Postsocialist Landscapes: Real and Imaginary Spaces from Stalinstadt to Pyongyang 9783839451243

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Thomas Lahusen, Schamma Schahadat (eds.) Postsocialist Landscapes

Culture & Theory  | Volume 230

Thomas Lahusen is a professor at the Department of History and Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. After studying in Switzerland and Poland, he earned his Doctorat ès lettres at the University of Lausanne. Besides writing academic texts about Russia, Kyrgyzstan and China, he directed a number of documentary films. Schamma Schahadat is a professor of Slavic literatures and cultures at the University of Tübingen. She is working on Russian and Polish literature and film from a cultural studies perspective.

Thomas Lahusen, Schamma Schahadat (eds.)

Postsocialist Landscapes Real and Imaginary Spaces from Stalinstadt to Pyongyang

The project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation; SCHA 769/9-1) and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de

© 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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 publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Tong Lam Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5124-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5124-3 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839451243

Contents

Introduction Thomas Lahusen and Schamma Schahadat ................................................................. 7

Part 1: History’s Playground  The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space Serhy Yekelchyk ....................................................................................................25

The Last Soviet City Kate Brown .......................................................................................................... 47

Spaces of Detachment Serguei Alex. Oushakine.......................................................................................... 67

Part 2: Friendship of the Peoples? Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space Susi K. Frank ........................................................................................................95

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space Schamma Schahadat............................................................................................. 117

Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen............................................................... 143

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War Davor Beganović .................................................................................................. 161

Part 3: “Minus Stalin” The Limits of Central Planning: Rudimentary Town Centers in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros Mark László-Herbert............................................................................................. 183

Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia Ivaylo Ditchev ..................................................................................................... 205

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography Ekaterina Mizrokhi ................................................................................................ 217

(Re)Mapping National Space: The One Hundred Tourist Sites of Bulgaria and Their Metamorphoses Daniela Koleva .................................................................................................... 235

Part 4: Traveling Boundaries The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism: New York, Moscow, Pyongyang, Dakar Gesine Drews-Sylla .............................................................................................. 255

The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65 Andre Schmid ...................................................................................................... 281

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes Tong Lam........................................................................................................... 305

Authors ...........................................................................................................321

Introduction Thomas Lahusen and Schamma Schahadat

Fourteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Landolf Scherzer, a former GDR author and journalist, decided to walk 440 kilometers along the so-called Kolonnenweg, the fortified cement-paved path constructed by the East German authorities on their side of the border separating East and West Germany (Scherzer 2007). In every locality encountered, he chose to ring the doorbell of the first house on his left, asking the question: “How are you after fifteen years of German unity?” When the authors of the present volume met during a workshop on “postsocialist spaces,” held first in Tübingen in 2014, and then in Toronto in 2015, Scherzer’s question had taken a new urgency. Russia and the West were engaged in a confrontation that was increasingly labeled as a new Cold War, and the cracks in the European Union started to be felt along the old “iron curtain.” The shift to the right and nationalism is of course felt globally, but in the “East” it strangely echoes what, some twenty years ago, Katherine Verdery labeled as “transition to feudalism” to characterize the transition from socialism to the neo-liberal order (Verdery 1996: 227). Would it be too far-fetched to consider the regimes of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Andrzej Duda, or those of the Central Asian “heads of clan” a new form of “suzerainty” and the breakup of the Soviet Union and its “outer empire” as some sort of “feudal” fragmentation? (Ibid.: 205).With the transition to postsocialism came what Catherine Humphrey has called the “emotional identification with place”: the obsession with frontiers, territoriality, nationhood and ethnicity, from the Bosnian war to the war in the Donbass and the occupation of Crimea, and its social effects—the exponential increase of the “dispossessed.” (Humphrey 2002: 5-6) None of the participants to our workshops has experienced the border of postsocialism like Scherzer, but each of them has followed Karl Schlögel’s advice “to go out, to set oneself in motion, and descend from the high seat of reading,” (Schlögel 2003: 503)1 in order to take stock of what is the postsocialist “landscape” today. This term seemed to us better suited for the interdisciplinary character of our collection, represented by cultural anthropology, geography, history, literary scholarship, and

1

English translation: Karl Schlögel, In Space we Read Time. On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, transl. Gerrit Jackson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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even artistic photography. It also better “covered” the various uses, by its authors, of the notions of place and space. Some of us were dealing with the official, “detached” spaces that were the monuments, museums and other “lieux de mémoire” found in Bulgaria, Bielorussia, Kyrgyzstan, and even Senegal.2 Others were drawn to the concrete, personal and intimate experience of what humanistic geography has called “place,” to “topophilia” (to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s term), i.e., “the affective bond between people and place.” (Tuan 1974: 4) Affect and emotion have indeed become a major theme for human geographers. For Nigel Thrift “thinking” is “forms of doing and inhabiting.” He writes about the “infinitude of sensuous real-time encounters through which we make the world and are made in turn.” (Thrift 1997: 138) It is such “sensuous real-time encounters” that the authors of the present collection have often searched for and, to some extent, have used in their writing. In this sense, we have attempted some sort of “critical feeltrip,” to use the term of a recent “engaged” experiment conducted by geographer Oleg Golubchikov, who sent his students on a fieldtrip to Moscow, based on an “explicitly more-than-cognitive conception of field-based teaching and learning.” (Golubchikov 2015: 143-157) A number of essays in our volume have been written in such “explicitly more-than-cognitive conception,” in other words, “in affect,” especially, but not exclusively, when they were written by “natives.” We have in mind Ivaylo Ditchev’s memoir “Neighborhood Socialism,” Davor Beganović’s essay about besieged Sarajevo and its literature, Ekaterina Mizrokhi’s essay “Mourning the Microrayon,” Kate Brown’s “The Last Soviet City” and, to some extent, Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen’s “Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan.” We think that their inclusion gives our collection a “feel” not always present in academic volumes. We agree with Maruška Svašek and most contemporary cultural geographers that “emotions are inherent in political dynamics” (Svašek 2006: 1): they are inherent in the memories or the traces of a socialist past that haunt many of the landscapes described in this book. If emotions are one of the cornerstones of dealing with a socialism that was once conceptualized as a future that has already reached the present and that has now become the past,3 imagination is the other one: the spaces that seem to be so real—houses, people and objects left behind by socialism 2

3

A concept famously used by Pierre Nora, for whom memory means life, while history tries to control the events that happened, defiguring and taming them. Nora speaks of “the conquest and eradication of memory by history.” See Nora 1989: 8. An interesting study of such lieux de mémoire of socialism is provided by Owen Hatherley in his Landscapes of Communism. A History through Buildings (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Hatherley follows communist ideology through its buildings: the magistrale, the microrayon, etc. Emotions in Russian and Soviet culture are a topic that has been explored in detail in the last few years; we just want to mention three studies that trace the history of emotion in Russia and the Soviet Union: Plamper 2009: 229-334; Eli/Plamper/Schahadat 2010 and Steinberg/Sobol 2011.

Introduction

(like the Spreewald gherkins in the film Goodbye Lenin, 2003)—are always already imaginary spaces, filling the traces of the past with new meaning. An earlier Russian example of Schlögel’s call to “descend from the high seat of reading” is Vladimir Kaganskii’s Kul’turnyi landshaft i sovetskoe obitaemoe prostranstvo (Cultural Landscape and Soviet Habitable Space) (Kaganskii 2001). It is based on the author’s two-year travel across thirteen regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Kazanskii visited more than two hundred cities, towns, settlements and villages, traveled by train, bus, car, ship, sometimes by plane, and walked thousands of kilometers. His conclusions can be summarized as follows: the “universality” and “totality” of the former Soviet landscape, which was “generated by and lived in the semantics of the slogan, telling the story of overcoming and fulfillment,” has given way to a “universe of blocs, details, fragments, painfully becoming places, towns, districts, and countries.” The privatization of land has revealed the “true nature of homo sovieticus: to involve him in the control of the land has resulted in the privatization of theft [privatizatsiia grabezhy]”. (Ibid.: 6-7) To a greater or lesser extent, the authors of the present volume have explored various spaces of the postsocialist landscape by travel, or including travel and movement in their analysis: from Moscow to Dakar, through Pyongyang (Gesine DrewsSylla); from Bishkek to Belarus (Serguei Oushakine); through vanished or vanishing literary “Central Europe” (Schamma Schahadat); from Stalinstadt/Eisenhüttenstadt in East Germany to Sztálinváros/Dunaújváros in Hungary, or to Slavutych (near Chernobyl), a “brave new world, which, if we are lucky, city builders of the future will emulate” (Kate Brown); or, to the contrary, to an urban village in Guangzhou where the ghost of socialism is very much alive (Tong Lam). From the description of (post-)socialist interiors, façades, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, and objects to the imaginary spaces of literature, the authors have attempted to describe both the concreteness and intimacy of some of the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the “second world” today. On the one hand, the Soviet mapping of space has undoubtedly left traces of “Sovietness” in its former territory and zones of influence, and more than one essay in our volume deals with its legacy. On the other hand, one has to be careful not to over-emphasize the “fetishism of legacy,” as Oleg Golubchikov contends. Golubchikov understands transition as an “ideological, totalizing—indeed, totalitarian—project” and proposes to conceptualize the “mutual but hierarchical embeddedness of capitalism and socialist legacy” as “the hybrid spatialities of transition”: Hybrid spatialities represent the mutual containment and reconciliation of otherwise highly contradictory tensions between the spatial ideologies of state-socialism inscribed into the previously egalitarian landscape of economic geography and those of neoliberalism with its anti-egalitarian and exploitative effects. … At the scale of the city, new urban consumption-based semiotics lubricates class

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transformation. … The social and physical conditions of cities and their fortunes may seem to depend on their geography and legacy, but the root causes of their crises or otherwise are in the existing socio-political system—which twists, distorts, or recreates the meanings of the inherited landscape in its own image. This is why when under state-socialism the geographical differences served the egalitarian project of equalizing development, under capitalism, as Harvey [...] contends, even minor inequalities “get magnified and compounded over time into huge inequalities of influence, wealth and power.” (Golubchikov 2016: 616; Harvey 2010: 290) As demonstrated, for example, by the essay of Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen, the “hybrid spatialities of transition” started well before the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Soviet “affirmative action” (Martin 2001) ended up by producing Russified and urbanized Kyrgyz or other Russified ethnic minorities, who happened to be “more equal” than those who remained in the periphery or the countryside, but “less equal” than their Russian fellow citizens. After independence, both Russians and Russified Kyrgyz were increasingly challenged by citizens of the titular nation from “below” or the periphery, attempting to take their place in the conditions of “Kyrgyzation,” but most of them ended up by joining the ranks of the new colonized in the conditions of global neoliberalism. We have in mind the masses of migrant workers from the most impoverished places of Central Asia, sending their remittances back home. The Kyrgyz case—like many other postsocialist “cases”— proves, as Arif Dirlik has argued in a famous 2002 article, that “the cultures constituting the hybrid […] are themselves products of previous hybridizations; that is, previous histories” and that “the colonialism of the nation-state has become more apparent in these new settings, as the formerly colonized have sought to establish the hegemony of the nation, and the national idea, over widely disparate populations.” (Dirlik 2002: 428,442) The authors of our volume explore such hybrid spatialities in their own disciplinary terms. Historian Serhy Yekelchyk sees the “main lesson” of Mariinsky Park’s history in its hybridity, i.e., the “co-existence of the political, the commercial, and the communal within the same ‘ecological system’.” For Mark László-Herbert, also trained as a historian, what is distinct in the centrally-planned space of socialism in East German Stalinstadt and the Hungarian Sztálinváros turns out to be the absence of a center in both cases. The “five-storey, prefabricated khrushchevka apartment on 9-Parkovaya ulitsa” which Ekaterina Mizrokhi “mourns” in her “essay on affective geography” is inhabited by individuals “who do not always relate to a singular temporal framework, but can hold several temporalities simultaneously in variety of fractured, disjointed, hybrid and integrated ways.” Schamma Schahadat writes about “aesthetic geography,” “a cultural image, a pictorial way of represent-

Introduction

ing, structuring or symbolizing surroundings,” a “way of seeing.”4 For Susi Frank, the fact that Soviet literature continues to have an effect on the shaping of new literary developments in post-Soviet regions is due to the “complex and multilayered, transregional and transnational” character of its literary space, and its “dense intertextual entanglements,” brought forward by the project of a multinational Soviet literature. Seen from a distance of more than a quarter of a century, the recollection of socialism may acquire accents of irony and nostalgia like in the memoiristic essays of Ivaylo Ditchev and Ekaterina Mizrokhi, or negativity (the crimes and the dead bodies of World War II in Schamma Schahadat’s chapter on (East) Central Europe). But it can also be surprisingly hopeful, like Kate Brown’s celebration of Slavutych, despite contamination, economic depression and isolation. There are official spaces and intimate places inscribed with the traces of socialism. Examples of the first are the lieux de mémoire built to preserve or, more often, to create a collective memory. Serguei Oushakine, Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen, Daniela Koleva, and Gesine-Drews Sylla describe such spaces of memory: the State Historical Museum in Bishkek, the Khatyn’ Memorial near Minsk, the one hundred tourist sites in Bulgaria, and the “Monument de la Renaissance africaine” in Dakar. Examples of the second are the places that are lived in: the socialist apartments in North Korea (Andre Schmid); Ivaylo Ditchev’s own childhood neighborhood in Sofia; the microrayon and communal apartment in Moscow (Ekaterina Mizrokhi) or the Chinese Urban Village (Tong Lam). The mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetical and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of academic and essayistic writing makes it possible for us and, we hope, for the readers of this volume to cast a glance at the very heterogeneous and indeed “hybrid” relics of socialism and its transformation in very different parts of the world. “In space we read time,” states Karl Schlögel, going back to the idea of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary chronotope (see Bakhtin 1990: 84-258) and, at the same time, coining a very apt formula for the entanglement of time and space. History, Schlögel argues, can only be understood if the historian frees himself or herself from the linear regime of time and attempts, instead, a spatialization of time-maps, mental or geographical, that allow the historian to identify simultaneity and similarity, as well as differences (Schlögel 2003: 51). The authors of this volume do not only read space in time, but turn space into text (a scripturescape) and sometimes experience it with their memories or their bodies, so that space is transformed into a mem-

4

The first term is used by Schamma Schahadat in her essay. The further definitions are by Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, also quoted in Schahadat’s essay.

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oryscape or a bodyscape.5 Conceptual frameworks are recapitulated, living spaces revisited or analyzed, spaces are visualized, intertwining (historical) narratives and images, time and space. There are many other aspects that the essays in this book deal with, such as memory, narrative, borders, center and periphery. Certain topoi show up again and again: emptiness and abandonment, vision and failure, planning and chaos, dreamworld and catastrophe, as Susan Buck-Morss puts it (see Buck-Morss 2002). What connects all our case studies is the fact that they have experienced a socialist experiment, and that most of them came “back from the future” (Groys/von der Heiden 2005) and had to adjust to a hic et nuncwithout the perspective of a shining path ahead, to use the Russian translation of svetlyi put’. When did postsocialism begin? Is it the “post-communist condition” that Boris Groys writes about, the time after “the communist event,” i.e., after 1989/1991?6 On the one hand, this time line holds true for the former Soviet Union or, more generally, for the former Eastern bloc. On the other hand, we need to consider postsocialism in a broader framework, both in time and space (Shih 2012: 28). Three essays included in our volume transcend the time-space of the “post-communist condition”: an essay on the “socialist” resistance of a present-day “urban village” in China challenges this country’s neo-liberal repositioning that already started toward the end of the 1970s;7 the return to a Pyongyang apartment of the late 1950s not only “preserves” the laboratory status of socialism in action, allowing for useful comparisons with other such domestic spaces analyzed in our volume, but it also serves as lesson of history that any scholarship alternative to the current neo–cold war studies of North Korea should consider; the third “anomaly” is an essay on a highly syncretic monument in Senegal, which enlightens us about the way socialist myths and ideologies worked their way into the rest of the world and how persistent they are, even if Senegal has never been a “people’s republic.”8                                                                             ***   The book is subdivided into four subsections. PART ONE of the book, “History’s Playground,” is devoted to three very different hot spots of the present: the former Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv, which became one of the political landscpes of present-day Ukraine (Serhy Yekelchyk); “Plutopia” in post-Chernobyl workers’ communities (Kate Brown); and the postcolonial spaces of 5

6 7 8

These neologisms are, of course, inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s attempt to describe global space as a network of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. See Appadurai 1996. Boris Groys, “The Post-Communist Condition”: https://blogs.brown.edu/hiaa-1810-s01-fall2017/files/2017/08/Groys.pdf, 167. Accessed 31 Oct. 2018. See, e.g., Bolesta 2014. See also Stanek 2012.

Introduction

the Khatyn’ Memorial and the reenactment park of the Stalin Line in Belarus (Serguei Oushakine). Serhy Yekelchyk, in his analysis of “The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space,” concentrates on an urban site that only in recent history was transformed into a political space: the Tsar’s Garden, rather than the Maidan, for example, which is saturated with political and symbolic meaning. The Tsar’s Garden (or: Mariinsky Park) acquired its political role much later and is, as Yekelchyk claims, “a site that could still revert to its previous social role”—as such it offers an interesting example to show how space becomes a political place and its reverse. Yekelchyk narrates the park’s history from the 18th century until today. The park acquired political meaning from the 1980s onward, due to its closeness to the Supreme Rada—in the crisis of 2013/2014, however, the park was claimed by the (often paid) supporters of the anti-Maidan as part of a “street politics.” Kate Brown, a specialist in (post)catastrophe in the Soviet Union and the United States, acts as participant observer in her text, “The Last Soviet City,” attending a memorial party, feeling “transported into the set of a Soviet film.” The reader follows her to Slavutych, the town that was built after the Chernobyl reactor exploded, to house plant operators and liquidators and, more important perhaps, to prove that, “like the mythical phoenix, the Soviet Union would emerge triumphant from the catastrophe.” Once built as a Soviet town, Slavutych now finds itself on Ukrainian soil. Until today, however, the town has preserved its Sovietness; “the last Soviet city” is an anachronistic landscape in a post-Soviet world. In a very personal account about her visits to Slavutych, Brown describes the place as a total exception to the drab, one-artery provincial towns of post-1991 Ukraine and shows how the architectural plan of the city is based on the ideal of a Soviet city that encompasses, among others, “the international ideology of the late Soviet state,” something hardly ever realized. The contribution combines a short history of Soviet city landscape with an ethnographic narrative, focusing on the woman Nadia who was evacuated with her family from Pripiat after the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and found a new home in Slavutych. Serguei Oushakine, in “Spaces of Detachment,” describes the “uneasy coexistence of history and material structures” in post-socialist nations (in this case: Kyrgyzstan and Belarus). The starting point for Oushakine is the State Historical Museum in Bishkek, which appears to be an “uneasy” combination between the material inherited from socialism and a post-socialist context: state socialism has inscribed itself into the post-socialist narrative. This example, Oushakine states, is typical for many post-socialist countries; post-socialist memorial sites turn Soviet structures into “objects of elaborate historical debates”: while the material structure/space remains unchanged, the signification has shifted considerably. Oushakine looks at two sites closely linked to the Stalinist past: the Khatyn’

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Memorial near Minsk, which was built to commemorate the victims of World War II, and the theme park Liniia Stalina (Stalin’s Line). PART TWO is devoted to what is left—or not—of the “Friendship of the Peoples” after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Susi Frank writes about the legacy of Soviet multinational literature, taking examples from contemporary Ukrainian poetry; Schamma Schahadat traces the literary “invention of (East) Central Europe” in the travelogues of the Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk, of the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych, and others; Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen analyze the multiple hybrid landscapes of post-independence Kyrgyzstan, while Davor Beganovič focuses on the literary landscape of Sarajevo before and after the Bosnian war, attesting to what was destroyed of the multiethnic socialist Yugoslavia. Susi Frank’s contribution is entitled “Contemporary Ukrainian RussianLanguage Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space,” and it thus shifts the focus from geographical to literary space. She asks what happened to the paradox of the Soviet project of “multinational literature” in post-Soviet times, a paradox insofar as multinational Soviet literature was supposed to be Soviet and national at the same time, a “zone of influence of Soviet and Russian literature where Soviet Russianlanguage literature formed the center of a transnational and multilingual canon.” In the contemporary literary field of Ukraine, where we find Ukrainian-language and Russian-language poetry side by side, Soviet traces as well as national and transnational tendencies can be observed. How, Frank asks, does the post-Soviet literary field (new literary institutions, journals, or internet-platforms) “try to reshape Russian literature transnationally in the form of a Russian-language literature that is crossing political boundaries?” Schamma Schahadat’s focus is on the “(Re)invention of (East) Central Europe,” borrowing Larry Wolff’s expression of the “invention of Eastern Europe.” The chapter follows the traditions of the invention of Central Europe from pre- to post-socialist times: from Friedrich Naumann’s political and economic notion of Mitteleuropa to the imaginary geographies from the cold war until today. Czesław Miłosz’s concept of (East) Central Europe in his Native Realm (1959) and Milan Kundera’s in his “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1984) were continued by Andrzej Stasiuk, Yuri Andrukhovych, and Serhii Zhadan, among others. What becomes obvious is the fact that Central Europe—a cultural landscape with a historical dimension—is always already an imaginary space governed by geopolitical, artistic, or intellectual forces. Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen, in their article titled “Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan,” examine the complex hybridities of a changing place and those who inhabit it: the recent total remake of the State Historical Museum in Bishkek analyzed by Oushakine; the self-published novella written by a Russified Kyrgyz man whose identity is still very “Soviet,” but whose

Introduction

“Kyrgyzness” surfaces when he is confronted with Russian privilege; an interview with the first president of independent Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev, advocating his political program of a “common home” for all ethnicities, which recalls the utopia of the “friendship of nations” in a country of overlapping ethnic and regional borders; the transition from previous “clan” practices to new class divisions of a rural Kyrgyz family, its rise and decline under the “spatializing effects of neoliberalism”; and finally those left behind, experiencing various degrees of hybrid existence: like Nurbek, a Kyrgyz who only speaks Russian, still living in the “no-place” of a previous Soviet “secret city,” or like Liudmila, whose first language and emotions are Kyrgyz, but whose “homeland” considers her Russian. In “Space under Siege: Sarajevo during and after the War” Davor Beganovič follows Sarajevo’s city planning from Ottoman times until the Yugoslav War in the 1990s. From the beginning the city has, on the one hand, a “vulnerable city core,” and, on the other, difficulties expanding on either side for topographical reasons. If one looks at besieged Sarajevo during the civil war, two topographies emerge: the landscape of the occupier and the landscape of the occupied, both of whom experience an intimate but also different relationship to the city. Beganovič analyzes three literary texts to examine the relationship between the actual situation of the war and the imaginary reworking of it in literature (Milenko Jergovič’s “Gravedigger,” Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin,” and Semezdin Mehmedinovič’s Sarajevo Blues). PART THREE is entitled “Minus Stalin,” to locate the transcendent body of power eliminated after the collapse of the Soviet Union and that still somehow remains present as a specter of the past. If Ernst Kantorowicz in his The King’s Two Bodies argues that the “King never dies,” (Kantorowicz 1957: 377, 396)9 he has in mind the transcendent body of power that is eternal. The essays of Part Three examine post-Soviet spaces in which the “king is dead,” but where one can, nevertheless, still feel his uncanny presence. They deal with the “absent” town centers of two former “Stalin cities” in East Germany and Hungary (Mark László-Herbert); with memories of a “different” neighborhood of Sofia and its changes after socialism (Ivaylo Ditchev) as well as with childhood memories of a Moscow microrayon (Ekaterina Mizrokhi) and with the “remapping of national space” through the “one hundred tourist sites of Bulgaria during and after socialism” (Daniela Koleva). The imaginary spaces in Mark László-Herbert’s essay titled “The Limits of Central Planning: Rudimentary Town Centers in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros” take shape on the drawing board, when architects planned socialist cities in the GDR and in Hungary. These cities, however, were never built as designed—history overthrew the blueprints. Disagreeing with Henri Lefebvre, according to whom socialist space never existed, László-Herbert argues that this existence became obvious after the end of socialism. Paradoxically, its main charac9

“Dignitas quae non moritur”.

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teristic is absence: absence of a proper social center. Instead, we find “unfinished, rudimentary civic centers.” Instead of monumental buildings, after the 1953 uprising in Stalinstadt (later, Eisenhüttenstadt), the dissatisfied population was awarded with shops and entertainment along the Magistrale. Today the never filled city center is covered by a park and a parking lot. Similar developments can be observed in Stalinstadt’s Hungarian twin town, Sztálinváros (later, Dunaújváros). Ivaylo Ditchev’s essay titled “Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia” is very different from the impressions László-Herbert evokes in his two socialist towns gone capitalist. Ditchev confronts us with a personal narrative about the neighborhood in which he grew up in (socialist) Bulgaria. Instead of planning from above, as shown in László-Herbert’s contribution, here we have intimacies from below, although the neighborhood’s origin lies in the official plan to create an intellectual district in the 1920s. What is similar, however, in both cases is the failure of state planning: while Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros could not be realized because of the unexpected turns of history, political will in Bulgaria’s socialist center was disturbed by irrational forces from below, from the neighborhood, a “relatively closed space that both profited from and resisted to the communist project, transforming its backwardness into privilege.” Ditchev’s reminiscences go back to a neighborhood called Losenez, a privileged intellectual district, “far from urban planning.” Ditchev, like László-Herbert, asks what was specific about socialist space and responds with another paradox: “The socialist character of place consisted in the specific resistance to the socialist project.” “Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography” by Ekaterina Mizrokhi echoes the landscape of Kate Brown’s “last Soviet city.” But it doesn’t share Brown’s nostalgia for the future. Many years after emigration, Mizrokhi returns to her native Belyaevo in Moscow to investigate the rhythms and characteristics of the spaces of the microrayon, the standardized, prefabricated latemodernist micro-district housing estates that littered the Soviet Union and many other places of the socialist landscape, as well as their affective geographies in the face of impending demolition.10 Weaving together personal reflections, architectural particularities, and artistic exploration, Mizrokhi creates a matrix of understanding of what it means to inhabit these places in the present moment. To study and document the phenomenology of life in a microrayon is an exercise in the archival preservation of fleeting local and diasporic cultural histories profoundly rooted in places that will soon cease to exist—an act of frustratingly futile mournful defiance. Mizrokhi’s essay is perhaps the closest in this collection to Golubchikov’s “feeltrip”—including engagement with spatial justice, with perhaps the same limitations that were experienced in Golubchikov’s experiment: “thinking 10

About the persistence of prefabricated housing in the post-socialist world and the emotions of those who continue to live in them, see also Lahusen 2006: 736-746.

Introduction

about the ‘difference’ of the Russian spatialities involved only limited reflections of what this means for the order back home.” (Golubchikov 2015: 147) Daniela Koleva’s chapter called “(Re)Mapping National Space: The One Hundred Tourist Sites of Bulgaria and their Metamorphoses” concerns itself with the transformation of “national space through tourism in socialist and post-socialist Bulgaria.” What happened, she asks, to “socialist leisure and tourism” in post-socialist Bulgaria? Koleva’s starting point is the difference between capitalist and socialist tourism: While Western tourism is satisfied with leisure and consumption, socialism had to justify leisure activities in the context of the ideology of national production and the creation of the “new man” (and woman). Tourism under socialism constituted a kind of biopolitics, controlling the individual’s body and time. This ideological background for tourism in Bulgaria is measured against the tourist landscapes (the “tourist inventory”) that have changed significantly in the shift from socialist to post-socialist Bulgaria. Koleva shows how tourists are perceived to respond to landscape, especially postsocialist landscape. PART FOUR, entitled “Traveling Boundaries,” goes beyond the European scope of its predecessors. It deals with the bewildering migrations of socialist aesthetics in a Senegalese monument (Gesine Drews-Sylla), with “gendered anxieties” of dormitory and apartment living in North Korea during the early 1950s and their transformation in the early 1960s (Andre Schmid), and ends with a photo essay on an “urban village” in the midst of Guangzhou, China (Tong Lam). In “The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism: New York, Moscow, Pyongyang, Dakar,” Gesine Drews-Sylla follows the route of a socialist aesthetics from Russia to Senegal via North Korea, thus showing how two global paradigms, the postcolonial and the post-socialist, interact locally in the Global South. Senegal marks the semantic center of the essay, or, more specifically, the giant Monument de la Renaissance africaine located outside of Dakar, which from the aesthetic point of view is a “syncretistic hybrid” that evokes Soviet as well as American associations. Drews-Sylla shows how ideological and aesthetic concepts are inscribed into this statue, built in 2010 by a North Korean company. The contribution offers a perfect example of the global circulation of a socialist aesthetics through both socialist and post-socialist spaces and shows how socialist internationalism and local traditions fuse. Andre Schmid’s contribution deals with the last Stalinist-type country in existence, one that is definitely not “post-socialist”: North Korea. In “The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953–1965,” Schmid concentrates on the restructuring of living space in the 1950s, after the devastation wrought by the Korean War when prefabricated mass-housing was built. These houses resembled their counterparts in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Specific to this Korean case was that the housing project not only carried the symbolic meaning of socialism and nationalism but it also was viewed “as a space of potential labor

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and production.” The apartment, Schmid writes, “acquired shifting meanings” depending on the context: (national) history, socialism, or the everyday. Individual in tune with collective happiness lay at the core of this New Living, and it was closely connected to participation in the production process; the “model workers stories” functioned as the grand récit of happiness. Tong Lam’s contribution to the book is a very special one, since it combines image and text to show and to describe an “Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes”. While Lam’s photographs give us artistic insights into this Chinese urban village, an essay accompanies his photographic work. They both evolve around the oxymoron of the “urban village”: the village transported into the city, representing the dark side of an “urban modernity that fetishizes gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular architecture.” Lam follows the changes in Xiancun (Xian Village) in the southern provinces of Guangdong from the 1950s to today, from a “Soviet-style collectivized farmland” to a space swallowed by the growing metropolis Guangzhou (Canton). Xiancun turned into an illegal settlement within the metropolis, one in which the city’s most marginalized population found its living space, a spot “where the disposable labor force is stored, ready to be mobilized when needed.” It is a very special slum space created in the uncontrollable aftermath of socialism, located not at the capitalist city’s periphery, but right in the city center, protected by walls from intruding into the surrounding city. Undoubtedly many blank spots remain on the landscape sketched by our volume. For example, none of its authors have dealt with Russia per se (with the exception of Ekaterina Mizrokhi’s microrayon) , but since “Russia” had neither its strictly national territory during the lifetime of the Soviet Union, nor its own Communist Party, it identified increasingly with the Soviet Union as a whole, it was “everything else.” (Slezkine 1994: 435) As to the “periphery,” Cuba, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and all the mental and political landscapes of the left in Western Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, their history is in need of many other travels along the hybrid places of our global world. Let us go back to Landolf Scherzer’s inspection of the former border between the two Germanys. First published in 2005 by Aufbau-Verlag, Der Grenz-Gänger (The Border Walker) earned both criticism and praise. The author was accused of lacking objectivity, even of falsifying some of the interviews he conducted. One critic accused Scherzer of “fogging up” (vernebeln) his argumentation, along the lines of PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) followers, presenting everything related to the Federal Republic of (West) Germany (FRG) as negative, and everything concerning the former East Germany (GDR) as positive.11 Judging from the almost four hun11

Matthias Biskupek, “Krieg um die Grenzen der Rezension, Ein Lehrstück in bisher fünf Bataillen.” http://www.matthias-biskupek.de/text/palmbaum-grenzen.html (accessed 1 Nov. 2018).

Introduction

dred pages of Der Grenz-Gänger, the latter criticism seems rather unfair, even if Scherzer’s leanings to the political left do crop up now and then. At times, some of the remarks made on the former GDR-FRG border sound prophetic. Near Point Alpha, NATO’s Cold War observation post between Rasdorf, Hesse (former West Germany) and Geisa, Thuringia (former East Germany), a former GDR soldier talks about the border guard dogs: “Only the best German shepherds survived the horrible torture to run along the border all year long in the heat and the cold. Out of these, the breeders chose the toughest ones for the next generation. These very dogs were bought by American breeders. Where are these German-American dogs deployed today? Perhaps at the Mexican border?” (Scherzer 2007: 359-60) A few days before, a (West) German peasant, asked about his relations with the Thuringian farmers besides whom he now works on adjacent fields, shares the following comment with the author: “The wall is higher than before; even if one cannot touch it, it’s there.” (Ibid.: 339) For one of the editors of the present collection (Thomas Lahusen) Scherzer’s account of the inner German border was not only an example of the “descent” called for by Schlögel, but helped to clarify unresolved issues of childhood memories. Born in (West) Germany, Thomas Lahusen remembers discovering on a postal stamp, sometime around 1952, the existence of the “Deutsche Demokratische Republik.” Asking what the abbreviation of DDR meant, he was informed that it was “in der Ostzone” (in the East zone), beyond the “iron curtain”.12 “I imagined a gigantic metal curtain coming down from the sky… Both the ‘zone’ and the image stayed with me for a long time, as it did probably for many West Germans, perhaps even until today, which marks perhaps the origin of the misunderstanding between “Ossies” and “Wessies” and most certainly the fact that, for those born in the German Democratic Republic, the “East” does not “let them go.”13 Recently, a retirement home in Dresden has chosen an interesting new method of helping its patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, called “reminiscence therapy.” It is a room, furnished in the style of the GDR sixties. According to nurses, doctors, and psychologists, it has helped many affected persons “to regain lost skills, such as taking meals by themselves.”14 A real-life sequel to the film Goodbye Lenin? We hope that our volume will contribute to both reminiscence and therapy. 12 13

14

About the “iron curtain” between the two Germanys at that time, see the interesting report by Rutter 2014: 78-106. Elke Bredereck, “Der Osten lässt mich nicht los” (The East does not let me go). Die Zeit (14 September 2018): https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2018-09/ehemalige-ddr-ostdeutschlandidentitaet-chemnitz-fremdenfeindlichkeit-10nach8. Accessed 14 September 2018. “DDR-Devotionalien helfen Alzheimer-Patienten,” MDR Sachsen March, 1, 2017: http:// www.mdr.de/sachsen/dresden/demenz-erinnerungen-100.html (accessed 6 March 2017). We thank Sanja Ivanov for having drawn attention to this article.

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                                                                            ***   The book is the result of the project “(Post)Socialist Spaces”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). To both institutions we want to express our thanks for the generous funding of our international and interdisciplinary project. We also want to thank various people who read the manuscript at its different stages: Petra Dreiser for copyediting the English texts of the non-native speakers; our students in Tübingen who helped to prepare the manuscript: Daniela Amodio, Jennifer Döring, and Josef Nelson; transcript publishers and Gero Wierichs for turning the manuscript into a book and publishing it. And, last but not least: We also acknowledge the help of the kind and not so kind reviewers who helped us to make this volume better.

References Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1990): “Forms of Time and the Chronotope of the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in: Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 84-258. Bolesta, Andrzej (2014): China and Postsocialist Development, Bristol: Polity Press. Buck-Morss, Susan (2002): Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Massutopia in East and West, Cambridge: MIT Press. Dirlik, Arif (2002): “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation,” interventions Vol. 4(3) (2002). Eli, Marc/Plamper, Jan/Schahadat, Schamma (eds.) (2010): Russkaia imperiia chuvstv. Podchody k kul’turnoi istorii emotsii, Moscow: NLO, 2010. Golubchikov, Oleg (2015): ”Negotiating critical geographies through a “feel-trip”: experiential, affective and critical learning in engaged fieldwork.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education, vol. 39, No. 1(2015), 143–157. Golubchikov, Oleg (2016): “The urbanization of transition: ideology and the urban experience.” Eurasian Geography and Economics, Vol. 57, No 4–5 (2016). Groys, Boris/ Von der Heiden, Anne (eds.) (2005): Zurück aus der Zukunft. Osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp. Hatherley, Owen (2015): Landscapes of Communism. A History through Buildings, London: Allen Lane. Harvey, David (2010): A Companion to Marx’s Capital, London: Verso.

Introduction

Humphrey Caroline (2002): The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kaganskii, Vladimir (2001): Kul’turnyi landshaft i sovetskoe obitaemoe prostranstvo: sbornik statei, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Kantorowicz, Ernst (1957): The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lahusen, Thomas (2006): “Decay or Endurance? The Ruins of Socialism.” Slavic Review, 65: 4 (Winter 2006), 736-746. Martin, Terry (2001): The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nora, Pierre (1989): “Between Memory and History,” Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26, Spring, 1989, (Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory), 7-24. Plamper, Jan (ed.) (2009): Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture, special section in Slavic Review, 68: 2 (Summer, 2009), 229-334. Rutter, Nick (2014): “The Western Wall: The Iron Curtain Recast in Midsummer 1951,” in: Patryk Babiracki / Kenyon Zimmer (eds.): Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s—1960s, College Station: University of Texas at Arlington, 78-106. Scherzer, Landolf (2007): Der Grenz-Gänger, Berlin: Aufbau. Schlögel, Karl (2003): Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Schlögel, Karl (2016): In Space we Read Time. On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, transl. Gerrit Jackson, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Shih, Shu-mei (2012): “Is the Post- in Postsocialism the Post- in Posthumanism?” Social Text 30: 1 (2012), 27-50. Slezkine, Yuri (1994): “The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, 53: 2 (Summer, 1994). Stanek, Lukasz (2012): “Introduction: the ‘Second World’s’ Architecture and Planning in the Third World,” The Journal of Architecture, 17:3, 299-307. Steinberg, Marc D./ Sobol, V. (eds.) (2011): Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Svašek, Maruška (2006): “Introduction. Postsocialism and the Politics of Emotions,“ in: Maruška Svašek (ed.): Postsocialism. Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1–33. Thrift, Nigel (1997): “Cities Without Modernity, Cities with Magic,” Scottish Geographical Magazine, vol. 113, No. 3 (1997). Tuan, Yi-Fu (1974): Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Verdery, Katherine (1996): What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Other Sources Biskupek, Matthias “Krieg um die Grenzen der Rezension, Ein Lehrstück in bisher fünf Bataillen.” http://www.matthias-biskupek.de/text/palmbaumgrenzen.html (accessed 1 Nov. 2018). Bredereck, Elke ‘Der Osten lässt mich nicht los” (The East does not let me go). Die Zeit (14 September 2018): https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2018-09/ehemalige-ddrostdeutschland-identitaet-chemnitz-fremdenfeindlichkeit-10nach8. Accessed 14 September 2018. “DDR-Devotionalien helfen Alzheimer-Patienten,” MDR Sachsen March, 1, 2017: http://www.mdr.de/sachsen/dresden/demenz-erinnerungen-100.html. Accessed 6 March 2017. Groys, Boris “The Post-Communist Condition”: https://blogs.brown.edu/hiaa-1810s01-fall-2017/files/2017/08/Groys.pdf, 167. Accessed 31 Oct. 2018.

Part 1: History’s Playground 

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space Serhy Yekelchyk

The Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine (2013–14) derives its name from Kyiv’s central plaza, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. It was there that the revolution’s supporters camped out and crowds of Kyivites headed when a crackdown seemed imminent. In selecting this venue, the revolutionaries relied on an established tradition of holding public protest rallies there, in particular during the student hunger strike of 1990 and the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005. In Soviet times Khreshchatyk Boulevard, which crosses the square, also served as the city’s and the Ukrainian republic’s principal parade ground; this made it and the main square where the government reviewing stand was located during the late Soviet period Ukraine’s principal space of symbolic political action. By camping on the Maidan, the protesters did not threaten the actual seats of authority because the parliament and government buildings were located in the upper part of town, not far from Maidan but on a steep hill. Instead, they were challenging the authorities in public space by claiming the city’s main plaza and the traditional nexus of political spectacle (see Yekelchyk 2015: 1–4). A deeper look into the history of the Maidan as a political space reveals that it was, in fact, construed as a protest space in relation to the seat of authority, the City Duma (municipal council) building that had stood in the center of the square between 1876 and 1943. The revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 organized their rallies in front of the building, and significant political monuments stood on the square before the Duma facing Khreshchatyk Boulevard: Stolypin, Marx, and—after the building was no longer there, on the opposite side of the boulevard, directly across from where the Duma had been—Lenin and the Independence Column. Initially, a pragmatically-chosen protest venue, this place became marked symbolically as political space, caus ing new protesters to show up there a century later. Maidan is thus a fascinating case study of a spatial turn in historiography of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Building on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre and later scholars, such as Fernando Coronil, one can demonstrate with the example of the Maidan that space is not just a “stage” of politics and social life, but exists in a complex interaction with time and being. Social and political relations are

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produced and reproduced through the medium of space, and space shapes human action as much as it is being shaped by it. (Lefebvre 1974; Coronil 1997) No matter how fascinating the spatial history of the Maidan is, one senses in this highly political locale some degree of inevitability or overdetermination. There is no going back to the nineteenth-century model of Khreshchatyk as a grand boulevard and Independence Square as a place for an itinerant circus to build its tents. The Maidan will always be political space as well as a more abstract symbol of either people’s power and Ukraine’s sovereignty or Western-backed nationalist violence, depending on the narrator’s position. Khreshchatyk will remain a venue for military parades, encoding whatever official ideology and memory politics are current in Ukraine. It is more interesting from a theoretical standpoint to examine a site with a more recent history as political space, a site that could still revert to its previous social role. Such a study would allow for a more subtle analysis of the process of becoming political space and its reverse, as well as of the main actors involved in imbuing landscape with political meaning. The Euromaidan Revolution furnished this very example in the form of Kyiv’s Mariinsky Park. During the fateful winter of 2013–14 this park next to the government quarter became the bulwark of counterrevolutionary forces and a place of violent clashes, which left several people dead and many injured. It also became in public discourse a Kyivan Vendée of sorts, the only place in the capital dominated by the faceless crowd of protesters-for-hire waving the flags of the ruling Party of Regions. How did Mariinsky Park come to play this role? Tracing the park’s development into a political space, this paper will focus on the complex interaction of power and society in the making of an urban landscape. It will show how the city residents repeatedly reclaimed this green space, which at different points in its history was the realm of royalty, monuments, and mass politics. The park’s remarkable resilience as a common social space can be explained by its fundamental spatial hybridity. High politics was part of this green space from its very inception, but it always existed in symbiosis with public leisure and commercial entertainment. It is also telling that no attempt to divide the park into sections and give them separate names ever succeeded beyond the official maps; no matter which authorities tried to divide the park—tsarist, Soviet, or Ukrainian—the new names did not hold. It almost feels as though Mariinsky Park’s continued vitality as the site of both communal life and politics has been linked to its wholeness.

The Tsar’s Garden Kyiv’s Old Town, where the ancient princes of Rus′ resided from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, was built on a hill high above the Dnipro River, the lowlands

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

area by the river becoming the trading suburb known as the Podil. A deep ravine with a stream running through it separated the Old Town from the much larger hill just south, where the first monastery in Rus′ became established in the eleventh century, on the end farthest from the Old Town. This neighborhood became known as Pechersk or Pecherske, named after the caves that housed the original monastery. After the city came under the rule of the Russian tsars, they found it frustrating that Kyiv lacked a distinct city center. Peter I concluded, during the Northern War, that the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra (or Kyivan Cave Monastery) was the only part of the town that could be defended in case of an enemy attack, and he ordered that it be encircled by impressive fortress walls. Catherine II complained in a letter to the German Enlightenment thinker and journalist Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, that she could not find the town itself, just the suburbs here and there (Tolochko 2012: 159). She initiated the construction of a modern fortress in Pechersk that her grandson Nicholas I completed in the 1840s. The military and the ecclesiastical hearts of the city thus developed on the far side of the hill opposite the Old Town and separated from it by a ravine. As for the part of Pechersk closest to the Old Town, the industrious Peter I ordered it turned into a medicinal garden. Empress Elizabeth found it already decaying and in 1748 ordered a formal French garden to be build there instead. A French garden had to center around a palace, so Elizabeth engaged her favorite architect, Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, to design an ornate two-storey palace in the style of Louis XV, which a team of other architects led by Ivan Michurin constructed in 1752–55 (Kudrytskyi 1981: 366). Catherine II stayed at the palace in 1787, when she “failed” to find the city of Kyiv. Ironically, she did not see the city center precisely because this center was forming before her very eyes. Although the new royal palace rarely served as an actual royal residence, the aristocracy rushed in to build their houses in this part of Pechersk, which became known as Lypky (because of the prevalence of linden trees). By 1811 Lypky boasted such impressive mansions that Alexander I stayed that year at the private residence of the marshal of nobility, Prince Obolensky, rather than in the royal palace. New office buildings were also constructed there. Before the Napoleonic Wars some of the region’s governor-generals lived in the palace; it was thus a seat of administrative power, which enjoyed the prestige of a royal residence (Makarov 2005: 485). Yet the palace, which was simply referred to as the Palace, was also part of an architectural whole that included the Tsar’s Garden. Back then the garden lay only to the northeast of the palace (the present-day part, which is located between the palace and the Dynamo Stadium), with the Valley of Roses cascading down to the lake that is now a soccer field. Descriptions of the garden from the 1770s mention alleys decorated with statues, pavilions, grottoes, and fountains that a “welldressed public” could enjoy. On holidays, the governors-general organized impressive fireworks in the garden. The park thus functioned as a social and cultural space

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for the upper classes already in the eighteenth century. However, the palace’s presence was an important component of this picture; once the palace burned down in the fire of 1819, the park fell into neglect (Ibid.: 486). By then, new construction was connecting the previously separated parts of Kyiv. The ravine between the two hills became a bustling new avenue, Khreshchatyk Boulevard, which acquired its current contours between 1803 and 1837. As the city’s population grew, the share of the middle-class public increased, especially after the opening of Kyiv University in 1834. In the aftermath of the first abortive Polish rebellion of 1830–31, the city’s upper and middle classes also changed in terms of ethnic composition, as more Russian and “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) officials and their families replaced dispossessed Polish nobles. New bourgeois models of leisure gradually spread around the mid-nineteenth century, transforming parks across Europe into public spaces and venues of paid entertainment (on the case of St. Petersburg, see Konechnyj 1994: 121–130). Beginning in the 1830s, this trend could also be observed in Kyiv. The palace did not burn down to the ground in the fire of 1819. Its lower, brick floor survived, although the upper wooden floor and all the furnishings were lost. Neither Alexander I nor Nicholas I expressed interest in restoring the palace; Nicholas visited Kyiv on many occasions, but usually stayed at the governorgeneral’s residence, a block away from the palace. Constructed in the early 1800s and acquired by the crown in 1833, this smaller palace was destroyed during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. As for the charred first floor of the royal palace, in 1834 it was leased to the Society of Curative Mineral Waters, which carried out superficial renovations. Perceived as a “southern” city, where people would go on vacation before the railways made the Crimea easily accessible, Kyiv had no notable natural mineral springs. However, “taking the waters,” a combination of health treatment and vacation, was so fashionable that the public flocked to the palace to partake of the mineral water that was actually prepared in the other wing of the same building (Kievskie Vedomosti 4 June 2007: 25). The commercial character of this enterprise helped solidify the park’s evolution into a space of bourgeois entertainment. A military band played there once a week and masked “Italian carnivals” were held every year. A summer theater became a tradition from the 1830s, and by the 1840s food stalls and itinerant musicians occupied the central alley. A popular zoo featuring an elephant, lions, and tigers also opened in the park. Far from serving as a symbolic center point for Lypky’s high society, the palace and the park were now dominated by a noisy crowd that was not admitted to the neighborhood’s tony mansions. Entertainment-hungry revellers from other parts of town tended to come from Khreshchatyk Boulevard, which by the 1860s had become a popular strolling avenue, where prostitutes plied their trade. Catering to this public, a French entrepreneur in 1863 opened in the lower part of the Tsar’s Garden (at the northern end of Khreshchatyk) a private paid-

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

entry entertainment park featuring daily music, popular theater performances, and dancing. Called pretentiously Chateau de Fleurs, this establishment was expanded in the 1870s with the addition of a large cafe and dancing pavilion. In 1882 the entire part of the park adjacent to Khreshchatyk was constituted as a separate entity, the Merchants’ Garden, with the city’s Merchant Assembly taking responsibility for its maintenance (Shirotskii 1911: 220–221 and Gazeta po-kievski 18 August 2008: 17). Meanwhile, in the upper part of the park, the transformation into a common social space for well-to-do urbanites was reversed. With the appearance of railroads and the discovery of the Crimea as a resort, the royal family started making regular trips south with a stopover in Kyiv. In 1868 Alexander II ordered the restoration of the palace. The mineral-waters company moved out and the Ministry of the Royal Household reclaimed control over part of the garden north of the palace, the oldest and most cultivated part of the upper park. A public park was developed instead on the southern side of the palace, where until 1847 soldiers did marching training on a huge, empty ground between the palace and the Pechersk fortress. Beginning in 1847, this space was redesigned as an English garden; it was opened to the public in 1874 as Alexander’s Garden, a name that did not stick. Nevertheless, this part of the park facing the main entrance to the palace carried some political symbolism, and not just because spectators could sometimes catch a glimpse of the royal carriage entering and exiting through the palace gates. In 1889 an impressive neo-Byzantine church, St. Alexander Nevsky, was built at the entrance to the park closest to the palace to mark the survival of Alexander III and his family in the railway crash of 1888. It also became the official parish church of Pechersk (Ibid.: 221). Encoded with religious and monarchical symbolism, this part of the park was the closest one could get to the notion of political space.1 The palace and the park still needed a name and they acquired it in 1870, when Empress Maria Aleksandrovna, the wife of Alexander II, became the first royal to stay at the renovated palace. First informally and then formally, both the palace and the park became known as Mariinsky (Kievskie Vedomosti 4 June 2007: 25). From then on, royal family members stayed at the palace quite regularly, if briefly, usually on their way to or from the south or sometimes going to or returning from Europe. When Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, his mother was staying at Mariinsky Palace as part of her trip to the Southwestern Front to supervise convalescent hospitals. On and off, Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna spent nearly two years

1

The monument to Alexander II unveiled at the eastern end of Khreshchatyk in 1911 stood on the edge of the Merchant Garden, but it faced the Tsar’s Square (now European Square) and Khreshchatyk, thus serving as part of this avenue’s architectural ensemble rather than the park’s. The same is true of the Soviet monuments that replaced it during the interwar period: statues of the Red Army warrior and Stalin. For an essay on the history of European Square; see Bakanov (2006: 23).

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of the war at Mariinsky, turning one wing of the palace into a temporary hospital. Such royal visits imbued the palace with political symbolism resulting in mass ceremonies on the edge of the park, which very likely spread into the park itself because the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky was located there. Thus, an undated photograph from the World War I period on the site of the Museum of Kyiv’s History shows a crowd of Kyivites and a number of military personnel, presumably convalescing soldiers, kneeling before the palace during an open-air church service for the Russian army (see “Vystavka 1914 Kyiv”).

Proletarian Park There was no storming of Mariinsky Palace during the revolution, either in March or November 1917. Major revolutionary rallies took place on Khreshchatyk Boulevard near the City Duma building, and fiery speakers addressed the crowds from the Duma’s balcony. In 1919 a major conflict over whose flag would fly on the Duma building developed between two potential allies, the Russian White and the Ukrainian armies. The center of the city’s revolutionary public politics during the chaotic years 1917 to 1920 was clearly there, in the exact spot where the democratic opposition would erect its tents in 2004 and again in 2013. While Mariinsky Palace was not stormed, it was searched. In the early days after the fall of the monarchy, rumours circulated in the city that the Dowager Empress had a telegraph installed in the palace to communicate with the German high command. Representatives of the City Duma visited the palace in her absence, but only found a small telegraph apparatus connected to the city’s main station (Kievskaia mysl 6 March 1917: 2). Once the Dowager Empress departed Kyiv peacefully in late March 1917, two organizations moved into this politically-symbolic residence—the Executive Committee of United Civic Organizations, which supported the Provisional Government, and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The close proximity of the fortress with its revolutionized garrison and Arsenal factory, which later served as a base for two Bolshevik rebellions in the city, likely helped the Soviets to claim part of the palace and, eventually, to dislodge the more moderate Executive Committee. However, the Soviets in Kyiv were originally dominated by the Mensheviks, rather than the Bolsheviks. In July 1917, when the Ukrainian Central Rada reached an agreement with the Provisional Government recognizing limited Ukrainian autonomy, the future head of the Ukrainian government, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, traveled at night by car from the Rada’s building on the other side of Khreshchatyk to Mariinsky Palace, where visiting ministers of the Provisional Government were consulting with the Soviets and the moderate pro-Russian Executive Committee (Ianevskyi 2010: 119).

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

Instead of the revolutionaries storming the palace, as in the mythologized version of the Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, in Kyiv the forces loyal to the Provisional Government surrounded Mariinsky Palace on 28 October 1917 (10 November New Style). They arrested the members of the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee, but the Ukrainian Central Rada intervened on behalf of the latter. In the end, the Bolshevik leaders were jailed briefly, while the pro-Soviet and pro-Ukrainian troops battled the Provisional Government loyalists on the streets of Kyiv for the next three days (Verstiuk 2011: 199–200). Fighting also took place in the park itself, which was cleared of the Provisional Government’s forces by 31 October (12 November) (Kudrytsky 1981: 195–196). Kyiv changed hands numerous times during the revolutionary period—fourteen times to be exact, at least according to the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who spent most of the period from 1917 to 1920 in the city (Bulgakov 1995: 298–299). Each arriving army felt the need to claim the palace, which suffered significant damage as a result. According to the Ukrainian memoirist Dmytro Doroshenko, the forces of the Provisional Government were the first to devastate the palace when they took it briefly in October 1917 (Doroshenko 2007: 187). For two days in January 1918, Mariinsky Park turned into a battlefield once more; the forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic fought there against the Bolsheviks, who were advancing from the southern side of the park (Rukkas et al. 2016: 61–62). Interestingly, only the Bolsheviks in 1918 and again in 1919 chose the palace as the seat of political power in the city. (In 1918 they also executed in the park in front of the palace various suspected “enemies” in the park in front of the palace, see Hrynevych & Hrynevych, 2001: 126–27.) The Ukrainian Central Rada operated from the building of the former Pedagogical Museum on the other side of Khreshchatyk, close to the Old Town; initially, it planned plan to move eventually into the Palace, but then the Pedagogical Museum acquired a symbolism of its own as a site of Ukrainian authority.2 Other administrations of the revolutionary period preferred the governor-general’s smaller palace nearby. The governments of the Ukrainian People’s Republic resided there, as did the Ukrainian puppet monarch during the 1918 German occupation, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky (Kucheruk 2008: 99). For the early Menshevik-dominated Soviets and, later, the Bolshevik masters of the city, their “occupation” of the palace probably had the weightiest political connotations. They confirmed this by symbolically claiming the small square in front of the palace and the park itself for fallen revolutionaries. They marked this space with large mass graves of those who were killed in November 1917 while fighting the forces loyal to the Provisional Government, as well as during the Arsenal rebellion against the Ukrainian People’s Republic in January 1918. One of these graves 2

On the Central Rada’s initial plan to requisition Mariinsky Palace, see Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady i upravlinnia Ukrainy (fond 3645, opys 1, sprava 1, fol. 107).

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was directly in front of the palace’s main entrance, on the edge of the park, some fifty meters away from the main gates. Another was located in the part of the park closest to the Arsenal. Both mass graves were on the southern side of the palace, in the “new” park reclaimed from a parade ground. The entire park was renamed Park of the Victims of the Revolution. The name and the memorial referred only to Bolshevik victims; the memory of those whom the Bolsheviks executed in the palace and in the park itself was erased from this commemorative landscape, as was the memory of the Ukrainian soldiers solemnly buried there after Kyiv returned under the control of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in December 1918 (Tynchenko 2014).3 Such selective symbolic landscaping determined the political-memorial character of this section, which the Soviet authorities further consolidated after World War II. Meanwhile, the palace itself lost any political significance. After the Bolshevik victory in 1920 military staff of the local garrison moved in, followed by an agricultural college, and, briefly, a museum of agriculture (Segodnia 4 June 2007: 25). The key political institutions of Soviet power in the city took possession of the former City Duma building, and Khreshchatyk Boulevard became the customary location for parades. Moreover, Kyiv was not the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic at the time, the city of Kharkiv, near the Russian border, played this role. In fact, it was the transfer of the capital, Stalin’s surprise decision in 1934, which changed Kyiv’s political geography and put the park on the trajectory leading to its present state (on the decision and its consequences for Kyiv, see Yekelchyk 1998: 1229–1244). By then, the ideological processes that produced Stalinism had already resulted in a new name for the park; with the cult of the revolution and revolutionaries vacating the central stage for that of the heroes of the present and their new leader, the park was renamed as Proletarian in 1930. The leadership of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine had grand designs for their new capital. City reconstruction plans in the 1930s featured the creation of a new government quarter in the Old Town with a colossal statue of Lenin between the two symmetrical neoclassical office buildings. Lenin was to face the new, large parade square, to be created by extending St. Sophia Square, the traditional place of religious festivities in the city and the place where the (noncommunist) Ukrainian People’s Republic held parades and rallies between 1917 and 1920. In the end, the square and the Lenin monument were never constructed, and only one of the two symmetrical government buildings went up. The relatively narrow Khreshchatyk remained the main venue for parades. On the other side of Khreshchatyk, on Pechersk Hill, new government offices also appeared. The 3

The authorities of the Ukrainian People’s Republic organized in January 1919 a solemn burial of the Sich Riflemen who died fighting against the troops of Hetman Skoropadsky, see Tsehelskyi (1960: 195–96).

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

large building of the CP(B)U Central Committee stood at some distance from other landmarks, up a steep hill from the Maidan. However, the building that had been intended for the NKVD, but in the end (and to this day) was used to house the Cabinet of Ministers and the central apparatus of the ministries, was constructed across the street from Mariinsky Park, approximately a hundred meters from the palace’s back entrance. Finally, the new capital needed a legislature building, especially after 1937, when the Supreme Soviets of the union republics became permanent institutions with frequently convened sittings. In 1939 the relatively small building of the Supreme Soviet was completed right next to Mariinsky Palace, standing parallel to it, its main entrance also facing the park. It would have faced the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky in the park if the latter had not been destroyed shortly before the construction started. The legislature held no real political power, and the Stalinist concept of public politics did not envisage mass rallies in close proximity to government buildings. For this reason very little space, no more than fifty meters, was left between the Supreme Soviet’s main entrance and the park. The park itself was also transformed. At first, the Ukrainian authorities considered creating a gigantic Central Park of Culture and Recreation, modeled on the Moscow one, and spreading over the entire length of Pechersk Hill to Volodymyrska Hill on the Old Town side (Visti 14 July 1934: 4).4 Then, however, they went in the opposite direction. According to the 1936 decision of the Ukrainian party leadership, the former Merchant Garden in the lower part of the park close to Khreshchatyk became Young Pioneers’ Park, complete with children playgrounds and cinema. With the Dynamo Stadium on the site of the park lake from 1933, Proletarian Park was reduced to a narrow strip of green space between the palace and the stadium’s southern fence; it was also renamed May First Park. The newest, southern, section of the upper park, which was previously referred to as its political-memorial section, became the unimaginatively called Soviet Park (TsDAHO 1/20/6914: fols. 2–3). In line with the Stalinist restoration of conservative cultural and family values, the CP(B)U Politburo also decided in 1936 to resume the tradition of free symphony concerts in May First Park (TsDAHO 1/6/408: fol. 222). It appears that this tradition was interrupted only for two years after the capital moved to Kyiv, and possibly in connection with the construction of government buildings nearby. Free symphony concerts in the park marked it as a public space of high culture. In 1930 Boris Pasternak immortalized them in his poem “The Ballad” (“Drozhat garazhi avtobazy”); they

4

The idea of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure was implemented after World War II, when the city authorities started developing into a park the green zone on the slopes of Pechersk Hill leading to the Dnipro, around and below Petrivska Alley. However, neither their enthusiasm for the project nor the name lasted long, see Gazeta po-kievski (21 February 2008: 18–19).

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also served as an inspiration for the 1934 poem “Symphony” by the Ukrainian poet Mykhailo Drai-Khmara (Bykov 2005: 176–178; Drai-Khmara 1991: 185). World War II left a terrible mark on the park and the palace. Their militarization started in the fall of 1939 with an exhibit of Polish military equipment captured by the Red Army, but already by the summer of 1941 the park housed Soviet anti-aircraft guns and Zeppelin-type airships used at night as barrage against German aircraft (Malakov 2002: 34, 44). Later during the war the palace suffered damage from bombings, likely Soviet ones, whereas the German occupation authorities used the park for public executions, hanging suspected Red partisans and labor-duty evaders there (Pravda 8 November 1943: 3). When the Soviets returned in November 1943, they strengthened the political-memorial function of the park with two important burials. The commander of the first tank to break into the city center, Sgt. Nychypir Sholudenko, was killed on Khreshchatyk and buried on the edge of the park at the street’s eastern end. His tomb filled an important symbolic niche, that of a memorial place marking the Red Army’s bloody efforts to liberate the city, and, moreover, because Sholudenko was an ethnic Ukrainian and native of the Kyiv region. His unassuming gravesite soon became the place for official and unofficial political pilgrimages.5 The following year, however, a prominent Soviet military leader upstaged the lowly Sholudenko: Army General Nikolai Vatutin, Commander of the First Ukrainian Front, the group of armies that had taken Kyiv in 1943. In late February 1944 Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas ambushed Vatutin’s car, wounding the general, who died of sepsis in a Kyiv hospital on 15 April. His majestic funeral on 17 April 1944 featured a procession walking uphill from Khreshchatyk to the Supreme Soviet and into the park beyond; Vatutin was buried in the exact same spot where the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky had stood until the mid-1930s. This major commander, who could be defined in the public discourse as “Stalin’s faithful pupil,” was a much better fit for the Stalinist concept of a war hero because in a sense he was Stalin’s proxy; a great man leading the troops. The Ukrainian party leader Nikita Khrushchev led the funeral procession, and the most prominent wreath on the grave was “From J. V. Stalin and the Officers of the General Staff” (Yekelchyk 2014a: 61). Already in 1948 Khrushchev unveiled an impressive monument with the general’s statue on Vatutin’s grave, and for the next decade the gravesite functioned as the official Ukrainian site of memory related to the war. That was what Khrushchev

5

It was located approximately halfway up along the park walkway from the present-day European Square to the Puppet Theater. In 1957 Sholudenko’s remains were moved into the burial alley in the Eternal Glory Park, which the authorities built in the part of Pechersk that was closest to the Cave Monastery.

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

meant in approving the inscription, “To General Vatutin from the Ukrainian people,” although such an ethnically-exclusive formula displeased Stalin (Kalnytsky et. al. 2002: 325). The memorial section, known as Soviet Park, now featured a majestic monument to a World War II general, in addition to two relatively modest signs marking the mass graves of the revolutionary period. The Stalinist concept of a public park combined entertainment and political education (see Kucher 2007; Kukher 2012). Every summer weekend in the immediate postwar years the main branch of the regional library, located nearby (today the Parliamentary Library) wheeled book stands into the park to create a mobile library. Interestingly, the internal library paperwork referred to the park by its old name, Mariinsky, a practice that apparently existed throughout the Soviet period (DAKO 178/1/7: fol. 5 overleaf). Throughout 1947 the Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra gave forty-five concerts in the park, thus continuing the tradition of park music that stemmed from tsarist times (Kyivska Pravda 3 April 1948: 4). By 1952 political-information and educational lectures were given regularly in the park; a report about all city parks during that year’s summer season gives a total of 371 lectures with a combined audience of 190,000 people, the latter probably an inflated number (DAKO 1/11/316: fol. 45.). That year city newspapers admitted that the lectures were often boring and unsophisticated (at a “low level” of quality) (Vechirnii Kyiv 23 August 1952: 3). What made them more palatable was the regular presence of food stalls and ice cream carts, at least beginning in the 1950s (DAKO 1/11/316: fol. 45). The late Soviet period saw the park’s transformation into a place where political life turned into a mere formality; public leisure was the true raison d’être. On the Revolution’s fiftieth anniversary in 1967 the authorities unveiled a new monument on the mass grave closer to the Arsenal: a statue of a revolutionary worker waving a (presumably red) flag. On major Soviet holidays various dignitaries and schoolchildren came to the park to lay flowers at its memorial sites, although their importance has now diminished. The Revolution could be celebrated elsewhere, for example, at the Lenin statue at the western end of Khreshchatyk (unveiled in 1946) or near the large monument to the Revolution on the Maidan, showing Lenin leading workers and soldiers (unveiled in 1976). The “Great Patriotic War,” too, acquired new principal memory sites: first, the Park of Eternal Glory located a kilometer south of the memorial section, with its monument to the Unknown Soldier (1957), and farther south, the colossal Motherland statue (1981). The false enthusiasm of speeches delivered in the Supreme Soviet, the institution that rubber-stamped the party’s decisions, did not stir members of the public strolling peacefully in the park to any political action. The Mariinsky Park of the 1970s was above all community space. It belonged to young mothers pushing baby carriages and parents chatting about life as their kids played together on the grass. Specific male communities congregated in the two

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opposite corners of the park: chess players in the chess pavilion near the Dynamo Stadium in the north and a somewhat noisier group of domino players, who sat at outdoors tables near the southern entrance. The two large, ornate fountains dating from the early 1900s served as popular picture-taking spots. For the children from the surrounding neighbourhoods, by far the most important part of the park was the small children’s amusement park that was developed in the 1970s right behind the statues of Vatutin and the revolutionary worker. Rides on the swings and carousels were relatively inexpensive, unlike the more popular mini railroad and, beginning in the late 1970s, gaming machines, where one could torpedo as many enemy ships on the screen as time and a steady hand permitted. The icecream kiosk stood in front of the entrance to the amusement park. Crossing into another part of the park meant walking by the palace, but there was nothing to see there. At the time, it was used for rare diplomatic receptions; the Ukrainian republic’s branch of the Soviet Committee for Peace occupied the wing closest to the Dnipro River. The next part of the green space, May First Park, was not always a children’s domain. The adult world intruded there from time to time, especially in the evening; slightly inebriated soccer fans heading to the Dynamo Stadium and dropping a swear word every now and then. The audience at the free symphony concerts, on the contrary, would get annoyed if the children were too loud. Crossing the beautiful, small bridge over Petrivska Alley, one could reach Young Pioneer’s Park, the site of the most exciting cinema in the city, a stereoscopic one (standing in the exact same spot where the Puppet Theater stands today). On this end of the hill one could already see the city lights and hear the Khreshchatyk Boulevard roaring below.6 The Mariinsky Park of the late Soviet period can be seen as a fascinating case of spatial hybridity, with the society and the state coexisting in the same space without ever meeting each other. Yet, there was an incipient political dimension to this silent symbiosis. In 1963 a group of young patriotic writers organized a concert and poetry recital in the park to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Ukrainian poet and playwright Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913), a distinguished figure who belonged to the official cultural pantheon, but was also a participant in the Ukrainian national movement and a connoisseur of European modernism—key elements that were suppressed in her Soviet biographies. The concert was first permitted then banned at the last moment for fear of “nationalistic” statements. When the young litterateurs tried to go ahead anyway, the management of the summer concert podium turned on some loud music. The organizers then retreated to the fence of the Dynamo Stadium and read poetry there, using newspapers as torches

6

This paragraph is based on the author’s reminiscences of growing up in a neighbourhood near the park.

