officially a classless society, by contrast, derives its interest largely from its compelling depiction of the transition from childhood to adulthood amidst world-shaking change: the first and second film (Age 7 in the USSR and 14 Up: Born in the USSR) both portray the dramatic effects of the demise of the Soviet Union on the individual lives of twenty participants from the republics of Russia, Kirgizia, Georgia, Lithuania, and

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Azerbaijan. These children are all “born in the USSR,” but after the revolutions of the late 20th century many found themselves in independent countries or had immigrated to other parts of the world. The contrast in their living conditions—already noticeable at age seven—has been intensified, often in dramatic and surprising ways, by the time they are 14 or 21. It is this sheer unpredictability of the children’s fate that sets the series apart from the premise of the British Up films. In the Soviet/Russian version, unprecedented political, economic, and demographic upheavals preclude the predetermination implied in the Jesuit adage and in the attitudes of the 1960s British Left underlying the early stages of the British project.1 As can be seen in various moments in the films, the disruption of the political and economic establishment, and the dislocation of previous forms of sociality, make untenable any predictions about what paths the children’s lives will take. Part of the films’ charm resides in their filtering of the seismic changes of the late 20th century through the perceptions of the children. In 1989, seven-year-old Anton, the grandson of the editor of the newspaper Pravda, sums up the major problems of the Perestroika era to Miroshnichenko: “Some think it’s better one way, and others think it’s better another way. There is a struggle going on. Each side wants its own way. Both lots.” When Miroshnichenko asks what will come of this, Anton (who is labeled “the little prophet” in the subsequent episode) responds: “I don’t know, some sort of turnaround.” In addition, many viewers were struck by the children’s apparent lack of materialism. Asked what she would do if she had “a lot of money,” Rita, who lives on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, promptly responds that she would give it to the poor. The ethnically Russian Katia from Lithuania answers the same question by displaying wisdom beyond her years: “moral qualities are more important [than money].” And Andrei, who lives in an orphanage in Irkutsk, reacts by decisively stating, “I wouldn’t take it [.  .  .] I don’t want to be rich.” Over the course of 21 years the participants’ dreams and aspirations shift, as do their attitudes toward money. Fourteen years after making those charitable remarks about giving her money to the poor, Rita recants and says that now she would find a purpose for the money in her own life. In the later installments the futures envisioned by the children as sevenyear-olds often appear, to the viewer and to themselves, to have been mere whims, and over the years many of them have grown sadder and wiser. In the later episodes, the participants regularly look back on the “good old days” that are, for some of them, tinged with the warm glow of childhood memories. Sometimes these personal recollections are conflated with a rose-tinted vision of the Soviet Union as a political system that had cultivated a level of equality and social solidarity that is felt to be painfully absent in the post-Soviet era.

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Analyzing the cultivation of nostalgia in this longitudinal documentary project, this chapter does not treat nostalgia as stemming from the participants’ “emotional response to time’s passage” (Hutton 2013, 1). Rather than concentrating on these occasionally nostalgic expressions by the films’ protagonists, my analysis instead focuses on the nostalgic premise, structure, and (visual and verbal) rhetoric of the films themselves. What particular structuring of time is wrought by the seven-year intermissions? How do the documentaries, through their editing and use of voiceover, integrate the participants’ private experiences into a larger metanarrative of post-Soviet development? To what extent are personal expressions of nostalgia (or the lack thereof) appropriated for a prevalent (and state-backed) rhetoric of loss or restoration in contemporary Russia? And how has the political orientation of the films shifted as the project progresses?

Practices of Nostalgia In posing these questions, I subscribe here to the idea that nostalgia, rather than a static set of emotions, is a dynamic cultural practice, “an action rather than an attitude” (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 937), one that is open, moreover, to ongoing additions and adjustments that fit contemporary social concerns and political needs. I argue that Born in the USSR, exploring as it does in ever-shifting ways the possibilities of continuity and (biographical and collective) identity in the face of dramatic ruptures and upheavals, vividly exemplifies some of the tropes and devices that are typical of nostalgia’s meaning-making practices. While the political implications of these practices are a major concern in all parts of this chapter, I address the politics of nostalgia explicitly in the conclusion, where I briefly contrast the intertwining of personal and historical narratives in Miroshnichenko’s films with the devices employed in a comparable documentary project: My Perestroika (Robin Hessman 2010). In her analysis of Born in the USSR, Daria Shembel comments on the changing political orientation of the series. She remarks that the project, ever since its third installment, has progressively aligned itself with the Putin government’s (selective) rehabilitation of Soviet values. The documentary, in her view, embraces the “rhetoric of the rebuilding of Soviet Russia” (2016, 70). She also asserts, however, that the documentary’s specific format resists the easy co-option of its material in the service of the hegemonic patriotism and restorationism of Putin-era Russia. This argument is based on Shembel’s interpretation of the films as “database documentaries” (ibid.): the project takes an almost mathematical approach to the lives of the participants, one structured through the repeated sevenyear interval separating each interview period and through the fixed set of questions posed to the interviewees. This rigid and recurring format,

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she contends, guarantees an unbiased approach, and shields the films’ multifarious messages against mobilization for the rhetoric of the state: Like a computer database, the essence of database cinema is the links between its elements. Born in the USSR is not a random collection of events, people, and places; there is an algorithm to its presentation; the film is arranged into separate sections of family, education, religion, money, etc. The task of the filmmaker is to choose a structure and method and let them play out, while the viewer is expected to actively construct a meaning rather than passively observe, keeping track of scenes and events and juxtaposing them herself . . . . [T]he database structure exists independently of its author. And even though it is possible to detect the state’s presence—in the voice of its leading filmmaker Miroshnichenko—in the last instalment of the series, its content remains unbiased. (ibid., 82) I will argue, by contrast, that the films, rather than simply organizing “segments of historical material” according to the logic of an “algorithm” (ibid., 82, 83), engage in an active interpretation and narrativization of the material presented. The selection of scenes—10–15 minutes per participant in each film, condensed from 600 hours of footage (Gorodetskaia 2012)—already hints at the extent to which the participants’ experiences are submitted to careful organization that does not ensue simply or directly from the application of an unvarying interview format. As we will see, the voiceover, editing, and insertions of historical footage all work to cultivate relations between (individual and collective) pasts and presents in ways that enforce an interpretation upon the material. The films essentially create a series of plots out of the disparate experiences of the participants. Such a process of emplotment, as Hayden White has famously asserted, comes, by definition, with the imposition of coherency and meaning, as well as with the impetus to moralize (1990, 14). Arguably, it is precisely the (apparent) database-like approach and the reliance on the traditions of documentary film that obfuscate these processes of interpretation and narrativization. As Bill Nichols reminds us in his seminal work on the documentary tradition: “Documentaries are not documents. They may use documents and facts, but they always interpret them” (2010, 147). However, ever since its emergence, documentary film has often relied on distanced, observational, and expository modes of presentation that tend to produce an aura of neutrality and objectivity. In alignment with this tradition, Born in the USSR, I argue, obscures its own mediation of the scenes presented. In the interviews conducted, Miroshnichenko always remains off-screen, and often relies on the technique of the masked interview, in which the viewer does not hear the interviewer’s questions but is given only the interviewees’ “monologue” answers. Shots

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of these monologues are interspersed with scenes of the participants engaged in their day-to-day activities while the director’s “voice-of-God commentary” (ibid., 157) explains (and interprets) the developments in the participants’ lives. Miroshnichenko’s approach, rather than being unbiased, thus employs the typical devices of the expository and observational documentary tradition (ibid., 167–79) to gloss over its imposition of meaningful relations between disparate moments in biographical and historical time. Every episode in the Up series includes material from earlier films and engages, as Stella Bruzzi remarks of the British project, in a “perpetual negotiation between the established narrative and new material” (2007, 63). Thus, while creating the suggestion of aloof ethnographic or sociological fieldwork—Miroshnichenko emphasized the status of the project as a “study,” or as research into “how the environment influences human being[s]” (Afanas’eva 2012)—the films in fact continually (re)structure and (re)negotiate the relations between past and present, to different rhetorical and political effects. I locate nostalgia in these meaning-making practices, and especially in the documentaries’ exploration of the ruptures and continuities between the Soviet era and the present time. Creating carefully structured juxtapositions of old and new visual material, overlaid by the voiceover’s interpretive comments and moralizing evaluations, the films ponder which elements from the Soviet empire are to be mourned and which can be saved, where (cultural and biographical) continuities can be found and in what respects Russians have decisively broken with the Soviet legacy. The documentary project thus builds a nostalgic narrative that does not always coincide with the participants’ personal evaluations of the passage of time. For my conception of nostalgia I rely on the work of scholars like Kathleen Stewart, who have been keen to avoid essentialist characterizations of what nostalgia is and have instead focused on what it does, treating nostalgia as a “cultural practice, not a given content” (Stewart 1988, 227). Inspired by Fredric Jameson’s diagnoses of postmodern culture, Stewart explains that “[i]n positing a ‘once was’ in relation to a ‘now’ [nostalgia] creates a frame for meaning, a means of dramatizing aspects of an increasingly fluid and unnamed social life” (ibid.). Elaborating on these meaning-making effects, she adds that nostalgia is a “function of language that orders events temporally and dramatizes them” (ibid.). This ordering of time is not naturally dictated by historical events themselves but ensues from a situated perspective within the social world and the cultural landscape. That is, the forms and implications that nostalgia may take are situational; they depend “on where you stand” (ibid., 228). In his well-known 1979 study Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, the sociologist Fred Davis had already observed that “nostalgia uses the past—falsely, accurately, or [. . .] in special reconstructed

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ways—but it is not the product thereof” (1979, 11). More recently, scholars have explored nostalgia’s uses and structuring of time in greater detail. They generally agree that an alleged “break from the past” is, as Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko put it, “the precondition for [nostalgic] discourses of return and recovery” (2004, 491). Stuart Tannock, too, sees the postulation of a disjuncture in time to be the fundamental springboard for the practices of nostalgia: there is always and everywhere, for nostalgia to logically exist, a positing of discontinuity. A critical reading of the nostalgic structure of rhetoric should focus, then, on the construction of a prelapsarian world, but also on the continuity asserted, and the discontinuity posited, between a prelapsarian past and a postlapsarian present. (1995, 457) Nostalgia, in these interpretations, relies on the notion of a broken relationship between the past and the present, a condition that, in turn, serves as the starting point for the exploration of continuity or identity over time. Underscoring this two-pronged orientation in nostalgic practices, Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies cogently remark that “nostalgia serves as a negotiation between continuity and discontinuity: it insists on the bond between our present selves and a certain fragment from the past, but also on the force of separation from what we have lost” (2010, 184).

Dramatizing Discontinuities Progressing at seven-year intervals, the Up series, regardless of where they are filmed, engage precisely in such negotiations of (dis)continuity. The documentaries generally derive their arc from the protagonists’ increasing distance from their childhood experiences and from the contrasts and resonances provided by carefully chosen visual “returns” to earlier moments in life that the subjects themselves often do not remember. The convention of the seven-year interval thus foregrounds the (biographical) discontinuities, the breaks or cuts that according to Tannock (1995, 459–61) form a key component in nostalgia’s rhetoric. What makes the Soviet/Russian variant of this format unique, however, is that the lapses in the participants’ lives also bring to the fore the tectonic changes in their environment. The films’ editing devices (the back-and-forth movement between old and new material, interspersed with historical footage depicting social unrest and economic deficits) underscore that what separates the seven-year-old children from their adolescent and adult versions is not merely a temporal lapse in their (universal) biographical development but also a series of unprecedented historical developments that have redirected the course of their lives.

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As Fred Davis argues, nostalgia is essentially an attempt to hold onto identities, especially at moments when they are felt to be “badly bruised by the turmoil of times” (1979, 107). While vividly presenting such turmoil and the threats it poses to the consistency of individual and collective selves, Born in the USSR does something more than merely cling to a desire for cultural and biographical sameness over time. The documentaries, paradoxically, invoke individual and collective identities precisely through an exuberant dramatization of their irretrievable loss. As a validation of Stuart Tannock’s observations, the films’ insistence on unbridgeable ruptures is thus part of the search for cultural and biographical origins and continuities. Understandably, the project’s “dramatization of discontinuity” (Fritzsche 2004, 1610)2 is largely absent from the first film. Despite the signs of roiling interethnic strife and political upheaval, the first installment, released in 1990, underscores how the participants’ experiences are (still) very much in sync. Notwithstanding the sweeping panorama of the Soviet Union’s disparate localities and the children’s diverse living conditions, their lives develop according to a homogeneous script. Emblematic is the depiction of the first school day, a moment that marks the children’s introduction into public life. Dressed in the same uniforms, they enter school on the same day (September 1st), and they all bring flowers to their new teachers. This sense of a shared biographical script has decisively collapsed when Miroshnichenko’s team returns to visit the children seven years later. The director’s voice, introducing the second installment in a ponderous tone, meditates on the time that has passed since the making of the previous film: It’s strange, but for them—and for me—it was a completely different life. Lenin, Communism, the October Revolution. But it existed. In their birth certificates will always be stamped: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We will show how our children have changed, and how the world has changed around them. Later in that same episode Miroshnichenko picks up the subject, stating that “many of our subjects are already living abroad, though they did not move anywhere.” Here, in the opening sequences of the second film, the project’s new (and current) title, Born in the USSR, is introduced—a title conceived only at a moment when the USSR, in which the protagonists were born, had decisively disappeared. The opening scenes are compiled of footage of the fourteen-year-olds posing motionless for the camera, as if their picture were being taken. Overlaying these “portraits” are close-up shots of a Soviet birth certificate (Figure 6.1). Subsequently, the portraits of the children disappear and the certificate’s letters grow sharper. A still of

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Figure 6.1 Sasha’s portrait overlaid with a Soviet birth certificate, as shown in the opening scenes of Born in the USSR: 14 Up.

one of the children, Sasha, is now pasted, as it were, into the document. Then red English words are “stamped” onto the certificate: “Born in the USSR.” Finally, we hear the fizzy sound of a spray-paint can, and the text “14 up” is added to the document in graffiti lettering (Figure 6.2). This multilayered compilation cues the viewer into adopting a particular perception of the subsequent scenes. The birth certificate presents the children’s origin in the Soviet Union as the prism through which their progressive biographical time-tracks are to be seen, and the “Born in the USSR” stamp supports the voiceover’s statement that their lives have forever been marked by their shared roots in the vanished empire. The belated emphasis on the participants’ (lost) place of birth adds a political dimension to their separation from their earlier childhood selves. Interestingly, at the moment when the daily lives of most of the children have been uprooted by radical post-Soviet change, the documentary emphasizes their common roots in the bygone stability of the Soviet political order. In close alignment with Davis’ and Tannock’s remarks about the workings of nostalgia, the notion of a shared (political) home3 gains relevance as a marker of identity precisely when that home is presented as lost and its inhabitants as dispersed. In this context, “exile” often works as a metaphor that dramatizes the participants’ geographical and temporal “removal” from the Soviet

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Figure 6.2 “Sasha’s birth certificate,” marked with a stamp and graffiti lettering, as shown in the opening scenes of Born in the USSR: 14 Up.

motherland, for instance in the storyline of the Jewish twins Zhanna and Leonid. At the age of seven they flee anti-Semitism and economic crisis in their native Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and leave for Israel. At the city’s railway station the children and their parents say farewell to those relatives who are staying behind. Asked what their greatest wish in life is, Zhanna responds, “to stay here,” and Leonid adds, “because Granny will be left on her own here.” The English voiceover straightforwardly explains the reasons for the family’s emigration. When the second film cuts back to the farewell scenes, the commentator, now Miroshnichenko himself, strikes a different chord. In his words, Zhanna and Leonid had left Russia to embark on a journey to “the country that their ancestors had called the ‘Promised Land’.” This shift from matter-of-fact explanation to high-flown biblical language exemplifies the increasing dramatization of post-Soviet dislocation and drift, as well as the film’s fascination with the possibilities of homecoming and return. If the rhetoric of nostalgia essentially relies on a perceived rift with past conditions (Boym 2001, 25; Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 492; Tannock 1995, 459–61), the exile motif conflates, in its presentation of this rift, spatial and geographical dimensions. The scenes of Leonid’s and Zhanna’s departure now come to function as a metaphor for the way that all the participants are “exiled” from their

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Soviet origins. Whereas the twins can return to the ancient land of their ancestors, the other children are denied any such “return.” For them, the director suggests, home remains irretrievably distanced in time and (for many of the dispersed protagonists) in space. Combined, the stress on the children’s birth in the USSR and the motif of exile mark the first film—to which the subsequent installments repeatedly “return”—as the moment of temporal, geographic (but also cinematic) origin, against which the later moments in the series acquire their meaning. The emphasized removal from domestic origins, however, also includes references to the perceived loss of cultural values. The newly introduced affordances of capitalist consumerism, the second film suggests, have infused the collective home with an unheimlich quality. The first film portrays Tania from Leningrad who, together with her playmate Ira, glances through the pages of what appears to be a Western mail-order catalogue. The girls pretend to “eat” from the overfull refrigerators displayed on its pages. In the context of Perestroika-era shortages, the gastronomic abundance exercises an irresistible appeal to the sevenyear-olds. Western clothing, too, exerts a magnetic attraction, which is only reinforced, it seems, by its unattainability. Ira, in a precocious tone that seems to echo the perspective of her parents, says that the fashionable dresses and jackets “will never be sold here”: “it’s offensive to even show them to us.” Seven years later, in their renamed city of Saint Petersburg, the hunger for everything Western has been replaced by inurement and boredom. The products in that now worn-out catalogue are, according to the fourteen-year-old girls, “outdated.” Subsequent shots show Ira shopping for a top in a huge warehouse. It is hard to miss Miroshnichenko’s distaste when he comments that her behavior is “particularly picky.” A later scene follows Tania during a visit to a supermarket, the shelves loaded with exotic fruits. Both girls, the film suggests, have experienced a 180-degree reversal of identity. They have restyled themselves, in garb and in attitudes alike, entirely “in Western fashion” [po zapadski], as the director notes. Scenes like these, which aim to foreground the detrimental effects of newly introduced market principles, make it hard to contend, as Shembel does, that the time-lapse documentary is structured by the disinterested logic of the database. Visually and verbally, the portrayal of Tania and Ira accentuates how capitalist values and practices, introducing choice overload and boredom, have corrupted the dreams and charms of childhood. Other scenes, too, explore the market economy’s corrosive effects. At fourteen, Almaz from Kirgizia is re-introduced to the viewer: “Here, together with friends, Almaz acquaints himself with the notions of money, market and business. Many of our children, unfortunately, already have a clear understanding of these [principles].” These words accompany shots of Almaz frantically seeking buyers for his stack of newspapers.

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In the subsequent interview the boy explains that he, apart from his current merchandise, has been selling lemonade and chewing gum, all in an attempt to support his family financially. When Miroshnichenko returns to the same shots seven years later, his evaluation is even harsher, explaining that Almaz, who had tried to set up his own company, was confronted, again, with the principles of the “callous market.” The later installments thus repeatedly associate the advent of capitalism with the loss of childhood innocence, confirming a widespread perception in post-socialist societies that their inhabitants “were collectively forced into adulthood by the political transition, no longer sheltered by the hand of state paternalism” (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 510). In repeating this trope, Miroshnichenko’s documentaries, rather than adhering to the neutral accumulative logic of the database, infuse the documentaries’ time-lapse structure with a moral evaluation: the scenes depicting Tania’s bored consumerism and Almaz’s economic troubles work to associate the temporal lapses of the documentary’s structure with a “fall” from grace. Stuart Tannock writes that this notion of a “lapse (a cut, a Catastrophe, a separation or sundering, the Fall)” (1995, 456) is one of the key ideas in nostalgia and is often associated with “forces external to a previously stable and utopian system” (ibid., 460). This emphasis on corrupting influence wrought by forces from the outside may “mystify or displace the extent to which the decline—that is, the changes that are interpreted as decline—is caused by pressures and forces internal to the past, utopian world itself” (ibid., 460–1). In Born in the USSR, the capitalist realities that have presumably cut off the participants from the non-materialistic charms of their childhood are marked, almost without exception, as external and Western. At age fourteen Almaz wears a cap with the text “New Yorker” that, according to Miroshnichenko, fits him “like a glove”; the voiceover underscores, as seen above, that Tania’s and Ira’s inured attitudes entail the reshaping of their identities “in western fashion”; and at the age of fourteen the party boy Sasha, who frequents discotheques and collects Western cigarette packages, is shown opening a crown-capped bottle of Pepsi-Cola—a widespread icon for newly introduced Western-style consumerism—with his teeth. The latter scene visually resonates with an earlier image in the same film, in which Sasha eagerly sinks his teeth into an apple that he has just picked in his parents’ orchard. Miroshnichenko comments that Sasha, in contrast to seven years earlier when he had talked about his homework, now “tastes completely different fruits, far from those of the Tree of Knowledge.” The biblical reference is ambiguous, as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the shared point of reference for two moments in time that the documentary aims to contrast (discipline and education in the Soviet Union versus the hedonistic pastimes provided by the economic liberalism and moral permissiveness of the new Russia). Evident, however, is the analogy the director draws between

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Western-style consumerism and the eating of the forbidden fruit. In the portrayal of Sasha, Almaz, Ira, and Tania, the time-lapse format supports the director’s insistence on a “fall”: the temporal intervals are interpreted as marking a dramatized and moralized disjuncture with the interviewees’ former selves, a break supposedly wrought by the arrival and rapid ascendency of external, capitalist forces.

Reimagining the Soviet/Russian Family So far I have demonstrated how the documentaries invoke the lost times, spaces, and values of a collective “home.” But how exactly do the films turn the subjects’ personal experiences into the building blocks for a narrative about the collective fates of post-Soviet populaces? In Yearning for Yesterday Davis argues that “the life cycle affords us a bridge from the apparently intensely private quality of nostalgic experience to its sources in society and its consequences for collective life” (1979, 54). Above I have demonstrated how socioeconomic developments in the former Soviet Union were indeed projected onto the participants’ life-paths. Entering adolescence was presented as an experience that ran parallel to the confrontation, experienced by the former Republics at large, with freshly introduced Western products and behaviors. This “collectivization” of individual experiences, however, is also brought about through other means, most importantly through a pervasive metaphor of family kinship. The anthropologist Gediminas Lankauskas reminds us that the nostalgic trope of home is inseparable from “an idyllic imagery of familial togetherness, well-being and coherence” (2014, 39). Born in the USSR, bringing together children with whom the viewer becomes increasingly “familiar” over the years, solicits an assessment of the participants as relating to one another—or even to the director and the viewers—along the organic logic of family ties. The family metaphor is implicitly invoked at the outset through the stress on the participants’ “origin” and “birth” (Born in the USSR) as a uniting factor, and it is elaborated in the director’s repeated references to the interviewees as “our children.” This view was further substantiated in media performances, for instance when Miroshnichenko in a 2007 interview with Anna Kachkaeva remarked that “there were cases in which we [the team] had to participate in certain events literally as parents.” Apart from the children serving as (symbolic) family members of the director or the viewer, the films take a keen interest in the participants’ familial relations and conflicts, often mobilizing family trouble as metaphoric shorthand for the fragmented social cohesion of post-Soviet life itself. Much attention is drawn, for instance, to the relationship between the twins Stas and Denis. In the first films we see them, dressed identically, in their Moscow apartment, frolicking and completing each other’s

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sentences. At age fourteen they tell us, through their tears, that their father has recently died from a heart attack at their dacha, and that none of the fellow dachniks were willing to help the family transport the dead body to the morgue. At 21 the twins begin to part ways. Stas works as a waiter in a high-end restaurant (where he once served Vladimir Putin), while Denis makes a career for himself in commercial maritime transportation. At age 28 Denis has furthered his career in shipping, whereas Stas has lost his job. Their joint portrayal is now directed and edited in such a way as to point up the increased emotional distance between them. In one scene they sit on a bench in the park, Denis dressed in a chic jacket, Stas in a stained shirt. In the ensuing interview Miroshnichenko tells the twins that they no longer look alike and that even their haircuts are now different. When the brothers explain that they do not see each other much, they immediately begin fighting about the frequency of their visits with each other. The twins’ distanced body language is juxtaposed with footage from 21 years earlier, when they sat on a bench in their parents’ apartment and lovingly touched and teased each other. A later scene, revolving around a fight between Denis and his mother, drives home the point that the family, so tightly connected in the early installments, has now decisively fallen apart. The scenes with Stas and Denis, as well as others depicting fraternal conflict and parental loss, carry a weighty significance. The allegory of (post-)Soviet society as a disintegrating family works on many levels: post-Soviet upheaval and financial inequality is shown to harm the fraternal relations between Stas and Denis; it sends the participants (“our children”) to the four corners of the earth; and it erodes the “fraternity of peoples” that (at least in Soviet propaganda) existed among the Soviet Union’s multiple ethnic groups. This last dimension is highlighted in scenes showing the 28-year-old Almaz, who has emigrated from Kirgizia to Novosibirsk in Russia, where he now works at the local market. Almaz struggles with Russians’ unfriendly attitudes towards Central Asian guest workers and declares to Miroshnichenko that he belongs to an “orphaned generation.” In a scene not included in the shorter English cut of the fourth film, Almaz says that “it was better during the Soviet Union. Everything functioned . . . the plants and factories . . . people lived in equality. If one compares . . . I’d probably choose that state in which I lived until I was seven.” As these scenes suggest, the vanished “paternal” patronage of the state has “orphaned” its former inhabitants, and the (“fraternal”) ideals of social and ethnic equality have been sullied. The family metaphor also works as a prism with which to view the (severed) relations among the peoples of the Soviet Union in the scenes portraying the fourteen-year-old Algis. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his father had been an active campaigner for the independence of Lithuania, and Miroshnichenko’s voiceover explains that although the family

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speaks Russian fairly well, they now prefer to converse in Lithuanian. Shots of a family dinner and of Algis driving a dirt bike are interspersed with an interview, the Lithuanian dubbed into Russian. Algis enthusiastically explains that his coming of age gives him new privileges, possibilities, and experiences. He cannot wait for the next seven years to pass. Miroshnichenko comments that “maybe in seven years he, too, will separate from his family and from his home.” The referent of this “too” is not specified, but the word, apparently, aims to metaphorically link Algis’ increasing independence from his family with the independence of his country, a development championed, as Miroshnichenko emphasizes, by people like Algis’ father. The implication is that Lithuania has “come of age” and has severed ties with the multi-ethnic “family” of nations that was once its “home.” The family metaphor realizes its full potential, however, in the scenes with Andrei. His story has attracted more attention from Russian and from foreign audiences than that of any other participant in the project. The first film featured a heartbreaking interview with the boy in the orphanage in Irkutsk where he lived. Miroshnichenko asked what Andrei, who had lost his mother when he was two, dreamed about, and the boy, with tears in his eyes, explained: “Once I dreamt . . . I heard my mother’s voice. I was lying there and I heard a shout: ‘Andrei!’ I woke up.” Miroshnichenko asked how Andrei knew that the voice was his mother’s. “I recognized it at once,” the boy replied. After the international release of the first film, the orphanage received dozens of foreign requests to adopt the boy. In the next film we see Andrei again, now in the house of his American foster parents. It turns out, however, that his recent adoption is not a success. While Andrei gets on well with his adoptive father, he clashes with his foster mother and has difficulties adhering to her “many little rules.” She wants to send him back to Russia, but with the help of the film crew, we learn, another family was found, this time in Florida. Andrei’s situation squarely fits the films’ increasingly patriotic and anti-Western take on post-Soviet change. As Shembel remarks, “Andrei’s negative experience with his first adoptive family resonates with a massive Kremlin anti-American propaganda campaign that told Russians that the majority of U.S. parents adopting Russian children are sadists, pedophiles, and child abusers” (2016, 79–90). The sequences with Andrei, however, do more than hammer in the Kremlin’s anti-Americanism. Having lost his parents and his country, and having exchanged the poor living conditions in Irkutsk for an environment of alluring capitalist pleasures in Florida, Andrei, within the logic of the documentary, symbolically epitomizes the destiny of his generation at large. As one of Svetlana Boym’s informants remarked in 1995: “it seems that the whole of the former Soviet Union went into emigration, without leaving the country” (2001, 328). Cultural tropes of exile and emigration, combined with a notion of “orphanhood” brought about by the

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loss of paternal protection by the Soviet state, invest Andrei’s fate with exemplary significance. In this light, Andrei’s stated loyalty to his country of birth is all the more important. At age 21 he remarks, in still flawless Russian, “you can’t change a person. You can’t take him out of his skin, put him in some other shell.” Later he adds: “I’ve always felt Russian, and I will always be Russian. I even plan to live in Russia in the future. I will be buried in Russia.” The fact that an adoptive family and a new country, despite the apparent comfort they provide, cannot replace the primordial markers of home once more underscores the inalterable naturalness of Soviet/Russian belonging. Later, when the 28-year-old Andrei refuses to participate in the project, Miroshnichenko comments lightheartedly on the situation: “In our project, as in life, people leave and return.” Just as Andrei says he will one day return to Russia, this prodigal son will also inevitably return, Miroshnichenko suggests, to the symbolic family of “our children.” We find the same hope for reunification, phrased in terms that evoke the effect of kinship, in the references to Pavlik. In the 1990 episode, the Russian Pavlik had fled ethnic strife in Baku, living with his parents in a refugee camp in the center of Moscow. Seven years later Miroshnichenko’s team could not trace him. In the second film the director explained: “We could not find him now, and we do not know what happened to that boy.” In a concerned tone he continued: “Where is he? Is he alive? May God grant it.” Twentyone years later, in an interview with Konstantin Kosachev, Miroshnichenko announced that his team might have found Pavlik (or rather Pavel now) on social media: “his age corresponds, and his face is very similar. I was so excited that it might be him, I would be so happy. It would be curious if our hero appears again in the next episode, if he returns.” In 2004 Serguei Oushakine already remarked on the stunning ubiquity of the terminology of kinship in contemporary Russian culture: “Over the course of the last decade metaphors of social and blood kinship became a virtually hegemonic form for conceptualizing political, economic and cultural development” (2004, 10). As Oushakine underscores, the omnipresent symbolism of the family generally works to invest the relations between individual lives with an order that is seen as “‘organic,’ ‘natural’” (ibid., 11). In Born in the USSR the family metaphor indeed invokes imagined communities that become invested with a natural gloss. The metaphor suggests organic and unalterable ties among the members of both the “micro-family” of the films’ participants and (in a rhetoric that perpetuates Soviet notions of the “fraternity of peoples”) the macrofamily of formerly Soviet ethnic communities.