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

(Yekelchyk 2015a: 56). The Ukrainian authorities launched a crackdown on patriotic intellectuals, but in 1965 they also unveiled in the same section of the park a small statue of Lesia Ukrainka and, in 1974, a monument to the Ukrainian actress Maria Zankovetska (1854–1934), as if acknowledging the Ukrainian dimension of this cultural and political space.

A Political Park The park’s tranquility ended rather abruptly in 1990, when independent civic action became possible during the late stage of Gorbachev’s perestroika. After the conservative Ukrainian party boss Volodymyr Shcherbytsky retired in 1989, the party’s control over public space disintegrated quickly. Real power was now vested in the republic’s Supreme Soviet (now referred to by its Ukrainian name, the Supreme Rada), which was also an arena of intense political controversy, especially after the 1990 republican elections. If there was a single event marking the transformation of the Supreme Rada building and its environs into a modern political space, it was the storming of the building on 1 October 1990. At the time, the democratic opposition was demanding the resignation of the cabinet and official recognition of the historical Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flag. However, the so-called “group of 239” stalwart Soviet functionaries still held the majority in the legislature, even though they now commanded little support on the streets. The opposition was preparing for a nationwide strike; student activists would soon occupy Kyiv’s central square and launch a hunger strike there. Against this turbulent background, on 29 and 30 September the opposition bussed into the capital tens of thousands of supporters, who disembarked in the suburbs in order to enter the city on foot, as political pilgrims of sorts. On 30 September some 200,000 protesters held a rally near the Central Stadium (in a different part of town). The next day they marched uphill to the Supreme Rada building carrying a large blue-and-yellow flag. With oppositional parliamentarians at the head of the procession, the marchers broke into the legislature, carrying the flag and a large portrait of the national bard Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861). Neither the riot police at the entrance, nor the communist legislators inside put up any serious resistance, and the flag was soon raised over the building (see a participant’s memoir Karelin 2013). The communist majority drew its conclusions from this storming, and in November it organized its own “counter-rally” by busing in clerks and collective farmers from the provinces, as well as “miners” sporting suspiciously pristine white, brand-new helmets. They camped at Mariinsky Park, leaving their red banners under trees while awaiting action (Pavlychko 1992: 122–123). From then on, supporters or protesters showed up increasingly often before the walls of the parliament, and police could only control the main entrance by cordoning off the entire narrow pedestrian square in front

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of the building. This move pushed the crowds back into the park. The grass became trampled quickly in the strip of green space between the Vatutin monument and the parliament—and it remains largely so today, because of nearly continuous rallies, sit-ins, and tent cities. In the early 1990s the authorities acknowledged the area near the Supreme Rada as political space by broadcasting some parliamentary debates over loudspeakers. The protesters also got into the habit of bringing megaphones, while the representatives of striking miners in 1993 brought their yellow plastic helmets to bang them against the ground in unison.7 There was much noise and political tension, but never enough portable washrooms to accommodate the crowds. The general public began avoiding this stretch of the park, and the children amusement center was no longer there. Yet, somehow political rallies did not spread to other sections of the park. In 1993 the names of all three sections of the park were changed to Khreshchatyi, City, and Mariinsky parks, respectively, although Kyivites continued referring to them as a single entity, Mariinsky Park. Elsewhere in the park, peaceful life went on as before. The continuing vitality of the park as the site of communal life was demonstrated by the emergence of new traditions. In the 2000s young couples started hanging lovelocks with their names on the small bridge connecting the City and Khreshchatyi parks. This Western European-inspired practice became so popular that the municipal authorities had to organize an annual removal of locks every spring, each time collecting up to a ton of metal (Kievskie Vedomosti 16 July 2008: 4; Segodnia 2 April 2010: 9). A popular Water Museum opened in Khreshchatyi Park above European Square in 2003, in the towers of the city’s first centralized water-pumping station dating to the 1870s. Small businesses proliferated in all parts of the park in the 2000s, especially unregistered mobile vendors of coffee and ice cream, as well as pedal car rentals and pony rides. In 2008 the venerable tsarist and Soviet tradition of music in the park was restored with the establishment of a summer music festival called Kyiv Summer Musical Evenings. This annual event takes place in the months of June and July; occasionally, classical jazz supplements the classical music (Gazeta po-kievski 15 July 2008: 4; Metro 1 June 2009: 4). Finally, after dark the park attracted some communities still marginalized in mainstream Ukrainian society; in particular, it became a meeting place for gay men (Kievskie Vedomosti 13 May 2009. 9). Wild capitalism invaded on a large scale in 2005, when an executive high-rise apartment building was constructed on the northeastern edge of Mariinsky Park, its large footprint swallowing a narrow strip of greenery, which was previously part of the park. The courts spent years debating the legality of land requisition for the project, but in the end all public protests and even President Viktor Yushchenko’s 7

The miners demanded, among other things, a special session of the Supreme Rada, which was indeed convened in June 1993, see Wolczuk (2001: 117–18).

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

personal condemnation of the developers’ greed were in vain. The 22-storey building is still there, its apartments selling for seven-figure sums in US dollars (Kievskie Vedomosti 16 June 2006: 4; Gazeta po-kievski 22 June 2009: 2). In contrast, the 2009 proposal to build an observation wheel in the park modeled on the Eye of London was shelved because of the landslides-prone soils of the Dnipro hills (Segodnia 28 July 2009: 10). Instead, the palace itself—after independence, an official venue for receiving foreign dignitaries—became the subject of an extreme case of corruption and inefficiency. If the park’s renovation in the mid-2000s went relatively quickly and without much public scandal (the work was limited mostly to changing the asphalt and tiles on the pathways), the restoration of Mariinsky Palace became a longdrawn-out affair. It began in 2007 with President Yushchenko’s plan to turn the palace into the presidential residence and office. From the municipal authorities he obtained permission to transfer a stretch of the park to the Presidential Administration office, which immediately installed construction fences (Kievskie Vedomosti 29 November 2008: 11). Ironically, it was the same section of the park that the Ministry of the Royal Household had reclaimed from the public in the 1860s. After several years of large budget appropriations for the renovations, the palace was left unfinished, surrounded by a construction fence. What was originally a threeyear project remained unfinished at the time of the Euromaidan Revolution, and no further funding was available (Obzor 26 June 2008: 2; “V boi idut odni aferisty: zavkhoz Ianukovicha rvetsia v parlament,” SpetsKorr 5 September 2014). Only in January 2018 did President Petro Poroshenko officially open the renovated palace by hosting a large diplomatic reception. However, he did not intend to use the palace as a residence (“President Poroshenko holds diplomatic reception at Mariinsky Palace,” Ukrinform 17 January 2018). While big business could only impinge on the park’s borders, a much larger threat came from big politics, specifically Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. The nonviolent protests during the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 unfolded down below, on Khreshchatyk, although at some point the Orange opposition blockaded all government buildings in Pechersk and even stormed the empty building of the Supreme Rada, where Viktor Yushchenko had sworn a symbolic presidential oath in the hall without a quorum. However, the park suffered little damage during these tumultuous events. In the end, Yanukovych was defeated, but his advisors clearly learned some lessons from the revolution, in particular concerning the symbolic power of a protesting crowd and the need to prevent the blockading of government buildings, by physical force if necessary. In other words, they understood the need to create, in opposition to the Maidan, an anti-Maidan that could claim public space and an aura of authenticity for the Yanukovych camp. The importance of supplying a television image conveying popular support for Yanukovych to compete with the iconic image of the Maidan as the site of popular protest was not lost on them

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either. The Party of Regions needed to engage in street politics in Kyiv, a city where it had little popular support. The first occasion to test the new strategy came with the parliamentary crisis of 2007. With Yushchenko as president, his former nemesis Yanukovych as prime minister, and his former ally Yulia Tymoshenko as the leader of the opposition, a messy three-way struggle ensued beneath the Supreme Rada’s glass dome. The Yanukovych team engaged in bribing and blackmailing parliamentarians to join their coalition, an unconstitutional tactic against which both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko protested vigorously. As the opposition organized mass rallies on the Maidan, the Yanukovych team bussed in large groups of people from eastern Ukraine, who on 31 March took part in a meeting on European Square nearby; that evening the easterners moved into Mariinsky Park, where they pitched tents. By 4 April, after Yushchenko dissolved the parliament, the Party of Regions organized the arrival by bus and train of several more thousand people, many of them young men, reportedly at a price of up to $30 per day, a significant amount for average Ukrainians. That day they physically cleared the Maidan of opposition supporters, but returned again to Mariinsky Park for the night. By 5 April the number of their tents in Mariinsky reached 216 and, in City Park on the other side of the palace, 162 (“V Kiev pribylo piat poezdov i 66 avtobusov so storonnikami Ianukovicha,” Lenta.ru 5 April 2007). This was the first time that street politics enveloped almost the entire park. By the time the crisis was resolved in late May through the scheduling of early elections on a date on which all the sides agreed, most of the park was ruined. Even newspapers close to the Party of Regions did not deny that all the Yanukovych supporters left on the same day, following “an order to return to their home regions” (Segodnia 31 May 2007: 3). Kyivzelenbud (Kyiv Green Construction Administration), the municipal organization responsible for the park’s maintenance, anticipated that it would need a month of full-time work to remove the garbage and restore the grass and plants (Gazeta po-kievski 15 June 2007: 6). In early June it proposed to fence in all city parks and establish fixed operating hours: from 7 a.m. to midnight in the summer and from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. from October to March. The proposal, which clearly targeted Mariinsky Park above all, also called for a system of fines for violators (Kievskie Vedomosti 8 June 2007: 3). The project was shelved by the municipal council, however, because political parties understood the value of Mariinsky as a political space. By 2010 the supporters of Yulia Tymoshenko rallied in the park, without putting up tents (Segodnia 26 April 2010: 2). In the same year newly elected President Yanukovych showed up in Mariinsky Park with a large group of bureaucrats armed with rakes and shovels for a day of voluntary labor, clearly trying to disassociate himself from those who had trashed the park, presumably the opposition supporters (Segodnia 24 April 2010: 7).

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

When the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013–14 brought masses of protesters to the Maidan, the Party of Regions resorted to a familiar tactic by bussing in the antiMaidan. This time, young men from the provinces constituted the large majority of its supporters. They also acquired a generic name, titushky, after Vadym Titushko, a wannabe athlete from a small town near Kyiv, who often came to the capital with a group of fellow thugs-for-hire to pose as Yanukovych supporters. Titushko himself missed the call for the anti-Maidan because he had had the misfortune of being captured on camera beating up a female journalist earlier in 2013, receiving a conditional sentence as a result. However, titushky as a social group of underemployed young men from the provinces, often members of athletic clubs, constituted the core group of the anti-Maidan in 2013–2014. Often armed with clubs, they coordinated their actions with the police. The anti-Maidan began, as on the previous occasion, on European Square, with a mass meeting of Yanukovych supporters on 12 December 2013. There, the anti-Maidan could vie for control of the city center with the opposition, as well as limit the possible geographical spread of the Maidan simply by brutal force. In fact, it can be argued that the reliance of the Party of Regions on titushky started the spiral of escalating street violence that eventually led to the revolution’s victory (Yekelchyk 2014: 63-69). Having conceded the loss of the city center to the opposition, the anti-Maidan immediately set up its tents in Mariinsky Park with the intention of preventing the Maidan protesters from marching on the government quarter. Contemporary photographs show large groups of similarly-dressed young men sometimes carrying the blue-and-white flags of the Party of Regions. They are usually standing behind the cordon of riot police. When the clashes in the city escalated to their bloody crescendo on 18, 19, and 20 February 2014, titushky joined the riot police in beating up Maidan supporters in and around Mariinsky, which resulted in several deaths and many injuries (“Titushek v Mariinskom parke vooruzhali so skladov MVD—Avakov,” Novoe vremia, 2 February 2015; “Za poperednimy pidrakhunkamy, sohodni u Kyievi vbyto 20 liudei,” EspresoTV 18 February 2014; “Cholovik z rushnytseiu, abo shcho trapylosia na Maidani,” BBC Ukraina 19 February 2015). The anti-Maidan in Mariinsky was disbanded on 21 February, as the riot police left its positions and word reached the titushky that their services were no longer required. In a spectacular acknowledgement of their lack of ideological commitment, the titushky left the Party of Regions’ flags on the ground, next to mountains of garbage (“Antimaidan snova ostavil posle sebia razgrom v Mariinskom parke,” Censor.net 21 February 2014). They also left the park tainted with blood and the image of a reactionary citadel in the middle of the capital.                                                                             ***   In the summer of 2014 Mariinsky Park still showed its open wounds. Several

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makeshift memorials and church candles stood in places where people lost their lives, and some walkways were missing bricks and plates that had been used as projectiles. Buses with riot police stood parked in the alleys behind the palace and near the stadium, this time guarding the new authorities from the opponents both among the former Yanukovych allies and members of the extreme Ukrainian right. By the summer of 2015 all the pathways were repaired, and some makeshift memorials disappeared, but the buses with riot police were still there. Slowly and cautiously, the general public, together with special-interest groups of capoeira dancers, skateboarders, and proponents of Falun Gong, was reclaiming the park. Small businesses also returned, ranging from the ubiquitous (illegal) food stalls to rentals of two-wheel segways. In 2015 the summer music festivals also returned (this description is based on the author’s field trips in 2014 and 2015). Yet none of these groups or initiatives tried to reclaim the park as a park, as a communal green space free of politics. An active group of park enthusiasts, many of them university students or graduate students, exists in Kyiv, but they are focused on mobilizing the residents to claim control over smaller parks that fall under the jurisdiction of the district (raion) authorities. They do not work with Mariinsky because this park is under the city’s control, which does not give local residents the same opportunities to get involved. However, this is only part of the reason. As one person involved with the group wrote to me, Mariinsky is “the space of officialdom,” meaning, practical difficulties in locating a community of citizenstakeholders, but at the same time implying that this space has been claimed by the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian political world (Popova 2015). Yet, politicians were also interested in reviving the park. In 2016 the mayor of Kyiv, the former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko (Vitalii Klychko), organized minor restoration work in the park complete with the installation of free dispensers of plastic bags for dog feces—and claimed credit for it by way of strategically-placed signs informing Kyivites of this being his initiative. In December 2016 the amusement mini-town known as “Santa’s Residence” opened in the park, although this new tradition/novelty did not gain traction and was not renewed in subsequent years. In May 2017, when Ukraine hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, its opening was staged in the park with a red carpet laid out in the narrow space between the park and the parliament. On that occasion, stands with large banners separated the parliament building from the walk and the park, thus symbolically reorienting this space toward the park and the world of entertainment (“U Mariinskomu parku Kyieva vidrylasia rezidentsiia Santa Klausa,” S′ohodni 26 December 2016; “U Kyievi vidbulasia urochysta tseremoniia vidkryttia Ievrobachennia-2017,” UNIAN 8 May 2017). All in all, the park’s present and future do not look grim. The main lesson of Mariinsky Park’s history may well be its hybridity: co-existence of the political, the commercial, and the communal within the same “ecological system.” Protesters

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

and strollers can be one and the same people who are using the park as a hybrid public space. No less remarkable is the park’s resilience as a single space. Neither the tsarist authorities nor the Soviets succeeded in dividing it into several smaller ones, each with a well-defined social function. Rather, it is a symbiosis of these functions that made Mariinsky Park what it is.

References Bakanov, Vitalii (2006): “Zhivaia ploshchad stolitsy,” Argumenty i fakty v Ukraine, 30 June 2006. Bulgakov, Mikhail (1995): “Kiev-gorod,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, Moscow: Golos, 298–99. Bykov, D. L. (2005): Boris Pasternak. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Coronil, Fernando (1997): The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doroshenko, Dmytro (2007): Moi spomyny pro nedavnie mynule, Kyiv: Tempora. Drai-Khmara, Oksana (1991) “Pro batka,” Suchasnist, nos. 7–8, 184–92. Hrynevych V. A. & Hrynevych L. V. (2001): Slidcha sprava M. A. Muraviova: dokumentovana istoriia, Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NANU. Ianevskyi, Danylo (2010): Proekt “Ukraina” abo taiemnytsia Mykhaila Hrushevskoho, Kharkiv: Folio. Kalnytsky, Mykhailo & Malakov, Dmytro & Iurkova, Oksana (2002): Narysy z istorii Kyieva, Kyiv: Heneza. Karelin, Oleh (2013): “Sylove vnesennia Derzhavnoho Prapora v Verkhovnu Radu Ukrainy 1 zhovtnia 1990 r.,” Ekolohichni Problemy Zakhidnoi Ukrainy, 10 November 2013 (http://karelin.org.ua/sylove-prapor-vr/). Konechnyj, Albin M. (1994): “Shows for the People: Public Amusement Parks in Nineteenth-Century St. Petersburg,” in: Stephen P. Frank /Mark D. Steinberg (eds.): Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistances in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 121–130. Kucher, Katharina (2007): Der Gorki-Park: Freizeitkultur im Stalinismus, Köln: Böhlau. Russian Translation: Kukher, Katarina (2012): Park Gorkogo: Kultura dosuga v stalinskuiu epokhu, Moskva: ROSSPEN. Kucheruk, Oleksandr (2008): Kyiv 1917–1919: Adresy. Podii. Liudy,. Kyiv: Tempora. Kudrytsky, A. V. (ed.) (1981): “Zhovtneve zbroine povstannia 1917,” in: Kyiv: Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk, Kyiv: URE, 195– 196. Kudrytskyi, A. V. (ed.) (1981): “Mariinskyi palats,” Kyiv: Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk, Kyiv: URE. Lefebvre, Henri (1974): The Production of Space, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Makarov, Anatolii (2005): Malaia entsiklopediia kievskoi stariny, Kyiv: Dovira.

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Malakov, D. (2002): Oti dva roky: U Kyievi pry nimtsiakh. Kyiv: Amadei. Pavlychko, Solomea (1992): Letters from Kiev, trans. Myrna Kostash. Edmonton: CIUS Press. Popova, Iuliia (2015): Letter to the Author, 4 July 2015. Rukkas, A. & Kovalchuk, M. & Papakin, A. & Lobodaiev, V. (2016): Na bii za voliu: Ukraina u viinakh i revoliutsiiakh 1914–1921 rokiv, Kharkiv: KSD. Shirotskii, K. V. (1911): Kiev: Putevoditel, Kyiv: Shulzhenko. Tolochko, Aleksei (2012): Kievskaia Rus i Malorossiia v XIX veke, Kyiv: Laurus. Tsehelskyi, Lonhin (1960): Vid legend do pravdy, New York/Philadelphia: Bulava. Tynchenko, Iaroslav (2014): “Tsina nezalezhnosti: Iak Ukraina borolasia z ahresiieiu bilshovykiv,” Tyzhden, 3 February 2014 (http://tyzhden. ua/History/99941). Verstiuk, V. F. (ed.) (2011): Narysy istorii Ukrainskoi Revoliutsii 1917–1921 rokiv., Kyiv: Naukova dumka. Wolczuk, Kataryna (2001): Moulding of Ukraine, Budapest: Central European University Press. Yekelchyk, Serhy (1998): “The Making of a ‘Proletarian Capital’: Patters of Stalinist Social Policy in Kiev in the mid-1930s,” Europe-Asia Studies, 50:7, 1229–1244. Yekelchyk, Serhy (2014): “From the Anti-Maidan to the Donbas War: The Spatial and Ideological Evolution of the Counter-Revolution in Ukraine,” Perspectives on Europe 44:2, 63–69. Yekelchyk, Serhy (2014a): Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War, New York: Oxford University Press. Yekelchyk, Serhy (2015): The Conflict in Ukraine, New York: Oxford University Press. Yekelchyk, Serhy (2015a): “The Early 1960s as a Cultural Space: A Microhistory of Ukraine’s Generation of Cultural Rebels,” Nationalities Papers 43:1, 45–62.

Other Sources Derzshavnyi arkhiv Kyjivskoi oblasti (DAKO), 1/11/316, fol. 45. DAKO, 1/11/316, fol. 45. DAKO, 178/1/7, fol. 5 overleaf. Gazeta po-kievski, 21 February 2008, 18–19. Gazeta po-kievski, 15 June 2007, 6. Gazeta po-kievski, 22 June 2009, 2. Gazeta po-kievski, 15 July 2008, 4. Gazeta po-kievski, 18 August 2008, 17. Kievskaia mysl, 6 March 1917, 2. Kievskie Vedomosti, 13 May 2009, 9. Kievskie Vedomosti, 4 June 2007, 25.

The Ideological Park: How the Tsar’s Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space

Kievskie Vedomosti, 8 June 2007, 3. Kievskie Vedomosti, 16 June 2006, 4. Kievskie Vedomosti, 16 July 2008, 4. Kievskie Vedomosti, 29 November 2008, 11. Kyivska Pravda, 3 April 1948, 4. Metro, 1 June 2009, 4. Obzor, 26 June 2008, 2; Pravda, 8 November 1943, 3. Segodnia, 2 April 2010, 9. Segodnia, 24 April 2010, 7. Segodnia, 26 April 2010, 2. Segodnia, 31 May 2007, 3. Segodnia, 28 July 2009, 10. Segodnia, 4 June 2007, 25. Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady i upravlinnia Ukrainy (TsDAHO), fond 3645, opys 1, sprava 1, fol. 107. TsDAHO, 1/20/6914, fols. 2–3. TsDAHO, 1/6/408, fol. 222. Vechirnii Kyiv, 23 August 1952, 3. Visti, 14 July 1934, 4.

Internet Sources “Antimaidan snova ostavil posle sebia razgrom v Mariinskom parke,” Censor.net, 21 February 2014 (http://cen­sor.net.ua/pho­to_news/272057/antimayidan_snova_ostavil_posle_sebya_razgrom_v_mariinskom_parke_foto). “Cholovik z rushnytseiu, abo shcho trapylosia na Maidani,” BBC Ukraina, 19 February 2015 (http://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/politics/2015/02/150219_maidan_investigation_yg). “President Poroshenko holds diplomatic reception at Mariinsky Palace,” Ukrinform, 17 January 2018 (https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/2383634president-poroshenko-holds-diplomatic-reception-at-mariinsky-palacephotos.html). “Titushek v Mariinskom parke vooruzhali so skladov MVD—Avakov,” Novoe vremia, 2 February 2015 (http://nv.ua/ukraine/titushek-v-mariinskom-parke-vooruzhaliso-skladov-mvd-avakov-32369.html). “U Kyievi vidbulasia urochysta tseremoniia vidkryttia Ievrobachennia-2017,” UNIAN, 8 May 2017 (https://www.unian.ua/ society/1911423-u-kievi-vidbulasurochista-tseremoniya-vidkrittya-evrobachennya-2017-foto.html).

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“U Mariinskomu parku Kyieva vidrylasia rezidentsiia Santa Klausa,” S′ohodni, 26 December 2016 (https://ukr.segodnya.ua/kiev/kwheretogo/ v-mariinskomparke-kieva-otkrylas-rezidenciya-santa-klausa-782982. html). “V boi idut odni aferisty: zavkhoz Ianukovicha rvetsia v parlament,” SpetsKorr, 5 September 2014 (http://korr.com.ua/persony/item/5379-v-boj-idutodni-aferisty-zavkhoz-yanukovicha-rvetsya-v-parlament.html). “V Kiev pribylo piat poezdov i 66 avtobusov so storonnikami Ianukovicha,” Lenta.ru, 5 April 2007 (http://lenta.ru/news/2007/ 04/05/invasion/). “Vystavka 1914 Kyiv: myr/viina” (http://kyivhistorymuseum.org/vistavka-1914-kiyivmir-viyna/). “Za poperednimy pidrakhunkamy, sohodni u Kyievi vbyto 20 liudei,” EspresoTV, 18 February 2014 (http://espreso.tv/new/2014/02/18/za_poperednimy_pidrakhunkamy_sohodni_v_kyyevi_vbyto_9_lyudey).

The Last Soviet City Kate Brown

We sat over a small table, brimming with salads, fish, meat, potatoes, pickles all glued together with mayonnaise. Lots of mayonnaise. They decided I should drink vodka, not red wine. They determined I should not sip, but swig the vodka. My acquaintances resolved I needed to eat after with the alcohol. Judging that I wasn’t eating enough, they filled my plate and glass over and over. When the day had started, I had not known my dinner companions. I had never before been to this city of Slavutych. I was a stranger in a strange land, but nonetheless, I played along, feeling comfortably at home, because I had been there before, not right there, in northern Ukraine on a warm and breezy summer evening just after the solstice, but there, nonetheless, among Russian-speaking hosts in the former Soviet Union on a backless stool, pinned between the table and the wall, alcohol slipping into shot glasses, faces growing redder, no sign the evening would end before the first light of dawn. Slava M, a retired psychologist at the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant, lowered his chin and struggled to reach a high note of the Russian romance he was singing, one I recognized from a TV drama of the Soviet era. He missed the note and bayed instead. He directed his song at me, an unexpected foreign guest at this dinner commemorating the year anniversary of the death of their friend, a respected nuclear engineer. His wife interrupted his song to recite a poem she had written on the commuter train she takes to work at the former nuclear power plant. The poem was about the student-led protest on the Maidan Square in Kiev in 2014, about how she wished it had not occurred. A debate flared up about politics. Slava M asked me if it was true that American diplomats are doing all they can to divide Russia from Ukraine. He easily slipped into a Cold War-sounding panegyric about the United States as “our (Russia’s) historic enemy.” I had been here too, serving as the pin-up for the “West,” the “USA,” and with it unrestrained capitalism, militarized violence, excessive liberalism, and decadence. Nadia, hoping to cool Slava M down started singing, first a song in Ukrainian, then another in Belorussian. “We have many nationalities in our town. We don’t discriminate,” she told me. We sat on a winterized sun porch, crickets clambering, the pop music and TV turned off, with time stretching languidly before us. No one pulled out a device

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(though I had the impulse to do so) and recorded the moment for YouTube, LiveRu, or Facebook. This evening disappeared as soon as it was over, remaining only in the cranial stores of individual memory. Sitting around the table, listening to drunken, off-pitch song, I was transported into the set of a Soviet film. Little did I know that when I purchased a bus ticket to Slavutych, on the northeastern edge of the Chernobyl Zone, I was buying a ride on a time machine that transported me back to the USSR. It wasn’t just that Slavutych, looked Soviet. It felt Soviet. Hushed, restrained, waiting, somewhat bored, safe, hospitable, comfortable, yet easily moody. A place where people had time for unexpected guests, where a foreign guest was a rare and important event, where people still composed poems and stood to recite them, while their friends listened attentively. That night, I realized that there was something special about Slavutych, a resilient quality that had enabled people in the city to slow down the storm of economic and political changes that had occurred in communities around them. Slavutych grew out of the ashes of Pripiat, the contaminated city evacuated on April 27, 1986 a day after reactor no. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and blew an estimated 90 million curies of radioactive fallout into the surrounding environment. One of the Soviet leadership’s main goals, as the accident played out, was to keep the three remaining reactors at the Chernobyl Plant running, producing energy. That is why soldiers risked their lives to shovel radioactive graphite off the roof of reactor no. 3, and why crews washed streets and buildings, and hauled away tons of contaminated earth.1 The easiest approach would have been to seal up the plant, enclose it with a barricade, and walk away, as Japanese businessmen did after Fukushima. But from the start, Soviet leaders were not willing to admit defeat, nor to lose on the investment of three functioning reactors and two more under construction. Slavutych was a dual-purpose town, as were the reactors that powered it; it possessed both practical and metaphorical origins. It was created to house the remaining plant operators and liquidators who toiled on after the accident and the city served to send a message that, like the mythical phoenix, the Soviet Union would emerge triumphant from the catastrophe.2 Of course, that didn’t happen. Chernobyl marked the beginning of a series of technological and economic disasters that sped the USSR toward collapse in 1991. The city felt like a late Soviet film because it was designed and built on precepts 1

2

The Politburo commissioned a study the summer of 1986 on whether Pripiat could reinhabited. When the answer was that it would take several years to let radioactive isotopes decay, Politburo leaders decided to preserve Pripiat for future re-habitation (Politburo Study 2011[1986]: 379-381). Mikhail Gorbachev’s (1986) first statements to the United Nations on the Chernobyl accident show him making confident pronouncements on the state of future international coordination on nuclear affairs.

The Last Soviet City

that no longer make sense in the neoliberal terrain of contemporary Ukraine. In fact, the foundational socialist and internationalist origins of Slavutych contradict the ideology of the nationalizing, capitalist Ukrainian state to such an extent that traveling to Slavutych feels like crossing a border, one marked less by geographic markers than temporal ones. Slavutych is special because it is the last Soviet city. The last city built by the Soviet polity in the now-gone Soviet era, and the final city to be constructed along the ideological lines of the late Soviet state. And, in many ways, Slavutych is the most magnificent—the most creative, cosmopolitan, ecological and socialist—of the hundreds of planned Soviet cities constructed between 1917 and 1991 because it was designed and built in the optimism and good will of the early perestroika period when Soviet citizens believed they were emerging from isolation to a more forgiving, generous, democratic, and prosperous form of socialism. Revolutions are supposed to spawn new architectural forms. Art is thought to reflect profound changes in social relations, politics, and foreign relations. Certainly the revolutions in France, the Americas, and tsarist Russia created new aesthetic forms, radically altering the way people viewed cities, public art, and monumental memory. But that formula falters when you consider the revolutions in Eastern Europe in the late 20th century. If what occurred at the Berlin Wall in 1989 and in Moscow in 1991 were revolutions, then where in cities from Prague to Vladivostok is the revolutionary art and architecture that the revolutions spawned? Architectural historian Owen Hatherly argues that the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 are unique in that they created nothing new, but rather “a restoration of what was on rather spurious grounds considered to be normality.”Pointing to the postsocialist strip malls, condos and housing developments of eastern Europe, Hatherly quips that what everyone apparently wanted as they took to the streets in protest ... was to live in California (Hatherly 2015: 382). So, what if the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 were not revolutions? What if, instead, they were restorations of revived nationalist, capitalist and imperialist states? Revolutions are about ideas and idealism, and what Slavutych, the last Soviet city, indicates is that historians might well move the revolutionary moment back a few years to the perestroika period when a revolution in ideas and values occurred that indeed brought about new architectural forms. Slavutych, built in 1986-87, is that product. My first visit to Slavutych occurred in the summer of 2014. I went by bus that trolled for several hours through faintly luminescent deciduous forests and yellow fields of goldenrod. Pushing aside the dusty curtain, I witnessed the scene grow grimmer the closer we approached the Chernobyl Zone. Kitschy roadside taverns gave way to kids and old women selling fruit and potatoes from the tops of wooden crates. We passed defunct collective farms with collapsing barns, pastures turning to scrub and forest.

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Dropping down from the creaking bus at the Slavutych bus stop, I had expected to find the usual grim, one-artery provincial town of central Ukraine. Instead, a park opened before me of soft, red pines interrupted by walkways and beds of geraniums. Women strolled arm in arm. Awkward teens flirted on benches. Children rode tiny bikes in tiny, joyful abandon. I followed the park to a main square, where girls with bows in their hair skipped out of dance classes, and shoppers gathered in front of the grocery store, exchanging news. Turning slowly around the large, flat, concrete square, I saw more shops, cafes with verandas, a colorful sports stadium, a hotel, and city hall that held the offices of the much-admired mayor, Vladimir Udovychenko, the same man who founded the city as the communist party boss in the Soviet era. I ambled to the hotel, which was spotless and well-run. I called a contact I had never met. Though he had no advanced notice of my visit, he came right over, in less than ten minutes. We crossed the square, sat on a leafy cafe terrace and talked. I returned to the hotel and called another contact I had never met. She came right over in less than seven minutes. We took a walk. I found the stroll quiet and relaxing. It took me a few minutes to figure out that this was because of the absence of cars. The core of Slavutych is a series of pedestrian zones configured within one main circular street. My companion and I strolled by a few shops and department stores, past a pleasant looking coffee house. Each neighborhood had its own square where neighbors buy essentials, sit and cool off with a drink, and watch the children spin about in their play. One section or “quarter” of the city had an outdoor summer movie theater, another a beer garden. They all had kiosks to rent videos or buy a hot dog and sit under an umbrella. And people were doing that. Free of smog or honking traffic, they hailed their neighbors who stopped for a chat. The city felt cozy, safe, neighborly, and restful. The few cars on the main street were mostly boxy, Soviet-vintage Ladas. The city, designed for 40,000, had no traffic lights. No hum or noise. Residents park their vehicles in a belt of garages that circles the outskirts of the town. Inside Slavutych there is little need for a car because everything is no more than a ten-minute walk away. In 1960, a leading, transportation visionary, Nikita Khrushchev, argued that personal automobiles were a relic of the past. In the United States in 1959, Khrushchev’s American hosts proudly showed him spanning highways and 20 acre parking lots, which they saw as talismans of American personal wealth, but Khrushchev scanned the vast parking lots at the Detroit Ford plant with disdain. “What a waste,” he declared. The Soviet leader thought it was foolish for people to purchase their own cars, for which city managers would have to find space to drive and park them. Instead, Khrushchev had an idea that automobiles should be shared among citizens for their personal use. He imagined an enormous carsharing network that traversed the nation, a larger, more affordable and statesupported version of Car-To-Go (Pétery 2013: 47; Rose 1973: 38).

The Last Soviet City

One tragedy of the 20th century is that good ideas enunciated by socialist thinkers were most often deemed “utopian” in the capitalist West. Khrushchev’s car-sharing idea never got off the ground, but the pedestrian orientation of postwar, planned Soviet cities did. Slavutych takes the de-elevation of personal automobiles seriously, designed with a pedestrian plan (“Protokol soveshchanie pre ispolkome …” 22 Octobre 1986: 2–15). When Slavutych was being built, prominent Danish architects were just starting to popularize co-housing projects, which were small pedestrian-centered communities that, like Slavutych, shared many communal features, relegated automobiles to the outskirts, and planned community structures along walking paths (Levinson & Christensen 2003: 195). Slavutych’s lead Soviet architect, Fedor Borovik, managed to carry out this vision, not on the diminutive, Danish scale of a single development, but for a whole city. Reporters flocked to Danish co-housing projects in the 1980s, but at the time few people associated ’Soviet’ with state-of-art design, and so no one came to photograph the environmentally sustainable, new city in northern Ukraine. For decades, Soviet urban architecture had reflected Soviet socialism’s social and economic disappointments. Massive, monumental wedding cake buildings celebrated leaders and the state over individuals and liberty. Demolished historic city centers cleared for flattened, asphalt parade space revealed Soviet leaders’ attempts to erase the past. Monotone housing estates sacrificed the dignity and aesthetics of daily life for cost-cutting cheapness. The sameness of urban centers from Almaty to Murmansk reflected ethnic equality bought at a dear price of suppression of national difference. Gorbachev’s revival of socialism, one with a human face, however, was confident enough to tolerate variety, difference and respect for individual desire. Slavutych architects had access to designs and housing styles from abroad. In addition to the usual housing blocks, in Slavutych architects mapped out in each quarter a cottage district of freestanding houses surrounded by yards. These areas look much like garden suburbs in London or Berlin, not like the usual dacha districts outside Soviet cities. Dacha districts feature fences. Tall, mismatched, ungainly fences, preferably with a heavy chain and a snarling dog to protect tools, berries, vegetables, and the general agricultural work space within them. Slavutych’s cottages are on display like suburban housing in the West. They have inviting lawns and flower gardens, short picket fences and driveways leading down into basement garages. To better understand how different Slavutych is, it helps to consider Kyiv, a three hour drive to the South. Kyiv flows with an unruly, unregulated free market that drowns the city in a hurricane of goods tossed up from global factories and flea markets and scattered helter-skelter streets. Former squares have transformed into districts of sheet metal kiosks glued together with liquid foam sell everything from espresso and sushi to cheap lingerie, lottery tickets, and porn. The kiosks

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shadow fridges parked on sidewalks displaying soda and beer. Card table vendors crowd in plying socks made in China, cell phones manufactured in Taiwan, and vegetables farmed somewhere in Ukraine. Men with kegs pour into plastic cups beer and kvas, a sweet, lightly fermented drink made of bread. And all around, especially in the newer districts, circle large, multi-lane arteries swarming with speeding, impatient automobiles. It is hard to walk in Kiev for all the cars and unchained free market blocking the sidewalks, but when I make a short cut through the nexus of courtyards and back alleys, there too the obstacles are formidable. The courtyards of apartment buildings are the former community commons. In the Soviet period, they were the domain of neighborhood children, resting grandmothers and courting teenagers. In the neoliberal order they have been taken over by parked cars and fierce parking attendants, by warehouses, sweat shops, and more corrugated metal kiosks, all circumscribed by high fences and locked, wrought iron gates. I imagine it was also hard to walk in an Imperial Russian city. Photos show sidewalks and squares crowded with hawkers and peddlers trading with abandon from the backs of wagons, tents and canvas tarps. Soviet designers set out to change all that. They tossed the money changers and the vendors from the streets and they dreamed up a new, orderly, planned city that would serve up residents’ needs in a sensible, premeditated manner. They constructed careful cardboard models and transformed them into whole cities (that looked like the models!) In these designed spaces of late socialism, architects calculated a family’s daily needs and the steps residents would need to take to get groceries, drop a child at daycare, attend a play, or borrow a library book. In Kyiv, many of these public places and services are gone. Public spaces don’t turn a profit or earn a bribe. The transition of the Soviet economy from socialism to the free market ushered in the world’s greatest fire sale of public property, and the privatization of public space materializes in most every step in peregrinations across post-socialist cities. Fences are everywhere in post-socialist cities: iron doors in archways, corrugated steel partitions in courtyards for makeshift garages, swinging steel bars in entryways and in front of new, gated communities. The fences are the physical icons of the appropriation of formerly public, socialist space. Stopping short before an iron gate, residents in post-Soviet cities grasp the new neoliberal language of exclusion, private property, and commercialization at the expense of openness, inclusion, and public ownership (Shevchenko 2015: 17). This new boundary maintenance is the physical manifestation of what has happened more invisibly in the privatization of oil, gas, steel, coal, sugar, and wheat industries in Ukraine. The deregulation of the urban landscape of Eastern Europe reflects the deregulation of the financial order in the 1990s that left the formerly socialist economy in a free fall towards what Pierre Bourdieu (1998) describes as a “pure and perfect market, made possible by the politics of financial deregulation.” The aim of finan-

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cial deregulation, Bourdieu argues, was to undermine collective structures, and so atomize worker’s unions, collectives, associations, and even the family (Bourdieu 1998). For geographer David Harvey, a critical harbinger of the neoliberal order is “accumulation by dispossession,” which financial deregulation made possible (Harvey 2005: 19). In the 1990s, pensioners complained about the new markets and gates, but most people overlooked this great shift of wealth because the appearance of longed-for goods elicited a celebration of consumerism as a sign of the vitality and irrepressible creativity and rightness of unrestrained capitalism. The goods on the street and in freshly-washed shop windows refashioned formerly ’colorless,’ and fashionless Soviet cities into metropoles easily recognizable from the perspective of global capitalism. The state-sponsored redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle classes to a new wealthy class is what makes the “revolutions” of 1989 and 1991 really just disappointing, run-of-the-mill restorations. Walking around re-imperialized St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Budapest or re-capitalized and re-sacralized Kiev and Moscow makes it clear that we have been calling the events ending East European socialism by the wrong name all along.3 As my new friend took me on a walk around Slavutych, we passed the Tallinn cafe in the heart of the Tallinn Quarter and crossed into and out of neighborhoods named Vilnius, Tbilisi, Moscow, Leningrad, Erevan, Riga, and Baku. Each of the eleven neighborhoods of Slavutych is named after major cities of the republic that donated the architects, supplies, and construction workers to build it. Drawing on the example of Tashkent, decimated by an earthquake in 1969, republic architects after the Chernobyl explosion drew up plans, each for one section or “quarter” of the new city to replace the evacuated, charred Pripiat (Baranovskaia 2011: 88). The accident was seen as a tragedy for the whole country and citizens volunteered in the weeks following the explosion to host displaced families, donate their bonuses, and work on the clean up.4 Soviet press and officialdom emphasized how the effort to rebuild after the Chernobyl disaster involved the entire socialist world. They included in that formula Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Romanians whom Soviet

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The concentration of wealth and the privatization of public assists has been occurring in Ukraine since the collapse of communism, but as oligarchs got superrich and more politically belligerent, western commentators ceased celebrating the transition to capitalism and criticized the East European variants as mutant misbirths of proper, regulated, controlled and largely idealized capitalism. They called it “crony capitalism,” diseased with inside deals, networks of friends who protect each other, gained control of media networks, political lobbies and political office across a rigged playing field. See Myers & Becker & Yardley (2014). For a political economy that lays out similar trends in the US, see Stiglitz (2013). The final count of so-called “liquidators” is estimated to be 600,000. In May of 1986, Soviet leaders replaced volunteer liquidators with young army conscripts.

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officials described as in “the European part of the Soviet Union” (Baranovskaia 2011: 86). In the fall of 1987, construction managers broke ground, and crews from the various republics lived in a temporary constructors’ village. Working quickly in the heroic, mass mobilization method in which Soviet builders specialized, the crews from Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Baltics, Russia, and Ukraine together built the new city. Slavutych’s design in national quadrants reflects the internationalist ideology of the late Soviet state, one very difficult to recall in 2015, when Armenia and Azerbaijan had sealed borders, Georgia and Russia existed in a tense stalemate, and Ukrainian and Russian-backed troops were engaged in an active war. In 1987, few guessed how badly things would go. In Slavutych, Georgian architects drew up plans for spacious apartments with tall ceilings and an extra “men’s room.” The Tallinn quarter features the Tallinn cafe of heavy timber logs with a large spacious balcony shaded with vines. Azerbaijani designers added to their apartment buildings flourishes and extended balconies of intricate metal work for an imagined view of the Caspian Sea. There is more to these designs than Soviet folklorish kitsch. The republic architects in Slavutych were reimagining the city as a place of universal values capable of accommodating national difference at the same time that perestroika-era historians were reconciling the persecution of minority groups in the Stalin era. The blueprints reflect a glasnost period desire for equality and social harmony, where the top brass no longer ruled through intimidation and coercion, and where the working classes could learn to see themselves, at long last, as masters. In contrast to contemporary, neoliberal Kiev or Donetsk, ruled by oligarchs and mired in nationalist sentiment, the peaceful, multi-ethnic Slavutych reflected these values. The city was, in other words, a manifestation of an outburst of patriotism, socialist altruism and the ’friendship of nations,’ concepts that had long been stale, Soviet cliches, but were revived and took on new meaning in the aftermath of the Chernobyl tragedy. The process was not flawless. Problems abounded. In 1989, Armenian construction workers walked off the job and demanded plane tickets home after an Azerbaijani worker killed an Armenian in the woods. At the time, Armenian and Azerbaijani crowds were attacking one another over the disputed territory of NagornoKarabakh, a conflict that exploded into a war after 1991. Party chairman Udovychenko spent three days convincing the crew to stay (Udovychenko 2015). And in 1991, six months before the collapse of the USSR, crews from Russia stopped work and started heading home, leaving Slavutych’s construction sites arrested midway.

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Today the hulk of a never-finished hotel stands next to the train station as a reminder of that period of despair.5 As I walked about with my new friend, Nadia Shevchenko, she told me about how she came to Slavutych as a poor immigrant who had lost everything. Until 1986, Shevchenko worked at the Chernobyl plant in the ventilation department. She left the city of Pripiat, a few miles from the burning plant, in the evacuation on April 27, 1986 with her two sons, husband and 40,000 neighbors. The police told them to pack a few things to leave for three days, no more. She took a bag with tshirts for the boys and their documents. She put food out for the cat, fed the fish, and left the small city she loved for its pathways of roses, modern conveniences, for the quiet birch and pine forests and the sandy beaches along the warm, clear, fish-filled Pripiat River. The waiting bus took them to a village not far from Pripiat. The village had no food, no place for them to stay. Nadia figured this village must also be contaminated. After a couple of nights on the floor of a peasant hut, Nadia decided it was time to get out of there. A bus went by the village heading to Kiev, so she and her sons got on it. When they arrived in Kiev, they had no place to go. At the station, Nadia told a clerk that they had come from Pripiat and had no money. The clerk appeared to know all about Pripiat and the disaster, though the story had not yet reached the news. She told Nadia to go to an office where “the others” had gone. At that office, a clerk asked them where they wanted to go and wrote them tickets for Moscow, where Nadia had a sister. “Moscow was the only place I knew someone who could take me in,” Nadia remembered. She and her boys stayed a few nights until her younger son came down with a fever and started to vomit. Her sister called a friend who was a nurse. The nurse called someone she knew in radiation medicine, and in no time there appeared at the door a team of medical people who were bound up, Nadia remembers, “in saran wrap.” They told Nadia and her two sons to gather all their belongings. “Are you sure you have everything?” they asked several times. They had a beeping monitor with them. They instructed Nadia’s sister to mop up three times, wash down every surface and do it all again. Then they sped Nadia and the boys to Moscow Clinic no. 6, made famous after Chernobyl for treating liquidators and firemen with severe radiation poisoning, but since the fifties a hospital for victims of nuclear accidents in the USSR that did not make the press. At the clinic, medical attendants shaved Nadia and her sons’ hair, and confiscated their clothing, which, with the hair, was disposed as radioactive waste. 5

Despite these setbacks, Udovychenko pointed out to me that many of the construction crews liked the city so much they asked to stay on after they built the city. “We have representatives from 49 nationalities in Slavutych today” (Udovychenko 2015), he commented proudly.

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Doctors then started them on treatment for over-exposure to radioactive isotopes. The cure had little to do with medical practice. Shevchenko and her sons did not receive blood transfusions, nor were they given shots of zinc DPTA or other cheliating agents that might help excrete radioactive isotopes from the body. Rather, their sacrificed bodies were treated to a cure that simulated life in an idealized Soviet society, one that did not experience chronic shortages and drastically limited consumer choices. Nadia was served red wine, the boys equally exotic orange juice. They ate red meat, bananas, dumplings, white bread, chocolate and candies. Stuffing themselves and moving very little, never leaving the hospital compound for two months–that was the cure. Nadia and her sons were treated like cosmonauts or olympic athletes preparing for a first flight or a big match. Every material wish was granted. “We got sick of all those luxury foods!” Nadia laughed thinking about it. She described how one day her ten-year-old son, Slavik, was crying bitterly in the ward when the chief doctor walked by and asked why the boy was upset. Slavik boldly speaking for himself, told the doctor that his mother had taken a trip abroad to Bulgaria and bought him a pair of jeans that had metal rivets and were almost as good as American jeans. “So what is the problem?” the doctor asked impatiently. “They took my good jeans and gave me this shit to wear,” the exasperated boy explained gesturing to his plain, Soviet-issue, polyester slacks and shirt. Nadia held her breath, waiting for the chief’s reprimand about sacrifice, nation, duty, and profanity, but instead the doctor ordered an attendant to go out and get the boy a new pair of jeans, and a sweater to match. The attendant did, returning in a few hours with new jeans and sweaters for Slavik and his older brother. Clinic No. 6 and its cornucopia of delicacies and rare western-style consumer goods embodied the patronage-style economic system of Soviet socialism. Citizens gave everything they had to the state, sacrificing their health if need be, and, in exchange, the state took care of them. They stayed two months and on release Nadia was given her passport and a document for each of them that said they had been patients of Clinic no. 6. Leaving the hospital, the doctor asked her where she was going. “Well,” she answered, “I have to get back to Pripiat and to my job. I need to work to get my pension.” The doctor laughed. “You’ve given enough to your country for ten pensions.” It was August. Nadia set off to the Ukrainian Republic consulate in Moscow to retrieve a promised 200 ruble subsidy to help pay for the family’s lost wardrobe. She was passing through Pushkin Square on the anniversary of the poet’s death where a crowd of Muscovites had gathered to read Pushkin’s poems. She asked a police officer where the consulate was. He curtly gave her directions, but she could not find the consulate and returned to ask him again. At that point, the policeman turned on her, asking for her documents, a sign she was under suspicion.

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Suddenly she realized why he had been so brusque. She looked like a woman just released from prison. Her shaved hair was growing in patches. She had on government issue clothing and shoes several sizes too small that bloodied her feet. Realizing the policeman thought of her as homeless rubbish, she lost it. She first started to cry. Then, with her anger growing at the thought that she had lost her apartment, furniture, money, job, friends, community because of Chernobyl, while this man thought she was a bum, turned her rage into an uncontrollable urge to yell right into the face of a Moscow cop. She screamed at such a pitch that the Pushkin-lovers at the foot of Pushkin’s statute turned and approached, forming a circle around the woman on the ground, who through tears shouted that she came from Pripiat and had lost her home, that they had cut off her hair, and taken her clothes. She had nothing left and just wanted to find the Ukrainian consulate. Her too-small shoes flew from her blistered feet, she dropped her purse, and in her agitation she tore open her shirt. Someone picked up her documents, and the crowd passed them around. The bystanders turned into witnesses at seeing the certification from Clinic No. 6, and they began to curse the policeman, while he anxiously grabbed his walky-talky to call for reinforcements. A woman helped Nadia to her feet, straightened her clothes, and buttoned her shirt. The policeman suddenly had a black sedan on the street and he ushered her and her sons into it to drive to the consulate. Someone in the crowd pressed a large package of money in her hands. The bystanders had taken up a collection. “That was what it meant to be Soviet,” she told me pointedly. “We were all in it together. None of that would have happened, “Nadia told me with an uncharacteristic bitterness in an ice cream shop in Slavutych, “had the accident occurred now. We would have been left to die in Pripiat.” “Then it was the Soviet Union and people had respect for one another, “she continued, “They didn’t call each other Kochkli or Moskali” [derogatory names Ukrainians and Russians call one another]. “We were just citizens of the same Union and we spoke a common language. Only that one policeman ever treated me poorly. That was the only time during the ordeal I did not feel supported.” Officials offered her a plumb job and much-desired apartment in Moscow, but she turned it down. Nadia just wanted to go home to cozy, peaceful Pripiat. In 1986, as today, that desire is as fanciful as wishing to live on the moon. She tried to get hired on the cleanup, but at the time they were not taking women, especially ones with dependent children. Instead, she found a post at a power reactor station just downwind from Chernobyl, in Rivno, and then finally transferred to the new city of Slavutych as soon as it opened to residents in 1988. Many other former residents of Pripiat settled in Slavutych. It was as close as Nadia could get to going home. As we strolled along, Nadia showed me a pre-school. Each quarter in Slavutych has its own pre-school, also designed by republic architects. The preschool in the Yerevan Quarter is painted a sunburnt orange and punctuated with a red stone

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cut from Armenian cliffs. Patterns in the wrought iron fence circle in octagons and repeat in the school’s doors and windows. The school is surrounded by large, park like gardens and on two corners stand spacious, outdoor classrooms with covered verandas. The school was beautiful, inviting, festive. I have to admit I was envious. I had handed over a good portion of my monthly paycheck for my child to attend preschool first in a narrow, dark row house, and after that in a concrete church basement. My child had none of the luxury and thoughtfulness that this preschool demonstrated. The pre-schools, more than any other feature of Slavutych, express the Perestroika Revolution. They are beautiful, lovingly designed and constructed, sun-filled, spacious chateaus for children. They are the teahouses of Samarkand, the opera houses of central Europe, the skyscrapers of 20th century United States. They are the most well-endowed and cherished architectural feature of Slavutych. Soviet planners had a traditional focus, as modernizers and educators, on children, but there is more to these buildings than the usual Soviet emphasis on behavioral adjustment. Slavutych’s elaborate, ornate, lovingly-tendered preschools epitomize the emphasis on a society dedicated to renewal. They also signal how children and fears for the future stood at the center of the Chernobyl disaster. In the months following the great belch of radioactive isotopes from the burning reactor, the top party leadership worried a lot about sick kids and the doses that especially infants, children, and pregnant women in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were receiving. Though most of them knew little about radiation when the accident occurred, they came to understand quickly that children are the most vulnerable because their growing bodies eagerly drink up minerals which radioactive isotopes mimic perfectly. Plutonium and cesium 137 parade as calcium. Radioactive iodine and radioactive phosphate the body takes in as iodine and phosphate. Rapidly growing bodies are most at risk because, in developing, cells duplicate. The more cells exposed to ionizing radiation multiply, the greater they are vulnerable to jolts of ionizing energy banging into cells and damaging them. Damaged cells, if not fixed, duplicate the injury, then quadruple it, etc. The resulting mutations can amount to tumors or poorly functioning organs. In the summer after the accident, Soviet leaders followed the lead of concerned parents who pulled their children from schools and sent them to relatives or friends as far away as possible. Soviet leaders set up a titanic program to send all children in the contaminated zones to summer camps in the southern parts of Ukraine, to other republics, to areas considered cleaner, anywhere, but home where the dosimeters ticked ominously (see, for example, “Spravka o medico-sanitarnom …”, 1987: 147-50; “Spravka po evakuatsii …”, 1986: 93-6; “Raoiny 30 km zone Kievskoi oblast”, 1986: 75-9). Mothers could go with babies, but children older than one went alone. Nadia remembers the trains in May heading for Leningrad filled with crying children. One long rolling wail. Soviet society was a spatially hierarchical society

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and so there were different kinds of summer camps depending on the children’s provenance. Kids from cities tended to go to resort locations, sanatoria, and camps reserved for urban children. Children from villages usually went to village camps, often just repurposed collective farms. In these village camps, farm kids who were used to farm work, had to toil in the fields or barns a mandated four hours a day. One camp had no real teachers or camp counselors and no nurse or doctor. The farm chairman, short on workers because so many volunteers were needed for the clean up, employed kids, who were supposed to be resting, getting healthy, and staying indoors. He had them on the job eight hours a day or more, leaving them in the fields, like a class of slaves, until they had finished a quota of acres to weed or block. The food was terrible at that camp: last year’s cucumbers, cream that had soured, mouse droppings in the porridge. Four children ran away. Three were recovered, but one Stanislav Lisitskii was still at large at the end of the summer of 1986 (Baranov’ska 1995: 218-9). The camps for urban children were better. Children rested in beds. Nurses, doctors and teachers looked after them. The head of the science sector of the Communist Party of Ukraine, a Mr. V. Sokol made a visit to Crimea in June 1986 to have a look (Baranov’ska 1995: 224-225). He was shown the medical records. Half of the 150 “Chernobyl children,” as they quickly came to be called, had become radioactive sources, measuring doses of radioactive iodine in their thyroids from 100-326 micro-roentgen (Baranov’ska 1995: 224-5; for more reports on thyroid measurements, see “Materialy dlia doklada pravitel’stvu”, 1989: 159-161; “Spravka o sostianii …”, 1992: 1-5). Talking to the camp doctor, Sokol learned that the children with the highest doses slept continually, ate practically nothing, and were limp and listless. Many families who later settled in Slavutych came from the evacuated zone around the nuclear power plant. They had watched how their children ran and played with abandon in April, but in June had little interest in getting out of bed. They had lost their kids to departing buses and trains. They continued to worry about the chronic health problems their children suffered, something that became a fact of daily existence for most people who lived in the city. While nuclear medicine experts in Moscow and Vienna denied health problems from the accident, doctors in contaminated regions of Ukraine wrote in the years following the accident to report mysterious and significant increases of a wide range of illnesses, especially among children. Children had chronic gastritis, chronic tonsillitis, swollen thyroids, heart problems, and kidney illnesses. A classified study of children of KGB agents in Kiev reported “a rise in illness in practically all classes of chronic, unspecific and specific illnesses, including bronchial, endocrine, and diseases of the digestive tract and circulatory systems.” State-generated statistics showed a sharp increase in autoimmune disorders such as diabetes and epilepsy, and a noticeable lowering of resistance to infections (Liubinetskaia 1996: 149-80; and also “O pori-

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adki provedeniia …”, 1986: 2-4; N. G. Savel’lova v Snizhenko 1989: 373-8; “O sostiyanii zdorov’ia …”, 1989: 35-36; “Spravka o rabote komissii …”, 1990: 57-9). Slavutych’s lavish pre-schools, elaborate after-school programs, and state of the art home for handicapped children are not accidental. The tragedy shaped the special child-centered features of Slavutych in part because of the fact of sick kids and worried parents, but also because the accident was framed internationally as a futuristic disaster. Other than the 270-some emergency responders who were hospitalized for severe radiation illness, most people did not get ill from Chernobyl radiation, not right away. Instead, the exposed worried they would get sick in the future. They fretted about the future of their children and about the yet to be born and their still un-conceived offspring. After 1986, the future on contaminated territory no longer looked the same as future on clean land. The instinct to conserve and restore the territory of Slavutych, rather than abandon it, brought about a new understanding of childhood, architecture, the Soviet friendship of nations, and also of ecology and conservation in the late Soviet state. Slavutych’s founding document states that the project “is grounded on the maximum preservation of the natural environment,” including “the surrounding forests, streams, and wild life.” Preservation became a feature of survival. Because forests captured more radioactive isotopes than meadows and pastures, they were more dangerous to enter (Savchenko 1995: 25). They were also harmful to use as fuel or building material. As a consequence, the woods around Slavutych were no longer tracts to survey for logging, foraging and exploitation, but preserves to be held in perpetuity. More, the woods that densely surround the city were made dear by the fact that they were still standing, not turned red or a sickly yellow from radioactive overload, as were forests closer to the plant. KGB officers noted that within a year of the accident the population showed a growing concern for ecology, a movement that grew with the dawning realization of the magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster (see “Informatsionnoe soobshchenie …”, 1987: 147-150; “O problemakh atomnoi energetiki ...”, 1989: 127-30; “Informatsionnoe soobshchenie”, 1989: 125-129; “O prossesakh, sviazannykh …”, 1990: 198-200; “O polozhenii …”, 1990: 163-164; Sovet Ministrov UkSSR… 1990: 63-64; Marples 1991). Leafy, pleasant Slavutych, then, presented a novel problem for urban planners. Rather than figuring out how to decontaminate a community after it was exposed, Slavutych founders had to plan how to clean it up before settlement–a novel, if morally troubling set of obstacles. For, Slavutych was planted, intentionally, square in the middle of a post-catastrophic waste heap. Alexander Lozhkin was in charge of choosing a site for the new city in the fall of 1986. He boarded a helicopter, pocked with bullet holes from service in Afghanistan and flew over the territory. He found a first, good, clean spot for the new city near the village of Nedanchichi. The village showed minimal radioactive contamination, but it was swampy and had no road leading to it (“To Zam Ministera …”, 1986: 19). He

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found a second, drier site along the rail line at a crossing of two roads, but because of winds and contaminated trains and trucks with contaminated cargo rolling back and forth from Chernobyl, the site registered much higher levels of radiation, so Lozhkin rejected it. Lozkhin’s superiors were unhappy with his decision. The second, dirtier site promised to be much cheaper and swifter to build as it already had infrastructure in place. He was called before commissioners, who asked him: “Could kids live there?” “That is for the health department to decide,” Lozhkin remembers answering, “but I stand by my measurements” (Kupny 2011: 91). Lozkhin was brought to Moscow to answer the same questions and he gave the same replies. Nedanchichi was cleaner, but the site that became Slavutych would be quicker to build and cheaper. So Slavutych it was.6 The levels of cesium 137, ranged from 1 to 13 curies a square kilometer (international agencies recommend 1 curie a square kilometer as a safe for residence). Monitors also found deposits of highly toxic strontium 90 and plutonium 239, which are especially harmful isotopes when ingested lodge in human bones, causing pain, crumbling limbs and cancers. To prepare the site for habitation, monitors swept across the territory, measuring radiation levels in the top soil and below at one and three meters. They took water samples from streams and wells. Helicopters circled the site sampling the gamma field to map out the uneven distribution of radioactive isotopes (“Radiationno-gidromecheskaia …”, 1987: 28-38). With the map in hand, construction crews’ first job was to skim truckloads of earth from the surface of hot areas, dig trenches, line them, bury the contaminated soil, and then pave over the sullied grounds (Baranovskaia 2011: 485-7). Engineers designed fountains and waterworks that filtered out (radioactive) branches and leaves. After the earthwork, sewer construction, and paving, the radiation fields declined by half in the city regions, but when there was a lot of dust in the air the measurements could rise from 5 to 25 times, so city leaders set up schedules to regularly wash down walkways, squares and buildings to eliminate the build up of radioactive dust. They planted grass, shrubs and trees to keep the reworked soils from eroding and blowing in the wind. They sent out instructions that playing fields and recreational areas had to be checked first and approved by state health inspectors before use. They dug deep wells for drinking water and monitored the water regularly. They instructed residents to remove outdoor shoes and clothing when arriving home and to wash down their interior spaces frequently (Baranovskaia 2011: 485-7). The surrounding forests–inviting, quiet, green, teaming with game, fish, berries and mushrooms–could not be cleaned so thoroughly as the city proper. 6

On the Politburo’s discussion of this trade-off between cost and harm, see Yaroshinskaia (2011: 466-467).

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Most of the radionuclides deposited in the living green wall circulating Slavutych were in the first centimeter of soil, where locals digging their gardens and searching for mushrooms and berries, would come into contact with them. To entice residents away from the forests, city leaders worked to supply Slavutych’s shops well, even in the hungry days of late perestroika. “Slavutych, an official wrote, “is centrally supplied so its contamination [of food] will be the same as contemporary circumstances in Ukraine as a whole.” The sentence accepts at face value the reality that Soviet food processing industries planned for the fact that radioactive isotopes were in circulation in Soviet markets. They established maximum levels for nearly every category of food-grains, dairy, meat, honey, berries, jam, etc., and then set up hundreds of monitoring stations to check food samples for contamination (“O vremenno dostupnii …”, 1986: 18; V I. S. Levykinu ot Mukharskogo 1986: 125-127; “O resul’tatakh ...”, 1986: 1, 7; “O zakupke …”, 1986: 62). Not wanting to lose valuable food in a hungry country, food producers did not throw away food products that registered over the maximum. Instead they mixed contaminated food with clean food to share across the country the radioactive burden (V S. V. Litvinenko …, 1986: 169). If people in Slavutych acquired their food in grocery stores, rather than from peasant markets or their own gardens, then they ingested no more radioactivity, ideally, than people in Odessa or Murmansk. The only people who were safe from ingesting Chernobyl radiation were Muscovites because Moscow leaders decreed that the only place that could not receive contaminated food was Moscow (BChgramma …, 1986: 162). There is a certain heroism in the acceptance of the fact that the ground is contaminated, so too the air, water and food, and that is just how it is. From the city’s founding moment residents had to face the reality of contamination and live by the changing, evolving rules of “safe living” on poisoned ground. Surrounded by high-tech waste, city managers stood at the vanguard of nuclear disaster management. Unlike most cities, which start out relatively clean and become polluted over time with industrial and human waste, Slavutych began its existence polluted and became cleaner over time. Unlike surrounding villages which time gradually abandoned, Slavutych emerged into the heart beat of the new age. Technicians took hundreds of measurements, helicopters scanned the air above, checked gamma detectors inside buildings and out, set up food control, monitoring schedules, sanitation commissions, regular scrub downs–all this city leaders did not shy from. These actions bely an honesty and unflinching willingness to broach the nearly infinite succession of problems that emerge when living on contaminated territory. The man who handled most of these daily details was the communist party boss, Vladimir Udovychenko, who was elected mayor after independence and continued to win every subsequent election for the next 25 years. He has a reputation in Slavutych for honesty, intelligence and hard work. When I met him, he still sounded like a socialist, speaking most proudly of the social, medical and educational programs

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he had built in Slavutych. He was a solid supporter of nuclear energy, and, like everyone else I spoke to in Slavutych, he felt the greatest blow to the community was the closure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 2000, which left the city cast off in an economy lost at sea.7 I admired Udovychenko. In my country, when I ask an official who supports nuclear energy about health effects, he tells me flat out there are none at low, chronic doses other than an increased, but still minimal risk of thyroid disease and cancer. But Udovychenko didn’t do that, nor did he lecture me about natural background radiation from the sun or the dangers of burning coal and highway driving. Instead, when I asked him about health problems in Slavutych, he waved his hand and said, “Of course there are health problems, hordes of them. Everyone knows that.” Soviet bureaucrats were much maligned in the last years of the USSR, but in Slavutych, Udovychenko, his superiors and his staff, did not deny radioactive contamination, nor shirk from the job of cleaning it up as best they could. I bet the residents of Love Canal, a housing development built on a chemical waste dump in New York State, would have appreciated a similar concern before they settled into their homes; same too of the 345 home owners in the Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Residents of Spring Valley who had to wait until the emergence in the neighborhood of a rash of rare, life-threatening diseases to learn that their comfortable houses and green lawns stood on the grounds of a former U.S. Army chemical weapons testing ground (see Gibbs 2010; “Spring Valley…”). Surely they and the millions of people living in areas near toxic releases would rather have the Slavutych approach to contaminated territory than silence, denial and inaction (Lerner 2014). Slavutych, a small city on this planet rotating the sun, is the future in ways that socialist dreamers, who constantly had their eye on the future, never expected. A future in which clean up, de-contamination and dis-activization occur before, not after, settlement, urbanization and suburbanization. Slavutych is a child-centered, pedestrian-friendly ecologically sustainable community where parents watch their kids closely, not because of the suspected pedophile down the street, but because of the isotopes lurking in their bodies. Slavutych is the brave new world, which, if we are lucky, city builders of the future will emulate. I hate to write this, but contaminated, economically depressed and isolated Slavutych is a great place.

7

On contemporary economic prospects of Slavutych, see Pickett 2016.

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References “Spring Valley DC Forum on Health and Exposure to WWI Chemical Weapons,” https://www.facebook.com/SpringValleyWWI (accessed September 30, 2015). Baranov’ska, Natal’ia (ed.) (1995): Chornobyl’—problemy zdorovia naselennia: Zbirnyk dokumentiv i materialiv u dvokh knyhakh, Kyiv: Institute istorii Ukraini. Baranovskaia, N. P. (2011): Chornobylʹsʹka trahediia: Narysy z istoriï, Kyïv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny. Bourdieu, Pierre (1998): “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Le monde diplomatique, December 1998, http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/ 08bourdieu (accessed September 15, 2013). Gibbs, Lois Marie (2010): Love Canal: And the Birth of the Environmental Health Movement, Washington: Island Press. Harvey, David (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York. Hatherly, Owen (2015): Landscapes of Communism, London: Penguin. Kupny, Aleksander (2011): Zhivy poka nas pomniat, Kharkov. Lerner, Sharon (2014): “The Brain Cancer Rate for Girls in This Town Shot Up 550 percent–Is a Defense Contractor to Blame?” The Nation, 14 October 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/182099/brain-cancer-rate-girls-townshot-550-defense-contractor-blame (accessed October 18, 2014). Levinson, David & Christensen, Karen (2003): Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, Thousand Oaks/London: SAGE Publications. Liubinetskaia, N. Iu (1996): “Otchet o nauchnou rabote po teme: Okhrana zdorov’ia profilaktika i reabilitatsia zabolevanii u voennosluzhashchikh i chlenov ik semei,” Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy (SBU), Kiev, Ukraine 35/64/36, 149-80. Marples, David (1991): Ukraine under Perestroika: Ecology, Economics and the Workers’ Revolt, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Myers, Steven Lee & Becker, Jo & Yardley, Jim (2014): “It Pays to Be Putin’s Friend,” The New York Times, September 27, 2014. Pétery, György (2011): “Alternative Modernity? Everyday Practices of Elite Mobility in Communist Hungary, 1956-1980” in Lewis Siegelbaum, ed., The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 47-68. Pickett, Nathaniel Ray (2016): “Notes from Slavutych: The last nuclear monotown,” Toxic News, 3 May 2016 (https://toxicnews.org/2016/05/03/notes-fromslavutych-the-last-nuclear-monotown/). Politburo Study (2011[1986]): “O khode vypolneniia postanovleniia TsK KPSS i SM SSR to 29 maia 1986 go, no. 634-188,” June 24, 1986, in Alla Yaroshinskaia, Bol’shaia lozh’, Moscow: Vremia, 379-381.

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Rose, John (1973): Wheels of Progress?: Motor Transport, Pollution and the Environment, Boca Raton: CRC Press. Savchenko, Victor K. (1995): The Ecology of the Chernobyl Tragedy: Scientific Outlines of an International Programme of Collaborative Research, Parthenon Publishing: Paris. Shevchenko, Olga (2015): “Resisting Resistance: Everyday life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Postsocialist Russia,” in: Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel etc. (eds.), Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 52-71. Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2013): The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Udovychenko, Vladimir Petrovich (2015): Interview with Kate Brown, Kiev, July 8, 2015. Yaroshinskaia, Alla (2011): Chernobyl’: Bol’shaia lozh’, Moscow: Vremia.

Archival Material Gorbachev, Mikhail (1986): “Oral message handed by Ambassador Dubinin,” June 3, 1986, SG Country File, S-1024-88-2, United Nations Archive (UNA), New York, NY.

TsDAVO “Raoiny 30 km zone Kievskoi oblast,” no date, 1986 TsDAVO 342/17/4391, 75-9. “O poriadki provedeniia meditsinskogo nabliudeniia za litsami, prebyvshimi iz zony Chernobyl’skoi AES,” May 29, 1986, TsDAVO, 342/17/4390, 2-4. “O resul’tatakh issledovaniia klubniki,” May 6, 1986, TsDAVO 342/17/4370, 1, 7. BCh-gramma no 129 ot 23.06.86 g. Iz Minsdrava SSSR,” June 23, 1986, TsDAVOVU 342/17/4340, 162. “O vremenno dostupnii urovne soderzhaniia radio-aktivnykh veshchestv v mede,” June 5, 1986, TsDAVO 243/17/4370, 18. “O zakupke i pererabotke yagod,” June 25, 1986, TsDAVO 342/17/5411, 62. V S. V. Litvinenko ot M S Mukharskogo, July 1, 1986, TsDAVO 342/17/4340, 169. “Spravka po evakuatsii naseleniia iz opasnoi zony vokrug AES,” July 15, 1986, TsDAVO 342/17/4391, 93-6. V I. S. Levykinu ot Mukharskogo, August 7, 1986, TsDAVO 243/17/4370, 125-7. “To Zam Ministera zdravookhraneniia SSSR, tov. Borob’evu, E. U.” August 21, 1986, TsDAVO 2/15/1871, 19.

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“Protokol soveshchanie pre ispolkome Chernigovskogo oblastnogo Soveta narodhykh deputatov s uchastium predstavitelelei general’nogo plana g. Slavutycha,” Oct 22, 1986, TsDAVO 2/15/1871, 2-15. “Spravka o medico-sanitarnom obsepechenii detei i bereminnikh zhenshchin iz zone povyshenooi radiatsii,” 1987, TsDAVO 342/17/4391, 147-50. “Radiationno-gidromecheskaia obstanovka v g. Slavutiche,” September 28, 1987, TsDAVO 2/15/1871, 28-38. “O sostiyanii zdorov’ia detei, podvergshikhsia radiatsionnomu bozdeustviiu,” June 21, 1989, TsDAVO 324/17/5091, 35-6; N. G. Savel’lova v Snizhenko, Iu P., June 23, 1989, TsDAVO 324/17/5091, 37-8. “Materialy dlia doklada pravitel’stvu,” Sept 29, 1989, TsDAVO 342/17/5089, 159-161. Sovet Ministrov UkSSR ot predsedatel’ ispolkoma E Ya Gusel’nikov, Feb 11, 1990, TsDAVO 2/15/1871, 63-4. “Spravka o rabote komissii Minzdrava SSSR v Polesskom raione Kievskoi oblasti,” March 4, 1990, TsDAVO 342/17/5240, 57-9. “O polozhenii del na Khmel’nitskoi AES,” Oct 12, 1990, TsDAVO 2/15/1871, 163-4. “Spravka o sostianii okazaniia meditsinskoi pomoshchi detiam g. Chernigova,” no later than 24 chervnia, 1992, TsDAVO 324/19/32, 1-5.

SBU “Informatsionnoe soobshchenie o negativnykh prostessakh sredi chasti sovetskoi molodezhi,” April 1987, SBU l6/11/16, l. 147-150. “O problemakh atomnoi energetiki respubliki i protsessakh, sviazannykh s avariei na Chernobyl’skoi AES,” April 20, 1989, SBU 16/11/22, 127-30. “Informatsionnoe soobshchenie,” August 28, 1989, SBU 16/11/23, ll. 125-29. “O prossesakh, sviazannykh so stroitel’stvom i ekspluatatseiu AES v republike,” April 29, 1990, SBU 16/11/25, ll. 198-200.

Spaces of Detachment Serguei Alex. Oushakine We shall define as postcolonial a cultural landscape that emerges—as fragments or ruins—at the crossroad of various powers. This fragmentation of cultural space results in the absence of reference points (daminantav) or even in the absolute absence of those essential historical criteria that could have helped to discover or to invent such reference points. (Ihar Babkov, 2005: 9)

The State Historical Museum in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) appears somewhat frightening in its non-transparency. An imposing glass-and-limestone cube in the city’s main square, it looks completely sealed off, promising and advertising nothing (Fig. 1). In March 2010, when I visited for the first time, the permanent exhibit on the second floor bombarded me with multiple statues of Vladimir Lenin and his party colleagues. The accompanying narrative in window-cases traced the details of the Bolshevik Party—first as an underground organization in the Russian Empire, then as the avant-garde of history in the USSR. The third floor presented ethnographic artifacts from Kyrgyz tribes—from the Stone Age to the end of the nineteenth century, when they became incorporated in the Russian Empire. The imperial incorporation, the exhibit suggested, had ended the history as we knew it: no materials in the permanent exhibit dealt with the Soviet period of the Kyrgyz nation. Instead, abandoning objects and archival documents, the museum framed the Soviet period in the region exclusively as part of a visual history of the “Soviet people.” Murals on the ceiling highlighted main scenes of the USSR’s history: from the Bolshevik revolution to the Second World War, from Yuri Gagarin’s space trip in 1961 to Ronald Reagan’s obsession with star wars in the 1980s. (Figs. 2 -3) This thematic focus of the museum was not entirely arbitrary, of course. Opened originally in 1984 as the Museum Named after Vladimir Lenin, the place

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Figure 1. The Museum of National History in Bishkek, 2012.

Photo by the author.

became the country’s main historical museum after the collapse of the USSR. Renamed but not converted, the institution has been incrementally grafting its new status and mission onto the material structures inherited from the previous period. In 2003, a large statue of Lenin in front of the museum was moved to the museum’s backyard; instead of facing the main prospect of the capital, the statue now greets the country’s parliament. But this external spatial modification was the only significant visible change. The country’s intelligentsia expressed little interest in any radical makeover of the museum. The state’s cultural offices did not seem to be concerned with the situation either. As a promise, rather than evidence, of a new national history, the building for almost two decades has symbolized a deferral of the country’s representational abilities. It did not help that the architectural specifics of the building considerably limited any plans of major renovations. Many ideological items exhibited in the museum (reliefs, sculptures, mosaics, murals, etc.) are firmly merged with the building’s crucial structures (pillars, beams, walls, ceiling, lighting, etc.). Technically speaking, the removal of the communist insignia would require a complete transformation (perestroika?) of the building. The ideological superstructure seemed to have become inseparable here from the material base. Frozen in time and space, the museum exists as a hostage of its own origin. It is precisely this uneasy coexistence of history and material structures, this unavoidable permanence of the hardscape of state socialism in post-Soviet con-

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Figures 2-3. Ceiling murals in the National Museum of History in Bishkek; left—the celebration of the space travel of Yuri Gagarin in 1961; right—a march against Ronald Reagan’s Star War Initiative in the 1980s.

Photos by the author, 2012.

texts, this unyielding presence of spatial shells and frameworks of the bygone era in today’s narratives that I want to explore in this essay. In its own way, the museum’s failed attempt to replace Leninism with a national history reveals a crucial socio-symbolic problem, typical for many postsocialist countries. Important locations of the past could be recaptured, renamed, or even repurposed. Yet these acts of spatial reappropriation frequently do very little to change the syntax or even the vocabulary of places that persist in “speaking Bolshevik” (Kotkin 1995: 188-237). Retaining their stylistic organization and narrative sequencing, such spatial structures continue to generate meaningful effects in a situation in which their primary historical referents have become irrelevant. What strategies of signification and/or symbolic recycling could be used in regard to such structures? When a demolition is not feasible, when stylistic gutting and/or retrofitting of the inherited historical forms are not a possibility, how could the hardscape of state socialism become incorporated into nonsocialist or even anti-socialist discursive frames? As the Kyrgyz Museum of History demonstrates, spatial structures of the past might not be able to provide new narratives about the nation’s history; yet they do continue to act as material signs of withdrawal, as placeholders for national histories that have yet to be imagined and articulated. In a sense, the museum in Bishkek is a perfect example of postcommunist subalternity that delineates rather than describes. Using it as my starting point, in what follows, I focus on slightly more advanced instances of the symbolic re-appropriation of structures inherited from the socialist period. I will look at two sites in Belarus where prominent structures and locations associated with the Soviet past have been turned into objects of elaborate historical debate during and after the collapse of the USSR. Just like in Bishkek, the physical structures in these cases also remained mostly intact. Yet

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by placing them within different semantic fields, the authors of such contextualizing moves have performed an operation of détournement that radically shifts the meaning and importance of structures that must stay. I borrow the concept of détournement from Henri Lefebvre, who used it for describing an activity that mediates between domination and appropriation. Basically, the mechanism of détournement is an exercise in aggressive formal borrowing. In the process of transposition from one context to another, signs are detached from their content and diverted from their meaning. However, their formal structure remains intact (Lefebvre 2014: 96; for more on détournement, also see Kelly 2014: 170–72). Focusing on two sites near Minsk, the capital of Belarus, I suggest that these practices of historical iterability allow us to perceive postsocialism not only as an operation aimed at dismantling the key configurations produced by seven decades of a Soviet way of life but also as a form of intense postcolonial investment in these structures, conventions, and forms. It constitutes an investment that makes the very critique of these historical forms and their originary narratives possible. Bringing Kyrgyzstan and Belarus together is less whimsical than it might seem. These two newly independent countries were profoundly impacted by the Soviet period: each country’s territory, economy, and its demographic and ethnic makeup are a direct product of an active process of socialist modernization that succeeded in creating a modern state but failed in producing a modern nation-state (Filatov 2007: 6–10; on the modern state versus the nation-state within the colonial context, see Chakrabarty 2002: 83–91). As a result, the post-Soviet period in both places has been marked by a variety of efforts aimed at nationalizing the Soviet legacy of statehood in particular, and Soviet history in general. In his passionate Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire reminded us that colonialism was—among many other things—a result and a reflection of a radical elimination of possibilities and alternatives (Césaire 2000: 9).Postcommunist postcoloniality, then, could be seen not only as an attempt to restore the opportunities suppressed or marginalized but also as an invitation to construct “a lineage not of the present but of the past.” (Richards 1993: 48). Revisiting historical crossroads and turning points is a way of producing the past as it could or should have been. The two Belarussian sites that I analyze—the memorial ensemble Khatyn’ and the historical park Stalin Line—could be seen as indicative reflections of the postcolonial reasoning that started shaping in new independent states emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike the classical subaltern studies of South Asia, postcolonial scholarship of post-Soviet space is less interested in formulating a robust intellectual alternative to colonial or nationalist versions of history. Its proponents are not preoccupied with the desire to uncover sources of subaltern agency within the structures of domination, typical for the first generation of the post-colonial scholars (e.g. Guha 1997). Nor are they concerned with “the

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“autonomous domain” of the people.” (Chandavarkar 2012: 56). The paradigm of resistance is not the main driving force for post-Soviet postcoloniality: studies of the colonialist past predominantly seek to demonstrate the brutality of the colonizers. If anything, the portrayal of the colonized is negative—to highlight their non-presence in the history of the Soviet experiment. In my discussion below I pursue such postcolonial gestures of self-withdrawal not so much as a sign of coming to terms with a new (disempowering) identity, but, rather, as a discourse that frames former Soviet space as a site of major political contestation. Using geography as a model of social morphology, subaltern histories of socialism ontologize space, turning it into the key source of individual and collective identity. “Nation as narration” seems to be replaced by the nation envisioned in terms of nationscape. This turn toward the spatial creates an interesting rhetorical and interpretative trap: postcolonial laments tend to marginalize the historical malleability of the national borders by downplaying facts of imperial expansion and ethnic hybridization (for details see, e.g. Savchenko 2009: 83, 118-119). Instead, they forefront the “anchoring” capacities of the nationscape with its cyclical teleology of external invasions and retreats: “the French, the Germans, the Swedes, they all went through Belarusians, back and forth,” as the country’s president put it (Sovetskaia Belarus 2005). Plasticity and diversity, in other words, is the plasticity and diversity of the foreign. As a result, a potential history of Soviet subalternity—with all its thwarted agencies and compromised resistance—is replaced by a chronicle of subalternation, documenting successions of occupation regimes. This spatial perception of history determines the type of interaction with the regimes of external domination too. Since occupational regimes could not be deposed, one could at least try to circumvent or divert them. Imposed or left behind structures could be dealt with incongruently—through their deliberate misappropriation and elaborate détournement. By linking postsocialism and postcolonialism, I want to draw attention to the issues and dynamics of a process that has become somewhat eclipsed by discourses on nation-building in newly independent countries. Examining current debates about historical sites helps me document an uneasy process of the retroactive production of colonial subjectivity. Similar to the museum in Bishkek, these locations demonstrate that reclaiming a place often remains indistinguishable from being beholden to this place.

Memory Preserved Unlike the Kyrgyz State History Museum’s exhibitions, the museum’s stores were more in tune with time, indicating a significant re-evaluation of history and its artifacts. Along with ethnic rugs, scarves, and costumes, the stores also had an extended nostalgia section that offered various objects of Soviet memorabilia—stamps,

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small flags, statuettes, postcards, and button pins. Predictably, many of these objects were associated with Lenin. Some were propaganda items designed to celebrate major political anniversaries. Others memorialized such key events as the Moscow Olympic Games (in 1980) or a youth festival in Moscow (in 1985). For some reason, one big window-case was almost entirely devoted to three-dimensional pins depicting Soviet cosmonauts ($1 each). It is among these celebratory reminders of the Soviet conquering of the universe that I found a pin that drew attention to a very different politics of space: a small bronze rectangle showed a church bell squeezed by two vertical columns, with a sign underneath saying “Khatyn’.” Lending evidence to the ubiquity of Soviet agitprop, the pin referenced a major campaign of late socialism aimed at creating a wide network of spatio-symbolic memorials that would acknowledge losses of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). Located several thousand kilometers to the west of Bishkek, the bell of Khatyn’ found its presence in the middle of Central Asia. The history of the Khatyn’ complex was the story of a quick and remarkable success of the memorialization campaign, precipitated by a landmark decision of the Soviet government that restored May 9 as a national holiday, celebrating the victory in the Great Patriotic War (in this section, I draw on the materials that I discussed in detail in my earlier essay Oushakine 2013). The exact reasons behind the state’s attention to this holiday remain unclear: the holiday existed for a few years after the war, but it was cancelled in 1948, without much explanation. Yet the decision to reinstate it significantly influenced the makeup of many cities. The holiday required special sites, capable of incorporating new rituals of mourning and commemoration, and cities responded to this call by creating memorials, erecting monuments, and opening museums. For instance, such emblematic monuments as the Grave of the Unknown Soldier near Moscow’s Kremlin and the monumental sculpture of Motherland Calls for You in Volgograd (Rodina-mat’ zovet) were unveiled in 1967. The Khatyn’ memorial formed a key part of this process. It was created by a group of young architects from Minsk, who tried to retain the factorgraphic quality of the monument that grew out of the landscape of the “former village.” (Eismont 1999: 4). The original village—with twenty six houses, four wells, and several barns and woodsheds—was populated by 153 residents. On 22 March 1943, 149 residents of Khatyn’ were killed and then incinerated in one of the barns (for detailed accounts of the event and the survivors, see Kobets-Filimonova 2005: 114-16; Rudling 2012: 29–58). A few days earlier, a car with a high-profile German officer had been ambushed and destroyed by a group of local partisans, and the Khatyn’ atrocity supposedly retaliated for this murder. The memorial was envisioned as “a museum-preserve” (muzei-zapovednik), which was supposed to retain the original layout of houses, wells, barns, and the cemetery by rendering them as modern brutalist structures made out of concrete

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(Adamushko et al. 2008: 133). As Leonid Levin, the leader of the architectural team, insisted in his recent book, the landscape of the village (trees included) was “left untouched [netronutyi].” (Levin 2005: 58). This historically conscious attempt to commemorate a village that vanished during the war, however, quickly became transformed into something else. Prompted by the republic’s political leadership, the architects radically expanded a rather minimalist memorial into a vast spatiosymbolic ensemble, which now occupies seventy-five acres and includes several large-scale structures (for an outline and a virtual tour see the museum’s website ‘Khatyn’ www.khatyn.by). A historicized document was turned into an exemplary metaphor, into an expression that could “convey the tragedy of all Belarusian people through the tragedy of Khatyn’” (Levin 2005: 92). Next to the grave of the Khatyn’ residents, an unprecedented “cemetery of villages” was created. Each of its 185 “graves” contained ashes brought from settlements that like Khatyn’ had been incinerated and never revived. Metal trees nearby listed 433 “resurrected” villages, ones were completely burned down during the war but repopulated later. Framing the complex, a 225-foot-long Wall of Sorrow exhibited 66 names of concentration camps and killing sites (out of a total of 260) that existed in Belarus during the war. Every fourth Belarusian was killed during the three years of occupation (2,230.000 people altogether),1 and the composition of the memorial’s eternal flame visualized these morbid statistics by blending the spatial and the social. Out of four openings in the black stone ground, only three were occupied by growing birch trees; the forth was left empty—but enflamed. (Fig.4) The Khatyn’ ensemble became a major Soviet memorial commemorating the losses of the war. It was a key destination too: from 1969 to 1993, more than 33 million people saw the site; in 1988, the memorial probably had the highest attendance in its history—three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Khatyn’ hosted 1,700,400 visitors (Kuts 1993). As part of the late Soviet commemorating canon, the Khatyn’ ensemble stood as a Soviet equivalent of Auschwitz: a killing site preserved to remind future generations about the unimaginable atrocities of the Second World War. In the process of this canonization, the basic historical narrative was eventually boiled down to a few unproblematic lines like these: “Khatyn’ was a Belarusian village. In 1943, the Germans rounded up all the residents of the village—including the children—into a wooden barn and burned them to death.” (Tumarkin 1994: 207). Perestroika and glasnost significantly undermined this view. From 1990, a series of publications—first in Moscow and later in Minsk—revealed that the famous

1

Khatyn’ (Minsk: Belarus, 1973). The numbers have been corrected since the 1970s. A recently published guide to the Khatyn’ memorial, for instance, gives the following statistics: during the occupation, 209 cities and towns were destroyed; 9,200 villages were burned down; 2, 596,000 people were killed (i.e., every third person), see Kirilava (2007: 14).

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Figure 4. Every Fourth: the eternal flame at the Khatyn’ memorial, 2014.

Photo by the author.

tragedy was in fact organized by members of the special 118 Punitive (karatelnyi) Battalion called on to conduct anti-partisan operations of “pacification.” Created by the Nazis, this police formation consisted mostly of Ukrainians; but it also included Russians and Belarusians. The German Major Erich Körner was in charge, while the Ukrainian Grigorii Vasiura, the battalion’s chief of staff, supervised the battalion on a daily basis. Formed in Kiev, the battalion included about five hundred soldiers initially used in Ukraine; they were transferred to Belarus in early 1943 (Krapivin 2003: 14; for more details, see Rudling 2011: 195–214). These revelations brought about a rather fundamental change in the overall view of the war’s legacy. Viktor Glazkov, a retired lieutenant colonel who presided over the 1986 military trial that dealt with the Khatyn’ tragedy, expressed well the ethical dilemma that this change entailed. In his 1990 interview titled “Khatyn’ Was Burned by Polizeis,”2 Glazkov put it this way: “The truth is: Khatyn’ was destroyed not by Germans but by the 118 punitive battalion… . These people cannot be forgiven. But they were born and they grew up in our own country; they were brought up by our land. This is a fact, irrefutable and undeniable. A fact we have to reconcile with.” (Zdaniuk 1990: 3). It is precisely the acceptance of the fact that the village was burned down by “our own compatriots” (nashi s vami sootechestvenniki), as one newspaper put it, that proved very difficult (Zdaniuk 1996: 6). A clear-cut story

2

“Polizei” (politstai) was often used to refer to Soviet citizens who collaborated with the Nazi regime, usually in the form of conducting a close police control on the occupied territory.

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about German invaders and Belarusians’ popular resistance gradually turned into a messy narrative about a civil war in which relatives were split between partizany (partisans) and polizeis (police) and neighbors switched sides almost on an hourly basis.3 Increasingly, what happened in (mostly Catholic) Khatyn’ was looking more and more like the pogrom in Polish Jedwabne, where on 10 July 1941 three hundred Jews were killed by their Polish neighbors (see Gross 2001: 72-104).

Postcolonial Preoccupations While the transcripts of trials published in Belarus in the past two decades did document a direct involvement of Soviet “compatriots” in the erasure of Khatyn’, these publications hardly changed the outline of the traditional (official) narrative about war violence and its victims. Nobody disputed the number of people killed or the number of villages destroyed. And recent guides to the Khatyn’ memorial, restored and updated in 2004, continue to use the blanket term “fascists” to describe the perpetrators of the massacre. Even though there was no nation-wide discussion of the topic, facts of wartime collaborationism had certainly been well known in Belarus for quite some time.4 When I visited the Khatyn’ memorial in September 2014 with a group of tourists, our tour guide, a former art historian, was quite frank about the situation, explaining that “even during the Soviet time, many local war survivors mentioned—though it was prohibited to say this loudly —that punitive actions in local villages were carried out by citizens of the Soviet Union. Mostly, [these citizens] spoke … Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian.” While recently publicized facts of collaboration were not exactly new, they dramatically undermined the basic metanarrative about the role that Soviet Belarus had played in the war. The Khatyn’ revelations have made increasingly problematic the existing tradition of locating the accounts of suffering and atrocities within a larger framework of the popular partisan resistance to the Nazis, which has become dominant for narrating the history of Soviet Belarus since the 1960s. It proved instructive to hear the tour guide in Khatyn’ emphasizing again and again that the memorial visualized “the tragedy of the regime of occupation” (okkupatsionnyi rezhim), which “inflicted suffering on the innocent population” of Belarus. Limiting the story of the partisan resistance to a bare minimum, the guide focused instead on what she called “the genocide of the Belarusian people,” for which “nobody has

3

4

For a detailed account of events that preceded the Khatyn’ tragedy and for the descriptions of complicated configurations of political and social alliances in the village, see KobetsFilimonova (2005). In 1980, Ales Adamovich published a novel entirely devoted to the topic of collaborationism:The Punitive Squads: The Joy of the Knife or the Hyperboreans and How They Live.

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officially apologized for so far.” Belarusian popular culture and intellectual debates demonstrate a similar rerouting of the historical narrative: the trope of resistance is being replaced by that of occupation (for a cinematic version of this approach, see Kudinenkos 2003 feature film Okkupatsia. Misteria). Discursively, such a rhetorical move helps externalize possible sources of violence and domination; it legitimizes the perceived lack of agency and/or moral choice too. Valiantin Akudovich, a leading Belarusian (oppositional) philosopher, historicizes the argument in the following way: “For the Belarusians, the subaltern state [podnevol’noe sostoianie], the state of occupation became natural; with time, they got used to the foreign yoke [chuzhezemyi gnet], as one gets used to the atmospheric pressure” (Akudovich 2008: 69). This language of subalternity is not accidental. From the end of 1990s, Belarusian intellectuals have been developing local versions of postcolonial studies, trying to redefine their relationship with the historical narratives that routinely framed their past as a part of somebody else’s history, be it Poland, the Russian Empire, or the USSR (see Babkov 1999: 75-88; Abushenko 2004: 124-156). Leading Western scholars of postcoloniality—from Dipesh Chakrabarty to Walter Mignolo—visited Minsk. Major texts, from Gayatri Spivak’s to Homi Bhabha’s, have been translated (at least in fragments). No doubt, the transposition of postcolonial theory into the Belarusian context is very much an editorial project: ideas and concepts are carefully selected and merged with already existing discursive traditions and cultural concerns. The inaugural 2004 issue of Perekrestki (Crossroads), a major intellectual journal in Belarus of the past decade, is a good case in point. In its first issue, the journal published Mignolo’s article “(Post)Occidentalism, (Post)Coloniality, and (Post)Subaltern Rationality” alongside several essays by Belarusian authors who addressed directly and indirectly Mignolo’s vision of postcoloniality. Strikingly, Belarusian participants almost completely ignored Mignolo’s main message—his enthusiastic invitation to view coloniality as a direct product of European modernity to begin exploring both “issues that stem from the borders of the imperial differences” and the epistemological possibilities that “the limits and perspectives of the subaltern” could offer (Mignolo 2004: 179). Instead, the local contributors theorized “the break from the Soviet past as a projection of Belarus’s Europeanness,” (Shparaga 2004: 204) and called for “eliminating from within the creolity [izzhivanie kreol’skosti iznutri]” of the Belarusians, which was produced by the (Soviet) experience of the twentieth century (Abushenko 2004: 150). Indicatively, Mignolo’s “borders of the imperial differences” were spatialized: as a particular geographic location that promises some distance (if not a kind of autonomy) from the imperial influence and domination. Within this reading, the borderland emerged as a liminal space of sorts, envisioned either as a “bridge between West and East” or as a field of indistinction, where different “civilizational” trends and traditions overlap and hybridize

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each other, leaving no clear reference points (see Bobkov & Tereshkovich 2004: 5-9; Gnatiuk 2005: 38-39). Ihar Babkov, the founding editor of Perekrestki and one of the most ardent proponents of the idea of the borderland, pointed to an important ontological dimension of this postcolonial turn toward the spatial: I’d define this strategy of searching for identity [samatoesnas’ts] as a strategy of Belarusian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a search for the soil [grunt], for the foundation... The national is not about some essence, nor is it about some idea. Rather, it is about topos, it is about a place, which gives us a sense of uniqueness. (Babkov 2005: 33) Babkov’s understanding of the exact content of place varied from a region to a state to a geopolitical configuration. What remained constant in his texts was a profound saturation of geography with ontology. To some degree, this search for the foundational soil could be read as a historically situated politico-intellectual attempt to locate a standpoint from which to conduct the anticolonial resistance further. For instance, in 2011, at a roundtable on public protests against the heavily managed presidential election in December 2010, Babkov insisted that deconstruction as a method of the social critique of grand narratives of modernity was hardly helpful in Belarus. In fact, as his argument went, the authoritarian government eagerly wished to adopt deconstructing interpretations precisely because they de-universalized the metanarratives of “freedom, democracy and human rights” by pointing to those “concrete actors with their specific economic interests” who “hid behind these discourses and metanarratives.” In this context, to de-universalize meant to discredit. Debatable as this interpretation of deconstruction might be, it is helpful for understanding why the incorporation of postcolonial theory in postcommunist contexts often looks like its “hostile takeover” (Snochowska-Gonzalez 2012: 708–23; see also Todorova 2015: 708–14). Absorbed by nationalist discourses, this version of postcolonial criticism approached its “post-” as “anti-” through promising more struggle, resistance, and suffering. To put it briefly: postcolonial theory is read here for its apophatic effect. Neil Lazarus in his analysis of resistance in African postcolonial fiction traced a similar tendency. As he put it, “The general rhetoric of anticolonialism was reductive. It implied that there was only one struggle to be waged, and it was a negative one: a struggle against colonialism, not a struggle for anything specific” (Lazarus 1990: 5). Yet in the situation that Lazarus described, the reductive anticolonialism of the 1960s had little or no alternatives. Babkov’s postcolonial reasoning shows what happens when such alternative intellectual frameworks become available: Anticolonial nationalism prefers to remain reductive, actively rejecting concepts and arguments that might complicate the straightforward dynamic of anticolonial resistance. With its language of hybrid identities and dif-

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fused power, the classical postcolonial theory obfuscated the targets that originated the antillectual nationalism in the first place. Viewing the anticolonial resistance as the matrix for any political resistance, Babkov highlighted grave implications of such disarming postmodernity in his earlier work: The culture of resistance is built on specific anticolonial practices, anticolonial thought, and anticolonial art that can easily locate the enemy, be it Russia, Poland or conformism. Under the condition of postmodernity, where … everything and anything are mixed together, … the culture of resistance as an anticolonial culture might not survive for too long. (Frahmenty 2000) Certainly, postcolonial studies in Belarus are far from homogeneous; different scholars pick different key points in their constructions of alternative histories (for an extensive discussion of Belarusian postcolonial thought see my essay: Oushakine 2017). Yet it would not be a stretch to say that the meaning and the role of the Great Patriotic War have become a main target of this anticolonial critique. Seen from below and from under the rubble, the war is presented as a historical variation of the same unhappy civilizational choice, with East and West personified now in the figures of Stalin and Hitler. This rhetorical framing of the historical borderland—“between Stalin and Hitler,” as one film about Khatyn’ put it (Pravda Khatyni 2008)—makes possible the next important rerouting of the historical narrative. The problematic histories of resistance and collaboration are dismissed as equally meaningless. It is the nature of occupation, not the effect of subjection, that becomes the site of principal intellectual investments. As a result, the partisan resistance in Soviet Belarus emerges as an example of forced heroism, as an imposed form of agency that went against every rational or cultural reasoning of the local population. To understand the significance of this interpretative shift, it is important to keep in mind that the narrative about popular resistance during the Great Patriotic War still constitutes the core of the official interpretation of Belarusian identity. A course on the history of the Great Patriotic War is a mandatory university requirement in Belarus, and teaching materials for high schools still present the partisan movement as a crucial part of war history (Fig. 5). The postcolonial détournement of the partisan movement should be read against this image of the “Republic of Partisans” (respublika-partizanka), as Belarus was routinely referred to during the late Soviet period. In some cases, the revision targeted patterns of description. For instance, Irina Voronkova, a historian and the deputy director of the National Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk, suggested to scale down the scope of resistance, at least terminologically. As she asserted, the usual formulaic description “the nationwide [vsenarodnoe] partisan movement” should be replaced by a more precise “mass movement” (Voronkova 2009: 97). The nation, the suggestion implied, could not be

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Figure 5. A poster from a collection of teaching materials The Great Patriotic War: The Lesson of Memory (Minsk, 2006 ). The caption clarifies: “Partisans destroy the railroad. “The railroad war” was the name used to describe the partisans’ attempt to destroy on the mass scale the railroad communications of the [Nazi] invaders.”

seen as unified anymore. Other critics went much father and questioned the very fact and nature of the resistance. To quote Valiantin Akudovich: Spearheaded by Moscow, the partisan movement provoked Germans to exercise an additional, “unplanned” brutality. At the same time, this movement forced the Belarusians towards ... an unnatural, unnecessary, and, in the end, disastrous fight against the occupation ... Neither from a sociopolitical point of view, … nor from the point of a natural striving to protect oneself, one’s family, and one’s kin, could the idea of the struggle against the occupation be perceived by the people as its vital necessity. (Akudovich 2008: 71, 72) If earlier attempts to question the reckless and dangerous aspects of the partisan resistance (partizanshchina) were usually framed as attempts to understand local sources of this phenomenon, that is to say, as an effort to approach the history of the Great Patriotic War also as a history of a civil war that took place within one nation (Uiferova 1996), then current interpretations of the partisan resistance are structured by a definite desire to place the very figure of the partisan outside the local context. Postcolonial estrangement is realized as a retroactive expulsion. Just like “the fascist,” “the partisan” becomes a sign of invasion, in this case from the

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east. Bracketing off specific circumstances that brought to life particular forms of social organization, this approach perceived subalternity as an inversed version of domination. Hence the intrinsic negativity of this type of postcoloniality: by and large it constitutes itself through a compulsion to reject—forms of identity, linguistic behavior, or types of agency that are perceived as imposed by outsiders.5 Unlike subaltern studies of South Asia, with their principal desire to perceive imperial structures of domination also as a source of colonial agency, which destabilizes these very structures from within, (Prakash 1994: 1483) postcolonial historicists in Belarus limit the epistemological promise of subalternity to the gesture of withdrawal, to a process of rhetorical alienation from the experience of subjection that should not have happened in the first place. To show how this insistence on non-belonging and distancing is played out in the Belarusian historiography of the Second World War, I want to cite one recent example. In her study of the Nazi occupation of Belarus between 1941 and 1944, Olga Baranova, a historian from Belarus, convincingly demonstrates that locals were not making simply random choices at the time. Within one year (from December 1941 to December 1942), with the German army firmly advancing (and the Red Army retreating), the number of Belarusians who volunteered for the Hilfspolizei Ordungsdienst (the German order police) increased tenfold (starting from 3,682 in 1941) (Baranova 2008: 122). The trend reversed at the end of 1942, after the Red Army started gaining momentum, and the locals were exposed to punitive measures, compulsory recruitments to labor camps in Germany and elsewhere, and other forms of hostility and terror. In 1943, some military and police units formed by the Nazis in Soviet Belarus switched their allegiance completely and joined the partisans. Being with the losing Germans, as some of these “converts” explained, made no sense any more (ibid. 124). This tactical flexibility (rarely acknowledged publically in today’s Belarus) is important, but I find even more crucial the conclusion that the historian offers. Placing her subjects squarely “between two fighting authorities, being exposed to attacks and retribution from both sides but without protection … from either of them,” (ibid. 121). Baranova delineates, to paraphrase E. P. Thomson, the immoral economy of subalternation: Among people who willingly assisted the Germans at the initial stage of the occupation were not only the open opponents of the Soviet system but also those indigenous civilians whose decision was determined by rational choice or pure opportunism. For the denunciation of Jews and commissars, the Germans offered material rewards such as land or part of the confiscated Jewish property. However, 5

In this respect, Belarusian postcolonial scholars share a lot with the Russian nationalists who also create their identity through a meticulous cartography of their alienation. I discuss the phenomenon in Oushakine (2009: 109–15).

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it is quite difficult to put these people into the category of collaborators in the Holocaust since their indirect participation in the destruction of the Belarusian Jewry was not prompted by racial conviction or anti-Semitic feelings but by the desire to make an easy profit. (Baranova 2008: 120; E. P. Thompson 1971: 76–136) Cleansed of its moral connotations, denunciation is presented as a tool of survival: it’s not personal; it’s the economy. It would be wrong to assume that this revisionist attitude toward World War II is dominant in today’s Belarus. In the fall 2014, when I presented the preliminary outlines of this essay to a group of local history professors from a Minsk university, some of them told me that I sided with the anti-Lukashenko “minority” whose views were far from representative of any meaningful trend. Defending the canonical interpretation of the war, the historians insisted that the survivalist, valueneutral approach to collaboration with the Nazis during the war would be detrimental for Belarusian society, and rejected completely the immoral economy of Belarusian postcolonials. Strikingly, a recently issued glossy booklet about Khatyn’ points in a similar direction: the threat of historicist immoralism is neutralized there by a claim to the place’s sanctity (Fig. 6). A museum-preserve once conceived as a spatial document of war atrocities has finally been transformed into a ritual site.

Figure 6. A cover of a new guide to the Khatyn’ memorial. The Russianlanguage title reads “A Shrine of the Nation’s Memory.”

And yet, I think the shift that I describe is significant. Similar interpretative transformations have already taken place in many other post-Soviet countries. I

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am less interested in speculating about political consequences of this change; more important for me is the social and intellectual logic that underlies this attitude to Soviet history. New interpretations of the Great Patriotic War, I have been suggesting, form only a small part of a larger attempt to reframe the experience of state socialism as an imperial project imposed from above. The immoral economy of post-Soviet postcoloniality, then, is less concerned with ethical dimensions of collaboration and resistance than with alienating and estranging the historical forces that have enabled current forms of subjectivity in the first place. The picture of empire that emerges in these narratives seems to share the logic of the imperial fantasy described some time ago by Thomas Richards: the empire “not as it was but as it [i]s imagined to have been” (Richards 1993: 8).

Constructing Sites of Memory The 1996 referendum in Belarus is usually remembered for its overwhelming, albeit questionable, support for a radical constitutional transition from a parliamentary to a presidential republic. It often remains unnoticed, however, that the first item on the ballot involved a question about ritual. Back then, Alexandr Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, suggested using July 3 as the new date for celebrating Independence Day (aka the Day of the Republic); his initiative was supported by 88.18 percent of voters. The change of date constituted not a mere calendar reshuffling but an important symbolic gesture. Until the referendum, Independence Day was celebrated on July 27, marking the date in 1990 when the Belarusian parliament adopted the Declaration of Sovereignty. The 1996 change suggested a new time of origin: for several decades, July 3 had been celebrated in Belarus as the “Day of liberation of Minsk from the Hitler occupants” (gitlerovskikh zakhvatchikov) that took place in 1944 (Respublikanskii referendum 1996). This decision to use the memory of the Great Patriotic War for consolidating a postsocialist nation was not entirely original. In 1995, Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, orchestrated a massive celebration of Victory Day, turning the holiday, which had somewhat faded away during the early 1990s, into the main national event of the year. Since then, Victory Day has been undergoing serious modifications in Russia. Appealing to younger generations, Russia’s cultural industry increasingly associates Victory Day with various participatory activities: public performances of war songs or the mass dissemination of the St. George ribbon meant to signify a material link with the veterans (for further discussion, see Oushakine 2013a). Until very recently, commemorative rituals of the Great Patriotic War in Belarus continued to reproduce the patterns inherited from the Soviet period. Official celebratory parades and such places of traditional commemoration like Khatyn’ have

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limited capacity for participatory involvement.6 A lack of venues for performative patriotism precipitated the emergence and relatively quick success of a radically new form of memorialization: the war theme park called Stalin’s Line. Opened in July 2005, the park offers a peculiar combination of historical artifacts, newly built structures, a hands-on attitude, and a celebratory rhetoric. Abandoning any pretence of historical authenticity, the organizers of the site demonstrate an unabashedly pragmatic engagement with the past, downplaying issues of historical memory and historical truth so crucial for the debates associated with Khatyn’. Aleksandr Bazarnov, the director of the “historical and cultural complex Stalin’s Line,” as the site is officially known, explained in an interview that the ninetynine-acre complex started small. Interested in history, Bazarnov for several years explored fortification remains around Minsk—bunkers, trenches, and shelters. By talking to military engineers and historians, he eventually came to realize that all these seemingly haphazard remains belonged to a large-scale fortification line built in the 1930s along the old border of the Soviet Union. The original fortification line extended for 1,835 kilometers, including twenty-one fortified areas, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea (see Stepanenko 2006). In 2004, together with a group of young historians, Bazarnov restored one such shelter close to Minsk, and used it as a base for military reenactments. Looking for support, he tried to get some help from the organization Memory of Afghanistan (Pamiat Afgana), which brings together veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. This contact completely changed the scale of Bazarnov’s plans. Aleksandr Metla, the head of the veterans’ organization, came up with an idea of a major national theme park. President Lukashenko supported the plan, and in March 2005, the Ministry of Defense signed an order, allocating human and material resources for the construction of Stalin’s Line (see Simak 2005). For four and a half months, soldiers from several engineer regiments and a railroad battalion lived in tents, restoring bunkers, digging anti-tank ditches, creating an artificial lake, and building a navigation structure over it. In his illustrated book about the creation of the complex, Metla describes the four-month period of construction as a period of “shock-labor” that required intense work of seven hundred soldiers (Metla 2006: 92). The final site included such fortification structures as trenches, anti-tank ditches, two gun-machine bunkers, one half caponier, and various engineering constructions designed for observation. The newly created fortified area also exhibits a large collection of military equipment used during the Soviet period—from cars, trucks, and tanks to howitzers, 6

The attendance of the Khatyn’ memorial radically decreased after the collapse of the USSR, reaching 179,110 visitors in 2009 (ten times less than in 1988). See statistics on the museum’s site Khatyn (n.y.), on parades see Romanova (2008: 358–67) and (368–96), respectively.

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airplanes, and missiles (for the detailed and updated list of objects see Liniia Stalina n.y.). The opening of the complex took place on 30 June 2005, a few days before Independence Day. The ceremony was attended by the president, and along with a tour around the site and meeting with war veterans, it also included a theatrical show called Invasion (Nashestvie) (Figs. 7-8).

Figure 7. A bust of Stalin at the Stalin’s Line Park, Minsk.

Photo by the author, 2014.

The history of the war was compressed and streamlined into a one-hour reenactment with a chain of scenes, from occupation to victory. Airplanes adorned with Nazi symbols bombed a group of refuges and a column of Red Army soldiers; an air fight between “Soviet” and “Nazi” planes was gradually replaced by a tank

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Figure 8. President Lukashenko at the opening of the Stalin’s Line in June 2005.

battle on the ground, which itself was followed by a victorious attack of the Red Army supported by gun machines and partisans (Belorusskaia Niva 2005). Reporting on the opening of the complex, many local newspapers described the site as “a reconstruction of the feat,” as a memorial to “heroism,” as a “revived memory” (Chirskii 2005; Galovka 2005; Kriat 2005; Krapivin 2005: 3). Aleksandr Metla, not noticing the irony, referred to this restorative project as “the national construction (site) of memory” (vsenarodnaia stroika pamiati) (Metla 2006: 94). Yet there was very little to remember, actually. Historians and journalists were quick to remind the public that the actual fortification area was barely used for its primary purpose. Constructed in the late 1930s, the fortification line became irrelevant after the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which moved the Soviet Union’s border westward. Nor was it ever called Stalin’s Line. Most likely, it never even saw a single major fight (see Zelenkova 2005, 3; Buravkin 2005; Iurkovets 2007; Grinchevskii 2009; Kantor 2010). As Alexandr Bazarnov recollected, during the reconstruction period, the team found very few cartridge cases. And impressive traces of rocket shots carefully preserved on the wall of a bunker most likely evidence the Germans’ attempt to test the strength of the wall, not a fight between the two armies (Rabkovskii 2006: 4). Despite its fabricated, rather than restorative, nature, the site has become an important attraction. A big sculpture of Stalin by the entrance adds some controversial flavor to the park, and the chance to try a “typical” war food ration—a bowl of boiled buckwheat with pickles (and a shot of Stalin’s Line vodka)—made war history quite palatable. Yet predominantly, the park has become a popular setting for

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a variety of participatory activities—from gatherings of bikers and dog shows to reenactments of military events, be it a medieval tournament or a Soviet fight with Afghan mujahideen (Figs. 9-10).

Figures 9- 10. Stalin’s Line as a platform for historical re-enactments: left, a reenactment of the Afghan war (1979-1989), right—a reenactment of a medieval tournament.

Strongly emphasizing the importance of having historically correct uniforms, equipment, and weaponry, one of the reenactors explained to me in a 2014 interview that because of its fortification remains, the site provided a perfect “interactive platform” for various reproductions of military events (11).

Figure 11. A re-enactor/tour guide at Stalin’s Line.

Spaces of Detachment

By focusing on the authenticity of the material detail, this reenactive attitude to history makes irrelevant larger questions and concerns about the spatial structure that enables these reenactments, contributing in its own way to the immoral economy of post-Soviet postcoloniality. Listening to stories about various reenactments, I found it hard not to notice how well the theater of war played out at Stalin’s Line materialized the idea of subalternation. Different military detachments—the “Poles,” the “Germans,” the “Russians,” the “Afghans”—went through the battlefield, replacing each other in a continuous flow of military occupations.

Figure 12: A leaflet for a re-enactment performance on September 13, 2014 (an official Day of Tank-men). The caption reads “Comrades, it’s better join me at the Line than take a walking tour to [the prison camp at] the Kolyma. J. Stalin.”

There is a certain irony in the fact that a call for the “post-foundational” treatment of history and colonial legacy articulated by the second generation of subaltern scholars found its most developed representation in the officially sponsored Stalin’s Line (Prakash 1990: 383–408). For quite some time, Belarus’s historians and social scientists have been talking about the necessity to use history to forge a new national identity. Examples are too numerous to list, so I quote only one. Pointing to the fact (revealed by a poll) that in “the mass consciousness” of the republic’s citizens the pre-Soviet period of Belarus’s history was presented least (naibolee slabo), Aleksei Lastovskii, a political scientist from Minsk, concluded in one of his articles: A weak knowledge about the history of Belarus before the twentieth century demonstrated by the country’s inhabitants could be interpreted as “a clean slate” of sorts, which could be filled up with constructed memories. In fact, the weak

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knowledge should be seen as advantageous when compared to the knowledge of the recent history, which would inevitably create contradictory interpretations. … pre-Soviet Belarusian history could be effectively used for creating a shared set of representations about the past and present of the Belarusian nation. (Lastovskii 2010: 195-196) The state authorities seem to have responded to this idea. Perhaps in the most flamboyant way, Stalin’s Line crystallizes the logic of postcolonial détournement that I have been tracing in this essay. The military theme park created in Minsk turns to Soviet history primarily for its ability to provide a repertoire of plots and a vocabulary of gestures. Neither a sign of authenticity, nor a source of objective truth, history is utilized here from a distance, and with a twist: as a necessary material foundation (Fig.12). This does not mean, however, that the authors of such postcolonial narratives are not concerned with the credibility of their stories. As I have shown throughout the essay, it is the materiality of space, the physical tangibility of structures and remains inherited from the past that are called on to corroborate, justify, and persuade. Used as material anchors, these spatial structures incite debates about the nation’s past rather than representing it. Detached and “détourned” from stable meanings and frames of reference, these sites indicate a crucial trend: while new national histories have yet to be properly articulated, the appropriation of the national space in the name of history is already well on its way.

References Abushenko, Vladimir (ed.) (2004): “Kreol’stvo kaki no-modernost vostochnoi Evropy (vozmozhnye strategii issledovanii),” Perekrestki 1-–2, 2004, 124-156. Adamovich, Ales (1988): The Punitive Squads: The Joy of the Knife or the Hyperboreans and How They Live, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Adamushko, Vladimir et al. (ed.) (2008): Uvekovechivanie pamiati zashchitnikov Otechestva i zhertv voin v Belarusi 1941-2008, Minsk: NARB. Akudovich, Valiantsin (2008): Kod otsutstviia. Osnovy belaruskoi mental’nosti, Vilnius: Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Litovskoi respubliki. Babkov, Ihar (1999): “Etika pamezhzha. Transkulturnast ak bearuski dos’ved,” Fragmenty 1-2 1999, 75-88; Babkov, Ihar (2005): Karaleistva Belarus’. Vytlumachen’ni ru[i]nai, Minsk: Logvinov. Baranova, Olga (2008): “Nationalism, anti-Bolshevism or the Will to Survive? Collaboration in Belarus under the Nazi occupation of 1941-1944,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 15:2, 2008, 113-128.

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Bobkov, Igor & Tereshkovich, Pavel (2004): “Vmesto predisloviia.” Perekrestki 1-2, 2004, 5-9; Buravkin, Genadz’ (2005): “General’naia liniia,” Salidarnast’, July 8, 2005. Césaire, Aimé (2000): Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press. Chandavarkar, Rajinarayan (2012): “The Making of the Working Class:” E. P. Thompson and Indian History,” in: Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.): Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, Verso: London. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2002): Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Chirskii, Nikolai (2005): “Liniia Stalina,” Belorusskaia Niva, July 7, 2005, Eismont, Mariia (1999): “Memorial “Khatyn’” sozdavali tridtsatiletnie rebiata,” Narodnaia volia, July 16 1999, XXX. Filatov, Aleksandr (2007): “Belarus’ kak pogranich’e: neskol’ko zamechanii o sud’be issledovatel’skogo na[ravleniia,” Perekrestki, 3-4, 2007, 6–10. Galovka, S. (2005): “Platzdarm geraizmu i podvigu,” Minskaia Pravda, June 21, 2005, Gnatiuk, Olga (2005): “Proshchanie s imperiei. Mezhdu Vostokom i Zapadom.” Perekrestki, 1–2, 2005, 37-97. Grinchevskii, Sergei (2009): “Liniia Stalina,” Rossiiskoe voennoe obozrenie 3 March 2009, 52–55; Gross, Jan Tomasz (2001): Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Guha, Ranajit (1997): Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Iurkovets, Iurii (2007): “Liniia vran’ia,” Ogonek, May 7, 2007, 39–40. Kantor, Iuliia (2010): “Teatr voennykh deistvii,” Vremia novostei, April 29, 2010, 6. Kelly, Casey Ryan (2014): “Détournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-1971),” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 44:2, 2014, 170–72. Kirilava, Natallia (ed.) (2007): Khatyn’. Khatyn. Chatyn, Minsk: Belarus. Kobets-Filimonova, Elena (2005): Raspiataia Khatyn’, Minsk: Bellitfond. Kotkin, Stephen (1995): Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press. Krapivin, Sergei (2003):“‘Izbytochnaia’ Pravda o Khatyni,” Trud v Belarusi, March 20, 2003. Krapivin, Sergei (2005): “Na linii vechnoi slavy,” Sovetskaia Belarus, July 1, 2005, 3, XXX Krivolapov, Aleksei (2008): “Parad oznachaiushchikh: Belorusskii opyt vizualizatsii Dnia nezavisimosti,” in: Almira Ousmanova (ed.): Belorusskii format: Nevidimaia real’nost, Vilnius: EGU, 368-395. Kuts, N. (1993): “Kolokola Khatyni,” Vo slavy Rodiny. March 27, 1993,

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Lastovskii, Aleksei (2010): “Istoricheskaia pamiat’ kak faktor ukrepleniia Belorusskoi natsional’noi identichnosti,” Sotsiologicheskii almanakh 1, 2010, 187-195. Lazarus, Neil (1990): Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, New Haven: Yale University Press. Lefebvre, Henri (2014): Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Levin, Leonid (2005): Khatyn’. Avtobiograficheskaia povest’, Misnk: Asobny Dakh. Metla, Aleksandr (2006): Liniia Stalina: Pravda i pamiat’ istorii, Minsk: Pamiat Afgana. Mignolo, Walter (2004): “Oksidentalizm, kolonial’nost’ i podchinennaia ratsional’nost’ s prefiksom ‘post’,” Perekrestki 1–2, 2004, 161-197. Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2009): The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2013): “Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space between Stalin and Hitler,” in: Julie Buckler / Emily D. Johnson (eds.): Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europ, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 285-314. Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2013a): “Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History,” Ab Imperio 1, 2013, 269–302. Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2017): “How to Grow out of Nothing: The Afterlife of National Rebirth in Postcolonial Belarus,” Qui Parle 28.2, 2017, 423-490. Prakash, Gyan (1990): “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:2, 1990, 383–408. Prakash, Gyan (1994): “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99:5, 1994, 1475-1490. Rabkovskii, Aleksandr (2006): “Liniia Stalina” snova derzhit oborony,” SanktPeterburgskie vedomosti, July 4, 2006. Richards, Thomas (1993): The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso. Romanova, Olga (2008): “Simvol, “rabota s pamiat’iu”, media-sobytie: Voennyi parad k 60-letiiu Pobedy v Balarusi i Rossiii,” in: Almira Ousmanova (ed.): Belorusskii format: Nevidimaia real’nost, Vilnius: EGU, 358-367. Rudling, Per Anders (2011): “Terror and Local Collaboration in Occupied Belarus: The Case of the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118. I. Background,” Historical Yearbook. Journal of the “Nicolae Iorga” History Institute VIII 2011, 195–214. Rudling, Per Anders (2012): “The Khatyn’ Massacre: A Historical Controversy Revisited,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26:1, Spring 2012, 29–58. Savchenko, Andrew (2009): Belarus—a Perpetual Borderland, Leiden: Brill. Shparaga, Olga (2004): “Kak i zachem kontseptualizirovat’ Belarus? (Soobrazheniia, vyzvannye k zhizni tekstom Min’oly),” Perekrestki 1–2, 2004, 198-208.

Spaces of Detachment

Snochowska-Gonzalez, Claudia (2012): “Post-colonial Poland—On an Unavoidable Misuse,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 26:4, 2012, 708–23. Thompson, E.P. (1971): “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50, 1971, 76–136. Todorova, Maria (2015):“On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” Slavic Review 74:4, 2015, 708–14. 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. Uiferova, Iadviga (1996): “Nas tak dolgo uchili liubit’ cheloveka s ruzh’em.” Interview with Svetlana Aleksievich, Izvestiia, February 29, 1996, Voronkova, Irina (2009): “Problemy otrazheniia istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v muzeimnoi ekspozitsii,” in: Irina Chuvilova (ed.): Istoricheskie ekspozitsii regional’nykh muzeev v postsotsialisticheskii period, St. Petersburg: Aleteia. Zdaniuk Vasilii (1990): “‘Khatyn’ sozhgli politsai’: Interv’iu s Viktorom Glazkovym,” Vo slavu Rodiny, November 20, 1990. Zdaniuk, Vasilii (1996): “Khatyn’ sozhgli politsai,” Svobodnye novosti-plius, March 2229, 1996, XXX. Zelenkova, Anastasiia (2005): “Imeni palacha,” Salidarnast’, June 17 (2005).

Newspaper Articles Belorusskaia Niva (2005): “Istoriko-kul’turnyi kompleks “Liniia Stalina” otkryt,” Belorusskaia Niva, July 1, 2005. Sovetskaia Belarus (2005): „Teoplyi dom dlia vsekh. Press-konferenstia A. Lukashenko,” Sovetskaia Belarus, November 24, 2005.

Films Kudinenko, Andrei (dir.) (2003): Okkupatsia. Misteria, Studio Navigator, 90 min. Pravda Khatyni (2008): BelsatTV.

Internet Sources Frahmenty (2000): “Sens i nonsense supratsivu. Dyskusiia,” Frahmenty 1-2 (2000), http://knihi.com/storage/frahmenty/3discus.htm (accessed September 4, 2016). Khatyn (n.y.): The state memorial complex ‘Khatyn’, http://www.khatyn.by/ru/news/d18c26fb26ca91be.html (accessed September 4, 2016).

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Kriat, Dmitry (2005): “Liniia pamiati,” Sovetskaia Belarus, July 1, 2005, https:// www.sb.by/articles/liniya-pamyati.html (accessed October 10, 2019). Liniia Stalina (n.y.): Webpage, http://stalin-line.by/ (accessed September 4, 2016). Respublikanskii referendum (1996): “Tsentral’naia komissiia respubliki Belarus po vyboram i provedeniiu respublikanskikh referndumov.” Respublikanskii referendum 24.11.1996: http://www.rec.gov.by/ru/arhiv-referendumy/respublikanskiy-referendum-24-noyabrya-1996-goda (accessed September 4, 2016). Simak, Roman (2005): “V armiakh SNG,” Krasnaia zvezda, March 17, 2005, http:// old.redstar.ru/2004/11/16_11/w.html (accessed October 10, 2019). Stepanenko, Oleg (2006): “Na linii vechnoi slavy,” Pravda, June 22, 2006, https:// kprf.ru/pravda/issues/2006/64/article-12323/ (accessed October 10, 2019).

Part 2: Friendship of the Peoples?

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space Susi K. Frank

This contribution on Ukrainian contemporary poetry or literature forms part of a wider field of interest: Post-Soviet literatures in the wake of multinational Soviet literature. I am studying the multilayered history and afterlife of this project and want to investigate its impact on the literary developments, the aesthetic tendencies, and on language preferences and translation practices in and after Soviet times. I find it important to analyze the history of implementation and investigate the tensions between, first, the declared post- and anti-imperial intentions of this project that should promote regional literatures as national; second, the imperial practices of its implementation; and, third, its unintended effects and afterlife. As my point of departure shall serve the hypothesis that the implementation of this project had a deep impact not only on Soviet but also post-Soviet literatures, bringing forward a highly integrated transnational literary space whose effects are still visible today and sometimes can function as a breeding ground for new developments across and beyond its borders.

Remarks on the Notion of Literary Space The notion of space related to literature can mean many different things. In her article “Poetischer Raum: Chronotopos und Geopoetik” (2010: 294-308), Sylvia Sasse differentiates between at least six levels of meaning of space: the level of textual structure (relatedness of textual elements within the virtual space of symbol, paradigm, and syntagm according to Roman Jakobson); the level of the virtual space of intertextuality; the level of textual materiality, that is, the space produced by writing, the book as a spatial object; the level of fictional perspectivization (Uspensky 1973); the level of narration (the function of the boundary and its crossing as the core of a narrative in principle according to Yuri Lotman; Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopoi as narrative nodal points); and the level of the symbolic construction of space and its axiological organization, which can include social and cultural spaces, as well as geo-spaces. Including a sociological dimension, we can add Pierre Bour-

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dieu’s notion of the “literary field” (1996: 47-173). Bourdieu focuses on discursive fields and the historical process of their delineation. Yet some scholars criticize that despite all differentiations, some important spatial aspects of literature still remain unconsidered. Xavier Garnier, for example, proposes to speak of “literary space” as the dynamic process of interaction between literature and the “world,” which can be understood by means of the actor-network approach (Latour 2005: 10-11). What I mean by literary space is something else yet again. In contrast to Bourdieu’s literary field, literary space is not the “space or field of literature” among other fields or discourses. What I am interested in is not the historical process of the autonomization of a field and its rivalry with other fields.1 By a certain analogy to Stefan Troebst’s preferred term Geschichtsräume (historical spaces) and to the term Sprachräume (linguistic spaces), I understand literary space—Literaturraum—as a zone of intensive literary contact that emerges as a highly complex and multilayered, mostly transregional and transnational unit through dense intertextual entanglements, all different kinds of canon building, institutional (politics of publishing, translation, awards, etc.) and aesthetic, by means of language choice and linguistic poetics (monolingual, multilingual, translingual), and by means of poetic and aesthetic representation and construction (geopoetics). Literary spaces are complex and by far not homogeneous communities that mostly have a geographical or geocultural reference, but they can hardly be neatly delineated in terms of geography.2 In this article, I will focus on Soviet and post-Soviet literary space and try to demonstrate its very specific character, development and afterlife, i.e. its impact on contemporary literary dynamics out of Russia. My first step will be to look back at the history and the political strategies that conducted the shaping of Soviet literary space, its structures, institutional framework and ideology, and then, in a second step, to analyze its afterlife as well as new dynamics of Russian-language contemporary literatures. I will include into my discussion some attempts to redefine and reposition Russian-language literature after the end of Soviet Union, and then, in a third step, focus on contemporary Russian-language Ukrainian poetry as a case study. My task here is to ask whether Russian-language literatures out of Russia today should be seen as relicts in a fading process or whether they form part of an ongoing process of transformation in which Russian is going to lose its function as the lingua franca because of the political heterogeneity of the space, while, on the

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The fact that precisely literature has been ascribed a highly important role as an instrument of indoctrination, and the corresponding fact that the literary field was by no means autonomous in Soviet times, are important premises of my project too. In my understanding, there may also be a global literary space, while there also exist literary spaces that are not global but are dispersed in subzones throughout the globe.

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other hand, it cannot be reduced to a merely national range. Examining the recent work of some contemporary Ukrainian poets I will try to analyze their literary negotiations—in a politically critical situation—of the status of the Russian language in Ukrainian literature today. But let me start with some reflections about the literary space of Soviet multinational literature and its post-Soviet afterlife.

The Literary Space of Soviet Multinational Literature Multinational Soviet literature, as it emerged as a project of cultural and literary politics in the mid-1930s, can be seen as a significant part of the enterprise of nationalities policy in the Soviet Union. In accordance with such policy, multinational Soviet literature was proclaimed anti-imperial, as a project meant to emancipate the literatures of all Soviet nations from their former situation of imperial repression. Soviet language policy played a crucial role in this context and went hand in hand with literary politics, because, in many cases, to proclaim itself a national literature, the written language had to be standardized first. The First All-Union Writer’s Congress in August 1934 demonstrated how Soviet multinational literature was to be understood: When Maxim Gorky (1990) mentioned “Soviet literature” in his keynote lecture, he defined it as a unit, as an “allunion’s literature.”3 The uniform content of the contributions following Gorky’s speech shows that this unit had to consist of a multitude of homogeneous components: the multitude of non-Russian literatures reflecting the administrative order of the Soviet territories that were ascribed national identity and a national literature (Slezkine 1994: 414–452). The regional representatives of the Soviet Writers’ Union had the task to affirm the existence of the corresponding national literature, and to invent its appropriate (pre)history. In the following years, a huge nationwide institutional apparatus emerged, with institutes of literary translation, publishing houses with a special focus on non-Russian literatures, and journals like the famous Druzhba narodov4 as its foundation. Subsequently it also included a new research department in the Academy of Sciences and the famous Gorky Institute of Literature as a kind of “factory of Soviet writers.” These institutions brought into existence a multitude of widely differing literatures that were conceived of as homogeneous with respect to history 3 4

Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine, S.F. It was in the context of the foundation of Druzhba narodov that the very term “mnogonatsional’naia sovetskaia literatura” (multinational Soviet literature) came into use. The first evidence comes from an article by Petr Pavlenko, the editor in chief. Interestingly, in the passage that coins the term, Pavlenko emphasizes the prominent role accorded to translators in the context of the emergence of multinational Soviet literature (Pavlenko 1939).

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(in accordance to Marxist-Leninist standards), status (national), and style (socialist realism). Just think of Georgian literature as one of the longest-standing Christian literatures in comparison to Kazakh or other literatures, which had either no written tradition or did not conceive of themselves as national units. In their case, by inventing national units and proclaiming “national emancipation” this apparatus promoted local literary developments that otherwise would probably have had no chance. What according to Terry Martin (2001: 414-431, 460-461), Jane Burbank (2010), and others holds true for politics, is true for literature as well: multinational Soviet literature as part of the so-called affirmative action empire was declared antiimperialist, but in its essence it retained some—quite crucial—(neo-)imperialist characteristics. The two arguments that multinational Soviet literature was implemented from top-down and that Russian is the predominant lingua franca would possibly be too weak if there were no other moments of centripetal power asymmetry and authoritarian regulation. There are three of them: The role of Russian literature, the dictate of socialist realism as the only adequate style of representation and narration, and the underlying concept of literary space. At a first glance it seems strange that Russian literature—although several speakers refer to it as a standard—did not figure among the national literatures represented at the Writers’ Congress. But at a second glance it becomes clear that there exists an obviously intended ambiguity between Russian literature and Russian-language literature. The meaning of Russian literature was expanded to equate Soviet literature with Russian-language literature as a transnational unit. As Gorky said in his speech: Not only the Russian masses, but also workers of all parts of the Soviet Union read Soviet literature in the Russian language; millions of pupils of all Soviet nationalities are brought up with them. Therefore the Soviet proletarian Russian-language literature ceases to be read exclusively by people who speak Russian and are from Russia, but gradually acquires an international character also in its form. (Gor’kii 1990: 15; italics S.F.) The omission of Russian literature from the ranks of national literatures is legitimized by the transnational function that has been ascribed to it. But it also had a primus inter pares status, since the canon of Russian literature was again regarded as the exemplary model for all national literatures. One can read this between the lines of Gorky’s speech: “If we had the giant Pushkin in our past, this does not mean that Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other tribes are unable to give birth to great masters of literature” (Ibid.). We can also recognize the same argument in the subsequent speeches delivered by representatives of the national literatures, for example, in Ivan Kulik’s contribution on Ukrainian literature and in Samuil Marshak’s speech on Soviet children’s literature. Kulik wrote:

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space

Proletarian literature developed in Ukraine in connection with the proletarian literature of Russia, under the special guidance of the Bolshevik party … Russian proletarian literature had giants such as Maxim Gorky already before the revolution. (Kulik 1990: 44) We may identify the normative dictate of socialist realism that does not tolerate any deviation as the second imperial moment of the project of multinational Soviet literature. But there is yet a third imperial aspect that still awaits a thorough examination: its conceptualization as a principally open, expanding and inclusive influence zone and, as a result, the not always explicit claim to world literature, i.e. to global influence and global domination. Alongside the parceling out of the space of multinational Soviet literature into national units, this aspect forms another constitutive spatial parameter. This claim to world literature had spatial and temporal dimensions that in turn have imperial implications. Let us return once more to Gorky: Defining socialist realism in 1934, Gorky spoke of its subject as “the beautiful home of the whole of mankind, united into one family.”5 This cannot be interpreted otherwise than as a claim to universality. Formulations concerning multinational Soviet literature allude to the expanding meaning of the term that turns out not to be fixed on the actual territory of the Soviet state. Gorky, he developed the idea of a “world literature, Soviet style”—as Maria Khotimsky (2013: 119–154) put it—as early as 1918. Aiming at “acquainting the Russian proletarian reader with world literature” (Khotimsky 2013: 122), he meant first of all a canon of outstanding works of European literature (later on he also included Asian literatures). We can thus regard multinational Soviet literature in more than one sense as the successor of the editorial project of vsemirnaia literatura, world literature, through which Gorky aimed at presenting the Soviet canon of world literature as one that included not only the literatures of the West but those from all over the world. The global horizon, the omnipresent orientation toward the canon of the world classics, the idea of a political (or ideological) connection, and a fundamental humanism that includes the formula of the “brotherhood of nations” together associate the project of vsemirnaia literatura with Gorky’s project of “Soviet literature.” But whereas vsemirnaia literatura limited itself as a general-education project and the development of global cultural knowledge, multinational Soviet literature aimed, first, to globally expand the influence of socialist realism and, second, to spearhead the development of literatures throughout the world. From the perspective of Marxist dialectical materialism, all local (national) cultures and literatures have their place along an axis of consecutive forms of economy-driven societies.

5

“Prekrasnoe zhilishche chelovechestva, ob’’edinennoe v odnu sem'iu” (Gor’kii 1990: 17).

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Only one historical scale of cultural development exists; and the literature that corresponds to the most developed stage of world history shall be understood as “world literature,” because it represents the avant-garde of this global development. Multinational Soviet literature was conceived of as this kind of world literature, and it was this claim for spatial or geopolitical literary power that gave the project its third imperial touch. But what about the results of this project’s implementation? For more than fifty years the project of multinational Soviet literature, with all its institutional support, has brought forward a literary space of astonishingly enduring stability, a space that in its structure developed multiple layers, consisted of officially constructed institutional networks and unofficial levels emerging uncontrolled, a space that even twenty-five years after its foundation walls collapsed continues to have an effect on the shaping of new literary developments in post-Soviet regions. This may be due to several facts: The generations of writers that dominate the literary scene now are still scions of the Soviet educational system and heirs of the Soviet canon. Even after decades, the Russian language at least partially still functions as a lingua franca throughout the zone of the former Soviet Union and that of former Soviet influence, and some non-Russian writers use Russian as their writing language. In most cases, the works of these writers find a reception in Russia too and are even included in processes of canon-building like literary awards and the like. Many of the former institutional instruments of shaping and canonizing multinational Soviet literature still exist today and have only modified their program. But, interestingly, not all effects of this program were intended. As the apparatus of literary institutions simply produced a huge number of highly educated authors from all regions of the Soviet Union, among these authors were some who disagreed with the dogma of socialist realism. The Gorky Institute in Moscow was not only a “factory for literary bureaucrats,” but also became a breeding ground for literary dissent. From the perspective of the history of Soviet literary space, the literary underground with its subversive, archaic system of publication and circulation, the samizdat, constituted a crucial side effect of the project that had tremendous impact on its spatial reality and—as is clear today—sustainability. The development of the underground across regional and national borders in its own way fostered a dense entanglement of Soviet literary space. It developed transnationally but remained center-bound, because Moscow was not only the official center and the capital of the Soviet world but also the fulcrum of dissent: It was the only place in the Soviet hemisphere where knowledge about avant-garde traditions and current art developments beyond the Soviet world were circulating. At the same time, my (still early) observations suggest that the literary underground, more than of-

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ficial institutional structures of translation and publishing, fostered regional and transregional developments behind the center’s back.6 Like the official part of Soviet literary space, the underground was predominantly Russian speaking, but there were regional (or, in Soviet terms, “national”) circles as well. To sum up: despite the dogmatic character and the authoritarian and rather imperial strategies by which multinational Soviet literature came into existence, its outcomes were not uniform at all. It brought forward a literary reality of dense intercultural entanglement, a reality that—not least in its split into official literature and underground—had a transnational character, a reality that as a result of intensive communication, translation, and intertextuality produced a huge and highly integrated literary space.