Conclusion: The Politics of Nostalgia Above we have seen that the films’ nostalgic rhetoric relies on a twopronged strategy: a dramatization of temporal and spatial displacement,

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but also, on the contrary, an emphasis on the continuities implied in a metaphorically evoked familial togetherness. Taken together, these two rhetorical gestures confirm scholarly observations that nostalgia is an affective cultural practice premised on a perceived rupture or fall from grace, but one simultaneously directed toward explorations of the possibility of continuity, sameness, identity, and return. Even within the films’ pervasive metaphor of family kinship, notions of disjuncture and loss are never far away. Put more strongly, family is evoked, as seen in the analyses, primarily through its negative cognates of orphanhood, conflict, and fraternal rejection. On the one hand, these recurring, negative points of reference inflate the drama of lost social cohesiveness, vanished inter-ethnic harmony, and abated “paternal” protection by the state. On the other hand, these references evoke, precisely through these losses and conflicts, an organic “homeliness” that supposedly existed before the “fall,” that is, before post-Soviet strife and fragmentation struck. It is the displayed drama of the (post-)Soviet family in disarray that, paradoxically, works to invoke notions of collective belonging as structured by the natural ties of birth and kinship.4 It is important to see that in Born in the USSR this Janus-faced nostalgia hardly ever emerges from the views or utterances of the participants themselves. It is the structure, editing, and voiceover that appropriate the experiences of the participants for these narratives: the director, in his comments, aligns Algis’ celebration of his adolescent freedoms with the fate of Lithuania; contrastive editing of material from disparate periods underscores the increased emotional distance between Stas and Denis, making these scenes resonate with the motif of lost Soviet brotherhood elsewhere in the film; and even Andrei’s refusal to participate in the fourth film is cast, by the director, as a natural and transient phase in the generational and cultural solidarity among those who are united by having been born in the Soviet Union. The experiences of the participants are thus appropriated within a narrative that increasingly resonates with the hegemonic discourses of the Putin government. The project’s swelling pathos of a lost Soviet/Russian “home” and “family” shows noticeable parallels with the Russian state’s rhetoric of loss and restoration. Echoing Vladimir Putin’s famous statement about the collapse of the Soviet Union being “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” (2008, 272), Miroshnichenko has remarked that his films portray the “catastrophe of the great empire” (Interview by Konstantin Kosachev). He has also explicitly supported the annexation of Crimea (Izvestiia 11 March 2014), and the fascination in his documentary project with organic ties and inevitable returns (be it on a micro or macro level) resonates with Putin’s speeches in the wake of the Crimean campaign. As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, the president’s statements about the 2014 events underscored that Crimea had always served as a common home for various ethnic groups and that the

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reunification with Russia amounted to a return of Crimea to “the native shores, to the home port” (Putin 2014). Miroshnichenko’s compliance with the Putin government’s restorationism raises questions about the political implications of nostalgia. In their article The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices, Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko make a convincing case against the prevalent idea “that the very structure of nostalgia endows it with a particular political meaning” (2004, 490). Challenging the essentialism implied in this view, they submit that nostalgia is premised precisely “on the non-partisan quality of memory which alone can lend it an aura of objectivity” (ibid., 506). Zooming in on the post-socialist context, the authors write that the recollection of childhood memories by the last socialist generation often comes with an evasion of politics, as these recollections are tied to a “period when perception is by definition pre-political” (ibid., 510). Given nostalgia’s apolitical, nonpartisan aura, scholars, they argue, cannot cling to distinctions between “good nostalgia” (apolitical or subversive) and “bad nostalgia” (“explicitly reactionary”) (ibid., 504). Picking up on Kathleen Stuart’s remarks about nostalgia’s situationality, Nadkarni and Shevchenko propose that nostalgia research focus on the (often similar) structures of nostalgic expressions, whose intentions and political functions can differ radically “depending on the context in which they unfold” (ibid., 507). I submit that it is precisely the apparently non-political character of nostalgia, repeatedly pointed up in Miroshnichenko’s films, that opens this project up to co-option by the forces supporting political restorationism. Already in 2001 Svetlana Boym had remarked on the seemingly apolitical character of nostalgic discourses in post-Soviet Russia, pointing out that in Russians’ longing for the certainties of childhood, “personal affective memories” were often projected “onto the larger historical picture” (2001, 58). Precisely by disguising itself as deeply private, Boym feared, nostalgia could take on markedly political forms: “Nostalgia works as a double-edged sword: it seems to be an emotional antidote to politics, and thus remains the best political tool” (ibid.). Boym’s emphasis differs from that of Nadkarni and Shevchenko. She stresses how the seemingly apolitical character of (restorative) nostalgia may function as a disguise for its inherently political agenda, while Shevchenko and Nadkarni reject the idea of nostalgia’s inherent political orientation and underscore that identical practices of nostalgia may result in different effects depending on their social and political embeddedness. What these scholars share, however, is the (paradoxical) view that the “non-political promise of nostalgia” (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 514) is also the major prerequisite for its possession of political potential. This view provides a useful perspective on Born in the USSR. The project’s stress on private and family life, with its supposedly natural developmental stages, allows the political implications of its stories of

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origin and return to be obfuscated. While the recurring family metaphor gives a natural quality to the relations between individuals and groups, the documentary’s format, and in particular its “archival” logic, invests the films with a sense of objectivity. These naturalizing and objectifying effects stand out more clearly when Born in the USSR is compared with another documentary with a similar scope. My Perestroika (2010) by the American film director Robin Hessman (who graduated from the All Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow) traces the lives of five ordinary Russians from Moscow, four of them alumni from School #57. The documentary’s main subjects, Boris and his wife Liuba, work as history teachers at that same school and live in a small apartment with their son Mark. Ruslan, a former classmate and longtime friend of Boris, is a single father and freelance musician who is (and has always been) an outspoken nonconformist; Ol’ga, formerly the prettiest girl in their class, is now a single mom who is a manager in a company that services billiard tables in bars; and their adaptable ex-classmate Andrei is currently a successful businessman, selling high-end French shirts, suits, and ties in shops across Moscow. The documentary zooms in on three phases in the characters’ lives and in the history of their country: the stable Stagnation years of the late 1970s when the protagonists were kids, the era of Perestroika and the roaring 1990s, and the Putin and Medvedev period of the film’s present. These various epochs are represented not only through Soviet propaganda footage, period newsreels, and (masked) interviews with the characters but also through unique 8-mm home video material shot by Boris’ father. It becomes clear that the “Perestroika” of the film’s title signifies not merely the upheavals of 1985–1991 but also the personal transformations that these Muscovites have undergone over the decades. As the film’s tagline has it, “a nation’s history is personal.” Hinting at the original meaning of the word perestroika (“restructuring”), the film explores what Sheila Fitzpatrick has described as the “reimagining of self” (2005, 310) that late- and post-Soviet citizens had to bring about in their lives. Like Born in the USSR, My Perestroika portrays the effects of radical personal and national transitions but also explores what are sometimes surprising continuities. Abstaining from extradiegetic comments, or from any other narrative intervention, the director relies on the words of the subjects and on an editing style that works with associative connections between rhyming and contrasting images. A compilation of short homevideo shots, for instance, shows Boris’ face as it evolves throughout the years; a contemporary scene of Andrei lifting and hugging his daughter in their spacious Ikea-furnished home is contrasted with home-video material from decades earlier of Andrei embracing a little girl (possibly his sister) in a crammed Soviet-style apartment; and the film shows

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Ruslan—otherwise a vocal critic of Western-style consumerism—visiting a Pizza Hut restaurant with his son. The scene is contrasted with old footage showing Ruslan in a pioneer costume during an unspecified event in School #57. The film ends with contemporary scenes depicting the September 1st ceremonies at School #57. Andrei accompanies his daughter to her first day at school. We also see Ruslan with his son, while Boris and Liuba attend both as parents and teachers. The children, in their Sunday best, bring flowers to their teachers. The images are strikingly similar to the old home-video scenes of the same ceremony that are inserted into the film’s finale. The resulting panorama of changes and continuities is varied, as are the interpretations of the post-Soviet transition by those who experienced it firsthand. Boris reminisces about his happy childhood before Perestroika and fondly recalls the nonconformist subcultures of which he took part, and also expresses his fears about the return of increasingly authoritarian policies in the present. Ruslan is nostalgic for the liberal and experimental music scene of the Perestroika era. Unable to find his footing in the new capitalist realities of the post-Soviet period, however, he opts for a life as an outcast. Andrei, who seems flexible enough to flourish within any social reality, welcomes the possibilities provided by the market economy. By no means, however, does he support the Putin government. While the viewer senses the director’s sympathy for Liuba, Boris, and their son, who receive the most intimate portrayal, the film is open to these other perspectives, too. Resisting the temptation to incorporate the experiences and views of the subjects into one monologic narrative, My Perestroika retains a strong multivoiced character. The basic nostalgic logic of Born in the USSR and My Perestroika is rather similar. These films dramatize disjuncture while also exploring parallels and continuities between disparate epochs. The difference between the documentaries lies in the extent to which they naturalize and unify these practices. While Born in the USSR glosses over the nostalgic “work” it undertakes—presenting its methodology as objective and its proposed links as natural—My Perestroika self-consciously flaunts its own devices, using an editing style that is associative, defamiliarizing, and sometimes ironic. It is this self-conscious display of nostalgia’s negotiating (and open-ended) work that sets it apart from Miroshnichenko’s project and that shields it against facile political instrumentalization.

Notes 1. Even in the British Up series, however, the Jesuit determinism is hard to maintain because of the many unexpected events and developments that frequently disrupt the lives of the participants (see Bruzzi 2007, 75–86). 2. For Fritzsche nostalgia is a “fundamentally modern phenomenon” in that it depends on a view of historical progress as “the continual production of the new” (2004, 1589). Ever since the French Revolution, Fritzsche emphasizes,

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intellectuals have relied on nostalgic discourses to dramatize and accentuate the breaks in time wrought by modernity. 3. As the anthropologist Gediminas Lankauskas reminds us, nostalgia “is a pre-eminently ‘homey’ or domestic concept,” which often comes with related notions of safety, comfort, predictability, and togetherness (2014, 39). 4. This logic is reminiscent of what Serguei Oushakine has described as the “patriotism of despair.” Reflecting on the ubiquitous post-Soviet litanies on social dislocation and fragmentation expressed by his informants from the provincial city of Barnaul, Oushakine points out that precisely these references to loss often had a constitutive effect, serving as the focus for fantasies of collective belonging (2009, 38).

Works Cited Atia, Nadia, and Jeremy Davies. 2010. “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History.” Memory Studies 3 (3): 181–6. Barnouw, Erik. 1993. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bruzzi, Stella. 2007. Seven Up. London: British Film Institute. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 2005. Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in TwentiethCentury Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fritzsche, Peter. 2004. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gorodetskaia, Alena. 2012. “Serial na vsiu zhizn’.” Bolshoi Gorod, August 31, 2012. http://bg.ru/society/serial_na_vsyu_zhizn-11731/. Hutton, Patrick H. 2013. “Reconsiderations of the Idea of Nostalgia in Contemporary Historical Writing.” Historical Reflections 39 (3): 1–9. Izvestiia. 2014. “Deiateli kul’tury podderzhali pozitsiiu prezidenta po Ukraine i Krymu.” March 11, 2014. https://iz.ru/news/567299. Lankauskas, Gediminas. 2014.“Missing Socialism Again? The Malaise of Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Lithuania.” In Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 35–59. New York: Berghahn. Miroshnichenko, Sergei. 2007. “Molodezh’ na televizionnom ekrane.” Interview by Anna Kachkaeva. Radio Svoboda, June 25, 2007. www.svoboda.org/a/ 399389.html. Miroshnichenko, Sergei. 2012. “Kontrol’naia dlia rozhdennykh v SSSR.” Interview by Elena Afanas’eva. Ekho Moskvy, September 9, 2012. https://echo.msk.ru/ programs/tv/927145-echo/. Miroshnichenko, Sergei. 2013. “Sovremennoi Rossii nuzhna masshtabnaia dokumental’naia letopis’.” Interview by Konstantin Kosachev. Golos Rossii, June  17, 2013. https://news.rambler.ru/community/19634086-sovremennoyrossii-nuzhna-masshtabnaya-dokumentalnaya-letopis-razgovor-s-konstantinomkosachevym/. My Perestroika. 2010. Directed by Robin Hessman. Red Square Productions. Nadkarni, Maya, and Olga Shevchenko. 2004. “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices.” Ab Imperio 2: 487–519.

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Nichols, Bill. 2010. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Oushakine, Serguei. 2004. “Mesto—imeni—ia: Sem’ia kak sposob organizatsii zhizni.” In Semeinye uzly: Modeli dlia sborki, edited by Serguei Oushakine, 7–52. Moscow: NLO. Oushakine, Serguei. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaka: Cornell University Press. Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. 2006. “Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology 54 (6): 919–41. Putin, Vladimir. 2008. “Poslanie federal’nomu sobraniiu Rossiiskoi Federatsii [25 April 2005].” In Izbrannye rechi i vystupleniia, 271–90. Moscow: Knizhnyi mir. Putin,Vladimir.2014.“Address by President of the Russian Federation.”The Kremlin, Moscow, March 18, 2014. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603. Rozhdennye v SSSR. 1990—. Directed by Sergei Miroshnichenko. Gosteleradio, Granada Media, Sovtelexport, Studio Ostrov. Shembel, Daria. 2016. “Born in the USSR: Children vs. Ideology and the Impact of Database Cinema.” Slovo 28 (2): 69–84. Stewart, Kathleen. 1988. “Nostalgia—A Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3 (3): 227–41. Tannock, Stuart. 1995. “Nostalgia Critique.” Cultural Studies 3 (9): 453–64. White, Hayden. 1990. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Part III

Contestation

7

Under the Sign of Nostalgia The Cultural Revolution in Perm and Its Narrative Representations Marina Abasheva and Vladimir Abashev

In the post-Soviet period, Russian society’s attitudes toward the present have been dominated by nostalgia. This idea is almost universally accepted. Nostalgia has even been called a “culturally formative point of reference in Russian life” (Shmeleva 2011, 80). At the same time, we should bear in mind how nostalgic attitudes have changed in the decades since 1989, both in their predominant features and forms and in the extent of their influence on social, cultural, and political realities. We should also bear in mind the historical processes and cultural conflicts that have given rise to various forms of nostalgia. This chapter focuses on semiotically loaded encounters between competing discourses of nostalgia that are representative of their time and place: the brief period of the Medvedev-era modernization in a provincial Russian city. We will concentrate on a single important conflict, which has come to be known as the “Perm cultural revolution.” If post-Soviet society before 2012 was marked by the prevalence of symbolic nostalgia (Levada 2006, 298), or reflective or ironic nostalgia (Boym 2002, 301), it is clear that since Vladimir Putin’s third term as president, nostalgia has gone on the offensive, and, in Levada’s words, the “ghosts of the past are being brought back to life” (Levada 2006, 296–8). In this context, the period of leaps of modernization under Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency is of special interest. This period was described as “nostalgic modernization” by some (Kalinin 2010); “sentimental technology” by others (Kukulin 2010, 277). Either way, its most salient feature was its conflicted sense of temporality, its fraught relationship with both the present and the future. Nevertheless, this period also led to hope for structural changes in social consciousness; it is therefore a fascinating object of study that can help us understand both the vicissitudes of Russia’s historical self-determination and its relationship to modernity. A noteworthy event of this period was the “Perm cultural project,” or “Perm cultural revolution” as it came to be known (Leibovich and Shushkova 2011; Lysenko 2014; Iankovskaia 2013; Velikaia and Khokhlov 2016; Podvintsev 2016), which will be analyzed in this chapter.

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Modernizing the Provinces: A War of Discourses The “Perm cultural project” is what observers called a policy whose aim was to decisively modernize cultural life in Perm between 2008 and 2012. Two facts about this episode stand out. First, the location: a provincial city that viewed the cultural revolution as an invasion from the capital, an attempt to wipe out their sense of self-determination. Second, the repercussions: the events in Perm attracted national attention and were subjected to intensive discursive treatment, both in the local community and beyond; they were reflected in, among other places, Aleksandr Prokhanov’s articles, his newspaper editorials, and his novel Star Man (Chelovek zvezdy) and gave rise to a striking, nostalgically tinted narrative. This narrative trail left by the Perm cultural revolution will be the object of our analysis. Let us begin by introducing the main events and key figures in this short-lived but turbulent period. Several factors are crucial to understanding how the Perm cultural revolution unfolded. First, the Perm cultural revolution was a political initiative launched by the local government, whose goal was to keep up with President Medvedev’s own modernizing initiatives. Second, the key figures involved in the project did not come from the local community, but from Moscow; they were artists and cultural administrators. Finally, the Perm cultural project emphasized and promoted not traditional culture, but contemporary culture, and especially contemporary art. An important figure who helped launch the Perm cultural project was Sergei Gordeev, one of Russia’s leading real estate developers. From 2007 to 2010, Gordeev was a member of Russia’s Federation Council representing the Perm Region. It was Gordeev who advised the governor of the Perm Region, Oleg Chirkunov, to stake his money on contemporary culture in developing the region and introduced him to Marat Gel’man as someone capable of getting this ambitious project off the ground. The governor voiced his enthusiastic support for the idea of a cultural revolution and gave the project a political carte blanche, as well as financial backing. The main ideologues and facilitators of the Perm cultural project were the theater director Boris Mil’gram, who was head of the Perm Region’s Ministry of Culture at the time, and the aforementioned Marat Gel’man, a prominent gallery owner, curator, and cultural administrator. The project took off rapidly, with an intensity that took the local community by surprise. The Perm cultural project brought together a number of measures whose purpose was to modernize the cultural sphere: these included cultural financing reforms, multifaceted urban planning initiatives, the development and promotion of territorial brands, the founding of new cultural institutes and festivals, the creation of a master plan for the city, and the launching of international architecture competitions. New homes for theater, opera, and ballet were designed, as well

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as art galleries and a contemporary art museum. A high point of the cultural project was the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, known by the acronym PERMM. It showed numerous exhibits, including “Russian Povera” (2008), “The Evangelical Project” (2009), “Night at the Museum” (2010), “Trimalchio’s Banquet” (2011), and many others, introducing the inhabitants of Perm to the work of virtually every leading practitioner of contemporary art in Russia. An artist residency program was founded in Perm, which hosted artists by invitation; a theater called “Stage-Hammer” (Stsena-Molot) was opened, where younger directors could put on experimental productions. Large festivals were founded— “Live Perm” and “White Nights in Perm”—as well as a contemporary poetry festival (“WordNova”) and a public art initiative. Art installations began popping up all over the city, giving dramatic visibility to Perm’s new image. These included Andrei Liublinskii’s “Red People” and Nikolai Polisskii’s “The Perm Gates” (2012). An important goal of the cultural revolution was to attract leading creative figures, both from Russia and abroad. The buildings for the new art galleries were designed by Peter Zumthor; those for the theater, opera, and ballet were designed by David Chipperfield. The commission for an urban master plan was given to a Dutch architectural firm led by Kees Christiaanse; the city’s logo was designed by Artemii Lebedev. Perm played host to the artists Il’ia and Emilia Kabakov, the directors Kirill Serebrennikov and Pavel Lungin, and the novelist Vladimir Sorokin. The cultural administrators from Moscow founded new cultural institutions. Marat Gel’man became the director of the contemporary art museum while theater director and producer Eduard Boiakov founded the “StageHammer” Theater. Teodor Currentzis was brought in as artistic director of the theater, opera, and ballet companies. The media’s response to the project was unprecedented. For the first time, Perm became a source of intriguing and, on the whole, positive coverage in every major Russian news outlet. Events taking place in this provincial Russian city attracted international media attention. The entire history of the cultural revolution in Perm, from its inception to its decline, was featured in a series of New York Times articles with headlines like “Pushing Art, Maybe a Bit Too Far” (Bohlen 2010), “A Bilbao on Siberia’s Edge?” (Jones 2011), and “Moscow Crushes an Uprising, This Time an Artistic One” (Nechepurenko 2016). Though in many ways one-of-a-kind, the Perm cultural project was entirely in keeping with the spirit and rhetoric of the larger modernization effort underway during Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency. The Permbased sociologists O. L. Leibovich and N. V. Shushkova are completely justified in analyzing the project as an example of “fitful modernization.” In their view, although the project catered to a circumscribed social group comprising the “academic, media, and creative establishment,” it “ended up falling in line with [.  .  .] [a proposed] road map for the country’s

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future development” (Leibovich and Shushkova 2011, 89). For the project, this guaranteed not just the support of the local government, but even the approval of much of the country’s political leadership. The name Vladislav Iurievich Surkov comes up repeatedly in publications about the events in Perm; at the time, he was the deputy chief of staff for the Kremlin and a coordinator of the Skolkovo Innovation Center: “In many ways, Skolkovo served as a model of modernization for the Perm cultural project. On Marat Gel’man’s initiative, the Skolkovo model spurred a discussion about developing a ‘Skolkovo of the humanities’ (Gumanitarnoe “Skolkovo” v Permi 2011) .”1 The idea of a separate humanities cluster never got past the discussion phase, but in the modernization paradigm of 2008–2012, the role (it would have played) fell to Perm. Much like Skolkovo in the spheres of engineering and technology, Perm became a kind of testing ground in the sphere of cultural administration. Taking this analogy still further, Leibovich and Shushkova write: Only the technologies are different; technical sciences in the one case, art in the other; the patronage of the federal government in the one case, that of the regional government in the other; attracting foreign experts in the one case, attracting tourists in the other. The venue is different, too. In the Moscow Region they built it up from scratch; in the Kama Region, they worked within the space of a Soviet industrial city. (2011, 88) However, with the political regime change in March 2012, the cultural experiment in Perm was no longer “in line [. . .] with the road map for the country’s future development” (ibid., 89) and was phased out within two years of Governor O. A. Chirkunov’s resignation in April 2012. On June 19, 2013, Marat Gel’man was fired from his post as director of the Contemporary Art Museum. “This firing was just one more symbolic gesture, one more sign that the Medvedev era had come to an end,” wrote Daniil Dondurei, a sociologist and editor-in-chief of the journal Art of Film (Iskusstvo kino). “Now we are told in no uncertain terms that our little game of ‘cultural innovation’ and ‘modernization’ [. . .] has run its course, that it is time to forget such words” (Dondurei quoted in Karev 2013). Of course, the Perm cultural project had a significant impact on the city as well, and ultimately played a positive role in its development. In the current estimation of sociologists who study the implementation of cultural policies in Russian provincial cities, the experiment in Perm became a “game-changer in Russia, as far as developing the cultural and social potential of a region and using this to ‘brand’ a territory” (Velikaia and Khokhlov 2016, 20). The project’s success on a local scale was seen

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as a step toward forging “new relations between government, business, the creative intelligentsia, and civil society” in Russia as a whole (ibid.). For our purposes, we will deal less with the Perm cultural project itself and more with how it was perceived by the local community and reflected in local discourse. In the Russian state media it was portrayed in a highly positive light, but in Perm itself the cultural revolution unfolded in an extremely adversarial environment. The local community was split between a relatively small group that supported the project and a significantly larger group that was staunchly opposed. The core of the opposition comprised members of writers’ and artists’ unions, leaders of the regional trade union of cultural workers, numerous journalists, and vocal members of the local branch of the social movement “Essence of Time” (Sut’ vremeni). The size of the opposition can be inferred from the fact over 500 people were present at a rally on June 30, 2011, calling for the minister of culture’s resignation. The opposition was considerably more active, while the “Permian supporters of Mil’gram and Gel’man were put in the position of trying to justify themselves,” as one observer aptly noted (Averkiev 2009). Opposition to the Perm cultural project made strange bedfellows out of activists who otherwise held to diametrically opposed political views and positions (the motives of the various people involved is a topic for further research); this resulted in a difficult conflict of choice. The journalist L. Sokolova summed it up rather trenchantly as follows: All the bigots and graphomaniacs, Russophiles and anti-Semites, all of them seemingly condemned to obscurity by the March of History, have joined forces in their battle against Gel’man, and in this light they look (. . .) downright progressive. Any Gel’man could say, with a nod in their direction, “whoever is against me is with them.” And what can you say to that? (2011) The cultural conflict in Perm was undoubtedly first and foremost a clash of political and social positions as well as personal ambitions. It can be described, after Bourdieu, as a struggle for symbolic and economic capital; the main objection raised by opponents of the Perm cultural project was that it was a huge waste of public funds, and there was resentment at their not being allocated for use by the local cultural community. For our purposes here, we will set aside that aspect of the conflict and focus instead on the discursive and rhetorical manifestations, which lay bare the value systems of those involved. The discourse of opposition took shape in response to the discourse of cultural modernization, which in that particular context meant the discourse of “alien” Moscow-based “Varangians.” It was perceived as an

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assault on everything authentically “Permian,” on the local way of life, on local identity itself.

The Battle for Identity The cultural “intervention,” to quote one of the more consistent and rational opponents of the Perm cultural project, “moved the people of Perm to search for a regional identity [. . .] [If], before the invasion, this search was limited to a small circle of amateurs, professionals, and politicians, [then now] there are wider circles of Permians trying to answer the questions ‘who are we?’ and ‘where are we headed?’” (Averkiev 2009). The assertion of a local, uniquely Permian identity became a rallying point for the discourse of opposition (Averkiev 2009; Iankovskaia 2013; Lysenko 2014; Podvintsev 2016). Observers have described this discourse of opposition as essentially a “rhetoric of local patriotism” (Lysenko 2014, 104) or as “a kind of xenophobia,” a “local fundamentalism” (Iankovskaia 2013, 157). They agreed that it resulted from a collision between the local community and a new, “universalist” conception and model of identity, which viewed Perm as a contemporary and creative city. Permian political identity, as it formed at the turn of the new millennium, was mostly backward-looking in its orientation, and its “reference points [. . .] were events and images from both the recent and distant past, but not, by any stretch, from the present or the future” (ibid., 160). It is hard not to agree. In terms of chronology, we can identify two layers in the symbolic discourse around Permian local identity: the militaryindustrial legacy of the Soviet period from the 1930s through the 1980s and Permian antiquity—the artifacts, icons, and linguistic expressions that have come down from the Perm Region’s remote past, including its geological past. Starting in the 1930s, Perm became an important center of the Russian military-industrial complex, a city specializing in the production of artillery and engines for rockets and airplanes. The legacy of this period is clearly visible in the city’s layout, its architecture and monumental design, and its toponyms. It includes not just monuments to factory directors and general designers, but military hardware as well: tanks, cannons, and military aircraft—all of which are displayed throughout the city as monuments. Visitors to the city are always told to go to the Artillery Museum at the old Motovilikhinskii Factory. This is a kind of open-air, permanent installation of combat-ready weapons. They represent the history of artillery for the 150 years that the factory was in operation, from an enormous smoothbore mortar from the mid-19th century (known locally as the “Tsar-cannon”) to modern multiple-launch rocket systems. “Permian guns” and “Permian motors” are points of pride for the local community. As for the images, themes, and rhetoric around the Perm Region’s legacy from antiquity, it was only in recent years that these became a

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symbolic resource for local self-identification. A pronounced interest in Permian antiquity in local literature, art, and cultural analysis began to gain traction in the post-Soviet period. This process was set in motion by the publication of two novels by the talented Perm-based writer Aleksei Ivanov, The Heart of Parma (Serdtse Parmy 2002) and The Gold of Rebellion (Zoloto bunta 2005). Using tropes from fantasy and adventure novels, he created an evocative and engaging portrait of medieval Perm during the period of Christianization. These novels were highly successful and generated a good deal of interest in the region’s distant past. Beginning in the mid-1990s, post-Soviet Perm looked for self-affirmation by turning to Permian antiquity, a constellation of artifacts, images, and concepts associated with the region’s distant past. The iconography of Perm’s zoomorphic style; local bronzes from the 8th through 12th centuries C.E.; the myth of Bjarmaland (an ancient country located in the Kama River Region); paleontological evidence from the Permian Period in the geological record; and, above all, Permian wooden sculpture (a collection of Christian art objects dating to the 18th and 19th centuries)—all these contributed significantly to the idea of the region’s exceptionalism. In theoretical terms, the “gods of Perm” (as the Permian wooden sculptures have come to be known in local discourse) and “guns of Perm” constituted the twin pillars of a symbolically constructed local identity. It was against this model of identity, with its backward-looking and nostalgic bent, that the leading figures of the Perm cultural project held up the modernizing model. This latter model was proclaimed in the spirit of a manifesto in the introductory essay of the exhibition catalogue for “Russian Povera” (2008), which set the Perm cultural project in motion. The essay was written by Sergei Gordeev, then a senator for the Perm Region and a driving force for cultural modernization. As Gordeev wrote, “the factories that served as engines of Permian civilization are tired of dragging the city on their backs, and they need help. [. . .] We need a new motor!” (2009, 22). The policies of fitful modernization collided head-on with the nostalgic imagination of the local community. The “[nostalgic nature] of the images associated with regional identity[.  .  .] [was] an underlying reason for the negative reaction to these new cultural policies” (Iankovskaia 2013, 161). The discourse of opposition was built around the rhetoric of military intervention. The Perm cultural project was described as an “intervention,” an “invasion,” a “takeover,” an “occupation,” and a “hostile takeover,” while its representatives were portrayed, accordingly, as enemy invaders, occupiers, and “Varangians” (Podvintsev 2016, 87). “In 2009,” states Igor Averkiev, “the cultural space of Perm was seized in a hostile takeover by Marat Gel’man and his troops. The metaphors are numerous—'civilizing mission,’ ‘cultural colonization,’ ‘hostile invasion,’ ‘imported cultural revolution’—but the underlying meaning is quite clear” (Averkiev 2011–12). The discourse of opposition was partly motivated

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by the fact that the “revolutionaries” did not seem too concerned about getting the local intelligentsia on their side. Igor Averkiev, a human rights activist with democratic leanings, ended up in the “nostalgists’” camp, largely because he saw the “Varangians” position as an intervention that totally failed to engage the local progressive intelligentsia. In the eyes of its fiercest opponents, the cultural intervention in Perm was projected onto the global stage and viewed as “part of a larger culture war being waged against our nation and people for over twenty years. [. . .] In this historical and cultural context, the city of Perm figures as an experimental center for postmodern experiments [. . .] whose goal is to spread the ‘Permian experiment’ to other regions” (Fedotov 2013). In the rallying cries to resist intervention, the military language would sometimes be literalized: Resistance [is impossible] without acknowledging that we are in the middle of a culture war, whose outcome depends on your willingness to mobilize and take action! Each one of you is responsible for how this war turns out, before those who fell, those who perished, those who defended and contributed to the culture that shaped our great nation and people. (ibid.) In this militarized context, the people of Perm who supported cultural innovation appeared as willing or unwilling collaborators on the side of the interventionists: The intelligentsia of Perm [. . .] has capitulated. It has unconditionally surrendered the city and its people to the enemy, and cleared a wide path for the intervention. [.  .  .] Don’t they realize that this intervention is slowly becoming an occupation?! (ibid.) Thus, the motives of the cultural project’s local supporters were interpreted as collaborationist. Gel’man was seen as “recruiting local chieftains, enticing the shamans with his wining and dining” (Sokolova 2011). Here, the words “chieftains” and “shamans” highlight an important aspect of the emerging interventionist narrative model of the Perm cultural project: the colonial plot. The interventionists from Moscow operate in Perm “like the Spanish conquistadors in South America” (ibid.). Gel’man “trades in his glass beads for our gold, wiping out anyone still capable of casting gold plates. He is gutting our resources; all he cares about [. . .] are metals and ores—for export” (ibid.). Those opposed to the cultural modernization project are depicted as guardians and defenders of a “golden” cultural heritage. O. M. Vlasova, a prominent art historian specializing in the wooden sculpture of Perm,

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appealed to the uniqueness and wealth of the local cultural heritage and rejected outright any meddling by the “Varangians” in the local cultural scene: The art of Perm is self-sufficient. Its development goes back to ancient times. [. . .] We have our own Permian zoomorphic style [. . .] and a huge reserve of our own ancient artworks. Our medieval period was magnificent! The Stroganoff School of icon-painting, Stroganoff gold embroidery, the wooden sculpture of Perm. [. . .] Other regions have nothing on our traditions. (qtd. in Oborina 2011) In his own approach to resisting cultural intervention, the poet Iurii Belikov found inspiration not in Perm’s antiquities but in Soviet cultural memory. For him, the fact that a sizeable part of Leningrad’s creative intelligentsia was evacuated to Perm during World War II was nothing short of a rescue mission in which Perm saved Russia’s cultural gene pool—a “crescendo” in the city’s history. Building on this analogy, he described a rally for opponents of the Perm cultural project in tones befitting a popular uprising: The people of Perm are at boiling point. It was in times just like these that the city reached its most secret crescendo: the nation’s gene pool, which had once strengthened Perm, and in turn was strengthened by it. [. . .] Painters and draftsmen, writers and filmmakers, architects and theater people, musicians and librarians—all advancing together as one army. It was as if they had been summoned by the music of Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian; inspired by the protagonists of Veniamin Kaverin and Aleksandr Grin; by everyone, in fact, who had ever contributed to Perm’s noosphere. [. . .] It was as though the Intelligentsia Congress in Perm—whose letter to the governor demanded that Boris Mil’gram be removed from his post as minister— were founded through the will of that invisible host. (Belikov 2009) This discourse of the opposition is simple in its narrative structures, but the expressions embedded in it proved extremely rich in opportunities for development. Even from the examples cited above, it is clear that, having passed through the crucible of local discursive practices, the people and events of the Perm cultural project assumed a larger-than-life, fictional dimension. Igor Averkiev alluded to this inevitable process of novelization in a series of highly critical articles titled “Perm’s cultural bubble” (Permskii kul’turnyi puzyr’). “I had hoped,” he wrote, “that [by analyzing the cultural revolution in Perm as it developed,] I would never have to leave the ‘rational field’ behind. [. . .] But since we are dealing here with