Some General Remarks on the Afterlife of Multinational Soviet Literature Politically, the Soviet space fell apart. But political decisions and cultural transformations develop along different time scales. Interestingly, in the case of Soviet multinational literature, even the institutional framework, which could have been changed immediately, turned out to be quite persistent. Nearly all important institutions of multinational Soviet literature have survived in post-Soviet times and, within the remaining Russian Federation, they continue to fulfill their function of holding together a literature defined by its multinationality: the Writer’s Union, the Gorky Literary Institute, journals like Druzhba narodov, even if they have a much diminished reputation and significantly lower print runs. Since the beginning of the new millennium, changes on this level oscillate between modification and restoration. For example, the Department of the Literatures of the Peoples of the Soviet Union, founded in 1949 at the Institute of World Literature (IMLI), was integrated into the Department of Soviet Literature in 1955, given back the old name in 1988, and renamed into Department of the Literatures of the Peoples of Russia and the SNG after 1991. In 2005, it issued the Slovar’ literatury narodov Rossii (Dictionary of the Literatures of the Peoples of Russia), which—judging by the authors listed—seems to be oriented mostly toward the past (Nad’’yarnych 2005). 6

Interestingly, this seems to be true for processes of translation as well. Probably due to fact that literary translation was not only one of the most powerful instruments of Soviet literary politics but also an important niche for dissident and repressed authors, translations did not always go through the center: Yuri Andrukhovych, the Ukrainian writer, told me about the significant case of a Georgian book that became important for critical intellectuals in Ukraine: the (historical) novel of the 1970s “Tata Tutashkhia” by Chabue Amiredzhibi was—translated directly from Georgian into Ukrainian. But this, of course, was an exception.

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Symptomatically, it is an old, renowned member of this very same IMLI Department, Chinghis Guseinov, himself an important representative of Azeri Soviet literature, who is one of the few critics or authors trying to stimulate a new discussion about how to redefine the remnants of multinational Soviet literature and to deal with the multinational character of today’s Russian literature. In 2007 Guseinov suggested what could replace multinational Soviet literature as the department’s research object—bol’shaia russkaia literatura (great Russian literature): Russian-language ethnic authors (besides Aitmatov, I would mention Bykov, Zul’fikarov, Sudeimenov, and Pulatov) organically participate in what we might call great Russian literature which is brought forward today all over the world by representatives of different peoples raised on the traditions of Russian literature and spread to all parts of the world due to the waves of emigration, from Australia, the Americas, Europe to, last but not least, Israel … . This is not only ethnically Russian literature, but world literature that requires a new approach and new ways of understanding from the point of view of the reflection of different ethic existence through the Russian word. (Guseinov 2014) It is quite revealing to compare Guseinov’s post-Soviet vision to how Gorky defined and thereby invented Soviet literature: the only difference between their definitions is that for Gorky, the link was first ideological, then linguistic, whereas Guseinov considers language the only constitutive element of the unit. Using the term “great”—bol’shaia—Guseinov neatly delineates this concept from the imperial tradition: bol’shaia evokes the imperial term velikorusskaiia (Great-Russian)but he makes the difference clear: bol’shaia refers to all parts of Russian-language literature, including the “Russian non-Russian authors”—an expression also coined by Guseinov—and all authors using Russian as their writing language while living beyond the borders of Russia: exiles, migrants, and authors from former Soviet republics. At the same time, Guseinov draws a thin line between Russian-language literature and national literatures in other languages, marking a second decisive difference between his vision and the concept of multinational Soviet literature, which consisted of literatures in many different languages and their translation into Russian. Guseinov’s “great Russian literature” then skips the inner-Soviet multinational part and understands the legacy of multinational Soviet literature merely as a transnational one-language unit. Much in the same direction, the online project “Novaia literaturnaia karta Rossii” (The New Literary Map of Russia), founded by Dmitrii Kuzmin, aims at “reconstructing the literary space of Russia.”7 Without using the term “Russianlanguage literature,” it takes into account authors and places that use Russian as a writing language, whether in Russia or beyond. 7

“Vosstanovlenie tselostnogo rossiiskogo literaturnogo prostranstva“ (Kuzmin n.y.).

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space

A tendency to emphasize the multinational character of contemporary Russian literature can also be observed in the Russian prize policy of the past few years: sometimes there are one or two non-Russians among the short-listed authors or winners of literary prizes whose works foreground ethnic topics in a post-Soviet or/and regional perspective: be it a Tartar (like Guzel Yakhina) or authors with a Daghestanian background like Alisa Ganieva, or even authors from the post-Soviet abroad, like the Estonian Andrei Ivanov. They are all awarded prices for works that mostly deal with regional history from a transnational Russian—imperial, Soviet, or post-Soviet—perspective. In contrast to the focus on “new” or “great” Russian literature, the long-standing journal Druzhba narodov continues along old paths: Besides representatives of all parts of Russian-language literature, it continues to publish translations from different literatures of the former Soviet Union. While continuing the dialogue with them, it reconstructs the former space of multinational Soviet literature. But what about the current literary tendencies themselves? The situation must be described as a very complex process of ongoing transformation, whereby nationalization and/as de-Sovietization in the former Soviet republics and now independent states develops in parallel to nationalization in Russia itself. Topics of national history dominate the current development of Russian literature, and its multinational dimension is mostly seen as an integral part of the national. The literatures of the post-Soviet countries emphasize their independence by separating themselves completely from Soviet and Russian literature in general, from both its intertextual memory and its language. Of course, differences exist between countries in which Russian was always one of the regional languages, like Belarus or Ukraine, and countries where Russian became a lingua franca as an effect of Soviet language policy, as in Central Asian republics. But nearly everywhere, even in the Baltic states, authors today use Russian as their writing language. They constitute a group and a tendency in-between. These authors represent different generations and different poetics—think, for example, of the poet Shamshad Abdullaev (b. 1957), an admirer of European modernism and the founder of the completely Russian writing Ferghana school of poetry, or the aforementioned Estonian writer Andrei Ivanov (b. 1971), or Boris Khersonskii (b. 1950), an Odessan Jewish poet, and the poet Anastasia Afanas’eva (b. 1982), both of whom will be discussed in more detail below. What they share, however, is a common Soviet past—none of them was born after 1991. What they also have in common with Russian non-Russian (and some Russian) authors in today’s Russia is the will to face the Soviet past, the necessity to work through its cultural impact and at the same time accept a common heritage that is more than Soviet, namely, the space of Russian-language literature. What these Russianlanguage authors of post-Soviet countries apparently also share is a more or less critical attitude toward the dominant trend of language-based renationalization

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in the former Soviet republics. Some of them recognize this trend as an outcome of the Soviet multinational project that—following the romanticist concept of nation—simply equates nation and language, thereby skipping the transnational aspect of the Soviet project that brought forward a transnational literary and cultural space potentially able to finally emancipate these cultures from Soviet-made nationalism.

The Literary Space of Soviet and Contemporary Ukrainian Literature The fate of Ukrainian literature during Soviet times in its general line did not differ from that of other national Soviet literatures. After a few years of coexistence among Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish as languages of Ukrainian literature,8 Ukrainian was declared the only official language of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, and Russian and Ukrainian, side by side, remained the country’s writing languages. Like many Soviet national literatures, Ukrainian Soviet literature developed in two languages. It consisted partially of works written in the national language and partially of works originally written in Russian. Translations into Russian, however, meant a higher degree of canonization, and by far not all works in Russian were translated into the national language, because everybody in fact understood Russian. Russian was not only the lingua franca in Ukraine as in other Soviet republics, however, but one of Ukraine’s regional languages. Maybe it is for this reason that Ukrainian literature from the very beginning of the Soviet period has held prime importance among the other non-Russian national literatures. In the implicit hierarchy of multinational Soviet literature manifest for example in the order of talks at writers’ congresses or in manuals about the history of multinational Soviet literature, it received first place. That is, the second place after Russian literature. Yet in its further developments Soviet Ukrainian literature resembled the general Soviet situation: the intensification of support for Ukrainian language in the 1960s coincided with a general liberalization and the intensification of Soviet nationality policy, while the trend toward marginalizing Ukrainian since Brezhnev’s zastoi (stagnation) had its origins in this period’s more restrictive nationality policy. The common Soviet practice of translation and self-translation existed in Ukraine as well. A good example in this context is Oles’ Hončar who —similar to

8

At the First All-Union Writers Congress in 1934 Ivan Kulik, the already mentioned JewishUkrainian writer, could still present Ukrainian literature as trilingual, but after the end of the 1930s—after the nearly complete extinction of the Ukrainian avant-garde including its Jewish representatives—Yiddish was no longer accepted as an official language in Ukraine.

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space

the Belarussian Vasyl Bykau—translated some of his Ukrainian written works into Russian himself, and authorized the translations of others. Post-Soviet Ukrainian literature up to now has shared the tendencies characteristic for most post-Soviet national literatures: nationalization understood as emancipation from Soviet occupation and the Ukrainization of literature by means of language, by means of extinguishing the Soviet layer of literary (and cultural) memory, and by means of conceptualizing Ukrainian historical narratives as independent from Russian/Soviet history or as a story of repression and liberation. Despite an ongoing cultural situation of a deeply rooted and very complex bilingualism, although most writers of the 1990s passed through the Soviet system of literary education,9 and despite the fact that post-Soviet Ukrainian literature unconsciously developed within the old Soviet (institutional) frames, Ukrainian literature at first easily found a way out. Many important aesthetic and cultural layers had been neglected or oppressed during Soviet times: the Ukrainian baroque that owed to Polish baroque, the layer of the Austro-Hungarian period, fin de siècle, decadence, and the like. How convenient, then, that these layers—and not only Shevchenko’s folklore-oriented romanticism—belonged to the Ukrainian language part of Ukrainian literary memory. It was the literature from Galicia that during the 1990s developed with a vengeance by reactualizing more Western, but no less imperial historical belongings and—at the same time—by attempting to establish a new national literature in the sense of the traditional unity of language and culture. The novels of nationally and internationally renowned authors like Oksana Zabuzhko, Taras Prohasko, Yuri Andrukhovych, and Yuri Vynnychuk, as well as the geopoetical essays of Yuri Andrukhovych, may serve as good examples here. The strategy to reconstruct Ukrainian culture by reawakening supposedly forgotten regions of central Europe and forgotten layers of its cultural memory helped promote an intensive European reception of this literature and its recognition as the new Ukrainian literature in general.10 During the political crisis of the past few years, the tendency toward a general predominance of Ukrainian even increased. Especially in Kiev, the capital that was a pure Russian city before, the shift toward Ukrainian can easily be felt. That a Russian-language Ukrainian literature could develop and coexist alongside this strong and influential trend (sometimes unnoticed by the Galician public), raises many questions. Is Russian-language literature beyond the borders of Russia 9

10

Yuri Andrukhovych is a very good example here: After having studied in Ukraine, he completed the “Vysshie literaturnye kursy“ –-OWTTE: “Higher school of created writing” at the Gorky-Institute in Moscow—an experience that delivered him the subject for his first novel “Moscoviada.” During the last Soviet decade Andrukhovych also took part in the translationmachinery of Soviet literature: As he told me, in 1991 he translated Anatolii Kim’s novel The Squirrel which, because of the collapse of the system, could not come out then. This is true especially for its German reception.

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now only a relict from Soviet times or does it also contribute to the development of post-Soviet Ukrainian literature? Is it a regional phenomenon or not? And if not, how can the language choice of an author be explained? And does Russianlanguage Ukrainian literature contribute to a reconstruction of Ukrainian literary space? How? A clear division in fact exists between authors using Ukrainian and authors using Russian as their writing language. Although most Ukrainian authors are bilingual and do use both languages in their everyday life, hardly any of them uses both languages in their writing. Only after the events on Maidan, that is, since 2015, some singular cases of language-switching can be registered that are always related to the ongoing process of the politicization of literature and art in general: Andrei Kurkov, who in the past wrote all his novels in Russian,11 recently started to write children’s literature in Ukrainian; Boris Khersonskii, a Jewish Russian poet from Odessa wrote his first poems in Ukrainian after the Maidan events. It is worth noticing that despite obvious regional predominances, language choice cannot be deduced from an author’s regional origin. Ukrainian literature cannot be mapped as clearly divided regionally in accordance with the dominance of one or the other language. Take as an example Ukrainian-writing authors like Serhiy Zhadan (b. 1974) or Liubov’ Jakymchuk (b. 1984): Both come from the region of Luhansk, where Russian—a very specific, regional Russian—is the dominant everyday language. Yet both authors choose Ukrainian as their writing language. In novels like Voroshilovgrad (2011)—citing in the title the old Soviet name of Luhansk—Zhadan translates the whole Russian-speaking region into Ukrainian, thereby integrating it into the new Ukraine. This is Zhadan’s strategy to demonstratively destroy the dividing delineation between language regions. Elsewhere it is important to see that language choice cannot be interpreted simply as an act of political self-positioning. Several or even most Ukrainian Russian-language writers and poets support Ukrainian independence from Russia: Boris Khersonskij, Aleksandr Kabanov, Anastasiya Afanas’eva, Andrei Kurkov. With respect to international reception, it has to be said that the internationally most famous Ukrainian author is a Russian-language writer (and an ethnic Russian), Andrei Kurkov. In his interviews, Kurkov has repeated that he is fine with Russian as his writing language in Ukraine and cannot see any troubles with Russian in the Ukraine. Kurkov’s language choice is based on his identification as an ethnic Russian, but at the same time he defines himself as citizen of Ukraine (cf. Kurkov 2014). Besides his popular novels for adults—which in my opinion follow the tradition of Soviet magical realism, the dominant tendency of multinational Soviet 11

Most of them, and especially the earlier ones, were published first in Russia and came out afterwards in Ukrainian translation in Ukraine. The novels and books of the past years, although written in Russian, were all published in Ukraine.

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prose since the 1960s —which are translated into dozens of languages, Kurkov, who speaks Ukrainian perfectly, in his country is well known as the author of children’s literature in the Ukrainian language. Is there a deeper meaning behind this choice? Ukrainian as the language of the future Ukraine? Or Ukrainian once and forever as the children’s language that it had to be under imperial conditions? Anastasia Afanas’eva, a young Ukrainian Russian-language poet from Kharkiv, shares Kurkov’s point of view concerning the language. In two interviews of March 2014, Afanas’eva exposed herself as a sharp critic of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. But she nevertheless continues to write in Russian. Boris Khersonskii also defends Russian as a language for literature in Ukraine. In a recent interview he proposed to differentiate between “Ukrainian literature” as “Ukrainian-language literature” and “the literature of Ukraine,” to which may belong texts in different languages (cf. Khersonskii 2015). Aleksandr Kabanov—like Andrei Poliakov—describes the situation of Russianlanguage poets in Ukraine more critically. He complains about the conditions for publishing, because, in his view, Russian-language poets do not get enough financial support: neither do they receive national awards, nor are they supported by institutions in Western Europe or in the United States. Indeed, most Russian-language Ukrainian poets were and are awarded the so-called Russian prize sponsored by the El’tsyn Foundation. What these examples clearly show is that the language situation in general, and in the field of literature especially, has become more and more politicized and that there is no one-dimensional, simple connection between language choice and political point of view. But how can we interpret the strategies of Russian-language Ukrainian poets in a historical perspective and in correlation to multinational Soviet literature? On the one hand, we can see that translations into Russian function within the old institutions of Soviet literature—like the journals Druzhba narodov, Interpoezija or even Novyj mir—signaling continuity, at least from the Russian side. But do we witness continuity on the Ukrainian side too? Khersonskii and some other representatives of the elder generation still use Russian in the tradition of samizdat, recalling its status as the lingua franca of dissent. There are authors of the middle generation—for example, Andrei Poliakov—who understand their Russianness as purely national and therefore have left Ukraine for Russia after the annexation of the Crimea. Yet the literary space has changed fundamentally; Soviet literary space has fallen apart and Moscow no longer functions as the generally accepted cultural center for authors of non-Russian origin. While for Russian-language authors who actually take part in the general development of Russian literature the trendsetting aesthetic developments in Moscow remain important as an orientation point, they are no longer the only one. There are indicators in Ukrainian Russian-language

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literature and especially poetry that signal that its new self-understanding significantly differs from the Soviet tradition because it is characterized by a twofold orientation:12 on the one hand toward the context of Russian literature, and on the other, toward Ukrainian literature, which these authors try to define as bilingual, contrary to the common equation of language and nation. An indicator of such an approach is the fact that Ukrainian poets from both language sides translate each other and thereby establish a symmetrical relation between Russian- and Ukrainian-language poetry. Zhadan, for example, is translated, among others, by A. Tsvetkov and B. Khersonskii; whereas Khersonskii, Kabanov, Afanas’eva, and Tsvetkov are translated by Zhadan; Khersonskii translates poems by Liubov’ Yakymchuk about the family memory of Donbass miners and so on. In the same way, the bilingual poetry festival “Kievskie lavry” in Kiev, started in 2004 by the initiative of Aleksandr Kabanov, and the successfully developing bilingual journal SHO, also founded by Kabanov,and which publishes even texts from Russian ultra-nationalist authors like Zakhar Prilepin, redefine the RussianUkrainian literary relationship in an innovative way: as symmetrical and non-exclusive. Due to these initiatives, Ukrainian-and Russian-language authors take more notice of each other and are involved in an intensive process of translation in both languages. Let us turn now to some recent poems by Russian-language Ukrainian poets and examine how they reflect on their writing language.

Russian-Language Ukrainian Poets in Comparison As their poems of the past two years show, especially for those Russian-language poets who understand themselves as citizens of Ukraine, both writing language and literary identification are at stake. With the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the status of Russian as a writing language has dramatically changed: it has become the language of the enemy, and it seems that in contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Russian language is about to lose its legitimacy as a language of dissent. Boris Khersonskii, a Jewish Russian poet from Odessa, one of the most important representatives of Ukrainian samizdat,13 and in his civil life a clinical psy12

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Boris Khersonskii (2015) speaks of a “double poetic citizenship” and affirms that since the “space of a language does not equate the borders of a state”, “the territory of an author is the language he writes in”. Since the 1990s nearly all of his work came out in Russia. His most famous work, Semeinyi arkhiv—Family Archive, a compendium of mixed genres, autobiographically motivated reflections on the fading away of the Jewish population from southern Ukraine, was circulating in samizdat circles since 1995, until it was published in 2006 by NLO publishers Moscow, and in the same year it appeared on the shortlist of the famous Andrei Belyi award. Khersonskii’s

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space

chiatrist, in 2014 published a small volume of poems, Missa in tempore belli.14 Like most other work by Khersonskii from these years, all its poems are dedicated to the topic of life in wartimes, and some of them reflect on the changing significance of Russian in Ukraine. In the following poem the lyric persona painfully reflects on the fact that the language he has been using for many years as an instrument of dissent has now become the language of the occupant: The language of the occupier—the words of the construction regulations… . The hand of the fighters, as you know, got tired of splitting. The language of the occupier, like a tank does not know borders. It yells and moohs, clamors and rampages … And Russian speech does not dissolve in it, Russian speech survives, but how—I don’t know. (Khersonskii n.y.)15 Khersonskii tries to defend his writing language, to differentiate between the language of war, the language of the everyday, and the language of poetry that has the potential to prevail. The subtle differentiation between iazyk (language) and reč’ (speech) means to indicate the potential of the language of poetry to prevail. Compared to Russian-language authors, Ukrainian language authors seldom thematize the (critical) coexistence of Russian and Ukrainian (or even a possible alternative between them). In the May 2015 volume of A. Kabanov’s bilingual literary journal Sho, Yuri Andrukhovych did so: in an essay on the term “hate speech” and the Russian language in the Ukraine. Andrukhovych writing does not differ much from Khersonskiis’s lines: by the recent events, due to the unspoken war in Donbass, Russian has become the enemy’s language. Not surprisingly for Andrukhovych’s ironic attitude, the essay ends with a rather ambivalent formulation: “I wish there was no language of the enemy in Ukraine.” This could signal his opposition to either the war or Russian language in general. Andrukhovych’s unequivocal deligitimization of Russian goes straight to the heart of Ukrainian Russianlanguage authors. Like Khersonskii, Aleksandr Kabanov, who is sixteen years his junior, in one of his poems touches the same problem: to use the Russian language, to be Russian, now means to be indistinguishable from the enemy:

14 15

long poem was translated into several languages. Whereas a German translation came out as a regular print volume in 2010 (“Familienarchiv”, transl. Erich Klein and Susanne Macht, Klagenfurt 2010), the English translation can be found online: (http://www.dalehobson.org/ khersonsky/archive.html (12-30-2016). With a delay of ten years, a Ukrainian translation by Marianna Kijanovska was published in 2016: Rodynnyj archiv ta inši virši (L'viv, 2016). Again it was a Russian publishing house that brought out Khersonkii’s new volume: The small Jewish Petersburg publisher Ivan Limbakh. Original text by Boris Khersonskii (n.y.) in: http://censor.net.ua/news/285338/

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This goblin, tubercular light changing into sound— violet, sweet, tearless, like a Yalta onion. On the tele-box, as in a telegrave, on some other shores, Pushkin and Gogol invaded Crimea, while Shevchenko is still on the run. And a second squadron underground won’t leave its barracks, and they serve macaroni in a prison near Bakhchysarai. the sound doubles like a bell’s entering under the skin; it’s good that no one can tell me from an enemy yet. (Kabanov 2014) Published in 2014 in the journal Interpoeziia, this poem is dominated by an isotopy of broken symmetries, wholes, complementarities: synesthetic correspondences turn out to be false harmony (first stanza), authors that formerly belonged to one cultural sphere have become enemies (Pushkin, Gogol, Shevchenko), the “subterranean hundred” of the Crimean mirror the “heavenly hundred” of the Maidan, the sound is dividing, and the lyric persona is (ironically) happy to be indistinguishable from the enemy. Two years earlier Kabanov had written: “There is no Russianlanguage literature, but only Russian literature. It is not relevant to which nationality you mean to belong. If you are writing a Russian poem, you are a Russian poet. Everything else is geography” (cf. Kabanov 2010). Now—as at least Kabanov’s verses suggest—the double identification formerly taken for granted as a citizen of Ukraine and a Russian author—has become highly problematic. Even authors who left Ukraine many years ago, like Aleksej Tsvetkov,16 feel the necessity to question Russian as their writing language. In a recent interview, Tsvetkov defined his understanding of “home” in quite a typical post-migrant way: When talking about fatherland, we should not use capitals… . My fatherland corresponds to my biography: partially Ukraine, partially Russia, and, since many years,

16

Born in 1947 in Stanislav/Ivano-Frankivsk, Tsvetkov immigrated in 1975 to the USA, where he never felt at home, though he did not go back to Ukraine either. In the early 1980s, Tsvetkov stopped writing poetry for a long period. He worked as a program editor for Radio Svoboda. But in 2004 he brought out a new volume of poetry, Bestiarii (Bestiary), (Ekaterinburg: Evdokiia, 2004), and since then he has continuously developed his poetry in a more abstract and metaphysical direction.

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space

the USA, but I don’t want mythicize any of them… . Fatherland means to me: a street in Zaporozh’e or a Bar in Tiumen’, but not to be proud of victories or eager to annex the Kurile islands. All conquests I remember … are sexual ones… . Memory as well as language are my own, I did not lease them from any state. (Tsvetkov 2015) Despite these multiple individual belongings that show the author in utmost distance from nationality conflicts in contemporary Ukraine, Tsvetkov —much like Kabanov—problematizes in his recent poems the use of Russian as a language for poetry. In the following poem Tsvetkov, by elaborating on the image of an abrasive and perforated surface, intertwines the imagery of an injured body and its powerless therapeutical surrounding of help, the imagery of a frozen Black Sea landscape and a metapoetic or even metalingual image of likewise useless and polluted Russian speech: The eyelids should not stick together above the abyss But is it speech’s hurt profile Only useless Russian language like a wastewater piper hangs out of the mouth Only a babble under the castle mound. ( Tsvetkov n.y.) All examples mentioned so far direct their critique toward the Russian language because it has lost its innocence and because the authors cannot and do not want to draw a line between Russian as the language of literature and Russian as the language of state politics. Anastasia Afanas’eva, is the youngest among the mentioned Russian-language Ukrainian poets, a poet from Charkiv,17 and also a psychiatrist who recently published a collection of poetry at the small New York publishing house Ailuros (Afanas’eva 2014). She goes even farther in her critique to deplore the loss of language in general and the impossibility of poetry after what has happened in the Donbass: Is poetry possible after Jasinovataja Gorlovka Saur-Mohyla Novoazovsk

17

Anastasia Afanas’eva, like the other Russian-language poets, is mostly published in Russia (Druzhba narodov, Novyi mir, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Ural, and was also awarded the Russian prize in 2006. As a translator from English into Russian, Afanas’eva is a mediator between American poets with Russian background like Ilya Kaminsky and the Russian readership. Afanas’eva—like Kabanov—also translates Ukrainian poetry into Russian.

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After Krasnyj Luch Doneck Luhansk After the partition of people in relaxing and perishing ones After poetry became As one poet put it Simply “autistic mumuring” lip movements in the dark I would say half asleep is poetry possible when poetry awoke when from its steps every heart is shaking It’s impossible to speak about something else But speaking is also impossible. While I am writing these lines Not far from here Any possibilities are abolished. (Afanas’eva n.y.) Afanas’eva thematizes a lack of words as the lack of language in general vis-à-vis a quasi-apocalyptic catastrophe. It is for certain that she here alludes to Theodor Adorno’s famous sentence about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. Whereas some of the Ukrainian-language poets also write about their troubles to find an adequate language for poetry in times of crisis and war, but never give up, the lack of language Afanas’eva describes seems to be more fundamental and hopeless. And probably this has to do with Russian, her writing language. At this point a further difference between the Ukrainian-language and Russianlanguage poetry in contemporary Ukraine has come to the fore: Besides the problematic present, Russian-language poetry seems to be mostly orientated toward the past, the Soviet past when the coexistence of Russian and Ukrainian was far less problematic than now. But should their poetry then be dismissed as a relict? I don’t think so. On the one hand, they help us work through the Soviet past that most Ukrainian language poets would prefer to forget or, at least, would never bemoan. And on the other hand, by reflecting on the legitimacy of Russian as their writing language, they also defend Russian as one of the languages of Ukraine.

Contemporary Ukrainian Russian-Language Poetry and Post-Soviet Literary Space

Conclusion Coming back to our reflections on literary space, we can say that it is the Russianlanguage authors, together with the above-mentioned Serhiy Zhadan or Liubov’ Yakimchuk, who turn away and step out of the borders of post-Soviet space, away from the remains of the multinational framework, to contribute to the new conceptualization of literary space. In his novel Voroshilovgrad, Zhadan adds to a new multicultural and multilingual understanding of Ukraine by translating traditional Russian-language regions into Ukrainian, giving them a second, an alternative language identity. In his recent poems, Zhadan outlines a new multicultural image of Ukraine that neither corresponds to Soviet nor to Habsburgian multiculturalism, but instead comprises all marginal groups of contemporary Ukraine (and Europe) (cf. Zhadan’s poem about the incompatibility of Christianity and xenophobia, “Our Children, Maria,” 2015). Russian-language authors practice a double orientation toward Russian-language literature in general, and toward literature in Ukraine. Thereby they simultaneously participate in the construction of two different literary spaces: in the construction and the development of the transnational space of Russian-language literature and in the construction of the space of Ukrainian literature that they understand as multilingual.

References Afanas’eva, Anastasia (2014): Otpechatki, New York: Ajluros. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996): Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford: University Press. Burbank, Jane & Cooper, Frederick (2010): Empires in World History, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gor’kii, Maksim (1990): “Sovetskaia literature” (1934), in: Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’. Khersonskii, Boris (2016): Rodynnyj archiv ta inši virši, transl. Marianna Kijanovska, L’viv. Khersonskii, Boris (2010): Familienarchiv, transl. Erich Klein and Susanne Macht, Klagenfurt. Khersonskii, Boris (2006): Semeinyi arkhiv—Family Archive, Moscow: NLO publishers. Khotimsky, Maria (2013): “World Literature—Soviet Style,” Ab imperio 3, 119–154. Kulik, Ivan (1990 [1934]): “Doklad o literature USSR,” in: Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’. Latour, Bruno (2005): Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Martin, Terry (2001): The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nad’’yarnych, Nina S. (ed.) (2005): Slovar’ literatury narodov Rossii XXv, Moskva: Nauka. Pavlenko, Petr (1939): in: Literaturnaia gazeta, 20.04.1939. Sasse, Sylvia (2010): “Poetischer Raum: Chronotopos und Geopoetik,“ in Raum: Handbuch. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stefan Günzel et al., Stuttgart: Metzler, 294–308. Slezkine, Yuri (1994): “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,“ Slavic Review, 53:2, 414–52. Tsvetkov, Aleksej (2004): Bestiarii (Bestiary), Ekaterinburg: Evdokiia. Uspensky, Boris (1973): A Poetics of Composition:The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Zhadan, Serhiy (2015): “Our Children, Maria,” in: Zhyttia Mariyi: Knyga virshiv i perekladiv (Life of Mary: Book of poems and translations), Chernivtsi: Meridian Czernowitz.

Internet Sources Afanas’eva, Anastasia (n.y.): “Is poetry possible after Jasinovataja…,” in: http:// itsnothere.org/verses/afanasieva02.html and: https://vk.com/ club21335246. To my knowledge, this poem has not yet been published in print. Guseinov, Chinghis (2014): “K voprosu o russkosti nerusskikh,“ Druzhba narodov 4. http://magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2014/4/21g.html (accessed March 1, 2016). Kabanov, Aleksandr (2014): Interpoėziia 2. http://magazines.russ.ru/ interpoezia/2014/2/14k.html. Translated from Russian by Ian Probstein: http:// intranslation.brooklynrail.org/russian/poetry-by-alexander-kabanov. Kabanov, Aleksandr (2010): “Sprosili—otvetili”. http://alexandr-k.livejournal.com/ 299043.html (accessed December 30, 2016). Khersonskii, Boris (2015): Facebook comment on September 5, 2015. https://www. facebook.com/borkhers (accessed September 9, 2015). Khersonskii, Boris (1996): Family Archive, transl. Ruth Kreuzer and Dale Hobson. http://www.dalehobson.org/khersonsky/archive.html (accessed December 30, 2016). Khersonskii, Boris (n.y.): http://censor.net.ua/news/285338/ (accessed December 30, 2016). Kurkov, Andrey (2014): “Why I stayed as the crisis in Ukraine flared“: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/06/ukraine-crisis-russia-andreykurkov (accessed December 29, 2016).

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Kuzmin, Dmitrii (n.y.): “Novaia literaturnaia karta Rossii”: http://www.litkarta.ru/ about/ (accessed March 22, 2016). Tsvetkov, Aleksei (2015): “Poėty, kotorye ne vpuskajut v stichi biografiju, ne očen’ mne simpatičny…”. Interview by Vadim Muratkhanov, Interpoėziia 1, trans. S. Frank. http://magazines.russ.ru/interpoezia/2015/1/13ts.html. Tsvetkov, Aleksei (n.y.): Zemleprokhodets. https://sunround.com/club/journals/26zvetkov.htm.

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(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space Schamma Schahadat

Since the 1990s, many Central European writers have been developing a conspicuous passion for space. The Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk, for example, has moved away from fiction to an essayistic form of travel writing, exploring the Central European landscapes, crossing borders and ignoring the political demarcations of countries in order to recapture and represent the center of Europe, thereby stretching it further and further to the East. Yuri Andrukhovych, a writer from Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine and an ardent adherent of the European idea, likewise on and again leaves the path of fiction in order to explore his Ukrainian homeland in the essayistic form. Serhii Zhadan, rebellious poet, writer and musician from Luhansk in the Eastern region of Ukraine, traces the Soviet remnants under the new Ukrainian reality. All three of them are concerned with a geographical space which they describe vaguely as Central Europe or East Central Europe, and they all transform geographical and political space into an imaginary, poetical space that is closely linked to their biographies. Their bodily presence as well as their imagination transforms the spaces they visit, they remember and they write about spaces of experience, “autotopographies,” as Jennifer Gonzáles (1995: 133-150) calls it.1 Autotopography, she writes, is a “private-yet-material memory landscape [...] made up of the more intimate expressions of values and beliefs, emotions and desires” (Gonzáles 1995: 133). The autotopographies of the (East) Central European writers are directed against the grand récit of Soviet space that dominated the 70 years of its existence when the Soviet Union undertook an all-embracing mapping of the Socialist world which subdivided the World into East (pro-Soviet) and West (anti-Soviet). After the collapse of the Soviet Union the writers from Poland and Ukraine began to write counter-narratives, appropriating Central Europe as an in-

1

About “spaces of experience” see also Crang/Thrift (2000: 19-22). They link “spaces of experience” to mobility and the body as “the privileged centre of perception” (19), to the material world and to travel, to a “a distributed and distracted practice galvanised into action by connection in spaces which are therefore depicted as a swarm of movements and countermovements” (20).

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between-space between East and West that had been obliterated by history. One could argue that they re-territorialize a space in writing that had been de-territorialized by political demarcation lines, thus re-inscribing their Central European identity into the landscape as well as into their texts. In my article, I want to read the conceptions of (East) Central Europe as imaginations about a space that, on the one hand, has an effect on the biographies and the texts of those who write them, and that, on the other hand, is created and (re)invented by those writers. Before I get to the narratives in the twenty-first century, however, I will take a look back and recapitulate the imaginations about Central Europe in the twentieth century in “Inventing the ‘Other’” (section 1). I will then turn to some general methodological remarks about “Literature, Geography, and History: Text, Space, Events” (section 2). The Central European imaginary is, as we will see, filled with certain topoi (I later call them “keywords”) which come up again and again: Central Europe is imagined as the center of Europe and is remembered as a place of multiculturality and multilinguality. While these two older topoi shed a positive, often nostalgic note on this or that European region that constantly moves and shifts its borders,2 newer topoi take a somewhat desperate turn: in the era of globalization Central Europe seems to be “last and lost,” as Katharina Raabe and Monika Sznajderman (2006a) write. The German essayist Martin Pollack (2014) describes the region as a “contaminated place.” I will follow these topoi or keywords in “(Re)Writing Central Europe: Central Europe as a Scripturescape” (section 3). In the final part of my article I will return to the idea of the Central European space as a space of experience: “The Reappropriation of Central Europe” (section 4). Before we now turn to (East) Central Europe, a note on terminology, since “different disciplines do space differently,” as Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (2000: 1) write in their introduction to Thinking Space. The perspective I have is that of a literary and cultural scholar, focusing on the imaginary dimension of space, the memories and emotions connected to it, while still taking historical contexts into account. The semantic field of space comprises place, landscape, chronotope, among other. My starting point is that Yuri Andrukhovych, Andrzej Stasiuk and Serhii Zhadan set out on a heroic quest when they started describing (East) Central Europe, which Andrukhovych calls “his” part of the world. While in Soviet times the heroes were arctic explorers or cosmonauts whose goal was to discover unknown 2

The geographers John Allen, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane (2002) argue that regions in general are in motion; in their study on regions in the context of British neo-liberalism they examine how the perception of certain regions changes when you define it by social relations rather than by material characteristics: “Thinking ‘a region’ in terms of social relations stretched out reveals, not an ‘area’, but a complex and unbounded lattice of articulations with internal relations of power and inequality and punctured by structured exclusions” (53). While the social relations are, of course, relevant for my understanding of Central Europe as a “region”, the imaginary conception of it is what is relevant in the literary and essayistic texts.

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

and uninhibited spaces, the postsocialist writers explore spaces in order to reappropriate them for themselves, to create personal counter-narratives against the Soviet master plot. What they are concerned with is space which they, however, turn into places: while space is an abstract, general term, it becomes concrete when you do something with it. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) writes: “undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it and endow it with value” (6). Space, he goes on, is movement, while place is “pause” (6). The writers exploring Central Europe thus are transforming space into place, and more correctly: into imaginary places and, at the same time, into personal lieux de mémoire, closely connected to their childhood and youth. They fill the space they move in with their memories, experiences and emotions, inscribing themselves into the physical landscape around them. But what is landscape? “Landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolizing surroundings” (Cosgrove/Daniels 1988: 1)— landscape is “a way of seeing.” (Cosgrove 1984: 13; quoted in Kühne/Weber/Jenal 2018: 12)3 This is an especially intriguing definition, since landscape in Central Europe is often contaminated, connected to secrecy and crime. It is a part of the land that hides what cannot be seen. Landscape is also, if we follow the Russian theoretical geographer Vladimir Kaganskii, a “living texture, imbued with sense” (zhivaja tkan‘, pronizannaia smyslom) (1997: 134). This means that landscape is constantly changing, it is material and it is seen and semanticized. The last term I want to introduce here is chronotope, narrative time-space, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in the novel” (1981: 84). Since the authors we deal with are located in the time-space of post-socialism, the “intrinsic connectedness” is always obvious. Space, one can conclude, is transformed into places and landscapes when individuals as well as cultures invade it, and it forms a unity with time. How do politicians, intellectuals and writers fill (East) Central Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first century with their aspirations, hopes, their emotions and their bodies?

1. The Invention of the “Other” The starting point of my argument is the idea that Central Europe is not a formally fixed region or part of Europe, but that it is an invention—of politicians, writers,

3

Kühne/Weber/Jenal (2018) give a concise overview about the demystification of the term ‚landscape‘ from the 1960s on, especially in the German context, and its return in a constructivist version.

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historians, among others. Imaginary acts of inventing the “other” are quite common; the West invented the Orient, as Edward Said showed in Orientalism (2003), published first in 1978, and Western travelers, writers, and diplomats created a certain image of Eastern Europe in an act of mental mapping, as Larry Wolff argued in his Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). The Orient and Eastern Europe were mainly products of the Enlightenment, when the West was busy inventing itself as a civilized culture and needed “barbarian” counterparts. Yet while the Orient served its oppositional function through complete difference, Eastern Europe occupied an ambiguous position: the invention of Eastern Europe was a kind of “demi-orientalisation,” as Wolff (1994: 6) writes, since Eastern Europe was, at the same time, Europe and not Europe, a mediator between Europe and the Orient. Like the Orient and Eastern Europe, Central Europe has resulted from an imagined geography, from a mental mapping or a “Philosophical Geography,” as John Ledyard, one of Captain James Cook’s fellow travelers, called a “freely constructed geographical sentiment” (Wolff 1994: 4). Writers from (East) Central Europe have performed a similar act of appropriating discursive power and of describing or, rather, inventing one’s own (supposedly different) space at various times throughout the twentieth century. A nostalgic note, a longing for a lost time and space, often characterizes this (re)invention of Central Europe, thus in fact creating something that does not exist (or no longer exists), filling an empty space: First, after the end of the Habsburg Empire, writers like the Galician Joseph Roth mourned the demise of a Central European space. Then, during the Cold War, when only the East and the West seemed to exist, divided by an iron curtain, Polish and Czech writers—or, more precisely: Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera—asserted the existence of a European center. And since the end of the dualistic world order, writers from Central Europe have undertaken the task to create their own, imaginary, Central Europe. Yet rather than emerging from ideas of the Enlightenment, Central Europe is a product of the twentieth century. Like Eastern Europe, it occupies a mediating position between the West and the East, but the East, in this case, is Eastern Europe. At the same time, Central Europe constitutes an always already lost space that has to be recovered—by conquering it with one’s body (a bodyscape) and in writing (a scripturescape). In the beginning, the invention of Central Europe was politically motivated. In a politicized version Friedrich Naumann (1916) called it “Mitteleuropa,” Central or Middle Europe, when he reflected on its economic resources and considered Germany a leading force in the area. This Central Europe, however, disappeared twice in the course of the twentieth century: first, after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and once again after World War II, when a so-called iron curtain divided Europe into East and West. But while, on the one hand, Central Europe vanished as a historical, political, or even geographical idea, on the other hand, it experienced an extraordinary reanimation in literature: Joseph Roth, for exam-

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

ple, recreated a Central European imaginary space in which his heroes searched for a lost and irretrievable land. Thus, Roth transformed Central Europe, and especially Galicia, into a nostalgic, emotionally loaded dream space. His novel Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End, 1927), for example, tries to retain the Habsburg Empire or, rather, the sentiment connected to it. Franz Tunda, the protagonist, loses his orientation after his Galician home has become part of another country—he is not only geographically but also culturally lost. When Central Europe once again disappeared with the iron curtain, individual voices rose in protest against this subdivision without a center. Czesław Miłosz, for example, disputed the geopolitical partition in his autobiography Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm, 1957), and in the aftermath of 1968, Milan Kundera’s Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe Centrale (The Tragedy of Central Europe) initiated the debate from a different angle. The year 1989 marked the next milestone in conceptualizing the center of Europe, when the European map was redesigned with the sketching of new borders and the falling away of others. A new (new, considering the literary field in the decades before) genre made its entrance on the literary scene of East and Central Europe: the travel essay or travelogue in which the writers (or their literary alter egos) journey through Central or East Central Europe by foot, bus, by train, or car with their bodies occupying the space they create in their fiction. From a sociological or psychological point of view, this invention of a geopoetical imaginary space seemingly obliterated by historical and geopolitical events may be considered a coping strategy resulting from a “trauma of social change”: “The collapse of communism was a traumatogenic change par excellence,” the sociologist Piotr Sztompka (2004: 171) writes, just as the disappearance of the Habsburg Empire was in the beginning of the twentieth century: It was “sudden and rapid,” “truly systemic,” “a complete reversal of deep premises of social life,” and it was “certainly unexpected—at least at this scale and at this time” (ibid.). And although the majority of the population welcomed the change, it “has turned out to produce trauma” (ibid.). The (re)invention of Central Europe, I would argue, constituted a coping strategy to deal with this traumatogenic experience, filling a space that had disappeared from the mental map of Europe. Writers mobilize forces to produce cultural capital, which Sztompka would call an “innovative strategy” (2004: 184), to adapt to new circumstances after having undergone a traumatogenic experience.4

4

Sztompka does not, however, mention cultural capital; his innovative coping strategies are the production of economic or social capital.—Mariella Gronenthal in her dissertation on nostalgia on post-1989 novels from Germany and Poland argues that while historiography tries to deal with the aftermath of 1989 from a seemingly objective perspective, literature and the arts can use emotional, often nostalgic, narratives and devices in order to deal with the traumatic upheavel society and the individual experienced (see Gronenthal 2018: 34).

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For Central Europe, not only has the field of interest shifted from history and politics to literature; another shift in geographical space has occurred once again, this time to include countries and cultures formerly considered part of the East (e.g., Ukraine) or the South (e.g., Albania). For the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych, the imaginary center encompasses countries that are far in the European East or even South; to adapt the geographical borders to his personal map, he uses the term “East Central Europe,” thus bending the center to the East: his “own private” East Central Europe is a space united in post-totalitarian reality between Estonia and Albania. This is why my East Central Europe should also enclose Latvia and Lithuania (the last one completely and not only a little), besides that … Moldavia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia and Macedonia. On the other hand, neither the former West Germany (maybe the former GDR) nor Austria nor Switzerland have anything to do in this space. (Andrukhovych 2006b: 118-119)5 Such geographical shifts have occurred before; the history of geography shows other cases of imaginary mapping, moving spaces around, taking into account material and political conditions as well as power relations. Thus, in the Renaissance, when the geographical worldview was organized along a North-South axis, Russia was seen as part of the North (see Ebert 2010: 11)—which means that in the Enlightenment the invention of Eastern Europe involved, among other things, a movement from the north to the east. Similarly, the twentieth-century debate about Central Europe in the fields of literature and culture has created a space only loosely connected to (topological) geography. Especially Central Europe has always constituted more of a political (Naumann 1916) or a cultural concept than a geographical one. When in 1984 Kundera appealed to the world not to forget Central Europe, he described it as the part of Europe “culturally in the West but politically in the East” (Kundera 1984: 33). For Kundera, Central Europe in 1984 encompassed Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, cultures that “belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity” (Kundera 1984: 33). Since the beginning of the 1990s, writers and historians—writers acting as historians and historians writing quasi-literary texts—have designed a Central European space much larger than Kundera’s. Romania, for example, has returned into Central Europe, and by including the adjective “Eastern,” as already mentioned, Ukrainian authors as well have made a claim to become part of the center of Europe. Andrukhovych not only includes the countries mentioned above into his “own

5

All translations from original texts into English are, unless otherwise indicated, my own. Usually I translate from the original, but sometimes I had to take the detour via the German translation when no original was available.

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

private East Central Europe” but he also reflects on the contingency of geographical notations such as East, West or Central, referring to a German atlas (Diercke Weltatlas) published in 1996: If you want to believe the atlas, Ukraine, for example, where I am living, does not know to where it belongs. Its Western part obviously lies in Central Europe (pp. 14/15), the rest, however, lies in Asia (pp. 152/153). Torn apart and lost between the pages 15 and 154 of the Diercke Weltatlas, Ukraine cannot decide about its belonging. (Andrukhovych 2006b: 121-122) A geographical construction of the world to Andrukhovych is just as contingent as a philosophical or a literary mapping. At this point it becomes obvious how difficult it is to determine geographical space, especially a space that is as volatile as (East) Central Europe. So, what does Central Europe (with or without the “East” in brackets) look like in the literary geography written since the end of the old East-West world order in the early 1990s? Which topical descriptions return again and again in the literary works of Polish, Ukrainian, and Czech writers? Which traces of the (historical, political) debate does the Central European chronotope—a chronotope created poetically—carry, which historical layers of the former Soviet satellite states do the writers perceive in the space they are exploring? Which void do the writers try to fill? Before I turn to this literary landscape, I want to make a short detour and go into the preliminaries that allow me to interconnect writing (literature), space (geography), and events (history). Only then will I return to the literary texts and the space, filled with different semantic layers, they create. Observers have associated Central Europe with certain characteristics or myths: obviously, there is the myth of the center of Europe—Central Europe seems to be different, mythical, legendary. Although Central Europe is, politically speaking, more periphery than center, its geographical position at the center of Europe has been reactivated in the literary mapping. Another topos is the multiculturality and multilingualism of the area, both resulting from the fact that the Central European countries for centuries formed part of various empires: The Polish-Lithuanian rzeczpospolita, the Russian Empire, or the Habsburg Empire. All these myths are older topoi that have lately been reactivated in the literature from and about Central Europe. Newly invented images and markings, however, now describe the space between East and West: the land between Germany in the West and Russia in the East seems empty or even lost, it is a “no place,” as Kate Brown calls the kresy, the “European borderland” (Brown 2003). Like the kresy, Central Europe is a space historically contaminated, bruised, and injured, either by war and destruction or by a Soviet eradication of the local (multicultural and multilingual) traditions. The act of reconquering this lost and injured space is one of movement: the heroes of

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the travelogues move through the space they describe, remembering and forgetting and writing, putting a new layer on the Central European scripturescape to transfer the supposed “no place” into their own place.

2. Literature, Geography, and History: Text, Space, Events Literature turns geographical space into a scene of fiction, into a narrative. This scene can be designed according to two opposites: it can either closely resemble reality or completely differ from it. Virginia Woolf took the latter position, separating fiction from reality: “A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain” (Woolf 1986: 35), she wrote in her essay “Literary Geography” (1986: 32-36), while James Joyce in Ulysses created “a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Budge 1960: 67-68). The fall of the Berlin Wall initiated not only changed political landscapes but also the redefinition of literary spaces. In close alignment with the so-called topographical or spatial turn, literary scholars focused on the processes that took place in literary texts written by authors who inhabited the part of Europe that for nearly half a century had been part of the political East but that considered itself, geographically and culturally, the center of Europe, or, at the very least, located itself at the eastern border of the center (e.g., Ukraine). What do writers do to the space they describe? Any space in literature (or literary space) is always an act of imagination, even if it as closely resembles the facts as Joyce’s description of Dublin. Writing about a certain space, writers create this space, and no matter how precise this creation, it remains fictional. Vladimir Nabokov got very upset at the idea that a reader might confuse the literary space described in Cervantes’s Don Quichote with the ‘real’ geography of contemporary Spain.6 The spaces authors create are—even if they are more accurate than Cervantes’s description of Spain—fiction, poetically transformed spaces. Lately, this poetic 6

In his Lectures on Don Quichote Nabokov writes: „Let us not kid ourselves. Cervantes is no land surveyor. The wobbly backdrop of Don Quixote is fiction […] However, it is still Spain; and here is where the generalities of ‘real life’ (in this case geography) may be applied to the generalities of a work of fiction. In a general way Don Quixote’s adventures, in the first part, take place around the villages of Argamasilla and El Toboso in La Mancha […] If, however, we examine Don Quixote’s excursions topographically, we are confronted by a ghastly muddle. I shall spare you the details and only mention the fact that throughout those adventures there is a mass of monstrous inaccuracies at every step. The author avoids descriptions that would be particular and might be verified. It is quite impossible to follow these rambles in central Spain […] Cervantes’ ignorance of places is wholesale and absolute” (Nabokov 1982: 4f).

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

reinvention of geographical space has come to be considered a form of geopoetics, a term coined by the Scottish-French poet Kenneth White in 1987, when in his essay Éléments de géopoétique he defined geopoetics as located at the border between geography and spiritual space (see Marszałek/Sasse 2010: 7).7 Geopoetics can be used as an umbrella concept to describe any contact between writing (i.e., poetics) and “real” geographical space that results in poetic or literary space. The concept of geopoetics seems especially fruitful for post-1989 East Central European writing, which turned to creating its own literary-geographical space in form of the essay or travel writing, inspired by the changes on the political map of Europe (see Marszałek 2010: 45). Magdalena Marszałek has analyzed the essayistic travel writing of Andrzej Stasiuk and Yuri Andrukhovych, which, as she writes “present the performative cartographic potential of a writing that is inspired by geography.”8 The poetic creation of space appears especially relevant if we consider that the (East) Central European space is a space disturbed by history: although it sits at the geographical center of Europe, after 1945, it was politically moved into the East. The recovery of this space after 1989 made it seem especially urgent not only to subdivide new nation-states but also to invent this space anew to recover it as a third space between the East and the West. While most discussions about the newer concepts of Central Europe start with Kundera’s The Tragedy of Central Europe from 1984, I want to go back nearly another three decades and have a look at Czesław Miłosz’s book Rodzinna Europa, written in 1957 in Polish and translated into English as Native Realm (although literally the title means “Familiar Europe” or “Native Europe”). The book is a kind of autobiography in which Miłosz entangled his personal history with that of East Central Europe, or more precisely, that of Lithuania and Poland. Miłosz was born in 1911 in Lithuania, which then still formed part of the Russian Empire, and he describes himself as a “Lithuanian writing in Polish” (1987: 18). Miłosz spent his formative years in Vilnius, and later emigrated, via France, to the United States. The background for Miłosz’s book is the political division of Europe into Western Europe and Eastern Europe; in Native Realm he seeks to explain to the Western reader what it meant “to come from this other, worse part of Europe, what complicated history one had to live through being from there”9 (Czarnecka 1992: 124). Native Realm is a(n) (auto)biography of a landscape and a person, merging space and the individual. It designs a special East Central European chronotope (which Miłosz himself calls “Eastern” as opposed to 7

8 9

This understanding of geopoetics—in opposition to geopolitics—was taken up by some Berlin Slavists (Sylvia Sasse, Magdalena Marszałek and Susi Frank) in relation to Central and Eastern Europe. “Die Essayistik Andruchovyčs und Stasiuks führt das performative kartographische Potenzial des von der Geographie inspirierten Schreibens […] vor” (Marzałek 2010: 66). “Z tej innej, gorszej części Europy, jakie komplikacje historyczne trzeba przeżywać, kiedy jest się stamtąd.”

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“Western”, thus using the Cold War terminology familiar to a Western public at the time, even if Polish or Lithuanian readers would not consider themselves part of Eastern Europe), one constituted of a landscape and a culture (topos) that experience a series of historical destabilizations in time (chronos). This East Central European chronotope differs markedly, as Miłosz states right at the beginning of his book, from the Western time-space. For many centuries, while kingdoms rose and fell along the shores of the Mediterranean and countless generations handed down their refined pleasures and vices, my native land was a virgin forest whose only visitors were the few Viking ships that landed on the coast. Situated beyond the compass of maps, it was more legendary than real. For that matter, chroniclers have never given much attention to the tiny peninsula that can be found today by running one’s finger along the map from Copenhagen across the northernmost edge of Germany and Poland. (Miłosz 1968: 7) Miłosz here uses the term “land”, since he does not describe a political entity, a nation state, but a more flexible space, “more legendary than real.” This land is, much as the narrator had indicated in his foreword, different from the Western lands that passed on “refined pleasures and vices”: it is a land from a fairy tale. In the following chapters the autobiographical “I” will appear as a product of this land, and reality—the Russian revolution, war, the Communists—will force this legendary place into the reality of political landscaping. When the book moves on, this legendary land falls victim to historical events and loses all its fairy-tale characteristics. Kundera also deals with the two parts of Europe, the East and the West that resulted from World War II; he defines Central Europe as the part that culturally belongs to the West, but politically forms part of the East.In his argumentation, Kundera goes back to František Palacký, who in 1848 justified the Habsburg Empire as a supposed protection of Central Europe against the Russians: Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural variety, a small arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space? (Kundera 1984: 33) Kundera, much as Miłosz had already done, points to Central Europe’s heterogeneity. The “Tragedy of Central Europe” is, as Kundera states, the fact that the Soviet satellite states “have vanished from the map of the West” (1984: 34). Kundera’s Central Europe, however, does not constitute a geographical region but a “culture or a fate: Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

historical situation” (Kundera 1984: 35). It is exactly this drawing and redrawing I am interested in. After publication, Kundera’s article was widely discussed. For example, a polemic dispute between Kundera and Joseph Brodsky followed it: Brodsky challenged Kundera’s anti-Russian feelings, which for Kundera were concentrated in Dostoevsky.10 The participants of the discussion saw Central Europe more as a “state of mind” than a geographical region.

3. (Re)Writing Central Europe: Central Europe as a Scripturescape I will now turn to the writers and their movement through this vast region referred to as Central Europe. I begin with the observation that the Central European chronotope carries a specific semantic baggage, marking it as central or “in-between Europe” (Zwischeneuropa), as multicultural, as a part of the world in which time stands still or, in other words, a part of Europe that is “last and lost”: catastrophic, contaminated, a space that must be conquered by movement. I will follow those keywords, but first I want to quote some of Yuri Andrukhovych’s definitions of East Central Europe after the millenium: it is a territory of extreme experiences, a space characterized by bad roads and lots of alcohol, an export zone of cheap labor, a parking space for children whose parents have disappeared, a linguistic Babel where most people still speak Russian but pretend not to and where at the same time nobody understands their neighbor (see Andrukhovych 2006b: 119-121). Andrukhovych mixes old topoi (extreme experiences) with new ones (export zone of cheap labor), thus laying bare the contingency and openness of describing space and, consequently, the strength of the imaginary.

Keyword 1: The Center of Europe Central Europe should, by definition, constitute the center of Europe. This idea of the centrality has nothing to do with the political center; in fact, the opposite holds true: it is important to note that Central Europe has always been far removed from the political centers—and thus, from stasis, conservatism, and immobility—and 10

„It may be a tribute to Western rationalism that the ‘specter of Communism’, after wandering about in Europe, had to settle in the East. But it should also be noted that nowhere else has that specter encountered stronger resistance, starting with Dostoyevsky's ‘Possessed’ and continuing through the blood bath of the Civil War and the Great Terror”, Brodsky (1985) writes.—But not only Kundera’s Soviet colleagues were irritated by this demarcation between Central Europe and the (Soviet) East: “In his contradictory Slavic anti-Slavism, Kundera created a new conservative utopia out of his ‘Central Europe’”, Nikola Petkovič (2006: 381) writes.

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has politically always been located at the periphery. In 1986, the German historian Karl Schlögel wrote an article entitled “Die Mitte liegt ostwärts: Die Deutschen, der verlorene Osten und Mitteleuropa“ (“The Center Lies Eastward: The Germans, the Lost East, and Central Europe”; see Schlögel 2002). Published three years before the events that would redefine the whole geopolitical situation of East and West, the article follows seismographic and semantic shifts in the area. The word “Mitteleuropa,” “Central Europe,” is a “semantic confusion,” Schlögel fears, implying imperialistic aspirations and, at the same time, the exact opposite of those (Schlögel 2002: 16; Schlögel is quoting Henry C. Meyer here). In 1986, Schlögel stated: “We no longer know anything about Central Europe, but we know all the more about the Eastern block … . Central Europe is terra abscondita, the Eastern block is reality”11 (Schlögel 2002: 26). Elsewhere in his essay Schlögel writes: “Central Europe is a vanished picture. It was lost. It was left behind when people were fleeing precipitously, when they had to save lives, not pictures”12 (2002: 30). Much of the prose written in Poland or Ukraine after 1989 tries to reconstruct those pictures, especially Andrzej Stasiuk’s poetic prose creates a firework of pictures of a landscape that forms part of this recovered center. More than twenty years later, in his book Grenzland Europa: Unterwegs auf einem neuen Kontinent (Border Country Europe: On Tour in a New Continent), Schlögel focuses on maps and borders that shifted in the twentieth century: he calls Europe’s center and its East a classic space of “wandering borders” (Schlögel 2013: 62).13 Precisely the borders, Schlögel states, make history visible: transfer processes, hybridities, movements (see Schlögel 2013: 70). While the iron curtain as a static, impermeable border neatly subdivided Europe into East and West, the post-1989 borders produced confusing European maps, new demarcations, and new movements. Maps and borders play a central role in post-1989 literature from East Central Europe; the literary heroes are constantly crossing borders and using maps that have become superfluous. The concept of the middle or the center of Europe is conspicuously absent from literary memories or essays written before 1989. If Czesław Miłosz in Native Realm differentiates between East and West and wants to explain the East to the Western reader, what he has in mind actually is (East) Central Europe, or more precisely, Lithuania and Poland, where he grew up. Andrukhovych, the Ukrainian writer from Lviv, which is definitely more West than East, retraces the idea of Central Europa by going back into history: First, there was neither Eastern nor Western Europe. 11 12

13

“Wir wissen nichts mehr von Mitteleuropa, dafür umso mehr vom Ostblock […] Mitteleuropa ist terra abscondita, der Ostblock ist real.” “Mitteleuropa ist ein verschwundenes Bild. Es ist abhanden gekommen. Es wurde zurückgelassen bei der überstürzten Flucht, bei der nicht Bilder, sondern Menschenleben in Sicherheit zu bringen waren.“ “Wandernde Grenzen” is an expression from Joseph Roth.

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

“Then (at the end of the century, at the fin de siècle, Zarathustra would have said) all this still belonged to the most grotesque of all empires” (Andchruchowycz 2000: 23). Later, when the narrator (Andrukhovych’s fictional alter ego) was young, there was only the East and the West: We were students and wanted everything from life: impressions, friendship, sex, wine, music… . We sensed that the young people in the West had been searching for something similar already ten years ago, it must have resulted in new disappointments and clinical disturbances. But the West—what was the West for us at that time? Once in a while it gave us sound signals in form of smuggled music. Otherwise it didn’t exist, maybe as a clever invention of our Manichean ideologues, a kind of the dark side of the moon, an anti-world, a world upside-down from a television program. (Andchruchowycz 2000: 11) And in 2000, at the time the essay was written, he writes: “The world that later was to be called East Central Europe” (Andruchowycz 2000: 22-23). The center of Europe, however, is also the geographical center: “(48 degrees 30 minutes Northern amplitude and 23 degrees 23 minutes Eastern longitude) locus perennis, the constant, exact, eternal place” (Andruchowytsch 2006a: 105). This “eternal space“ is located in southern Bohemia and is represented by a monument that has the form of a pyramid and that marks, probably incorrectly, the center of Europe. Geographical, fictional, and historical space collide in Central Europe, which can form part of a memory or a monument made out of stone.

Keyword 2: Multiculturality and Multilingualism Since most of today’s Central Europe or East Central Europe once formed part of either the Russian or the Habsburg Empires, in Native Realm Miłosz describes a part of Europe (Lithuania and Poland in the first half of the twentieth century) that was generically multicultural and in which Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Belarussians, and Russians had been living together until history separated them into different political camps. It is a space and a culture destroyed by wars and political demarcations. Remnants of this East Central European multicultural past can be found in Stasiuk’s novels and travelogues, where the protagonist, the writing I, travels through Carpatia, crossing borders that no longer exist and diving into a linguistic Babel in which Romanian, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, and Ukrainian are spoken. When the protagonist in the essay “Sarmatienexpress oder ‘Unsere weltliche Orientierung’” (“The Sarmatia Express; or, ‘Our Western Orientation’”) by the Ukrainian writer and journalist Mykola Riabchuk takes the train, he listens to a conversation between two men speaking Serbian and Bulgarian, both of them using their mother tongues and still understanding one another, while the Ukrainian Riabchuk un-

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derstands both of them. What is peculiar about this situation is not only that three people with different languages understand each other but also that the train where all this takes place seems to connect the entire world: Some years ago, I was traveling from Vienna to Budapest and farther East or, actually, South, although already South of Budapest the East begins, the Balkans begin, as we all know, in Vienna, right after Metternich’s famous garden; I was, as I said, travelling in this Orient Express to Belgrad, Sofia and further on to Asia, Africa or even Latin America, in one word, to exotic countries, which you can hardly find on European maps and which are subsumed under the medieval. (Rjabtschuk 2005: 249) The center of Europe in Ryabchuk’s version becomes the key to an orientalizing dream of an East less connected to Eastern Europe (i.e. Russia) than to an Orient that, as Said would have it, as an imagined place, eliminates all borders, a place where we meet “un-imaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance” (Said 2003[1978]: 168). The idea of multiculturality has long been rooted in the Galicia myth that, in turn, is concentrated in its former capital Lemberg, today Lviv, a city that at once symbolizes a multicultural past and Central European catastrophic history. The German historian Dietlind Hüchtker shows that basically two narratives construct the idea of Galicia: rural poverty combined with a multicultural and multilingual population until 1918 (see Bechtel 2006: 63-64). The Galician myth then turned into a narrative of loss and the destruction of Hassidic Jewish culture—both narratives reached their peak after 1918, that is, after the end of the Habsburg Empire and after World War I. Joseph Roth called Habsburgian Galicia a “big house with many doors and many windows, for all kinds of people” (Roth 1990: 675), and Hüchtker describes Galicia as an “Arcadia of multiethnic tolerance” (Hüchtker 2002: 2), something created by “myth producers” (3). Hüchtker claims that the attractiveness of the space lies exactly in its distance from the center, which made it possible to transform a hardship-ridden landscape into an imaginary paradise of equality and happiness (see Hüchtker 2002: 13). If we take Galicia as a nucleus containing the characteristics of Central Europe, then a similar argument could work with regard to Central Europe’s attractiveness to writers after 1989. The Galicia myth has become especially productive in Ukrainian literature since the mid-1990s, with Galicia signifying Europe and Central Europe in particular (see Stefanowska 2009: 224). Exactly at that time a rift occurred among Ukrainian writers, and two schools appeared that represented traditionalism, on the one hand, the so-called Zhytomyr school, and, on the other, the Bu-Ba-Bu group linked to Lviv and Galicia, a group oriented toward postmodernism and Europe. The latter group invented another name tag, the “Stanislaviv Phenomenon,” under the leadership of Yuri Andrukhovych. The use of the old name Stanislaviv, instead of

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

Ivano-Frankivsk, as the town is called today, marked the connection to (European) Galicia instead of to post-Soviet Ukraine (see Hnatiuk 2009: 207-208).

Keyword 3: Last and Lost In 2006, the German editor Katharina Raabe, who heads the East and Central European literature section at the publishing house Suhrkamp, and her Polish colleague Monika Sznajderman, head of the Polish publishing house Czarne, edited a book called Last & Lost: Ein Atlas des verschwindenden Europas (Last & Lost: An Atlas of Vanishing Europe, Raabe/Sznajderman 2006a). The book covers countries from Spain to Ireland and Turkey, and many of those “last and lost lands” are part of Eastern, Central, or Southeastern Europe: Lithuania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Albania, Croatia, Poland, among others. Why last and lost? It is a book, as Raabe and Sznajderman say in their foreword, about those places in Europe where something is ending, radically changing, or just decaying. Those spaces that from an economic perspective have become useless have acquired a certain aura: although spaces may become superfluous and desolate if they lose their function (e.g., the Polish-Russian border station Brest), they may also reacquire former layers: “Left to themselves, with each new chapter in history they fall back into their deeper past”14 (Raabe/Sznajderman 2006b: 11). The writer who more than any other realizes the concept of lands “last and lost”—a space characterized by stasis, boredom, and emptiness—is the Pole Andrzej Stasiuk. Stasiuk himself moved from the Polish center, Warsaw, to the Polish periphery, to a village in the Beskides, next to the Slovak border, where he is running the publishing house Czarne with his wife, the already mentioned Monika Sznajderman. Most of his texts—some of them novels, others travelogues or essays—have protagonists who move through Central Europe, including the East and the South: In his novel Biały kruk (The White Raven) from 1995, five friends go hiking in the Carpatian Mountains; in Dukla from 1997, the protagonist tells episodes of his life connected to the village Dukla, from his communist childhood up to the postcommunist present; Jadąc do Babadag (On the Way to Babadag) from 2004 is a collection of literary reports about travels to Albania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia; and the novel Taksim from 2009 follows two street vendors through decrepit (East and South) Central European market towns. All those places are “last and lost”: empty, static, boring. Since there is no movement and no action, there is basically nothing to tell, as he writes in Dukla:

14

“Sich selbst überlassen, fallen sie mit jedem neu aufgeschlagenen Kapitel der Geschichte in eine tiefere Vergangenheit hinein.”

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There won’t be any plot, there won’t be any story, especially in the night, when the terrain is stripped of its landmarks, when we’re driving from Rogi to Równe and on through Miejsce Piastowe. We’re traveling between place-names in a solution of pure idea. […] There’ll be no plot, with its promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is a remission of sins, the mother of fools, it melts away in the rising light of the day. (Stasiuk 2011: 4, 6-7) The novel starts with the night passing into the day (“At four in the morning the night slowly raises its dark backside as if it were getting up from a heavy dinner and going to bed“) (Stasiuk 2011: 3). As indolent as the night is the place: Dukla, then. It’s a strange town, from which there’s no longer anywhere to go. Farther on there’s only Slovakia, and even farther the Bieszczady Mountains, but on the way, you pass through the back of the proverbial beyond and nothing of any importance is going to happen, nothing, there are just frail houses squatting by the roadside like sparrows on a wire, and between them windswept pastures inevitably ending in a sky that rises then curves, hangs overhead, and comes to rest on the opposite rim of the horizon. That’s right—Dukla as the overture to empty spaces. (Stasiuk 2011: 63-64) Dukla is the place of the protagonist’s first love, the place where his ancestors lived, and to which he returns now. Different historical layers are placed one upon the other: 1910, 1973, the present: You drink a beer at the Graniczna, walk out onto the market square, and your imagination swells like a balloon in a physics lesson when it’s put in the chamber of a vacuum pump. And at that moment Dukla becomes the center of the world, omphalos of the universe —the thing from which all things begin, the core around which are strung the successive layers of mobile events that are turned irreversibly into immobile fictions: One-horse dorozhka from Iwonicz 3 crowns, twohorse dorozhka 7 crowns, stagecoach one crown fifty. The stagecoach departs at 6:00 A.M., 7:30 A.M., and 2:00 P.M… . . The year is, let’s say, 1910. Taken together, the whole thing resembles a sepia photograph or an old celluloid film still—the one and the other burn easily and leave an empty space behind. (Stasiuk 2011: 64) The return from now (drinking a beer in Graniczna Street) to 1910 is a purely fictional one, and it seems as if the whole place is the imagination of something that is missing and that has to be added by imagination. Stasiuk’s travel reports are made-up memories: Subtle entities, among which we should include both thoughts and the images that memory has preserved, enter into unpredictable relations with one another. […] Because what real things could possibly link Dukla with that village from

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

twenty-odd years ago, aside from the letter u that both have in their name. (Stasiuk 2011: 32) Dukla in Stasiuk’s description is a place in which all the events that happen over a century are imaginary rather than real, where time and place are standing still. It is a place that is not real, a place of imaginations, “filled with space in which images lie down and are overtaken by the past, while the future ceases to be of interest” (Stasiuk 2011: 96). In the beginning of this article I defined space as something that is transformed into place in the imagination of the writer and the paper of the book. Stasiuk here creates an intriguing image when he writes that Dukla is a “space in which images lie down”—Stasiuk here reverts the process, going back to the origin of place which is, first, a space, and which is only transformed into place by the “images”. The last and lost space of Central Europe that Stasiuk covers—with his actual body by traveling through this space as well as his writings—is closely connected to time: On the one hand, there is historical time (1910, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras); on the other, time is fragile: Time cracks and falls apart and, in order not to go mad, you have to continually recreate it. This fragility, this transitoriness, this impermanence of time is a characteristic of my part of the world. Time here never flowed in the steady, calm current found in the great metropolises. There was always something in its way. It divided, multiplied, twisted and turned back, entering into strange relations with space, at times becoming entirely still, then disappearing. (Stasiuk 2009: 8-9) This synchronicity and circularity of time makes a classic linear narrative—with beginning, middle, and end—impossible. Dukla—and not only Dukla, but “my part of the world”, that is (East and South) Central Europe—is a no place, an empty space filled with the writer’s imagination. It cannot produce a coherent narrative and thus corresponds to the image of Central Europe already presented by Kundera. Quoting an interview with Kundera from 1982, Nikola Petkovič argues that for Kundera, Central Europe “still lacks a clear historical narrative”—Central Europe seems, for Kundera, more a witness of history than a maker of it: “The reality of Central Europe is thus caught in the paradoxes of its historical time that never allows the present to speak for itself” (Petkovič 2006: 382-383). The writers who invent Central Europe use their personal histories that resent a narrative in time. Rather, they rely on associations, repetitions, images, and, if we follow Stasiuk, these scripturescapes invented by the writer are the only remedy against ta środkowoeuropejska samotność, this “Central European loneliness” (Stasiuk 2009: 24). In Dukla, it is basically one lost village that is thrown out of time and space; in On the Way to Babadag, the whole (East) Central European region seems to be lost.

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While on the one hand geopoetic approaches to the (East) Central European landscape attempt to recover the heterogeneity of a region homogenized by socialism, on the other hand Stasiuk invents a new homogeneity not based on the political system but on the landscape itself: Any place was good, because I could leave it without regret. It didn’t even need a name. Constant expense, constant loss, waste such as the world has never seen … . The morning on the coast, Wybrzeże, the evening in a forest by the San River; men over their steins like ghosts in a village bar, apparitions frozen in mid-gesture as I watched. I remember them that way, but it could have been near Legnica, or forty kilometers northeast of Siedlice, and a year before or after in some village or other. (Stasiuk 2011: 4-5) In his texts, Stasiuk uses a range of terms that evoke the feeling of being lost: “loss,” “waste,” but also “solitude,” “orphanhood,” and “abandonment” (Stasiuk 2009: 24).

Keyword 4: Contaminated Landscapes Martin Pollack, an Austrian writer and translator of Polish literature into German, coined the word formation “contaminated landscapes” to show how landscapes (“cultural images”; Cosgrove/Daniels 1988: 1), that on first sight seem idyllic (“grass and wood, meandering rivers and brooks, wild canyons and green hills,” 2014: 5) carry, in fact, a heavy burden, since this idyllic layer hides a history of people having been tortured and murdered. Already in the nineteenth century the word “landscape” acquired a racist dimension in the thinking of German geographers and historians who considered it the German race’s objective to cultivate Slavs and Jews, transforming wilderness into Germanic culture (Pollack 2014: 12-13). But even before many European landscapes lost their innocence, Pollack writes: “Europe is blotched with battlefields, arenas of grueling fights, bloody offensives and counter offensives; whole landscapes became metaphors for senseless fighting and dying” (Pollack 2014: 15). Timothy Snyder calls those landscapes “bloodlands,” and they extend not between two cultures or countries (Germany and Russia), but between two dictators: “Europe between Hitler and Stalin” (Snyder 2010: viii). Although we find contaminated landscapes worldwide, Pollack focuses on (East) Central Europe, on places he visited. Sometimes contaminated landscapes are remembered (in monuments, cemeteries, museums), but more often than not they are hidden, mass graves that remain unmarked. One effect of the end of the Eastern Bloc from 1989 forward was the attempt to recover not only landscapes in general, as the writers are doing, but also those landscapes that were hidden or contaminated. One example Pollack gives is Kočevski Rog, south of Ljubljana. In the so-called massacre of Kočevski Rog, in June 1945 thousands of members of the Slovenian Home Guard, who had partly been allies

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

of Hitler’s Germany, as well as returning prisoners of war were murdered by Communist partisans (see Pollack 2014: 39). For decades the administrative forces tried to make their mass grave disappear (many of the victims were thrown into caves) and all attempts to recover the graves were inhibited. Only after the end of Communist Yugoslavia did those recovery attempts become successful. As an investigative essay writer, Pollack travels to these contaminated landscapes: to Kočevski Rog, to Bełżec at the Polish-Ukrainian border where the Germans and Austrians installed an annihilation camp, to Ukraine, where 1.6 million Jews were murdered during World War II (see Pollack 2014: 86). Today’s younger writers are concerned with a different contamination of (East) Central Europe: in reconquering their space from the East and reintegrating it into a center (which is leaning toward the West), they want to lay bare the traces of Sovietness to get rid of them. One example is Serhii Zhadan from Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. Born in 1974, he was not yet twenty when the Soviet Union collapsed, but still he sees the traces of the Soviet layer everywhere. In his 2005 kaleidoscopic book with the English title Anarchy in the UKR, Zhadan proffers a succession of images that show the Ukrainian present, but into those contemporary impressions he inserts images of the Soviet past, for example of Starobilsk, a town in the district of Luhansk: For a short time Starobilsk even was the capital of the Soviet Ukraine. In 1943, when the Russians were advancing West, Starobilsk was freed as one of the first Ukrainian cities, and in the entourage of the army, of course, the bureaucratic assholes invaded the town, and since they had not conquered any more important city, without further ado they made Starobilsk the capital. The liberation was excessively blown up and distorted [...], although the real battles were fought in the Donbass, where everything was a stake: coal, black gold, pits […] in Starobilsk there was only one Rumanian post, some tank heroes who overpowered the runaway Rumanian, obnoxious partisans and masses of collaborators, of course they had to make something out of it which fit the spirit of the time, it would have been too embarrassing—the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and a runaway Rumanian post. (Zhadan 2005: 22-23) In the present, the protagonist—here, as well, the author’s autobiographical alter ego—crossfades the memories of his childhood with images of the present: 1983. Luna Park. Soviet Propaganda educated me to love life. The red colour of the flags and banners has burned itself into my retina like jodine into an open wound… . On buildings and monuments of former Soviet cities I am discovering signs and testimonies of the big information war and I understand why I like them so much—those are the letters of my childhood, the colours of my 80’s, my first love, my real pride, my private socialism, which they took away from me without

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asking me first. My socialism was, before all, something external… . There was hardly any ideology, and I understand very well that the choice of colours and the composition of the image of “Honour and Fame for the Party” from the 80s is similar to “Always Coca-Cola” in the 90s. Everyone finds his own pathos, and who doesn’t will perish from depression. (Zhadan 2005: 71-72) In both half-ironic passages Zhadan lays bare the Soviet cover placed on reality; from his perspective, the layer of propaganda could not really contaminate the landscape or himself, but it remained a layer, external, that after 1989 was exchanged for something different, capitalism in this case. However, what shines through the new surface is what Emma Widdis calls “Sovietness”: It [Sovietness] should have disappeared. And yet in contemporary Russia and in the former Eastern bloc at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for better or worse, something that we recognize as Sovietness remains very much alive: it is a way of understanding the world, and a way of living in it. (Widdis 2003: 1) This Sovietness is not easy to erase, as Zhadan shows, and Widdis sees one of its characteristics in the “endurance of Sovietness” (ibid.). While Zhadan is very specific in his description of Sovietness, finding it in letters, colours, and language, Stasiuk links Sovietness, communism, to the climate: “Communism—at least the way I saw things—belonged in drab, temperate zones” (Stasiuk 2009: 19), thus making it seem like something natural, something that comes and goes as the earth changes.

4. The Reappropriation of Central Europe: Bodyscapes The literary heroes explore the landscape with their bodies, thus first creating bodyscapes conquered through the movements of their bodies and then transforming them into scripturescapes projected in their writing. They walk, they take the bus, they ride the train, or drive a car. One thing they all have in common (the heroes of Andrukhovych, Zhadan, and Stasiuk) is that they neglect all chronological or spatial organization: they do not pay attention to timetables, they generally do not use any maps, and if they do use them, the maps are old and useless. Stasiuk actually appears obsessed with maps, but only with those that show the past and make it possible to crack open the layers of the spatial palimpsest. Looking at the “Neue Verkehrskarte von Österreich-Ungarn, Freytag und Berndt, Wien 1900,” a map of Austro-Hungary published in Vienna in 1900, brings him back to the fragility of time and space and to that of memory in general—which makes any

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

Aufschreibesystem (system of notation, a term by Friedrich Kittler)15 more or less worthless if seen from a perspective of truth, but invaluable if used as a poetic canvas: My map […] , like any old map, incidentally, preserves the world and at the same time shows its disintegration, its passing. As I study it I’m gazing into a nothingness that my imagination wants at all costs to fill. This frail, moldering sheet of paper is reminiscent of human memory—weak, imperfect, prey to forgetfulness and dementia. (Stasiuk 2009: 33) This carelessness toward any form of measuring or cartographing is not only a kind of manifesto for a poetic vision of the world but also a counter-reaction to the Soviet world order that depended on a careful and constantly corrected mapping of territory. When Walter Benjamin visited Moscow in 1927, he was struck by the presence of maps on the streets of Moscow.16 “Between 1917 and 1935, a vast mapmaking process took place in the Soviet Union,” Emma Widdis writes, with the aim to create an “imaginary geography” that marked the “boundaries of power”of the new Soviet state. Map-making and the production of globes formed part of the “obsessive process of self-representation,” a “propaganda campaign involving the vast machinery of the Soviet cultural system” (Widdis 2003: 3). But while the Soviet “imaginary geography” was propaganda founded on a Soviet ideology, the writers in the newly recovered East Central European space create an aesthetic geography. To conquer space and turn it into private, personal place, they use their bodies. While the Soviets attempted to transform “space (the unknown) into ‘territory’ (the known and the mapped)” (Widdis 2003: 3), post-Soviet writers insist on place instead of territory. And while the Soviet model was based on center (Moscow) and periphery (everything else), the post-Soviet Central Europe is the political periphery, with landscapes, mountains, and little towns where nothing happens. The heroes oversleep their bus stops, miss their trains, and travel without destination, as Stasiuk writes in On the Way to Babadag: I drank strong tea in a station bar and took the train back, to go north in a day or two, or east, without apparent purpose. One summer I was on the road seventytwo hours nonstop. I spoke with truck drivers. […] The landscape outside the cabin window drew close, pulled away, to freeze at last, as if time had given up. (Stasiuk 2011: 3)

15 16

Kittler’s book “Aufschreibesysteme” was translated into English as “Discourse Networks” in 1990—but this is irrelevant for my argumentation; I just want to use the German metaphor. “On the street, in the snow, lie maps of the [R]SFSR piled up by street vendors who offered them for sale … The map is almost as close to becoming the centre of the new Russian iconic cult as Lenin’s portrait.” Walter Benjamin, quoted in Widdis (2003: 2).

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And while Zhadan or Andrukhovych perceive a socialist layer in the places they visit, Stasiuk’s places are without history, without time. He even tries to recreate space, to transform inscribed places into empty spaces and, once again, to reinscribe them, using his bodily sensations: I jumped on the crate and, wrapped in a blanket, dozed beneath the fluttering tarp, and my doze was visited by landscapes of the past mixed with fantasy, as if I were looking at things as an outsider. […] I moved through a space that had no history, nothing worth preserving. I was the first man to reach the Góry Pieprzowe, Pepper Hills, and with my presence everything began. Time began. Objects and landscapes only started their aging only from the moment my eye fell on them. (Stasiuk 2011: 3-4) In Stasiuk’s prose, the creation of place is not an intellectual act but a bodily sensation: here, the gaze does something to the space. While in the eighteenth century young men (and writers) made the Grand Tour through Europe (deconstructed by Laurence Sterne in his Sentimental Journey) to see Europe’s cultural achievements, the post-socialist travelers do not want any achievements; they search for quite the opposite: emptiness, landscape, anything devoid of human deeds. They are like the first adventurers, explorers looking for an earth marked by signs of earlier times, or, even better, for an earth untouched.

Conclusion Writing about writers who write about Central or East Central Europe is difficult, since for each one of them this region means something different, the borders cannot be aligned, the region cannot be defined. It is the area roughly in the middle of Europe, transformed in writing into the place of the writers’ childhood, their emotions, their presence, into autotopographies. It is, before all, an imaginary space which these authors turn into narratives about themselves, their identities, Europe. Yuri Andrukhovych’s statement which I already quoted about “his” East Central Europe that encompasses Estonia and Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia and Macedonia explains why Central Europe was not defined in this article or why no clear demarcation line separates Central Europe from East Central Europe. (East) Central Europe is, like Said’s Orient, first and foremost a space turned into places by everybody’s imagination.

(Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space

References Allen, John/Massey, Doreen/Cochrane, Allan (2000): Rethinking the Region. Spaces of Neo-Liberalism, London: Routledge. Andchruchowycz, Jurij (2000): “Środkowowschodnie rewizje,” in: Id./Andrzej Stasiuk (eds.): Moja Europa. Dwa eseje o Europie zwanej Środkową, Wołowiec: Czarne, 9-74. Andruchowytsch, Juri (2006a): “Heilpflanzen, Transkarpatien und ein Gefängnis für die Zeit,” in: Katharina Raabe/Monika Sznajderman (eds.): Last & Lost. Ein Atlas des verschwindenden Europas, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Andrukhovych, Yurii (2006b): Diiavol chovaetsia v siri. Vybrani spoby 1999-2005, Kiiv: Kritika. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981): “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, in: Id./Michael Holquist (eds.): The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, transl. Caryl Emerson/Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 84-258. Bechtel, Delphine (2006): “Lemberg/Lwów/Lvov/Lviv: Identities of a ‘City of Uncertain Boundaries,’” Diogenes 210: 53/2, 63-71. Brodsky, Joseph (1985): “Why Milan Kundera is Wrong About Dostoevsky,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1985. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/17/specials/brodsky-kundera.html (accessed August 25, 2015). Brown, Kate (2003): A Biography of No Place. From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Budge, Frank (1960): James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cosgrove, Denis/Daniels, Stephen (1988): „Introduction: iconography and landscape”, in: Id. (eds.): The iconography of landscape. Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environment. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1-10. Cosgrove, Denis (1984): Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London: University of Wisconsin Press. Crang, Mike/Thrift, Nigel (2000): “Introduction,” in: Mike Crang/Nigel Thrift (eds.): Thinking Space, London/New York: Routledge, 19-22. Czarnecka, Ewa (1992): Podróży świata. Rozmowy z Czesławem Miłoszem. Komentarze, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Ebert, Christa (2010): Literatur in Osteuropa. Russland und Polen, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Gonzáles, Jennifer A. (1995): “Autotopographies,” in: Gabriel Brahm Jr./Mark Driscoll (eds.): Prosthetic Territories. Politics and Hypertechnologies, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford: Westview Press, 133-150. Gronenthal, Mariella (2018): Nostalgie und Sozialismus. Emotionale Erinnerung in der deutschen und polnischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Bielefeld: transcript.

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Hnatiuk, Ola (2009): “Nativists versus Westernizers. Problems of Cultural Identity in Ukrainian literature of the 1990s,” in: Larysa M.L. Zaleska Onyshkevych/Maria G. Rewakowicz (eds.): Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe. Armonk/London: M. E. Sharpe, 203-218. Hüchtker, Dietlind (2002): “Der ‘Mythos Galizien.’ Versuch einer Historisierung,” in: Michael G. Müller/Rolf Petri (eds.): Die Nationalisierung von Grenzen. Zur Konstruktion nationaler Identität in sprachlich gemischten Grenzregionen. (= Tagungen des Herder-Instituts zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 16), Marburg: HerderInst., 81-107. Here: Online: http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/beitr/fallstudie/ DHuechtker2.pdf, (accessed August 25, 2015), 1-13. Kaganskii, V.L. (1997): “Landshaft i kul’tura”, in: Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ 1, 134-146. Online: http://ecsocman.hse.ru/data/ 911/927/1217/014Kaganskij.pdf (accessed September 17, 2018). Kühne, Olaf/Weber, Florian/Jenal, Corinna (2018): Neue Landschaftsgeographie. Ein Überblick, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Kundera, Milan (1984): “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” in: The New York Review of Books, Apr. 26, 1984, 33-38. Online: http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/materiellekultur/ag/migrationgender/download/zu_Annex_3_1_Kundera.pdf (accessed August 24, 2015). Marszałek, Magdalena/Sasse, Sylvia (2010): “Geopoetiken,” in: Id. (eds.): Geopoetiken. Geographische Entwürfe in den mittel- und osteuropäischen Literaturen, Berlin: Kadmos, 7-18. Marszałek, Magdalena (2010): “Anderes Europa: Zur (Ost)mitteleuropäischen Geopoetik,” in: Id./Sylvia Sasse (eds.): Geopoetiken. Geographische Entwürfe in den mittel- und osteuropäischen Literaturen, Berlin: Kadmos, 43-67. Miłosz, Czesław (1968): Native Realm. A Search for Self-Definition trans. Catherine S. Leach, London/Manchester: Sidgwick and Jackson Limited in association with Carcanet New Press Limited. Miłosz, Czesław (1987): Die Straßen von Wilna, München: Hanser. Nabokov, Vladimir (1982): Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Naumann, Friedrich (1916): Mitteleuropa, Berlin: G. Reimer. Petkovič, Nikola (2006): “Kafka, Švjek, and the Butcher’s Wife,” in: Marcel CornisPope/John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Vol. II., Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 376-390. Pollack, Martin (2014): Kontaminierte Landschaften, Wien: Residenz Verlag. Raabe, Katharina/Sznajderman, Monika (2006a): Last and Lost. Ein Atlas des verschwindenden Europas, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Raabe, Katharina/Sznajderman, Monika (2006b): “Von sprechenden Ruinen, verschobenen Grenzen und unsichtbaren Städten—Texte und Bilder eines ver-

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schwindenden Europas,” in: Id. (ed.): Last and Lost. Ein Atlas des verschwindenden Europas, Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 9-15. Rjabtschuk, Mykola (2005): “Sarmatienexpress oder ‘unsere westliche Orientierung’,” in: Martin Pollack (ed.): Sarmatische Landschaften, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Roth, Joseph (1990): “Die Büste des Kaisers,” Novelle [1935] in: Fritz Hackert (ed.), Joseph Roth, Werke. Bd. 5: Romane und Erzählungen 1930- 1936, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Said, Edward (2003[1978]): Orientalism, London: Penguin Books. Schlögel, Karl (2002): “Die Mitte liegt ostwärts,” in: Id. (ed.): Die Mitte liegt ostwärts. Europa im Übergang, München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 14-64. Schlögel, Karl (2013): Grenzland. Unterwegs auf einem neuen Kontinent, München: Hanser. Snyder, Timothy (2010): Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books. Stasiuk, Andrzej (2009[2006]): Fado, trans. Bill Johnston, Champaing/London: Dalkey Archive Press. Stasiuk, Andrzej (2011[1997]): Dukla, trans. and with an introduction by Bill Johnston, Champaign/Dublin/London: Dalkey Archive Press. Stasiuk, Andrzej (2011[2004]): On the Road to Babadag. Travels in the Other Europe, Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Stefanowska, Lidia (2009): “Back to the Golden Age. The Discourse of Nostalgia in Galicia in the 1990s,” in: Larysa M.L. Zaleska Onyshkevych/Maria G. Rewakowicz (eds.): Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe, Armonk/London: M. E. Sharpe, 219-230. Sztompka, Piotr (2004): „The Trauma of Social Change. A Case of Postcommunist Societies,” in: Jeffrey C. Alexander (ed.): Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 155-195. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977): Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis/London: Unversity of Minnesota Press. Widdis, Emma (2003): Visions of a New Land. Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War, New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Wolff, Larry (1994): Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1986): “Literary Geography,” in: Andrew McNeillie (ed.): The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1: 1904-1912, London: Hogarth Press, 32-36. Zhadan, Serhi (2005): Anarchy in the UKR, Charkiw: Folio.

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Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan Gulzat Egemberdieva and Thomas Lahusen

The Kyrgyz State History Museum, described by Serguei Oushakine in the essay included in the present volume, has recently be subjected to a total remake since the author visited it in March 2010. Its opening, announced for the Independence Day of Kyrgyzstan on 31 August 2018, has been “delayed again” (see Novosti.kg 2018). The reason might be that the Kyrgyz General Prosecutor’s Office is currently “checking the materials pertaining to the reconstruction” (ibid.). According to what we know from various reports, its Kyrgyz content, to use Oushakine’s description—“ethnographic artifacts from Kyrgyz tribes—from the Stone Age to the end of the nineteenth century, when those tribes became incorporated in the Russian Empire,”—which had only occupied the third floor, has expanded and now occupies the whole museum. As to the murals on the ceilings, highlighting Cold War propaganda and Soviet historical scenes, with some Kyrgyz ingredients (such as a Central-Asian looking man, wearing a budenovka with a red star, driving a Fordson tractor)1 , they have disappeared together with the statues of Vladimir Lenin and other luminaries of Soviet history. They might be part of the items of the collection that have been stolen during reconstruction, according to some recent reports (see Sputnik 2018). Oushakine correctly predicted that the removal of the communist insignia did require a complete transformation (perestroika) of the building. It costed 13 million dollars.2 The main theme of the exhibits was to be about the national epic hero Manas, but critics have charged that his display has been diminished by expensive design and decoration; see the recent report of Azattyk media (2018), the Kyrgyz version of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. There is still no trace of the Soviet 1 2

Probably an illustration of Chingiz Aitmatov’s story “The First Teacher” (and the 1965 film by Andrei Konchalovsky). After a recent visit to the yet-to-be opened museum, the parlementary delegation of Ata Meken (the Kyrgyz socialist party) voiced serious complaints. The deputee Kanybek Imanaliev complained that two of the horse statues, bought each for 14,000 Euros “looked like donkeys” and that the remake of the inside of the museum had spent 13 million dollars on nothing, including the chairs bought in Germany (see Sputnik 2018).

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period of the Kyrgyz nation, except one room devoted to the Great Patriotic War with black and white photographs, including the famous picture of the Red Army soldier, raising a flag over the Reichstag. Even if we do not yet know the details of what has disappeared, reappeared, and persisted, it is already clear that the remake of the Kyrgyz Historic Museum is only part of the complex hybridity of a changing place and those who inhabit it. Mackenzie, Clearwater, a self-published novella of Talant Dzhumabaev, a Russified Kyrgyz man remembering his school years in Frunze during the 1970s, may allow us, at least for the present essay, to get a sense of what has been discarded during the Museum’s “invention of tradition.” Dzhumabaev’s writing reveals what an ethnic Kyrgyz, living in late-socialist Frunze (now Bishkek) might have experienced. It shows, on the one hand, that socialist identity was far from “tepid,” at least for some of the inhabitants of the capital of Soviet Kirgizia (Diener & Hagen 2013: 496).3 On the other hand, Dzhumabaev’s testimony shows that “specific workings of the Soviet system account[ed] for much of the segregation visible today” (Gentile 2004: 118). To introduce the second section, the transition to post-socialism, we will start by using another testimony, this time an interview we conducted in 2010 with former Kyrgyz president Askar Akaev in his Moscow exile. In the interview Akaev justified the political program, promoted during his presidency, of overcoming ethnic and linguistic divisions in his country. The program was characteristically couched in spatial terms: Kyrgyzstan—nash obshchii dom (Kyrgyzstan Is Our Common Home). We will argue that Akaev’s emotionally-charged claim is grounded in the contradictions of the program itself and the situation during which the interview was conducted, i.e., right after the ousting of his successor Kurmanbek Bakiev in April 2010 and the ethnic riots in Bishkek and Osh. The spatial politics related to the massive inflow of rural migrants to the city after 1991 is our next item. After independence, both Kyrgyz and Russian residents of Bishkek resented the many Kyrgyz newcomers from the villages. For Zamira Sydykova, editor in chief of the newspaper Res Publica (and later ambassador of Kyrgyzstan in Washington, D.C., under Bakiev), the “invasion” of Bishkek from the countryside was a “serious problem.” “The Kyrgyz have started to fight against each other” (Kosmarskaia 2006: 133). By taking the example of the B. family, part of which moved to Bishkek from an Issyk Kul small mountain village after independence, we will show the transition of previous “clan” practices to new class divisions, and how these divisions have taken form in the appropriation of urban space and its symbolic meaning. In the last section of our essay, we will focus on a number of places and their inhabitants who lived in Kyrgyzstan’s “no-places”: a previous “secret city” that enjoyed 3

It is on purpose that we use here the Russian designation of Kyrgyzstan.

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“Moscow provisions,” now a ghost town, visited, at times, by Western trekkers; other former “islands” whose inhabitants experience various degrees of “hybrid” spatial existence, between country and city and blurred affective attachment to ethnicity, past and present.

Mackenzie Clearwater During one of our visits to Kyrgyzstan we were given a book, published in 2003 in Bishkek, with the curious title Makkenzi—chistaia voda (Mackenzie, Clearwater) by Talant Dzhumabaev, a Kyrgyz journalist and filmmaker who worked at that time for the Kyrgyz State Broadcasting and Television Corporation.   The narrator of the novella reminisces about his last year of school in Frunze during the 1970s. A few years before—we read on page 2 of the novella—he was still playing cowboys and Indians, imagining himself as the tough chief “Mackenzie Clearwater” galloping on the prairie, and spending the day on his sofa reading Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid. Since both Mackenzie and Clearwater are rivers in Canada, the title of the novella may have been inspired by one of the children’s books written by the Polish “Canadian” author Sat-Okh (real name, Stanislaw Suplatowicz), translated into Russian in the late 1960s. Sat-Okh claimed to have grown up among a First Nation tribe on the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories.4 Not much in Dzhumabaev’s book indicates explicitly that the authornarrator—let’s call him, for the sake of clarity, and using part of the title, Clearwater—is a sixteen-year-old Kyrgyz. The novella is written in Russian, most of his classmates are Russians, and the only Kyrgyz among them, Toktogul,5 has his first name Russified: “All called him Totosha, to make it simple” (Dzhumabaev 2003: 46).6 At first sight, Clearwater’s culture seems definitely Russian and European: one of his friends plays the guitar à la Vysotsky (pod Vysotskogo), and he borrows an album of the Beatles, even if this is—as his friend Kolia, who prefers the Rolling Stones, says—“music for girls” (dlia bab muzyka) (ibid.: 25). Everyday life in and out of school is definitely Soviet: preparing, for example, a representation of the “best revolutionary song” for the yearly October Revolution competition; offering pretty postcards and imported pens to the classmates Ol’ga and Zulia on March 8 for International Women’s Day; spending New Year before the TV screen, watching shows reporting on the life of the Soviet capital, and, toward the morning, watching “Melodies and 4

5 6

A 2004 master’s thesis, defended at the University Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Lublin, demystifies Suplatowicz’s biography. The author’s “Indian” biography was a hoax (see Krępulec 2004). Obviously a reference to Toktogul Satylganov, a famous Kyrgyz improvising poet and singer (tökmö akyn). All translations in this essay are our own.

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rhythms of variety from abroad” (Melodii i ritmy zarubezhnoi estrady) (ibid.: 131). At times, discussions between the teenagers touch on “the capitalist countries” (kapstrany), and when they do, these discussions, too, are very “Soviet.” For example, when Kolia pontificates about women, declaring that they are all “prostitutes” in their soul, Clearwater objects: “Perhaps in the West. In our country, people are different. There are no social conditions for prostitution and pornography to appear. It is always possible to work, and not to sell one’s conscience.” (Ibid.: 146). When Kolia mentions that he happened to catch The Voice of America, Clearwater qualifies him as a “natural enemy of the people” (ibid.: 150). The girl with whom Clearwater is desperately in love is his beautiful Russian classmate Elena Mavritskaia. They walk on the street at night and stop in front of a furniture shop: Do you want a wall unit (stenka) like this?”—asks Clearwater. Lena answers: “No, it’s local.” She wants a Romanian, or Polish stenka. And she wants to travel abroad. “Do you want to travel abroad?”—she asks. “How?” “Very simple, you have to get a place on a tour (putevka). To France, Italy. I heard that there are such tours.” “To a capitalist country? That’s unreal. It’s simpler to go the movies,” replies Clearwater. A minute later, discussing another “foreign” issue—a Polish variety poster—he declares that he is “Soviet” (ia sovetskii). (Ibid.: 94) To be Soviet, however, does not exclude social differences. Kolia is a Russian kid from the Postal neighborhood, where Clearwater’s other classmates, Kamil’ and Lesha live too. It is just next door to his own kvartal (neighborhood), Gastronom. The Postal neighborhood is surrounded by high walls: It is part of the industrial complex (kombinat) of precious metals, the former secret object Postal index N… . Colloquially, Postal Block. It was said that they had Moscow provisions (moskovskoe obespechenie). When we were young boys we used to run there sometimes. The beautiful lawns, the clean, asphalted roads, the private cars, and the well-dressed people always impressed me. Another world—well supplied, self-assured, satisfied. They even had a janitor, chasing us beggars (golodrantsev) away with his big broom. (Ibid.: 17-18) When Clearwater comes to visit Kamil’ and Kolia, he notices the “solid wooden furniture,” the mirrors, the carpets, the shelves full of “collected works” seen only “in public libraries,” the Great Soviet Encyclopedia; a kitchen full of import furniture and, “a never-seen wonder—a tea pot with a whistle.” (Ibid.: 21) Kolia reads the “forbidden” novels Master and Margarita and Red Cavalry. Clearwater remarks, “For a normal person Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are enough.” “Sheep!”—replies Kolia, using the well-known pejorative baran by which the Russians often qualify their Kyrgyz

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compatriots.7 “Your Tolstoy has been out of date for a long time, it’s from the last century. It’s time to grow up!” (Ibid.: 149) When Clearwater asks him whether Red Cavalry (Konarmiia) is about horse breeding (konovodstvo), the form of address becomes explicit in Kolia’s reply: “Peasant—he yelled—your jokes are inappropriate. This is forbidden literature of a genius writer. Any cultured person should read it” (Derevnia,—zavopil on,—i shutki tvoi neumestnye. Eto zapreshchennaia literatura genial’nogo pisatelia. Kazhdyi kul’turnyi chelovek dolzhen ee prochitat). (Ibid.: 182) In this context baran (sheep) and derevnia (countryside, peasant) definitely give clear indications of Clearwater’s identity: he is Kyrgyz.8 Explicit references to his ethnicity are rarely mentioned in the novella. The first time his ethnic identity appears is when he asks his father to allow him to go to a concert. He “switches to Kyrgyz” and the father agrees—in Kyrgyz (Ibid.: 32). The day of the concert, some of his friends want him to use his father’s connections to jump the line. “Mixing Kyrgyz and Russian words,” Clearwater tries to convince the lady at the ticket counter. She answers … in pure Russian (na chistom russkom iazyke). (Ibid.: 41) The third occurrence happens when Clearwater and his Kyrgyz friend Totosha go on an outing to the mountains, with two girls met at a bar. The janitor of the canyon refuge, where they consider spending the night, is upset because Clearwater addressed him in Russian. He lectures him about being a member of his nation and does so … in Russian. (Ibid.: 190) On another occasion, Clearwater notices a yurt, which appeared in a courtyard of Frunze. He explains to his friends that the yurt is there because somebody died: “They will mourn him, I saw this in the countryside during funerals. Interesting that they authorized a yurt to be set up. Before, it wasn’t allowed” (Ibid.: 118) Less immediate, but far more telling signs indicate the specific hybridity of both hero and author of the novella: both are urban, Russified Kirgiz, living in Frunze/Bishkek, sharing with the Russians of their city a large part of common Soviet culture. But they are also different. Clearwater’s Kyrgyz rural origins are visible in the interaction with his family: they are more hierarchical, devoid of ostensible signs of intimate feelings. When his mother gives him a watch that the father cannot use because the numbers on the face are difficult to read, and five rubles, “because she doesn’t want her children to look poor,” Clearwater does not thank her, nor wish her anything (at the occasion of the October celebrations), nor say goodbye: “Billing and cooing and signs of fondness are not accepted in our family” (Siusiukan’e i nezhnosti v nashei sem’e ne priniaty). (Ibid.: 85) On the contrary, hearing from Russians expressions of family affection and civility makes him feel

7 8

The Kyrgyz had their own nickname for the Russians: zhün bash, literally “wool head.” Other common derogatory words, used by Russians or “Russianized” Kyrgyz, denominating rural (Kyrgyz) fellow citizens are kolkhoz (collective farmers), or myrk, myrkushka (something like “country bumpkin” or “simpleton”).

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uncomfortable, but also provokes specific feelings. In a telling passage the hero shares with the reader painful memories of his childhood, when he was given to a twenty-four-hour kindergarten, growing up without his mother’s love (ibid.: 162). Family relations and intimate feelings are experienced, and certainly expressed, very differently in Kyrgyz and Russian societies.9 For those like Clearwater/Zhumabaev, who live in the hybrid space of Kyrgyz/Russian Frunze/Bishkek, they coexist without ever coming together.

Transition to Post-Socialism: A Not So Common Home In an interview that we conducted with Askar Akaev in his Moscow exile in Summer 2010,10 the former president laid out with passion (and in Russian) the reforms implemented during his presidency, above all his program Kyrgyzstan—nash obshchii dom (Kyrgyzstan Is Our Common Home), aiming at overcoming not only the linguistic and ethnic divisions between Kyrgyz, Russians, and Uzbeks but also including smaller minorities, such as the Dungan, the Tajik, the Uygur, the Meshketian Turks, the Chechens, and others under the neologism Kyrgyzstantsy (Kyrgyzstanis), a word that “started to be used in everyday language.”11 Other reforms that Akaev was proud of included the building of the Bishkek-Osh Highway, “that united geographically North and South,” the assignment of several ministries to Osh, making it Kyrgyzstan’s “second capital,” and the like. When asked about what caused the 2005 Tulip Revolution, Akaev blamed the Bakiev clan, “actively helped by the CIA.” What he failed to mention was, on the one hand (and understandably), the high degree of nepotism and corruption that marked the last years of his presidency, and the contradictions between what Alexander Diener has called “national” and “patriotic” identity (Diener 2002: 632), between the self-conception of “homeland” lived by the various ethnicities of Kyrgyzstan and Akaev’s “Common Home.” Druzhba narodov, the “friendship of peoples” had a particularly hard time being implemented and maintained in regions where borders and nationalities failed to coincide, in

9

10 11

The linguist Anna Wierzbicka, famous for her theory on the “natural semantic metalanguage,” has identified “emotionality” as one of the fundamental themes of the Russian language and culture. Based on her analysis of the abundance in Russian—more than in other languages—of colloquial expressions involving the human body, Wierzbicka argues that Russian culture, in contrast, for example, to Anglo culture, includes a “general script” related to expressions of emotions. This script is paraphrased as follows: “it is good if other people know what a person feels.” (Wierzbicka 1998: 477) We have used part of this interview in our film, The Interim Country (Lahusen & Egemberdieva & Loersch 2010). The analogue in Kazakhstan was Kazakhstani, denoting the same “patriotic identity,” in contradistinction to “national” identity (see Diener 2002: 632).

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this case, and famously, in the Fergana region, where ethnicities, including Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tadjik, and others were not necessarily confined to the borders drawn for them.12 Clashes started as early as in the late 1980s between Uzbeks and Meshketian Turks, who had been deported there from their “homeland” Georgia during World War II. The June 1990 riots in Osh and Uzgen were triggered by Uzbek demands for more representation and linguistic and cultural rights, and Kyrgyz demands for the redistribution of land belonging to a mostly Uzbek collective farm. The KyrgyzUzbek riots in the Summer of 2010, during which thousands of Uzbeks fled to Uzbekistan, but (were) returned to Kyrgyzstan, are often interpreted as a continuation of the 1990 clashes (see Rezvani 2013: 60-81). Land grabs by impoverished Kyrgyz rural migrants near Bishkek took place a few weeks before.13 Victims were Meskhetian Turks, blamed for occupying “national” territory. The 2006 clashes between Dungan and Kyrgyz in the village of Iskra had similar reasons (see Laruelle 2012: 44). Some of these tensions were played out within a single family. Born in a village near Lake Issyk Kul during the late socialist era, B.’s14 spectacular movement from a modest provincial administrative position in Soviet times to one of the highest administrative-political posts in the Kyrgyz capital under Akaev’s presidency are a textbook case of what Oleg Golubchikov calls the “spatializing effects of neoliberalism”: As the only global order, … neoliberalism of the everyday … is not simply “domesticated,” but subsumes pre-existing practices altogether, alienates them from their own ideological history, and recasts them under the exigencies of capital(ism). (Golubchikov 2016: 615, 620) B.’s raise and subsequent decline shows how the transition of previous “clan” or “sub-ethnic” (Schatz 2010: 490) practices from the socialist to the post-socialist era became not only transformed into new class divisions, but also how these divisions took form in the appropriation of urban space and its symbolic meaning. B.’s high position allowed him to get access to real estate in a prestigious Bishkek neighborhood, a series of apartments for his daughters, son, and sisters, and other attributes of privilege, such as SUVs, cell phones, luxury clothing, and foreign travel. Those of the B. family who “didn’t make it” remained in the village, good enough to provide meat and fresh produce to their relatives in Bishkek, or send their children to clean their house and apartments.

12 13 14

For an excellent publication on this matter, see Reeves (2014). Our film The Interim Country (Lahusen & Egemberdieva & Loersch 2010) is in part devoted to this issue. The initial does not correspond to B.’s real name. Details on the collection of data must also remain unidentified for security reasons.

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B.’s role as a “head of clan” of sorts was tellingly “recast” when he lost his position and influence after Akaev’s downfall. For some time, wealth was retained, but not for long. The exigencies of capital(ism) made themselves felt soon, and dramatically so. Lured into easy and extensive borrowing, one relative after the other lost all of his or her possessions. The only “way out” was to continue borrowing from each other or leave the country as guest worker in Russia or elsewhere in the Soviet space, like so many Central-Asians did. As to the “head of clan,” B.’s symbolic position faded within lineage, i.e., in his close and extended family, and society at large. Forced to exchange his house for modest apartment, he now attempts to maintain what is left of his economic and symbolic position by engaging in more or less shady business ventures, inherited from previous times or available on “the market.” B. keeps the thinking of the elite he belonged to, “trapped between neoliberalism and traditionalism, but in either case unable to think beyond the world of transnational capitalism, or the ideology of globalization that underwrites it, which has assumed the power of a life-force” (Dirlik 2002: 440). As to B.’s relatives who stayed in the village (his brothers and their families), they continue to live on the farm, attempting to adapt to the fluctuations of the Eurasian Customs Union, or hoping to profit from the spinoffs of the global market (see Yalovkina 2015). They hope to join those in the near-by town Karakol who have opened restaurants and hostels for Western tourists, hungry for “ecological” travel, horse riding, and trekking on the wild Tian Shan mountain range. The story of B. and his family confirms Golubchikov’s observations: “the post-socialist city has become a dividing and divided experience” and “the new regime has also created preconditions for the extraction of wealth from the large majority of people and places and its re-concentration in the hands of the select few (people and places)” (Golubchikov 2016: 619).

Non-Places We know that by the 1930s, the “exuberant national carnival” of the early Soviet nation-building drive gave place to the increased Russification of the Soviet “communal apartment,” to use Yuri Slezkine’s witty and telling image: Between 1937 and 1939, Cyrillic replaced Latin in all the literary standards created in the 1920s; and in 1938, after a three-year campaign, Russian became an obligatory second language in all non-Russian schools. The Soviet past was becoming progressively more Russian and so were the upper echelons of the Party and the state… . The Russians began to bully their neighbors and decorate their part of the communal apartment (which included the enormous hall, corridor and the kitchen where all the major decisions were made) but they did not claim that the

Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan

whole apartment was theirs or that the other (large) families were not entitled to their own rooms. The tenants were increasingly unequal but reassuringly separate. (Slezkine 1994: 443-444) This inequality and “reassuring” separateness became most visible in the sites that enjoyed a special status in the Soviet hierarchy of incorporation—“Moscow provisioning” (Moskovskoe obespechenie), like secret object “Postal Blok” in Dhumabaev’s novella. Such “secret objects” could be entire cities and regions. Vladimir Kaganskii, who is mentioned in our introduction, devoted an entire chapter to one of those closed cities, the center for nuclear research Arzamat-16 (Kaganskii 2001: 216). It could not be found on any map. It is only after 1991 that it received a name—Sarov—and a place on the map: in the center of the Mordovian reserve, and a corner of Nizhny Novgorod oblast. Before becoming Arzamat-16, it was first known as the Facility (Ob”ekt), and until 1975, its official address was “Moscow. Center-300.” When Kaganskii’s book was published in 2001, the mail still went to that address. For Kaganskii, Arzamat-16 was a non-place, a utopia (the author uses the neologism nigdeniia), and ultimately, a “miniature Soviet Union.” Although reports on these closed cities have since materialized, scandals or strikes have been given publicity, and the USSR is no more, this kind of space continues to exist. “We cannot understand the country in which we live, if we don’t take into account such special spots, focal, nodular, unique and typical at the same time.” (Ibid.: 214) Since the publication of Kaganskii’s book, things have of course changed. “Secret objects” have disappeared in Kyrgyzstan like elsewhere, but twenty-five years after independence, in the new conditions of “market economy,” their remnants have become places of confusion and hybridity. Engilchek is a ghost town located at 2,500 meters above sea level in the Ak-Suu district of the southeast Issyk Kul region, not far from the Chinese border.15 Foreign tourists happen to come by the town, on their way to the glaciers and peeks of the Tien Shan mountain range: they are “mountaineers and serious hikers,”16 usually accompanied by local villagers carrying equipment. Like any newcomer, they need a special permit to enter the town. Built in 1989, Engilchek counted between 9,000 and 20,000 inhabitants (the number varies according to the sources), who came from all over the Soviet empire to work in the tin mining complex. After 1991, work ceased, and almost everybody left. Today, about thirty inhabitants, almost all women (most men have left to work in Russia), live among the empty apartment blocks and rusty structures. The majority are newcomers, living from the sheep grazing on the nearby meadows. Soviet mining has reverted to Kyrgyz 15 16

The now-abandoned coalmine and town of Shurab, on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, was another of those sites. See: Reeves 2014: 114. Engilchek, Kyrgyzstan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engilchek,_Kyrgyzstan (accessed 18 August 2018).

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jailoo (summer pasture). Snow and rain have washed away the graves of Engilchek’s cemetery. The inhabitants say that ghosts visit them at night. Nurbek, one of our interlocutors, had worked in the mining town. He is Kyrgyz, but only speaks Russian. Nurbek has good memories of the Soviet closed town: its inhabitants used to support their families living elsewhere thanks to the special provisions and superior salaries. But he blames the Russians: “Everything was for them, they just used us, the Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Uzbek. They always put us down. We were always second-class. I am happy that we are independent now.” Our questions about the Soviet past triggered a lot of interest among Engilchek’s inhabitants. One of them brought a portrait of Lenin from his living room. He offered it to us for sale (see figure 1).

Figure 1.

Photo by Gulzat Egemberdieva.

The inequality that characterized the relations between Russians and the now titular nation has historical antecedents. Starting around 1868, an increasing number of peasants from the central provinces of Russia were resettled in “Semirechye,” the eastern end of the Kazakh steppe and what is today the Kyrgyz border. They typically occupied the most favorable spots: along post roads, the shore of Issyk Kul Lake and other lakes, and nearby river banks. Karakol, for example, as well as Teplokliuchenka (literally “Warm Spring,” now Ak-Suu), or Taldy Suu, are all named after rivers or streams. Other villages took the names of first settlers. Slivkino—later Pokrovka and Kyzyl Suu today—was named after the peasant who first settled in that the place. Or they were named after land surveyors, tsar’s generals, replaced in Soviet times by communist leaders, national heroes, and the like, and eventually given or restored Kyrgyz names after 1991. Przhevalsk (after the Russian geographer and explorer of Central and East Asia, Nikolai Przhevalsky) became Karakol again.

Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan

Kalininskoe (in the Chui Valley) is now Kara-Balta, but the name of nearby Liuksemburg, inhabited by former German “special settlers,” remains (Aitbaev 1957: 25-28). The land reforms of the early Soviet 1920s in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (then called the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast) saw the mass expulsion of Russian and Cossack settlers, and land was returned to the local population. After these measures gave rise to major ethnic conflicts in the region, they were reversed a few years later. The semi-nomadic Kyrgyz population was settled in kolkhozes (cooperatives) and sovkhozes (state farms) in less favorable areas. B.’s mother, for example, was working on a collective farm cultivating opium. Until the end of the Soviet Union, most of the sanatoria along Lake Issyk Kul and hot springs around Karakol were closed to local Kyrgyz inhabitants. Any visitor of the rural center (aiyl ökmötü) Taldy Suu, not far from the district town of Tiup (previously Preobrazhenskoe), can see on the walls of many houses large Soviet paintings, representing heroes of labor and scenes of the Soviet spatial program, like the vanished murals of the remolded State History Museum in Bishkek (Figure 2). They all are buildings formerly inhabited by Russians.

Figure 2.

Photo by Gulzat Egemberdieva.

In one of those houses, on Dyikanbaeva Street (previously Ordzhonikidze Street), we met Vera, one of the few Russians still living there. She said: “My father moved to this village because of its pure water. I grew up drinking Taldy Suu’s water. Maybe that’s the secret of my health. I get sick very rarely. Until this day I drink that water.” Born in 1937, she also fondly recalls Soviet times. Taldy Suu was mainly inhabited by Russians; that is where she lived the most part of her life, together with her Russian husband who passed away a few years ago. Both worked as collective farmers. She is fluent in Kyrgyz and Russian. “We, the Russians and

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the Kyrgyz, learned the language from each other. We all lived the same way and helped each other, everything was done by hand. Now, it’s different.” Four of her five children are now living in Russia, but Vera does not want to leave Taldy Suu; she believes she belongs there. An impressive library covers the walls of her home, as she loves reading. “We bought the books in the local bookstore, and when we needed more, we ordered them from Leningrad.” She gave us a book, written by her husband, entitled The Past, the Present, and the Future of Mankind (Zuban’ 2010). “During the day he worked, and at night he wrote his book.” To some extent, the politics of “Kyrgyzstan Is Our Common Home” recalls early Soviet “affirmative action” efforts—to use Terry Martin’s formula—to promote national identity, national cultures, and languages through programs of indigenization (korenizatsiia) at the expense of Russian “great-power chauvinism.” Soviet affirmative action, however, was accompanied by many flaws and realized only in part (Martin 2001). It was limited to the creation of indigenous elites, which were more or less realized at the republican level and below, but failed to promote nonRussian elites into central institutions, while the Russians and Russian language became the “unifying glue of the multi-ethnic Soviet state” (Ibid.: 179;393). The following quote, taken from a volume on language politics in the ex-Soviet Muslim states, published in 1995, gives evidence of how this “glue” was perceived after the end of the Soviet Union: According to official Russian sources, about a third of the emigrating Russians, moved to the Russian Federation… . Their main arguments, like those of Russians in the other five [post-Soviet] states, against what they perceived as language discrimination at school and office, were that in a democratic society, Russian should be fostered as a world language; and that, in the 1989 Soviet census, more than two million out of four million respondents in Kyrgyzstan had considered Russian their native language. (Landau & Kellner-Heinkele 2001: 48) Liudmila’s story could be called “indigenization in reverse.” We made her acquaintance in the summer of 2013 in front of the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church in Karakol, a town at the eastern tip of Lake Issyk Kul. The church was first built as a wooden construction in 1867. Destroyed several times by fire and earthquake, the church was rebuilt in 1895. In 1932, it was transformed into a workers’ club and then returned to the believers in 1944. During the Khrushchev era, the church was again confiscated by the authorities and turned into a gym. During perestroika, reconstruction resumed and the building was to become an ethnographic museum. The church started to function once more in 1993. It was renovated thanks to

Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan

donations of the Russian community, and became church property in 2005.17 It is now a site of orthodox worship for the local Russian population and the major tourist attraction of Karakol. That day, Liudmila was selling ice cream at the gate of the church. When we first asked her if we could film her, she refused. But then she agreed to talk about her life. The interview was entirely conducted in Kyrgyz, which Liudmila speaks better than Russian. Born in 1947, Liudmila Piotrova spent all her life in the Przhevalsk/Karakol region. She was raised by her mother, who had come from Ukraine, and worked in a Przhevalsk collective farm. There Liudmila went to a Kyrgyz primary school. Asked why, she said, “because I played with Kyrgyz children, and then followed them.” Soon, she was blamed for attending that school. She would turn into a Kyrgyz, said a Russian neighbor. So, she burnt all her books. When she moved with her mother to Taldy Suu, аn Issyk Kul village that had a Russian school, she struggled. Her teacher disliked her, “because my Russian was weak,” she said. So, they moved to the village of Korumdu, where she finished Kyrgyz school. Liudmila started to write poems in grade 4, in 1964. For the first poem, entitled “Terezedegi gül” (“A Flower on the Window”), she got a “B.” While she worked at a collective farm in nearby Kazakhstan, she wrote a poem for May 9, “for the veterans, the grandfathers, and grandmothers of the village soviet.” She remembers her pride for being able to recite the poem to the veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Later, she published several poems in an Issyk Kul newspaper. “One was about Kyrgyzstan, the other was about doctors,” she said. She even wrote a poem about Roza Otunbaeva, the interim president of Kyrgyzstan between 2010 and 2011, because “she raised my pension.” She liked to write about neighbors: “If you are very poor, but have a good neighbor, you don’t feel poverty,” she said. She was able to publish sixteen poems and one story in another journal, which unfortunately closed. Otherwise she would still be sending them her writings. Liudmila considers Kyrgyzstan “her country.” Here are a few verses devoted to it: My Kyrgyzstan, if I leave you, how could I live? How could a vagabond ever be happy? Thinking of other places, They will never be my homeland. I am attached to my country And I don’t look for other ones. I am at ease only here, My Kyrgyz land. Only you can give me happiness. 17

These details were provided by the prior of the Holy Trinity Church in Karakol, archpriest Sergii Chuvichkin, interviewed in 2013. Chuvichkin’s ancestors were Cossack settlers who moved to the region in 1864. He was born in Tiup, one of the towns that had a Russian majority.

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Nevertheless, Liudmila’s homeland still considers her Russian. “I wrote about longing for the Kyrgyz language, because I wanted to work as a Kyrgyz language teacher. But I was not accepted.” Her husband, who passed away some five years ago, was Russian. Her (Ukrainian) mother died in 1961: she is buried “in a cemetery of theirs,” that is, a Russian cemetery. Her mother spoke some Kyrgyz, but very badly. About her father, who never lived with Liudmila and her mother, she states: “My father is a Russian from Tiup, so that’s why I belong here.” Once she tried to contact her father, but his (Russian) wife did not let her in. Liudmila has one daughter and three grand-children. They only speak Russian. Liudmila does not only speak Kyrgyz better than Russian but she has learned the Kyrgyz customs, “like not turning bread on its other side.” A mullah who “analyzed her poems” thought that they were written by a Kyrgyz. The fact remains that Liudmila learned to read the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses: There I learned that you should love God like you love people close to you. That made me think. I was angry with the Russians, so I decided to come to the Orthodox Church and ask for forgiveness. I am Russian, so I decided to come to this church and I am here for the last three years. God blessed me and gave me this job where I can sell ice cream.” We met Liudmila Piotrova again in 2014. The encounter took place in the refectory of the Holy Trinity Church, where she works as a kitchen helper. She gave us her book of Kyrgyz poems and stories, published recently, and told us about her interviews on national radio and TV (Piotrovskaia 2013). Obviously her story was worth showcasing as a rare example to follow. But this time, she talked to us in Russian. The last time we met Liudmila was at the occasion of a play entitled Uluu Ürkün (The Great Revolt), by Baktybek Maksutov, celebrating the one-hundred-year anniversary of the 1916 revolt against the Russian forces in Central Asia.18 At the end of the play, the audience gave voice to their enthusiastic patriotic feelings. Liudmila, who had also watched the play, came to hug me (Gulzat Egemberdieva) and apologized, adding: “Will you turn away from me now, because I’m Russian?“ Is Liudmila’s story a curious and isolated case? Not really. But gender matters. In rural Kyrgyzstan one can often find Russian men who speak perfect Kyrgyz and who have been somehow “integrated.” Vasia Korzunov was born in 1956 in Taldy Suu, the village where Liudmila had moved to attend, unsuccessfully, Russian school. He was the second of four sons. When his father passed away, his mother gave all children to an orphanage, where they almost died of starvation. She died the next year. After leaving the orphanage, the brothers lost touch of each other. 18

The play was performed on 6 August 1916 in the Karakol Drama Theater: http://www.kabar.kg/regions/full/109559 (accessed 5 January 2016). For a summary of the commemoration, see Pannier (2016).

Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan

We found Sergei, one of Vasia’s brothers, after talking to people in Taldy Suu. Both had left independently for the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Sergei became a wellknown boxer, traveled all over the USSR and Eastern Europe, before coming back to Kirghizia. He is now a pig farmer in Kara-Balta. Vasia worked as a woodcutter in Siberia, and came back to Taldy Suu. “I longed for that place” (Mne tianulo). When they met after forty years, they thought about their parents. They could not find their grave in the Taldy Suu graveyard, but talked about how good life was then in the village: the taste of its apples, the smell of flowers, and of course the clear water. After coming back from Russia, Vasia survived traveling from village to village, building “Russian stoves” made of brick, and constructing roofs. Russian men of that region were in great demand for these skills. The Kyrgyz family of B., whose story we have told, adopted him as their tenth child when they still lived in the village. But Vasia, or Baske in Kyrgyz, slept in the kampa, the Kyrgyz word for the storage room where the animal fodder is kept. He had a “Russian smell” (orus dzhyt). Russian women such as Liudmila do not enjoy that type of “privilege.” They don’t have the necessary skills and they have no “exchange value”—nobody would pay a bride price (kalym) for a Russian woman. There are a few so-called success stories, such as the story of Gulia, a Russian orphan whose parents died in the Leningrad Blockade and who then grew up in a Kyrgyz peasant family in the Issyk Kul region. Her story was made into a documentary film of the same name (Gulia, Sovetskaia Kirgiziia, n.d.). It showcased the “friendship of nations.”

Conclusion In a way, all the heroes of our story have been searching for a place. The reader of Mackenzie Clearwater and other adventure stories so popular among Soviet readers “knew his place” and understood the difference between those who had “Moscow provision” and those who had not. Even if its author lives now in Bishkek, his emotions are still, at least in part, about Frunze and speaking Russian better than Kyrgyz. B. and his family experienced both “the spatial ideologies of state-socialism inscribed into the previously egalitarian landscape of economic geography and those of neoliberalism with its anti-egalitarian and exploitative effects” (Golubchikov 2016: 616). The remnants of “affirmative action” made it still possible to start a career when one came from a Kyrgyz village during the late Soviet era. But to keep both power and wealth in the volatile era of post-socialist Kyrgyzstan is another affair. The ups and downs of the B. family after their arrival to Bishkek show clearly that “the post-socialist city has become a dividing and divided experience—with increasing social and economic disparity and polarization at both inter-urban and intraurban scales”. (Ibid.: 619)

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Many of those who never made it to the capital continue to lead a hybrid existence between “then,” “now,” and “tomorrow.” But the future does not hold much promise, and the chance to “make it” or even get a job in the city is slim. Hybridity increases, when one becomes a guest worker in Russia or elsewhere in the former Soviet space. It means, on the one hand, to experience first-hand the “neoliberalization of the everyday, the appropriation of the everyday by capitalism” (ibid.: 615), even if Moscow, Omsk, or other places where “Kyrgyz towns” are growing, are “sites of continued affective attachment” (Reeves 2012: 134). On the other hand, a very large amount of the remittances (30 percent of the country’s GDP) that the soon one-million Kyrgyz in Russia alone are sending home per year is spent for lineage obligations and communal practices of social reciprocity (see Goble 2017), such as hosting a toi (celebration), pay for kalym (bride price), or for other life-cycle ceremonies (Reeves 2012: 127; Rubinov 2014: 183-215). But here too, tradition does not escape the “neo-liberalization of the everyday.” An acquaintance of the B. family, Nurzat T., has in recent years created a highly successful school of toi specialists in Bishkek, training entertainers and singers (paid $250 per song, plus airfare if they perform in distant places). As of late, Nurzat T. has founded the online center Nur Akademia, offering lessons in “psychology” via WhatsApp, training students how to become happy and successful in business.19 Did Nurzat find her place? In any case, she has learned to live with hybridity, like so many others. As we have tried to show in our essay, hybridity in Kyrgyzstan is multiple: ethnic, regional, rural/urban, tribal, class, “national” and often still “Soviet.” The existence of these multiple hybridities, which do not necessarily overlap, makes being “in-between” far more complex. Present well before 1991, the emotion associated with it has grown ever sharper.

References Aitbaev, M.T. (1957): Istoriko-kul’turnye sviazi kirgizskogo i russkogo narodov. Po materialam Issyk-Kul’skoi oblasti Kirgizskoi SSR, Frunze: Izd. AN Kirgizskoi SSR. Azattyk media (2018): “Muzejdegi milliondor.” Azattyk media, 14 June 2018: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs-aY7Cy32k&feature=youtu.be (accessed 20 August 2018). Diener, Alexander C. (2002): “National Territory and the Reconstruction of History in Kazakhstan,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, 43:8, 632-650. Diener, Alexander C. & Hagen, Joshua (2013): “From socialist to post-socialist cities: narrating the nation through urban space,” Nationalities Papers, 41:4, 487-514.

19

http://oino.site/hashtag/НурАкадемия (accessed on 24 August 2018)

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Dirlik, Arif (2002): “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation,” Interventions, vol. 4(3), 428-448. Dzhumabaev, Talant (2003): Makkenzi—chistaia voda, Bishkek: Izd. Turar. Gentile, Michael (2004): “Divided Post-Soviet Small Cities? Residential Segregation and Urban Form in Leninogorsk and Zyryanovsk, Kazakhstan,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 86:2, 117-136. Goble, Paul (2017): “More Kyrgyz Now Work in Russia than in Bishkek and Osh Combined,” Window on Eurasia—New Series (Wednesday, July 5, 2017): http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/07/more-kyrgyz-nowwork-in-russia-than-in.html (accessed on 24 August 2018). Golubchikov, Oleg (2016): “The urbanization of transition: ideology and the urban experience,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, 57:4–5, 607-623. Kaganskii, Vladimir (2001): Kul’turnyi landshaft i sovetskoe obitaemoe prostranstvo: sbornik statei, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Kosmarskaia, Natal’ia (2006): “Deti imperii” v postsovetskoi Tsentral’noi Azii: Adaptivnye praktiki i mental’nye sdvigi (Russkie v Kirgizii, 1992-2002), Moscow: Natalis. Krępulec, Katarzyna (2004): Stanisław Supłatowicz: Niezwykła biografia Sat-Okha, czyli jak się zostaje legendą, www.indianie.eco.pl/litera/sat-okh1.html (accessed 3 July 2015). Lahusen, Thomas & Egemberdieva, Gulzat & Loersch, André (2010): The Interim Country [online], Toronto: Chemodan Films & Geneva: Media4Democracy, https://vimeo.com/ondemand/92667 or: https://www.journeyman.tv/film/5344. Landau, Jacob M. & Kellner-Heinkele, Barbara (2001): Politics of Language in the exSoviet Muslim States: Azerbayjan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Laruelle, Marlène (2012): “The paradigm of nationalism in Kyrgyzstan. Evolving narrative, the sovereignty issue, and political agenda,” Communist and PostCommunist Studies, 45:1–2, 39-49. MacFayden, David (2006): Russian Culture in Uzbekistan: On Language in the Middle of Nowhere, London/New York: Routledge. Martin, Terry (2001): The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Novosti.kg (2018): “Otkrytie istoricheskogo muzeia v Bishkeke opiat’ otkladyvaetsia,” Novosti.kg, 05 Septembre 2018: http://novosti.kg/2018/09/otkrytieistoricheskogo-muzeya-v-bishkeke-vnov-otkladyvaetsya/ (accessed 15 September 2018). Pannier, Bruce (2016): “Remembering The Great Urkun 100 Years Later.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 29 April 2016: https://www.rferl.org/a/qishloq-ovoziremembering-great-urkun/27706415.html (accessed 11 September 2018).

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Piotrovskaia, Liudmila (2013): Ysyk-Köl Irgaktary (Rhythms of Issyk Kul), Karakol: Master Print. Reeves, Madeleine (2012): “Black Work, Green Money: Remittances, Ritual, and Domestic Economies in Southern Kyrgyzstan,” Slavic Review, 71:1, 108-134. Reeves, Madeleine (2014): Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rezvani, Babak (2013): “Understanding and explaining the Kyrgyz-Uzbek interethnic conflict in Southern Kyrgyzstan,” Anthropology of the Middle East, 8:2, 60-81. Rubinov, Igor (2014): “Migrant Assemblages: Building Postsocialist Households with Kyrgyzx Remittances,” Anthropological Quarterly, 87:1, 183-215. Sputnik (2018): „Skandal s rekonstrukciej Istoricheskogo muzeja—9 faktov o genpodrjadchike,” Sputnik, 25 May 2018: https://sptnkne.ws/hCcX (accessed 15 August 2018). Schatz, Edward (2010): “The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan.” Europe-Asia Studies, 52:3, 2010, 489-506. Slezkine, Yuri (1994): “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, 53:2, 414-452. Wierzbicka, Anna (1998): “Russian Emotional Expression,” Ethos, 26:4, 456-483. Yalovkina, Anna (2015): “Kyrgyzstan Joins the Customs Union, and Business Finds Itself in Stand-By Mode.” Open Democracy, 23 June 2015: https:// www.opendemocracy.net/anna-yalovkina/as-kyrgyzstan-joins-customsunion-business-finds-itself-in-standby-mode (accessed 22 August 2018). Zuban’, I.S. (2010): Proshloe, nastoiashchee i budushchee chelovechestva. Filosofskii etiud. Novyi vzgliad na protsessy evoliutsii v mire zhivykh system i prezhde vsego—cheloveka, Karakol: Issyk-Kul’skii gos. Universitet.

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War Davor Beganović

For the main objective of this essay I will concentrate on the problematic of space and try to analyze the consequences of its appropriation in literature using three texts as examples: two short stories by Miljenko Jergović (2004) and Aleksandar Hemon (2001) and a few of poems by Semezdin Mehmedinović (1998). But let me firstly give a short historical overview of the city of Sarajevo, its history and geography. In Sarajevo, history and geography are irresistibly intertwined. Even more so if one considers the specific relief that determines the construction of the city’s urban space. Sarajevo is a place surrounded by hills; only to the west does it open into a wide field that ultimately leads to central Bosnia. Urban development started in Ottoman times along the river Miljacka. The narrow valley did not leave enough space for the surface of the city to spread, so the planners were enforced to build diverse settlements on the steep surrounding slopes. So-called mahalas (city quarters), the places where people lived, ran around the city center, which was the focus of commercial, economic, religious, cultural, and political life.1 This urban structure, however, for me is of secondary value. I see as more important how the topography existed as a challenge to further expansion, as well as to the defense of a vulnerable city core against military attacks during unruly times. Only during AustroHungarian occupation, which began in 1878, did Sarajevo have the possibility to stretch westward. Some of the city’s most prominent buildings were constructed between 1878 and 1918. The stagnation of the interwar period was succeeded by the city’s hurried development in socialist Yugoslavia, culminating in the hosting of the Winter Olympics in 1984. The construction activities pursued during the socialist period resulted in some architectural achievements comparable to the most valuable ones from Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian times. Moreover, the communist regime established Sarajevo as the capital of the prospering Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The city originally built in a valley encircled by hills and overlooked by mountains now spread along the plains. The historian Holm Sundhaussen, too, recognizes

1

I am strongly simplifying this division. Dževad Karahasan (1994) uses it to signify the very essence of life in the oriental city.