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deeply symbolic events, staying grounded in that field proved extremely difficult” (Averkiev 2009). The creative imagination followed suit; the metaphorical war was marked by heightened expressiveness, hyperbole, and literary allusion. Not only were the events of the Perm cultural revolution structured around standard narratives of military intervention and colonization, but its participants were imaginatively personified as well. Of course, this applied, first and foremost, to Marat Gel’man. For Averkiev, Gel’man’s motives and behavior could, for the most part, be understood in aesthetic terms: The ‘Perm cultural revolution’ is a story, a drama, whose plot unfolds according to the will of a demiurge provocateur, while ‘Perm— Russia’s cultural capital’ is a kind of multi-part ‘happening’, as performed by Marat Gel’man. [. . .] It’s a classic venture in the spirit of Count Caliostro, a venture as an artistic genre, dazzling the establishment with its pyrotechnics, aestheticizing everything it touches, from flattering gestures to vengeful actions. (Averkiev 2009) Perm is the setting for a [. . .] fairy tale with [. . .] a classic plot: ‘a schemer in the provinces’, whether it’s Giacomo Caliostro, Ivan Khlestakov, Ostap Bender, or Marat Gel’man. [. . .] [Gel’man] appeared suddenly, out of thin air, as befits a schemer [. . .] projecting big-city glamor and bursting with ideas. He did his song and dance for the naïve country bumpkins and talked up the good life that ‘modern art’ would bring to dreary Perm. (Averkiev 2011–2012) “It’s hard not to demonize someone who’s larger than life, and talented too,” confessed Averkiev (Averkiev 2009), and the opponents of the Perm cultural project were all too eager to take part in this demonization. Gel’man’s demonization (which, incidentally, he cleverly managed to use to his advantage)2 exposed the intentionality latent in the discourse of the opposition, its penchant for using metaphor, hyperbole, and symbol to represent actual people and events. The revolution’s overall artistic mode assumed a definite form as well, as an atmosphere of phantasmagoria, of sinister carnival. As Averkiev put it: Many of us have noticed the stench of evil, but this stench is wafting from [the interventionists’] ‘culture’ [. . .] [their] festivals, shows, exhibits. The ingenuity of this evil being wrought by Gel’man and Chirkunov [. . .] has put many [of Perm’s residents] in a stupor. (Averkiev 2011–2012)

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These local discursive wars were also where a crucial symbolic dichotomy emerged, which presented the conflict in terms of “Varangians” versus Permians; “little red men” versus the “gods of Perm.” The cultural conflict was presented as a battle between monuments. “Little red men” was the moniker given—locally at first, and later throughout Russia—to a series of sculptures, titled “Red People” (2009, original title in English), created by two members of the St. Petersburg art collective “Professors,” Mariia Zaborovskaia and Andrei Liublinskii. The “little red men” were bright red sculptures made of wood and plastic, built up out of rectangular blocks. They look like Legos, the popular construction toy for children, and at the same time allude to the style of Soviet constructivism. The artists intended these sculptures to be playful decorative objects “whose purpose was to bring some color to dreary housing projects” (Liublinskii and Zaborovskaia 2012); they could not have foreseen the explosive impact their creations would have on Perm. The little red men became a focal point for hostilities in the local community. A key factor here was the placement of the sculptures outside the House of Assembly and the Governor’s Administration. The “little men” came to be seen as a direct manifestation of arbitrary rule. One of the figures was installed on the roof of the legislative assembly building. They [. . .] are placed [. . .] in a way [. . .] that makes local residents feel humiliated and attacked by the installation, and powerless before it. Artistic taste is beside the point here [. . .] The ‘little red men’ are nothing less than the kulturträger having a laugh at Perm’s expense, because Perm didn’t accept them. (Averkiev 2011–2012; italics by M. and V. Abashev) Thus, a sculpture that was innocent in its conception—an urban toy— became a demonic metonymy for power. One slogan from a rally organized by opponents of the Perm cultural revolution was: “Who’s in charge here—the little red men?” (“Kul’turnyi miting” [Cultural rally] 2011). Another important factor in the symbolic overloading of the little red men (and one that might have come as a surprise to the artists) was that in the local cultural context, these sculptures came to be associated with one of the most important objects in Perm’s cultural heritage—the “gods of Perm.” This is the local name for one of the most extensive collections of religious wooden sculpture in Russia. The little red men were perceived (thanks to a certain iconographic resemblance) as a blasphemous parody of religious sculpture. A news story about a rally to protest the local government’s cultural policies was published with the headline: “Cultural rally takes place: how will the little red men respond to the gods of Perm?” (“Kul’turnyi miting” 2011). It was appropriate, then, that a sign of the Perm cultural revolution’s demise—the coup de grace—was the removal of these demonized

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sculptures from public view: “The symbolic end of the Moscow-Perm revolution was not Marat Gel’man’s dismissal from the PERMM museum [. . .] but the dismantling of the hated ‘little red men’” (Ryzhova 2015). Thus, the outcome of the Perm cultural revolution supports the idea, proposed by scholars of post-Soviet nostalgia, that in contemporary Russia modernization is not an economic project so much as a cultural and political project (Kukulin 2010, 279); and that the inclusion of “the Soviet” in Russian modernity legitimizes the Soviet past, not as a privileged political or ideological resource, but as a “cultural and historical legacy” made up of a shared and inalienable “contemporary Russian cultural baggage” along with a national historical tradition (Kalinin 2010, 10). At the same time, the discursive battles for national identity proved to be deadly serious, and the recent political situation has shown just how much sway these rhetorical wars can have not just on cultural but on political agendas as well.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: An Aesthetic Representation of the Conflict Aleksandr Prokhanov visited Perm in late June of 2011; he was invited by the organizers of the project “Russian Encounters” (who positioned themselves as Russian nationalists).3 He spent a week there “gaining a thoughtful and subtle understanding [of the city],” (Iushkov 2013a) in the words of Roman Iushkov. Iushkov, a chief ideologue for “Russian Encounters” and a leading figure in the opposition to the Perm cultural revolution, had arranged for Prokhanov’s visit and introduced the writer to the city. According to Iushkov, Prokhanov met with the people of Perm, appeared on local radio stations [. . .] spoke with the directors [. . .] of military factories [. . .] as well as local art historians [. . .] and carefully examined antiquities from the Chud’ Region at the Meshkov Mansion.4 In the galleries, he stood transfixed before the wooden gods of Perm. He reverently touched the mounted guns on display in front of the Motovilikhinskii factories. He was astounded by the smug affront of the pieces at the Contemporary Art Museum. (Iushkov 2013a) This last fact suggests that the author not only got acquainted with the look and feel of the city but threw himself headlong into the discourse of the local opposition. In no time at all, this immersion bore fruit. Prokhanov’s creative response to the Perm cultural project was almost instantaneous. In an essay titled “The Heroic Deed of the ‘Gods of Perm’,” he spun a phantasmagoric tale about a “lively Russian city” that is invaded by a “demonic host [.  .  .] of cronies and disciples” of

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Marat Gel’man; and how that “subtle deceiver [and] master [. . .] bluffer” seduced the local government and flooded the city with “a mysteriously proliferating horde of little red men” (Prokhanov 2011). Meanwhile, the people of Perm fell into a “grievous enchanted slumber”; but then, overnight, a mystical native force rose up against the interventionists, and in a ferocious battle, the “gods of Perm” destroyed the red idols, and the fog over the city dispersed (ibid.). The essay is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it shows that Prokhanov did indeed “thoughtfully and subtly” absorb the local history and mythology. “The Heroic Deed of the ‘Gods of Perm’” opens with a dramatic and vivid portrait of the city, a nearly exhaustive compilation of various symbols of local identity. This includes ancient, pagan Perm, whose “spirit of the Ugro-Finnic shamans” is preserved in Perm’s zoomorphic style; Orthodox Perm, which opened a “corridor for Russian civilization’s [. . .] march across the Urals and into the West, all the way to the Pacific Ocean”; Soviet Perm, “armed, steely, casting guns for all the great Russian wars [. . .] a center of the aerospace industry, creator of one-of-a-kind aircraft engines, solid-fuel missiles, and volley fire systems.” Prokhanov ends his litany of Perm’s iconic images with “[its] greatest [. . .] marvel [. . .] the wooden sculptures [. . .] a Divine Host hewn from wood, astonishing in its anthropomorphism and epiphanic power.” The “gods of Perm,” writes Prokhanov, “are watchmen who stand guard over the mystery, power, and beauty of Perm” (Prokhanov 2011). This flattering panegyric to the city serves an important function: Prokhanov brings the symbols of identity competing within the local discourse into a perfectly consistent, synergetic union. For Prokhanov, “the gods of Perm” and “the guns of Perm” form a united front. Antiquity and reverence for the past are combined with the monuments of Soviet modernization. Second, the essay is bound up with the local discourse of opposition. Whether consciously or not, Prokhanov synthesized and creatively amplified the narrative and symbolic potentialities that were already present in that movement: the plot of intervention and insurgency; the metaphorical rivalry between the “gods of Perm” and the “little red men.” At the same time, Prokhanov projected the events of the Perm cultural revolution onto a global stage. He treats the cultural intervention as an extension of other invasions of Perm: by American specialists “sniffing around the city’s military factories” (Prokhanov 2011) who oversaw the destruction of missiles in compliance with the START treaty; and by the criminals from the Caucasus who decimated the forests of the Perm Region. The local cultural conflict is recast as part of a larger global conspiracy against Russia, with Perm as its focal point—a “marvelous, mysterious, and great city” (ibid.). “The Heroic Deed of the ‘Gods of Perm’” proved to be a launch pad for Prokhanov’s imagination, a preview of things to come, and, in part, a rough sketch for the plot of a new novel. The following year, in 2012,

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Prokhanov published the novel Star Man, where the themes introduced in his earlier essay were blown up to the proportions of a space opera. The novel combines formulaic devices from several genres of popular culture: serial novels, thrillers, utopian fictions, and conspiracy novels. The novel’s characters are one-dimensional; the plot is predictable, driven by heavy-handed ideological pathos. It is a novel-as-picket, a novel-aspamphlet; it could even be called a novel-as-flyer—a military leaflet of a book—if such a genre existed. For the locals fighting against big-city intervention, Prokhanov’s Perm texts became the voice of their own protest. As one of them wrote, before Prokhanov “the energy of protest had dissipated into [. . .] bickering”; but then “Aleksandr Prokhanov’s arrival became a true cultural explosion. He sensed right away that war was in the air; and in his public appearances, articles, and books he used vivid, imaginative figures to rouse a warlike spirit” (Fedotov 2013). In these quotations, Nikita Fedotov—an activist with the far-left National-Patriotic movement “Essence of Time”— discusses Prokhanov’s book as though it were an act of civilian resistance and transposes the plot of the novel onto the realm of ideological conflict, even of public rallies: Aleksandr Prokhanov [. . .] sensed, on a metaphysical level, the terrible threat that has engulfed our streets. Like a true soldier of the [Russian] Empire, he joined the battle willingly, wielding artistic language in an attempt to wake society, and Perm’s creative intelligentsia, from their ‘grievous enchanted slumber’. [. . .] Prokhanov rallied the people of Perm to [. . .] civilian resistance [. . .] and just a few days later the first important battle took place [. . .] [the rally] that [. . .] brought nearly 500 people together. (ibid.)5 This rally had no direct connection to Aleksandr Prokhanov’s arrival or his publications, but there is little doubt that Prokhanov’s essay, and his subsequent novel, magnified the events of the Perm cultural revolution to a much larger scale. Prokhanov presented the provincial discourse of opposition to a Moscow-led modernization project as a coherent narrative about a conflict between much larger forces: westernizing liberals versus patriotic nationalists; progressives versus heirs to the Soviet Empire; Darkness versus Light. By grounding his novel in an actual place, Prokhanov gave it a sheen of authenticity while also using the region as a synecdoche: the provincial city of P. (the novel specifies that it is a provincial capital in the Ural region and that it is situated on the banks of a major river) is a reflection of contemporary Russia—not in a historical or geographic sense, but in a symbolic and mythological one. It epitomizes the myth of the Russian province as a place where the purity, spirit, and values of the Russian nation as a whole are preserved.

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Prokhanov opens the first chapter of the book with an overview, which in many ways recapitulates his opening to “The Great Deed of the ‘Gods of Perm’,” with its inventory of semiotic signs and mythologies specific to Perm: its remote geological past and medieval pagan cults preserved in the artifacts of the Perm zoomorphic style; the “gods of Perm” and the history of metallurgy in the Ural region; the guns of Perm, the missiles and “silvery lozenges” of UFOs, reports of which were widespread in Perm in the 1990s. This compendium of local myths, placed ahead of the actual plot of the novel, allows Prokhanov to efficiently map out the spatial coordinates (cultural and ideological, rather than geographic) for the fantastical, and at the same time polemical, history, which makes use of these myths as it sees fit. The novel does allude to actual historical reality as well: to Perm’s urban and natural landmarks, its history, and the leading figures and atmosphere of its cultural revolution. As symbols of the Perm cultural project, the notorious little red men play an important role in the plot as well. Prokhanov’s mythological text is structured as follows: the author moves from local to universal mythologies (cosmogonic, eschatological, etc.) and, at the same time, to political mythologies (national patriotic ones specifically). By steeping himself in Perm’s local mythology, Prokhanov “stole its language,” to quote Roland Barthes (1996, 257): local myths, their signs and symbols, are re-semanticized and reconceptualized in accordance with the author’s aims. The plot of the novel is built around a snowballing of conflict, which is resolved in a final face-off between the protagonists, who represent two worlds—the world of light and the world of darkness. The Prince of Darkness, Mr. Myers, arrives in P. with a business card that reads “President of the International Academy of Arts,” and a truck full of little red men; the latter are sculptures made out of wooden blocks. The city’s roads are falling apart, its research institute has been converted into a candy factory, its famed aircraft factory has been torn down to make room for a supermarket, and Myers proposes that the city be turned into the cultural capital of Europe: “He promises the governor that in these remote forests of the Urals [. . .] a new beacon of culture will shine its light over the world, winning the laurels from Paris, from Vienna, even from Saint Petersburg” (Prokhanov 2012, 17). A key argument for turning the city of P. into “the cultural capital of Europe” is that it will appeal to the president, an “ultramodern man with a keen interest in electronics, digital communication, Twitter, iPads, [and] iPhones” (ibid., 19).6 Thanks to friends in high places and his own supernatural abilities, Myers—a schemer who resembles both Gogol’s Chichikov and Woland from The Master and Margarita—is able to pressure the governor and other influential people to install the little red men on territory under their jurisdiction; the sculptures are meant to be a kind of mascot for

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a grandiose festival of contemporary art. Myers manipulates the local authorities, all of whom have “skeletons in their closet.” Both the public officials and the governor are painted in broad, satirical strokes; they are corrupt and depraved. The governor is a pedophile; the Chairman of the Legislative Assembly is a former mobster, one of the “bratki” from the 1990s. The author needs this litany of deadly sins perpetrated by the municipal government in order to paint a picture of a liberal regime; on an aesthetic level, it allows him to create the image of the “Harlot City” (Toporov 1987) tempted by the devil, that is Myers. As he goes around blackmailing and seducing politicians, business leaders, and bosses of the criminal underworld, Myers floods the city with his wooden mannequins: “They sat on the rooftops, dangling their feet. They stood before the entrances to municipal buildings like red guards. . . . These little red men were everywhere—in cemeteries, factory lobbies, supermarket display windows” (Prokhanov 2012, 66). We soon learn that these little red men are far from innocuous: they emit an energy that takes over people’s minds and awakens their darkest desires. Toward the end of the book, we find out that the little men are sophisticated robots programmed to help Myers carry out his global secret mission. The cultural revolution in P. is just a front for this mission. In keeping with the novel’s phantasmagoric narrative logic, Myers turns out to be a high-ranking American intelligence officer. He is sponsored by a Kremlin official named “Vladislav Iur’evich” (a thinly veiled reference to Vladislav Surkov). Myers recruits the corrupt liberal politicians and businessmen for his Army of Darkness, instilling fear in the officials with tales of a supposed communist putsch brewing in the city, which could take place when the president is in town for the festival. In fact, Myers plans to use the festival to take control of the city, taking advantage of the citywide celebration to brainwash the populace with his little red robot men. This terrible spectacle will clear a path for the invading army and set the forces of darkness loose in the city. As Myers says, the new cosmology teaches us that our universe lies between two others, separating them from each other. The Universe of Light and the Universe of Darkness. [. . .] Monks learned to harness the Luminous Energy from this neighboring universe with their prayers; poets and artists did it with their insights; martyrs did it by laying down their lives ‘for their friends’. [. . .] Russian poets and icon painters [did it too]. [.  .  .] Meanwhile, the works of the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf are the generators of Dark Energy. (ibid., 186–7) Myers, the devil, is eager to start Armageddon, the explosion that is bound to happen when these worlds collide.

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Myers’ nemesis is Sadovnikov, a soldier, poet, and scholar with Sovietera values. He used to be employed by a top-secret organization founded by none other than Stalin himself; this is the Victory Institute, whose headquarters are in the city of P. Sadovnikov’s job was to study the various energies in the Russian noosphere and build technologies to harness them. The workers at this institute were building a Russian Paradise, but this proved impossible after the fall of communism. In an attempt to safeguard their accumulated knowledge and technology, the Institute’s workers fled to a distant planet, leaving behind a single spaceship in the city of P. Sadovnikov’s rare gift is that he can make contact with spiritual energies from Russia’s noosphere and use them in the physical world, and he is entrusted with a vital mission: when the time comes, he must launch the spaceship into outer space with a message of victory, a signal to the heirs of the Soviet Empire, who are biding their time on a distant planet, that they can return. Their return will mark “the beginning of Russia’s transformation” (ibid., 335). Myers’ mission is to locate and destroy the hidden spaceship which was built during the twilight of the Soviet Empire. The displacement of the Soviet paradise into outer space is a predictable move, and not just in light of the utopian tradition that lives on in the science fiction novel. Russian Cosmism plays a part here too: Nikolai Fedorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovskii are mentioned in the text. Outer space is a crucial component of the Soviet myth; space exploration is second only to the victory in World War II as far as significant events that legitimized the glory of the Soviet nation (which is also the Russian nation, as far as Prokhanov is concerned). In the novel, outer space serves as both a nostalgic reminder of the USSR’s former glory and a futuristic projection of the world to come.7 Sadovnikov’s Army of Light is made up of symbolic characters, personifications of nostalgia for the Soviet way of life. Drawn in broad strokes, they represent the principles on which the now debased world of the Soviet people once stood. The former factory engineer has become a boatman. The bellmaker used to work in an ordnance factory. There is a priest who is hounded by an archbishop for keeping a portrait of “the Tsar-Martyr Joseph Stalin [. . .] the new saint and vanquisher of Jews” (Prokhanov 2012, 160, 164) in his cell (the anti-Semitic theme recurs several times in the novel). There is also a shaman, whose purpose is to remind us about the local peoples and about the pagan substrate in Prokhanov’s formula of national identity. The idea of generational continuity is embodied by a schoolboy; Sadovnikov teaches him how to talk to a mounted gun, and the gun tells the boy how his grandfather fired it at the Reichstag (let us recall that there is a mounted gun—a monument to war heroes—at the entrance to Perm’s Motovilikhinskii neighborhood, where the ordnance factory is located). In the novel, a bitter fate awaits these stock characters: the righteous few are martyred, subjected to exquisite tortures, but none of them betray

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the spaceship’s location. “You must endure this, for you suffer in Christ’s name,” exhorts the priest. “We will suffer until the end, when we shall find ourselves next to Christ. Victory lies with those who suffer until the end. We suffer together with Russia. Russia is the dwelling place of the Holy Mother of God” (ibid., 286). It is telling that the priest invokes the victory of 1945. In the novel, mythological time prevails over historical time. As Sadovnikov explains, Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War is the most important, mystical, “immutable” victory: Stalin knew there was no escaping the cosmic war, the battle between Light and Darkness, and he readied an Army of Light, and sent it off with his brilliant Star of Victory. For the coming victory in the war between Light and Darkness is already assured. Light has vanquished Darkness, and this coming victory has determined the course of all of modern history, all human events, all revolutions and uprisings. (ibid., 262) The idea of a Victory that redeems all suffering is at the core of Prokhanov’s mythology and goes beyond the work of Prokhanov. In the 2000s, as historians and sociologists have argued, Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War attained the status of a “foundational myth for post-Soviet Russia” (Koposov 2011, 91–105, 162–8). No other event in Russia’s history has been so instrumental in consolidating the nation and giving it a sense of self-worth. According to sociological surveys, victory in that war is the main source of pride for Russians, more than anything else in their history. In the 2000s, and especially in the 2010s, commemorations of the victory have grown larger in scope. Prokhanov combines the prestige of this victory with values that are markedly archaic. In the battle for the city of P., the right to victory falls to the “gods of Perm.” Fighting for the Army of Light in its war against the little red men—the Army of Darkness—is a sculpture Sadovnikov finds in the woods, a “wooden St. Nicholas, the kind one sees in the local churches and that bear a secret resemblance to pagan idols” (Prokhanov 2012, 73). The sculpture’s description leaves no doubt that its iconographic prototype is the statue of Nikola Mozhaiskii in the wooden sculptures collection at the Perm Art Gallery; the warrior saint with the high forehead holding a sword in his right hand and a cathedral in his left. In the novel, the cathedral is replaced by a book. Armed with a sword and a book, and emanating divine light, Nikola smashes the little red men to pieces. The old mounted gun, too, suddenly springs into action against Myers’ henchmen, firing a shell that has been sitting in its barrel since the end of the Great Patriotic War. The gun is fired by the ghost of a Soviet officer, thereby literalizing Nikolai Fedorov’s idea about the resurrection of the fathers, a conceit close to Prokhanov’s heart.

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The final battle between the novel’s antagonists is not just an homage to the clichés of popular art; it is also an excuse for Prokhanov to give vent to his mythical and ideological theories. Sadovnikov is able to defeat Myers thanks to the energy of the Russian noosphere: “He [Myers] was pierced by a gushing torrent out of the past, the mighty energies of Russia’s victories and achievements” (ibid., 328). This last battle is fought not just for the city of P. but for Russia, for the whole world. In the end, Myers vanishes in a swirl of darkness, sucked into a black rift in the universe. Yet this is not the end. There is another twist in store for the reader: in the novel’s epilogue, there is a sudden switch to a first-person narrator, a novelist named Sadovnikov, who shares a last name with his hero. As it turns out, the “star man” is not just the hero but the author as well. And indeed, when a fellow-fighter asks if their people will ever return, is it not the author himself who replies, together with Sadovnikov, “they will. Look to the dawn, and you will see a silver spaceship emblazoned with the letters ‘USSR’” (ibid., 76)? In other words, the dream will come true, the dream Prokhanov describes in the spirit of A. A. Deineka’s and V. P. Efanov’s apotheosis paintings: It is as though I leave my house at dawn, the morning sky is so mild, and there in the sky, all in silver, is our spaceship. On the white fuselage are the letters ‘USSR’. [.  .  .] And out step Nikolai Ostrovskii and Valerii Chkalov, Mikhail Sholokhov and Georgii Zhukov, Viktor Talalikhin and Yuri Gagarin, Liubov’ Orlova and Sergei Korolev, and in their midst, wearing a white jacket with a star and golden shoulder marks, is Stalin himself. (Prokhanov 2012, 75)8 This passage in the novel is remarkable for the way it echoes a speech given by Vladimir Putin, where Putin spoke out against refusing the memory of the Soviet past: If we were to be guided by this logic alone, we would have to forget the achievements of our nation over the course of centuries. But then where will we put the achievements of Russian culture? Where will we put Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky? Where will we put the achievements of Russian science, with Mendeleev, Lobachevsky, and many, many others? [. . .] Is there really nothing worth remembering from our country’s Soviet period except Stalin’s camps and the repressions? Where, then, will we put Dunaevsky, Sholokhov, Shostakovich, Korolev and our achievements in space exploration? Where will we put Yuri Gagarin’s flight? And what about the brilliant victories won by Russian arms since the days of Rumyantsev, Suvorov and Kutuzov? And what about the victory in Spring 1945? (Putin 2000).

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In his interviews, Prokhanov has talked openly about his influence on the president; recently, he talked about meeting him before the most recent elections (Prokhanov 2017b). In Putin, Prokhanov sees a champion of the strong state, an heir to the imperial idea: “The bird of statism looked for a place to settle and wove its nest in Putin” (Prokhanov 2016).

Glocal Nostalgia This emblematic image of the USSR’s return can be found throughout Prokhanov’s fictional texts, journalistic writings, and interviews. For Prokhanov, the most valuable takeaway from the Soviet experiment was the imperial idea: We, the inhabitants of Russia, children of a long-suffering nation, entreat God for an empire. We will model it on the Heavenly Kingdom. Among the nations, our Russia will be the most beautiful, powerful, and good. It will carry in it an image of the Heavenly City. Using the Russian ‘secret of immortality’, it will prevail over the dire ‘secret of lawlessness’. That is the mission of the Fifth Empire, descending in rays of glory over the Russian lands. (Prokhanov and Kugushev 2007, 11) Thus, in Prokhanov’s writings, conspiracy theories, cosmological myths, and clichés from popular culture are brought to bear on a unified, nostalgic mythology of a new empire, the heir to the USSR. Svetlana Boym has called this form of nostalgia “restorative” (Boym 2002; 2013). In Boym’s view, restorative nostalgia is marked by “the most extreme cases of contemporary nationalism, fed on right-wing popular culture” (Boym 2013, 122): The conspiratorial worldview reflects a nostalgia for a transcendental cosmology and simple premodern conception of good and evil. The conspiratorial worldview is based on a single, transhistorical plot, a Manichaean battle of good and evil, and the inevitable scapegoating of the mythical enemy. Ambivalence, the complexity of history and the specificity of modern circumstances is thus erased, and modern history is seen as a fulfillment of ancient prophecy. (Boym 2013, 43) Restorative nostalgia, unlike what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, “evokes national past and future” and “tries to restore a mythical collective habitat” (ibid.). In fact, all of Prokhanov’s post-Soviet novels, including Star Man, act out a nostalgic restoration of the USSR as a mythical collective habitat. Prokhanov’s hallucinatory dreams of imperial restoration are both a byproduct of collective memory and the material from which it is built.

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We should not dismiss Prokhanov’s bombastic, crude, and tasteless style as a mere curiosity. After all, a nostalgic narrative of Soviet empire has become dominant both in the minds of most Russians and in recent state rhetoric. Nowadays, the rhetoric of national identity is gaining momentum, and this rhetoric uses a time-tested repertoire of ideas and symbols: the ancient past, the Great Victory, the achievements of the USSR. In 2017, the sociologist K. Sultanov defined the historical myth of Russia, which has become entrenched in the last decade, as follows: “In the paradigm of Russia’s ‘seamless’ history as a ‘great power’, the memory of the USSR is conflated with the memory of the imperial era, within a single framework of uninterrupted greatness.” The discourse of power has avoided a semantic rupture with the Soviet past [. . .] opting instead to retain the Soviet model. [. . .] Rather than a responsible actualization of modernity [. . .] in all of its challenging fullness [. . .] there is a withdrawal into the past, a burden of repeating Sovietness, a mobilization of ‘great power’ chauvinism, positioning itself with increasing obviousness as a euphemism for the imperial. (Sultanov 2017) Accordingly, “nostalgia for greatness inevitably becomes nostalgia for empire [. . .] the imperial mindset positions itself as a renewable resource of self-identification and is itself aligned with macropolitical or civilizational identity” (ibid.). Prokhanov’s imperial project is significantly more radical than the one currently promoted by official state discourse. Prokhanov’s writings resemble political caricatures, burlesques, grand guignol. At the same time, they demonstrate the potential of taking the nationalist-patriotic idea to its outer limits as a kind of nostalgic project. In Prokhanov’s earlier novels, Crimea (Krym, 2014) and Novorossiya Washed in Blood (Novorossiia, krov’iu umytaia, 2016), he treats the conflict with the “Banderovite junta” as a concerted effort by Russia to resurrect its empire. Prokhanov glorifies and sacralizes images of imperial leaders, and this is reflected in the titles of his editorials for the newspaper Zavtra: “Mystical Stalinism” (Misticheskii stalinizm, 2015) and “Putin Crowned” (Ventsenosnyi Putin, 2017a). If we consider Prokhanov’s novel Star Man as a representation of the conflict (as it played out in Perm) between modernizers and traditionalists in a time of cultural revolution, we can draw the following conclusion: by demonstrating the victory of Soviet nostalgia over post-Soviet modernization (the modernizers were driven out of the city), as well as the triumph of nostalgia as depicted in Prokhanov’s novel, the cultural revolution and counterrevolution in Perm foreshadowed the subsequent development of this nostalgic narrative on a national scale. In Russia today, the ideas of state-centered patriotism and national triumphalism

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(as seen in the pathos of the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the subsequent disgrace of the doping scandal) are victorious, as is the restoration of imperial attitudes; the idea of rehabilitating Stalin has been revived countless times; and the KGB’s anniversary was celebrated by the government in 2017. In Perm, the conflict between the “archaists” and “innovators” ended with the reinstatement of a commemorative sign. Where the little red men had stood, a stele for the “Order of Lenin” has been restored to its original place. This stele was originally put up in 1973; it was later taken down by the property owners, and triumphantly unveiled once more in 2014. Still, this victory over the modernizers seems only relative. True, the stele (completely unconvincing from an aesthetic standpoint) still stands in the city center, and the “revolutionary Varangians” (the Muscovites) have left Perm and are busy with their own projects. However, thanks in large part to the energy generated by the protests, Perm has seen the founding of new institutes for young writers and artists in response to the modernizers’ challenge. One example is the Perm-based literary magazine Veshch (Thing/Work); another is the Kompros poetry festival (the name comes from the main street “Komsomol Prospekt” in Perm). And significantly, the “Stevedores’ House,” a consummate example of Soviet architecture, now houses the Laboratory of Contemporary Art, which exhibited its ideas in Moscow at the Garage Museum’s Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2015. It seems, then, that the opposition to the modernizers was heterogeneous and did not dovetail neatly with Prokhanov’s imperial fantasies. In the ideological conflict between nostalgia and modernization, modernization—at least on a social level—has occurred after all. The cultural landscape has been transformed, new agents have arisen within that landscape, and these agents are seeking new ways forward, ways that are potentially far removed from sentimental technologies. Translated from Russian by Philip Redko

Notes 1. In developing the idea of a Skolkovo of the Humanities, Andrei Il’nitskii, Deputy Director of the Central Electoral Commission (TsIK) of the United Russia party, saw it as a necessary step toward expanding popular support for modernization. As Il’nitskii wrote with the modernizing pathos typical of that period: It is a daring attempt to break through the cynicism of the elites, the skepticism of experts and scholars, bureaucratic ineffectiveness and corruption. It is a desire to show the city and the world what’s possible, and what’s necessary. Here and now, in Russia. By recruiting and mobilizing the very best, both in our own country and abroad. (Il’nitskii 2010) At present, Il’nitskii—that erstwhile champion of modernization—works as an adviser to the Minister of Defense, providing ideological training for

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army officers. Surely this is in keeping with the spirit of the times. The list of specialists he has invited to lectures and master classes at the General Staff Academy is telling: television personality Vladimir Solov’ev, State Duma members Irina Iarovaia and Petr Tolstoi, and Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinskii. Il’nitskii’s new credo is that it is not modernization but “service to the Fatherland, the ideology generated by the army—that is what will make Russia self-reliant and ensure its peaceful and progressive development” (Il’nitskii 2017). In response to his opponents, Marat Gel’man, an experienced spin doctor, immediately announced a poetry contest where the rule was to make him look as bad as possible; he then published the participants’ entries in a volume titled Black Gel’man and created a website with the same name. According to Roman Iushkov, the organizer and chief ideologue of “Russian Encounters,” “the goal of the project is to inoculate Perm—which has a reputation as a ‘liberal capital’—with a nationalist vaccine; to legitimize the discourse of Russian nationalism, and to make nationalism [. . .] a respectable topic of discussion in public spaces” (Iushkov 2013b). “Chud’ antiquities” is another name for the Perm zoomorphic style. It comes from the ethnonym “Chud’,” the medieval Russian name for the indigenous population of what is now the Perm Region. The largest collection of objects in the Perm zoomorphic style is held by the Meshkov Mansion, a museum of regional history. The essay “The Heroic Deed of the ‘Gods of Perm’” appeared in the newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) on June 29, 2011; the rally protesting the Perm cultural project was held on June 30. The allusion to Dmitry Medvedev in this passage is obvious. The critic Sergei Beliakov correctly noted the futuristic orientation of Prokhanov’s imperial idea: “Prokhanov’s Russian ideal is not Holy Russia, not even the late-Stalinist Soviet Union; rather, it is a glorious futuristic state founded on advanced technologies, a world where human happiness comes in the form of ‘cosmic all-terrain vehicles and solar-powered trains. Interplanetary ‘shuttles’ and ferries with photon-powered engines . . . agricultural technology for lunar and Martian gardens’” (the last quote is from Aleksandr Prokhanov’s novel The Extremist, 2007) (Beliakov 2009). See various examples of “apotheosis” paintings in Soviet art: “Stakhanovites (On Stalin’s Path)” (1938) by A. A. Deineka; “Notable People from the Land of the Soviets: Study for a Panel for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair” (1937) by A. A. Deineka; “Notable People of the Land of the Soviets” (1939) by V. P. Efanov.