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these three development periods in Sarajevo’s urbanism, but he notes certain difficulties in their realization connected to the transition from one architectonic and urbanistic paradigm to another: After the Second World War, Sarajevo experienced the third boom phase (after awakening in Austro-Hungarian period and after awakening in the glory days of Ottoman Empire). Whoever moves in Sarajevo from the old town in the east to the west can clearly and unmistakeably recognize the traces of different epochs in the cityscape: The Ottoman part is followed by the Austro-Hungarian, and the Austro-Hungarian by the Yugoslav-socialist one. Three epochs with different construction styles, urban concepts, and political and social visions. The urbanization that everywhere in Yugoslavia until the end of World War II proceeded slowly, here gained a new dynamic. The population and the area of Sarajevo grew increasingly during the course of this third urbanization. (Sundhaussen 2014: 293)2 The new socialist government did not show much respect for the Ottoman heritage. It considered the latter backward and not worthy of preservation. The situation changed only haltingly with Bosnian Muslims’ increasing national awareness, especially in the 1960s. The process of Muslims’ political emancipation culminated in the early 1970s, when they obtained the status of a separate Yugoslav nation. Architectural monuments were now no longer seen as ruins to be demolished but as a part of a valuable past. Accordingly, they were carefully restored and preserved by newly trained specialists. One could argue that the city’s rapid development after the Second World War, culminating in the hosting of the Winter Olympics, helped create for Sarajevo the image of a genuinely metropolitan city. Apparently, for the very first time in its history, it became a multinational and multicultural conglomeration in which each of its parts participated equally in the city’s political, economic, and cultural life. At the same time, this development was marked by the penetration of all these areas into private life. The result was a strong mixture of diverse ethical and national populations mostly underscored by the increasing number of so-called mixed marriages, the trademark of the communist ideology of brotherhood and unity. It is a speculation, but it seems relevant that this mixing greatly annoyed the nationally conscious parts of Bosnian-Herzegovinian society—with their center in Sarajevo as the capital, and therefore a symbol of the republic itself. The extremely harsh polemics concerning mixed marriages during the 1992-1995 war in Sarajevo indicate how irritating this change from a supposedly homogeneous population to a culturally diverse metropolis appeared in the eyes of nationalist apologists, although by then the city was already ethnically divided.3 The war, therefore, op2 3

My translation. For a broader representation of those polemics, see Beganović (2011: 201–224).

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posing groups argued, was something inevitable, something almost fateful, caused and determined by a higher power, impossible to prevent. If we look at it from a radically different perspective, this ethnic division constituted a disturbance in a steady urban development, one caused by those who did not believe in the established multicultural and multinational dimension of the Bosnian socialist state after the Second World War. I am not trying to give a simple explanation for extremely complex events here, but it is a fact that the end of the twentieth century ended Sarajevo’s progressive building strategy and the city’s continuous expansion.4 The reason for this interruption was primarily the war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, but the tendency of division mentioned earlier was also not without import. The war proved extremely violent, especially in Sarajevo. The long siege of the city destroyed much of its core and saw more than ten thousand people killed. The destruction of the cityscape was followed by the destruction of civic life, a process that started during wartime but continued in the postwar years in a long process of national homogenization that took the form of the emigration of “other” ethnic groups and the settlement of one’s own. It is not difficult to imagine that the development of Sarajevo after the fall of the Berlin Wall and of socialism as a system could have proceeded similarly to that in the other post-socialist spaces: without the war the city would have witnessed a growing capitalist economy, along with its architectural excess. The buildings in in the city center would have been considered an obstacle for an advancing capitalist economy and its architectural symbols—shopping malls and banking towers, followed by gentrification connected with a claim for allegedly neglected space in the inner cities.5 But the war as a traumatic event, a wound in the urbanist body, stopped that predictable development with the brutal force of physical destruction. It is not a coincidence that one of the greatest observers of the war in Sarajevo, the photographer Milomir Kovačević Strašni, captured not only images of people afflicted by war but also ones of the destroyed monuments of the Winter Olympics. They stood as the main symbols of a glorious socialist architectural past that came to a violent and tragic end. Destruction and standstill, and their influence on the inhabitants of Sarajevo, will be the main topics of the following pages.

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Again I talk about Sarajevo in the metonymic sense, as part of the greater unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina: the country shared its capital’s destiny. This process could be observed in the lost fight for the city center of Zagreb, or, more precisely, for its second most representative square, Cvjetni trg, which lasted from 2008 until 2011. The devastation of this location culminated in the building of a shopping mall, an underground carpark, and luxury flats that completely changed the nature and urban quality of this prominent venue. We see a similar repetition these days in Belgrade’s mega project called “Belgrade on Water.”

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To return once more to the city’s topography and its importance for the activities of the war: As mentioned, Sarajevo’s topography is determined by its relief, which is dominated by the steep hills surrounding the city in almost all directions. This made it easy for aggressors to close in on the city.6 The encirclement of the city by the Bosnian Serbian forces was initially performed by the Yugoslav People’s Army. Under the cover of military exercises, it surrounded the city with well-hidden and dug-in equipment (tanks, cannon, mortars, rocket launchers) strategically positioned in the hills surrounding Sarajevo. Of course the siege was not meant to last for a long time. The weapons were there to facilitate the definitive attack on the city and its seizure. The aggressors, however, did not immediately succeed because the city’s defenders heroically resisted a first assault. The interference of the international community did the rest and confirmed the status quo. Something designed as a quick action turned into a long torture. The tormentors had a hold on the city for almost four long years, partially because those who could have helped decided not to for various reasons. On the one side, they (especially French president Mitterand) thought that they could stop the war by reducing armament supply for the Bosniaks, which was of course an illusion. On the other there was some sort of unease on the part of Western politicians toward Islam. The Bosnians were for them only exponent of a hostile religion, not sufferers of an aggression war. The siege’s extent, closely connected to the geographical relief, can be witnessed in the following map (Figure 1). Robert Donia states that “those who stayed prized any semblance of normal life. In Sarajevo everyday life itself became a universal form of resistance” (Donia 2006: 18). In this sense, we might regard art as just another form of resistance, something resembling normality brought into a city in a state of exception. Art was thus transported into alternative spaces, often into the basements, where performances took place. At the same time, the location provided some shelter from the incessant shelling.7 It seems impossible to talk about the representation of the Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo in literature, film, and the arts without considering a plethora of concepts that lie at the core of cultural studies. “Trauma,” “memory,” “space”—all these terms could be applied in a cultural approach to the war in Bosnia. In this way the central concepts of cultural studies seem appropriate for the study of concrete artifacts concerning the besieged Sarajevo. The city appears to be an ideal labo-

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It is not a coincidence that one of the first films dealing with siege of Sarajevo, Ademir Kenović’s Savršeni krug (1997), with its title emphasizes this state of affairs. The other art of accommodating everyday horror was that of joking—about beleaguerers, about the besieged, about the newly formed elite. This topic exceeds my present theme, however.

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War

Figure 1. Map of Sarajevo under siege.

Source: https://www.showbe.de/deutsch/around-the-world-2010/die-narben-sarajevos/

ratory for testing the theoretical background of cultural studies and its possible application.8 Karl Schlögel, one of the most important representatives of the “spatial turn” in Germany, indicated the importance of the besieged city of Sarajevo for topographic research at the end of the twentieth century. It therefore seems appropriate to start with his interpretation of space in historical context. Two moments are worth noting here: the intimacy of the besieger with the city and the focus on the besieged in cartography and topography. In Reading Time in Space, Schlögel writes:

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Terri Tomsky refers critically to this state of affairs. “While the (Anglophone) world is preoccupied with a new narrative of trauma and a sense of historical rupture in a post 9/11 world, Bosnia continues to linger in a post-war limbo. Six years have passed since the war ended, but much of Bosnia’s day-to-day economy remains coded by international perceptions of the war. No longer a haven for aspiring journalists, Bosnia is now a thriving economy for international scholars of trauma and political theory, purveyors of thanatotourism, UN peacekeepers and post-conflict nation builders (the ensemble of NGOs, charity and aid workers, entrepreneurs, contractors, development experts, and EU government advisors to the Office of the High Representative, the foreign overseer of the protectorate state that is Bosnia).” (Tomsky 2011: 58)

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The whole space of the city is exposed to the grip of the besieger. The besieger of Sarajevo is the aficionado of the city par excellence. He lived here, went to school here, knows every angle, every lane, every shortcut, every back exit. He knows even the rhythm of the city, the diagrams of movement, the intervals in which the streetcars, trains and the buses are running. The bullets are fired by gunmen who are intimately acquainted with the city. Only they can hit so often and so precisely. The besieged city of Sarajevo has its own topography: the hospitals, churches, the tunnel. They will stay in the heads of inhabitants forever… . The besiegers don’t need maps, because they have a local knowledge of the state of exception and of mined terrain. The maps of Sarajevo are drawn post festum. For the besieged the topographic knowledge was once essential, for life as well as for survival. All city inhabitants became specialists in city topography and in the study of terrain. (Schlögel 2006: 112–113) Schlögel combines two perspectives to determine the new distribution of the cityscape. On the one hand, there are the assailants who are doing their best to make the life of those enclosed in the city as difficult as possible. Therefore, they act as the terrorists. On the other hand, there are the besieged who cannot find a way out of their precarious situation. They are forced to adapt to and accommodate it. Both sides complement each other in a strange way. They are both in possession of local knowledge, but they apply it in completely different ways and for completely different purposes. The besieged fight for survival, the besiegers for destruction. It is obvious that this fight cannot generate any winners; all participants are condemned to lose. This ethical and political fission appears to be an ideal field of action for literature—its authors are at the same time the witnesses and chroniclers of tragic events, ones who can perfectly implement their double war experience in their texts. But these events are inextricably related to the space of the city. We can confront Schlögel’s theory of space with the literary representation of the city’s space (i.e., its topography) and see how deeply space penetrates literature as part of everyday life in the besieged city. In this sense it is crucial to explore how his thesis concerning the entanglement of the besiegers and the besieged operates in literary texts. How do these texts correlate with the actual situation and with the reality of the war? How do they correspond with other, nonartistic, representations of urban structures? These are some of the questions I shall try to answer in my essay.

Miljenko Jergović’s “Gravedigger” and Symbolic Space The story “Gravedigger” by Miljenko Jergović offers an ideal starting point for any representation dwelling on the narrow relation between space and time. It encom-

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War

passes the specific mixture of those two dimensions that proves central for the other texts about besieged Sarajevo too. By using the concrete geographic location of the city, it incorporates the moment of storytelling into the space that is by definition static and free of temporal extension. Narratologically speaking, the story opens with a direct appeal by the narrator to the anonymous community of readers. His words frame the mountainous relief of Sarajevo and connect it with the metaphysical theme of death. The narrator’s central question is: “Do you know why you should never bury people in the valley?” (Jergović 2004: 97) The answer proves less predictable: Because a graveyard needs to be located on a hill somewhere above a town. Just imagine you’re climbing up the slope because you want to rest your eyes perhaps, or walk among the tombs flicking through the album of headstone photographs. Let’s say you meet a stranger idling through the deep grass and he expressed an interest in the life story of person buried up there—well there you have it. At least if you’re on the hillside you don’t have to regurgitate the story. You can actually map up the life story of the deceased as it moved through the downtown area, from shop to bar toward the grave. (Ibid.) We are confronted with a sort of theoretical introduction to the narrative. The two main topics are memories and the construction of story. Memories should be recovered from photographs, and life stories reconstructed from the bird’s eye perspective made possible by an observer’s elevated position. The bird’s eye perspective is essentially panoramic, and in this context, it works metaphorically as a possibility to summarize not a sight but a story. Something basically situated in space—such as the glimpse of the valley from atop the hill—is transformed and expanded into a temporal narrative construction of human life. Having realized this theoretical framework, the narrator can now concentrate on the concrete transformation of space into time. He does this by introducing one concrete dramatis persona. This character, whose name is Rasim, seems to be chosen arbitrarily, but with the ease typical of oral narrative, he is turned from an example into monolithic unit. Again, this transformation at the core of the narrative becomes possible by the cohesiveness of time and space. Time is used to encompass his entire life in concise sentences; space appears in the narrator’s extremely precise descriptions of his itinerary through varied Sarajevo quarters that capture different stages in his life. Rasim was born in Kovači—you point with your index finger so the visitor can see. He went to school over there, by the bridge, you add, gesturing with your hand. When he was seventeen he fell in love with the beautiful Mara who lives in Bjelave—look! You can see Bjelave from Alifakovac—but his father wouldn’t allow him to marry her, so he ran away from home and moved into Mara’s house. They

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hid on Ilidža for three months. Ilidža, by the way, is the mountain you can vaguely see in the fog. Sooner or later his father discovered where Rasim was living and begged him to return to Kovači. (Ibid.)9 As we can see, the story develops its momentum from the storytelling abilities of a narrator whose descent or actual occupation remain unknown at this point.10 He has gained legitimization as someone capable of insights into both the inner and outer workings of the protagonists’ lives. One ability is given to him precisely through his almost perfect mastery of space. The story becomes psychologically motivated when the narrator reveals its tragic background. Soon after the couple’s marriage, Mara dies. Of course, their original elopement and return were caused by the two protagonists’ different religious affiliations: Rasim is Muslim and Mara Catholic. Their connection is almost impossible in the divided world of Bosnia after the First World War. The legitimate question could be: Did they commit the ultimate sin that led to the young woman’s death? Either way, her death causes Rasim to go mad and make the next wrong decision. At the beginning of the Second World War, he joins the ranks of the fascist Ustašas. Nobody knows if he has committed any atrocities, but everybody fears his mad look and red eyes. Immediately after the end of the war, the winning partisans arrest and decide to execute him. Yet the Jew Solomon Finci rescues him, testifying that Rasim saved five Jewish families from the Nazis. His life story finds its end again in the very space where it began. After his release from prison, where he spent three months, he returns to work in his father’s bakery in Vrbanja: One morning he was found dead with his head in the dough mixer. Apparently poor Rasim had been lying there for much of the night, with the result that his face had left a mould in the dough. His friends brought him back to his father’s house in Kovači and buried him just here beneath the patch of grass that you are standing on. In a way you can review his whole life, and pass judgement merely by standing on this spot. Only thieves and children and people with something to hide are buried in the valleys. There’s no trace of life in the valley—you can’t see anything from down there. (Jergović 2004: 100) The narrator’s flow is not stopped here. Following the matrix of oral narrative, he changes the time and theme and leaps to Sarajevo during the siege. In the next

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I conducted an experiment with students a few years ago. During our excursion, we went to Alifakovac, positioned ourselves at the actual graveyard, and reconstructed Rasim’s journey through life following the instructions of the narrator. It was a successful exercise in literary topography. Again the weak translation should be noted. The story’s original title is “Grave,” not “Gravedigger.” Only at its end does it become clear that he is speaking from his personal experience, not as some disinterested observer.

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story, he retells his anonymous interlocutor what he told an American journalist while digging the grave of Salem Bičakćija, a man shot by a Serbian sniper. Only in this moment is his real occupation, gravedigger, revealed to readers. At this moment the story at least temporarily leaves behind its spatial component and proceeds in the direction of the dimension of time—because now the narrator tells his own story. The interlocutor is no longer anonymous either—he now has the identity of an American journalist asking the gravedigger whether he regrets returning to Bosnia after some years of exile, leaving him now to experience the war. The narrator’s answers remain evasive; he tries to involve the journalist in a conversation about the metaphysical questions of life and death, fully aware that he can tell him the truth yet without standing a chance of it being accepted or understood. Therefore, his final evasion leads to the world of the non-living, to the world of things. The journalist can approach Bosnia—that is the tenor of gravedigger’s speech—only if he is able to observe the things. He admits it was the same strategy he himself used at the beginning of his exile in the United States. I understand that he is researching the subject for his article, except that he can’t write a piece because he already knows what it’s going to say. I tell him that he shouldn’t gaze into people’s faces so intently if he doesn’t understand what he sees. Perhaps he should just look at things the way I used to look at neon signs in America in order to get a rough idea of the country. (Jergović 2004: 102) The gravedigger would not be fulfilling his tasks if he remained in this unresolved tension between space and time, between a foreigner who does not understand and a local who is not willing to explain anything to him, because he knows that every explanation would be discarded. At that moment a turn occurs that inverts all ideals the narrator had about himself and his culture. Moreover, that turn shows that the American was right regarding the futility of the Bosnian way of reflecting on the world. The central question is one of rationality, and its obvious lack in the Bosnian “oriental” worldview. Something seen at the beginning as a stereotype appears, at least on the metaphorical level, as a firm fact. The narrator takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, but no label is printed on it. The paper is white. He starts to explain the whiteness as a consequence of the war and destruction of printing plants: I begin to unwrap the packet because I know that something is printed on the inside: it might be the label from a box of soap or a detail from a movie poster or part of an advertisement for shoes. I’m very curious to find out what is inside I make a point of checking—and it’s always surprise. The American is curious too, but he has no idea what I’m doing. At last I undo the cigarette packet to reveal a Marlboro wrapper—the old brand from Sarajevo. The American is nonplussed but I swear under my breath, I don’t know what else to say. Whatever I say he’ll

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just think, “Look at these mad people! They turn cigarette wrappers inside out, then tear them apart to see what cigarettes they’ve bought. If you want my opinion the people here are just like their packs of cigarettes: everything is back to front—what they say and what they think and what they do. (Jergović 2004: 103) The wrapper around a cigarette here becomes a metaphor for the whole country and its absurd habit of turning things inside out. Space has gained central stage again. This time it is not the topographic space of a city, constructing the macrostructure of human life in general; on the contrary, it is a microstructure, compressed into a pack of cigarettes, or precisely a cigarette wrapper absurdly turned inside out to symbolize the distance of rational life. Still, and here comes the solution for the deadlock, there is a moment of war that makes the inhabitants of Sarajevo, locked in their narrow space, the victims who have a right not to be rational. Their alibi is contained exactly in the combination of space and time that is made clear and, at last, plausible or even visible in the state of emergency brought upon them in the severe siege of the city. That is what the foreigners cannot understand. That is the element of an unbridgeable difference: In the United States people use elevators in graveyards. It says a lot about Americans. If the Serbs attacked Pittsburgh or some other city the local people could just go and hide underground using the elevator. They wouldn’t have to worry about the shelling or the fighting in the streets. When you look at the advertising billboards, fifty feet high, you don’t have a clue what Sarajevo Marlboro is or isn’t. Nor do you comprehend the sort of unhappiness that sent Rasim underground, or why he saved those Jews, or why he was in turn saved by Salomon Finci, or what happened to his face in the dough mixer at Edhem’s bakery, Vrbanja Street, which can be seen from every graveyard. (Jergović 2004: 104) Again the narrator plays with the individual and the general. His interlocutor is stigmatized as an American who cannot comprehend Bosnia because Americans put their dead into the ground by elevators. For this very same reason they would be able to escape the Serbian bombardments. But the narrator’s implication is that for exactly that reason they are not capable of telling a plausible story connecting the space in which the persons move during their lives and the time that gives meaning to that space, making it, so to say, vivid. The metaphor of Sarajevo under siege as a grave is visible once more. The story ends by thematizing the impossibility of mutual understanding between the Bosnian people under siege and their Western observers.

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Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin” and Geometrical Space Another story dealing with the siege of Sarajevo is “A Coin,” written by a Sarajevo native in exile in the United States, Aleksandar Hemon. The story was written in English and published in Hemon’s collection The Question of Bruno. It is an extraordinary example of the genre that Riccardo Nicolosi calls “the literature of siege.” According to his definition, various authors “participate in the construction of the siege-text, shape a city space in their texts in which a state of exception that has become everyday life creates its own ‘unreal’ reality. The common borders between life and death, internal and external space, of the own and the foreign are misplaced and recoded here; converted space—for example thresholds and crossovers such as junctions, windows and doors or underground spaces such as basements or tunnels—determines the destiny of people who find themselves permanently on the border between this and the other world” (Nicolosi 2007: 131)11 . This fragmentation of space does not stop at the level of the friend/enemy division. The space of the own is additionally divided by the lines drawn in the interior. “The permanent danger from above divides the city space into a secure and an unsecure zone, that is, into closed, sheltered spaces and open spaces, those that are under enemy fire. Thereby in the closed space the further spaces are opened, for example windowless rooms or basements that don’t open into the outer space because the thresholds, such as windows or doors, are the places of danger” (Nicolosi 2007: 137). In Hemon’s text one can find all these components of siege literature in an almost experimental, distilled form. The text is constructed on two levels; first there are the letters of a girl called Aida from besieged Sarajevo; then there are the comments on these letters by an anonymous narrator who is Aida’s friend living in exile in Chicago. The letters give an authentic, if fragmentary, report from the city under fire. The narrator’s comments gradually move away from his interpretation of the destruction that the present brings to the idyllic past he spent with Aida and focus on his actual situation at the site of his exile. The two positions are marked graphically: Aida’s words are printed in regular letters, the narrator’s in italics. Aida’s text begins with a starkly topographically determined position: Suppose there is a Point A and a Point B and that, if you want to get from point A to point B, you have to pass through an open space clearly visible to a skilful sniper. You have to run from Point A to Point B and the faster you run, the more likely you are to reach Point B alive. The space between Point A and Point B is littered with things that sprinting citizens dropped along the way. (Hemon 2001: 119) The geometrical outline of the city is visible from the beginning, and is mirrored in the language. The space is clearly divided between different points: life in the 11

My translation.

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beleaguered city consists of attempts to move between the points and to cross the in-between-spaces, to move in and through the urban space by finding the shortest cuts. The result is linearity. The space loses its volume and exists only on the surface. Its inhabitants are forced to move only straightforward, without the possibility of exploring its essential but hidden qualities. In this sense it is, because deprived of this dimension, dehumanized, constructed only in the most necessary form. The only remnants of humanity are the scattered things lost by their owners trying to cross geometrically linear passages between two points. In this way Hemon develops a catalogue that testifies to those who probably did not survive the passage, who died in their fruitless attempt to reach Point B.12 The story starts with Aida’s description of this geometrical passage of horror; only then can she start telling her own life story. Told by Aida, the horror of the collective catastrophe is sized down to an individual one. Her description of mutilated human corpses, which she films for professional ends (she works as a film editor), intermingles with the story of her dying Aunt Fatima, the most personal moment in this narrative. The narrator, who can only react to Aida from his Chicago exile, tries to understand her feelings and to translate her report into a general story of Sarajevo under siege. At the same time he is obliged to make a comparison between the world he once knew and the one that escapes his comprehension now. The only possible result is a melancholic voice tending toward nostalgia. Is that voice appropriate to tell his story too? Obviously not. Hemon therefore endows him with an irony that could save the narrator. It is extremely difficult for topographic melancholy, i.e. the melancholy which is generated by topographic quality of the literary text itself, to find its way into the narrator’s prose.13 Lament prevails, which prevents the narrator’s voice from concentrating on the topography of the city. He mourns the loss of well-known vedutas (city-scape paintings) but cannot position them in 12

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It is interesting here to draw a parallel between Jergović’s gravedigger and Hemon’s Aida. The gravedigger is the commentator whose voice comes from an oral culture, a fact that is stressed by his extensive usage of colloquial words or jargon. On the other hand, Aida appears as an urban intellectual. She need not fear communicating with foreigners, as is confirmed by her liaison with an American war reporter. Hemon does not aim to thematize the impossibility of mutual understanding between the West and Bosnia. On the contrary: by writing in English himself, he indicates that this relation is more than just possible—it appears to be necessary. “Reflective and reflecting nostalgics (from former Yugoslavia) reject and abolish the borders of new countries, criticize their autarchy and offer their own picture of the past, recent as well as early in which the present is mirrored too. But this time stripped of its ideological mask and laid bare showing its ugliness. The poetry necessary to represent such a state is poetry of non-acceptance, rejection, loneliness. Its name is melancholy. Yugoslav melancholic nostalgics are in the virile state of unwillingly dwelling in the present, which can only offer them spaces of endless melancholic sorrow, and a past in which lost happiness is situated—critically reflected, often the subject of irony but still cognizable.” (Beganović 2012: 151)

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War

the “real” space.14 The reason for this is that he, unlike Aida, does not live in geometry, in a world of straight lines.15 His picture of Sarajevo is strongly limited by time—because nostalgia, by definition, is bound by time. Only when he translates Aida’s story into his new environment, into Chicago and into his own flat, can he produce a topographical picture. For now, however, let me stick with Aida; I shall return to the narrator later. After Aida starts working for a foreign news agency, she meets the American war photographer Kevin, with whom she has an affair. Following Kevin while he is working, she becomes a witness to the atrocities inflicted mostly on Sarajevo civilians. The relationship between Kevin and Aida is marked by trauma on both sides. Kevin’s constant contact with corpses and mutilated bodies has left traces on his psyche, although he pretends that the horrors have no impact on him. Additionally, the dead body of Aunt Fatima always hovers in the background of the narrative. The constant shelling and sniper fire prevent her from being buried, so that the corpse is temporarily deposited in Aida’s room. This situation creates an obvious problem: the corpse begins to stink. The decay is unbearable. With a private room used to hold a corpse, the concept of space becomes an issue—which space can one use for what purpose? Somewhat paradoxically, the outer space, exposed to strong outside influence of the enemy, still retained some elements of order. The inner space, which by definition, should be under control of the individuals who inhabit it, is left to the powers of chaos. The familiar environment is transformed into a place of horror. Aida’s narrative voice gives the scenery an additional dimension of terror through its almost indifferent tone: Mother and Father wrapped her up in a bed sheet, and then another one, and then another one, their faces distorted by the urge to vomit. I couldn’t watch when they actually pushed her over the windowsill, but I heard the thud. I thought, as if remembering a line from a movie: “Her life ended with a thud.” (Hemon 2001:129) It is not a coincidence that this letter is the last one the narrator receives from Aida. The rest of the story is his reconstruction of possible events, his search for contingent fragments that could help retell the story of Aida’s life after the break in

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This loss is double. On the one side, the narrator suffers psychologically because of the loss of his former life. On the other, he follows the physical destruction of well-known places in his hometown (the National Library, parts of old town, railway station, etc.). Riccardo Nicolosi points out that the “fragmented representation” marks a crucial moment of the composition of a narrative. “It becomes a paradox juxtaposition of places in the text that reveals the non-existent correspondence of fragments and the impossibility of forming a coherent unity. Moreover, it exposes this insufficient precarious situation.” (Nicolosi 2007: 145)

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correspondence.16 The aim is to dispel the fear that she died in the siege, to postpone her death by narrating, which constitutes an almost classical motive of narrative literature. The fact that Aida is most certainly dead cannot be accepted. Therefore the narrator continues to tell her story, hoping that this action can negate her death. His effort mixes information he received earlier from Aida, a reconstruction of the possible course of events in Sarajevo, and his own memories that allegedly help him to overcome the feeling of irretrievable loss. Just one example will show how this difficult narrative strategy works and how it combines the two topographical discourses that I would only provisionally label as Sarajevo and Chicago discourses. The first intervention by the narrator involves Aida’s remark about dogs in Sarajevo. They are the leitmotif of her report; in their decrepitude she reads the decay of the city. Pedigree dogs running wild and mixing with mongrels—this drama of the animal world spills over into the human world. When he continues Aida’s script after she has stopped writing him letters, the narrator insists on this idea but enhances it in a profound way. After the corpse of Aunt Fatima is thrown out of the window, the following scene happens: Then we watched over it, the white pile that used to be my aunt, from the window that was hidden from snipers. We watched the bundle of decomposed flesh, as if were on a wake, but a wake of something other than Aunt Fatima, and transcendentally important nonetheless. We would take turns, we would have shifts. … So I had the morning shift. And right after it dawned, I saw a pack of dogs coming towards us. There was a Rottweiler, a poodle and several mongrels. They tore the sheet and I turned my head away, but I could not leave […] When I looked out again, I couldn’t look at the place where the corpse was. I looked around it, as if making a compromise. I saw the Rottweiler, trotting away, with a hand in its jaw. I wish I had a camera, so I wouldn’t have to remember. (Hemon 2001: 132–33; emphasis in original)17 Aida’s story, which is not hers anymore, reaches its peak here. The urban space is usurped by dogs that eat the human flesh in a state of decay. From this point on, there is no other way forward than to leave Sarajevo. That happens to Aida who, in the narrator’s imagination, goes to London. That happens to the narrator who, under the burden of memories, starts to reimagine and reconstruct the space of his hometown in Chicago. But what is his strategy? Rhetorically it rests on paradoxes. The big American city does not appear at all, but is synthesized in the dilapidated, vermin-riddled room of a Bosnian immigrant. In a strange way there exists a parallel between 16 17

On the further elaboration of the fragmentation of Hemon’s story, see Nicolosi (2007: 147) and the following pages. As mentioned earlier, italics mark the words of the narrator.

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War

the vermin and the dogs from Sarajevo, though at the same time the difference between the two is constructed in the conception of space. As I have already said, the dogs bring chaos to the geometrical topography of Sarajevo. On the other hand, the people move geometrically, led by the principle of rationality based on fear for their lives. The cockroaches in the narrator’s flat follow the same logic as the inhabitants of the besieged city. They run for their lives and try to find to shortest way to safety: While my head was still on the pillow, my nightmare not completely erased by sudden awakening, I opened my eyes and saw a cockroach running from the stove, over the grey kitchen-floor tiles, getting on the carpet, running a bit slower, as if on sand, going beneath a chair, coming diagonally across, going around my slippers, trying to reach the safe space underneath my futon. I watched it, it was running fast, never stopping, going straight without hesitation. What was it running from? What was running that little engine? Desire to live? Fear of death? The instinctual—perhaps, even, molecular—awareness of the gaze of the supreme sharpshooter? What a horrible world, I thought, when every living creature lives and dies in fear. I reached for my left slipper, but the cockroach was already underneath the futon. (Hemon 2001: 131–132; emphasis in original) The parallels between the two discourses are obvious. The narrator assumes the role of the pursuer here; he is the one who tries to conquer the space of his room, to gain complete control over it, while the cockroaches are the living beings pushed by an adrenaline rush in their fight for survival. In an act of terminal violence, the narrator ends up killing a cockroach with a knife. He divides it in two, only to become the unprecedented ruler of his own space, thereby repeating the act of the Serbian sniper who wants to conquer the foreign space and therefore to make it his own. Aida’s (or pseudo-Aida’s) text is given the chance to close the story. Again it turns to the geometrical space, to the short movements between Point A and Point B. When you get to Point B, the adrenaline rush is so strong that you feel too alive. You see everything clearly, but you can’t comprehend anything. Your senses are so overloaded that you forget everything before you even register it. I’ve run from Point A to Point B hundreds of times and the feeling is always the same but I’ve never had it before… . But once you get to Point B everything is quickly gone, as if it never happened. You pick yourself up and walk back into your besieged life, happy to be. You move a wet curl from your forehead, inhale deeply, and put your hand in the pocket, where you may or may not find a worthless coin; a coin. (Hemon 2001: 134) This time physiology complements psychology. Running for one’s life becomes an adrenaline-driven chase at the end of which the person finds redemption (if he

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or she manages the way from A to B). The coin, as Riccardo Nicolosi (2007: 148) notices, serves as a payment for the passage into the beyond. But this is only one side of the possible allegorical interpretation of Aida’s last words. The enhanced possibility is to observe it as a lucky penny, as a deposit for the better future that will be fulfilled in some new topography.

Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues and Fragmented Space Sarajevo as a city was forced to change its topography during the war. The poet Semezdin Mehmedinović is a writer who noted these changes in his poems and short prose pieces collected in Sarajevo Blues. The central concept of these texts is discontent. This holds particularly true for the case in relation to space. Its distortion is a sign of the city’s new face. Topography once familiar now becomes strange. Discontent in this context takes on Freudian connotations. It reinscribes his famous essay from 1930, giving it new dimension.18 The central question posed here is: In which way is the lyrical I of the fragments discontented with civilization? Of course, this turn from satisfaction with one’s position in the life to absolute dissatisfaction happens because of the war. Sarajevo was once an open city. Now it becomes the epitome of a closed one. Its encasement is the consequence of siege. What interests Mehmedinović are the consequences of that state for inhabitants’ psyches. How does the psyche change? How does it react to the new situation that is inflicted from outside and has nothing to do with former emotions? Mehmedinović finds answers to those questions by constructing something we might call “topographic discontent.” In Sarajevo Blues, time ceases to play an active role. Diachrony, which is connected with continuity, must yield to a synchronicity that accentuates the simultaneity and parallel existence of different layers of time. An indicative sign of Mehmedinović’s discontent with history is to be found in the prose piece “Surplus History” (“Višak historije”). Two moments in it seem to carry the meaning that determines that of the whole collection. The first one: “The city has flattened itself out, like a military map” (Mehmedinović 1998: 88). The city has lost its form, its three dimensions. It has become a two-dimensional military map. Yet its plainness also made it readable in the topographic way too. For the inhabitants it is essential to know how to read the newly constructed map, because only it can show the shortest way that divides life from death. Of course, Aida’s elaborated experiences are comprised in this short sentence.

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Freud’s essay “Civilization and its Discontent” anticipates the Nazi takeover in Germany and is therefore in an elaborate and entangled, almost allegoric, way rather untypical for its author. Although hidden, its main theme threatens political developments in interwar Europe.

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War

The second moment plays with the time dimension. The very title of the piece—“Surplus History”—indicates the well-known and now almost stereotypical obsession of people from the former Yugoslavia with history. I’ve long ago lost the sense that words like history and progress have meanings that might ever coincide. Progress definitely doesn’t exist in that sense, and we live in a space infected by a surplus of history. And when that’s how it is, it’s only natural for history to serve someone’s interests. Down the very last puff. (Mehmedinović 1998: 89) Mehmedinović uses two clusters of associations here. On the one hand, there is richness of memories sedimented in the changing names of Sarajevo streets that appear as a palimpsest in the time of violent political changes. On another level, an invisible but reflexive one, the idea of history as progress is abolished. The author does not take the final step to equate history with barbarism. But the idea is palpable. The battles had turned the city into its opposite. The physical as well as the spiritual history became the reverse of themselves. History has become so useless that it can serve trivial purposes—such as last cigarettes, for example. Trivial? If I made a connection between Hemon’s story and Mehmedinović’s note concerning the geometrical substance of both, it is time now to connect Mehmedinović’s poem with Jergović’s “Gravedigger.” Here the cigarettes were obviously not trivial objects. Quite to the contrary: they symbolized an essential lack in the everyday life of citizens. Moreover, through a fine web of associations, the cigarettes could be connected with the Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, which itself symbolized the beginnings of the city’s industrialization. The ruin of the factory that Jergović indicates by the use of any kind of paper for the cigarettes instead of an original one reflects the eradication of history by Mehmedinović: The wrapping on the carton from which I’ve just taken a cigarette is actually documentary material. Because of the paper shortage, the tobacco factory uses any leftover material they can find; the wrapping might be toilet paper or even pages from a book, so that in the leisure time tobacco affords, you can read fragments of a poem or the ingredients of a bar of soap. Foreigners buy cigarettes here as souvenirs, to bring home as living proof of this new tobacco art. (Ibid.) Two notions are essential here: the document and fragment of the book. Both of them are the central topoi of postmodern literature, used only to be ironically distorted in the final sentence of the paragraph. The foreigners are actually tourists who came to see a Bosnian war from a safe distance, and to bring some souvenir back home. The misunderstanding visible in the dialogue between the gravedigger and the foreign journalist is now exposed in all its ugliness, without the indulgence of the intermediary narrator. Foreigners do not understand Bosnia, but they use it for their purposes—the consumption of exotic art.

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But let me turn again to space. There is a component of fatalism that cannot be overlooked in Mehmedinović’s description of the lives of people in the besieged city. It is underlined by two factors that we should observe more closely now. If we assume that there are at least two kinds of space, open and closed,19 and that they symbolize the state of freedom and non-freedom, respectively, we can see how the situation changes in the besieged city. Open space becomes dangerous; being closed brings security, at least from snipers. The essay “Traffic” is the most important one in reconfiguring this role of space. The time dimension is suspended for two elemental movements: a before and a during. Before is captured in the melancholic moment of recollections. During is contained in the permanent condition of the eternal now that cannot pass away. The substantial changes in the conception of space are caused by this never-ending now. Now I remember the paths beaten across yards that everyone uses instead of pavement. One Sarajevo war-path leads through the ruins of a movie theatre. Here, the ways part by themselves—not through urban planning or oblivious residents falling into line. Don’t put yourself on display, that’s the long and the short of pedestrian law, precisely the opposite of peace decrees: that is, stay on the main drag and be seen. But the new paths don’t have the finality of asphalt; they go through a metamorphosis to the same extent that shells alter the shape of the city. Constant unpredictability (maybe you’ll be, maybe you won’t), the constant pressure of the new impressions makes them (these paths) continually new. (Mehmedinović 1998: 56) The condition before is normality: the wish to see and be seen that is congruent with the longing of the flâneur. This attitude is abolished now. The sense of walking corresponds to the will to survive. The final result of this precarious situation is that the whole city is transformed into an enormous ghetto. All inhabitants think about new ways that can bring them from Point A to Point B. These ways emerge in a space that has nothing to do with the urbanism of previous times. The space is non-urban, as it denies the older urban layers of its history. Urbanism in the new condition connotes the construction of necessity. It does not have anything in common with the mixture of art, architecture, and history that gave Sarajevo its flavor of a city between the Orient and the Occident. All that is left are fragmented and scattered parts of days gone by—and the melancholic gaze of a narrator who can still remember how it once was.

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Open space is the one which excels with its character of giving freedom of movement to all its users, while the closed one tends to convey the idea of claustrophobia, gloomy and depressed existence in an unfriendly environment.

Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War

Conclusion I have tried to show, using the example of three paradigmatic authors of beleaguered Sarajevo, how space here becomes constructed in ways that contradict previous models. I have named these three modes of changing the notion and conception of space symbolic, geometric, and fragmentary. At the same time, it seems to me that they do not appear in a clearly demarcated state. They mix and interfere, making up new constellations that are dominated by a profound sense of nostalgia and melancholy.

References Beganović, Davor (2012): “Reflective and Restorative Nostalgia. Two Types of Approaching Catastrophe in Contemporary Yugoslav Literature,” Balkan Memories. Media Construction of National and Transnational history. Ed. Tanja Zimmermann. Bielefeld: transcript. Beganović, Davor (2011): “Postapokalypse im Land der ‘guten Bosnier’. Kulturkritik als Quelle des kulturellen Rassismus, ” in: Sabina Ferhadbegović/Brigitte Weiffen (eds.): Bürgerkriege erzählen. Zum Verlauf unziviler Konflikte, Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 201-224. Donia, Robert (2006): Sarajevo: A Biography, London: Hurst & Company. Freud, Sigmund (1930): Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Wien: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Hemon, Aleksandar (2001): The Question of Bruno, New York: Vintage. Jergović, Miljenko (2004): Sarajevo Marlboro, trans. Stela Tomašević, New York: Archipelago. [Sarajevski Marlboro; Karivani; Druge priče 1992-1996,. Zagreb: Durieux.] Karahasan, Dževad (1994): Sarajevo, Exodus of a City. Translated by Slobodan Drakulić, New York: Kodansha Inter. Mehmedinović, Semezdin (1998): Sarajevo Blues. Translated by Ammiel Alcalay, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Nicolosi, Riccardo (2007): „Fragmente des Krieges. Die Belagerung Sarajevos in der neueren bosnischen Literatur,” in: Davor Beganović/Peter Braun (eds.): Krieg sichten. Zur medialen Darstellung der Kriege in Jugoslawien, München: Wilhelm Fink. Schlögel, Karl (2006): Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Sundhaussen, Holm (2014): Sarajevo. Die Geschichte einer Stadt, Wien/ Köln/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag.

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Tomsky, Terri (2011): “From Sarajevo to 9/11. Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy,” Parallax 17:4.

Film Savršeni krug (Dir. Ademir Kenović, 1997). (110 min)

Part 3: “Minus Stalin”

The Limits of Central Planning: Rudimentary Town Centers in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros Mark László-Herbert

In his seminal work on The Production of Space, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argues that the shift from one mode of production to another must entail the production of a new space (see Lefebvre 2008: 46). A higher mode of production reorganizes social relations, which in turn produce new “representations of space” and new “representational spaces” (ibid.: 36-46). In a discussion of the social spaces created by the modes of production that humanity has known, Lefebvre devotes ample attention to socialism “as it really existed” in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. Lefebvre answers the question whether socialism has produced a space of its own with a categorical no; he calls state socialism a “failed transition” and points out that the spatial construction of socialism never really took place because socialism has not produced any considerable architectural innovation (ibid.: 53-59). The means of construction of a socialist space did not differ from those of capitalism; moreover, socialism was in permanent competition with capitalism and therefore permanently tied to, and legitimized by, capitalism. Yet two and a half decades after the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe, one cannot but admit that there must have existed a distinct space of socialism. As space becomes, according to Lefebvre, increasingly uniform and modeled after capitalism’s spaces, there remains something distinct about the spatial setup of the postsocialist societies of Eastern Europe.1 The distinction is best comprehensible today through absences. Most prominent among them is the absence of a certain measure of normalcy: postsocialist space, both real and conceptual, is shaped by processes for the most part unknown in the West.2 To use a spatial term, postsocialist space is difficult to read. In the two so1 2

Throughout this essay, I use the geographic term “Eastern Europe” to denote the political—socialist, communist, etc.—Eastern European region of the Cold War era. I am thinking here, among others, of the economic and social effects of postsocialist privatization, broadly understood; varying levels of corruption causing the growth of oligarchies; seemingly ad hoc social mobility; the coexistence of hi-tech and illiteracy; the ever-growing

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cialist towns that are the subject of this essay—the East German Stalinstadt and the Hungarian Sztálinváros—one absence causing such reading difficulty is the lack of a proper town center: planned to the minutest detail, the successor towns of Eisenhüttenstadt and Dunaújváros remain to this day towns with unfinished, rudimentary civic centers.3 No festive town hall, no church, no majestic national monument, memorial, or statue planted into the town center connects the population to a wider imagined community or space;4 no important pedestrian pathways cross these town centers, prompting the population to avoid the central squares in their daily lives. I argue that apart from their geographic setting in “real” space, apart from the bad economic infrastructure that shaped these two towns for several decades, it is the absence of a functional town center that causes them to remain to this day relatively closed, introverted communities found at the periphery of their respective national societies. In the Hungarian town of Dunaújváros efforts are today underway to change this; different kinds of attempts made in Eisenhüttenstadt seem to perpetuate the closedness and the peripheral position of the town in postsocialist, reunited German space. When the East German Ministry of Heavy Industry set out to build a barracks settlement (Siedlung) around the emerging Eisenhüttenkombinat-Ost (EKO) about one hundred kilometres east of Berlin and just a stone’s throw from the Polish border, few planners thought of the new colony as a socialist town. But Kurt W. Leucht, an ambitious architect who rose to become the leadership’s favorite reconstruction specialist, was to change this: seeing the potential for a new beginning in his profession—Leucht worked as an architect of the Luftwaffe before and during the war—he proposed to General Secretary Walter Ulbricht to stop the development of the colony and instead have an entirely new town built for the future steel combine.Ulbricht agreed, and architects were promptly commissioned to submit

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gap between the richest and poorest decile of the population; unequal access to education, welfare, justice, and so forth. The absence of a finished center is in no way unique to these two socialist cities; other central squares designed in the 1950s also remained incomplete. The central square of the Polish town of Nowa Huta, the first and probably best-known socialist city of Eastern Europe, offers a good case in point, although local specificities should always be considered: two years into its existence, in 1951, Nowa Huta was incorporated into Cracow, which explains why the grandiose plans for the center were abandoned. The monumental theatre planned for the south side of the square, the Town Hall designed for Rose Avenue, or the many ornaments in and around the buildings of the square (including a giant spire to be planted into the heart of Central Square) were never built. This may be less true for Dunaújváros today, where the recent refurbishment of the center caused the absorption of October 23rd Square—along with its monument honouring the 1956 revolution—into Town Hall Square. Even so, the monument is situated within a spatially detached, peripheral appendix to the main square, not in the main square.

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plans for the new Wohnstadt.5 Since neither of the submissions adhered to the principles of socialist town planning—they were, allegedly, too modernist—Leucht was asked to present a plan of his own. His plan found approval, and as a result, Leucht was charged with overseeing the construction of the EKO’s residential town. In his work, Leucht was guided by the sixteen Principles of Urban Planning adopted in September 1950 by the East German government as a guideline for the reconstruction of the country’s towns and the construction of new settlements.6 The first Grundsatz (principle) proclaimed: “In view of the community life [Gemeinschaftsleben] of people, the town is the most economic and most culturally rich form of settlement… . In its structure and architecture, the town is an expression of the political life and of the national consciousness of the people” (Leucht 1957: 84). Principle 6 postulated the role of the center in the new towns of East Germany: “The center constitutes the defining core of the town. The center of town is the political center of the lives of its inhabitants. In the center of town are found the main political, administrative and cultural institutions. The squares of the town center host the political demonstrations, parades and popular celebrations [Volksfeiern] held on holidays. The center of town is built with the most important and monumental buildings, [as] it dominates the architectural composition of the cityscape and determines the architectural silhouette of the town.” Leucht planned his Wohnstadt accordingly. On the drawing board, the civic center appeared in the geographic center of the new town. Following the Principles, the center was to contain all the important political, social, and cultural institutions of the Wohnstadt. If the first versions of the general plan proved rather sketchy in their depiction of individual buildings, in 1952, Leucht published a “Perspektive” that would reveal details on the shape and location of the buildings of the center. The square was dominated by a majestic, tower building. Elsewhere in Germany this would have been a church tower; in the first socialist town of the GDR, it was the tower of Town Hall, the local representation of state power. A few steps from here, diagonally across the central square, a large, domed Palace of Culture (Kulturpalast) was shown. Through its size and temple-like design, the Kulturpalast resembled a Sakralbau (sacred building), making up for the missing temples built

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The architects first entrusted with the drafting of plans for a residential town, or a Wohnstadt, included Franz Ehrlich, Kurt Junghanns, Otto Geiler, and Richard Paulick (see Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung 2000). The “Grundsätze des Städtebaus” resulted from a study trip made by a delegation of architects and planners—including Kurt Leucht—to Moscow in the spring of 1950. When the East German Reconstruction Law (Aufbaugesetz) was adopted in September 1950, the “Principles” were made mandatory for any (re)construction work done in the GDR. There is agreement among scholars that the East German “Principles” were derived from the 1935 general plan for Moscow (see Flierl 2015).

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for the gods of yesteryear.7 Church towers were not needed in Stalinstadt, Ulbricht famously declared in 1953; socialist culture was the new religion.8

Figure 1. The center of Stalinstadt in Leucht’s “Perspektive” (1952)

“Zentraler Platz 1952,” Ehstiques, https:// www.flickr.com/photos/70637853@N00/ 364577458 (accessed on July 28, 2015)

From the town center, a wide boulevard, the so-called Magistrale, led to the majestic entrance of the Eisenhüttenkombinat. The gate was to be one of the largest structures of the town. Designed in a U-shape with its two ends pointing back toward the town, the gate essentially closed off or contained the Wohnstadt; on the other side of the gate, in an open, seemingly endless space, the ironworks were imagined behind a green belt. The long central section of the U-shaped building, of 7 8

The term Sakralbau is used by Ruth May in her book on Eisenhüttenstadt (see May 1999: 190). On May 7, 1953, on the day the Wohnstadt was officially named Stalinstadt, Walter Ulbricht was asked “whether the new town would have some towers as well.” Ulbricht allegedly replied that the new Town Hall will, of course, have a tower, and so will the planned House of Culture, but “other towers were not needed” in the first socialist town of the GDR, at least “no towers of bourgeois-capitalist institutions that addle the brain of people” (in the original “bürgerlichkapitalistische Verdummungseinrichtungen”). Meant were, according to several accounts, churches (see Bräuer 2000: 53; Berg 1999: 104). In 1957, Kurt W. Leucht wrote: “Church facilities were not planned initially, as according to the wishes of the population there was enough church space available in neighbouring Fürstenberg” (see Leucht 1957: 2–3). By this time, following the pressure of the population and the Lutheran and Catholic Churches, two church barracks (Kirchenbaracken) functioned in Stalinstadt.

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which the core resembled the Brandenburg Gate with a small tower on its top, was designed, just like the Palace of Culture, as a sacred monument; walking through it was to feel like a religious act or ritual (see May 1999: 189-190).

Figure 2. Leucht’s “Perspektive” (1952)

Karl Mueller (2010): “Vor 60 Jahren wurde ”Stalinstadt” gegründet. Eine kleine Materialsammlung,” Trend Online Zeitung, 09/2010, http:// www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0910/ t350910.html (accessed on July 28, 2015)

The Magistrale was thus to form the town’s main axis, which at once ended in two centers or main squares: the official town center and the square at the entrance to the Kombinat. The Magistrale symbolized the unity of the people and their work. To paraphrase Fritz Lang, the Magistrale served as the mediator between the head and the hands; it was the heart of the town; see Fritz Lang’s epic Metropolis (1927). If the Magistrale was accorded such prominence, however, it contradicted the principle according to which the center, and, one central square alone, was to constitute the “defining core of the town.” Leucht’s sketch presented yet another problem: the central square did not form part of the main axis of the town. It was not central enough; it merely bordered the Magistrale on its eastern edge, thus causing an imbalance of the center. Although facing the Magistrale and thus the gate of the EKO, the Town Hall was squeezed into a corner of the central square, while the temple of culture was entirely off the town’s main axis. Other institutions like the party and police headquarters would not get a prominent enough location either, while the entire layout discouraged the holding of mass demonstrations. The square was not a continuation of the Magistrale; it was around the corner from it. The central square was soon remodeled. In Leucht’s revised 1953 plan, which was also marked by the peak of so-called Stalinism and socialist realism in East German architecture and urban design, the Magistrale no longer ended in a façade (that of Town Hall), but in a square at the opposite end of which stood a large,

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towered House of Culture. On the eastern side of the square stood the House of the Parties and Mass Organizations, while on the western side a number of other important institutions were to have their headquarters: Town Hall, and in its immediate vicinity, along the east-west axis of the town, the County Council, the National Bank, and the Post Office. Across the street from these stood the House of Crafts. At the northern end of the central square was—separated by the eastwest axis—a hotel, and across the street from it, the local department store. All the important institutions were thus brought into the core of the town, with one notable exception: the movie theatre. As a home to entertainment, it was planted into the middle section of the Magistrale, which, with its numerous shops, became the shopping and entertainment street of Stalinstadt. Somewhat surprisingly, Leucht’s revised 1953 plan provided for the construction of a church as well; it was, however, well hidden on the western outskirts of town.

Figure 3. Leucht’s 1953 plan with the Magistrale ending in a “centered” central square. Postcard, undated.

Postcard. Stadtarchiv Eisenhüttenstadt.

Within months of Ulbricht’s visit to Stalinstadt in May 1953, the church vanished from the drawing board. By 1955, as a concession made to the inhabitants of the town, a peasant market with a market hall was added to the plan, right behind the cinema, close to the Magistrale and yet invisible from it. A monument earlier intended for the square at the entrance of the Kombinat was removed from the plan, while a Stalinmonument, of which it was never revealed whether it was to be a statue or a monument of another sort, was planted squarely into the heart of Zentraler Platz, the central square. Along with the seventy-meter-high Town Hall tower, the

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Stalinmonument was to “further the artistic ‘Gestaltung’ of the town centre” (Neuer Tag 1955). Nowhere in the region were Stalin monuments erected as late as 1955. Decision makers must have been aware of this, as the plan to build one in Stalinstadt was soon scrapped. In fact, except for the House of Parties and Mass Organizations, the hotel, and the department store, none of the grandiose buildings of the city center were ever built. The central square was left empty and nameless as a gaping hole in the texture of an otherwise complete town—perhaps as a memento of the ever-changing politics of space under state socialism. Sometime in the second half of the 1950s authorities decided that the House of Parties and Mass Organizations (completed in 1955) was large enough to house both the parties and the town administration. The marriage of party and state under state socialism could not have been more practical. The shift of emphasis from a center with monumental, representative buildings to the Magistrale, a shopping and entertainment street complete with a movie theatre and market hall, was hardly coincidental. By the middle of the 1950s, the grandiose center with a domed Palace of Culture and a Town Hall tower twice as high as the blast furnaces of the Kombinat could no longer be justified in the face of an ever-more dissatisfied population. Following the June 1953 uprising, it became clear that the national economy had to be oriented toward the production of consumer goods, rather than toward heavy industrial production. The Magistrale, with its many shops (and a cinema turned into a House of Culture), was the response; the abandonment of the town center (and its Palace of Culture) was the outcome.

Figure 4. Sketch of the Magistrale linking the central square to the Kombinat (1955).

“Stalinstadt—ein Bauplatz unserer Republik. So wird unsere Magistrale einmal aussehen,” Neuer Tag, February 5, 1955.

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During the next decades, the center was left to its own devices. As the plans for the Palace of Culture and the Town Hall were abandoned, finishing the square was put off indefinitely. For many years, the barracks built in the center, and later, the fancy Hotel Lunik (1963) and its bars and restaurant, generated some traffic in and around the central square; but once the Lunik was shut down in the year 2000, the square became a no-man’s-land. Today, the central square is central in name only: while it is still called Zentraler Platz, and while it houses most institutions of local government in the former House of Parties and Mass Organizations, it is certainly not the Hauptplatz (main square) of Eisenhüttenstadt. Transformed into a park and a parking lot, it has definitively and irrevocably lost its significance to the Magistrale and to the shopping mall ingeniously named City Center, built at the Magistrale’s opposite end, in the vicinity of what used to be the old Kombinat gate. Today, Zentraler Platz is used mainly by citizens attending to some business at Town Hall; the social center of Eisenhüttenstadt, if there is any at all, is found elsewhere.

Figure 5. Zentraler Platz in 2012.

“Die Kunst der DDR, wie man sie sehen kann und wohin sie gehören könnte,” April 15, 2012. Internet: http://eisen.huettenstadt.de/archives/1371Die-Kunst-der-DDR,-wie-man-sie-sehen-kann-und-wohin-sie-gehoerenkoennte..html (accessed on July 28, 2015)

Eisenhüttenstadt was born in 1961 through the merging of Stalinstadt and the nearby town of Fürstenberg an der Oder. If, in 1961, Fürstenberg was to be absorbed by the new socialist town, the regime change of 1989 reversed the trend and brought Fürstenberg back onto the map of Eisenhüttenstadt. The massive decline of the population in the new town led to the demolition of entire neighborhood units (Wohn-

The Limits of Central Planning

komplexe) in the new parts of town, leading to a relative loss of the weight of former Stalinstadt within Eisenhüttenstadt. The completion of the postwar restoration of Fürstenberg’s six hundred-year-old Nikolaikirche in the early 1990s and the concomitant restoration of Fürstenberg’s own town center have caused a further loss of the new town’s status within Eisenhüttenstadt. As a result, Eisenhüttenstadt has (at least) two town centers today: the central square of the former Stalinstadt (Zentraler Platz) and the area around the market square (Marktplatz) in old Fürstenberg. While the former is disproportionately large and visibly deserted, the latter is much smaller and visibly inhabited, besides also being surrounded by a number of small shops. While much of Marktplatz is also used as a parking lot during the better part of the year, it houses regular events including a peasant market and a wellattended Christmas fair. A Christmas fair is held in the former Stalinstadt, too; but due to its setting in the immediate vicinity of the shopping mall, it is by far less popular among those looking for a traditional Christmas market; the mall named City Center has, naturally, failed to produce a city center. Much of the history of Dunaújváros and its own town center resembles that of Eisenhüttenstadt and its central square. The settlement next to the Danubian Ironworks (Dunai Vasmű) was to be built following the same Soviet-inspired principles: its central square was to be lined with the most imposing, monumental, representative buildings of the town. But the political turns of 1953 and 1956, and the subsequent chronic shortage of funds, caused the plans to be abandoned; as the ironworks, and not the town, constituted the main purpose of the undertaking, the plan to build a (social) center for the new town was shelved for many years, and indeed, for decades. The onsite development of the town was entrusted to a chief architect familiar with the Soviet socialist town concept: Tibor Weiner, then a professor of architecture in Santiago de Chile (and, after 1952, at Budapest Technical University), had worked with the Moscow Institute of Urban Planning (GORSTROIPROIEKT) from 1931 to 1936. But Weiner learned his trade elsewhere: after earning his degree in Budapest in 1929, he attended the Dessau Bauhaus school of architecture, where his diploma was signed by none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.9 Weiner was commissioned to oversee the construction of the town in January 1950.10 The method he applied was Soviet. As Weiner himself recalled in 1952, From the outset, we applied the main characteristics of Soviet socialist town planning… . Following the model of Soviet towns, we linked the center of town to the entrance of the factory by a wide avenue… . We planned the center of the town 9 10

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), German-American architect, last director (1930–1933) of the German Bauhaus school of architecture. It was recently revealed that Weiner was on a visit to Hungary when he was practically taken prisoner and forced to work on the Sztálinváros project (see Végh 2015).

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following Soviet examples by concentrating in it the buildings serving the new socialist needs [of the population], cultural parks, and rally grounds. This is where, in the vicinity of the already standing Party House, [we will erect] the large Palace of Culture, the headquarters of the social organizations, the middle schools and the stadium holding many thousands of people. Thanks to the teachings of the Soviet Union there is thus no insecurity or hesitation in the [planning] of the town, which corresponds to the structures used in the socialist towns of the Soviet Union. (Sztálin Vasmű Építője: 1952) Weiner had good reason to be defensive; by 1952, many shortcomings of the initial planning had caused intense criticism. The first housing blocks built in the new town were, allegedly, too modernist (rather than socialist-realist) in style; a debate over the axis linking the factory to the center caused delays. What should the eighty-five-to-one-hundred-meter-wide avenue look like? How tall should the buildings lining it be? What function should the street level of these buildings have? The plans for the center were also much debated and constantly modified, as the construction of large, monumental buildings in the immediate vicinity of the already standing three-story party headquarters (1951) was regarded with suspicion by the party.

Figure 6. The back of the Pártház (Party House) in the mid-1950s.

Intercisa Múzeum, Dunaújváros.

Weiner’s ambition to follow those Soviet characteristics in the construction of the town center also raised an insurmountable problem: there was not enough room for all those buildings, let alone a stadium, in the center. The planned center was located in the northeastern corner (of what was built in the 1950s) of the new

The Limits of Central Planning

town; the eastern edge of the planned square was at only a couple of hundred meters distance from the Danube escarpment, which was very unstable and subject to erosion, and which thus hindered the further eastward expansion of the square and the town. Between 1951 and 1954, about twenty plans were drafted for the town center (see Matussné Lendvai 2003: 33). The most ambitious of these was Weiner’s proposal of May 1953, which, just like in Stalinstadt, marked the high point of socialist realism in Hungarian architecture and planning. The plan envisioned the construction of buildings of mostly exaggerated proportions for a local council, a district council, a local party headquarters, a district party headquarters, a seat of the social organizations, a library, a museum, a Palace of Culture, and a House of Crafts. To mark it as such for those who approached the town by boat, the intended center was also to receive a signpost well visible from the Danube: three alternative plans for a majestic Stalin statue were drafted, the first statue measuring eighteen meters, the second fifteen, and the third nine meters (none of them was ever built). Additionally, along one of its sides, the central square was to be lined by white marble statues of workers, each with the tools of their trade in their hands (Matussné Lendvai 2003: 33-34).

Figure 7. One of the numerous models made of the central square of Sztálinváros (probably 1953 ), with a towered Town Hall and a Palace of Culture. The party headquarters appear now encircled by larger buildings.

Intercisa Múzeum, Dunaújváros.

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Figure 8. Model of the main square extended towards the Danube with a Stalin statue close to the escarpment and a party headquarters integrated into a larger building complex (1953).

Intercisa Múzeum, Dunaújváros.

The politics of the time dealt a final blow to the center, however: Stalin had died in March 1953, and the new Hungarian leadership turned away from the plans for the monumental buildings of the town center.11 In fact, the entire Sztálinváros project was abandoned: the development of the ironworks was halted, and so was the further growth of the town as the arrival of new settlers was prohibited. Instead, funds were directed to the completion of unfinished construction business, and especially, to making the first socialist town of Hungary a liveable place. To the two already existing public buildings lining the main avenue—the movie theatre (1951) and the walk-in clinic (1952)—only one further building, the Golden Star Hotel (1954), was added.12 Construction of the Béla Bartók House of Culture (1953) in the geographic center (not in the intended civic center) also saw completion. It is indicative of the mental map emerging of Sztálinváros among its population that in October 1956 it was here, in front of the House of Culture and in the immediate vicinity of the department store (1952) and the temporary Town Council headquarters (turned later into an apartment building), and not in the planned center in

11 12

Imre Nagy had become prime minister in July 1953 after Mátyás Rákosi was summoned to Moscow and, eventually, forced to resign. This was the first hotel built in Hungary since the Second World War (see Végh 2015).

The Limits of Central Planning

the northeast where the Pártház (Party House) was built in 1951, that spontaneous worker protests broke out.13 In September 1958, following a “visit of support” by party leader János Kádár and Soviet Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev, Weiner presented to the Town Council his latest and “final” plans for the center. To underscore the significance of the event, the construction minister Rezső Trautmann and the deputy minister László Lux attended the meeting. Earlier sketches envisaging one large square that concentrated all the major buildings in one place were now dismissed as having shortcomings and as reflecting the “gigantomania” of the era in which they were drawn. Such plans, Weiner argued, “did not correspond to the needs dictated by life”; rather than building a “gigantic void” (gigantikus űr) in the town center, Weiner proposed the construction of a “contiguous system of smaller spaces,” that is, three squares lined along Dózsa György Street, the east-west avenue perpendicular to the thus far main north-south axis. The center situated at the meeting point of these two axes was thus to be but one of three; this is where the Town Hall and the Party House would symbolize the political center of the town. About three hundred meters further west, facing Gorky Square, a new Palace of Culture would mark the cultural center of Sztálinváros. Finally, about half a kilometer west of Town Hall, a third square would constitute a further unspecified county center (járási központ), whose existence and setting were justified by the easy access from the neighboring villages and by the link it would provide between the emerging Technikum neighborhood and the already existing downtown area (Sztálinvárosi Hírlap 1958). The north-south axis of older plans linking the ironworks to the center (Stalin Road) was thus stripped of its earlier role of a main street. At the same time, the less imposing east-west axis ending in the planned central square (rather than running past it), with the railway station at its other end, acquired a new symbolic meaning: it became the gateway to the city. The development of an east-west axis was also justified in view of the steady northward growth of the town; with new districts (városrészek) emerging in the north (in addition to the incorporated village of Dunapentele, which was also situated north of the new town), the east-west axis was clearly more central, in geographic terms, than the original north-south avenue running parallel to the Danube at only a couple of hundred metres distance from the fifty-meter-high escarpment. The Palace of Culture on the new, east-west axis was never built; nor was the county center of Weiner’s final plan of 1958. Planners continued to focus on the single central square, thenceforth named Lenin Square, found at the intersection of the two main axes. By the early 1960s, plans for a new, ten-story Town Council building were finalized; in 1968, the building was completed. In 1970, a modern, 13

Likewise, in the absence of a center in Stalinstadt, during the June 17, 1953, uprising, workers marched on the Town Hall of neighboring Fürstenberg.

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two-story Party House and Council building were added to the tower. The L-shaped building closed the square at its northern and eastern sides and blocked the view to the river, stirring some controversy among both planners and the population. As the building was inaugurated in honour of the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth (and, not least important, in Lenin Square), the occasion was also used to place a Lenin statue in front of it. The party committee was moved to the new building complex, while the former Party House was turned into a library and museum of local history.

Figure 9. The Town Council (Town Hall) building complex completed in 1970 and the square in front of it (photo taken in the early 2000s ).

Open Society Archives, Budapest.

The new administrative buildings did not add the aura of a civic center to the square. Moreover, by this time the town had several other, much more popular meeting and gathering places, including the aforementioned square in front of the Béla Bartók House of Culture, and especially, the square in front of the movie theatre (Dózsa György tér) on the western side of the former main axis. There, the feeling of a hangout place was only accentuated by the nearby bus stop (people arrived and left from here to neighboring towns, but also to/from Budapest), the hotel, and the shops in their vicinity. Lenin Square, the planned center of Sztálinváros (and after 1961, Dunaújváros), remained a barely frequented, sterile square at the periphery of downtown.

The Limits of Central Planning

The similarity of the fates of the city centers of Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros is striking: both were grandiosely planned with monumental buildings, and both remained unfinished following the political turns of 1953, 1956, or 1961. But apart from the ever-changing and eventually abandoned plans for the two town centers, a number of other factors were responsible for the absence of a single social focal point in Stalinstadt and in Sztálinváros. Authorities regarded the uncontrolled gathering of people, particularly in a large, central square, with suspicion throughout the socialist era. Especially after the June 1953 and October 1956 uprisings, the spontaneous public use of spaces found in the immediate vicinity of the institutions of state power was, to say the least, discouraged. The central squares were to be ceremonial spaces of the party-state, not spaces designed for popular creation (or, in Lefebvrian terms, production). Then, there was the Wohnkomplex- or kvartal-based setup of the towns, that is, the original division of the new towns into smaller neighborhood units, each containing essential social facilities like a school, a kindergarten, or a playground. The Wohnkomplexe were designed to channel their inhabitants’ focus to the inside, rather than to the outside; social functions were thus removed from the town center and anchored inside the Wohnkomplex. In return, the town center had only political functions invested in it: the central square with its public buildings represented state life, while the Wohnkomplex constituted the preferred site of everyday social interaction. Scale played a role in all this too: as a sizable segment of the population of both towns originated from rural areas (this held especially true for Stalinstadt), it was the Wohnkomplex—and, on a different scale, the town district (Ortsteil in Eisenhüttenstadt, városrész in Dunaújváros)—and not the town, that produced familiar patterns of social intercourse. Little has changed in the public perception of the two town centers after 1989. In Eisenhüttenstadt, the quasi absorption of the GDR by West Germany, and with it, the dissolution of the once famous Eisenhüttenkombinat into an all-German iron and steel industry dominated by West German and foreign companies, caused distrust and disappointment among inhabitants. Decisions made in Berlin, the newold capital, caused people to look at the town center, still perceived as the site of state-life, with suspicion. Following the so-called Wende (the 1989 turn and subsequent reunification), Berlin took a number of measures that hurt the feelings of Eisenhüttenstädters, of which I shall name but two: the 1993 absorption of the thus far district-free town (kreisfreie Stadt) of Eisenhüttenstadt into the Landkreis OderSpree, a new county with the capital in Beeskow, a tiny neighboring town of eight thousand inhabitants; and the threat, in the mid-2000s, of shutting down the local court (Amtsgericht) of Eisenhüttenstadt, a decision which, had it been made, would have “reduced Eisenhüttenstadt to the status of a village” (the decision was not taken in the end due to massive protests) (see Fromm 2005). The post-1989 “humiliation” of Eisenhüttenstadt, as some must have perceived it then, caused an exodus: from a town of more than fifty thousand inhabitants in 1990, Eisenhüttenstadt has

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shrunk to a settlement of around twenty-seven thousand (2014), with a continuing decreasing tendency. Like other former socialist towns built around heavy industrial plants, Eisenhüttenstadt is not only in (economic) decline; it is also aging. It should not surprise, then, that there is no one for whom to build a “proper” town center anymore. The current situation of Dunaújváros and its own center is somewhat different. The mono-industrial character of the local economy was turned around already in the mid- to late 1950s, when several light industries, from textile to food to paper, were settled in the town. Within a few decades, Dunaújváros successfully absorbed Dunapentele, the village next to which the first socialist town of Hungary was built in the 1950s. The new town has integrated into its history not only the history of the village but also that of the Roman settlement unearthed under what would later become the steel combine. As a result, local histories written about the town talk today of the millennial history (!) of Dunaújváros (see, for instance, Fitz 1979). More important, Dunaújváros has now for decades had an institution of higher education, which has attracted a continuous flow of young people. In 1990, Dunaújváros numbered sixty thousand inhabitants and was given the status of a city with county rights, a title that it holds to this day. New infrastructure was built to link the town to the rest of the country, including a direct motorway to Budapest in 2006 and a bridge across the Danube in 2007, in addition to the electric railway link to the capital completed in 1982. While the economic crisis that began in 2008-2009 has clearly taken its toll on Dunaújváros, and in spite of the problems raised by an aging and shrinking population, the town remains today one of the more dynamic economic centers of Hungary. With its forty-five thousand inhabitants (2013), Dunaújváros and its environs have, according to local planners, the ambition “to become by 2020 the country’s most competitive region in terms of investment per capita, productivity, employment level and GDP per capita” (Heti Világgazdaság 2012). It is in this context that a plan to refurbish the city center was adopted in 2013. Believing in the social impact of a functional center on the development of the town, the local council requested support from the government. What they received was beyond their hopes: Dunaújváros was granted a 100 percent non-refundable financing for the project, all of which was paid for by the European Union. To emphasize the importance of the undertaking, the government issued a decree listing the revitalization of Dunaújváros’s center among the priority projects funded under its so-called Operative Programme (Magyar Közlöny 2012). The plan, which according to the local press “will enrich [the] town with a genuine town center” (Info Dunaújváros 2014), included the renovation of the entire environment of Town Hall, the elimination of car traffic from the square, the creation in front of Town Hall of a “decorative square” (dísztér) complete with trees, benches, a water pool, and a fountain, the partial demolition of a (protected, but crumbling) building, and the

The Limits of Central Planning

construction of a promenade linking—finally—the square to the riverbank, where a sports field and a well-equipped playground with its own service building completed the new central area (“Ünnepélyes szerződéskötéssel…” n.y.). Dozens of new parking spots were built behind Town Hall to allow citizens to park their cars not in the central square, as they did before, but in its immediate vicinity, thus generating pedestrian traffic where not long before there had been little. A new, severalhectare central area was thus born that—at least in the hopes of its planners—will “finally produce the community spaces” (közösségi terek) that were so missing in the town since its inception in the 1950s (Grabarics 2013).

Figure 10. View of Town Hall Square during the construction works of 2014.

“Városháza tér felújítása,” Info.Dunaújváros.hu, March 20, 2014, http://www. infodunaujvaros.hu/kepek/slideshow/varoshaza-ter-felujitasa-2014-03-20/0 (accessed on July 28, 2015).

Centrality may, in the future, settle in Dunaújváros on a more abstract level too. In May 2015, shortly after the first town festival was held in the refreshed Town Hall Square, the College of Dunaújváros hosted an international conference titled “Cities of a New Type: Industrial Cities in People’s Democracies after 1945.” Young scholars hailing from about a dozen countries presented papers on new towns including Nowa Huta in Poland, Velenje and Železnik in former Yugoslavia, Havířov in former Czechoslovakia, Slavutych in the former Soviet Union, but also on obscure places like the secret uranium mining town of Dr. Petru Groza in Romania. In his opening remarks, the mayor of Dunaújváros told the audience of the town administration’s commitment to supporting such conferences in the future and expressed his “strong desire that Dunaújváros become the European center of research on socia-

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Figure 11. View of Town Hall Square on May Day, 2015.

“Májusi Mulatság 2015,” Dunaújváros Online, May 1, 2015, http:// dunaujvaros.com/gallery/majusi_mulatsag_2015 (accessed on July 28, 2015).

list cities” (Cserna 2015).14 Also present at the conference was Andreas Ludwig, the former director of the Eisenhüttenstadt Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR (Eisenhüttenstadt Documentation Center of Everyday Culture in the GDR).15 When I asked him about the state of scientific research at the center, Ludwig answered somewhat sadly that such work had practically stopped at the Dokumentationszentrum after his departure in 2012. The institution, which had been started by Ludwig, and which during Ludwig’s tenure had produced countless exhibitions and scientific publications on the history of Stalinstadt/Eisenhüttenstadt and the GDR, had become a hot potato which is being tossed today from one supporting public authority to the next, as nobody seems interested in its further existence (or at least in its financing). At the same time, millions of euros have been spent in Eisenhüttenstadt on the restoration of housing blocks built in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than attracting new settlers through the revitalization of economic and social life, and with it, the town center, planners have gradually transformed Eisenhüttenstadt into a socialist architectural theme park devoid of the social element that makes up the essence of urban life. The town center is deserted today; most notably, the formerly shiny Lunik is (as of January 2016) a ruin apparently too 14

15

Gábor Cserna, opening remarks by the mayor of Dunaújváros given at the conference on “Cities of a New Type. Industrial Cities in People’s Democracies after 1945,” Dunaújváros, May 21–22, 2015. Andreas Ludwig served as director of the documentation center from 1993 until 2012.

The Limits of Central Planning

costly to save from collapse. At the same time, City Center, the mall built where the entrance to the Kombinat used to be, has become, with its forty-odd shops, an ever more important social focal point for locals.                                                                             ***   I started this essay by recalling that socialist space becomes—according to Lefebvre—increasingly uniform and modeled after capitalism’s spaces. This is certainly true of both the former Stalinstadt and the former Sztálinváros, today named Eisenhüttenstadt and Dunaújváros. Commercial centers and shopping malls rival, or, as in Eisenhüttenstadt, may actually have taken over, the role of civic centers following the system change of 1989. In both towns it seems that in the absence of meaningful town centers and the social spaces produced through them, little exists to connect the local population to a wider imagined community—apart, of course, from Western-type consumerism. I also argued that “there remains, today, something distinct about the spatial setup of the societies of Eastern Europe.” In Eisenhüttenstadt, the painstaking renovation of the housing blocks now under strict monumental protection and thus removed from a competitive real-estate market, and the concomitant abandonment of the intended town center in favor of a characterless shopping mall, signal the town’s rather abnormal spatial setup, at least within the urban landscape of ordered, normal Germany. The structure of the town, with its very different main constituting units—the former Stalinstadt and Fürstenberg—visibly distancing themselves from each other; the demolished and missing Wohnkomplexe, and their thousands of missing people; the rudimentary town center overshadowed by an oversized city hall resembling a garrison; the ruins of the former Hotel Lunik; the city center that has, nominally at least, moved into a characterless shopping mall—all these render the postsocialist town of Eisenhüttenstadt difficult to read. It is hard to tell where this town is heading, just as it is ever harder to establish where it comes from. On the other hand, the rejuvenation of the town center of Dunaújvaros and the return of pedestrian traffic to it seem to signal that the town has, after many decades, found some focus: the inhabitants of Dunaújváros seem to like the new square; they use it to access the riverbank, and they fill the square when events like May Day or open-air concerts are being held there. It remains, however, to be seen to what extent the refurbished center without—as of now—cafés, restaurants, shops, or meaningful monuments will fulfil the promise of a social center for Dunaújváros. What seems certain is the death of Eisenhüttenstadt’s center; with a mall as the town’s social focal point, the chances of building a civic center for an ever less urban Eisenhüttenstadt are dwindling.

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References Bräuer, Heinz (2000): Die ersten drei Jahrzehnte der Evangelischen Friedensgemeinde Eisenhüttenstadt. Erinnerungen, Eisenhüttenstadt: Selbstverlag. Cserna, Gábor (2015): Opening remarks by the mayor of Dunaújváros given at the conference on Cities of a New Type. Industrial Cities in People’s Democracies after 1945, Dunaújváros, May 21–22, 2015. Fitz, Jenő (ed.) (1979): Dunaújváros története az őskortól napjainking, Dunaújváros: Intercisa Múzeum. Flierl, Thomas (2015): “The Soviet Discourses on Socialist Cities (Sotsgorods) in the 1930s as a Precondition of Socialist Industrialization and Urban Planning in Eastern European Countries after 1945,” paper presented at the conference on Cities of a New Type. Industrial Cities in People’s Democracies after 1945, Dunaújváros, May 21–22, 2015. Fromm, Günter (2005): Interview by the author, October 20, 2005. Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung (2000): Zwischen Moderne und Nationaler Tradition. Architekten in Eisenhüttenstadt. Die 50-er und 60-er Jahre, Eisenhüttenstadt. Lefebvre, Henri (2008): The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Leucht, Kurt W. (1957): Die erste neue Stadt in der DDR, Berlin: VEB Verlag Technik. Matussné Lendvai, Márta (2003): “Sztálin, a város—Lenin, a szobor,” Árgus 10, pp. 32-35. May, Ruth (1999): Planstadt Stalinstadt. Ein Grundriß der frühen DDR—aufgesucht in Eisenhüttenstadt, Dortmund: Universität Dortmund. Végh, Árpád (2015): “Architecture of Dunaújváros,” paper presented at the conference on Cities of a New Type. Industrial Cities in People’s Democracies after 1945, Dunaújváros, May 21–22, 2015.

Newspaper Articles Berg, Stefan (1999): “Für Gott und Adenauer,” Der Spiegel 43 (1999), pp. 104-107. Neuer Tag (1955): “Stalinstadt—ein Bauplatz unserer Republik. So wird unsere Magistrale einmal aussehen,” Neuer Tag, February 5, 1955. Sztálin Vasmű Építője (1952): “Szovjet segítség Sztálinváros tervezésében,” Sztálin Vasmű Építője, April 1, 1952. Sztálinvárosi Hírlap (1958): “Elfogadták a város főterének végleges tervét,” Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, September 5, 1958.

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Film Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927) (153 min).

Internet Sources “Ünnepélyes szerződéskötéssel...” (n.y.): “Ünnepélyes szerződéskötéssel került pont arra a folyamatra, amely lehetőséget teremt végre, hogy városunknak is legyen igazi főtere,” http://dvnzrt.hu/index.php/hirek/a-varoshaza-eskoernyezetenek-funciobovito-revitlizacioja-kdop-3-1-1-d1-12-k-2012-0001/66elkezdodhet-a-varoskoezpont-atalakitasa (accessed on September 22, 2014). Grabarics (2013): “Dunaújváros—Városháza tér és környéke revitalizáció,” Grabarics Építőipari Kft. (08.11.2013), https://www.grabarics.hu/hirek/dunaujvarosvaroshaza-ter-es-kornyeke-revitalizacio (accessed on September 22, 2014). Heti Világgazdaság (2012): “A magyar gazdaság motorja lenne Dunaújváros,” Heti Világgazdaság [online edition], http://hvg.hu/gazdasag/20120418_dunauj_ magyar_gazdasag/ (accessed September 19, 2014). Info Dunaújváros (2014): “Készül az új városközpont—képekkel,” InfoDunaújváros.hu, http://www.infodunaujvaros.hu/hir_olvas/permalink:keszul-az-ujvaroskozpont-kepekkel-2014-03-20-215518/ (accessed on September 9, 2014). Magyar Közlöny (2012): A Kormány 1506/2012 (XI. 16.). Korm. határozata, Magyar Közlöny (Magyarország hivatalos lapja, November 16, 2012), http:// www.kozlonyok.hu/nkonline/MKPDF/hiteles/mk12152.pdf (accessed on May 5, 2016).

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Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia Ivaylo Ditchev

Considering socialism through the lens of territory, rather than that of property or production, allows us to interpret it as an ambiguous way of modernizing—while protecting spaces from modernization at the same time. The capitalist economy, on the other hand, breaks up local communities, creating first national, then global markets in which “natives” and “aliens” are supposed to compete on equal terms. Here, borders fade away alongside regional privilege, resulting in a state of permanent insecurity, as it may appear that at any moment some competitor can settle down, take “your” job, marry “your” women. Soviet state capitalism homogenized territories not through the market, but through political will, which automatically distorted the sociopolitical space because of the ambivalent character of the human subjectivity itself. The notion of privileges, so central to the discourse of opposition, tends to express this distortion; but privileges are nothing but borders protecting given spaces from permanent competition. Such protectionism was neither planned nor coherent, and it certainly contradicted the universalist Marxist doctrine. The remilitarization and sealing of state borders was the accidental result of civil war; bureaucratic methods to control population flows into the cities through the residence permit (propiska) were a reaction to the disintegration of social cohesiveness during the revolutionary 1920s; ideological purges and nepotism proved instrumental in establishing domination of the locals and the old over newcomers and the young. Thus, in its own way, socialism followed a path similar to that outlined by Karl Polanyi in his analysis of Britain, where a laissez-faire utopia was imposed by political will, whereas social protectionism was spontaneous and supposedly irrational (1944: chapter 6). In the present essay, I will examine a specific type of local protection that is the neighborhood: a relatively closed space that both profited from and resisted the communist project, transforming its backwardness into privilege. In doing so, I pursue a somewhat paradoxical aim: to speak about socialist spatiality by way of a rather untypical neighborhood.                                                                             ***

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  Socialist cities are usually represented—by apologists, as well as critics —in two versions. On the one hand, there is the center, where ideology stages its monumental shows and rituals. In Stalinist times, this center is designed in a pseudoclassical style with lavish open spaces and realist monuments. As an alternative, we might find the center described as a dying old urbanity with irregular streets and unhygienic, somber houses, often personifying the grandparents of children who themselves live in bright new housing estates. On the other hand, we have the model neighborhoods of housing complexes, which began to be hurriedly built from prefabricated elements starting with the Khrushchevian thaw in the late 1950s. Unlike the monumental center, the panel blocks imply uniformity, rationality, and, above all, a feeling of temporariness: they are but a mere stop on the way to communism. Both representations suggest the triumph of political will that conquers spaces and imposes ideological sovereignty, thus defying pacified liberal capitalism. Beneath the big reterritorialization, we find the minor one of the neighborhood stronghold: on the one hand, it lies protected from the outer world by the regime, yet on the other, it discreetly resists this same regime. I would argue that it was, in fact, the cozy neighborhood, isolated from the turbulences of the outside world, which brought about the longevity of socialist rule. The communist project of homogenization and total control thus entered into a paradoxical alliance with premodern localism, even as it officially combated it. I will try to illustrate my point with the case Losenez, a quarter in Sofia in which I grew up in the 1960s.

Sofia’s Creative Class Losenez was regarded as a privileged place. It was built on the hills to the south of the city,1 to where the citizens of the new capital escaped for leisure in the nineteenth century. The patriarch of Bulgarian literature Ivan Vazov, in his poem “Generation” of 1881, wrote an early ode to the place, here as elsewhere having introduced sentiment to the new nation. Lozenez gradually took the place of “the Versailles of the Sofia clerk-aristocracy,” Kniajevo, a suburb to the West. Yet the special status of Losenez resulted not so much from beautiful nature as from its culture. Beginning in the early 1920s, state policy insisted on the creation of an intellectual district, because the young rural nation badly needed an image of cultivation to present on the international scene. Losenez was midway between the spontaneous gathering of artists that had occurred in Paris’s Montmartre in the late nineteenth century and the voluntaristic creation of the “golden cage” for 1

The name comes from the word for “vines.”

Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia

writers in Peredelkino by Stalin in the 1930s. The municipality sold building plots under special conditions, privileging candidates with financial resources and connections, as well as a taste for nature and isolation, ones ready to sacrifice modern conveniences: Losenez had no water or sewage systems until 1928, underdeveloped transportation routes, and very few businesses to. The Bulgarian version of cultural gentrification thus did not rely on higher market prices, but on inhabitants’ capacity to invest human resources in their habitat. This accounts for the strange human mix of the neighborhood in which intellectuals lived next door to immigrants having fled the Balkan wars, local peasants resided side by side with foreign diplomats,2 representatives of fundations, or couples of mixed social origin. Even the queen had a summer garden here. A large number of well-known intellectuals chose to live in Losenez in the 1930s: writers like Elin Pelin, painters like Sirak Skitnik, actors like Krastio Srafov, and many others (see Kolarova 2010). Over time, the neighborhood saw the establishment of two universities, one in the 1920s, the other in the 1970s, further affecting demographics. The place received the epithet “journalist quarter” likely not only because of the numerous residents who followed that profession but also because it sounded more serious than “artist” or “intellectual.” In addition, the national radio building started operating in the neighborhood in the 1930s, with radio then serving as a pillar of the young nation-state. In 1954, the communist regime continued the trend by building, a ten-minute walk from Losenez, the majestic Stalinist Polygraphic Combinate, the headquarters of the centralized press. If I could draw an anachronistic parallel to Richard Florida’s notion of the “quality of place” (Florida 2003: 3-19) that he deems to attract the creative class, most of those factors were united in Losenez: nature, an interesting demographic mix, the possibility (or rather, the necessity) of having a hand in shaping the community. This zone of almost cottages remained far removed from the urban planning that was to become extremely aggressive during socialism, and residents needed to resolve many a problem through their own initiative. Florida argues that wherever the creative class appears, real-estate prices rise, as a result attracting investors. In Bulgaria, it was not business people but communist elites and ideological institutions that followed the intellectuals: let me mention the government residence Losenez, a high-rise block for Central Committee Communist Party (CP) members, the offices of the military enterprise KINTEX, the investigation offices of State Security, the government hospital, to name just a few. Were they attracted by the prestige of the place? By the quality of life? Or did the authorities consider intellectuals more loyal to the regime than the rest of the population? In the threefold social structure of the communist doctrine, the third group—besides workers and 2

In fact, the law of 1920 for the building on plots outside the city limits that established the quarter was intended to help landless people.

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peasants—was supposed to be the intelligentsia, which combined creative people and the political leadership. A similar intellectual neighborhood was established in the 1930s to the southeast, on the other side of the forest, the future Borissov Park. The so-called professors’ quarter (today, Yavorov quarter) started as a housing syndicate on Avicena Street and got the support of the state, which granted plots to academics in the region for free. At work here was the same policy of furthering the intellectualization of a capital in dire need of prestige, having fortuitously transformed from a tiny provincial town to capital city in 1879, after the Russo-Turkish war. Communism followed a rather different strategy for engineering the creative class in the prosperous 1970s. The third settlement of intellectuals in the Izgrev District became known as “the nomenklatura quarter” (the district of high officials). It was situated further southeast along the same Borissov Park (now renamed to Park of Liberty), unambiguously situated beside the Soviet embassy and diplomatic residence buildings. It consisted essentially of four skyscrapers with more than fifteen stories that overlooked the nearby forest. Construction was led by the Writers’ Union, the Committee for Radio and Television, and the Committee for Culture who had conceived of the project, negotiated with the municipality, and then sold the spaces to their members at preferential prices. While these apartments were of excellent quality and location, the same romanticism as adhered to the houses in the journalist or the professors’ quarters never attached to them: somehow no one expected a writer to meet another in the elevator, garbage bag in hand. The new regrouping of the intelligentsia not only underlined its privileged status within the same quasi-class of the political elites: it also broke the links between the creative class and surrounding citizens (even physically a skyscraper rises high up above the common populace). The creative class in Losenez and Yavorov were a modest group, not too different from the peasants and artisans living next door; in the 1970s, it became monumental, privileged, and sterile. Losenez continued to attract intellectuals during communist times beyond any urban or ideological planning. Unlike the sites of apartment blocks, the uneven terrain and fragmented land ownership of the quarter discouraged big housing projects by the municipality or state enterprises, thus privileging the “cooperative way” of construction. Housing cooperatives, tolerated by the regime, practically constituted the only private way of building in cities. It meant uniting the forces of several families, one of which usually owned the plot, to construct a relatively modest three-to-four-story building, taking the pains to find materials and workers or performing some of the construction work themselves. Cooperative buildings were considered better quality and allowed citizens to avoid long years of waiting before being granted an apartment by the authorities. The latter usually turned out to be at least three times more expensive, all while necessitating the serious pulling of strings at all the stages of the process. People with cash at hand, such as artists, re-

Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia

searchers, or journalists, who received honoraria, were best equipped for such hazardous enterprises. Creative professions had the right to one supplementary room for a study that went beyond the established regulations (see note 124), which also attracted them to the non-standard solutions offered by the cooperatives. Again, gentrification during socialism occurred based on resources beyond the market. The creative class’s privilege consisted mainly of residing outside socialism’s normal economy, thus resulting in a somewhat atypical neighborhood (I shall return to cooperatives later). It might seem strange that with such a concentration of writers, painters, actors, and the like the journalist quarter remained invisible during the socialist period. We would possibly expect the perspective of artistic kitsch with essays on solitary artists living “somewhere out of the world”; romantic paintings of Pentcho Slaveykov’s oak, under which the writer (like the Buddha under the bodhi tree, Boileau under the lime tree) loved to sit and contemplate the city view; or a photo of the picturesque Thay temple constructed by a strange person in the forest. In fact, the only film on the quarter was a children’s movie called Up on the Cherry Tree (1984), which deals with a selfish old proprietor trying to protect his garden from the assaults of the neighborhood boys, cherry gardens standing as an emblem of the place. One might argue that such a neighborhood remains beyond the frameworks of memory for being untypical (see Halbwachs 1925). At first glance, it very much looked like a zone of cottages, and cottage-houses posed a difficult problem for ideology in the 1960s, as it was not clear whether this supplementary living space should be included in the space allowed per socialist citizen. In the 1970s, the cottages gained acceptance, but they had attached to them the pejorative connotation of petty-bourgeois complacency, selfishness, and ignorance,3 which was quite inappropriate for the Losenez population. In fact, invisibility constituted a strategy of defense, much in the same way as communist leaders would take extreme care not to reveal their houses, their summer resorts, and their general lifestyles. The TV camera was allowed to shoot the writer in front of his or her typewriter or the artist besmeared by paint, but dwelling too long on the large apartment decorated with rare objects, postcards from travels abroad, and exotic dogs—this would attract too much attention. In a way, the first period of socialism recycled the nineteenth-century vision of the artist living in seclusion, having sacrificed social life and material things for higher ideals. The only problem being that it was essentially mimicry, since loyal artists had better standards of living than the average citizen.

3

An emblematic movie of this period was Villa-Zone by Eduard Zahariev (1975).

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The Cooperative Mix Cooperative property, according to doctrine, was inferior to state property and doomed to wither away gradually. It was tolerated as a form of mutual help for hardworking people who had played an important role in the history of the left, but real socialist development was obviously to be achieved via nationalization. Cooperative owners put together their plots of land if they were peasants, their tools if they were artisans, and their apartments if they were urbanites: such a socialization of private interests made it possible for the regime to tolerate and integrate them in the planned, state-controlled economy. Nevertheless, individuals preserved their relative private shares and participated in the enterprise with specific resources, that is, one entered the cooperative farm with a cow, another with a plow. While productive cooperatives were gradually abolished (participants were invited to “voluntarily” give up their shares and no longer receive dividends), this never happened with housing cooperatives, because of the doctrinal difference between private (owning the means of production) and personal (owning the means of subsistence, i.e., consumption). Here again, socialism tolerated individualization only via consumption; productivity was hypercentralized, which had a lasting effect on post-socialist citizenship, bringing about an explosion of selfishness and greed (see Ditchev 2011: 196-206). On the level of the neighborhood, the cooperative way of construction encouraged social mixing, because of the diverse competencies required to build a house in a shortage economy.4 By comparison, the apartments in the high-rise complexes were most often given to people from a similar milieu, if not from one single profession. Let me illustrate this point with Losenez. The cooperative building constructed by my parents in 1955–57 had the following the social composition: my father was an author of historical novels. Next door, there was the family of the Fatherland Front (FF)responsible for the quarter;5 my parents watched their tongues whenever this family was around. Down the social ladder (or more literally, down the staircase), there lived two engineers, two schoolteachers, and a doctor. The basement, finally, housed the family of a poor house-painter. You could add to this mix several grandparents who had come to Sofia from the country, as it was the norm for the younger generation to take in the elderly. To our left stood a much more luxurious cooperative building (i.e., one family per story): on the top floor

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Shortage was not a simple shortcoming but a structural feature of the socialist regimes intended to maintain the primacy of political will over market forces. The notion was famously developed by Janos Kornai in the 1980s (see Kornai 1992). The FF was an antifascist coalition of left and centrist parties that after the war was taken possession of and stultified by the Communist Party.

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resided the architect who had planned the building (architects had always the best apartments). He was married to a German receiving deutschmarks from her family (precious resource!). On the second floor lived a vice minister of the economy, while the ground level housed a simple technician who had entered the cooperative as the proprietor of the construction plot. On our tiny Midzhur Street, there lived numerous other intellectuals: two couples of painters, two more architects, one writer, at least five journalists, one theatre artist, one translator. Most of them knew each other, but they still did not form a construction cooperative of their own, as intellectuals badly needed the expertise of engineers, party officials, plumbers, and many other professions required for the cooperative way of construction. The result was a social promiscuity rather unplanned by ideology. Imagine a marvelous mansion across from our house,6 owned by a former factory head, which escaped nationalization because the owner’s sister, Nadia Budevska, happened to be the favorite theatre actress of the communist leader Georgi Dimitrov. The three families (engineers, an architect, a scientist, a teacher) lived there under conditions of “self-condensing”:7 they went skiing in winter and camping in summer, received presents from their numerous relatives abroad, and relied on a large network of connections at home. In short, they lived a happy life, somewhat like European settlers in a developing country. To their right, just one brick wall away, there was a Roma shack, with an outhouse and tomatoes in the yard, constructed on squatted land (they were given an apartment somewhere in the complexes by the end of the decade and moved). How was neighborhood spatiality constructed? The relative isolation of the place made accessibility difficult. In fact, the only transportation to the city was a tramway line that had its last stop and turned around at the circle in the center of the quarter. It was first named after a princess, then a communist hero, and is now called Journalist Square. Was such isolation simply the result of the specificity of the terrain and its property lots? An elderly architect told me that there had been tacit NIMBY (not in my backyard) opposition to a plan for a modern transportation axis going through the neighborhood; it was in fact abandoned. This act of resistance by some of the architects living in the neighborhood was carried out behind the scenes and through personal relations, 6 7

The exceptional two-story building from the 1930s was often used to shoot films, showing the bourgeois world somewhere in the West; it never represent the neighborhood itself. Samosgastiavane (in the Soviet union: uplotnenie): the “voluntary” act of inviting friends or kin as tenants into the extra rooms of the home to avoid having them given to needy people by the municipality. In the 1960s, the regulations allowed one sleeping room per couple, one for two children under seven, two for two older children if they were of a different sex, etc. An exception was made for liberal professions, who had the right to a supplementary room for study. Of course you had to prove that you were, say, a writer, and the proof was membership in the Writers’ Union, which was extremely difficult to obtain.

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as the common inhabitants of Losenez would have gladly had better connections to the city center. There was, then, the spatiality of supply, which was more than simple urban planning, as the suppression of the free market proved essential for political control (see note 124). It was carried out by nationalizing big trades, and by tolerating small shops for some time, under conditions of harsh competition with state establishments that had access to goods, as well as the license to sell them. In the 1960s, there was a big candy shop with pastry, bosa,8 and ice cream (ice blocks were delivered to keep it cool), and near it a tiny booth, where we children went to buy a treat, some chewing gum, or syrup from grandpa Boris, as we called the owner. Competition was obviously untenable and when the old man died, the booth was closed. Most of the shops and services were located around the circle where the tram turned: a modern state colonial store, as they called it, a green grocer’s, a fishmonger’s, a butcher, a fabric store (readymade clothing came later), a hairdresser’s cooperative, and a private bakery, where people could have a whole lamb roasted. It disappeared when electric ovens started to be mass-produced in the country by the end of the 1960s. Some businesses proved to be as ephemeral as the candy booth, such as the one that caught and fixed runs on precious nylon stockings. Others were ambulant, such as the Roma man with his horse cart who shouted monotonously that he would buy old clothing or other things. There were seasonal items like corn or chestnuts, and cultural life was centered around the two pubs, one very cheap, the other having survived communism with its traditional name, the Bulgarian translation of “Unter den Linden”—probably because the famous Berlin boulevard had remained in the Soviet occupation zone. There was a newsstand, where people discussed world affairs while queuing (our FF neighbor was regularly there, possibly doing some sort of opinion poll for his superiors). Passions also ran high around the bookmaker’s office, where men waited for the results of the lottery of football matches, engaged in heated existential discussions. Elderly males sat on benches in the circle, watching trams come and go. Elderly women occupied the balconies, watching passersby. Outside of this modest center, social life took place in the gardens, with the monotonous noise of backgammon games, card-players swearing, neighbors talking from house to house through the windows. But it still was a communist regime, with the ambition to control and modernize. A neighborhood was thus a unit of surveillance, which, for some reason, did not coincide with the unit of urban planning. The militia headquarters were quite far away from the supply circle, for example, covering parts of other neighborhoods as well. On a lower level, there was the figure of the quarter official, who,

8

Thick Balkan drink made of slightly fermented millet.

Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia

unlike today, was entitled to visit your home and ask whether you had seen something suspicious; no one would dare to refuse him entry. The uniform was not only respected but feared. Children, instead of being taught to go and ask a representative of state order for help, heard from their mothers that if they were naughty, the militiaman would take them away. The Communist Party and its youth organization, the Komsomol, gradually concentrated their activities on the workplace, whereas responsibility for places of residence was conferred to the FF, a once prestigious organization in need of a raison d’être and honorary jobs for its leaders. It was thus assigned the responsibility of everyday life, the Slavic word byt for the latter also referring to matter as opposed to conscience, thus indicating an essentially reactionary nature. The depolitization of the FF in the early 1950s implied a certain competition with municipal authorities, which also were supposed to deal with place and the cultivation of the new socialist person. The then first secretary of the CP, Valko Chervenkov, resolved the conflict by proclaiming that municipalities would work with administrative constraint, whereas the FF should rely on persuasion. This gradually transformed the organization into an empty shell, peopled mainly by retired officials. At best, it stood for a kind of institutionalized patriarchal control over the young, incarnating the consensual value system of a country with a peasant majority until the mid-1960s, where communism essentially meant work and order, nice grass in the gardens, not drinking too much or leaving your family for younger women. Whereas the party developed a sophisticated network of agents and informers centered around particular enterprises or groups, the FF relied mainly on village-style eye control by those same women on the balconies, those grandpas sitting in the circle. It was hardly possible to have a guest at home without those activists of patriarchy taking notice: they would pop up at your apartment asking for salt, stealing an in-between glance at the things you bought or holding an ear to the music you were playing. The so-called comrades’ court (established in 1961)—another site at the circle, just by the candy shop—in fact constituted a semiofficial way of disciplining the new social mix in the cities. It had no real legislative authority; its so-called public reprobation could be an element in a chain of events that indirectly led to things like losing one’s job or facing internment in a village outside Sofia, but it would not cause these actions directly. Thus reprobation was closer to the bad name you might acquire in traditional communities than to modern law, even if it could stick badly to required modern documents, such as the one about place of residence “characteristics,” which one had to present on various occasions. Most of the troubles comrades’ courts dealt with were related to the young: hooliganism, parasitism (neither working nor studying), loose living. I remember one case in which two female students renting a room in the basement of the house next house were accused of inviting boys for the night, which was, until the 1980s,

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illegal.9 The “lawsuit” proved quite a topic for the neighborhood and we, boys, observed the girls walking, thinking we could see the difference that making love all night does to a woman’s gait. The girls disappeared soon after that, but they did not suffer more than the reprobation: the harsh political trials were done elsewhere and by rather different institutions. The cooperative mix that protected Losenez from the extremes of modernization during communism turned against it in the 1990s, when the small ownership and lack of urban planning—but also a marginalization of the intelligentsia and the high emigration rates among the former elites—invited savage privatization and overconstruction, rendering this neighborhood the first urban victim of neoliberalism. Today, the quarter is crowded, transportation is bad, social infranstructure is missing, and the kitschy constructions of the newly rich have replaced the old cooperative buildings. In short, it has become a monument of the wild years of transition.

The Child’s Territoriality A neighborhood is best defined by those assigned to it: the elderly and the children. As I said, public decency in the 1960s still presupposed that the young take their parents from the village to their new apartment in town: as a general rule, the old ones helped with the grandchildren, and while some participated to the civilizing role of the FF, others simply grew tomatoes in front of the cooperative houses. But the real glue of a neighborhood are its children. There was little contact between the very diverse quarter residents, and I do not remember a neighbor ever visiting our apartment (reunions of the cooperative were typically held in the stairwell). But children played together: we were one mahala (community), whereas our parents were from the mahala. Turkish words usually have a negative connotation in the Bulgarian language,10 but this term holds a sort of intimacy, unlike the bureaucratic quartal. Quartal implied control, whereas mahala described a space of physical closeness, most strongly experienced by the children born into the cooperative mix. We even had early presexual experiences with the two Roma girls from across the street, whereas our parents would hardly greet theirs in passing. I cannot possibly imagine my daughter today being best friends with children whose parents raise chickens or have an outhouse in the yard: social segregation has since come a long way.

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As late as the end of the 1970s, the regime introduced the so-called militia wedding, which allowed unmarried partners to live together under the condition of registration at the militia headquarters. Modern Bulgaria fought for existence against the Ottoman Empire.

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I was somewhat astonished when I learned, in high school, that our quarter was considered privileged. In fact, we felt rather envious of the modern blocks in the complexes, where they had central heating and did not need to drag coal in from the freezing basement in the mornings, as I had to. In second grade, we moved to a newly constructed school, three blocks from home, and I can remember our rapture at the enormous windows, the vast lobby halls, and the abstract mosaic on the wall. Today, the building of our old school from the 1920s seems much more precious, but back then, we considered it dated, poky, and sad-looking in comparison to the flat-roof modernity of the 1960s. Cars were very scarce in these parts, and we would run after a passing vehicle to inhale the exhaust fumes, which smelled so enchanting. Soviet cars had not yet arrived en masse, and in our street there was one small Renault Dauphine and one Triumph, bought secondhand abroad. One day one of the neighbors from the mansion across the street in some way acquired a majestic black Buick, and made a triumphant tour of the neighborhood with all the children aboard. In winter, cars entered a state of hibernation and steep streets became sledge-slides, were we coasted down by tens on self-made toboggans. As to the summer, it was the time of wheel carts made of ball bearings, which made a horrible noise and where put in motion by the small boys, who pushed the elders. This game was a specific privilege of our street, which was—and actually still is—the only one to be asphalted because of the vice-minister neighbor. Our street covering was then a real source of pride, but also of regret, because think only how much more asphalt there was in the complexes around the new blocks! If modernity is about self-comparison and envy, we were certainly modern. A child’s mahala is not too wide: those living on a parallel street were already another gang, with which we got into fights. Space was defined by the voice of one’s grandmother: at five, I was allowed to walk away from home as far as I could still hear her calling me from the balcony. The world grew gradually larger at seven with the road to school and the like. The life of a child back in the 1960s in Sofia very much resembled what they call classificatory kinship in places like Australia: we could be scolded, even given a slap, by any adult in the street—who was supposed to co-parent us. Intellectuals—or shall I say, persons with a longer urban genealogy—would be ashamed to do this, but they would not protest. Thus in many families, a split developed between rural patriarchy outside and urban liberalism at home—a cultural dimension of the class division that deepened with time. In the 1970s, the FF section became obsolete, the comrades’ court stopped operating, boys started staying with girls for the night, and even condoms appeared in the news booths. The big migration was over, populations had relatively stabilized, and there was no longer the need to impose patriarchic control over the young. The engine of Bulgarian communism was out of fuel and started painfully slowing down.

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                                                                            ***   So was there something specific to socialist spatiality? (Crowley& Reid 2002: 4) Shall we say that the socialist nature of place consisted in the specific resistance to the socialist project? In Losenez, it was the privileged intelligentsia who wisely preferred not to have highways and central heating, pulling some strings here and there and hiding behind rural backwardness. But there are many other instances of such hybridization of project and reality. In the center, the plan for the destruction of the palace and the building of a monumental socialist temple would be stopped, presumably, for lack of money. The water channel around Sofia, started with citizens’ volunteer work, would gradually degenerate into a pond full of frogs. Someplace they would keep a tree, wind the road round the house of a party official, or change ideas in the middle of construction works because of international politics. Thus socialist—or, in fact, any other—place could hardly be defined by a specific function or style. Rather, it is the trace of a zigzagging historic process.

References Crowley, David & Reid, Susan (eds.) (2002): Socialist Spaces: Sites and Everyday Life in the Socialist Block, New York: Berg. Ditchev, Ivaylo (2011): “Der Skandal des Konsums. Ein altes Lied in postkommunistischer Tonart,” in: Heinz Druegh (ed.): Warenaesthetik. Neue Perspektiven auf Konsum, Kultur und Kunst, Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp. 196–206. Florida, Richard (2003): “Cities and the Creative Class,” City and Community 2.1, March 2003, pp. 3-19. Halbwachs, Maurice (1925): Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: PUF. Kornai, Janos (1992): The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Polanyi, Karl (1944): The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: Beacon.

Other Sources Kolarova, Diana (2010): “The Journalistic Quarter Losenez,” in: Bulgarian Connection, 26.12.2010, (blog), http://dianakolarova.blogspot.bg/2010/12/blog-post_26. html (access Jan 25th, 2020).

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography1 Ekaterina Mizrokhi

It was 1959, or perhaps 1960—but certainly no later than 1962. My grandmother, who had spent her entire life thus far in shared basements and kommunalkas, moved to a private two-bedroom apartment where my mother was born. Or was she born in the kommunalka? Perhaps, but she certainly only spent the first year or two of her life living somewhere other than our forty-square-meter unit in the five-storey, prefabricated khrushchevka. The following forty-some years before emigrating to Canada were spent there. That apartment of ours is just a short walk from the metro station on the far eastern periphery of Moscow. I would say it is a five-minute walk, but my grandmother insists that the distance between our apartment and the station increases with age. It’s a humble building: concrete panels, afterthought balconies. Upon a visit to Moscow as a child, I cheekily inquired if there had been a war in the entryway of our khrushchevka. Perhaps, in many ways, there had been. This block of ‘honest’ architecture had borne witness to waves of national and personal histories, crises and traumas alike—cramped with residents ebbing and flowing for decades. In February of 2017, I returned to this apartment for the first time in several years. A week before I was set to leave Moscow once again, the mayor and president unveiled an aggressive demolition campaign targeting buildings just like ours. As I began writing this essay in early May of that year, we received our impending demolition notice.                                                                             ***   The buildings in question emerged en masse in light of a post-war housing cri-

1

This work was written with the support of the Jackman Humanities Institute Fellowship, under the 2016-2017 theme of Time, Rhythm and Pace, under the supervision of Prof. Michelle Murphy and the mentorship of Dr. Erag Ramizi. I would also like to thank the rest of the JHI cohort for their feedback, the support of Prof. Thomas Lahusen, and the help of Dr. Maximilian Sternberg.

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sis throughout the USSR, altering the fate of this aggregate state for decades to come. Khrushchev outlined the need to search for the cheapest and fastest methods of industrializing housing construction. Standardized, prefabricated manufacturing and modernist designs that rejected superfluity in favour of geometric rigidity were embraced. The first iteration of this industrial construction was the fivestorey apartment block, accordingly dubbed khrushchevka. In the following decades, subsequent generations of housing construction continued to grow vertically. The buildings were arranged into calculated neighbourhood units called the microrayon or microdistrict, planned around services such as schools, daycares and clinics. However, it must be mentioned that the desperate need for quick provision of basic residential units meant that the full extent of the initial socialist planning goals were not achieved. Despite complaints from settlers of the poor workmanship of some building construction and lack of neighbourhood infrastructure and maintenance, the gaps in state provisions, as Harris insists, allowed for residents to step in as active agents in their homes and districts (Harris 2013). All microrayons to-date are based on one initial, experimental model built from 1956-1958: the Ninth Quarter of Cheremushki in the south-western periphery of Moscow (Snopek 2015): the test ground for architectural experiments with materials, building divisions and layouts, intending to find the best solution to the challenge laid out by Khrushchev. Architect Kuba Snopek argues that, taking into account the quantitative influence on architecture, these twelve hectares of land [of the Ninth Quarter of Cheremushki] were probably the most influential in the history of humanity—they determined the direction of the architectural development of the biggest country in the world for decades to come. (Snopek 2015: 18) Not only are the twelve hectares of land in Cheremushki incredibly influential in determining the architectural development of this widespread urban typology, but also, it is worth investigating them as profoundly influential spaces due to the sociocultural dispositions that were moulded by such spaces, impacting millions of individuals to this day. For these reasons, khrushchevka microrayons—dismissed as artefacts of limited architectural imagination—are vital in crafting a holistic understanding of how ex-Soviet populations, and those of satellite states influenced by Soviet architectural visions, relate to themselves and the world around them. Modernist architecture, perhaps, saw the brightest heyday and the darkest demise in mainstream relevance and public opinion over the past century. These structures, which focused on ‘aesthetic rigidity and purity’ (Boym 1994), sought to purge any shade of affection from their construction. This, of course, cannot be further from the truth, as they have become breeding grounds for affective experiences saturated in memory, longing, fear, distaste, isolation, alienation, care, nostalgia, and temporal irregularities, to name a few. The landscape they

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

compose is thus a dynamic, pulsing, emotive entity in contrast to the intended sterile rationality of its conception. These largely disregarded architectural forms became a ubiquitous element of everyday Soviet life—from Minsk to Magadan, Chisinau to Chelyabinsk—their presence and influence persisting to this day. While the emergence of the Soviet khrushchevka microrayon has been well studied (Harris 2013; Smith 2015; Varga-Harris 2015; Meuser/Zadorin 2015), there are minimal works exploring the past genealogy of everyday practices in the khrushchevka as they relate to, inform and redirect contemporary experiences within them. Repeatedly throughout interviews, conversations and passing comments, residents claim that major changes, from perestroika, the crisis of the 1990s, and recent urban redevelopment attempts have largely bypassed their districts—“nothing has really changed”—“the five-storeys remain the five-storeys” (pyatietazhki i est’ pyatietazhki). This view, of course, neglects the immense spatio-economic restructurings that manifest in cities transitioning out of a planned to a market economy. These restructurings, which have been well studied elsewhere (Axenov/Brade/Bondarchuk 2006; Andrusz/Szelenyi 1996), are outside the scope of this essay. However, it is worth exploring why many residents do not associate a profound rupture in time in their everyday spaces some thirty years onward. One proposition is that, although the end of the Soviet Union brought, among many things, a loss of a unified Soviet cultural text or master narrative, in Boym’s (1995: 149) words, a distinct Soviet-style cultural script can be argued to have been preserved, or haunting, architecturally. Indeed, there is ‘no city that is not without its spectres’ (Andreotti/Lahiji 2016: 17). Does a space that has largely retained its original aesthetics, and thus the sensorial ordering of the body in said space, create and sustain access to a cultural continuum? What purpose might this serve for the residents whose spaces, and thus perceptions of the space in which they live, retain a sense of ‘sameness’? What significance might this analytic have in better understanding the cultural mosaic of postsocialist realities? Posing these questions urges to push understandings and analytics of Soviet urban heritage and legacy by adopting a “‘dwelling perspective’, [seeing landscapes as an] enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within, and in doing so, have left there something of themselves” (Ingold 1993: 2). Can a space every truly be fully divorced from its past without major aesthetic overhaul? Do decades of repeated, everyday use, animation, cultural productions and associations continue to inform daily life that still circulates in said space? What does this mean for the access, continuity and persistence of these cultural productions and associations if that circulation is broken and ruptured, by separation and destruction? The latter are explored and reflected on in the personal narratives that bookend the theoretical contemplation. Perhaps an aesthetic character of a given space, when anachronistic in nature, creates a particular affective atmosphere or culture in which external, societal and

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institutional transformations are not the sole sociotemporal characteristics one might trace there. Here, aesthetic is understood in the Ancient Greek genealogy as a ‘discourse of the body’ or a form of cognition through the senses, as explored at length by many others (Andreotti/Lahiji 2016; Benjamin 1968; Buck-Morss 2000; Ranciere 2009). This understanding of aesthetics as what interfaces with the senses of the body is enabling here in understanding how the projected appearance of a place can also inform the affective atmospheres that are felt there. Bohme (1993) theorizes atmospheres as affective states of being and perception, charged by the sociospatial qualities in which they find themselves. This complements Reckwitz’s (2012) assertion that affective cultures, programmed through space, create an ‘affective habitus’ that evolve throughout history. A sense of persistent sameness, a haunting, perhaps in other words, may be understood as atmospheres that carry affective habituses’ from past times, and can be activated based on conventional sociospatial habituses (Bourdieu 1980). Therefore, while the notion of affective habitus has been anticipated, the explicit temporalization of affective atmosphere—especially through the vehicle of aesthetic experience in space—can be better articulated, particularly in the temporally-intricate case of a post-socialist city. The proposition here works to temporally stretch the emotional landscape of a given space by expanding the palette of perceptible affective atmospheres and recognizing their varied sociotemporal signatures and orientations. This investigation continues an existing discourse of ‘postcommunist aesthetics’ (Pusca 2016) where the importance of analyzing the aesthetics of change in post-socialist societies is underlined as the ‘silent’ communicators of the process. Such communicators are not limited in a conventional aesthetic framework to the representations of change, but rather in the perceptive experiences of it. However, this essay seeks to probe how an analytic of post-communist aesthetics can be used to not only understand how changes are perceived and experienced, but how the perception of continuity and stagnancy are constructed and imagined, particularly in individual domestic or collective urban spaces in which the ‘communist aesthetic’ has changed too little to justify the prefix. How this continuity is imagined, perhaps, is key in this discussion, as in the words of Golubchikov et al. (2014), to speak of enduring legacies of socialist urbanism neglects the holistic usurpation of all structures and spaces under the logic of capital. However, in so far as there are residents who attest to and imagine and reproduce a sense of sameness in their spaces of everyday life, we must attend to the ephemeral and varied sociotemporal orientations that insist on their presence. Nostalgia is an unavoidably relevant concept when investigating the spectralities the past in the present of postsocialist cities. It is often seen as a hindrance that romanticizes areas with histories of conflict, creating an escapist, ‘unreflexive, simplification, if not a falsification of the past’ (Zemblyas 2014: 8). There has, however, been reappraisal of nostalgia as a productive cultural process with the

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

potential to engage with alternative narratives and representations of the past as a subversive resource (Boym 2002), and to ‘expand the range of spaces in which collective memories of trauma may be engaged’ (Zemblyas 2014: 8). Problematically, staunch critiques of nostalgia are often attempts at spotting ‘bad nostalgia,’ sympathetic to communist ideologies. Attuning to the critical potential of nostalgia, Nadkarni and Shevchenko insist, means ‘neither an endorsement of the socialist past nor of the capitalist present’ (Nadkarni/ Shevchenko 2004:490). Along the same vein, Reid urges not to replicate Cold War prejudices by dismissing the outpouring of attachment to the khrushchevkas after the demolition announcement as mere ‘nostalgia’ (Reid 2019). Indeed, as this essay aims to show in both personal and theoretical narratives, the presence of nostalgia can be both self-reflexive and imaginative, sympathetic yet critical, opening more nuance and heterogeneity into the sociotemporal orientations that are embedded within a given space. Accordingly, a building is not only representative of the historical and political context in which it was created, given that long after its construction, it continues to actively direct the ways in which bodies move, people relate and affects circulate within it. Framing architecture as a form of cultural script and archive allows us to decipher how a space retains spatial practices that were once enacted within it. In the Soviet city, not only was the architectural form and urban layout carefully considered for the goal of social(ist) reformations, but this thoughtful planning was also extended to the domestic realm. Following the extensive scholarship on the creation and enforcement of Soviet byt (Buchli 2000; Boym 1994) or everyday lifestyle, the idea that elements of a domestic environment have a defined, proper placement cements and underscores their status as “enduring fixtures around which habitual actions and routes are repetitively practiced” (Edensor 2005a: 312). This thereby strengthens, sustains and reproduces cultural values and practices that emerge within domestic domains. Accordingly, as Buchli remarks, architecture is the most durable form of material culture (2000: 1). It is precisely architecture’s durability—its ability to persist past the epoch of its conception, along with its paradoxical, yet unavoidable, material obsolescence—that lends architecture, and the spaces it carves out, a key property that this essay explores: the ability to nurture anachronisms by becoming rendered anachronistic itself. Hence, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the ordering of microrayons, whose space had once been directly ordered by the reigning Soviet state apparatus, still retains the learned behaviours, patterns of a past spatial order. Spaces that remain, spaces that persist, spaces that survive—whether on domestic or urban scales—have the capacity to carry on with them profound feelings of past times. Architectural, therefore, influences how certain affective responses, and their associated cultural practices, may be programmed. These affective responses may be recalled through muscle memory of engaging with a given physical space—our minds and bodies acting as phenomenological actors of embodied

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time-space (Laszczkowski 2016) and reservoirs of past habits (Lowenthal 2015). Indeed, Halbwachs’ asserts that collective memory is “programmed according to spatial constraints” (Scribner 2003: 37), and that a given group’s social, external milieu permeates every element of its consciousness. Therefore, the space of the khrushchevka microrayons, too, has the potential to create, harbour, reflect and refract affective responses that have been recalled from past spatial practice. The affective responses in question cannot be divorced from the spaces in which they circulate, spaces that appear to be relics of a past time where historical and political contexts allowed for prefabricated, standardized panel apartment blocks to populate the landscape. Now that those historical contexts have changed on both micro and macro scales—from the end of the post-war housing shortage, to the collapse of the USSR and the reintegration into a private property market and capitalist economy (Attwood 2012)—amidst the rapid urban redevelopment in Moscow, these khrushchevka microrayon spaces largely appear to be outside their time. Contemporarily, substantial subsections of the population have been raised in socialist time and socialist space, either directly through their own lived experience or by virtue of its lingering continuities and postmemory—the memory that was not embedded in the consciousness of a subject but reconstructed from external fragments, stories and projections (Hirsch 1997). Explored at length (Boym 2008; Yurchak 2005; Mbembe 2001; Jameson 1991) is the assertion that waves of radical historical upheaval from revolution to fierce modernization—particularly in the case of the Eastern Bloc (Haukanes/Trunk 2013: 3) contribute to individuals who do not always relate to a singular temporal framework, but can hold several temporalities simultaneously in variety of fractured, disjointed, hybrid and integrated ways. Similarly, the khrushchevka microrayons in question, spaces largely considered to be anachronistic in nature, also have the potential to assign varied temporal signatures to the affect they house. It becomes, then, that such spaces in question, units in buildings still ascribing to ‘anachronistic aesthetics’ can be thought of as encapsulating affective responses of users in a past temporality. This means that not only the space itself, but the affect that it produces and stores—ranging from isolation, tedium, nostalgia, delirium, familiarity, and resentment, to loss and alienation—can be considered anachronistic. The shades of the particular affective responses in a given space may be infinite, but what resonates as remarkably similar amongst ethnographic interviews, personal accounts and anecdotal evidence is the degree to which embodied affective responses in khrushchevka microrayons recall and reenact a sense of being in distinctly Soviet time, by virtue of being located, in aesthetic terms, an overwhelmingly Soviet space. By no means does this preposition attempt to imply that the temporal character of microrayons is solely defined through anachronisms, unanimously trapping its inhabitants in an affective and temporal vortex of the Soviet past. Anachronies are certainly not the only temporalizations to be traced in these spaces. However,

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

by exploring anachronism as one of the temporalizing qualities of the microrayon, it allows these spaces to be placed in question with such concepts like modernity, obsolescence, and generational time. For this reason, the characterization of both space and affect through the principle of anachronism, in the Rancierien (2015) sense, is highly enabling. Rather than conflating anachronistic spaces with the term’s pejorative connotation of something that is outdated, obsolete, and thus worthy of being discarded, forgotten or modernized, I opt for a different understanding. By conceptualizing the Soviet prefabricated, khrushchevka microrayons on the periphery of Moscow as anachronistic—or as something that pertains to a past epoch but persists nonetheless, thus “leaving its time”—it illuminates the spaces of the microrayons as ones with the potential and “capacity to define completely original points of orientation” (Ranciere 2015: 47). In this case, a phenomenological landscape of multiple, intersecting, or hybrid temporalities is neither redundant nor nonsensical, but valid and productive. These assertions work towards an understanding of how we can begin to understand space as a temporalizer of affect, assigning certain temporal qualities to affective responses that are engendered in, or emerge in relation to the space itself. Every affective response has some sort of temporal signature aligned with the time, historical context, and spatial circumstances it was elicited in. Vice versa, each space or architectural form is inscribed with its own temporal signature of the epoch it was created in. Whereas a space, community, affective response or material object whose temporal signature is aligned with that of the contemporary moment has its perceived ‘temporality’ neutralized by way of its integration with contemporaneity. Naturally, spaces of all architectural natures arouse, retain and amplify affective responses. But, when the triggers and defining characteristics of said affective responses are overwhelmingly tied to a continuity of a bygone age that persists via space, it is then that the affect becomes “temporalized” as anachronistic. Not because it has now acquired a temporality that it had once lacked, but rather, because of the ability we have gained to register and read its temporal signature that had been previously assimilated to invisibility. In other words, affect becomes temporalized not because it lacked a temporal signature originally, but rather because we begin to value, read, acknowledge, investigate and discuss said affect on the basis of its temporal qualities and characteristics once it diverges from the contemporary—discussions that would appear largely redundant had the temporality of the affect in question aligned with that of its contemporary era. Although state led socialism has been formally terminated, it leaves its skeleton through the built form and landscapes of everyday life such as the khrushchevka microrayons. These buildings and spaces were conceived with a utopian socialist vision in mind: to be reflective of ‘honest’ architecture that was equitable and functional. Any utopia, in its presupposition of reaching a superior end-goal is “a-chronia, it assumes atemporality” (Boym 1994: 130) by default. Naturally, any such utopian

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spatial constructions, as these housing districts created under a socialist modernist framework, are doubly vulnerable to time and obsolescence, for their material decay corresponds to a notion of ideological decay—of a utopian project becoming dystopian. Indeed, over the past decades, the moniker ‘khrushchevka’ has evolved alongside processes of material decay to become the colloquial khrushchoba, a combination of khrushchevka and the Russian word for slum, trushchoba. Spaces conceived and constructed under socialist regimes are experiencing increasing and very tangible signs of decay. In fact, khrushchevkas were not built to exceed five storeys so as to not legally necessitate an elevator, which would slow down production speeds and increase production costs (Ibid.). However, this now poses significant accessibility barriers to the elderly and those in need of assistive devices. These material degradations are not a new phenomenon, but rather the rushed initial construction of many such buildings, minimal maintenance and downloading of responsibility come privatization in the 1990s meant that these conditions have been ongoing for decades. As Lahusen describes, built socialist was, in both a material and immaterial sense, in a constant state of decay and ruination from its conception, however, “as for the people [who still live in the ‘ruins’ of socialism], they endured […] because they are home” (Lahusen 2006: 736). To see the signs of obsolescence materializing in Soviet prefabricated microrayons is to see the waves of historical progression that these sites were witness to reveal themselves simultaneously. A city’s built form has the potential to blend temporalities within itself, most often seen through the ocular of material wear and tear. As buildings begin to fade, crack, chip and leak, they are revealing their allegorical signs of historical process (Edensor 2013). Such buildings function equally as palimpsests, with various layers of histories and identities, that peel away at often arbitrary and non-synchronous ways, rendering a space to be the materialization of a certain “temporal collage” (Edensor 2005b: 834). To see a microrayon, a complex of buildings created to represent the utopian feats of socialism, not only persist in a capitalist present—but to persist as spaces that were originally conceived of to be post-capitalist, now deteriorating as Moscow’s obsolete castoffs on the margins of capitalist city’s great expanse—is a tragic anachrony. Overlooked and forgotten spaces, usually abandoned industrial areas, are often discursively conflated with waste landscapes. However, what is believed to be a waste landscape is not simply an abandoned industrial space, but may also encompass landscapes of dwelling and transition located on the urban periphery (Bobkova 2014: 11). In these apparently forgotten, peripheral spaces of the microrayons, as Bobkova describes, the “memory of the past seems to predominate over the present...they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city” (Ibid). Indeed, commonly, the whole of Moscow’s periphery of microrayons are thought of as a single district, with little colloquially disseminated knowledge of their cultural or geographic distinctions; in contrast, the dis-

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

tinctions of central neighbourhoods in Moscow are quite pronounced in the geographic imaginations of the city (Sitar 2014). Previous social network data analyses have found that these spaces, which make up approximately 75 percent of the territory of Moscow are “practically not mentioned in social networks, either positively or negatively...in order words, it is missing from the conscious image of place they inhabit” (Sitar 2014: 478). There appears to be a significant blind spot in the collective consciousness of the Moscow peripheries—few people think about where they are located, and fewer people think about the microrayons much at all. However, the tides are turning: increasingly, local organizations and galleries have begun reflecting and commenting on the particularities of their landscapes of ‘our common modernity’ (Boym 2008: 36). In addition, tens of thousands of local residents of Moscow’s khrushchevka microrayons, facing threats of demolition and resettlement, have taken to social networking platforms. They have begun posting optimistic vignettes in their khrushchevkas as a testament to the validity and viability of the microrayon way of life in contemporary Moscow. Despite these more recent affirmations, and the fact that similar prefabricated districts still make up much of the available housing stock across the rest of the former Soviet Union (Lahusen 2006), the stigma directed at khrushchevka microrayons persists nevertheless. This is poignantly the case in Moscow proper, where the associations of state neglect, disrepair and worsening living conditions, contrast particularly starkly with the pace, scale and monumental optics of new urban developments within the metropolis. In the work “Screens” by Olga Chernysheva, who adapted texts by Leonid Talochkin in her 2017 installation at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, she displays the following quote alongside a video of a Soviet teapot and a pair of eyeglasses: The better we know the composition of a living space, the less we notice changes within it. Everyday objects lose that nominative case. They pass into the genitive case. It is as if they are not there. They are no longer present in their former capacity, but their immutability remains and, and you need even more powerful optics to see their presence. Just as the integrity and significance of the mundane teapot and glasses are lost through time, the topology of the microrayon seems to similarly require increasingly powerful optics in order to be acknowledged, valued and recognized. The Soviet microrayons are spaces that unfortunately possess little or no mainstream “historical capital” (Nora 1989: 7), thus cultivating little desire to study, value, protect and remember them. However, even the stigmatized ‘waste landscapes,’ such as the khrushchevka microrayons, are vital spaces of social history that deserve to be acknowledged, honoured, and remembered in their own right. The difference between the treatment of ‘waste landscapes’ in the West and the Eastern Bloc is that the ‘waste landscape’ of Soviet standardized housing has virtually no ‘exhibiti-

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on value’ or noticeable gentrification as Lahusen explains, and people “continue to live in these concrete ruins of socialism” (Lahusen 2006: 738). In fact, the waves of gentrification in Moscow seem to occur not through repurposing these industrial microrayon buildings, but rather through their demolition. Cityscapes are topological collages of various histories, temporalities and epochs that are charged with memory politics—as to which spaces are allowed to remain—and the politics of forgetfulness, as to which spaces are erased and subsequently omitted from the historical continuity of the landscape. As cities are made and remade, the destructed space takes to its grave the most direct and poignant repositories of memory. In tandem, the destruction of certain spaces similarly erases inherent temporalities that were embedded in them. Therefore, the omittance of particular spaces and architectures not only disrupts historical continuity, but prevents potential constructions of memories and subjectivities that could and would have been rooted in the erased space, and subsequently, rooted in the erased space’s temporality. If we think of the khrushchevka microrayons as “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 1989), perhaps it is then their material persistence despite the arrival of new epochs, expectations and desires—their anachronistic essence, in other words—that lends them the fundamental purpose of serving as a literal ‘space of memory’: a space that haunts, a space stops time and blocks the work of forgetting. However, many of those that remain in these spaces of the microrayons, continuing their lives in the same prefabricated Soviet buildings are not allowed to forget, simply because their space does not let them. Although spatial memory does not necessarily need to be tethered to specific objects once it is instilled in the mind, any “material loss sustained by the group would translate into mnemonic aporia” (Scribner 2003: 26). Space’s endurance is stronger than immaterial impressions, and while impressions of space also endure, active presence within space reproduces stronger impressions than through memory alone. Accordingly, the precipitation of the affect arising from and within the microrayon, and the peculiar temporal qualities that it possesses, is much stronger in those who still reside rather than in those who have left. Those who have left, rely on their memory’s spatial reconstructions to conjure up similar emotive responses, whereas those who persist, whose bodies are continuously interacting with the affective atmospheres of said spaces, are far more exposed to the above-mentioned phenomena. To forget an inconvenient or uncomfortable past is often a luxury of those who have the resources to divorce themselves from the spaces that birthed said past. Although not all residents of Moscow’s prefabricated buildings are necessarily low-income, those of higher incomes rarely choose to stay unless they have been promised a new, replacement unit provided by the City (Krasheninnokov 2003: 14). These individuals, however, still possess the economic ability to relocate if they so choose. Other higher-income residents have already moved elsewhere but remain

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

listed as residents as they sublet their previous, prefabricated homes, problematizing what limited socioeconomic demographic data there is on Moscow’s microrayon residents. What is known, however, is that many residents that continue living in such prefabricated districts belong to what Dzrevus calls the “economically disabled part of society,” such as the elderly, immigrants and those with lower levels of education, contributing to feelings of “imprisonment” in these spaces because of a lack of material and social opportunity to leave (Dzrevus 2013: 52). Although, as mentioned above, many residents have begun to defend their microrayons over the last year, their spatial appreciation appears to still find itself in the minority. As such, many of those who have the material ability to leave, do. Those who stay are often either barred financially or socially from leaving. To be embodied in this space, is to be imbued by anachronistic phenomenology that both continuously loops back to past moments, and glides parallel to modern notions of capitalist time. In attaining the capital necessary to divorce oneself from the space of the microrayon, it can be thought of as attaining the ability to divorce oneself from affective temporal distortions, in a step taken to attempt to join linear, capitalist real-time and representations of ‘contemporary’ Moscow. In “Belyaevo Forever”, architect Kuba Snopek proposed to preserve Belyaevo, a prefabricated microrayon in south-western Moscow, as a UNESCO World Heritage site for the legacy it boasts of housing and inspiring prominent Moscow Conceptualist artists. While some residents were excited about the attention their neighbourhood was receiving following Snopek’s preposition, other residents filed an official complaint to the City fearing that if their neighbourhood were to be preserved as a World Heritage site, that would halt investment, improvements and ultimately “conserve the status quo—they didn’t want that to happen” (Snopek 2015: 118). It is fair to say that the residents who filed the complaint see their material surroundings as yet another reminder of a separation between some discarded life on the periphery and that of the pulsing centre. In other words, perhaps those residents are searching to ‘re-enter’ contemporaneity and to shed their anachronistic spatiality that seems to be constructing barriers to their full participation in the city. Despite of the residents’ anxiety, the task of preserving these standardized, and thus, often anonymous housing districts, is an uphill battle to say the least. One idea proposed by Snopek would be to propose to preserve just the Ninth Quarter of Cheremushki, the first microrayon; however, if that is successful, “it will be the first and last time this preservation method will work” (Ibid: 19). As the experimental site of conception of this empire of standardized housing, this is the only site that has any claims to uniqueness that could be used to bait a preservation order, thus no other subsequent site could be preserved on the basis of architectural significance (Ibid). Otherwise, to preserve other microrayons would be a nearimpossible feat. Simply put, the landscape of the khrushchevka microrayon is not a

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profitable one for neoliberal urban agendas—not in terms of real estate values that could easily be maximized in place of these sprawling complexes, nor in trying to create a seductive branding of Moscow as a top tier, world class city—upon which the khrushchevka is but a blemish. In February 2017, Putin ordered the demolition and resettlement of Moscow’s khrushchevkas, which still house 1.6 million residents according to Mayor Sobyanin (Byrnes 2017). I believe this decision, if carried out in its entirety, would be incredibly historically irresponsible. To deny history is to cheat the present. This ubiquitous landscape of standardized socialist building typologies—a landscape that has been so instrumental in amplifying affects and shaping subjectivities—is essential to the character and memory of the city’s residents and of Moscow itself, not to mention the myriad of other cities littered with these standardized districts. The just and free city, as Pile urges, “will need to find ways to accommodate its ghosts (whether from the past, the present or the future; whether personal or collective; whether dead or alive)” (Pile 2005: 161). Rather than accommodation, Moscow has opted for eradication. To demolish the Soviet microrayons would mean that the most ubiquitous remnant of the late modernist epoch, which so profoundly impacted life, culture and consciousness, would be erased from the urban fabric, and subsequently, eventually erased from collective memories. To erase these historically monumental spaces would break any holistic attempts at recognizing the coherence between social and cultural experiences and progressions, “creating a hole, disrupting the logical continuity of history” (Snopek 2015: 117). However, even if the khrushchevka microrayons were to disappear, that does not mean that the years of conditioned cultural scripts, habitual affective responses, cognitive effects and neuroses would similarly cease to exist. They will surely persist even if the spaces that created them would be gone, resulting in sensations of even more profound separation between the capitalist, linear real-time and the persistent socialist time, that so many individuals are thus tuned into. If this occurs, we will perhaps see a triad of socio-temporal orientations exist amidst Moscow’s urban fabric: there will be those who have sufficient capital to actively and willingly leave the microrayon, adapting to a new space, and thus joining and riding along with capitalist real-time; there will be those who remain in Soviet microrayon spaces, attuned to a socialist time that ticks out of sync with contemporary notions of capitalist time; and finally there will be a third meandering, transitional socialist time for individuals who have internalized their anachronized temporal signatures of through the Soviet spaces that raised them, but have since lost that same space, perhaps involuntarily, to ground them in the former socialist time. They will thus be relegated to the periphery of an already peripheral temporality, facing the challenge of re-aligning their habitual and now asynchronous rhythms—a task that, perhaps, lasts longer than a lifetime can afford.  

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

                                                                          ***   Reflecting on my field trip to Moscow, I seem to have found myself simultaneously in the past, present and future whilst living in our khrushchevka microrayon. I felt this futurity as I consciously memorized each of my movements, navigations and placements in the apartment and surrounding neighbourhood for the day when a sequence of deaths leaves me in charge of its fate. Don’t forget the route to the notarial office. Don’t forget which folder holds the internal passports and power of attorney—and don’t forget where this folder is hidden. I was in the present as I attempted to carve out my own pathways and associations within the city, mastering the pathways in the rather disorientating standardized districts. Finally, it’s not simply that I feel as though I am in the past here, but that I can feel the past. I feel that as I navigate through our microrayon, slowly walking out of the metro after a long day, stopping for groceries. I follow the same stomped out, shortcut paths as some working mothers did once upon a time in the Soviet era, remembering the hurrying to deliver the heavy bags they queued for hours to receive after work. I repeat the inability to part with food and material possessions, seemingly forgetting that the only world I have been fortunate enough to know myself was not one of scarcity. But amidst cartons of decades-old medicine, cosmetics, stale food, and ripped clothing, how could I be so entitled to discard an entire piece of cheese because of a few spots of mold, or a weathered, but still functioning, pair of shoes? How could I sleep easy in this panelled village knowing how much I might have spent on food in the city centre that day, rather than bringing a sandwich from the pantry of a neighbour? The way this trauma has splintered and precipitated feels infinite. There is a particular guilt that emerges when living a life that oscillates between continents, yet is strongly pulled to the side of Western abundance. Whereas my grandmother and her khruschevka neighbours live in what could not be described as much other than hyper-condensed poverty. I have the ability to leave, to divorce myself from that apartment, from that apartment block, from those spaces and all that they incubate. When I had initially returned to the khrushchevka on this visit after years of estrangement, I distinctly sensed the contours of my discomfort when rehearsing what felt like folding and compressing our bodies to navigate our 40-some shared square meters. I continued to sense this discomfort knowing that each gesture in front of the window was being watched by dozens of rectangular, uniform eyes. Slowly, however, that discomfort melted into a rhythm I could finally tune into: I tuned into the familiar warmth of the kitchens that radiated from the windows of each unit come sunset; I tuned into the loneliness of the elderly left to live in solitude in a concrete box; I tuned into the irrevocable need to fill the silence with the droning voice of a news anchor just to have someone to talk to, to criticize, to argue with. I think we’re better off with a sitcom.