Works Cited Auzan, Aleksandr, Andrei Arkhangel’skii, Pavel Lungin, and Vitalii Naishul. 2011. “Doklad ‘Kul’turnye faktory modernizatsii’. M.-SPb: Fond ‘Strategiia 2020’.” http://inp.ru/.files/129/0_backup.pdf. Averkiev, Igor. 2009.“Permskii kul’turnyi puzyr’.” Tsentr Grani. www.grany-center. org/content/iv-averkiev-permskiy-kulturnyy-puzyr. Averkiev, Igor. 2011–2012. “Neskol’ko replik na permskuiu kul’turnuiu situatsiiu.” Permskaia grazhdanskaia palata. http://old.pgpalata.ru/page/persons/ remarks. Barthes, Roland. 1996. Mythologies. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo imeni Sabashnikovykh. Beliakov, Sergei. 2009. “Etiud v krasno-korichnevykh tonakh.” Voprosy literatury, 5. http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2009/5/be4.html.

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Belikov, Iurii. 2009. “PERM’formans.” Literaturnaia gazeta, December 23, 2009. www.lgz.ru/article/N52--6256---2009-12-23-/PERMYformans11284/. Bohlen, Celestine. 2010. “Pushing Art, Maybe a Bit Too Far.” New York Times, November 24. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/arts/24iht-perm.html. Boym, Svetlana. 2002. Obshchie mesta. Mifologiia povsednevnoi zhizni. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Boym, Svetlana. 2013. “Budushchee nostal’gii.” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 3 (89): 118–38. Chikisheva, Anna. 2009. “Fenomen nostal’gii v postsovetskoi massovoi kul’ture.” In Fundamental’nye problemy kul’turologii. Sb. st. po materialam kongressa. Otv. red. D.L. Spivak, 267–77. Moscow: Novyi khronograf and Saint Petersburg: Eidos. T.6: Kul’turnoe nasledie: Ot proshlogo k budushchemu. Chikisheva, Anna. 2012. “Fenomen nostal’gii i ego problematizatsiia v sovremennom kul’turologicheskom znanii.” Elektronnoe periodicheskoe retsenziruemoe nauchnoe izdanie Kul’turologicheskii zhurnal 2012/13 (9). www.cr-journal.ru/ rus/journals/152.html&j_id=11. Fedotov, Nikita. 2013. “Kapituliatsiia permskoi intelligentsii.” Sut’ vremeni. Permskii krai, March 8, 2013. http://eotperm.ru/?p=1080. Gladnev, Igor. 2016. “O periode ‘kul’turnoi revoliutsii’, zadachakh kul’turnoi politiki i obshchestvennom zaprose.” Interview by Ivan Nechipurenko. Ministerstvo kul’tury Permskogo kraia, May 21, 2016. http://mk.permkrai.ru/presscentr/pryamaya-rech/52944/. Gordeev, Sergei. 2009. “Nash novyi motor.” In Russkoe bednoe: Katalog vystavki, 22–3. Perm: n.p. “Gumanitarnoe ‘Skolkovo’ v Permi.” 2011. Argumenty i fakty, October 25, 2011. www.perm.aif.ru/society/details/121466. Iankovskaia, Galina. 2013. “Lokal’nyi fundamentalizm v kul’turnykh voinakh za identichnost.” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Seriia: Politologiia, 2: 157–65. Il’nitskii, Andrei. 2010. “Ne tol’ko tekhnologii.” Vedomosti, August 27, 2010. www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2010/08/27/rasshirit_bazu_modernizacii. Il’nitskii, Andrei. 2017. “Nastoiashchaia elita—eto voennye. Interv’iu ‘Gazety. ru’ s sovetnikom ministra oborony Andreem Il’nitskim.” Interview by Mikhail Khodarenok, Maksim Solopov. Gazeta.ru, March 10, 2017. www.gazeta.ru/ army/2017/02/22/10540295.shtml. Iushkov, Roman. 2013a. “Gorod prorzhavevshikh zvezdoletov.” Permskii regional’nyi pravozashchitnyi tsentr, August 20, 2013. http://new.prpc.ru/ paper/gorod-prorzhavevshix-zvezdolyotov.html. Iushkov, Roman. 2013b. “Russkie vstrechi.” Zavtra, October 18, 2013. http:// zavtra.ru/blogs/russkie-vstrechi. Jones, Finn-Olaf. 2011. “A Bilbao on Siberia’s Edge?” New York Times, July 24. www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/travel/perm-russias-emerging-cultural-hotspot. html. Kalinin, Il’ia. 2010. “Nostal’gicheskaia modernizatsiia: sovetskoe proshloe kak istoricheskii gorizont.” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 74 (6): 6–16. Karev, Igor. 2013. “Perm’ lishili Gel’mana.” Gazeta.ru, June 6, 2013. www.gazeta. ru/culture/2013/06/19/a_5386125.shtml. Koposov, Nikolai. 2011. Pamiat’ strogogo rezhima. Istoriia i politika v Rossii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

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“’Kul’turnyi’ miting sostoialsia. Chem otvetiat krasnye chelovechki permskim bogam?” 2011. DayPerm.ru, June 30, 2011. www.dayperm.ru/node/14065# one_title. Kukulin, Il’ia. 2010. “Sentimental’naia tekhnologiia: pamiat’ o 1960-x diskussiiakh o modernizatsii 2009–2010 godov.” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 74 (6): 277–301. Leibovich, Oleg, and Natal’ia Shushkova. 2011. “Chuzhie igry . . . : sotsial’nyi analiz permskogo kul’turnogo proekta.” Vestnik Permskogo gosudarstvennogo instituta iskusstva i kul’tury 12: 80–90. Levada, Iurii. 2006. Ishchem cheloveka. Sotsiologicheskie ocherki, 2000–2005. Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo. Liublinskii, Anrei, and Mariia Zaborovskaia. 2012. “TOP 50. Andrei Liublinskii i Mariia Zaborovskaia. Interview by Artem Magalashvili.” Sobaka.ru, June 13, 2012. www.sobaka.ru/prm/oldmagazine/glavnoe/12075. Lysenko, Oleg. 2014. “’Patrioty’ i ‘progressory’: konflikt kak sposob konstruirovaniia lokal’nykh diskursov.” Labirint. Zhurnal sotsial’no-gumanitarnykh issledovanii 1: 91–119. https://elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=24105536. Nechepurenko, Ivan. 2016. “Moscow Crushes an Uprising, This Time an Artistic One.” New York Times, August 25. www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/world/ europe/russia-perm-culture-art.html?_r=0. Oborina, Ekaterina. 2011. “My im ne nuzhny.” Permskii obozrevatel’, October 19, 2011. www.permoboz.ru/txt.php?n=8838. Orlova, Mariia. 2011. “V Permi proshel miting protiv ‘novoi kul’turnoi politiki’ regiona.” Rossiiskaia gazeta, June 30, 2011. https://rg.ru/2011/06/30/reg-perm kray/miting.html. “Permskii proekt. Kontseptsiia kul’turnoi politiki Permskogo kraia.” 2010. Perm. http://kulturaperm.ru/files/Konsept%20polnyi.pdf (accessed on June 11, 2018). Podvintsev, Oleg. 2016. “Politika regional’noi identichnosti v Permskom krae: Novye vneshnie vyzovy.” Labirint: Zhurnal sotsial’no-gumanitarnykh isledovanii 5: 86–91. Prokhanov, Aleksandr. 2011. “Podvig ‘permskikh bogov’.” Zavtra, June 29. Prokhanov, Aleksandr. 2012. Chelovek zvezdy: Roman. Moscow: Veche. Prokhanov, Aleksandr. 2015. “Misticheskii stalinizm.” Zavtra, May 14, 2015. http://zavtra.ru/blogs/misticheskij-stalinizm-. Prokhanov, Aleksandr. 2016. “‘Na Putina napravleny sily t’my’. Aleksandr Prokhanov: prezidenta i Rossiiu spasut bozhii promysel i russkoe chudo.” Interview by Aleksandr Zadorozhnyi. Znak, August 31, 2016. www.znak.com/201608-31/aleksandr_prohanov_prezidenta_i_rossiyu_spasut_bozhiy_promysel_i_ russkoe_chudo. Prokhanov, Aleksandr. 2017a. “Ventsenosnyi Putin. O monarkhicheskom zaiavlenii mitropolita Ilariona.” Zavtra , July 4, 2017. http://zavtra.ru/blogs/ ventcenosnij_putin. Prokhanov, Aleksandr. 2017b. “Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Putin meniaetsia. Polittekhnologi rabotaiut nad nim, no ne okhvatyvaiut vsego’.” Interview for the journal Biznes Online, June 25, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_EMQoIdork. Prokhanov, Aleksandr, and Sergei Kugushev. 2007. Tekhnologii ‘Piatoi imperii’. Moscow: Iauza, Eksmo.

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Putin, Vladimir. 2000. “Ne zhech’ mostov, ne raskalyvat’ obshchestvo.” Rossiiskaia gazeta 233, December 6, 2000. Ryzhova, Polina. 2015. “Proshlye my. Polina Ryzhova o dolgozhdannom kul’turnom revanshe.” Gazeta.ru, February 11, 2015. www.gazeta.ru/comments/column/ ryzhova/6408541.shtml. Shmeleva, Tatíana. 2011. “Nostal’giia kak kul’turoobrazuiushchij smysl sovremennoi rossiiskoi zhizni.” In Nostal’giia po sovetskomu, edited by Z.I. Rezanova, 72–82. Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta. Sokolova, Liubov’. 2011. “Za chto ia nenavizhu Gel’mana.” Argumenty i fakty, July 7. www.perm.aif.ru/culture/details/121037. Sultanov, Kazbek. 2017. “Gibridizatsiia diskursov, ili Sovetizatsiia postsovetskogo. Postsovetskaia identichnost’: gipotezy o ‘gibridnosti’.” Gefter, February 10, 2017. http://gefter.ru/archive/21122. Toporov, Vladimir. 1987. “Tekst goroda-devy i goroda-bludnitsy v mifologicheskom aspekte.” In Issledovaniia po strukture teksta, edited by T.V. Tsiv’ian, 121–32. Moscow: Nauka. Velikaia, Nataliia, and Andrei Khokhlov. 2016. “Kul’turnaia interventsiia v rossiiskuiu provintsiiu: opyt sotsiologicheskogo analiza.” Vestnik Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta kul’tury i iskusstv 1 (69): 16–29.

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Nostalgia Inside Out Re-Addressing Post-Soviet Loss in Andrei Astvatsaturov’s Novels Ksenia Robbe

Astvatsaturov’s Fiction on the Russian Literary Scene While Andrei Astvatsaturov is well known to St. Petersburg and the broader Russian public as an expert in 20th-century British and American literature at the University of St. Petersburg, the publication of his first novel, People in the Nude (Liudi v Golom) in 2009, has marked his rise as an author of a brand of fiction which is both “intellectual” and “popular.” As readers were engrossing themselves in the collection of anecdotal stories, the book was included in the shortlists of the National Bestseller and the longlist of the Russian Booker awards and became the winner of the Saint Petersburg “TOP-50” literary prize. The two following books of the trilogy, Skunskamera1 (2010) and Autumn in My Pockets (Osen’ v karmanakh) (2015), although received less enthusiastically by critics, have secured a firm place for Astvatsaturov as a contemporary Sergei Dovlatov or a Russian Woody Allen, as advertised on his books’ blurbs. All three books are composed as a flow of short stories or episodes which are either the autobiographical protagonist’s reminiscences of his childhood and youth or his observations about current times. There is no central plot line; the stories follow each other through associations: a detail observed in the present triggers a memory from the past. Reflecting on his writing style, in a characteristically ironic manner, the protagonist declares that “life in a book should look like a bunch of grapes harboring silence, accommodating the wildness of ancient music, so that one could pick the grapes one by one and taste them” (2010, 34). This kaleidoscopic structure resisting the linearity of a conventional plot creates a perfect condition for the readers’ imaginative involvement and association with the events both in the present and the past of the stories. The combination of biting irony with lyricism, the anecdotal style, the playful association between the author and narrator figures, and the narrator’s pose as a modern jester whose grimaces put a mirror in front of the publics and challenge conventional perceptions, indeed, relate Astvatsaturov’s writing to that of his renowned predecessors (among other literary

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influences). The socially critical aspects of his texts, in turn, entwine his voice with those of other contemporary younger writers who during the last decade have loosely been referred to as the “generation of the thirtyyear-olds.” Mentioning the names of Zakhar Prilepin, Sergei Shargunov, German Sadulaev, and Mikhail Elizarov in an interview, Astvatsaturov refers to their shared resistance to the attitudes installed by the “pseudoliberal political reformers” of the 1990s “who were talking about personal freedom, but in fact meant only primitive individualistic initiatives of achieving personal material wellbeing” (Astvatsaturov 2012). Despite significant differences in style, he explains, what connects him to these other authors is the belief in the principles of “human solidarity and [. . .] social equality” (ibid.). The style and the choice of themes and characters distinguish Astvatsaturov’s writing from texts by each of the abovementioned authors, but the commonality hinging on disappointment with the post-Soviet politics of neoliberalism should be kept in mind as an ethical dimension of the nostalgic tone that colors the narrative of his novels. This chapter enquires into the uniqueness of Astvatsaturov’s literary voice by focusing on the poetics of nostalgia, considered as both very specific for his writing and at the same time reflecting and co-producing a historical emotion shared by individuals and social groups in contemporary Russia (cf. Boym 2001, xvi). The novels set forth the voice of an intellectual, a Petersburger born and bred, largely modeled on the persona of “Andrei Astvatsaturov” (though we are often alerted to the misleading nature of this association), the grandson of academician Victor Zhirmunskii, one of the founders of Russian literary studies; the son of Alexei Astvatsaturov, professor of German and comparative literature; and a professor of English and American literature himself. The narratives recollecting the protagonist’s childhood and youth during the 1970–1980s and relating it to the disappointing present of the 2000s zoom onto his family, friends, and colleagues—the circles of Saint Petersburg creative intelligentsia (contrasting their views and manners is the army of generically abusive teachers, docile schoolchildren, and blunt-witted students). The situations and characters are, thus, intentionally local and socially specific. It is noteworthy that these features came under the attack of some reviewers who interpreted the novel as a “self-portrait of a social class” and disparaged its attempts at social critique as an instance of mere spitefulness of an individual: “the main nerve and, essentially, plot of the novel is banal envy, which is the reverse side of class hatred. Look how we, the class of the dispossessed Saint Petersburg intellectuals, live.” (Babitskaya 2009) Along similar lines, many reviewers focused on the figure of the eternal “loser”—a skinny bespectacled boy who never meets his parents’ expectations and always comes in for teachers’ blame, and later, a nerdy-looking but charming young man regularly dumped by women, outsmarted or abused by enterprising colleagues, and feeling comfortable only in his

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small, Soviet-style apartment on the city’s outskirts in the company of his memories. Besides its comic typicality, and perhaps exactly due to it, this mask allows the narrator to create “serious” effects. Most important of them is that of drawing readers into a community bound by memories of late-Soviet urban childhood—a process of recognition through which they are moved to reflect on the gaps between “then” and “now,” collectively mourn the loss, and potentially shape a new identity which incorporates some of the old values within a new context (while ridding itself of retrograde ones). Nostalgic references to the late-Soviet past, then, become a discursive and emotional vehicle for resisting the reign of pragmatism, consumption-driven identification, and the processes of social atomization. Key to this work of identity-making is the affective force of nostalgia—the emotion which taints the protagonist’s memories of lateSoviet childhood and which is engaged, as my reading will demonstrate, with the sense of disappearance of free intellectual and creative pursuit. The narrative of disappointment addresses primarily late- and post-Soviet intellectuals who were longing for freedom from the repressive system and welcomed liberal reforms as a fresh alternative. Thus, it is concerned with giving a voice to the nowadays mostly silent or disregarded figure of reflective but skeptical intellectual who knows how to survive in the new world but rejects (at least some of) its rules and resists its injustice. Though this position is marked by a sense of elitism and occasional snobbism, the texts, in the best traditions of Russian literature, also invoke figures of the destitute, especially those impoverished under the current regime, to indicate social solidarity. For instance, Skunskamera ends with the scene of “a little old man of uncertain age with agile alcoholic wrinkles and a greyish bristle on this face” holding a “tissue bag stuffed with something” in one hand and an open beer bottle in the other who interferes into the conversation of the protagonist and his friend (111). He complains about how “that scoundrel” Sobchak (the first mayor of Saint Petersburg) has ruined the block of flats they live in and rushes to add the commonplace phrase used for bashing the 1990s reformers: “what a country [. . .] has been destroyed . . .”. Both characters meet this remark with silence: the protagonist (who, he confesses, “liked Sobchak”) due to his respect for an older man, his friend due to the principle of “never talking to common drunkards” (ibid.). But this silence also keeps them inactive, while the agency rests—emphatically, in the final words of the novel—with the “little old man” who simply “moved on—to look for more talkative companions” (ibid.). Whereas no communication across the social boundary appears meaningful or possible in this scene, the figure of the holy fool (iurodivyi) seems to resonate with the narrator’s pose of the eternal loser, which he develops and enriches with new undertones throughout the novel. Readers attempting to make sense of attitudes towards the lateSoviet past in Astvatsaturov’s writing will find themselves perplexed. Is

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the protagonist a typical nostalgic—a role he performs by employing a Proustian style in the opening pages of Skunskamera? Or does he set out to debunk everything reminding us of the Soviet everyday by, to use the most striking example, portraying the habitual cruelty of teachers and child-minders—a trope everyone who grew up in late-Soviet Russia is familiar with? The moment we begin suspecting him of nostalgia for Soviet childhood as a secure space, he refutes this impression by sharply scrutinizing Soviet educational culture and institutions. Or is he mourning the country’s geopolitical power? But imperial ambitions, both in their Soviet and post-Soviet guises, are repeatedly mocked in the texts’ depictions of the architectural and institutional thought in the “society of developed socialism [which] was a society of the spectacle,2 moronic, for the most part” (Astvatsaturov 2010, 5). We could, finally, approach his nostalgia as what Svetlana Boym theorizes as a “reflective” expression combining intellectual detachment and irony with a longing for a community of like-minded people, often a community of resistance (2001, 49–50, 122–30). This interpretation comes close to describing the style and emotions underlying Astvatsaturov’s texts. But the warm irony in the episodes that relate the protagonist’s nostalgic attachment to the images, smells, and sounds of the past often transmutes into sarcasm, and the protagonist’s traits transform from close and familiar to exaggerated and remote, marking the distance between the author and the character-narrator. An elaborate attack on the “new sincerity,” or at least its highly commercialized varieties in the 2000s cultural production, clearly marks the protagonist’s (and in this case, the author’s) attitude to these texts’ nostalgic mode: “Now everything has changed. A new author has appeared, and with him a new reader and a new type of communication. From heart to heart. From our table to your table, from Zaporozhian cossacks to the Turkish sultan.3 Moscow, at last, has believed in someone’s tears” (Astvatsaturov 2009, 151). This passage creates an ironic twist as it undermines the statement “everything has changed” by stressing actual continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet expressions of sincerity, despite the latter’s marketing of itself as “new.” The continuity is invoked through the sequence of banal phrases from Soviet-time popular jokes and films, the 1979 Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears quoted as a perfect example of Soviet sincerity “retro-fitted” (Oushakine 2007) into the present. I will return to this type of (pseudo-)nostalgia and the ways in which Astvatsaturov’s texts expose its “insincerity.” For now, it is important to consider the equivocal and elusive character of nostalgia revealed in the above examples. Through association and dissociation with various ideas and experiences of nostalgia, the texts create an ambiguous space of play in which the protagonist performs the role of a trickster, inviting the readers into a familiar world of Soviet childhood and then deceiving their

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expectations of any simple escape by showing the ugly and mutated sides of that world, past and present. In what follows, I will explore Astvatsaturov’s literary voice by regarding it against the background of post-Soviet politics and aesthetics of nostalgia and “tricksterism.” I will, first, consider how his fiction engages with contemporary discourses of “new sincerity” which, as we saw, it both imitates and mocks. Second, I will examine its versions of the “trickster trope” which Mark Lipovetsky (2011, 20–2) considers a leading metasemiotic device in Russian literature from the 1920s up to the present, one that both constructs and deconstructs the language of (post-)Soviet officialdom. My subsequent analysis will reflect on how Astvatsaturov’s texts develop counterpoints4 to “new sincerity” and its appropriations in state-supported rhetoric of nostalgia5—I call these counterpoints “nostalgia inside-out”—by focusing on three topoi of his fiction: childhood, the city, and the practice of writing.

Inside-Out Nostalgia as a Counterpoint I am borrowing the idiom of “inside out” (naiznanku) from Alexei Yurchak’s seminal study of late-Soviet culture, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, one of the chapters of which includes this expression in its title (“Ideology Inside Out: Ethics and Poetics”). The chapter elaborates the idea of the performative shift—the concept central to the book’s scrutiny of the famous paradox: “although the system’s collapse had been unimaginable before it began, it appeared unsurprising when it happened” (2005, 1). In the context of late-Soviet culture, we can observe a gradual “hypernormalization” of the language that was intended to create a new society and new relations between people and between people and objects. Having started in the late 1950s, according to Yurchak, this process culminated in the 1980s, when the official language turned into a routinely reproduced form emptied of its original meanings (ibid., 74–6). In this interpretation, he draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of “authoritative discourse” (a practice of postulating “truths” that cannot be questioned) and of dialogic speech that engages and cites the latter but simultaneously displaces its totalizing power by putting it into conversation with other discourses (ibid., 14–16). The performative shift, based on employments of dialogic speech, occurred increasingly when the ossified language of Soviet officialdom was being replicated at the level of form while its constative dimension became “unanchored” (ibid., 79). Reproducing official texts, images, and rituals guaranteed one’s social inclusion and access to privilege; but also, this reproduction of empty forms opened the possibility of filling them with alternative meanings. This created the peculiar state described by Bakhtin as vnenakhodimost‘ (“outside-ness”)—of being simultaneously in- and outside the authoritative discourse—which was shared by Soviet intellectuals including Bakhtin himself and which during the last Soviet decades turned into a

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common strategy of social survival, eventually resulting in “deterritorialization of Soviet life from within” (ibid., 134). What happened to the last Soviet generation and the poetics of “unanchoring” the official language they perfected after the early 1990s regime change? Having crystallized in the Sots Art and related genres during the 1980s, this creative technique became a leading characteristic of postmodern literature and art in the first post-Soviet decade. It is also portrayed as a mode of survival and transformation (or rather, transmutation) in the new capitalist economy of the 1990s, perhaps most prominently in Viktor Pelevin’s representations of the “society of shape-shifters” (Lipovetsky 2011, 233–8). In parallel to this, we can observe the unfolding of another mode—that of “sincere” expression—presenting itself as an alternative to postmodern nihilism. This proclamation of difference, however, is deeply performative and deconstructive. In her cultural-historical examination of “new sincerity,” Ellen Rutten traces the elaborations and permutations of this term from the Perestroika period up to the present: having existed as a “vector within the postmodern experience” of the 1980 and 1990s (2017, 18), the sincere mode re-surfaces as a dominant aesthetic and selfmarketing strategy during the 2000s.6 Yurchak observed these process of foregrounding sincerity in his examination of the early 2000s visual art that engaged with Soviet topics and aesthetics but that, unlike Sots Art, was interested in rehabilitating some aspects of Soviet idealism and re-actualizing the ethical dimensions of the socialist project. It is noteworthy that he opens his discussion by distancing the artistic processes and productions he explores from “the much discussed ‘postcommunist nostalgia,’” since “some features of these phenomena make nostalgia, as a concept, quite inadequate to describe it” (2008, 257). In the concluding passage, however, he qualifies this categorical statement by relating the artists’ explorations of Soviet modernity to what Slavoj Žižek had called a longing for “what that [Communist] past might have been” (qtd. in Yurchak 2008 276). This description of yearning for elements and experiences of past (utopian) imaginations and (future-oriented) temporalities of conceiving the self in the world comes close to Boym’s “reflective” nostalgia. Such broadening of nostalgia as a concept is important, specifically with regard to post-2014 Russia where “restorative” forms of nostalgia have been institutionalized as part of the official ideology. Longing for aspects of the Soviet past in current historical context differs from nostalgic practices of the earlier post-Soviet decades—the 1990s that placed many in the situation of being alienated from the country they expected the Soviet Union/Russia to become, and the 2000s, which were a period of turning back to the late-Soviet period in search of possible alternatives to be integrated into the present. During those times, “reflective” nostalgia could still rely on an aura of sincerity and act as a positive counterpoint to simple rejection, glorification, or commodification of the

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past. It could still, it seems, exist side-by-side with official discourses. But as the latter began to solidify and turn nostalgia into a tool for building an unambiguously nationalist narrative, these spaces were gradually shrinking. Thus, Dmitry Medvedev’s discourse of modernization during his presidential term directly addressed the popular longing for moral clarity by re-actualizing the symbols and tropes of the late-Soviet period along with activating “the romantic-conservative topos of blood,” which made this strategy essentially nostalgic (Kalinin 2011, 163). As Putin’s regime embarked on a more aggressive politics of restoration, the official discourse adopted more crude modes of sincerity, now prescribing public demonstration of belief in the righteousness of the state’s policies. (Gabowitsch 2017, 70–2) In this context, when possibilities for (re)creating spaces of intimacy and mutual understanding through nostalgia are being co-opted by official discourses, which idioms are left for resisting the combination of imperialist ideology and aggressive consumerism? In an interview during which Astvatsaturov, together with philosopher Alexander Pogrebniak (a prototype of the character appearing in the three novels as the protagonist’s closest friend and fellow thinker), was invited to reflect on “the return of the 90s” and “the nature of nostalgia for the USSR,” both asserted the importance of rehabilitating the figure of the “loser” that surfaced in the culture of the “chaotic 90s” and was subsequently de-legitimized within the “success culture” of the 2000s (Astvatsaturov and Pogrebniak 2010). This return of the loser, Pogrebniak observes, can function as an “exotic” in commodity culture; but it may also have a potential for resistance: If we recall Žižek, in the world where liberalism has won, the left intellectual has to take up the role of a jester—a seemingly harmless creature who can, however, snap you unexpectedly; that’s what saves the remaining spirit of radicalism. (ibid.) Astvatsaturov extends this metaphor, saying that “the contemporary intellectual is a jester in the direct sense of the word” and providing the example of Viktor Pelevin—an “intellectual-circus actor” who “plays with surface cultural forms” (ibid.). In another interview, he traces the jester trope, which he extensively employs in his own writing, back to the 1980s and the strategies of “being an outsider” (autsaiderstvo) espoused by his generation (Astvatsaturov 2012). Reading such performativity of non-participation with Yurchak, it is an act of turning ideology inside out and inhabiting this space of “inside/outside-ness.” The power of this figure extends across the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, as demonstrated by Mark Lipovetsky’s cultural-historical study of the “trickster trope.” The popularity of the trickster and his “cynical

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reason” in literature, film, and other types of cultural production, the critic argues, can be explained by the fact that readers and viewers could deeply relate to the ambiguity and flexibility that the trickster perfects. The cultural importance of trickster characters has been in that “they simultaneously undermine and embody the Soviet symbolic order” (2011, 42) using strategies of “artistic hyperidentification [. . .] and grotesque parody” (ibid., 34). Stressing the creative possibilities within the position of “inside/outside-ness,” Lipovetsky maintains that “[t]he Soviet trickster offers a cynical freedom from any affiliation, obligation or idolization” (ibid., 37). Furthermore, following Peter Sloterdijk, he differentiates between cynicism and kynicism,7 considering the latter the only antidote for the hegemony of cynical reason. Applying this distinction to tricksterism, he suggests that “if a cynic freely switches social roles and holds no beliefs [. . .] a kynical trickster represents survival in a cynical, contradictory and inadequate world not as a necessity, but as an opportunity for creativity, play and freedom” (ibid., 53). Within this argument, Lipovetsky defines official Soviet culture as based on a cynical type of tricksterism, the tactics of which have been inherited and actively elaborated by Putin’s regime. A change, however, can be observed in the temporality of the language that organizes the supporting ideology—from the future-oriented idiom of socialism to the pastorientation of neo-imperialism. Given the current uses of nostalgia in the “authoritative” discourse of officialdom, it comes as no surprise that a kynical counterpoint to it draws on nostalgia, too, but nostalgia of a different kind. In contrast to the literary tricksters of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Vavilen Tatarskii in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation P, who were striving for commercial success, the character turning dominant discourses of nostalgia inside out in Astvatsaturov’s writing performs “loserdom” as an academic, a writer, and a person.8 In his reading of Timur Kibirov’s poetry from the 2000s, Kevin Platt points out a similar tactic of inverting “official” practices of nostalgia for the Soviet by “hilariously shifting markers to carve out a zone of earnest, heartfelt meaning, yet accomplishing this without dismissing or degrading the ironically targeted original” (2009, 17). Astvatsaturov’s novels, published just a few years after Kibirov’s 2006 volume Kara-baras!, can be regarded as advancing similar approaches in prose and elaborating the enunciative position of an ironic and critical “nostalgic” into a plot of post-Soviet “loserdom.” The following readings explore the metaphors, topoi, and discourses that these performances engage and the meanings of loss elaborated through the nostalgic counterpoints.

Writing Soviet Childhood: The Metaphor of “People in the Nude” A major theme of the first two novels, as mentioned earlier, is the protagonist’s memory of his childhood. These recollections of typical scenes from

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the late-Soviet kindergartens and schools as well as family New Year’s celebrations, summer holidays at the dacha, or visits to the nearest supermarket evoke the endearing and enchanting “common places”9 that many readers can relate to, often with a sense of nostalgia. Such nostalgic effect is shaped, to an extent, by the fact that this period is remembered not only through recollections of one’s own experience but also via the images from books and especially films about children’s everyday life produced during that time; any contemporary literary representation of that period naturally relates to that repertoire, and so do Astvatsaturov’s novels. The nostalgia generated by his texts is bittersweet: while exposing the repressive character of Soviet institutions and family structures, in a style popularized by Pavel Sanaev,10 these reminiscences only occasionally employ a sarcastic tone; most often they render everyday coercion as a shared background which the characters resist in various ways. It is precisely these creative processes of resisting that seem to evoke the narrator’s nostalgia. Another important textual element that generates the nostalgic affect is the switching between memories of childhood and the narrative present. Juxtaposed with the disappointing present, the adventurous experiences and bright impressions of childhood appear as a clearer or more comforting reality. Such dialogic structuring of the narratives, which often move via associations between the time periods, is also important in that it does not allow past events to be regarded as being cut off from the present; instead, performances of memory grounded in the present and reflecting on links between different “times” are central to the three texts. One such connecting theme for staging dialogues between past and present is embedded in the title metaphor of the first novel: “people in the nude.” An explanation of this strange phrase appears in one of the first chapters, in which the protagonist reflects on the condition of loneliness experienced by a child being exposed to the repressive mechanisms of the school, family, and society at large: Loneliness is when you have nothing. No things. Your own things. You have a school uniform, a school bag, a pencil case with pencils, a notebook, and textbooks. The textbooks are not yours, they are from the library. You are strictly forbidden to draw in them. You are absolutely naked. [. . .] A lonely person is absolutely defenseless. Especially when it’s a small person. [. . .] Small in the sense that he is only seven, he is a child. For a small person, to be naked on display is a disgrace. It is ugly and shameful. For an adult, even if you are threefold Akakii Akakievich,11 it’s an artistic act, a performance. Pride and beauty. (2009, 32) He goes on to explain where the phrase matching the awkwardness of one’s being on display comes from. One of his mother’s students, a

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Vietnamese studying Russian in Leningrad during the 1970s, used this phrase in writing a scene for a film script which depicted a “woman in the nude” being violated by American soldiers. The day before he was taught the phrases “a woman in blue” or “a woman in white” to describe reproductions of classical paintings (2009, 33). The episode associates, in a somewhat controversial way, the ingenuousness of a Third World student with the naivety of a child. But, if we follow the unfolding of the metaphor throughout the text, its meanings and effects appear to be more empowering than denigrating. It is through the child’s “naïve” vision (or a student’s exploration of a foreign language for narrating his trauma) that we gain a perspective on the world of adults who, as later sketches reveal, use unashamedly childish ways to assert power: Kindergarten simplifies, schematizes human relations, while our later life fills these simplifying schemes with new, adult content. [. . .] In a kindergarten, a child shows another child his genitals, and the other does the same in return. Time goes by. Children grow up. Become adults. Graduate from schools, colleges, universities. Start working. Get married. But their behavior does not change at all. (2009, 61) When at an academic conference, as the next anecdote goes, an old professor sleeping through the whole paper suddenly raises from his seat to ask a random question, the protagonist sees a little child who once struggled to sleep on a huge metal bed in a post-war kindergarten. Thus, “nakedness” in the text’s conceptual frame is opposed to selfexposure; it denotes vulnerability and, at times, a naïve vision, which, however, does not equal “sincerity.” Rather than an attitude or an active gesture, nakedness is presented as a condition—of having nothing, and hence having nothing to lose. This condition, then, creates a fertile ground for inventing, experimenting, and shifting old meanings and creating new—all those practices that constitute mechanisms of resistance used by tricksters. Along with children, in several stories students are described as, sometimes unwittingly, performing this role. They, too, appear as naked and dependent: During my university years, I started noticing that university students are in fact much more disciplined than their teachers. Indeed, a naked person, who is equal only to oneself and has nothing to rely on, is bound to make bold, unexpected, and responsible decisions. Whereas a professor, enchained by ideals and carelessly relying on his bookish wisdom, on the contrary, is slack and casual. (2009, 64)

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One of the most colorful illustrations to this statement appears in the following chapter relating the story of the protagonist’s fellow student who was “sent to the frontier line of pedagogical service” (ibid., 71) to work as a youth leader in a pioneer camp. As part of an education campaign, she was asked to make a propaganda poster about the harms of smoking. Her creative response almost led to her expulsion from university: during an assembly, the amazed audiences saw an “installation” with a skeleton, wearing a pioneer tie, with a cigarette sticking from its mouth (ibid., 72). An excellent example of the performative shift theorized by Yurchak, this anecdote re-creates the spirit of playful subversiveness and hints at the impossibility of such responses today given the monopoly of commodification in contemporary societies. The chapter introduces this reminiscence of late-Soviet student joviality by arguing that students should be invited as entertainers to any newly opened hotel to enliven its atmosphere with “the boldness and artistism which only a genuinely lonely person with naked heart is capable of” (ibid., 71). The longing evoked through the metaphor of nakedness here is reinforced by the gothic image of a skeleton intruding the sphere of “golden childhood,” which the director of the pioneer camp is trying to preserve. Together with the juxtapositions of the “then” of student subversive pranks and the “now” of standard entertainment packages at “a hotel somewhere at the Red Sea” (ibid., 71), this metaphor validates the spaces that appeared in late-Soviet culture and opened possibilities for displacing routinized meanings.

Writing the City: Rehabilitation of the Neglected Another topos in Astvatsaturov’s writing that generates nostalgia is formed by descriptions of city spaces and references to its famous and lesser-known landmarks. In the tradition of 19th- and 20th-century literature that has created “the Petersburg text” (Toporov 2003), in these novels the city becomes a character in its own right. An expert in Henry Miller who has written on the representations of the city in Tropic of Capricorn as tropes of “civilization” (Astvatsaturov 2007, 145–65), Astvatsaturov opens a dialogue with the American writer’s famous engagements with city spaces as shaping the inhabitants’ perceptions, views, and disposition. This link is performed explicitly in Autumn in My Pockets, where the protagonist reflects on Saint Petersburg and its canonized images via comparisons to Paris as well as through geographically peripheral spaces of the city (his dacha in Komarovo) or his alternative visions of tourist attractions (the University Embankment). This method is at work already in Skunskamera, where the protagonist’s reflections on the city from the viewpoint of his apartment on the outskirts frame the entire narrative: the peripheral district as a “character” appears in

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the opening and closing chapters. In ways similar to his employment of the “nakedness” metaphor for foregrounding the ingenuity of the vulnerable, the texts address the grandiloquent images of Saint Petersburg and nostalgia for its imperial past only to displace them through “inverted” nostalgia for the city’s less attractive places. One such commonplace image popularized in Soviet education and still evoked in patriotic discourses is the city as a “window to Europe” famously “cut” by Peter the Great during the Great Nordic War with Sweden. Recalling his irritation at being fed with this banality throughout his childhood, the protagonist subjects it to scathing irony: “The world around me had no connection to either Peter or the Swedes or, especially, to Europe. I even think sometimes that the confusion from those times still occupies some immature minds” (2010, 12). The counterpoint to this image is created by the ugly building which was used during the Soviet times as a dormitory for international (mostly African) students and which the protagonist had been observing from his window for the past four decades. African students whom he as a child found both scary and fascinating (being a product of Soviet everyday racism which existed alongside internationalist imaginations), he admits, were much more attractive than the “stupid white people, future IT-specialists, boring and tired” (ibid.) now occupying the building. Metaphors of “civilization” and its alternatives, (re)created through city spaces, continue shaping the narrative of Autumn in My Pockets. Autumn functions here as a symbolic time and space (2015, 57–9) of the city and, synecdochally, of the protagonist who finds himself in a state of depression, having lost the woman he loved (first being left by her and then learning about her death). The chronotope is extended to naturalize the state of longing as a common condition of the city’s inhabitants (ibid., 59). The body of the city, just like the Parisian body in Miller’s novels, is emblematic of the people’s disposition. But, contrary to common comparisons of Petersburg with Paris or other European cities, Astvatsaturov’s narrator sees stark oppositions: “During autumn everything in Petersburg hides away: people—into warm clothing, monuments—into cardboard boxes, zoo animals—into indoor cages. And throughout the winter they stay there quietly and don’t stick out. There is something sickly, neurotic about this” (ibid., 210). On the contrary, Paris, it seems, does not suffer from any neurosis at all. It is incurably, hopelessly healthy. Even the monuments, those stone idols, look physically healthier and far more secure than in our city. If anything in Paris ever sticks out, it will never hide away. (ibid., 211) Thus, whereas Paris has turned into the epitome of repressive civilization denounced by Miller through references to Manhattan (cf. Astvatsaturov

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2007, 152–3), Petersburg now occupies the place of the early 20th-century Paris. Posing as shy and introverted, but also unruly and unpredictable, it appears here as “under-civilized” and provincial in relation to both Paris and Moscow (Astvatsaturov 2015, 210). Its nostalgic, autumn-colored image, then, functions as a counterpoint to narratives of progress that use either Western or nativist symbolic. The protagonist’s reading of the view from his window provides another example of the inside-out nostalgia. The ironic description of Ploshchad’ Muzhestva (The Square of Courage) that forms a ring around which “trams, trolleybuses, buses, cars, and trucks that had harmoniously thundered in Tristan-like accords” subverts its Soviet imperial design through a comparison with The Ring of the Nibelung by “the Bayreuth genius” which still produces “smells of sauerkraut and Bavarian beer” (2010, 5). Away from this front-line spectacle, in the backyards, a “Golden Ring”12 of beer stands would be regularly visited by local drunkards. Now, [t]he golden rings that lost their power over people have been swiped away by the furious tide of the 1990s. And the beer nibelungs, orks, and goblins have been wedged by the authorities into the stuffy cells of bars and clubs. (ibid., 6) Pointing at the common roots of the two “rings,” in the front- and backyards of the Soviet world, the protagonist distances himself from both. He yearns for “that former world which seemed to be eternal” and which “is now dozing, buried deep under advertisement posters”; at the same time, he mocks the old-fashioned longing driven by the myths of territorial ownership by refusing to “keep watch on an old fantasy at a Finnish boulder”—a phrase that invokes the image of Tsar Peter building an empire on the Finnish lands (2010, 9). Rather than pursuing such phantoms, he seeks refuge in the autonomy of his writing: “I’ll stay in my room, on the ninth floor, and sit at my desk and work to the point of exhaustion, seeing my reflection in the old wardrobe mirror” (ibid.).

In Defense of Imagination Using his imagination as a writer and scholar of literature, the protagonist finds himself able to resist the all-encompassing pressure of commercialization at universities, in the publishing industry, and in public life. The peculiar form it takes in post-Soviet Russia, when Westernized products marketed for the tiny elite are being infused with homegrown nostalgia, becomes the object of his attack in the second half of People in the Nude, which opens with sharply ironic debunking of the “new sincerity” trope in the “new Russian” culture of the 2000s. In a stiob-like fashion,13 the protagonist remarks: “Sincerity, especially when it’s new, is when a skilled

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designer supplies a luxurious apartment with a high-tech toilet disguised as a countryside latrine” (2009, 158). In a similar manner, he mocks the conformist tactics of scholars replicating models that are fashionable in their field: in response to the proliferation of Foucauldian histories, he suggests creating a classification of public toilets from “patriotic” to “radical left” depending on their design and the “signatures” left on their walls (2009, 35–6). By employing carnivalization techniques and abject metaphors in approaching matters of “high” culture (drawing on Miller and Bakhtin), the narrator challenges the sacred aura of Soviet academic spaces. His relationship to the institutional culture is markedly ambiguous: working at the faculty that cultivates the memory of his grandfather, the protagonist (and the author) is shifting between and reconciling the speaking positions of continuity and subversiveness. Some episodes, particularly those taking place at Komarovo, invoke nostalgia for the world and times of his grandfather (2015, 17–50): the respectful attitude to intellectual work, the experience of a community sharing a sense of humor (and hence a set of attitudes) that was passed on to the children. But other episodes convey the protagonist’s annoyance with Soviet rituals and rhetoric and a vision of their absurdity from a child’s perspective (2010, 51–3). Against the backdrop of these formulaic discourses, the protagonist’s memory highlights spaces of improvisation and play; indeed, everything associated with imagination and the creative possibilities opened by it—a classical feature of tricksterism—becomes privileged in Astvatsaturov’s textual universe. Along with children and students, those adults who preserve some kind of childishness as a protective mechanism against the “serious” laws of a neoliberal society are described as intriguing figures. The most elaborate story relating this confrontation is told in the last part of People in the Nude, where the protagonist is brought by his colleague Irena to the home of Archi, an eccentric host of an exuberant community in 1990s Saint Petersburg. Archi, it occurs, is the same person with whom the protagonist often played as a child, following the principle of “dynasty friendship” (2009, 226): their grandfathers, both Soviet academicians, were close friends, and the fathers kept up the tradition. Archi’s aunts, who never worked in contempt to the Soviet officialdom (and lived off their father’s inheritance), hosted a cultural salon in their old Petersburg apartment. Archi continued this tradition, though during the uncertain 1990s he had to rely on the sponsorship of foreign students keen to stay in his flat or the obnoxious “new Russians” looking for a “cultured” hangout. The re-acquaintance with Archi and the evening spent with him, in the protagonist’s words, “opened the flood gates of [his] imagination” (ibid., 232). We cannot be sure whether the following story of the narrator’s confrontation with the Petersburg mafia and his miraculous victory is “true,” but we can be certain that he enjoys the performance of plotting and writing. As a protagonist of his own story, he observes the effect of being drawn into Archi’s fictional(izing) world:

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It suddenly felt easy and calm. I felt like talking a lot, walking around the room and swinging my arms, telling outrageous lies. [. . .] I sensed a flow of some strange energy, totally neutral, insensitive to joy or suffering, yearning for new combinations of words, paradoxes of life, adventures, and tactical games. (2009, 239) This energy finds its outlet in him composing the story that becomes an alternative to the “new sincerity” fiction. The fragmented narrative, interrupted by memories and digressions, here and in the next novels, is counterposed to the linear biographical writing and heroic plots favored by publishers. As the narrator remarks in a metafictional passage, “[s] incerity is good, but you know (dear Irena), it lacks imagination—exactly what Archi is a dab hand at” (2009, 236). Indeed, the story of Archi appears as an ironic inversion of “new sincere” fiction: it foregrounds “literariness” in depictions of everyday life instead of making literature part of everyday consumption. In a similar way, it turns the nostalgia for authenticity in “sincere” writing inside out by treating any search for “realness” as a performative act.

Conclusion These representations celebrating imagination—of individuals and closeknit communities of intellectuals—may resonate with the long tradition of Russian intelligentsia’s shaping its identity by opposing the “unenlightened” authoritarian state and stressing its own “creativity” (inextricably linked to humanism). The most recent versions of this discourse have been scrutinized by Il’ia Kalinin: in his analysis of the 2011–2012 protests, he traces how some leading intellectuals who became “faces” of civic resistance framed the protests in terms of “stylistic” or “cultural” differences between themselves and the state power. This tactic turned out to be fatal for the opposition, as it provided the state ideologues with the idiom of “two Russias,” which it then appropriated to prove the protesters’ alienation from “the people.” Thus, creative intellectuals’ attempt to forge an autonomous zone of outsideness/“being vnye” (2018, 52) only revealed their complicity with the state (ibid., 55–6), which skillfully uses postmodern techniques of appropriation and inversion. How do Astvatsaturov’s novels and their nostalgic discourses relate to these paradoxes of post-Soviet power contestation? At first glance, the protagonist’s ironic distance, his elitist stance, and his resort to memory and other imaginative practices as a way of escaping the depressing present place the novels within the repertoire of responses by the “creative class” to the state’s aggressive cultural policies of creating a “united Russia.”14 But even if sharing his background and attitudes to the state with liberal intellectuals, Astvatsaturov’s “loser” differs generically from the

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image of “the successful and well-fed,” Leonid Parfenov’s phrase (Kalinin 2018, 56) that became a popular (self-)description of the protesters. The failure to take note of the narrator’s consistent critique of neoliberalism and of the co-optation of both academics and writers by the new politicaleconomic structures would be to misread the novel’s leading message, which constitutes perhaps its major contribution to current discussions about the position and agency of intellectuals vis-à-vis the state and the market. Even though fashioning the main character as a “loser” can itself be considered a marketing strategy (the author creating a new “niche”), the critique that this position enables points at the economic dispossession suffered by many during the early post-Soviet years and still defining the present of those who did not adapt to the new economy. The link between the “ordinary people” and the protagonist is probed in many episodes; disregarding this aspect by reading them as “intellectual” or “university novels” only, as it happened, misses an important (proto-) theme. Moreover, recuperating the figure of the “loser” allows for an (implicit) critique of moral dispossession (Hann 2011), which resulted from the disappearance of any guiding ethical values in post-Soviet society—a vacuum which is only filled by recycled cultural forms imbued with nationalist sentiment. Unlike representatives of the “creative class” who confronted Putin’s regime with accusations of “indecency,” Astvatsaturov’s protagonist prefers to occupy a position of “outsideness” by escaping from the obscene power of institutions into his own world of writing. However, it seems, no genuine community sharing this condition of “being vnye” exists in the present, and such a stance can be practiced only in a nostalgic mode as an attempt to recollect—and call into being through writing and reading—a community and communality, the last remnants of which are traced in Archi’s salon. An important aspect of this nostalgia for a lost sociality, in Astvatsaturov’s writing, is its inversion of present-day “official” rhetoric that appropriates and “channels nostalgic energy” (Kalinin 2011, 163) into shaping an openly nationalist discourse. After all, postsocialist experience involves “not only the longing for security, stability, and prosperity. There is also the feeling of loss for a very specific form of sociability, and of vulgarization of the cultural life” (Todorova 2010, 7). The “loser” in these novels appears as a figure addressed by the state rhetoric of recovering “ordinary people’s” dignity15 and the one subverting this address by refusing to be regarded as a victim in need of being dignified. This intriguing counterpoint reveals similarities with the multilayered rhetoric of sincerity in contemporary Russian culture: along with the commodifying uses of “directness” and “openness” for the sake of selling Russian literature and art to domestic and especially foreign audiences, there is “the trend to present the new sincerity as not a commercial but an anti-capitalist paradigm” (Rutten 2017, 149–50, original emphasis). Together with the practices of emerging designers, poets,

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artists, and bloggers discussed by Rutten in the final chapter of her book, Astvatsaturov’s novels can be regarded as performative manifestations of this paradigm. Differently from the orientation of the works by younger professionals towards the present day, these novels center on the problematic of the past and represent a strategy of coping with the trauma of the failed Soviet project (but with a critical take on the “new sincerity” employed in practices of “reparative” writing by, for instance, Vladimir Sorokin during the 2000s (ibid., 152–5)). The tactics of undermining nationalist and imperialist sentiments masking as anti-capitalist rhetoric within state-supported Soviet nostalgia in these novels merit attention, as they present an example of using nostalgia to draw parallels between alternative discourses and positionalities during the late-Soviet period and now. Thus, the protagonist turns out to be another contemporary impersonation of the “trickster trope”—a writer with “snap-on wings” that can always be folded and packed away for their owner to appear “normal” (2010, 19). But such performativity of “being here and there” points not only at continuities between practices of “outsideness” in late- and post-Soviet society. More importantly, as a technique of addressing post-Soviet experiences of loss, it constitutes an artistic re-interpretation of these practices. Through mimicking the nostalgic motifs in official discourses, Astvatsaturov’s texts re-route the existing nostalgia towards a more critical evaluation of links between past and present.

Notes 1. The title is a pun involving the words “Kunstkamera,” the Dutch name given by Peter the Great to the museum of curiosities (now the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography) that became one of the symbols of St. Petersburg, and “skuns” (skunk). In an episode of the novel reflecting on the gaps between “intellectuals” and “common people,” the protagonist is being asked by an uneducated visitor to Petersburg how to find a “skunskamera” (“skunk” standing for the ugliness of the curious bodily objects displayed in the museum)—a metaphor for the banalization of cultural heritage and the normality of ignorance in contemporary communicative culture. 2. This allusion to Guy Debord’s notion of “the society of the spectacle” debunks the romanticized interpretations of Soviet/socialist societies as having operated outside of the consumerist logic. 3. “Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Reply to the Turkish Sultan” is a famous painting by Il’ia Repin referring to a 17th-century legendary letter defying an ultimatum of the Ottoman empire. The image became a common currency in Soviet popular culture, conveying a mocking and resistant response to an (imperial) power (cf. Ostap Bender’s suggestion to spread the image of a painting “The Bolsheviks Writing a Letter to Lord Chamberlain” in Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs). 4. I use this musical term to describe the relationship between two “voices” in a text that are thematically interdependent but differ in the content and tone of their expression. My employment of this metaphor here is different from Edward Said’s use of “counterpoint” in his “contrapuntal reading” of

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11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

Ksenia Robbe colonial-era literature for the hidden voices and experiences of the colonized (in Culture and Imperialism). The interplay between the two voices in Astvatsaturov’s writing does involve a representation and contestation of power relations; in this sense, the term denotes his technique of “contrapuntal writing” that questions a hegemonic discourse. Such appropriations are insightfully discussed by Ellen Rutten in her analysis of artworks by Alexei Beliaev-Gintovt (2017, 110–15). A peculiar development within post-Soviet mediations between sincerity and postmodernist performance that deploys the tactics of late-Soviet ironic subversion is what Boris Noordenbos (2016, 109–44) has termed “imperial stiob.” Invoking key texts and figures of the late-Soviet practice of stiob (for a definition of the term see Note 11), writers such as Eduard Limonov and Pavel Krusanov invest them with clearly chauvinist undertones. Sloterdijk’s theorization of kynicism as a mark of post-Enlightenment culture draws on the Ancient Greek kynismos, which described the tactics of undermining the authority of idealist (Platonic) philosophy and related social norms. He refers to Diogenes as a prime example of this resistance to the official discourse “from below” that uses physical, bodily expressions (1987, 101–7). This genuine “cheekiness”, while surviving in later cultural formations, has in many instances been co-opted by cynicism, which is a tactic used by the powerful to demonstrate their “enlightened” realization of the untenability of an idealism that they proclaim as a foundation of their power: “The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adversary, and suppresses him” (ibid., 111). In this regard, a sharp distinction can be drawn between this position and the strategies employed by the icons of Russian postmodernism such as Vladimir Sorokin and Oleg Kulik, as outlined and critically explored by Ellen Rutten (2017, 136–9, 148–9). The notion of “common places” has been employed by Svetlana Boym (1994) in her reflection on myth-like cultural concepts that guide people’s imagination and structure their sense of community in (post-)Soviet contexts. Laurent Thévenot (2014) uses this concept in identifying the specific grammar of social engagement that foregrounds personal affinity. For elaboration of this concept in the context of contemporary social movements in Russia, see Gabowitsch (2017); for its employment in conceptualizing young writers’ attempts at creating a new “language” in the context of post-Soviet trauma, see Robbe (2016). Sanaev is the author of Pokhoronite menia za plintusom (Bury Me Behind the Baseboard, 1995), a novel that conveyed a debunking narrative of parenting and educational practices of the late-Soviet period through the eyes of a nine-year-old autobiographical protagonist. The protagonist of Gogol’s “Shinel’” and prototypical “little man” of Russian literature. Referring to the “Golden Ring” of old towns around Moscow, a major tourist attraction. Stiob is a form of irony practiced, most commonly, in late-socialist cultures. Distinguishing it from sarcasm, cynicism, or other genres of absurd humour, Yurchak defines it as a figure of “overidentification with the object, person or idea at which this stiob was directed” to the extent that “it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two” (2005, 250; original italics). A concept directly alluding to the ruling political party “United Russia.” The performances of hegemonic masculinity in this rhetoric drawing on 1970–1980s nostalgia for late Stalinism are analyzed by Il’ia Kukulin in Chapter 4 of this volume.

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Works Cited Astvatsaturov, Andrei. 2007. Fenomenologiia teksta: Igra i repressiia [Phenomenology of Text: Play and Repression]. Moscow: NLO. Astvatsaturov, Andrei. 2009. Liudi v golom [People in the Nude]. Moscow: Ad Marginem. Astvatsaturov, Andrei. 2010. Skunskamera. Moscow: Ad Marginem. Kindle edition. Astvatsaturov, Andrei. 2012. “I am a Writer and am Not Obliged to Preach.” [Ya pisatel’ i ne obiazan propovedovat’.]. Interview by Sofja Kozich and Nadezhda Stoeva. Petersburg Theatre Magazine vol. 3, no. 69, June 2012. http://ptj.spb.ru/ archive/69/theatre-and-reality-69/yapisatel-ineobyazan-nichego-propovedovat/. Astvatsaturov, Andrei. 2015. Osen‘ v karmanakh [Autumn in My Pockets]. Moscow: AST. Astvatsaturov, Andrei, and Alexander Pogrebniak. 2010. “Strategii: Pogrebniak and Astvatsaturov.” Interview by Nina Astashkina and Artem Langenburg. BeIn, June 6, 2010. www.be-in.ru/people/9104-pogrebnyak_and_astvatsaturov/. Babitskaya, Varvara. 2009. “Andrei Astvatsaturov. ‘Liudi v golom’: A Novel.” OpenSpace.ru, June 13, 2009. http://os.colta.ru/literature/events/details/1126 0/?expand=yes#expand. Boym, Svetlana. 1994. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic. Gabowitsch, Mischa. 2017. Protest in Putin’s Russia. Cambridge: Polity. Hann, Chris. 2011. “Moral Dispossession.” InterDisciplines 2: 11–37. Kalinin, Il’ia. 2011. “Nostalgic Modernisation: The Soviet Past as a ‘Historical Horizon’.” Slavonica 17 (2): 156–66. Kalinin, Il’ia. 2018. “Why ‘Two Russias’ Are Less than ‘United Russia’: Cultural Distinctions and Political Similarities: Dialectics of Defeat.” In Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia, edited by Birgit Beumers, Alexander Etkind, Olga Gurova and Sanna Turoma, 48–67. London and New York: Routledge. Lipovetsky, Mark. 2011. Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Noordenbos, Boris. 2016. Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Oushakine, Serguei. 2007. “We’re Nostalgic, But We’re Not Crazy: Retrofitting the Past in Russia.” The Russian Review 66 (3): 451–82. Platt, Kevin. 2009. “The Post-Soviet Is Over: On Reading the Ruins.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics and the Arts 1 (1): 1–26. Robbe, Ksenia. 2016. “Shaping ‘Common Places’: Post-Soviet Narratives Beyond Anti-Utopia in Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory and Igor Saveljev’s Tereshkova is Flying to Mars.” In Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present, edited by Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg, 222–40. Leiden: Brill. Rutten, Ellen. 2017. Sincerity After Communism: A Cultural History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thévenot, Laurent. 2014. “Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to Common Places.” Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 1 (1): 7–34.

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Todorova, Maria. 2010. “Introduction: From Utopia to Propaganda and Back.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 1–16. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Toporov, Vladimir. 2003. Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: izbrannye trudy [The Petersburg Text of Russian Literature: Selected Writings.] St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo SPB. Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yurchak, Alexei. 2008. “Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts and Other Soviet Heroes Born Today.” In What is Soviet Now? Identities, Legacies, Memories, edited by Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon, Jr., 257–76. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

9

“Perestroika and the 1990s—Those Were the Best Years of My Life!” Nostalgia for the Post-Soviet Limbo Otto Boele

The title of this chapter is not a playful rephrasing of Bryan Adams’ 1985 hit Summer of ’69, but a quote from an interview with Pavel (last name not given), who fondly remembers the atmosphere of the late 1980s when the dismantling of the Soviet system was only a matter of time. Fresh from the army, Pavel took full advantage of the increased business opportunities during the waning years of the Soviet Union first by buying and reselling computers and then by working as a self-appointed art director for Russia’s first private record company. Although Russia’s music industry and show business were hit hard by the ruble crisis of 1998, Pavel’s overall impression of the first post-Soviet decade remains decisively positive: “I travelled all over the world, hung out with musicians and was surrounded by wonderful people (. . .). The 1990s were the only totally happy, meaningful moment in my life” (quoted in Chukovskaia 2016, 253–5). For anyone familiar with the reputation of the 1990s as a period of total decay and national humiliation, Pavel’s rosy memories may come as a surprise. The cliché of the “rowdy” or “cursed 1990s” has become so ingrained in Russia’s collective memory that Pavel’s story could easily be construed as a provocative display of liberal chutzpah, an insult to the average Russian citizen struggling to get by. It is undeniable, however, that a certain revisionism of the decade “everybody wanted to forget” (Borenstein 2008, 226) has been growing stronger over the last five years. What is therefore more noteworthy than Pavel’s individual memories is the fact that they were published in a volume with tens of other eyewitness accounts of the Yeltsin years that diverge considerably from the well-known master narrative of chaos and destitution. Even if Museum of the 1990s. Territory of Freedom (Muzei 90-kh. Territoriia svobody), as the volume is titled, also contains more sobering testimonies, especially from people who had well-established careers long before Gorbachev came to power, the collection as such is a conscious attempt to reconnect with the 1990s and present a platform for people, such as Pavel, who claim to experience nostalgia for what they often refer to as the “drive” and “limitless opportunities” of that time. Characteristically, the editors

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use the word “freedom” prominently in the title and another four times in the subtitle to suggest that this was the decade’s main, if short-lived, achievement.1 From the aspect of social psychology it seems only natural that certain age groups in Russia, as well as in the West, are now rediscovering the 1990s as a time to which they feel peculiarly attached. Fred Davis, one of the first scholars to recognize nostalgia as a potentially productive engagement with the past, has argued that a nostalgic sentiment is a precondition for a generation to conceive of itself as such (1979, 115). At some point any generation will become nostalgic; if not, it is not a proper generation in the sense of an age cohort with a commonly experienced past, its own short-lived fashions and musical tastes. While I agree with Davis that nostalgia is invested with “powerful generation-delineating properties” (192), here I would like to emphasize the specific functions nostalgia may perform depending on time, space, and the interests of those involved (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 929). In Eastern Europe, especially in those parts of the region where regime change caused entire countries to dissolve, nostalgia can function as an “oppositional mode of memory,” a “weapon,” in the words of Daphne Berdahl, that allows marginalized groups in society to resist “official historical knowledge” and construct their own vision of the recent past. Berdahl developed her notion of nostalgia as weapon in the context of Ostalgie; nostalgic practices by which eastern Germans have sought to resist the triumphant west-German narrative of national reunification (1999, 205). In my opinion the concept is equally useful when applied to present-day Russia where we can now observe a similar urge to “reclaim” the past from the clutches of officialdom and redefine the first post-Soviet decade in considerably more positive terms. Even if this is not always a conscious operation, and feelings of mild nostalgia do not necessarily signal disloyalty to the present regime, we can observe a growing tendency among opinion makers and “ordinary” Russians to engage with the 1990s in ways that undermine the state-endorsed narrative of a national disaster. Material that warrants an analysis through the lens of nostalgia is potentially vast and diverse, ranging from lecture series and interviews with key-figures from the 1990s to flash mobs on Instagram and nostalgic lyrics by punk bands and rappers in praise of the decade’s “authentic” grittiness. Though I will mention some of these subculture-specific expressions of nostalgia in passing, this chapter is largely confined to two case studies: a recent TV series on Russian shuttle traders, more specifically its reception by viewers active in the well-known discussion list “kino-teatr.ru,” and a number of interconnected initiatives to reconsider and possibly redefine the historical significance of the 1990s. While a predominantly negative view of the decade may still prevail, feelings of nostalgia sparked by moments of recognition can clearly be detected in the material examined below. Particularly in online discussions by TV

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 205 viewers, personal memories of the Yeltsin years often serve to “correct” the view presented on screen and legitimize one’s own claims to expert knowledge. In its most extreme manifestations, this urge to correct and disagree with the “official” take on the 1990s comes close to Berdahl’s concept of nostalgia as weapon, but even expressions of moderate disagreement can reflect a sense of loss that is hardly compatible with the decade’s one-dimensional awkward reputation.

Defining the Decade: Towards a National Disaster Narrative Regardless of the label that one prefers to characterize the 1990s, treating a decade as a distinct historical period is in itself an artificial operation that hardly does justice to sudden changes in society or continuities over longer stretches of time. According to Jason Smith, the decade is only an “intellectual shorthand,” a convenient “decimal-oriented chronological marker” that leads us to conceive of 20th-century history almost as a succession of “moods” and “fashions” (1998, 264): the “roaring twenties,” the “rebellious sixties,” the “individualistic seventies” etc. This method of periodization seems more typical for the United States (and by implication Western Europe) than for Russia, where the historical “feel” and mental boundaries of a particular period are usually predicated on regime change and radical shifts in the country’s political course. Thus, while there are good reasons to question the validity of expressions such as the “Thaw” or the “Years of Stagnation,” it is uncertain whether a label such as the “long 1970s” (suggested recently to delineate the “quiet” years 1968–1982) will ever catch on.2 In consideration of all this, the expression the “rowdy 1990s” looks doubly artificial. It squeezes historically very complex processes into the narrow framework of a decade and goes against the national tradition of labeling historical periods by using season imagery and metaphors of construction and growth. Moreover, while historians see the time of Perestroika (1985– 1991) as “analytically separate” from the first post-Soviet decade, by the late 1990s Russian citizens often treated these periods as indistinguishable from one another, retrospectively interpreting the first signs of change under Gorbachev as indicative of what would follow under Yeltsin (Shevchenko 2009, 37). On the threshold of the new millennium, with both reformers being increasingly lambasted as the demolishers of the Soviet Union, the popular perception of what had happened to the country still resisted structuring according to “decimal logic.” This is in keeping with Serguei Oushakine’s observation that by the end of the decade ethnographers, politicians, and other opinion makers bemoaning Russia’s demographic decline often tended to “equate the dissolution of the Soviet state with the dissolution of the Russians as a nation” (Oushakine 2009, 80–1). In their opinion, the “Russian tragedy” predated the collapse of the Soviet Union and continued unabated throughout the first post-Soviet decade.

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Owing to the interplay of a number of factors, the first post-Soviet decade eventually did come to enjoy the reputation of a distinct era with its specific problems and its own mentality. The most straightforward of these factors is, of course, the succession of national leaders, which coincided more or less with the beginning and the end of the decade (1990/1991: Gorbachev and Yeltsin and 1999/2000: Yeltsin and Putin). This coincidence could only be appreciated in hindsight when it turned out that Vladimir Putin had an entirely different governing style than his predecessor and a steadily growing budget at his disposal.3 One can speculate that Putin’s rise to power exactly at the brink of the new millennium also added to the impression of an epochal change, if only— again—in retrospect.4 Another factor contributing to the perception of the 1990s as a distinct period is the dominance of a “crisis framework” through which many citizens perceived daily life just after the break-up of the Soviet Union. As Olga Shevchenko has convincingly shown, this framework did not necessarily reflect a person’s individual situation but rather a need to assert one’s autonomy and economic adeptness amidst the social misery that was assailing the country. Hence there was the persistent idea among Shevchenko’s interviewees that they were doing relatively well as opposed to the country as a whole (2009, 12). Deploying a crisis rhetoric was also a popular strategy among academics and political actors attempting to defend their own interests by painting a dramatic picture of national agony and immanent doom (32–4). In a seminal study on talk and urban lore during late Perestroika, Nancy Ries describes a similar mechanism of generalization by which individual cases of injustice or social decay were immediately integrated in a totalizing disaster narrative. Tales of “complete disintegration” were a popular oral genre that helped create a “sense of shared experience and destiny,” thus further contributing to the idea of a permanent national crisis (1997, 46). The last factor that made the 1990s stand out is the Kremlin’s initially modest but ultimately relentless attempts to capitalize on the disaster narrative described above by positing a correlation between the “national crisis” under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and Russia’s overcoming of it once Vladimir Putin took over. This intertwining of the crisis framework and Putin’s “redemptive” authoritarianism is reflected, amongst others, in historical cinema, particularly during the years 2004–2008, which often seeks to create diachronic “memory chains” with the aim of linking different periods and suggesting historical parallels (Wijermars 2016, 47; Brouwer 2016). Considering that Russian historical films have always been primarily about “legitimizing the present” (Gillespie 2003, 60) and the state has recently used film quite specifically as a nation builder (Van Gorp 2011, 253–5), it takes little effort to understand that the 1990s loom large in blockbusters such as 1612: Khronika smutnovo vremeni (1612, A Chronicle of the Time of Troubles, 2007), Admiral (The Admiral,

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 207 2008), and the TV series Stolypin . . . Nevyuchennye uroki (Stolypin. Disregarded Lessons, 2006). On the surface these state-funded productions (or co-funded by Kremlin-loyal oligarchs) deal with entirely different periods, but they invite the viewer to extrapolate the historical events on screen to the recent past and present: the “lawlessness” of the 1990s and the “return of law and order” after 2000 (Norris 2012, 255). Indirectly these historical parallels also testify to a “normalization of Soviet history” (Kalinin 2011, 158), which is no longer viewed as a failed experiment that lasted over 70 years (a popular notion when the Soviet Union was falling apart) but as an organic part of Russian history. The 1990s, by contrast, are now rarely regarded as a period of transition (the optimistic term used at the time) but rather as one of “anomalous social disorder” (Platt 2009, 9), a blind alley that stands out negatively because of its “disruptive” nature. After declaring in 2012 that the post-Soviet period was effectively over (Putin quoted in “Postsovetskii etap v zhizni Rossii zavershen”), Putin and his supporters have become increasingly explicit in condemning the 1990s as a time of social squalor and political chaos (Popova 2012, 236). When asked in December 2017 why his main rival (Aleksei Naval’nyi) wasn’t allowed to run for president, Putin reacted by evoking once again the specter of the “chaotic” 1990s and comparing the lenient authorities of that time to a “man lazily picking cabbage from his beard as the country turns into a muddy puddle” (Putin quoted in “Bol’shaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina”). Attending Putin’s inauguration on May 7, 2018, even Aleksandr Zaldostanov (aka the “Surgeon”), leader of the motorcycle club “Night Wolves,” chimed in, likening the president to a “powerful reactor” whose energy and commitment to the country’s prosperity had allowed Russia to overcome the “destruction of the 1990s” (Zaldostanov quoted in “Sochetanie Azii, kolokolov i tekhnologii”). This state-approved demonization of the 1990s shows that the decade has come to serve as the mirror image of some imagined great Russia which is frequently invoked by Vladimir Putin in his speeches and in other forms of official discourse. It is a Russia that is unmarred by former ideological divisions (imperial and Soviet) and consistently heroic in the course of its entire history. While this sort of nostalgia for immutable national origins has been part of Putin’s nation-building agenda ever since he rose to power (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 503; Stepanova 2015, 124–8), more recently it has become a “source of modernization” (Kalinin 2011, 159), a lens for looking at the future. Military operations, sporting events, and cultural projects: all of these seem to originate in a nostalgic vision of former and future greatness that makes the 1990s look bleak and incapable of fostering any feelings of loss. The next two sections, however, will demonstrate how people resist this one-sided juxtaposition of the “destructive” 1990s to the nostalgically idealized “before and after.” They do so either by openly engaging

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in a form of counter-nostalgia which rejects the one-dimensional “fromhumiliation-to-restoration” narrative, or, less drastically, by rediscovering the decade’s less gloomy aspects as they watch and question its representation in prime-time TV drama. Shuttle Traders (Chelnochnitsy 2016), a series about a group of women eking out a living in the mid-1990s, is an ideal case study for analyzing this latter tendency as it tries to achieve the impossible: to perpetuate the decade’s rowdy reputation while complying with the generic demands of the modern fairy tale. This incompatibility led quite a few viewers to criticize the series for its lack of truthfulness and formulate for themselves the “essence of the way things really were” (Davis 1979, 47).

Redoing the Decade: A Fairy Tale About the 1990s or Dark Nostalgia? Shown on Rossiia 1 in the fall of 2016, Shuttle Traders does little to rehabilitate the 1990s. Racketeering, money extortion, and revenge killings confirm in predictable fashion the decade’s reputation as a time of social misery and lawlessness. The series’ generalizing slogan (“this was happening to the entire country”) clearly draws on the crisis rhetoric discussed earlier, dispersing any doubt as to the magnitude of the national disaster that was taking place. At the same time, the decision to focus on shuttle trade (chelnochnichestvo)5 is quite innovative, as this was a field of work in which women were particularly active and arguably more successful than men (Mukhina 2010; Bruno 1997).6 Some viewers therefore praised the series as the first attempt to tell the story of Russian women during the 1990s by showing their resourcefulness and ability to navigate Russia’s budding market economy. Although the story becomes increasingly ludicrous towards the end, developing into a contrived celebration of family values, the first three episodes or so are still quite plausible and historically accurate. Less convincing is the complete absence of any political context. The main characters—two officers of the Russian air force and their wives and children—do not watch TV or listen to the radio and never discuss politics, even if they have plenty to be embittered about. As a result Shuttle Traders paints a picture of the 1990s that is not so much depressing as remarkably sterile and regrettably short of period details. It is 1994. The Russian army is a shambles, salaries are not being paid, and when one of the children is struck by an exceptionally severe asthma attack, her parents’ only hope is an “American medicine of 200 dollars.” No longer able to make ends meet, the wives of the officers decide to team up and start working as suitcase traders buying colorful clothes in Turkey and selling them at an open-air market in Moscow. Especially Ol’ga, who is a teacher by training, is initially embarrassed to earn her money as a petty trader (torgashka), a detail that accurately reflects how

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 209 shuttle traders were sometimes struggling to overcome feelings of shame instilled by Soviet sensibilities about proper labor (Bloch 2011, 329). Equally plausible is the frustration of these women’s husbands who cannot accept that their wives are turning into the family’s main breadwinners (Kiblitskaya 2000). After an ill-fated attempt to earn a decent living as taxi drivers, the men drift off into shady business stealing gasoline from the army and selling it on the black market or getting entangled in financial affairs. The financial hardship, stress, and frequent journeys to Turkey do not fail to take their toll. In no less than sixteen episodes we see marriages run aground, promiscuity thrive, and children skip classes to start their own “business.” Faithful to the Cinderella plot that permeates so many series on Rossiia 1 (Sulim 2018), Shuttle Traders ends on an optimistic note when the officers and their wives realize that family life is something sacred; they decide to reboot their marriages. In the last scene we see the two families walking towards a church where the newly born, illegitimate son of one of the officers will be baptized. While in the story we haven’t moved beyond the year 1995, the in-your-face symbolism of the last scene lends the ordeal of these families a sense of closure, as though they are now morally prepared for a more purposeful life in the new millennium.7 Considering the series’ unexpected happy ending and the routine-like stigmatization of the 1990s, nostalgia is probably the last word that comes to mind when trying to identify the general purport of this melodrama. The absence of now obsolete commodities (pagers, barsetki, stonewashed jeans, raspberry-colored suit jackets) and other period markers (songs, references to political events) makes the 1990s look implausibly sanitized, thus effectively deactivating any potential triggers of nostalgia and recognition. Not surprisingly, in the entire discussion devoted to Shuttle Traders on kino-teatr.ru (over 1500 posts),8 the word “nostalgia” occurs only three times and just once in relation to the series itself. This single instance, however, a comment by a viewer calling herself “Zubrilka,” is worth quoting. It shows how nostalgia is instrumentalized to articulate an autonomous position with regard to the contested “essence” of the past, in this case the 1990s. I started watching [the series] in order to indulge [my] nostalgia for the 1990s. But I simply don’t feel the atmosphere, it doesn’t get to me. The adventures of the shuttle traders are shown as a sort of a holiday. The bandits look like clowns, there is no tension, the bus passengers don’t look frightened. [.  .  .] Everything is superficial, shallow [.  .  .]. There is no coherent story, the desperate situation the country was in back then is missing, [the series] has no atmosphere. Referring to a scene in which a bus with shuttle traders is robbed by a gang of criminals, Zubrilka’s comment illustrates what could be called “dark”

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nostalgia; a desire to re-experience or experience vicariously yesterday’s anxiety or even fear in the comfortable knowledge of one’s present safety. Essentially this is not very different from Svetlana Boym’s concept of “reflective nostalgia” in that it also “thrives in the algia, the longing itself” (Boym 2001, xviii), except that it involves a sensation of mild horror. Dark nostalgia, then, is a form of reconnecting to the past (“I started watching to indulge my nostalgia”) caused by a fascination with some macabre or abhorrent aspect of it (“the desperate situation back then”).9 In Zubrilka’s case, it is the failure to evoke feelings of dark nostalgia that she identifies as one of the series’ main flaws. Instead of showing the full extent of the shuttle trader’s plight, the makers’ decision to prettify the 1990s has turned the decade into a cardboard reality. Although Zubrilka was the only one to use the word nostalgia explicitly (ponostal’girovat’), many viewers shared her disappointment, arguing or implying that the 1990s as shown in Shuttle Traders is simply too good to be true: “It’s a glossy, not a TV series” (No. 16, Nord); “Those who don’t know the 1990s may like the film, but for me it’s all phony ((No. 66, Vol’t); “As for the series’ credibility, it seems that we are watching a light, simple comedy” (No. 428, Florina). “It’s a film, everything is idealized, romanticized” (No. 702, Dzenifer); “I regret to have wasted my time on this fairy tale (No. 741, Sandra VRN). While I would not claim that all of these comments necessarily betray a nostalgic attitude toward the 1990s, or that reactions to Shuttle Traders were exclusively negative, it is clear that, at least in the perception of the viewers quoted here, the series failed to “grasp the essence” of the decade. Despite the fact that viewers widely recognized the shuttle trader as a familiar figure and the series contained some of the stock ingredients of the 1990s (financial hardship, unemployment, humiliating job-hopping, organized crime), something essential appeared to be missing. Attempting to define that “missing something,” viewers not only drew on their own memories as a more reliable source of information; they also felt called upon to identify and reflect on the decade’s unique characteristics that had apparently escaped the makers. It is here that we can discern the contours of more dark nostalgia and indeed the recognition that the 1990s were a unique and sometimes exciting period. One of the series’ most serious shortcomings, according to disappointed viewers, was its inability to convey the “spirit” (dukh) of the 1990s, in particular the “spirit of the market place.” On screen, it was “all dummies and props,” according to a certain “Vol’t” (No. 66), who in a subsequent post shared his own experience as a shuttle trader in the early 1990s. Although he had made only two trips abroad and had enjoyed little success selling his goods at the Luzhniki market in Moscow, the “spirit of the market, its energy and entourage” had made a lasting impression on him. Unfortunately, this was entirely missing in Shuttle Traders, and so was the very spirit of the 1990s (No. 188, Vol’t).

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 211 Another viewer was annoyed by the unnatural orderliness at Ol’ga’s market and the social and ethnic homogeneity of its population: Where are the vendors of different nationalities, from Slavs to Negros, from former engineers to tattoo-covered ex-convicts, where are the stands with illegal video tapes and CDs, with music to suit all tastes, from Kombinatsiia to Nautilus? We see nobody playing backgammon or cards, nobody is even drinking [alcohol. O.B.]. And where have the gypsies gone, the pickpockets? (No. 699, Seryi iz Khar’kov). On a similar note, but without overt nostalgia, a certain “Semruch” was disturbed by the overall brightness of the series (implausibly, all the episodes appear to be set in the early summer). Especially the portrayal of shuttle traders as well-groomed, high-heeled ladies (Figure 9.1) was at odds with the “truth of life” (pravda zhizni): “I remember the market places of those days. The stands were penetrated by the wind blowing from every direction; because of the frost the poor women were wearing ten sweaters, body warmers and felt boots size 45” (No. 721, Semruch). As in the previous two examples, personal memories of the time made this viewer disagree with the varnished picture presented in Shuttle Traders and advance the bustling marketplace with its concentration of petty crime and different nationalities as the epitome of the “true” 1990s. Using slightly more abstract terms, a viewer calling herself “Sandra VRN” believed the series had failed to capture that “mix of despair and drive” so typical of the 1990s. This was a time “when the old way of life with its familiar rules had already disappeared and the new way of life was still free of restrictions and offered zillions of opportunities” (No. 736, SandraVRN). Though acknowledging the traumatic loss that many citizens had experienced after the breakup of the Soviet Union, this viewer scorned the makers for ignoring the all-pervasive sense of freedom, which had been such a vital component of the “rowdy 1990s.” Semruch, the viewer who disliked the series for its superficial brightness, was implacable: “What can we learn from this creation? About the fate and life of shuttle traders: nothing. About the 1990s: nothing” (No. 1364, Semruch). Although some viewers were less disturbed by historical inaccuracies and accepted the series as a truthful depiction of the 1990s, there was nearly unanimous agreement that shuttle trading in early post-Soviet Russia was in itself an original and worthy subject for television drama. Who else but shuttle traders had supplied Russia with clothes, shoes, and food in the early 1990s, a certain “Arfa” wanted to know. The story of the shuttle traders was a heroic one that would require more than sixteen episodes if it was to be told properly (No. 1529, Arfa). A viewer from Izhevsk was convinced that “this astonishing and fascinating time”

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Figure 9.1 Announcement of the TV series Chelnochnitsy (Rossiia1).

would provide writers and filmmakers with inspiration for years to come, and he noted with some disappointment that Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich had completely ignored these “pioneers of trade” in her book Second-Hand Time (No. 229, vladkino). Frustrated with the “mute

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 213 models” featuring in Shuttle Traders, this viewer imagined a “real” shuttle trader to be an “audacious, superb psychologist” who closely followed the latest trends in fashion but also knew how to negotiate with racketeers (No. 773, vladkino). In the opinion of another admirer, the earliest shuttle traders deserved a monument for opening a “window to Europe” and ending once and for all the time of shortages and coupons (No. 1530, Iaropolk Pomorov).10 On the surface the belated recognition of the shuttle trader as a historic figure relates primarily to his or her role as a supplier of consumer goods. Adroit, persistent, and prepared to take risks, in some of the comments the shuttle trader acquires the Promethean traits of a “cultural hero” (Meletinskii 1976) whose exploits lead to a vast improvement of people’s lives.11 Sometimes viewers singled out steadfastness and perseverance as the shuttle trader’s most defining characteristics. The suggestion that it was only a small minority of the population that had engaged in shuttle trading (No. 17, Sovunia) and that these individuals were driven only by a desire to make a fast ruble (No. 21, aleksei22) was passionately rejected by other list members on the grounds that shuttle trading was extremely taxing and rarely allowed one to live it up (No. 22, Ellenochka). If anything, shuttle traders demonstrated an extraordinary talent for survival (No. 1529, Arfa), especially women “while their husbands were getting drunk” (No. 18, Argo Leo). To illustrate the stamina of the real female shuttle trader, a viewer by the nickname of “Eva Kurt” compared her to Nikolai Nekrasov’s well-known heroic Russian woman who “will stop a horse on the run // and storm into a hut on fire” (No. 20).12 Implicit in both images (the cultural hero and the heroic Russian woman) is the assumption that shuttle traders were able to muster up some exceptional qualities in response to the extreme circumstances of Russia’s rogue capitalism but that the demand for such qualities disappeared once the country switched from the survival mode of the 1990s to a regime of post-transition “normalcy.” In other words, as life became less of a struggle in the 2000s, the desperate fighting spirit of the first post-Soviet decade also began to wane. To quote again one of the most active list members on kino-teatr.ru: “it took a truly exceptional person to become a real shuttle trader” (No. 737, vladkino). These words tell us probably more about vladkino’s own romantic (and gendered)13 views on early entrepreneurship in post-Soviet Russia than about the social reality of shuttle traders, but they also signal the loss of a “can-do mentality” for which the 1990s deserve to be remembered. Moreover, the conviction that shuttle traders had “opened a window to Europe” is recognition of their contribution to post-Soviet Russia and by extension of the 1990s as a difficult but meaningful period in Russian history (and not its “blind alley”). While it would be going too far to qualify this as an example of “nostalgia as weapon,” the discussion on kino-teatr.ru does illustrate

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nostalgia’s ability to provide existential meaning by making the past look relevant (Routledge et al. 2011). The 1990s are no exception.

Defending the Decade: Nostalgia as Weapon Like the series itself, the discussion on Shuttle Traders at kino-teatr.ru never acquired an overtly political dimension. Viewers recalled the problems of the 1990s in general terms or by adducing examples from their personal lives, but we find virtually none of the usual Yeltsin-bashing that tends to surface in this context.14 It would therefore be a mistake to regard the nostalgic voices on this discussion list as directly responding to the vehement degrading of the 1990s by officials and other Kremlin loyalists discussed earlier. These viewers found fault with the makers for not having captured the vibrant atmosphere of the open-air market and, more in general, what they perceived as the true spirit of the decade. It could even be argued that thrill-seekers hoping to indulge in dark nostalgia implicitly subscribed to the traditional view of the “rowdy” 1990s. Independent media and non-governmental organizations have been telling a different story over the past four or five years. Here we see a more concerted effort to stimulate debate or even redress the critical balance in favor of the 1990s, whether by organizing lecture series and panel discussions for historians and social scientists or by recording the personal and often contradictory experiences of ordinary citizens. Museum of the ’90s, the 2016 volume mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, is the culmination of this development, bringing together a wide variety of material ranging from interviews to personal letters and diaries, grouped around the central theme of freedom in all its manifestation.15 Museum of the ’90s is also the title of the overarching project that was launched by the Yegor Gaidar Foundation in 2014. The foundation website provides access to resources for the study of the 1990s ranging from sophisticated economic graphs and Gaidar’s personal archive to light-hearted quizzes in the spirit of Trivial Pursuit and a “dictionary of the 1990s.” Since 2015 the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg has staged an annual festival, “Island of the ’90s” (Yeltsin Center 2017), where visitors can listen to live performances of the decade’s greatest hits, brush up their knowledge of early TV commercials, or receive a retro look in the feshion korner. These more playful encounters with the 1990s appear to perform the double function of stirring nostalgia in people with active memories of the decade and reaching out to the younger generation who may be susceptible to the lure of the 1990s by the lasting appeal of legendary KINO front man Viktor Tsoi and the period’s reputation as the Golden Age of Russian rock. More serious forms of infotainment are offered in the form of lectures and public interviews; the edition of 2017 featured, amongst others, Yeltsin’s biographer, Boris Minaev and a “conversation

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 215 marathon” in which journalists, entrepreneurs, and politicians shared their memories of the 1990s with their audience. While collective reminiscing about the past is not necessarily synonymous with nostalgia, retrieving memories in a group of peers can trigger a sudden recognition of aspects that have been overlooked or undervalued. This was graphically demonstrated during the “conversation marathon” in September 2017 when the speakers were asked about their most vivid impressions of the 1990s. Aleksandr Vinokurov (born in 1970), one of the leading figures behind TV Rain, remembered the anxiety with which he had followed the presidential elections of 1996 and, particularly, his determination to cast his vote in the run-off in support of Boris Yeltsin. Comparing the eventful 1990s to the 2000s when “there was only United Russia,” Vinokurov concluded: “This is how politics can be, this is how politics probably should be. This is the politics we had” (Vinokurov quoted in “Priamaia transliatsiia”).16 Even if Gleb Morev, editor-in-chief of Colta. ru, emphasized the importance of learning how to approach the 1990s “historically” and study the institute of Russian state power in a “civilized, European way” (Morev quoted in “Priamaia transliatsiia” at 13:35–14:25), the format of “Island of the ’90s” offers such a diversity of activities with varying degrees of audience participation that the “non-scholarly” nostalgic experience is taken for granted, if not outright encouraged. To generate publicity for the first edition of the festival in 2015, Colta. ru organized a Russian version of Throwback Thursday,17 urging its readers “not to blacken the 1990s” but instead post photos of when they were young and “feel [again] the atmosphere of freedom.” Many readers heeded the call and shared their photos from the 1990s, often adding comments that reinforced the life-affirmative impression conveyed by the visual material. One reader, for example, posted a twenty-year-old picture of himself and his wife on Instagram, adding the following caption: “me and my wife striding through Moscow” (my s zhenoi shagaem po Moskve). An allusion to one of Soviet cinema’s most optimistic and sundrenched films, these words undermine the “official” view of the 1990s, highlighting instead the value of personal memory.18 Other posts were even more explicit, showing primarily people in their twenties posing for the camera while clearly having a good time. A group photo showing four friends elicited the following reactions from two of them: vasiliev_andrey When we were young and carefree 🙊😂 a picture from the distant ’90s ☺ 🙈 around 93–94, thank you Tania)) @matveevatanya always nice to remember those times, what fun did we have👍 😂 there were huge deficits, but there was friendship 👍 👏 #nostalgia #youth #nineties #thisisyouth #youngyears vasiliev_andrey@matveevatanya yes))) to buy “Dr. Martens” boots you couldn’t drink and eat for two months, but even so we had a great time 😂👍

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Otto Boele vasiliev_andrey@matveevatanya yeah, we did 👍 ☺ 😂 vasiliev_andrey@edaminova shoot, and then we couldn’t figure out: which one is mine and which one the “boa constrictor’s”, then I got it, they are both not mine 😂👍 they were Lerka’s)))19 iradaminova😂😂😂👍 (vasiliev-andrey 2016)

The most obvious signal words denoting irreversible change and feelings of loss (“carefree,” “remember,” “those times,” “great time”) do little to anchor this conversation in the 1990s; they could be used by any generation looking back at its own youth. Yet the fact that these positive memories are articulated despite the mentioned shortages shows how the intimate and happy history of this small group (“there was friendship”) outweighs the bigger picture of national destitution. Moreover, although Tania and Andrey do not reflect on freedom as such (as the editors of Colta encouraged them to do), it is implicitly given in the difficult choice between buying food or a pair of fashionable boots. As can be inferred from the rest of the thread, the example of Dr. Martens is far from hypothetical (vasiliev_andrey did own a pair), reminding us of a very real problem that Russians were facing at the time: a steady increase in available goods, including prestigious products from the West, and a dramatic decline in purchasing power. Thus, while acknowledging the (material) problems they had to cope with, these Instagram users remember the 1990s mainly for their friendship and the fact that they were simply enjoying themselves (bylo klassno). Considering the involvement of “liberal” institutions such as the Yegor Gaidar Foundation and the Yeltsin Center, it is small wonder that the project “Museum/Island of the 1990s” was met with furious reactions from the newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow), the traditional red-brown bulwark of Yeltsin opposition. According to Andrei Fefelov, the organizers were nothing but a “small people” (malyi narod) whose “nostalgic longing for the 1990s” was proof of their alienation from Russian reality and complete irrelevance as a political factor (Fefelov 2016). Members of the KPFR (the Communist Party) were quick to discard the Colta initiative as a “manipulative political device” (Kostin quoted in “Nostal’gicheskii fleshmob” 2015), while Mikhail Deliagin, an economist and a former liberal, now affiliated with the center-left Spravedlivaia Rossiia (A Just Russia), voiced concern that the “liberals” were planning a come-back in Russian politics (Chernykh 2015). The Kremlin-loyal daily Komsomol’skaia Pravda (Komsomol Truth), while generously offering a platform to Kostin and Deliagin, pretended to assume an impartial position. It merely asked its readers to decide for themselves whether the decade should be remembered as a “breeze of freedom” or for “destructing millions of lives” (Skoibeda and Sazonov 2016). By denying that it could be both at the same time and conveniently ignoring the incongruity

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 217 of the choice itself, Komsomol’skaia Pravda framed this nostalgia for the 1990s as something immoral, the whim of a spoilt elite for whom the “lives of millions” were less important than the satisfaction of their own petty desires. In the comments section, readers almost unanimously agreed arguing that the decade had brought nothing but destruction and should not be rehabilitated in any way. While Komsomol’skaia Pravda may have wanted its readers to believe that these predominantly negative reactions on its website were more representative of the nation as a whole than the cheerful pictures posted by Colta readers, they only give an impression of the newspaper’s own audience and its political preferences. It would be a mistake to think of the discussion it hosted as an opinion poll (just as it would be wrong to treat Colta’s flash mob as one). What we can infer from the indignant reactions on the newspaper’s website is the continuing relevance of the disaster narrative and the “unseemliness” of feeling nostalgic for the 1990s; indulging in nostalgia is construed either as part of a political strategy that serves the “return of liberals” to key positions in government or as a mere reverie of irresponsible hipsters preferring not to remember the hardship of the common people. What we can also conclude, however, is that this perceived impropriety of nostalgia for the 1990s makes it an effective weapon for challenging the disaster narrative and drawing attention to the decade’s achievements. Vinokurov’s words on the “politics we had,” the repeated mention of “freedom” in Colta’s publicity campaigns, and even the apolitical but joyful pictures on Instagram challenge the “official” nostalgia for imperial greatness by breaking the ultimate taboo: to remember warmly and openly a time when the country was maximally exposed to the inroads of the West. Does this mean that counter-nostalgia for the 1990s is really the exclusive domain of a liberal elite, a “small people,” as Andrei Fefelov put it disdainfully? Not quite. Marina Strukova (born in 1975), a nationalist poet, blogger, and regular contributor to Zavtra and the literary journal Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary), remembers her involvement in the Neo-Nazi party Russkoe Natsional’noe Edinstvo (Russian National Unity) as follows: I remember that time as the heyday of healthy nationalism, not the kind of degenerated nationalism we witness today; I remember it for the influence of Russian rock which raised its listeners as free people; for the return of the works of forbidden authors, for a wealth of historical information, some of it quite contradictory, I remember that time for its energy, hope, and inspiration. (Strukova 2013) The “fascist” choice of words (“healthy” as opposed to “degenerate”) is doubtless unsettling, as is Strukova’s general sympathy for a xenophobic

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organization that flourished during the “darkest” years of the 1990s.20 At the same time, much of what is mentioned here looks quite familiar: the return of once forbidden literature and the unrestricted availability of music previously deemed suspicious or even dangerous (like so many of her generation, Strukova is an avid admirer of Viktor Tsoi). Contrary to the majority of her readers, she does not consider the 1990s a “tragedy,” an exceptional view to be expressed in Zavtra, which is reflected in the essay’s affectionate subtitle (“My 1990s”). Essentially, then, Strukova’s nostalgia for the 1990s as a time of hope and authenticity is not very different from Vinokurov’s regretful reflections on the time when elections still mattered. Like Vinokurov, she associates the decade primarily with “energy, hope, and freedom” and seems very conscious of the opportunities that the 1990s presented to political activists (significantly, the essay opens with an exciting picture of her semi-illegal activities for the Neo-Nazi party). Even if she understands that the older generation will remember Gaidar’s economic shock therapy and the (assumed) practice of “sex for a bar of Snickers,” Strukova, a “poet and a romantic,” sees the 1990s primarily as a “cruel, but merry time” (ibid.). Strukova’s aggressive nationalism and Vinokurov’s cosmopolitan liberalism make strange bedfellows, of course, but in their personal assessment of the 1990s they have more in common than one would expect. While they are realistic enough to recognize the 1990s as the time of their youth (late adolescence and early adulthood), they remember the decade primarily for its promises upon which the 2000s failed to deliver. Situated on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they seem to agree that the appropriation of their ideals by the state has led to their corruption, and the 1990s should be remembered as a time of authentic political engagement. While this point of view may be more characteristic of the liberal elite to which Vinokurov belongs, the counterexample of Marina Strukova shows that it is not unique to it.

Conclusion In this chapter I have deliberately ignored the most obvious instances of nostalgia for the 1990s available, such as Rodion Lubenskii’s stated desire to “go back to the ’90s” (see the introduction to the volume) or claims made recently by a popular rapper that “back then” he and his bros led “more natural, honest, and truthful lives” (ICE [KTL Dill]), quoted in “Prezentatsiia al’boma” at 2:10). While these words are probably the most convincing evidence that the first post-Soviet decade is capable of evoking feelings of loss, they primarily serve a need for group affirmation. They do not challenge other people’s views on the 1990s, let alone dispute the official disaster narrative, which, on the contrary, is often used for fashioning oneself as the “last of the decade’s Mohicans.” For musician and showman Sergei Shnurov, for example, the “adventurous

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 219 spirit” of the 1990s is still alive, but only in the music and concerts of Leningrad, his own band (Shnurov 2017). The viewers and opinion makers discussed in the previous sections were arguably less apologetic of the 1990s than the non-conformists of hip-hop and punk, but they questioned and openly challenged the “official” view of the decade by drawing on personal memories and offering an alternative picture of the way things had “really” been. By adducing this anecdotal and sentimental counter evidence, they aroused the suspicion of Kremlin loyalists wary of a liberal restoration, but in so doing they helped to define and simultaneously break a new taboo: to disregard the national trauma of the 1990s by remembering the decade with a mixture of fondness and regret, that is by remembering it nostalgically. Nostalgia for the 1990s should not exclusively be understood as a weapon to undermine the official state-supported view of the decade, however. In a somewhat milder form it allowed viewers of the TV series Shuttle Traders to express their admiration for a particular group of Russians whose entrepreneurship and determination was felt to be indispensable for the country’s post-socialist economy. Recognizing in the shuttle trader the heroic features of Russian womanhood (the “Nekrasov type”), some viewers were inclined to idealize the 1990s as a difficult time that had nonetheless stirred people’s (women’s) slumbering capacities for achieving the impossible. Taken together, the two case studies show the extreme slipperiness of post-Soviet nostalgia’s referent, ranging in this case from the freedom which the 1990s had to offer to the extraordinary mentality required to survive the excesses of that freedom. Nostalgia for the 1990s, then, is as contradictory a phenomenon as the decade itself.

Notes 1. The volume’s complete title reads Muzei 90-kh. Territoriia svobody. Svoboda slova. Svoboda vybora. Svoboda dela. Svoboda byta. 2. See, for example, the second issue of Neprikosnovennyi zapas in 2007, which was entirely devoted to the “long 1970s.” 3. For this reason, the first decade of the new millennium is now sometimes referred to as the “affluent zeros” (tuchnye nulevye), as opposed to the “meager tens” (khilye desiatye) that Russia is currently facing. 4. Particularly among “red-brown” opinion makers such as Aleksandr Prokhanov, his son Andrei Fefelov, and literary critic Vladimir Bondarenko, suspicion toward the ruling elite and Putin personally remained strong throughout the 2000s. When I interviewed Bondarenko on September 10, 2012, he told me that he personally liked many things Putin was saying, but he added in disappointment: “he doesn’t do anything” (on ne delaet delo). It is remarkable how the annexation of Crimea in 2014 led these men to reconsider their stance toward the president and made them oblivious of the critique they had previously leveled at him. 5. Shuttle trade in Russia took off almost immediately after citizens were allowed to travel abroad (1991), creating employment in one form or another for over 40 percent of the working population in the course of the 1990s (Bloch

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Otto Boele 2011, 323). Import restrictions imposed by the Russian government in 1996 and the financial crisis of 1998 reduced the number of Russians involved in shuttle trade significantly. In the 2000s open-air markets were dominated by traders from Central Asia. The Russian title of the series, Chelnochnitsy, refers specifically to female shuttle traders. In September 2018, Chelnochnitsy received a sequel of another sixteen episodes (Chelnochnitsy-2) situated in 1998. I have watched only the first three episodes but judging by the general description of the series on kino-teatr.ru and some 300 reactions by (loyal) viewers, the love interest seems to have grown disproportionately, overshadowing the struggle-for-life theme of the first series. Even the ruble crisis of August 1998 is only hinted at, but never really explored. For description and discussion of the sequel, see www.kinoteatr.ru/kino/movie/ros/ser/129926/annot/ (accessed October 17, 2018). All comments on Chelnotsnitsy can be read at www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/ movie/ros/ser/117283/forum/ (accessed on October 17, 2018). I use the term “dark nostalgia” by analogy with “dark tourism,” a niche type of tourism, which specializes in visiting places associated with death, massacre, and disasters. More specifically, dark tourism is about visiting sites where some horrible event has occurred that arouses anxiety about the consequences of modernity: the potentially destructive side of science and technology, for example (Lennon and Foley 2010, 11–12). Of course, dark nostalgia is not a critique of modernity but a gesture of resistance intended to preserve one’s own “authentic” memory of the 1990s as opposed to the varnished picture offered by Shuttle Traders. That feelings of nostalgia can also contain a darker element was pointed out by Davis, who argued that unpleasant memories can be successfully integrated in our mental autobiographies on the principle that “it was all for the best” (1979, 12). The idea that shuttle traders stood at the cradle of the “new” Russia that was emerging after the breakup of the Soviet Union is more common than these few comments suggest. Starting in the 2000s, statues of shuttle traders have begun to appear in Blagoveshchensk, Yekaterinburg, and Berdsk (and in Ukraine and Belarus as well). Usually they are placed at railway stations or near the entrance of a new commercial center where there used to be an open-air market in the 1990s. Interestingly, this idea of the shuttle trader’s social usefulness seems consistent with feelings of professional pride which real shuttle traders sometimes experienced. In Museum of the 1990s, a certain Liudmila recalls feeling distinctly proud whenever she encountered someone on the street or in the metro wearing “her” clothes (“I had the feeling I was doing something useful . . .”; Trofimova 2016, 340). “V bede—ne srobeet—spaset // Konia na skaku ostanovit, // V goriashchuiu izbu voidet! ” (Nekrasov 1963, 24; translation: “In case of emergency she will save // She will stop a horse on the run // She will storm into a burning hut!”). List member vladkino erroneously uses the term chelnok (shuttle) instead of chelnochnik (“male shuttle trader”), juxtaposing it favorably to the female shuttle traders (chelnochnitsy) in the TV series. It is conceivable, though, that any comments criticizing Yeltsin and possibly even his heir, Vladimir Putin, were quickly removed by the moderator. Most of the material was originally published on such “liberal” websites as Snob.ru and Colta.ru. The video of the conversation marathon is available on the website of the Yeltsin Center (see “Priamaia transliatsiia” in the bibliography). Vinokurov’s comments start at 4:20:10.

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 221 17. Throwback Thursday (or Flashback Friday) is a trend on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram that allows users to share personal experiences and nostalgic memories by posting and tagging old photos or videos. 18. The film alluded to is, of course, Georgii Daneliia’s Ia shagaiu po Moskve (1964). The title is translated in English as “I stride through Moscow” or “Walking the Streets of Moscow.” 19. “Boa Constrictor” (Udav) is in all probability the nickname of one of these group members. 20. It is debatable which years were the “darkest” of the entire decade, of course, but here I am referring specifically to 1998, the year the economy hit rock bottom (Rosefielde and Hedlund 2009, 118–21), and 1999, when apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk were bombed, allegedly by Chechen separatists.

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Kiblitskaya, Marina. 2000. “‘Once We Were Kings’. Male Experiences of Loss of Status at Work in Post-Communist Russia.” In Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, edited by Sarah Ashwin, 69–78. London and New York: Routledge. Lennon, John, and Malcolm Foley. 2010. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Engaging Learning. Meletinskii, Eliazar. 1976. Poetika mifa. Moscow: Nauka. Mukhina, Irina. 2010. “Regulating the Trade: International Peddling in PostSoviet Russia.” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 37 (2): 166–86. Nadkarni, Maya, and Olga Shevchenko. 2004. “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices.” Ab Imperio 2: 487–519. Nekrasov, Nikolai. 1963. Moroz, krasnyi nos. Red-nosed Frost. Introduction, notes and vocabulary by V.E.J. Holttum. Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Bradda Books Ltd. Norris, Stephen M. 2012. Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. “Nostal’gicheskii fleshmob po 90-m—legko chitaemyi polittekhnologicheskii priem.” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, September 19, 2015. www.kp.ru/daily/26435.5/ 3306415/ (accessed on July 26, 2018). Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pickering, Michael and Emily Keightley. 2006. “The Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology 54 (6): 919–41. Platt, Kevin M. 2009. “The Post-Soviet Is Over: On Reading the Ruins.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1 (1), 1–26. Popova, O. V. 2012. “Simvolicheskaia reprezentatsiia proshlogo i nastoiashhego Rossii v prezidentskoi kampanii 2012 g.” In Simvolicheskaia politika. Vypusk 1: Konstruirovanie predstavlenii o proshlom kak vlastnyi resurs, edited by Malinova O.Iu, D. V. Efremenko, Il’ and M. V. i dr, 222–38. Moskva: INION RAN. “Postsovetskii etap v zhizni Rossii zavershen.” Vesti.ru. April 11, 2012. www. vesti.ru/doc.html?id=767131 (accessed on July 26, 2018). “Prezentatsiia al’boma Bad Balance ‘Kriminal 90-kh’.” https://novom.ru/en/ watch/lxMuqNc45HE (accessed on July 26, 2018). “Priamaia transliatsiia ‘Razgovornogo marafona’ festivalia ‘Ostrov 90-kh’.” Yeltsin Center. Video file, November 25, 2017. https://yeltsin.ru/news/den-elcincentra-na-ostrove-90-h/?utm_source=FB_Ostrov90_event&utm_medium=FB& utm_campaign=Ostrov90 (accessed on July 26, 2018). Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Rosefielde, Steven, and Stefan Hedlund. 2009. Russia After 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Routledge, Clay, Jamie Arndt, Tim Wildschut et al. 2011. “The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (3): 638–52. Shevchenko, Olga. 2009. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

“Perestroika and the 1990s” 223 Shnurov, Sergei. 2017. “Net nichego pragmatichnee, chem chestnost: interview with Sergei Shnurov, by Andrey Arkhangel’skii.” Kommersant, June 26, 2017. www.kommersant.ru/doc/3329708 (accessed on October 17, 2018). Skoibeda, Ul’iana, and Evgenii Sazonov. “Napishem pravdivuiu istoriiu 90-kh!” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, August 24, 2016. www.kp.ru/daily/26435.7/3306369/ (accessed on July 26, 2018). Smith, Jason Scott. 1998. “The Strange History of the Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Perils of Periodization.” Journal of Social History 32 (2): 263–85. “‘Sochetanie Azii, kolokolov i tekhnologii’: Gazmanov, ‘Khirurg’ i Petrosian ob inaguratsii Putina.” TV Rain, May 7, 2018. https://tvrain.ru/teleshow/here_ and_now/petrosjan-463223/ (accessed on July 26, 2018). Stepanova, Elena. 2015. “‘The Spiritual and Moral Foundation of Civilization in Every Nation for Thousands of Years’: The Traditional Values Discourse in Russia.” Politics, Religion & Ideology 16 (2–3): 119–36. Strukova, Marina. 2013. “Veseloe vremia. Moi 90-e.” Zavtra, February 4, 2013. http://zavtra.ru/blogs/marina-strukova-vesyoloe-vremya-2013-02-04-025118 (accessed on October 17, 2018). Sulim, Sasha. 2018. “‘Siloviki v roli spasitelei. Chto-to o geiakh—tol’ko v vide shutochki’. Stsenaristy rossiiskikh serialov rasskazyvaiut, po kakim pravilam oni rabotaiut.” Meduza, April 17, 2018. https://meduza.io/feature/2018/04/17/ siloviki-v-roli-spasiteley-chto-to-o-geyah-tolko-v-vide-shutochki (accessed on July 26, 2018). Trofimova, Tat’iana. 2016. “Chelnochenaia sumka.” In Muzei 90-kh. Territoriia svobody, edited by Katerina Belenkina, Anna Nemzer, Tat’iana Trofimova and Il’ia Veniavkin, 336–43. Moscow: NLO. vasiliev-andrey. “Kogda my byli molodymi.” Instagram photo, April 1, 2016. www.instagram.com/p/BDqT1Skjtb5/ (accessed on July 26, 2018). Wijermars, Mariëlle W. 2016. “Encircling an Unrepresentable Past: The Aesthetic of Trauma in Karen Shakhnazarov’s Dreams (1993).” In Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian Film. Screen as Battlefield, edited by Sander Brouwer, 163–82. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi. Yeltsin Center. 2017. “Den’ El’tsin Tsentr na ‘Ostrove 90-kh’.” https://yeltsin. ru/news/den-elcin-centra-na-ostrove-90 h/?utm_source=FB_Ostrov90_event& utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=Ostrov90 (accessed on July 26, 2018).

Afterword After Nostalgia: A Backward Glance at a Backward Glance Kevin M.F. Platt

Sometime at the start of the 1990s, I had my first encounter with postSoviet nostalgia in its early configuration. A friend, recently arrived from Moscow, brought me a mixtape that was making the rounds in his circle, made up of Soviet patriotic songs ranging from the sentimental “Farewell,” about Komsomol lovers in the Civil War (“Proshchanie,” familiarly known as “Dan prikaz, emu na zapad,” Dmitrii Pokrass, lyrics M. V. Isakovskii 1937), to the stirring “Song About the Baikal-Amur Mainline” (“Pesnia o BAMe,” Oskar Fel’tsman, lyrics Robert Rozhdestvenskii). Both the quaint ideological content and the kitschy Soviet estrada aesthetic of these songs were profoundly appealing precisely in their aura of archaism and obsolescence, which seemed so palpable and complete in those first years after the Soviet collapse. I played the cassette continuously in my car, driving around California, learning all the words and singing along. Fun times. Of course, we did not call this nostalgia at the time—and it would have been as odd for my Moscow intelligentsia friend as it would have been for me, an American graduate student with limited experience of the USSR and even less emotional investment in it, to experience nostalgia for that then recently vanished civilization while singing along with Leonid Utesov and Vladislav Kononov. At the time, the arch appropriation of the symbolic resources of the Soviet past appeared as a natural continuation of the aesthetics of Sots-Art and Moscow Conceptualism, which had pioneered the mode of ironic play with the commonplaces of Socialist Realism and Soviet official discourse in the decades prior to the collapse. A mixtape like the one my friend gave me would have made a perfect soundtrack, for instance, for Il’ia Kabakov’s installation—his phenomenally successful 1988 show Ten Characters (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York), which winkingly staged the living spaces of oddball figures in a Soviet communal apartment. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this stance better than the poetry of one of the Conceptualists’ younger collaborators, Timur Kibirov, about whom I was writing at the time (figure A.1), especially compositions like his 1986 cycles The Life of K. U. Chernenko (Zhizn’ K. U. Chernenko; 2005, 650–82) and When Lenin Was Little (Kogda byl Lenin malen’kim; ibid., 601–27), the latter of which was multiply republished and became possibly his best-known work during the early 1990s.

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Figure A.1 Moscow poet Timur Kibirov (an ethnic Ossetian) posing, with irony, at a bust to Stalin, sometime in the 1980s. Gift of the poet.

Of course, in those years the former Soviet and socialist populations still included many others who had never relinquished their affective attachment to and conscious investments in Soviet ideology, values, and symbols. The Communist Party, although much diminished, reemerged

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from a brief ban to become a mass organization once again, while ressentiment identification with lost Soviet geopolitical greatness was also prominent in Russian public life of the early 1990s—for instance, in Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s earliest political manifesto The Last Drive Southwards (Poslednii brosok na iug, 1993), which called unabashedly for the reconquest of Central Asian and Caucasian territories, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia (presciently, as it turned out, although no one took him seriously at the time; see Kukulin 2018, 158). Yet few then called Zhirinovskii or dedicated communists nostalgic, either—it seemed more natural to call this form of non-ironic, serious backwards glance simply “reactionary.” A couple of years later, though, post-Soviet nostalgia in Russia was entering a new, mass phase—signaled by the launch of Old Songs About the Most Important Thing (Starye pesni o glavnom), which irreverently restaged classic Soviet song and film, as performed by new pop stars, in a televised extravaganza on New Year’s Eve, 1996. By the end of the 1990s, the appropriation and redeployment of Soviet and socialist symbols and culture—high, low, and material—was ubiquitous. In 1993, I frequented a completely unreconstructed Soviet cafeteria in the center of St. Petersburg where, without a thought of nostalgia, one could order from a standard Soviet menu of “Capital” (”Stolichnyi”) salad, meat cutlets, 100 grams of vodka in a little carafe, and the like. Five years later, just before the Russian currency default and market crash of 1998, a successful businessman friend treated me to dinner in the newly opened Moscow restaurant Petrovich, which featured those same classic dishes served up in retro Soviet interiors, yet now at exorbitant prices, aimed at a fashionable “New Russian” clientele. Just a few years later, as socialistand Soviet-themed cafes, fashion statements, tourist attractions, and monumental sculpture parks continued to proliferate across the former socialist territories, the nostalgia phenomenon was named and given its first scholarly analyses—still widely-cited works like Svetlana Boym’s 2001 Future of Nostalgia, Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko’s comparative survey article in the journal Ab Imperio (2004), and Serguei Oushakine’s important correctives concerning the affective, rather than political, motivations undergirding much nostalgic reminiscence of state socialism (2007). Yet nostalgia has come a long way since that time—especially in the former Soviet Union, which is the special focus of this volume. In the 1990s, post-Soviet nostalgia constituted a complex field of interplay and competition between ironic and sincere stances, private and public affects, and economic appropriations and political ones. This was a flexible matrix of practices and deployments that supported reflection on the past from a variety of positions, from playful celebration of the liberty to emblazon the Soviet crest on an American high-school letter jacket, to “red-brown” mourning for the loss of Soviet great-power

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status, to anti-capitalist critique of the harsh social Darwinism of the new Russia that reduced so many to abject poverty. Yet that was then, and this is now. As Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, and Ksenia Robbe explain in the introduction to this volume, drawing on analyses of Ilya Kalinin and others, the conditions for nostalgia have changed radically in the Russian Federation. Successive administrations of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have reassembled a narrative of national greatness that co-opts the affective energies of nostalgic reminiscence of the Soviet past, along with all other statist usable pasts, reaching back into the proverbial mists of time. The first sign of this turn in political discourse, perhaps, was the affirmation in 2000 of the Soviet state hymn, with “retrofitted” lyrics, as the anthem of the Russian Federation (Daughtry 2003). The most widely cited early official statement of a new state politics of history was Putin’s pronouncement, in his 2005 Address to the Federal Assembly, that “the destruction of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” (2005). Co-opting and tending to drown out the free-floating and multifarious nostalgia of the 1990s, the new regime of patriotic nostalgia that has unfolded under this banner endorses political significances only of an affirmative character. Focused on the “great traditions” of Soviet military prowess, geopolitical might, and political unity around patriarchal strongmen that have supposedly been reclaimed in the present, Russian state rhetoric has no use either for ironic play or for critical reflections on post-Soviet social inequality and loss of security. Instead, one is to celebrate piously along with Putin that Crimea has “returned to her native shores” (Ria Novosti 2014). Since the start of the new century, the discourse of patriotic nostalgia has consistently gained greater and greater sway in Russian public life, amplified by the increasing conservatism of the regime and its steady consolidation of control over mass media. As the contributions to this volume attest, these circumstances have radically changed the stakes for any and all nostalgic reminiscence in the Russian Federation. This situation stands at some remove from that of other former Soviet and socialist regions, where the more variegated and flexible matrix of nostalgic significances described above continues to persist to some degree. (Which is not to say that the state patriotic turn in Russian politics of history has not had a dampening effect on nostalgia in these regions as well: in Latvia, tourists are no longer entertained by Soviet-themed restaurants such as the “KGB Bar” that once could be found in Riga’s Old City—ironic engagement with the organization that launched Putin’s career has come to seem in poor taste. In Ukraine, sincere piety before Soviet-era monuments has been interdicted by the criminalization and demontage of the monuments themselves. And, as I have been writing this essay, 27 European Union MPs have written to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asking him to suspend the sale of Soviet-themed memorabilia.)

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The present volume undertakes a concerted exploration of nostalgia in the new circumstances of Russia under Putin, with some brief excursions beyond its borders. As the initial chapters grouped in the section on “Affect” demonstrate, even given the dominance of state rhetoric concerning the past, some possibilities for non-state modes of nostalgia continue to persist. Serguei Oushakine’s chapter on “second-hand nostalgia” shows how, as generational turnover progresses and memory of life in the Soviet Union fades, the Soviet past and its meanings may become more malleable, yet the material traces of that past—“trukhliashechki,” to use the term of visual artist Danila Tkachenko—nevertheless retain their ability to recall the conditions of that lost life world and induce a variety of engagements with it. Kathleen Parthé’s chapter shows that whereas in the 1980s and the early 1990s nostalgia for pre- or non-Soviet, rural peasant life was instrumentalized in service to xenophobic and often anti-Semitic Russian nationalism, memory of the village has since that time shaken loose, to some extent, from such unsavory politics. One might speculate that this shift has been possible precisely because patriotic state rhetoric under Putin finds less utility in nostalgia for rural life than it does for grander objects, such as military victories or industrial development. Yet the force field of statist nostalgia is hard to evade: while Mandy Duijn’s chapter explores what would seem to be an internet memory culture of intimate, private dimensions—what could be more personal than toys and childhood?—most of the comments she examines and the explicit endorsement of “patriotism” by the administrators of the internet portal where they appear, “The USSR Our Motherland,” resonate closely with the rhetoric of the state. The history and operations of the statist nostalgia force field are the subject of the chapters of the volume’s second section, on “Appropriation.” Ilya Kukulin shows that the roots of a nostalgia for Soviet society in its most totalitarian phase, under Joseph Stalin, run deep indeed— back to certain pop-culture phenomena of the late 1980s such as the retro-Stalinist music of the band Liube. Emily Johnson’s chapter demonstrates the startling potency of official nostalgic discourse, which has transformed the story of the Chernobyl liquidators, once one of the most prominent object lessons in the failure of Soviet political, economic, and media institutions, into a cultic celebration of Soviet values of collective sacrifice and heroism. Boris Noordenbos’ chapter, too, shows how Sergei Miroshnichenko’s Born in the USSR (Rozhdennye v SSSR) documentary film project has progressed from explorations of the equivocal implications of the Soviet collapse in earlier installments of the film to become a vehicle for the statist master narrative about the loss of values of brotherhood, kinship, and security with the Soviet collapse and the restoration of these values in the present era. The chapters of the final section of the volume, “Contestation,” turn attention to mobilizations of nostalgia that critique present social and

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political realities in one way or another, subverting the affirmative state rhetoric of nostalgia. The most counterintuitive of these “counternostalgias” is perhaps the stance of fond memory for the 1990s that Otto Boele discovers among viewer comments relating to the television serial Shuttle Traders (Chelnochnitsy). Although the remarks of viewers are not staged as overt political statements, they demonstrate the continued attraction for Russians of the social freedoms and sense of political openness characteristic of the 1990s despite the tendency of patriotic rhetoric to demonize that era as the moment of Russia’s deepest abjection. In her chapter, Ksenia Robbe describes Andrei Astvatsaturov’s novels as projecting nostalgia for the free intellectual activity and sincere sociality that was linked with the late-Soviet subject position that Aleksei Yurchak terms “vnye” or with the “trickster” stance as described by Mark Lipovetsky. Certainly, this mode of nostalgia stands at a distance from the instrumental project of state rhetoric about the Soviet past, but, as Robbe points out, Astvatsaturov’s position is an elitist one with limited potential for broader political traction. Finally, Marina and Vladimir Abashev’s contribution explains the fascinating use in Perm of traditionalist and Soviet nostalgia to mobilize resistance to modernization projects initiated in Moscow and imperiously imposed on the provincial city. Yet while these efforts at resistance were ultimately only of limited success, the story of that resistance was co-opted by the far-right ideologue Aleksandr Prokhanov as the plot for his 2012 novel Star Man (Chelovek zvezdy), transforming it, ironically enough, into yet another instrument of dominant, patriotic nostalgia. In sum, the accomplishment of this volume is to turn our attention squarely on the phenomena of post-Soviet nostalgia in Russia in recent years, where patriotic culture forms a looming frame or obtrusive background, in one way or another, for all turns towards the Soviet past. In conclusion, let us pull back from these close-up examinations of fascinating case studies to consider a wide-angle shot of their location in the cultural landscape. As many of the contributors to this volume observe, drawing on early treatments mentioned above (Boym 2001, Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, Oushakine 2007), the ripeness of the post-Soviet and post-socialist territories for nostalgia arose from the suddenness and completeness of state socialism’s fall, which seemingly overnight rendered a whole social and political world a piece of ancient history. Other factors included the hardships of social transformation; the unified nature of the socialist world that seemed to be so integral and of a piece; as well as the plethora of films, literary works, built environments, etc. that remained in the wake of collapse and continued to memorialize socialist values and meanings. Nostalgia is predicated on a sense of the impossibility of return to an ostensibly happier past state. In the early 1990s, an enormous population of people across a vast region were joined together by such a vantage on the irretrievable past of state socialism. It was this

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pervasive relevance that underwrote the extraordinary utility of nostalgia, its availability for multiple economic or political purposes, and its eventual state co-optation as a potent mobilizational rhetoric. Yet let us take a step back from these phenomena and consider their place in the larger landscape of post-Soviet memory. In assessing expressions of nostalgia as a response to the “traumatizing loss of the Soviet,” to quote the introduction to this volume, we should observe that the other regionally dominant discursive formation regarding the Soviet past during the late 1980s and early 1990s—a formation that contributed directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself—was also predicated on conceptions of collective trauma: the trauma associated with the history and experience of Stalinism and “totalitarianism.” This other mode of postsocialist and post-Soviet historical reminiscence, no less elusive in meaning and no less subject to political cooptation than the mode of nostalgia, continued to wield rhetorical potency in Russia for most of the 1990s. Consider, for instance, a contrasting example to Putin’s 2005 Address to the Federal Assembly, cited above—the Address to the Federal Assembly that Boris Yeltsin delivered nine years earlier, a few months before the hotly contested (and perhaps ultimately stolen) Russian presidential elections of 1996. In his speech, Yeltsin described the Soviet period as an integral fabric of traumatic social and historical experience: It is important to come to a full recognition that the tragic consequences of the Communist experiment were historically inevitable. Of course, one might have avoided some things or softened others. But, on the whole, the mass repressions, harsh political monopoly, class-based purges, total ideological “weeding out” of culture, isolation from the external world, and support of an atmosphere of antagonism and fear—all of these are the characteristic features of the totalitarian regime. (Yeltsin 1996) Or one could consider an animated political advertisement from the presidential campaign itself that begins with an image of Communist Party leader Gennadii Ziuganov delivering a speech while standing on a small island. The shot then pans downward, under the water, offering a glimpse of the iceberg on which he stands, the internal chambers of which conceal component parts of the Soviet past: militarization, closed borders, concentration camps, and food shortages. In short, from the moment of its rise to prominence in the early 1990s, post-Soviet nostalgia was one of two dominant positions or “strong attractors” in the highly polarized field of affectively laden discourse concerning the Soviet past. That past was either an object of traumatic memory that demanded continued recognition and working through, or it was an object of nostalgic reminiscence. For most individuals, perhaps, it was both of these things, in

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different contexts and registers of expression (Platt 2012). During the early and middle 1990s, state rhetoric was firmly associated with the former of these two positions. In the 2000s, state rhetoric “reversed polarities” and adopted the latter. Yet in order to situate post-Soviet nostalgia, as well as trauma, fully in their time and place, we may take one more step back, looking beyond these broad yet still local discursive conditions—to chart their relationship to global phenomena. Across Europe, the USA, and other parts of the world as well, the end of the 20th century witnessed what has been called the “memory boom,” as communities and political discourses everywhere turned increasingly to the past in search of identity or in contestation of present realities (Winter 2001). The rising prominence of cultures of memory and commemoration was linked to the changing time-horizons of the global political imagination. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis has come to seem a little laughable in the 21st century—the human quest for a better form of political life has hardly come to an end with the close of the Cold War and a supposed global recognition that “liberal democracy in reality constitutes the best possible solution to the human problem” (1992, 338) Yet Fukuyama’s observations were nevertheless symptomatic of the times: the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st has taken shape as an era of ideological exhaustion linked to fading expectations for meaningful and beneficial future change, especially in the societies and political institutions of the developed world. In this era of anxiety, the future, rather than appearing as a space for progressive developments and grand projects, has come more and more to present only a plethora of threats—climatic, demographic, financial, and political. As Aleida Assman has recently formulated the time-consciousness of the age: the future “no longer appears to us as a sort of El Dorado of fulfilled hopes and desires—rather, it has become the object of our ceaseless worry” (2012). As the future has lost its function as a space for optimistic ideological articulation, the past has become the screen onto which public, private, and political desire is projected—the source of the identities, social structures, and public goods that must be protected from the deleterious operation of time and the threat of looming catastrophes. This global perspective allows us, perhaps, to comprehend the specificity of post-socialist and post-Soviet nostalgia with maximal clarity. As early as 2006, Dominic Boyer critiqued the Western scholarly focus on nostalgia for its tendency to orientalize the societies of the former socialist east for their purported failure to progress in step with Western modernity—for their persistent civilizational and political backwardness (2006). Yet seen in the context of the memory boom and associated global shifts in political discourse, post-socialist and post-Soviet nostalgia begins to appear rather less a unique, distinguishing feature of these territories and societies. To be precise, it is of a piece with broader, global phenomena, yet derives certain distinctive features from its post-socialist

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context. These include, in the first place, the extraordinary polarization of the affective and political projections noted above, linked to the radical nature of the historical and social rupture of the end of the Cold War, that exaggerates the potential signification of the past towards the extreme, opposed positions of the nostalgic or traumatic modes. The conspicuousness and ostensible uniqueness of post-socialist nostalgia from the perspective of commentators during the first decade and a half following the collapse of state socialism related to its apparently anomalous nature when viewed against the backdrop of societies thought to be in “transition” away from a defunct state-socialist past. In the same era that Pierre Nora was both analyzing and licensing the memory boom with his Lieux de Memoire project in Western Europe, the former socialist and Soviet societies appeared as a distinct and “other” territory where nostalgic memory, at least of the recent past, was untimely, out of place, and pathological. In those years, analytical commentary normalized the affective position of traumatic reminiscence of the Soviet experience and identified with the dominant Russian state rhetoric of that era typified in Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign. In the early 2000s, when Russian state discourse veered towards the opposite end of the affective spectrum under the banner of nostalgic restoration of Soviet values and geopolitical power, the tendency to view post-Soviet nostalgia as a local pathology continued to shape Western discourse on Russia, as well as the stance of those within Russia who still identify with the political positions and memory politics of the 1990s. Yet just as with the post-socialist nostalgia of the 1990s, the populist “official nostalgia” of Russia under Putin might more properly be identified as a local variation on the global trend of post-ideological political culture predicated on the backwards glance at history. Further, the family resemblance that links political cultures and their foundational visions of history and memory, east and west, is becoming ever more evident as the century progresses—less and less appears to distinguish Putin, with his celebration of Soviet and even KGB values (see, in this regard, Andrei Kondrashov’s 2018 documentary film Putin), from Donald Trump, who clamors to “make America great again,” recuperating Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan, or from the local variations on such themes in the rhetoric of France’s Marie le Pen or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, for that matter. In conclusion, we may ask what stance towards the past remains for those who do not identify with contemporary versions of patriotic political nostalgia. Last year, while visiting Ekaterinburg, I purchased a beautiful silk scarf in the airport as a gift for my wife, Karina, executed in bright red and white with a pattern of decorative T-34 tanks—the chief element of Soviet armored corps during the Second World War that was constructed at the local Uralmashzavod. She loves it—ironically. For Karina, and for anyone else who claims it, the position of ironic postSoviet nostalgia is still available, infused perhaps with a touch not of

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Oushakine’s “second-hand” nostalgia but rather of “nostalgia to the second degree”—nostalgia for what some experienced as carefree play with the ruins and cultural remains of the Soviet past in the 1990s. Yet reminiscence of the Soviet past retains other potentials as well. For while patriotic nostalgia, in Moscow and in Washington, D.C., in support of xenophobic, oligarchic capitalist regimes, has truly come to seem a rather homogenous feature of global political life, the Soviet past remains pregnant with political meanings that are very far from those that may be associated with either Putin or with Reagan, founding father of neoliberal economic policy and the populist right. What about Marxist internationalism? Socialist egalitarianism? Leftist revolution? To take just one prominent counterexample to Russian official post-Soviet nostalgia, these other legacies of the Soviet past, studiously ignored or suppressed in contemporary Russian patriotic rhetoric, have since the early 2000s formed the central focus of the theory, art, and literature of the members of the “What Is To Be Done?” group, which includes such prominent figures of the contemporary cultural and intellectual scene as Aleksandr Skidan, Artemii Magun, and Keti Chukhrov.1 In 2017, as Russian state rhetoric on the centennial of the October Revolution was emphasizing the antirevolutionary theme of “reconciliation,” set by Putin himself, “What Is To Be Done?” created the film Palace Square. 100 years after. A Film-lecture Four Seasons of Zombies (Dvortsovaia ploshad’. 100 let spustia. Fil’m lektsiia 4 sezona Zombi), dedicated to the recovery of other, excluded potentials of revolution. Others in Russian society are mobilizing the elements of the seemingly defunct leftist tradition as well. Perhaps the only thing preventing us from recognizing this, too, as a form of post-socialist nostalgia is its unabashedly, yet so far atypical, optimistic stance towards the future.

Note 1. What Is To Be Done? (Chto delat’?) is an influential utopian novel written by Nikolai Chernyshevskii in 1863.

Works Cited Assman, Aleida. 2012. “Transformatsiia novogo rezhima vremeni. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 116 (4/2012). www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_ literaturnoe_obozrenie/116_nlo_4_2012/article/18871/. Boyer, Dominic. 2006. “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany.” Public Culture 18 (2): 361–82. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Daughtry, Martin J. 2003. “Russia’s New Anthem and the Negotiation of National Identity.” Ethnomusicology 47 (1): 42–67. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press.

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Kibirov, Timur. 2005. Stikhi. Moscow: Vremia. Kondrashov, Andrei. 2018. “Putin.” Rossiia 1. https://russia.tv/video/show/brand_ id/62624/episode_id/1729508/video_id/1828986/ (accessed on November 1, 2018). Kukulin, Ilya. 2018. “Russia as Whole and as Fragments.” In Global Russian Cultures, edited by Kevin M. F. Platt, 151–82. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nadkarni, Maya and Olga Shevchenko. 2004. “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices.” Ab Imperio 2: 487–519. Nora, Pierre. 1984–92. Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2007. “‘We’re Nostalgic, But We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia.” Russian Review 66 (3): 451–82. Platt, Kevin M. F. 2012. “Affektivnaia poetika 1991 goda: nostal’giia i travma na Lubianskoi ploshchadi.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 116 (4/2012). www. nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/116_nlo_4_2012/arti cle/18880/ (accessed on November 1, 2018). Putin, Vladimir. 2005. “Poslanie Federal’nomy sobraniiu.” April 25. www.krem lin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22931 (accessed on November 2, 2018). Ria Novosti. 2014.“Putin: Krym i Sevastopol’ vozvrashchaiutsia v rodnuiu gavan’— v Rossiiu.” March 13, 2014. https://ria.ru/politics/20140318/1000079137. html (accessed on October 30, 2018). What Is To Be Done. 2017. “Palace Square—100 years after. A film—lecture ‘Four Seasons of Zombies’.” https://chtodelat.org/category/b8-films/palace-square100-years-after-a-film-lecture-4-seasons-of-zombie-2/ (accessed on October 30, 2018). Winter, Jay. 2001. “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 21 (1): 52–66. Yeltsin, Boris. 1996. “Poslanie prezidenta Rossii Borisa El’tsina Federal’nomu Sobraniiu RF: ‘Rossiia za kotoruiu my v otvete’ 1996 god.” www.intelros. ru/2007/02/05/poslanie_prezidenta_rosii_borisa_elcina_federalnomu_sobraniju_ rf_rossija_za_kotoruju_my_v_otvete_1996_god.html (accessed on October 29, 2018).

Contributors

Vladimir Abashev is a Professor in the Departments of Journalism and Russian Literature at Perm State University. His research and publications explore the poetics of early 20th-century Russian literature and the history of literature of the Urals region. His best-known book, Perm kak tekst (Perm as text) (2000), explores the historical development of this city from a semiotic perspective. Marina Abasheva is a Professor of the Perm State Humanitarian Pedagogical University and Perm State University. Her academic interests include contemporary Russian literature, literary theory and criticism, gender studies, and regional studies. She is the author of Russian Women’s Literature at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007) and Russian Prose in the Internet Age (2013). Her most recent research is concerned with popular culture, national identity in culture, and media studies. Otto Boele studied Russian at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD degree at the University of Groningen (1996). He is now an Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Leiden. He is the author of The North in Russian Romantic Literature (1996) and Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev’s “Sanin” (2009). Currently he is working on Thaw literature and film, as well as on the memory of the 1990s in Russian culture. Mandy Duijn studied Slavic and East European Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven and holds an MA degree in East European Studies from the University of Amsterdam. She won the 2017 European Studies thesis prize with her thesis about the depiction of the domestic setting in contemporary children’s novels in the Soviet Union. Her research revolves around manifestations of post-Soviet nostalgia in contemporary popular culture. She is currently working as a researcher for a Dutch documentary series about recent European history, as well as on her PhD proposal. Emily D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of How

236

Contributors

St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (Penn State University Press, 2006), the editor and translator of Arsenii Formakov, Gulag Letters (Yale University Press, 2017), and, along with Julie Buckler, coeditor of Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern, 2013). Ilya Kukulin studied psychology at Moscow State University and received his PhD in literary theory at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. He authored a monograph Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015) and a number of articles on Russian literature, especially poetry, unofficial social thought in 20thcentury Russia, and cultural and intellectual history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia published in Russia, the USA, Germany, and other countries. Currently, he teaches at National State University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow (School of Cultural Studies). Boris Noordenbos is Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. In the past he has been affiliated with the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) as a researcher and with Ghent University (Belgium) as a visiting professor. He is the author of Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity (Palgrave, 2016). Among his recent publications are articles on trauma and conspiracy theory in post-Soviet Russian literature and film. Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His research explores transformations of cultural production and consumption during transitional periods—e.g. from capitalism to socialism in the 1920s–1930s in the Soviet Union, and from socialism to capitalism in post-Soviet states during the last two decades. He published extensively on aphasia, nostalgia, pastiches, reconstructions, and imitations in contemporary Russian culture. He also analyzed the politics of pity, the patriotism of despair, and different forms of totalitarian (and less totalitarian) laughter. His current research includes three major projects. One is a historical study of Russian radical modernism of the 1920s. In 2016, he edited a three-volume anthology of Russian Formalists and Constructivists (The Formal Method: An Anthology of Russian Modernism, Ekaterinburg-Moscow, 2016) and is preparing now an English-language version of this collection. The second project explores postcolonies of Communism, using materials from extended fieldwork in Minsk and Bishkek. Finally, he is also working on early Soviet illustrated books for children, analyzing how Communist ideas were translated into idioms and clichés of early Soviet visual culture. Kathleen Parthé is Emeritus Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester (NY, USA). Her publications include Russian Village Prose:

Contributors

237

the Radiant Past (Princeton, 1992), Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines (Yale, 2004), and A Herzen Reader (Northwestern, 2012). Current projects include a new, annotated translation of Past and Thoughts (with Robert N. Harris) and a volume of Herzen’s correspondence. With historian James Billington, she co-authored “The Search for a New Russian Identity. Russian Perspectives” (2003, on loc.gov). Dr.Parthé has presented research papers in the USA, Canada, Russia, Europe, and Australia and has taught at St. Petersburg University. Kevin M.F. Platt is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian culture. Platt received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Stanford University. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006). He is editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin UP, 2018) and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). He has published a number of collections of Russian poetry in translation, most recently Orbita: The Project (Arc publications, 2018). His current projects include a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia entitled Near Abroad and an account of the history and memory of Stalinism in the USSR and present-day Russia. Ksenia Robbe is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Leiden University, Centre for the Arts in Society. Her current research engages with practices of remembering the 1980s–early 1990s transitions in post-apartheid and post-Soviet literature, art, and theatre. She is the author of Conversations on Motherhood: South African Women’s Writing Across Traditions (UKZN Press, 2015). Her recent publications include articles on peripheral imaginaries of community, practices of resilience, and a poetics of failure as a tool of reimagining transition in contemporary Russian literature and art.

Index

Abashev, Marina 13, 157, 167, 229 Abashev, Vladimir 13, 157, 167, 229 Abramov, Roman 47 affect 3, 6, 8–10, 47, 52, 191, 228 Agamben, Giorgio 102 agency 7, 40, 96, 103, 107, 108, 123, 185, 198 Alexievich, Svetlana 115, 212 alienation 25, 28, 100, 197, 216; lateSoviet 94; self-alienation 100, 102 Andropov, Yuri 99, 102 Ange, Olivia 3 Anisimov, K. V. 83n14 Anoshin, I. 106–7 anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic 10, 71, 141, 173, 228 anti-American, anti-Americanism 99, 146; propaganda 146 Antonov, Aleksandr 128 Arndt, Jamie 214 Arvatov, Boris 38, 40, 41, 58 Assman, Aleida 231 Astaf’ev, Viktor 73–4, 83n4 Astvatsaturov, Andrei 14, 183–4, 185–7, 189–91, 193–9, 199–200n4, 229 Atia, Nadia 138 Austin, Linda M. 25 authoritarianism, authoritarian 4, 107, 151, 197; redemptive 206 Averkiev, I. 161–7 Babitskaya, Varvara 184 Bach, Jonathan 41, 42, 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail 187–8, 196 Bakin, V. 96 Barnouw, Erik 133 Barthes, Roland 171 Beissinger, Mark 15 Belarus, Belarusian 1, 47, 48, 51, 115, 117, 122, 123, 126, 220n10

Beletskaia, L. 121 Beliakov, Sergei 179n7 Belikov, Iu 165 belonging: collective 148, 152n4; nonbelonging 54, 60; shared 1, 10 Berdahl, Daphne 3–4, 12, 22, 35n3, 204–5 Berdinskikh, Viktor 71, 75–80, 82, 83n12, 83n16 Berger, John 76 Berliner, David 3 Billington, James 83n15 Bissell, William Cunningham 4 black market, black marketeers 33, 101, 209 Bloch, Alexia 209, 219–20n5 Boele, Otto 1, 14, 67, 203, 227, 229 Bohlen, Celestine 159 Boyer, Dominic 3, 4, 22, 25, 28, 231 Boym, Svetlana 1, 4, 5, 12, 15, 35, 70, 83n16, 108–9, 117, 129, 141, 146, 149, 157, 176, 184, 186, 188, 200n9, 210, 226, 229 Brezhnev, Leonid 11, 50; Brezhnev era 35n9, 101; moral corruption 11; social disillusionment 101 Brouwer, Sander 206 Brownett, Tristi 59 Brudny, Yitzak 81 Bruno, Marta 208 Bruzzi, Stella 133, 137, 151n1 bureaucrat, bureaucratic, bureaucracy 50, 70, 103, 122, 178n1 capitalism, capitalist 12, 13, 30, 142–4, 146, 151, 188, 213, 233; anti-capitalist 198, 199, 227; consumerism 142 (see also consumerism); pre-capitalist 12 Carden, P. 110n9

Index Carter, Sarah Anne 52 Central Asian 145, 226 Chernenko, Lev 119–20 Chernobyl 11, 115–29, 228; Chernobyl cult 128 Chernov, V. 75 Chernykh, Evgenii 216 childhood: desire 27 (see also desire); happy 23–6, 151; nostalgia 22, 23; rural 76; Soviet 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 33, 35, 185, 186, 190–3; toy 28 Christian, Christianization 73, 77, 81, 163 Chukovskaia, Anastasiia 203 Chuzhak, Nikolai 41 Civil War 95, 224 Cockwill, Neil 59 Cold War 4, 23, 99, 231, 232 collectivization 72, 79, 117, 144 Communist, Communism 4, 10, 34, 38, 42, 51, 58, 59, 71, 83n8, 99, 100, 106, 117, 120, 139, 172, 173, 188, 226, 230 Communist Party 58, 99, 216, 225–6, 230 consumerism 24, 99, 142, 143, 144, 151, 189; the cult of 99; westernstyle 143–4, 151 corruption 11, 99, 102, 106, 178, 218; anti-corruption 99 creative intelligentsia of 161, 165, 170, 184; Leningrad 165 (see also Leningrad); Perm 164 (see also Perm); Saint Petersburg 184; see also intelligentsia Creighton, Millie 22, 25, 31 Crimea, Crimean 15, 148–9, 177, 227; annexation 1, 148, 219n4 crisis 70, 77, 119, 141, 203, 206, 208; economic 141; financial 220n5; ruble 203, 220n7 Cross, Gary 2 cynicism, kynicism 11, 14, 100, 178n1, 190, 200n7, 200n13; see also Sloterdijk, Peter Danilova, Natalia 122 Dashevsky, G. 106 Daughtry, J. Martin 227 Davies, Jeremy 138 Davis, Fred 3–4, 8, 12, 137, 139, 140, 144, 204, 208, 220n9 Dawson, Jane 121 Demidov, N. I. 124

239

democracy 101, 125, 231 desire 5–6, 10, 12, 13, 22, 25, 27, 31, 33, 40, 41, 54, 60, 61, 66–7, 139, 172, 178n1, 210, 213, 217, 218, 231 D’iachenko, A. A. 122, 124–5 Dickinson, Sara 70 dictator, dictatorship 92, 100; communist 42 Diomidova, G. 122 discourse, discourses: authoritative 14, 187, 190; cultural 9, 14; dominant 5, 190; hegemonic 13, 14, 148, 200n4 (see also hegemony); local 161, 163, 169; memory 3, 22; nationalist 198; nostalgic 13, 22, 25, 138, 149, 151–2n2, 197, 228; official 7, 48, 189, 199, 200n7, 207, 224; patriotic 194; political 8, 227, 231 (see also politics); public 82 Djagalov, Rossen 70 Dmitrieva, O. 121 Dobrenko, Evgeny 31 Dologopolov, N. 120 Duijn, Mandy 9, 21, 228 East, Eastern: East-German 4 (see also Germany); East-West dichotomy 4; “other” 4 Eastern Europe, Eastern European: Eastern-Central Europe 7; nostalgia 3, 4 (see also nostalgia); postsocialist 6, 7, 22, 231, 232, 233 Egolf Brenda P. 119 emigration 141, 146 empire: Ottoman 199n3; post-empire syndrome 15; Soviet 2–3, 137, 170, 173, 177 Engel, Barbara 29, 81 Erofeev, V. 104 Evans, Owen 59 family: life 149, 209; metaphor 144–7, 150 famine 77, 108; 1946–47 89, 103 Fedotov, N. 164, 170 Fefelov, Andrei 216, 217, 219n4 Fitzpatrick, Shelia 71–2, 81–2, 82n3, 150 Foley, Malcolm 220n9 Foucault, Michel 102 Friedman, Rebecca 28 Friedman, Sharon M. 119

240

Index

Fritzsche, Peter 139, 151–2n2 Fukuyama, Francis 231 Gabowitsch, Mischa 189, 200n9 Galich, A. 110n5 Galkouski, A.A. 127 Gaskell, Ivan 52 Gavrilenko, Aleksandr 127 Geist, Edward 119 German, Germany: East, Eastern 4, 204; Nazi Germany 111n19, 118 (see also Nazi); West 4, 204 Gille, Zsuzsa 5 Glasnost 116, 120, 128 Golos Omeriki 2, 15n1 Gorbachev, Mikhail 10, 15, 70, 82, 95, 116, 118, 125, 128, 203, 205, 206 Gordeev, S. 158, 163 Goreslavskaia, N. 75 Gorham, M. 105 Gorney, Carole M. 119 Gorodetskaia, Alena 136 Gorp, Jasmijn van 206 Grainge, Paul 4 Gromenko, A.A 127 Gubarev, V. 119, 120 Haerpfer, Christian W 15 Hann, Chris 4, 198 Hedlund, Stefan 221n20 hegemony, hegemonic 190; discourse 13, 14, 148, 200n4; masculinity 200n15 (see also masculinity); patriotism 135 hero, heroes, heroic, heroism 11, 92, 95, 96, 98, 109, 110n5, 110n9, 115–21, 123–6, 129, 147, 173, 175, 197, 207, 211, 213, 219, 228 Herwig, Christopher 59 Hodder, Ian 40, 41 Hutton, Patrick H. 135 Iankovskaia, Galina A. 157, 162, 163 identity: collective 25, 30, 135; local 13, 162, 163, 169; national 70, 73, 80, 168, 173, 177; Permian 162 (see also Perm); political 162; regional 162, 163; Russian 13, 71; -shaping practice 8; shared 6; symbols of 169 ideology, ideological 6, 12, 13, 22, 23, 28, 29, 31, 70, 79, 83n8, 92, 93, 94, 96, 102, 110, 158, 168, 170, 171, 175, 178–9n1, 188, 189, 190, 207,

224, 230, 231; quasi-ideology 11, 103, 104 Il’nitskii, Andrei 178–9n1 immoral, immorality 101, 217 imperial, imperialism, imperialist 4–6, 12, 15, 83n14, 92, 117, 176–8, 179n7, 186, 189, 194, 195, 199n3, 200n6, 207, 217; ideology 189 (see also ideology); the imperial idea 92, 176, 179n7; neo-imperialism 190 innocence 12, 21, 25, 28, 107, 143; see also childhood Instagram 204, 215–17, 221n17 intelligentsia: creative 161, 165, 170, 184 (see also creative intelligentsia); local 13, 164; metropolitan 10; Moscow 224; progressive 164; Russian 7, 197 Itkin, Vladimir 119–20 Iushkov, Roman 168, 179n3 Jameson, Frederic 4, 7, 137 Johnson, Emily D. 11, 115, 228 Jones, Finn-Olaf 159 Kalinin, Ilya 6, 13, 157, 168, 189, 197, 198, 207, 227 Kalinina, Ekaterina 35n3 Karev, I. 160 Karp, P. 107 Keightley, Emily 7, 12, 135, 204 Kelly, Catriona 23, 24, 25, 29, 32, 35n11 Kenny, Michael 8 KGB 98, 101, 227, 232 Khodorkovskii M. 106, 107 Khokhlov A.A. 157, 160 Khomiakov, V. 74 Khrushchev, Nikita 116 Kiblitskaya, Marina 209 Knight, Rebecca 23 Koposov, Nikolai 92, 94, 102, 174 Kozlova, Elena 126 Kremkova, V. M. 41 Kremlin 105, 106, 128, 146, 160, 172, 207, 216; loyalists 214, 219 Kukulin, Ilya 11, 89, 157, 168, 200n15, 226, 228 Lankauskas, Gediminas 2, 144, 152n3 Laura, Salmon 70 Lazuka, B.A 127 Leibovich, O. 157, 159, 160 Leiderman, N. L. 71

Index Lenin, Vladimir 50, 51, 62, 77, 139 Leningrad 93, 142, 192, 219 Lennon, John 220n9 Levada, Iurii 157 Lewicka, Maria 39 Lewis, Philippa 70 Leys, Ruth 9 Limonov, E. 91–4, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110n5, 110n9, 110n10, 200n6 Lipovetsky, Mark 14, 106, 187, 188, 190, 229 Litchfield, Rebecca 59 Liublinskii, A. 167 Lotman, Yu. 110n6 Luk’ianova, E. 106 Lungin, P.S. 159 Lysenko, O.V. 157, 162 Marples, David 120 Martazanov, A. M. 74 masculinity 92, 94; glorification of 92; hegemonic 200n15; “real Russian man” 95, 109 (see also myth) Medvedev, Dmitry 6, 104, 128, 150, 158, 159, 179n6, 189, 227; Medvedev-era 13, 157, 160; modernization 6, 13, 157, 159, 189 (see also modernity) Meletinskii, E.M. 213 memory: boom 231, 232; collective 115, 117, 176, 203; cultural 165; nostalgic 22, 232; personal 34, 215; post-soviet 230; public 117, 118; traumatic 230 Mikheev, Dmitrii 127 military: intervention 163, 166; military-industrial complex 13, 162; red army 21, 22, 34 Miroshnichenko, Sergei 133–7, 139, 141–9, 151, 228 Mišina, Dalibor 4 modernism 75, 110n10, 200n8 modernity, modernization 3, 6, 8, 12, 75, 91, 102, 110n10, 157–61, 163, 164, 178–9n1, 189, 200n6, 200n8, 207, 220n9, 229; capitalist versions of 12; Russian 168; Soviet 13, 169, 177, 188; Western 3, 231 moral, morality 4, 25, 73, 75, 82, 95, 96, 100, 101, 108, 110n10, 124, 134, 137, 143–4, 189, 198, 209; corruption 11; traditional 71; see also immoral

241

Moscow 13, 24, 34, 41, 56, 62, 82, 92, 95, 96, 98, 104, 106, 108, 111n12, 115, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 144, 147, 150, 158–60, 164, 168, 170, 178, 186, 195, 200n12, 208, 210, 215, 221n18, 221n20, 224–6, 229, 233; intelligentsia 224; modernization 170 (see also modernity) Mukhina, Irina 208 myth, mythologies, mythological, mythical: collective 1; “golden myth” 94, 103 (see also Stalin, Joseph); “happy childhood” 23, 25 (see also childhood); historical 177; local 171; myth-making 7; nostalgia, nostalgic 176; official 14; Permian 161–5, 167 (see also Perm); “real Russian man” 109; Soviet 25, 173 Nadkarni, Maya 4, 7, 117, 118, 129, 138, 141, 143, 149, 207, 226, 229 Naiman, Eric 31 nationalism, nationalist 12, 14, 15, 70, 93, 168, 170, 176, 177, 179n3, 189, 198, 199, 217, 218, 228 Nazi 106, 111n19, 117, 118, 120; Neo-Nazi 217, 218 Nechepurenko, Ivan 159 Nekrasov, Nikolai 98, 213, 219, 220n12 neoliberal, neoliberalism 5, 38, 184, 196, 198, 233 Νichols, Bill 136 NKVD 91, 96 Noordenbos, Boris 11, 67, 133, 200n6, 227, 228 Nora, Pierre 232 Norris, Stephen M. 2, 15n1, 207 nostalgia, nostalgic: colonial 5, 15; consumed 2; Eastern European 3, 4; imagination 21–2, 163; imperialist 7 (see also imperial); instrumentalization of 8, 11, 151, 209, 228, 229; modernization 13, 157 (see also modernity); mythologized 94 (see also myth); phantasmatic 102; red 39; reflective 5, 8, 176, 188, 210; resistance 14; restorative 1, 7, 15, 70, 108, 129, 149, 176; rural 10, 75 (see also rural); second hand 10, 38–67, 228, 233; sentiment 8, 117, 204;

242

Index

technologies 6, 8; urban 8, 10, 71 (see also urban); as weapon 13, 14, 204–5, 213, 214–18 nuclear 58, 60, 115, 119, 120, 125; see also Chernobyl Oborina, E. 165 Odinets, M. 119–20 Ogden, J. Alexander 80, 83n14 oral history, oral histories 71, 76, 77, 82, 115 Orlova, M. 175 Orthodox: church 79, 104, 127; Perm 169 (see also Perm) Oushakine, Serguei Alex 6, 9–10, 25, 39–40, 44, 55, 58, 117–18, 123, 147, 152n4, 186, 205, 226, 228, 229, 232–3 pagan, paganism: cults 171; Perm 169 (see also Perm); Soviet 115–16 Pare, Richard 59–60 Parthé, Kathleen 10, 70, 73, 75, 82n1, 82n2, 83n7, 83n12, 83n14, 83n15, 228 Paton, B. E. 127 patriarchal 75, 78; strongmen 227; see also masculinity patriotic, patriotism: culture 229; of despair 152n4; discourse 194; Great Patriotic War 174; hegemonic 135 (see also hegemony); local 162; national, nationalism, nationalists 170, 171; nostalgia 227, 229, 233 (see also nostalgia); rhetoric, state rhetoric 228, 229, 233; Russian 6, 129, 233; Soviet 224; state-centered 177; see also politics Pavliuk, S. P. 127 Pavlovets, M. 99, 111n16 Paxson, Margaret 76, 80, 81, 83n12 Peacock, Margaret 23–4 peasant, peasants 70–2, 74–82, 82n3, 228; collective life 78; life 70, 71, 76, 77, 80, 228; nostalgia 70–82; rural 228 (see also rural); Russian 76, 77 perestroika: My Perestroika (Hessman 2010) 135, 150, 151; roaring 1990s 150; shortages 142 Perm, Permian: antiquity 162–3, 169; cultural conflict 161, 167, 169; cultural experiment 160; cultural project 157, 158–66, 168, 171,

179n5; cultural revolution 159, 165; identity, political identity 162; modernization 163 (see also modernity); pagan 169; zoomorphic style 163, 165, 169, 171, 179n4 Petrović, Tanja Pickering, Michael 7, 12, 135, 204 Pioneer, Pioneers 31, 32, 44, 151, 193, 212, 224; camp 59, 193; youth leader 193 Platt, Kevin M. 5–6, 190, 207, 230–1 Podgurskaia, G. 120 Podoroga, V. 102 Podvintsev, Oleg Borisovitch 157, 162, 163 Pogrebniak, Alexander 189 Polikarpov, Iurii 125, 126 politics, political: discourse 8, 227, 231; nostalgia 232 (see also nostalgia); patriotic turn in 227; of restoration 189 Polozhevets, P. 120 Popova, O.V. 78, 207 Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, Anastasia 81 postcolonial, postcoloniality 5; Soviet 123 post-communist: Eastern Europe 13, 117 (see also Eastern Europe); generation 39; nostalgia 4, 5, 38, 39; world 3, 38 postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernist 105, 164, 188, 197, 200n6, 200n8; culture 137; experience 188; literature 188; nihilism 188 post-socialist: economy 219; experience 198; nostalgia 6, 22, 232, 233; societies 143; studies 8; territories 229 Pravda 73, 97, 119, 121, 134, 211, 216–17 privatization 25, 29 Prokhanov, Aleksandr 13, 158, 168–78, 179n7, 219n4, 229 propaganda: anti-American 146; Communist 51; Kremlin 146; Russian 106, 107; Soviet 11, 51, 145, 150 Prus, Elena Viktorovna 127 Prusik, Monika 39 Putin, Vladimir: Crimea 1, 15, 148–9, 219n4, 227; government 135, 148, 149, 151; inauguration 207; nationbuilding 207

Index Razuvalova, Anna 71, 75, 83n14, Remnick, David 116 repression: NKVD 96; political 42, 91; Stalinist 91 (see also Stalin, Josef) revolution, revolutionary, revolutionaries: anti-revolutionary 233; counterrevolution 177; cultural 13, 157–9, 161, 163, 165–72, 177 (see also Perm); French Revolution 151–2n2; Great Revolution 99; ideals 99; literary 71; October Revolution 139, 233; post-revolutionary Russia 40 Ria Novosti 1, 227 Ries, Nancy 206 Robbe, Ksenia 14, 67, 183, 227, 229 Rogatchevsky, A. 103 Rosaldo, Renato 4, 7 Rosefielde, Steven 221n20 Routledge, Clay 3–4, 8, 214 Rubin, David M. 119 rural, ruralist: childhood 76; communist 10; identity 71, 73 (see also identity); literary figure, literature 70, 73; nostalgia 10, 75; peasant life 228 (see also peasant); Russia, Russians 70, 77, 80, 82; society 82; traditions 10, 71 Rüthers, Monica 24, 33 Rutten, Ellen 188, 198–9, 200n5, 200n8 Ryzhova, P. 168 Salimon, L. 122 Savel’ev, Denis 71 Sazonov, Evgenii 108, 216 Schechner, Sara J. 52 Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin 112n24 Shargunov, Sergei 71, 184 Sharov, V. 120 Shembel, Daria 25, 135, 142, 146 Shevchenko, Olga 7, 67, 117–18, 129, 138, 141, 143, 149, 205–7, 226, 229 Shklovsky, Viktor 53–4, 55, 60 Shkoda, V. G 124 Shlykova, Elena 122 Shushkova, N. 157, 159–60 Siberia, Siberian: Siberia, Siberia (Rasputin 1991) 80; villages 74; Western Siberia 26, 27 Sigov, Vladimir 73 Silverman, Rena 57

243

Skoibeda, Ul’iana 108, 216 Slavnikova, Olga 70, 72, 74 Slezkine, Yuri 81–2 Slobodchikova, O. 108 Sloterdijk, Peter 100, 190, 200n7 Smirnova, E. 106 Smith, Jason Scott 205 socialism, socialist: collective experience of 38; demise, fall of 39; embodied 24; everyday 39; late 50, 200n13; lived 42; Soviet 61, 116, 139, 227; state 226, 229–30, 232; see also post-socialism Socialist Realism, Socialist Realist 11, 72, 75, 105, 110n10, 116, 224 social media: Instagram 204, 215–17, 221n17; platforms 35, 221n17; Twitter 171, 221n17 Sokirko, V. 94, 101, 112n21 Sokolova, L. 161, 164 Sontag, S. 111n19 Sotskova, N.K. 128 Soviet Union: atmosphere of the 10, 52; break up of the, collapse of the, demise of, destruction of the, dissolution of the, falling apart of the 11, 24, 71, 73, 133, 148, 205, 206, 207, 227, 230; children in, growing up in 21, 22, 26 (see also childhood); collective cultural topography of the 31; former 48, 122, 144, 146, 226; framework of the 28, 32; geography of the 31; imaginary geography of the 31; late-Stalinist 179n7; life in the 56, 228; pre-capitalist “innocence” of the 12 (see also innocence); satellite states 4; toy industry in 28 (see also toy) spiritual, spirituality 1, 72–5, 79, 80, 111n19, 124, 173 SSSR Nasha Rodina 21 Stalin, Joseph 23, 31, 50, 72, 77, 90, 92, 100, 101, 104, 173, 174, 175, 178, 228; myth of 94, 102, 103 (see also Myths); post-Stalinist 70, 99; repression 91, 175 Stalinism, Stalinist(s) 11, 89, 92, 94, 99, 100–3, 177, 200n15, 230; neoStalinists, neo-Stalinism 93, 102; period, era 23, 72, 81, 82n3, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 99–100, 102, 103, 105 Stankevich, S. 104, 105 Starobinski, Jean 80, 83n12

244

Index

Stattford, Barbara Maria 47 Stepanov, Andrei 122 Stepanova, Elena 207 Stewart, Kathleen 7, 12, 137 Stewart, Susan 13 Strukova, Marina 14, 217–18 subculture, subcultures: Liubertsy, Liubery 95; non-conformist 151; western 95 Sulim, Sasha 209 Sultanov, Kazbek 177 Suvorov, V. 110n8, 175 Thatcher, Laurel 52 Thévenot, Laurent 200n9 Timofeev, Mikhail 43 Tkachenko, Danila 9, 10, 39–40, 56–7, 59–67, 228 Todorova, Maria 4–5, 26, 35n3, 38, 198 Toporov, Vladimir 172, 193 totalitarian, totalitarianism 90, 92, 94, 100, 228, 230 toy, toys: childhood 28 (see also childhood); contemporary, presentday 9, 29–30; during perestroika 89, 110n7 (see also perestroika); industry, national toy industry 28, 29–30; late-Soviet 9; Soviet 9, 21–5, 27, 28–30, 34; store 24, 31–3; Toys of the USSR 9, 21–3, 34; urban 167; Western 24 trauma, traumatic: collective 230; historical 103; national 219 Travin, D. 107 Trofimova, Tat’ian 220n11 Tsar 78, 162, 173, 195; Peter the Great 106, 194, 199n1 Tumarkin, Nina 118, 127 Twitter 171, 221n17 Ukraine, Ukrainian, Ukrainians 1, 48, 104, 111n12, 115, 117, 119, 122, 126–8, 222n10, 227; Chernobyl 11, 115–29, 228; Kiev, Kyiv 111n12, 119–22, 129, 161–7 Urals 169, 171 urban: childhood 185 (see also childhood); development, planning 82, 158; intellectuals 71; toy 167 (see also toy, toys) Ushakin, Sergei 6, 9, 10, 25, 39–40, 44, 52, 55, 58, 117–18, 123, 147,

152n4, 186, 205, 226, 228, 229, 232–3 utopia, utopian: Communist 59; fantasy 7; fiction, novel 170, 233n1; Soviet 61, 66 Valiakhmetov, Rustem 39, 42, 46, 47, 52, 57, 61 Velikaia, N.M. 157, 160 Velikonja, Mitja 13 Volkogonov, Dmitrii Antonovich 116 Volkov, S. 90 Volskaya, Tatyana 24 war: Great Patriotic War (of 1941–1945) 174; post-war 48, 78, 192; Second World War, World War II (1939–1945) 77, 89, 90, 100, 117, 118, 120–4, 126, 127, 129, 165, 173, 232 Wesseling, Elisabeth 21, 22 West, Tamara 22 Western: academic(s) 3; anti-Western 99, 146; audience 133; companies 24; culture 4; Europe, European 5, 100, 119, 205, 232; fashion 142, 143; media, press 119; modernity 3, 231 (see also modernity); products 144; subcultures 95; toys 24 Westernization, Westernizing, Westernized 25, 29, 30, 170, 195; liberals 170; of Russian market 30 White, Hayden 136 Wijermars, Mariëlle W. 206 Wildschut, Tim 214 Williams, Raymond 9 Winter, Jay 231 xenophobia, xenophobic 162, 217–18, 228, 233 Yakubov, M. 92 Yeltsin, Boris 10, 14, 103–6, 110n1, 118, 203, 205, 206, 214–16, 220n14, 220n16, 230, 232 Yurchak, Alexei 14, 35n3, 187–9, 193, 200n13, 229 Zaborovskaia, M. 167 Zaikin, V. 122 Zhukov, Iurii 119 Zhukovskii, Vladimir 119–20 Zinov’ev, A. 11, 99, 100, 101 Žižek, Slavoj 188, 189