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“This is what living in Moscow ‘today’ must look like,” I think as I watch the comedic escapades of three families living in a newly constructed residential neighbourhood. Their homes are just as standardized, aren’t they? Just, now, they bulge in odd places and boast brighter colours than a panel of concrete has ever adorned. Is that all it takes to be happy? Were we happy in our khrushchevkas, the relics of the exuberant Soviet Thaw? I belong to one of the last generations to be born into the khrushchevka apartments, the grandchildren of their original settlers, that must now see them off as they are wiped from the face of the earth. We didn’t inherit the exuberance, excitement, liberation—or even the alienation, frustration and disgust of the previous generation that makes it easier for them to part with the space. No, we inherited the epilogue. We inherited the demolition. I struggle to watch these structures disappear; to me, it’s a funeral of sorts. I feel a need to mourn, yet, there doesn’t seem to be room for this. I am not expected to mourn. I am not given an opportunity to mourn. The mayor and the president certainly did not ask me if I needed to mourn. The bulldozers, cranes, and wrecking balls didn’t ask me if I finished mourning. But when did I start mourning? Or have I always been mourning this place? I recall anecdotes of being dragged out of the door kicking and screaming when we embarked on our journey to the airport to leave that apartment once and for all. It was a journey to leave Moscow, to leave freshly post-Soviet Russia, to leave some sort of poverty that my family was promised didn’t exist in the West, and, naively, to try to leave behind the remnants of that Soviet past. I used to picture this anecdote vividly, yet it’s been growing hazier at the contours every passing day. It appears that even my memory is in mourning. Is my mourning of this space even my own? Who else’s could it be? My mother’s? Unlikely. She’s ready to demolish the building, to sell our promised unit, to burn her passport. Is it my grandmother’s? Perhaps, partially. She petitioned fiercely to be relocated to this khrushchevka, some 50 odd years ago. This apartment—its balcony, its window panes, its door frames, its cabinets—witnessed everything. They witnessed every loss: the upbringing of a child and the death of one, the building of a family and its destruction, the collapse of the Soviet state and the crisis of transition, the exodus of the emigres, the unquantifiable volume of isolation. Although she lives alone, she sees her entire life packed up in this compact apartment, sometimes bursting at the seams. My grandmother prays every day to die before our building is demolished. Does she realize then that I, as my family’s last remaining sympathizer of the khrushchevka, will be left to signal the DNR? That the cremation will be left to me, that I will be the one to scatter the ashes and to erect the tombstone? That I will be the one to read the eulogy?

Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography

She jokes worryingly that the possessions which litter our apartment will be discarded after her death before our plane even touches down on the runway in Moscow. I have already begun the process of slowly importing from the apartment: an orange, ceramic Soviet teacup and saucer that my grandmother drinks milk from and I shell sunflower seeds into; my mother’s old clothes from when she was a schoolgirl; the ubiquitous polka dot pantry boxes made in Tallinn; someone’s war medal. This time around, however, a panic ensued as my plane was about to commence landing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. It had finally hit me that I was here, in Toronto. No—not ‘here’—my ‘here’ was still oriented around Moscow. I was there—my suitcase filled with my favourite possessions. They were there, they weren’t here. In attempting to hoard, save and reconstruct that space, I had managed to fracture my own fantasy. Now the rhythms of life in the khrushchevka—at times slow and dizzying from its repetitive mundanity, and at times quick, flurrying, and overwhelming in its crampedness—would never be the same. These rhythms would never again circle around to include the orange cup—it would be a blank, a further destruction, a further erasure. And here—or there—losing track of my diasporic orientation, these items lose their charge, they lose their pulse. They become museumed on shelves, or forgotten in boxes. In trying to save them, or perhaps simply some fantasy, I had inadvertently accelerated my own mourning, it seems. Upon investigating my nostalgic imports, my mother remarked that history has an interesting way of playing tricks on us: everything she spent her entire life running away from, her daughter brought back.                                                                             ***   The words “hello to the next generation” were found written on the walls of a recently demolished khrushchevka. As we brace ourselves, collectively, unceremoniously, for their demolition, the generation of today silently whispers to the generation of tomorrow: “We were here.”

References Andreotti, Libero/Lahiji, Nadir (2016): The Architecture of Phantasmagoria. New York: Routledge. Andrusz, Gregory/Szelenyi, Ivan (eds.) (1996): Cities after socialism: urban and regional change and conflict in post-socialist societies. Cambridge: Blackwell. Attwood, Lynne (2012): “Privatisation of Housing in Post-Soviet Russia: A New Understanding of Home?” Europe-Asia Studies 64 no. 5, 2012, pp. 903-928.

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Axenov, Konstantin/Brade, Isolde/Bondarchuk, Evgenij (eds.) (2006): The transformation of urban space in post-Soviet Russia. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter (1968): “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century” New Left Review 48, 1968, pp. 77-88. Bobkova, Jenya (2014): “Productive Landscapes of Moscow: Binding Modernities,” (master’s thesis, TU Delft, 2014), https://issuu.com/jenyabobkova/docs/ productive_landscapes_bobkova_a4. Bohme, Gernot (1993): “Atmospheres as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36 no.1, 1993, pp. 113-126. Bourdieu, Pierre (1980): The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boym, Svetlana (1994): Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boym, Svetlana (1995): “From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia.” Representations 49, no. 1, 1995, pp. 133-166. Boym, Svetlana (2002): The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books. Boym, Svetlana (2008): Architecture of the Off-Modern. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Buchli, Victor (2000): An Archaeology of Socialism. Berg Publishers. Buck-Morss, Susan (2000): Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The passing of mass utopia in East and West. London: The MIT Press. Byrnes, Mark (2017): “The Disappearing Mass Housing of the Soviet Union.” CityLab, March 8, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/03/the-disappearingmass-housing-of-the-soviet-union/518868/?utm_source=nl__link6_031717. Dzrevus, Petras (2013): “Postmodern Discourse of Post-Soviet Large Housing Districts: Modelling the Possibilities.” Rigas Tehniskas Universitates Zinatniskie Raksti 7, 2013, pp. 51-58. Edensor, Tim (2005a): “Waste Matter - the Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World.” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 3, 2005, pp. 311-322. Edensor, Tim (2005b): “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 6, 2005, pp. 829-849. Edensor, Tim (2013): “Reconnecting with Darkness: Gloomy Landscapes, Lightless Places.” Social & Cultural Geography 14, no. 4, 2013, pp. 446-465. Franceschini, Silvia/Katerina Chuchalina, Katerina (2013): The Way of Enthusiasts. Venice: Marsilio Editori. Golubchikov, Oleg et al. (2014): “The hydrid spatialities of transition: capitalism, legacy and uneven urban economic restructuring.” Urban Studies 51 no.4, 2014, pp. 617-633. Harris, Steven (2013): Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press.

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Haukanes, Haldis/Trunk, Susanna (2013): “Memory, Imagination, and Belonging Across Generations: Perspectives from Postsocialist Europe and Beyond.” Focaal no. 66, 2013, p. 3. Hirsch, Marianne (1997): Family Frames. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Ingold, Tim (1993): “The temporality of the landscape.” World Archaeology 25, no. 2, 1993, pp. 152-174. Jameson, Frederic (1991): Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University. Krasheninnokov, Alexey (2003): “The Case of Moscow, Russia,” in Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements. 2003, 14: http:// www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report/pdfs/Moscow.pdf Lahusen, Thomas (2006): “Decay Or Endurance? The Ruins of Socialism.” Slavic Review 65, no. 4, 2006, (pp. 736-746. Laszczkowski, Mateusz (2016): Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana. New York: Berhahn. Lowenthal, David (2015): The Past is a Foreign Country—Revisited. Cambridge University Press. Mbembe, Achille (2001): On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meuser, Philip/Zadorin, Dmitrij (2015): Towards a typology of Soviet mass housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955-1991. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2015. Nadkarni, Maya/Shevchenko, Olga (2004): “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices.” Ab Imperio 2004, no.2, 2004. Nora, Pierre (1989): “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire.” Representations no. 26, 1989, pp. 7-24. Pile, Steve (2005): Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. Sage Publications, 2005, 161. Pusca, Anca (2016): Post-communist aesthetics. London: Routledge. Ranciere, Jacques (2009): “The aesthetic dimension: Aesthetics, politics, knowledge.” Critical Inquiry 36 no.1, 2009, pp. 1-19. Ranciere, Jacques (2015): “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth (English translation.” InPrint 3, no.1, 2015, pp. 21-52. Reckwitz, Andreas (2012): “Affective spaces: a praxeological outlook.” Rethinking History 16 no. 2, 2012, pp. 241-258. Reid, Susan (2019): “Palaces in our hearts: Caring for Khrushchevki” in Grossman T. and Nielson P. (eds). Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling since 1945. New York: Routledge. Scribner, Charity (2003): Requiem for Communism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sitar, Sergei (2014): “The Mobilized Landscape,” in Archaeology of the Periphery. Moscow Urban Forum, 2014: https://issuu.com/mosurbanforum/docs/archaeology_of_the_periphery

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Smith, Mark (2015): “Faded Red Paradise: Welfare and the Soviet City after 1953.” Contemporary European History 24, no. 4, 2015, pp. 597-615. Snopek, Kuba (2015): Belyaevo Forever: A Soviet Microrayon on its Way to the UNESCO List. Berlin: DOM Publishers. Varga-Harris, Christine (2015): Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Ithica: Cornell University Press. Yurchak, Alexei (2005): Everything was forever, until it was no more. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zemblyas, Michalinos (2014): “Nostalgia, postmemories and the lost homeland: exploring different modalities of nostalgia in teacher narratives.” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 36 no. 1, 2014, pp. 7-21.

(Re)Mapping National Space: The One Hundred Tourist Sites of Bulgaria and Their Metamorphoses Daniela Koleva

This essay aims to understand the construction of national space through tourism in socialist and postsocialist Bulgaria. It is limited to a top-down approach, based on the assumption that the communist regime used a variety of ways to “colonize” society, including prescribed leisure and tourism, whose spatial aspect (the itinerary of the journey) could play an important role in the formation of desired collective identities. Therefore I focus here on a specific aspect of the territoriality of state power: its hegemony in the production and transformation of the imaginary space of the nation, that is, the official representations and initiatives, rather than their receptions, negotiations, and subversions.1 I will only touch on the latter in the conclusion, to highlight the emerging agency of local authorities and communities.

Socialist Leisure and Tourism In a broad sense, tourism can be defined as a “leisure activity” involving “movement through space” to “sites outside the normal places of residence and work” without material gain and “with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or townscape than normally found in everyday life” (Urry 2002: 2–3). A tourist trip resembles a museum visit: just like museum visitors, tourists obtain new knowledge (often in the infotainment mode), but mostly they confirm what (they think) they already know about history, the world, and themselves. Early theorizations on tourism have already pointed out its aspect of being “a form of ritual respect for society” (MacCannell 1973: 589). Tourism can indeed be viewed as a kind of modern ritual constructing, affirming, and maintaining collective identities. Even some structural similarities exist between ritual and tourism: both lie outside the 1

To put it in Lefebvre’s concepts, I am dealing here with ideological “representations of space” (conceptualized space) rather than “representational space,” meaning that of the inhabitants, or lived space, see Lefebvre (1991: 38–39).

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everyday (the profane sphere), both offer a shift of usual social roles and a kind of liminal experience between the departure from one’s home and the return to it—that is, both constitute an “anti-structure” (see Turner 1966) of everyday life. Therefore we can expect tourist sites would acquire a certain “monumentality” in Henri Lefebvre’s sense, setting them apart from ordinary spaces, just like monuments are opposed to ordinary buildings. Although it has a voluntary and disinterested nature, the tourist trip must be morally justified/justifiable. Situated in the non-ordinary sphere of existence, outside of the everyday/profane, its goal is symbolically sacred. This quasi sacrality becomes most obvious in pilgrimage tourism, but it is also quite conspicuous in educational tourism, which constitutes my main focus of interest here. Tourism seems to have implied different things west and east of the iron curtain. While western research on tourism (from early milestones such as MacCannell 1973 to the currently influential Urry 2002) has been premised on theorizations of pleasure and consumption, the understanding of tourism in the context of state socialism, and of a gradual sliding of the regime into national ideology, needed to be based on other assumptions. It faced specific theoretical challenges rooted in the tensions between the ideological prioritization of industrial production and the need for the legitimation of consumption and leisure. These tensions seem to have been (partly at least) resolved in the regime’s efforts to create “the new socialist person.” In this respect, communist regimes followed two main principles. The first was the one of social engineering, that is, the belief that not only the material environment but also human beings and human lives were subject to molding according to the ideal. Hence they ought to be a target for organized influence. This idea led to the second principle, namely, that time free from work ought to be used for self-improvement. The working people’s free time ought not to be empty and idle, but meaningful and enriching; not simply leisure, but “cultured leisure” and “active leisure.”2 Thus the effort after organization and control was amplified by the one after meaning and improvement, so as to eliminate unregulated, uncontrolled free time that could lend itself to non-useful and unapproved utilization. The anthropologist Katherine Verdery has termed this gradual expropriation of individuals’ time the “etatization of time,” that is, its divergence from individuals’ private goals and its bringing under the control of the institutions (see Verdery 1996: 39–57).3 The etatization of time took place not only during working hours but also through organized activities such as public ceremonies, parades, meetings,

2 3

On the ideological conceptualization of leisure during the early years of socialism, see Elenkov (2013). On tourism and the preoccupation of Stalin’s regime with the control of movement, see also Gorsuch (2003: 760–785).

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and the like, as well as queueing, which demanded the physical presence of people at certain places for certain periods of time. Hence tourism under socialism could be expected to have a teleology related to the control of individuals’ time and bodies, and at the same time also to the education and molding of socialist citizens. Research on Soviet tourism has underlined the “quest to invest meaning in travel and leisure activities” and “the productive value of touring and travel for intellectual and physical self-improvement” (Koenker 2003: 659). In addition, instead of an interest toward cultural otherness, toward different places and peoples, the focus of attention lay on the national past. This idea held particularly true in Bulgaria—a tendency probably rooted in Johann Gottfried Herder’s intellectual legacy advocating a cultural-historical perspective and a romantic nationalism, quite influential in the Balkans.4 No less important, control of the past provided a source of legitimization for power in the present. Therefore tourism in socialist Bulgaria systematically privileged sites of memory over sites of Otherness.5 It linked visible material remains and locations to narratives about the past, thus granting them a certain historical significance. While the “ritual waiting” described by Verdery underlined the social distances between those who used to wait and the ones waited for, the ritual visits to specific sites, especially in the framework of organized excursions, validated the legitimizing narrative of the regime. In addition to the temporal markers in the commemorative calendar, the spatial marking of the territory created a mythic narrative, which naturalized its own ideological premises. This, of course, is not specific to socialism. Dessislava Lilova has shown how in the nineteenth century, such a symbolic geography included contemporary Ottoman towns in the imagined map of the Bulgarian motherland, thereby europeanizing and modernising them (see Lilova 2003). But let us look more closely into the symbolic geography of Bulgaria in the second half of the twentieth century and try to decipher its messages.

“Explore the Socialist Motherland” The tradition of organized tourism in Bulgaria has its roots in the late nineteenth century, most notably in the initiatives of the author, lawyer, hiker, and traveler Aleko Konstantinov (1863–1897). On 27 August 1895, he organized an outing to the

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It should also be kept in mind that the restrictions on travel abroad necessarily limited socialist tourism almost exclusively to domestic tourism and organized trips to the USSR and other socialist countries. Jay Winter explicitly links the construction of sites of memory with a top-down approach to the past, where they serve “as materialization of national, imperial, or political identity” (Winter 2010: 316).

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highest peak (2290 m) of the Vitosha Mountains on the outskirts of the capital Sofia. Some three hundred people climbed the peak on foot or on horseback. The invitation for the event, published in a widely read daily, addressed “all those who are dying to make the best use of their free time and [who] seek peace of mind and pure delight in the wild beauty and the overwhelming grandeur of our wonderful nature” (Konstantinov 1974: 253). The idea was to establish a tourist club aiming to “stir and maintain mutual love for hiking across the picturesque countryside all over Bulgaria; [to] get to know the country; [to] provide descriptions of the hikes and the countryside; … to recommend to the government certain measures for facilitating the tours and preventing hikers from losing their way in inaccessible and pathless places” (Konstantinov 1974: 254–255). Most of the participants came from urban milieus and occupations.6 They established a tourist movement with the motto “Explore the Motherland to love it.” We can interpret this phenomenon as an aspect of the normative utopia of modernity: the urban way of life, as well as leisure time, as phenomenona and values of modernity, gave rise to the very notion of “nature” as an object of contemplation, admiration, exploration, and care (in one’s leisure time) rather than an arena of human labor or a set of realities to handle on a daily basis (weather, landscape, terrain, etc.). The first tourist clubs seem to have been motivated by such a contemplative and gratuitous interest in nature. They used volunteer work and donations to build mountain huts and shelters, to clear paths, and to blaze trails. The essentially modern notion of nature and the practice of mountain hiking as a leisure activity were enthusiastically embraced by (mostly educated) urban residents, but they appeared quite unusual to large masses of the population.7 Therefore, the mission of patriotic education must have lent legitimacy to the initiative. The discovery of the beauties of Bulgarian nature was not to be an end in itself; rather, it was expected to reinforce patriotic feelings. This link between tourism and patriotism proved important for the later socialist reconceptualizations of tourism. After the Communist-led coup d’êtat in 1944, the tourist movement discontinued: the new regime had the tourist clubs merged into sports clubs, and the latter were placed under the control of Communist Party satellite organizations. The tradition of outdoors toruism was then reestablished in the late 1950s, but in a top-down way and “with socialist content.” Todor Zhivkov, at that time already the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), stated in his speech at the First National Tourist Convention:

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Among them were 110 officials, 25 students, 15 teachers, 6 lawyers, 4 professors, 3 medical doctors, 3 pharmacists, and 2 ex-ministers, as against 3 peasants, 2 carpenters, and 6 shoemakers, see Konstantinov (1974: 260). Evidenced by the pejorative vernacular expression bair-budala (“hill-fool”), someone who climbed hills for no practical reason, spending time and energy in quite a silly way.

(Re)Mapping National Space

To organize a genuine march for exploring the Motherland, its beauties, historical sites, monuments and landmarks, the new socialist construction sites, which will make it possible for the thousands of tourists not only to admire the beauties of nature, but also to acquaint themselves with the heroic past of the people, with the fruits of the selfless labour of the builders of socialism in this country—this is the important noble task of the Bulgarian Tourist Union. (BTS 1959: 41) The quote clearly indicates how the tourist movement’s priorities had been re-ordered in comparison with its earlier phase: the homeland was conceptualized no longer as nature and landscape only but primarily as history and contemporaneity. The party leader clearly saw the heroic past and socialist construction as having a better potential for patriotic education than the beauties of nature. The combination clearly set the task of ideological education: enjoying the charms of nature was not enough; knowledge of the heroic past and the socialist present was required. The leader’s insights were promptly developed into a program of the Bulgarian Tourist Union (BTU). Its statute defines the goals of the BTU as follows: •

• • •

•

to inculcate in its members the spirit of socialist patriotism, love and devotion to the Motherland through exploring it and through studying its heroic past, the struggle of the Party and the people, and the socialist construction; to work for improving the health of the working people and the youth through developing habits for active leisure close to nature; to contribute to the preparation of the working people and the youth for highy productive labour and defense of our socialist motherland; to struggle for the efflorescence of the life-giving Bulgarian-Soviet friendship and the friendship with the brotherly socialist countries, to work for peace and collaboration among nations and to expand its relations with tourists and mountaineers from all countries; to maintain international relations with similar organisations abroad, to organize mutual tourist and mountaineer exchange. (See Ustav na Bulgarskia turisticheski sayuz 1962: Article 2)

Thus the focus of the attention and activities of the Tourist Union was no longer nature but working people and youth. Contemplation and admiration were replaced by patriotic education, preparation for labor and defense, the improvement of health, peace, and friendship with the USSR and other brotherly socialist countries. Closely following this line, the Second Congress of the BTU (1961) called for the “saturation of the Union’s activities with rich patriotic and scientific-cognitive content, for the tightest linking of tourist events with the fulfilment of specific

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economic tasks” (Vtori kongres na BTS 1961: 55)8 . Fashioned according to the Soviet model, it aimed to generate “socialist patriotism” by creating a “correct understanding” of the past and investing it with “socialist meaning” (Gorsuch 2003: 761). On the level of practice, however, Bulgarian functionaries demonstrated a degree of originality in reinventing a tradition—the tourist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The program was put into action with the start of the movement “Explore the socialist Motherland” in 1966. This happened at the same peak of the Vitosha Mountains, perhaps to dispel any doubts in the return to tradition. Yet the newly instilled socialist content significantly altered the movement’s rationale: from exploring the motherland as nature and landscape to aquainting oneself with its history as a realization of the communist ideal; from sites of “peace of mind and pure delight” to sites laden with “institutional sacrality” (Nora 1984: vii).

Canonical Memory and the Tourist Canon In an influential article, the German literary and cultural scholar Aleida Assmann discusses two modes of cultural memory: canon and archive (see Assmann 2008). The canon is the active memory that implies selection and ordering, while the archive only accumulates, therefore constituting an institution of passive memory. The working memory, or the canon, indicates the presence of the past and its influence on the present. It is like a museum exhibition containing the most valuable and the most important aspects of the past. The cultural reference memory, or memory as archive, resembles the storehouse of a museum, where the past is contained without any relation to the present. The canon carries messages and creates models; it is the active memory, while the archive constitutes the referential memory. The canon excludes by selecting a few models; the archive aims at inclusion, guided by the effort to collect and store as much as possible. I propose that the movement “Explore the Socialist Motherland” was an instrument of canonical memory. I use the term “canonical” to refer also to the aspects of sacralization and commemoration, which have to do with the ritualist nature of tourism discussed above. The movement clearly and unequivocally linked sites of memory to physical places, thereby creating a kind of a tourist canon that established hierarchies of meaning and projected them onto the territory of the country. Like every canon, it was based on selection, appraisal, and the display of some aspects of the past at the expense of others. As in every canon, this selection was determined by an ideology and a political program that supplied the criteria for the appraisal of the past (what is of value and why). It was intimately linked with 8

Resolution of the Second Congress of the BTU, 27 May 1961 in Plovdiv.

(Re)Mapping National Space

the commemorative calendar and its instruments (rituals, ceremonies, mythologies), presenting the nation as a past and as a project—a communist project, in this particular case. The tourist movement had to mobilize the masses, especially the youth, for what the French researcher Anne-Marie Thiesse has called “identitary consumption” (consommation identitaire) (see Thiesse 1999). In this way, consumption became something legitimate and recommendable, and leisure time was saturated with meaning. To implement its patriotic-educational goals, however, the tourist movement had to control what tourists visted: they could not randomly see whatever they pleased, but would need to follow a kind of a checklist designed to ensure their molding as citizens of the socialist motherland. The list of the one hundred national tourist sites constituted precisely such an educational itinerary, or a tourist canon in a communist-educational context. It was compiled in the mid-1960s in accordance with “the three never failing sources of patriotism formulated by comrade T. Zhivkov—the heroic past of the Bulgarian people with its millennial culture and centuries-long struggle against the enslavers for national self-preservation and liberation, the glorious struggle of the working class and the whole working people against capitalism and fascism, the socialist present.” (IV kongres na BTS 17–18 april 1972: 65). Thus the hundred-sites movement also acquired a quasi-ritual character by linking the acquisition of specific knowledge to the pattern of growing up to become a “socialist person” and a “worthy member of the socialist society.” It opened a new kind of social space to school children and youth.9 The ceremonial agenda was meant not only to give a sense of completion to those who followed it but also to turn organiszed educational tourism into a state religion, a kind of pilgrimage to secular relics in museums and to monuments to secular martyrs acquiring their sacrality from an ideological discourse. As has been noted in research on Soviet tourism, not only the participation in “rituals of public self-admiration” (Gorsuch 2003: 771) but also the mere spatial aspect of travel itself, “the journey that placed

9

The movement was managed by a National Organizing Committee comprising representatives of a number of related institutions and organizations. The Organizing Committee approved the list of sites and later updated it. The participants received small booklets that were stamped at each visited site. Those who managed to visit twenty-five sites were awarded a bronze badge, a silver one was given for fifty sites, and a golden one for all one hundred. The latter were entitled to participate in a lottery that distributed five free trips abroad each year. The local and regional tourist associations were encouraged to organize trips to the national tourist sites. Many of them, especially those related to the national liberation struggle and the communist resistance, became a must for school trips and a stage for young pioneer and komsomol ceremonies. It seems that the movement enjoyed considerable popularity: the Fourth Congress of the BTU reported about 300,000 participants, 1,333 of them with golden badges.

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the traveller somewhere other than home,” had a widely recognized role in the formation of identities, especially national identities (Koenker 2003: 660). Domestic tourism was designed to contribute to the formation of physically and ideologically healthy socialist citizens. Let us now take a closer look at the list of the one hundred sites. The share of each type of site can give an idea of the priorities, or the rules of the canon (Table 1). Slightly more than one-third of the items on the list were museums (of history, ethnography, archaeology, art). The sites of socialist construction and those related to the history of the BCP and the partisan struggle (including monuments, memorials, museums of communist leaders) numbered sixteen to seventeen each, and together with the newly built resorts (strictly speaking, also examples of socialist construction), they too represented slightly more than one-third of all sites. The nature sites numbered twenty-three, and the religious ones amounted to two monasteries, and—as one item—the Metropolitan church and the mosque in Samokov. The latter, housing frescoes by members of the renouned Samokov iconography and painting school of the nineteenth century, were included in the list as art heritage, not as religious sites. The same largely held true for the monasteries, one of which, the Preobrazhenie monastery, was also known as a shelter to many national revolutionaries of the nineteenth century. Thus their selection remained consistent with the rules of the canon: echoing the regime’s aversion to religion, the religious sites were valued not qua religious significance but for their artistic and historical importance. By projecting history onto the territory, this national tourist inventory completed a symbolic mapping of the country to create a historically new version of the national space. Selecting and promoting certain exemplars, it reflected the vision of its creators about the most important anchors of Bulgarian memory and identity that should lead to the emergence of the new socialist person. The Fourth Congress of the BTU defined it as “a genuine school of patriotism, a school for forming zealous patriots-internationalists, passionately loving their socialist homeland, selflessly devoted to BCP, staunchly loyal to the great Soviet Union” (IV kongres na BTS 17–18 april 1972: 69). From the compilation of the list in the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s, when the movement was interrupted, considerable changes occurred (Table 1). Around one-third of the sites were replaced. Many of the freshly included ones were newly built, such as the National Palace of Culture and the Gallery of Foreign Art in Sofia, the Albena resort on the Black Sea, the Pantheon in Rousse, and the like. Some others, such as St. Sophia church, were restored and opened to the public during that period. Yet most conspicuous and most puzzling were the changes related to the third and never failing source of patriotism: socialist construction. Instead of adding new achievements, the Organizing Committee quietly took out almost two-thirds of the industrial enterprises, including the metallurgical plant Lenin in

(Re)Mapping National Space

Pernik, the Varna shipyard, and other symbols of early socialist industrialization, as well as the metallurgical giant Kremikovtsi on the outskirts of Sofia, promoted as the heart of socialist Bulgarian heavy industry. We can hypothesize about the reasons based on the report to the Fourth Congress of the BTU, which critically stated that “the formalism has become absolute because tourists are not let in the sites at all and their booklets are stamped by the door-keepers of the factories” (IV kongres na BTS 17–18 april 1972: 72). The report proposed urgent measures, but instead of demanding a more responsible attitude from the managers of the respective sites, changes were introduced in the list itself. That is, the changes were made in the inventory, the canon itself and its criteria. Compared to the end of the 1960s (Raychev et al. 1968), the number of sites of socialist construction dropped in the 1980s from sixteen (including fourteen industrial plants and two collective farms) to eight.10 This leads to the hypothesis that the ideological-educational potential of this type of site was re-estimated. Alternatively, we might assume that tourists’ visits interfered with the work of the factories and were therefore undesirable. Or that visitors’ safety could not be guaranteed. During the same period, the number of nature sites decreased as well, but the “beauties of nature” had received a lower priority already in T. Zhivkov’s speech a few years earlier. No mosques were included in the national inventory of the late 1980s. (The mid to late 1980s marked a period of forced assimilation against the Bulgarian Turks.) To compensate, the share of sites specifically designed for “identitary consumption,” that is, museums and memorials, increased. The geographical spread of the sites also changed: those in Sofia increased from six to fifteen. Partly, this resulted from a certain “optimization” aiming at better disciplining the tourists: while in the 1960s two sites were often listed under the same number (e.g., the Museum of Archaeology and the Museum of Ethnography), in the 1980s, this was no longer the case. Tourists were to visit twelve museums in Sofia, plus the National Palace of Culture, the Banner of Peace monument (both newly built) and Cherni Vrah, the highest peak of Vitosha Mountains. Thus the national tourist inventory of late socialism shifted toward a narrower specialization and a stricter adherence to its educational function. The models and the messages also changed to some extent. While the achievements of socialist industrialisation were quietly removed from the list and the communist sites stayed the same, the “national” ones increased both in number and in visibility, perhaps not without connection to the celebrations of the 1300th anniversary of the Bulgarian state in 1981. The spaces for tourist consumption thus gradually became nationalized in the later decades of socialism.

10

Ten industrial sites were taken out and two newly built architectural sites were added: the National Palace of Culture and the TV tower Snezhanka in the Rodopi Mountains.

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Postsocialist Tourist Inventory The movement “Explore the Socialist Motherland” quickly dwindled after 1989, to be re-established in 2003 under the motto “Explore Bulgaria—100 national tourist sites” and with a revised list of sites. It targets mostly young people and schoolchildren, and its goal is to acquaint the participants with “the most significant landmarks of nature, culture and history in Bulgaria” to educate them “in the spirit of patriotism and love for the motherland, and to contribute to the spiritual development of the nation” (Pravilnik na natsionalno dvizhenie… n.y. article 7 & 8). The BTU serves as the movement’s main organizer, and the Organizing Committee comprises representatives of the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Ministry of the Environment and Waters, the Ministry of Education and Science, the State Agency of Forestry, the Bulgarian Red Cross, the V. Levski Foundation, the Union of Automobilists in Bulgaria, National Radio and the National Television, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The list of participating institutions already suggests the project’s ambitions. How has the postsocialist tourist inventory been revised (Table 1)? First of all, the sites related to the communist narrative have been excluded, meaning the removal of almost one-third of all sites. Thus, in quantitative terms, the revision proved less significant than the one undertaken in the 1980s, but it was more radical because it resulted from a change in the selection criteria, that is, the rules of canon. In fact, some of the formerly excluded sites have returned to the list, but in modified or resignified versions. Thus the former Georgi Dimitrov museum is presently the National Politechnical Museum, and the former Museum of Brigadier Movement, enriched with an ethnography department, has become the Historical Museum of Dimitrovgrad. Another conspicuous aspect of the revision is the increase in the number of religious sites, from four to twenty-one (including thirteen functioning monasteries). The museums of mining (Pernik) and of the textile industry (Sliven) can be regarded as a new category—industrial heritage. All other categories, as well as most of the sites, have been retained. Further changes have amounted to the addition of new sites. Although the number remains limited to one hundred, the sites are many more: very often, two or more sites are listed under the same number, or a letter is added to the number to mark another site. Thus, while in 2006 the actual number of the one hundred sites was 146, in 2016 it was already is 212. According to an interviewed BTU official, the idea is to include up to 240 sites in the inventory, to give tourists a choice.

(Re)Mapping National Space

Table 1. Comparison of the 100 sites in 1968 (initial list), 1987 (revised list by the end of communist regime) and 2015 (re-established list). Type of sites

Number 1968

% 1968

Number 1987

Number 2015

% 2015

Museums and galleries (excluding those of communist functionaries)

39

34,5

39

101

47

Monuments and memorials (excluding the communist ones)

4

3,5

8

15

7

Archaeological sites

3

2,5

4

20

10

Architectural sites & architectural-ethnographic ensembles

5

4,5

3

21

10

Religious sites

4

3,5

4

21

10

Nature sites (incl. observatory & zoo)

23

20

13

32

15

Resorts

3

2,5

4

-

-

Socialist construction sites

16

14

8

-

-

Communist sites (BCP and partisan movement)

17

15

17

-

-

Industrial heritage

-

-

2

1

Total

114

100

212

100

100

Own elaboration based on: Raychev et al. (1968); Yanakiev/Kisyov/Raychev/Kostova (1987); and http://100nto.org/obekti/ordered-objects.html, last accessed on 20 May 2016.

If we take a closer look at the new tourist inventory, however, we will find that its principles are not new at all. In one aspect at least, they are entirely consistent with the late communist rules of the canon: again, a foundation narrative of a homogeneous nation is constructed, ignoring the presence of different ethnic and religious groups. The new list includes almost no sites related to the culture and identity of minority groups. The only exceptions are the Tombul mosque in Shumen and Demir Baba Tekke in northeast Bulgaria (the latter is a syncretic place of worship used by Muslims and Christians alike). The tourist symbol of the Eastern Rodopi Mountains, where more than half of the population is Turkish, is the archaeological site of Perperikon, which dates back to antiquity. The other sites included from the regional centre Kardjali are the ruins of a mediaeval Orthodox monastery with a newly built functioning church and the regional museum situated in a magnificent building from the early 1920s designed for a religious school. The description on the webpage of the one hundred sites states that the school was built by the “local community,” omitting, however, that that community was Mus-

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lim, and the school was thus a madrasa (medrese). The description stresses that the building never functioned as a religious school, but not that it did function as a Turkish school (see Regionalen istoricheski muzej n.y.). Thus diversity and cultural otherness become excluded not only from the national tourist inventory but also from the narratives of specific sites. Similarly, the region of Smolyan in the Western Rodopi Mountains, with its concentrated Pomak (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims) population, is represented mostly by nature sites (ten of the fourteen sites from the region included on the list, and almost a third of all nature sites). Again, the construction of the imaginary space serves a specific politics of representation. Having excluded the communist heritage and minority cultures, the new inventory glosses over discontinuities in an attempt at creating a linear narrative excluding the Ottoman period as well. The leading theme once again concentrates on a heroic past, now amounting to the national liberation struggle of the nineteenth century. This is obviously considered the historical period with the greatest integrative and consensual potential, hence it lies at the heart of the new tourist canon. Among the sites that can unequivocally be attributed to one period in history, the ones related to the National Revival (late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries) and the national liberation struggle predominate: there are forty-seven, including museums of national revolutionaries, monuments to people and events, and the like. Most of them have invariably been on the list of the one hundred sites since the 1960s. The sites related to antiquity and the Middle Ages have undergone more changes. Only three of the current twenty sites of antiquity were on the list from the 1980s. Some of the others (like the above-mentioned Perperikon) were discovered or restored and opened for the public only during the past few years. Four of a dozen medieval sites (apart from the religious ones) have been included in the list for the first time. While the medieval sites can easily be integrated into the continuous national narrative, the ancient ones—especially the Roman and early Christian ones—seem to relate to a larger European context. Can this be seen as a signal for another change in the postsocialist symbolic mapping, one seeking to include a European dimension through a symbolic repositioning in a European past?11

11

An alternative explanation can be given based on recent research into the often intimate link of archaeology to nationalism. For a Spanish nineteenth-century example, see Kohl (1998: 230). As the author has warned, “archaeological evidence may be peculiarly susceptible to manipulation for nationalist purposes because it is physical and visible to a nation’s citizens who interact with it, consciously or not, on a daily basis. Archaeological sites become national monuments, which are increasingly being transformed into lucrative tourist attractions… . Maps are compiled showing the distribution of sites identified ethnically and considered to be part of the state’s cultural patrimony” (Kohl 1998: 240).

(Re)Mapping National Space

Decanonisation, Elasticity and a Paradox The postsocialist hundred-sites movement started with a revision of the tourist inventory, but the subsequent additions to the list have not been subject to any selection, whether expert, political, or other. The National Organizing Committee decides on the expansion of the list based on proposals by mayors or the leaders of the organizations involved. The only condition for inclusion is that a site have fixed opening hours and that information about them is duly communicated. An entry fee of 300 BGN (153 €) applies, as well as an annual fee of 100 BGN. According to the movement’s statute, a site can be excluded from the list if it has no fixed opening hours, “no regular communication, has an inappropriate attitude to the visitors, or refuses to put a seal or to offer a stamp to the tourists” (Pravilnik na natsionalno dvizhenie… n.y.: article 30). This open and easy procedure, bypassing any expert judgment, perhaps best signals that the new tourist inventory is on its way of losing its canonical role. It does not impose any criteria related to type of sites, their authenticity, uniqueness, importance, or anything of the sort. The inclusion of a site on the list depends solely on the initiative of local actors and local authorities—a circumstance that could possibly have some democratizing potential. Yet localities and local communities seldom have an ideology or vision of their own. Most often they “parasitize” on the national idea and invent a local identity for tourism directly hanging on the national frame and overlooking (what could effectively be) markers of a distinctive local identity (cf. Cousin 2008). Thus in most cases, they do not really break with a national definition of cultural memory and with an ethnic definition of nationhood. Nevertheless, the structure of agency has changed and the politics in relation to the past have become more complex. A new tendency may be emerging, one in which the production of the nation is less important than the production of place and community and therefore the assertion of local/collective identities becomes possible. While the traditional territoriality of the nation-state naturalized its space through an absolute rather than a relative/relational conception of space (resulting in a monopoly of the communist Bulgarian state on territoriality), current developments seem to unpack this notion and to render space more elastic and multidimensional. If the hundred-sites movement initially looked like a tourist canon serving socialist-patriotic education, symbolically mapping the territory in compliance with the communist historical narrative, its metamorphoses during the past few years have increasingly led to the erosion of its didactic aspects and to the construction of local nuclei of landmarks (most often only spatial, rather than thematic). These do not always seek legitimacy through the national narrative or, if they do, they do so through various re-inventions of this narrative. This, in turn, affects the role of the state to crucially shape identity. The past, according to Arjun

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Appadurai’s expression, becomes less of a habitus and more of a choice. Similarly, certain realignments of territorial identity seem to appear anchored in regional and local specificities.12 Including a venue in the list of the one hundred sites perhaps means conferring status and some form of cultural distinction, but primarily it offers a chance for advertising it; it thus constitutes more of a marketing strategy than a recognition of a shared value through expert/institutional approval. Based on my limited observations, I can hypothesize that at the local level, it is also a strategy for reaching consensus around certain initiatives of local authorities and businesses, based on hopes for economic development through tourism. Thus tourism turns out to be both an economic sector and a political, social, and identity value (see Cousin 2008: 206). Hence the issue of the criteria for the evaluation of such strategies: should it be economic profitability or symbolic efficacy? To sum up, the hundred-sites movement provides an example of forging links between territoriality and identity. My initial assumption was that it formed part of the communist regime’s efforts after a symbolic and ideological colonization of the territory. Its demarcation as a space for tourist activity conformed to a specific canon whose rules privileged the communist narrative. The one hundred sites were invented as anchors of a legitimate national memory. A memoryscape was superimposed onto the landscape, using the materiality of the latter to solidify the meanings of the former. Thereby space/territory appeared no longer homogeneous and generalized, but symbolically mapped, ordered, and organized. It became a tool for the inculcation of communist values. Yet some interesting metamorphoses of the canon occurred in the later decades of socialism. Tourist space as mapped out through the one hundred sites became increasingly nationalized: the principles of its hierarchization (i.e., the rules of the canon) tacitly changed toward national values, promoting the idea of a monolithic nation with ancient roots. Physical space was now meant to produce a time-laden national geography: it was constructed as a national space belonging to a national community with a shared history. The spatial reification of communist ideology gradually mutated into a reification of the national one. If we accept Lefebvre’s thesis that “every society—and hence every mode of production …—produces a space, its own space” (Lefebvre 1991: 31), and extrapolate it onto symbolic space, we have a paradox: a transmutation of spatial semiosis within the same society. It seems even more paradoxical that the postsocialist change of society and mode of production did not generate another symbolic

12

Thus a recent survey has shown that Turks from the region of Kardjali in the Eastern Rodopi Mountains (with more than 50 percent Turkish population) point to the ancient site of Perperikon as the main landmark of their town and region, ignoring any ethnic or religious markers (see Kelbecheva 2015).

(Re)Mapping National Space

space. It only made the national(ist) values more explicit, adhering to the same primordialist conception of a homogeneous ethnic nation. There are, however, changes in the national tourist inventory that have become more conspicuous since Bulgaria’s full membership in the European Union. The availability of European funding for regional development and heritage projects, together with lax institutional control, have given rise to local/private agency. Consequently, postsocialist national space has in many cases become overcoded. Places, especially sites for identitary consumption, have been interwoven in multiple relations and in alternative narratives, connected in networks with multiple dimensions, laden with multiple meanings, embedded in ever more flexible, convertible, multifunctional landscapes. They exhibit what Lefebvre has termed a “horizon of meaning”: “a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore” (Lefebvre 1991: 222). This has generated a certain elasticity on the symbolic level and a kind of spatial intertextuality, an “interspatiality” of sorts: entanglement of national, local, and regional space, as well as the confluence of different narratives and significations. In addition, the past decades have seen a transcoding of the very notion of tourism as identitary consumption, bringing to the fore its leisure aspect at the expense of its educational one. Today’s tourists are more often inclined to look for exoticism and otherness even in their own past. Local actors, on the other hand, often are less concerned with claims to a local identity and more with tactics of bringing places and histories in line with the images expected by (potential) tourists. As Saskia Cousin has pertinently noted, “the activation of tourism is an activation of desire: the desire of a collectivity to see itself in the best light” (Cousin 2008: 207). As a result, the past has to a certain extent lost its organic and obligatory character. Society, especially at the local level, is on its way to view the past no longer in terms of what it imposes on us but rather in terms of what we invest in it.

References Assmann, Aleida (2008): “Canon and Archive,” in: Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Media and Cultural Memory VII), Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, pp. 97–107. BTS (1941): Sbornik reshenia, ukazania i statii [BTU. A collection of resolutions, instructions and articles], Sofia. Cousin, Saskia (2008): “The nation state as an identifying image. Traditions and stakes in tourism policy, Touraine, France”, Tourist Studies, vol. 8/2 (2008), pp. 193–209. Elenkov, Ivan (2013): Trud, radost, otdih i kultura. Vavedenie v istoriata na ideologicheskoto modelirane na vsekidnevieto prez epohata na komunizma [Labour, joy, leisure and

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culture. Introduction to the history of the ideological modelling of everyday life during the communist epoch], Sofia: CAS. Gorsuch, Anne E. (2003): “’There’s No Place Like Home’: Soviet Tourism in Late Stalinism,” Slavic Review, vol. 62, no 4 (2003), pp. 760–785. IV kongres na BTS 17–18 april (1972): Dokumenti [4th congress of BTU. Documents], Sofia. Kelbecheva, Evelina (2015): “The divided historical memories in Bulgaria”, unpublished presentation at CAS Sofia. Koenker, Diane P. (2003): “Travel to Work, Travel to Play: On Russian Tourism, Travel, and Leisure,” Slavic Review, vol. 62, no 4 (2003), pp. 657–665. Kohl, Philip L. (1998): “Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past”, Annual Review in Anthropology, vol. 27, pp. 223–46. Konstantinov, Aleko (1974): Sachinenia v dva toma. Tom 1 [Works in two volumes. Vol.1], Sofia: Bulgarski pisatel. Lefebvre, Henri (1991): The Production of Space. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford UK–Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell. Lilova, Dessislava (2003): “Natsiata i neinite gradove: vazrozhdenski vizii” [The nation and its towns: perspectives from the Vazrazhdane period], Sotsiologicheski Problemi, no. 3–4 (2003), pp. 173–91. MacCannell, Dean (1973): “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79 (1973), pp. 589–603. Nora, Pierre (1984): Les lieux de mémoire. I. La Republique, Paris: Gallimard. Raychev et al. (1968): “100-te natsionalni turisticheski obekta” [The 100 national tourist sites], Sofia: Medicina i fizkultura. Thiesse, Anne-Marie (1999): La création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe–XXe siècle, Paris: Seuil. Turner, Victor (1966): The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Urry, John (2002): The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. London: Sage. Ustav na Bulgarskia turisticheski sayuz [Statute of the Bulgarian Tourist Union] (1962): Article 2, Sofia. Verdery, Katherine (1996): What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vtori kongres na BTS (1961): (materiali i reshenia) [Second congress of BTU (documents and resolutions)], Sofia. Winter, Jay (2010): “Sites of Memory,” in: Susannah Radstone & Bill Schwarz (eds.): Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press. Yanakiev, Zahari, Ivan Kisyov, Mihail Raychev, Sava Kostova. 1987. 100-te natsionalni turisticheski obekta—patevoditel [The 100 national tourist sites—a guidebook], Sofia: DI “Medicina i fizkultura”.

(Re)Mapping National Space

Other Sources Regionalen istoricheski muzej (n.y.), online: https://www.btsbg.org/100nto /regionalen-istoricheski-muzey-3 (accessed 8 January 2020). Pravilnik na natsionalno dvizhenie “Opoznai Bulgaria—100 natsionalni turisticheski obekta” (n.y.) [Statute of the National movement “Explore Bulgaria—100 national tourist sites”], online: https://www.btsbg.org/sites/default/files/Правилник%20за%20работа%20на%20НОК%20%202019%20г..pdf (accessed 8 January 2020).

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Part 4: Traveling Boundaries

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism: New York, Moscow, Pyongyang, Dakar Gesine Drews-Sylla

Whether the “posts” in “postcolonial,” “postmodern,” “post-socialist,” “post-communist,” or “post-Soviet” have the same meaning has frequently been discussed. In 1991, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s article title asked exactly this question: “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”1 Ten years later, in 2001, David Chioni Moore cites Appiah in the title of his article “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique” (Moore 2005: 514–538), which has been translated and reprinted several times. However, the question asked in the following is not whether the “post” of “postcolonial” and “post-socialist” have a common reference, but rather how these two global paradigms interact locally at a given point in time and space, in this case in Senegal in the year 2010. As a former French colony, Senegal undoubtedly constitutes a postcolonial space. But it is also a postsocialist one in two different senses, global and local. On the one hand, Senegal forms part of a global postsocialist world that has seen the division into a so-called capitalist and a so-called communist part. On the other hand, Senegal has had its own local share in the socialist paradigm, a specific version of African socialism. The present article attributes global and the local perspectives to the giant African Renaissance Monument (Monument de la Renaissance africaine), built in 2010 in the Senegalese capital Dakar by then president Abdoulaye Wade and erected by the North Korean company Mansudae Overseas Group. Aesthetically, the statue offers a syncretistic hybrid. A number of observers—local Senegalese politicians and architects, international commentators, as well as art historians and artists—have 1

Appiah gives a negative answer and argues that postmodernism continues the modernist legacy of othering Africa, whereas the postcolonial “played a critical role … in its conceptualization of Africa’s relationship to modernity. Unlike modernism and postmodernism, it rejected the binarism of self/Other, Africa/West, as well as nationalist divisions within the African continent” (Raja/Bahri 2011: 1174).

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commented on one astonishing parallel. With its resemblance to Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa), a monumental sculpture that stands as one of the central Soviet symbols and that represented the Soviet Union at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris—it strikingly reminds these observers of socialistrealist aesthetics, to the extent that the statue has itself become part of an artwork by the South Korean artist Onejoon Chee who explores in his multimedia project Mansudae Master Class (2015) translated forms of socialist realism in Africa with a focus on the constructions of the Mansudae Overseas Group. In the case of the African Renaissance Monument such a translation of socialist realist aesthetics seems to have resurfaced from history in a decontextualized mode after traveling in time, space, and semantics from the Stalinist Soviet Union into a neoliberal African setting. As any other global movement, socialism has triggered a migration of concepts, people, cultural artefacts, and aesthetics. As such, socialism becomes one of the facilitators for global cultural transfers. Thus, the essay treats the African Renaissance Monument as an example for these processes of transfer and demonstrates the presence of socialist aesthetics in the cultural memory of a global post-socialist world. The line of argument will demonstrate global routes and networks and discuss both local and global contexts that facilitate attributions of meaning. I will develop my argument as follows: The first section shows the embeddedness of the African Renaissance Monument in a local version if the socialist paradigm that does, however, not serve as a motivation for the monumental aesthetics. This motivation is rather to be found in global routes of monumentalism that are shaped by socialist realism. Thus, the African Renaissance Monument becomes a site of an interaction of the different layers of a global post-socialism. The last section extends this argument to literary texts devoted to the statue.

African Socialism and the Global Socialist Paradigm Socialism, anticolonialism, and postcolonialism are intertwined in a variety of ways that I cannot discuss here at length. The point to be made is that socialism, as an alternative to capitalist-imperialist models of society, proved attractive not only to an oppressed (occidental) working class but also to those suffering from colonial domination.2 Therefore, numerous local varieties of the occidental model developed in the Global South. African socialism is one of these varieties, with Senegal one of the countries that experienced an African socialist anti- and postcolonial policy, as well as communist opposition to this model.

2

Robert Young (2001) shows these entwinements of communism and anticolonialisms in his historical overview of the genesis of postcolonial thought.

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

From independence in 1960 to 1980, Senegal’s postcolonial development was dominated by the politics of its first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, who was not only a politician but also a poet, philosopher, and the first African member of the prestigious Académie française. Senghor is one of the founding fathers of Négritude, a literary and philosophical movement crucial to the development of anticolonial thought and aesthetics. Its concepts were formulated by Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Gontran-Damas in Paris before and after World War II (for accounts of Négritude as a historical, cultural, philosophical, and political movement compare, from different angles, Garscha 2002: 498–537; Heerten 2008: 87-116; Murdoch 2011: 1100–1126). As a politician, Senghor adhered to a version of African socialism closely connected to his philosophical visions of Négritude. Both Senghor and his successor Abdou Diouf (1981–2000), who did not exactly continue Senghor’s politics but neither introduced an alternative model, belonged to the Parti socialiste sénégalais. It was only after forty years of this socialist party’s dominance that Abdoulaye Wade and his Parti sénégalais démocratique were elected in 2000. Wade represented hope for change, sopi, as was his slogan in Wolof, the dominant local language, or l’alternance as was the term in French, which is the country’s former colonial and still dominant official language. Senegal had been suffering from a long stagnation and people were hoping for an economic revival. Wade’s politics were decidedly neoliberal—and a great failure in the end. In 2012, he was literally chased from power after defeat in the elections, prior to which his attempts to stay in political office had triggered enormous resistance. The African Renaissance Monument has been described as a monument to Wade’s megalomania, a gigantic materialized symbol for the personality cult around him during his presidency (see, e.g., Diop 2010: 10; Dieng 2010: 9).3 When Wade was elected he was a political dinosaur who had already run for presidency four times. Born in 1926, Senghor was only twenty years his senior. Politically and culturally Wade was shaped by the ambivalences of Senghor’s socialist politics, to which he had a very open-ended relationship.4 Even though socialist 3 4

In Dakar in 2011, it was joked that the monument actually depicted Wade and his family. To which extent Wade is endebted to Senghorian thought, or haunted by it, can be shown by a couple of examples. Once he staged a third version of the Festival mondial des arts nègres/World Festival of Black Arts in 2010 that, however, had nothing of the landmark event of Senghor’s 1966 first edition. Second, Wade’s thought does not depart from essentialisms that are typical for Négritude and Senghor’s conception of African socialism. For instance, in 1984 Wade published a book that was republished in 2005 and in which one can find sentences that strangely resemble Senghor’s thought: “Savoir que la matière renferme de l’énergie, qu’elle est intégrable et désintégrable, prédispose le Nègre à la compréhension facile de la physique ondulatoire modern” [The knowledge that material contains energy, that it is integrable and disintegratable, predisposes the Negro to a facile understanding of modern wave physics] (Wade 2005: 61). This special predisposition for physics stems, according to Wade, from African culture, which is structured by the syncope. He concludes that quan-

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by designation, his predecessor Senghor has not been unanimously received as a socialist politician. Quite the contrary: in the late 1960s, he became a symbolic figure for neocolonial African politics and saw opposition from a radical left inside his own country, in the Western, and in the Eastern bloc. When in 1968 he was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize) in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt (Main) he faced protesting students, one of them Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who fiercly accused him of neocolonialism (see Seibert 2008: 59–71). Senghor also had to deal with student protests in his own country, as well as with fierce critique from Senegalese intellectuals, such as for instance from Ousmane Sembene, who considered himself a Marxist-Leninist even though he was not a member of a Communist Party (for the controversies between Sembene and Senghor cf. e.g. Murphy 2000: 186–218). During the 1970s, opposing Maoist groups became culturally influential (Benga 2010: 237–260). At the end of Senghor’s presidency, novels like The Times of Tamango (Le Temps de Tamango, 1981) by Boubacar Boris Diop or Sembene’s The Last of the Empire (Le Dernier de l’Empire, 1981) play with revolutionary sujets in which protagonists representing Senghor are toppled. The Eastern bloc also had its difficulties in acknowledging Senghor’s version of socialism. The Soviet Union could simply not ignore Senghor, neither as a head of state nor as a poet or philosopher. On the one hand, his poems were translated and introduced into collections of African poetry (Vaksmakher et al. 1973: 474–512). The Soviet Union was the country that covered the World Festival of Black Arts/Festival mondial des arts nègres, one of Senghor’s core projects, more abundantly than any other (Lengvold 1970: 260), even though it represented Négritude just as his poetry did.5 On the other hand, the Soviets strictly opposed the Négritude movement with its focus on race instead of class. Ivan Potekhin spoke of an “anti-racial racism” (Klinghoffer 1969: 73), which in turn reminds us of Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of Négritude in his introduction to Senghor’s anthology Anthology of New Ne-

5

tum physics and African culture correlate. This correlation of culture and physics is actually the same rhetorical figure that Senghor uses when speaking about an African predisposition for socialism. Wade simply transposes it from the realm of societal organization to science. The ambivalence of his relationship to Senghor might best be expressed by the exhibition on pan-Africanism on the ground floor of the African Renaissance Monument. It includes portraits of many influential African personalities from the twentieth century. Obviously, Senghor’s portrait was originally left out and provisionally added later on. I visited the monument in March and April of 2011, and among the high-quality portraits of the other African personalities honoured, I found Senghor’s portrait, a mere computer print in plastic film and attached to the wall with simple adhesive tape. Apparently, the attempt to establish a new paradigm, one that was independent from the Senghorian ghosts of the past, had failed. The Soviet documentary Rhythms of Africa (Ritmy Afriki, USSR 1966, Irina Venzher, Leonid Makhnach) is, to my knowledge, not only the only one in color but also one of the longest ones made on the festival.

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

gro and Malagasy Poetry in French6 (Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, 1948) entitled “Black Orpheus” (“Orphée noir.”) In it he used exactly this argument in favor of Négritude while embedding it in a socialist struggle (for the controversies that followed, see Irele 1986: 379–393). Soviets did not approve of Senghor’s refusal to break with the former colonial power France, and Potekhin therefore accused Senghor of not decidedly being anticolonial (see Klinhoffer 1969: 74). In short, the Soviet Union used a very similar neocolonialist critique that the Western left brought forth. The Soviets could neither approve of Senghor’s open critique of the Soviet Union in being as materialist as the United States (see Senghor 2001: 405) nor of his call for spiritual and religious values (Ibid.: 401) within socialism. Potekhin on the contrary strictly argued for a scientific socialism in Africa (Potekhin 1964: 112), even though he acknowledged that African socialism should and could not be a “faithful imitation of everything that has been done in the Soviet Union” (Ibid.: 110). Senghor’s African socialism clearly did not meet these criteria. If the radical left in the West and the Soviet Union saw Senegal so critically, what was Senghor’s socialism about? Senegal was a non-aligned country, belonging neither to the Eastern nor the Western bloc. More than anything, Senghor’s socialism was a cultural project. One of the myths that prevail in the memory of his presidency is the enormous amount of money he dedicated to culture, allegedly up to 25 percent of the national budget, even though recent research has shown that this figure desginates all of the “social and cultural activities.” Culture in fact received less than 1 percent of this overall sum (see Cohen 2015). Nevertheless, Senghor funded culture generously, realized large-scale cultural projects, and changed the infrastructure of Dakar for this purpose. He also founded an art school, a national theatre, and a national ballet (see Harney 2004; Benga 2010: 237–260; Cohen 2015). One of his main projects was the World Festival of Black Arts in 1966, which for the first time in a cultural festival gathered art and artists from Africa and from the African diaspora around the world (see Murphy 2016). The basic idea behind Senghor’s version of African socialism and his Négritude was the positive reevaluation of African culture. Its beginnings were shaped by contacts with the Harlem Renaissance writers in Paris during the interwar years, whose proponents often adhered to communist and pan-African ideals (see Schmeisser 2006). The coining of the term “Négritude” is attributed to Aimé Césaire in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1947), which was the text that made it known to the world. Raisa Rexer claims that the term can be derived from Césaire’s reinterpretation of Marxist thoughts, in which he takes the decicive theoretical step in allowing the exchange of class for race (see Rexer 2013: 1–14). A proximity between communist ideals and a positive reappropriation of Black skin color can also already be observed with Lamine Senghor, an anticolonial Senegalese 6

All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

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communist who died in 1927 and who was part of the sociopolitical climate that shaped the Négritude thinkers (Lamine Senghor and his role in the anticolonialist movement have recently been reevaluated, see, e.g. Young 2001: 259–266 or Senghor 2012). In short, Négritude has had a deep relationship with socialist thought from its very beginnings. In his conception of Négritude, Senghor asserts common values for all Africans in Africa and the African diaspora. It is a “theory of the distinctiveness of African personality and culture” (Ashcroft 2000: 161). It was a “powerful apparatus for negotiating identity,” and it “provided a discursive space within which to question reigning political and cultural hegemonies.” (Harney 2004: 22). It consisted of a positive reevaluation of African culture and humanity against the discursive paradigms of colonialism while not transcending some of its essentialisms.7 The concept of “négritude” implied that all people of negro descent shared certain inalienable essential characteristics. In this respect the movement was, like those of earlier race-based assertions of African dignity … both essentialist and nativist. What made the négritude movement distinct was its attempt to extend perceptions of the negro as possessing a distinctive ‚personality’ into all spheres of life, intellectual, emotional and physical. (Ashcroft/Griffiths/Tiffin 2000: 162 [original emphasis]) Senghor’s socialist programmatics reiterate this essentializing stance when calling idealized African societies traditionally socialist. We have decided to borrow from the socialist experiments—both theoretical and practical—only certain elements, certain scientific and technical values, which we have grafted like scions onto the wild stock of Negritude. For this latter, as a complex of civilized values, is traditionally socialist in character in this sense; that our Negro-African society is a classless society, which is not the same as saying that it has no hierarchy or division of labor. It is a community-based society, in which the hierarchy—and therefore the power—is founded on spiritual and democratic values: on the law of primogeniture and election; in which decisions of all kinds are deliberated in a Palaver, after the ancestral gods have been consulted; in which work is shared out among sexes and among technico-professional groups based in religion… . Thus, in the working out of our African Mode of Socialism, the problem is not how to put an end the exploitation of man by his fellow, but to prevent it ever happening, by bringing political and economic democracy back to our life; 7

Heerten correctly asserts that it was impossible for Négritude thinkers to transcend the discourse (see 2008: 103). It is only within discourse that discursive truth can be questioned. Therefore, Négritude must be considered a historical movement that was formed and functioned within its very particular conditions in time and space. Cf. also Garscha (2002: 498–537).

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

our problem is not how to satisfy spiritual, that is cultural needs, but how to keep the fervor of the black soul alive. (Senghor 1964a: 265 [original emphasis]) African socialism must therefore not be realized by a forceful revolution following a yet-to-be-developed capitalism, but by returning to a precolonial cultural essence that will uncover the traditionally socialist structures of African society (see Senghor 2001: 396–412). Capitalism belongs to imperialism and thus to the French colonizers, not to the African colonized. The decolonized African will have to find his/her way back to the original African to realize socialism. In the long run all of Senghor’s poetry, philosophy, and his cultural programs as Senegalese president can be seen as steps toward this fundamental cultural “renaissance” (Senghor 2001: 400). The term “renaissance” is used in Wade’s African Renaissance Monument, even though the official brochure mentions the South African president Thabo Mbeki as using it first. Originally, it was already the movement of the Harlem Renaissance that had spoken of the necessity of an African cultural “renaissance” (Schmeisser 2006).8 The very name of the African Renaissance Monument makes clear that Wade seeks to inscribe himself into this cultural dimension of Senghorian politics. On the other hand, it is not the socialist foundation that he reiterates—even though, in the beginning, he had the support of the political far left. Wade proclaims postsocialist liberal change after Senghor, which he symbolizes in a statue that reminds some observers to Stalinist aesthetics and that—as I will show later—indeed does derive its aesthetics partially from the other side of the ideological spectrum, that is, Soviet and North Korean versions of socialist realism. Senghor, to add to this, openly rejected these aesthetics (Senghor 1964: 285), just as he rejected the Soviet socialist model. Interestingly, though, he possibly also referred to a Soviet book that reworked both aesthetic paradigm and ideological content in the advent of the Khrushkhevian Thaw, namely Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone (Ne khlebom edinym, 1956), when phrasing his vision of a different type of socialism with a reference to the bible: “Man does not live by millet and rice alone; he lives truly and solely on the myths that are his spiritual nourishment” (Senghor 2001: 407).

The African Renaissance Monument: New York — Moscow — Pyongyang — Dakar The African Renaissance Monument is situated on the almost westernmost point of the African continent, on top of one of the two hills called Les Mamelles in the 8

Critics of Wade’s statue have remarked that the term is a contradiction in itself. The concept of a renaissance is a fundamental Western European one, linking European culture to its constructed past (see Camara 2010: 7).

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Senegalese capital Dakar. It has a height of fifty-two meters and is accessable to visitors, much as the Statue of Liberty on the other side of the Atlantic. On the first floor exhibitions illustrate the construction of the statue and the history of pan-Africanism; on the second floor several rooms exhibit modern African paintings. The head of the statue can be accessed by elevator, giving the visitor has a panoramic view of Dakar and the Atlantic Ocean. The statue itself depicts a man who steps out of a volcano and heroically points toward the West, the Atlantic, and thus toward the United States of America. In his arm he holds a small child that elongates the movement toward the West with its own arm stretched outward pointing to the Atlantic Ocean. Behind him the man holds a woman who stretches her arm slightly downward in the direction of the African continent located behind her, supporting herself by reclining on the volcano. The line from the woman’s to the child’s arms, connected by those of the man, dynamically points upward. This movement is repeated by the flames that symbolize a stylized outbreak of the volcano, which the hill geologically actually was. Other elements, like the man’s and the woman’s draperies or the woman’s hair that flutters in the wind, reinforce these dynamics. To reach the statue, visitors must climb a steep staircase. The bottom level houses a souvenir shop and a cultural center with a huge screen, and a large stage. Not far off there is another monument made from sandstone in the form of the African continent. At the new Place du Souvenir located a bit further to the south in Dakar, another outline of the African continent can be found, where the structure is built into the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, the directions of the African Renaissance Monument are repeated. The Place du Souvenir constitutes another one of Wade’s building projects, much as a new national theatre or many new and old or rather recycled monuments all over the city (see De Jong 2008: 195–214). Other plans, like a new national library, have not been realized. In 2011, the Place du Souvenir featured, among other elements, oversized posters of key films of Senegalese cinema. Thus, it is obviously designed as hommage to African and in particular to Senegalese cultural accomplishments of the post-independence period.9 The African Renaissance Monument is conceived as the symbolic heart of all of Wade’s projects that clearly cite Senghor’s investment in culture in the years after decolonization. Much like the Place du Souvenir, the statue is not only meant to enrich Dakar’s skyline or to improve the infrastructure, as is the restoration of many main roads, but to contribute to the cultural and symbolic infrastructure of the entire African continent and its diasporas. 9

According to the website Place du Souvenir Africain, the place and the premises, that include for instance a cinema and a conference hall, generally serve to honor pan-African cultural accomplishments.

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

Figure 1. African Renaissance Monument, Dakar, 2010

Photo by author

Distortedly reiterating Senghorian thought, but without its references to any kind of socialism, the officially proposed reading of the statue’s meanings suggests a symbolism that interprets the man as an African who presents his wife and his child to the Occident, to the world. The statue is conceived of as a symbol for Africa that has liberated itself from many centuries of emprisonment and racism, from ignorance and intolerance, and takes its place on earth, which essentially belongs to all races. The volcano represents the cold stone Africa has been trapped in for many

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Figure 2. African continent next to the African Renaissance Monument

Photo by author

Figure 3. African continent at the Place du Souvenir

Photo by author

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

centuries, a stone now, however, about to explode.10 Thus the statue is conceived as a symbol of freedom much like the Statue of Liberty, which is explicitly used as a reference. In both cases the statues are linked to semantically charged dates. The Statue of Liberty refers to the hundredth anniversary of postcolonial independence from England. The inauguration of the African Renaissance Monument clearly refers to this symbolic content, because it was staged on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Senegalese independence from France. Yet of course, the reference to the United States cannot be seen unidimensionally as a continuation and a transfer of a neoliberal utopia to Africa. As the official brochure clearly states, the African Renaissance Monument most of all stands as a countermodel to the Statue of Liberty. For example, the African Renaissance Monument is described as taller (52 m) than the Statue of Liberty (46 m),11 with an obvious symbolism behind it: from an African perspective, the successful history of the U.S. is a history of centuries of enslavement and discrimination. It is this memory that the African Renaissance Monument is to overcome allegorically through its added height. The idea of the liberation from slavery as the project’s origins story has initiated controversial debate (De Jong and Foucher give a comprehensive overview of the financial, religious, identitary, and ideological debates surrounding the monument, de Jong/Foucher 2010: 187–204). One of the controversies concerns the authorship of the project. Whereas Wade insisted that the idea was originally his, which led 10

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The official brochure explains the intended symbolism on the first page as follows: “Situated at the Western most point of the African continent, this African, who rises from the volcano facing the West, with his wife and his child raised as if he was presenting it to the world, serves as a symbol for an Africa, that has liberated itself from its century long imprisonment in the deepest abyssal of racism, of ignorance, of intolerance, in order to resume his place on this earth that belongs to all the races, in air, light, and liberty. The elements of the symbol are, first of all, the volcano, which has locked Africa in its coating for many centuries. Its slumber in the deepest layers of the earth expresses the obscurantism[,] its awakening the eruption of the greatest forces of the world, those of the bowels of the earth that propel everything while passing conjugated by the forces of an exterior attraction.” (Situé à la pointe la plus extrême-occidentale du continent africain, cet Africain qui surgit du volcan, face à l'Occident, sa femme avec lui et son enfant soulevé comme pour le présenter à la face du monde, était le symbole de l'Afrique qui s'est libérée d'un emprisonnement de plusieurs siècles dans les profondeurs abyssales du racisme, de l'ignorance, de l'intolerance, pour reprendre sa place sur cette terre qui appartient à toutes les races, dans l'air, la lumière et la liberté. Les éléments du symbole sont, d'abord, le volcan qui enfermait l'Afrique dans sa gangue pluriséculaire. Son sommeil dans les profondeurs de la terre exprimait l'obscurantisme son rèveil l'éruption de la plus grande puissance du monde, celles des entrailles de la terre qui propulse tout sur son passage, conjuguée à une force d'attraction extérieure). The brochure does not have an author indicated; the “I” that is encountered in almost all of its sections, however, attributes it to Wade himself (Monument de la Renaissance Africaine 2010). In fact, it is stated to be the highest statue in the world, which is not true.

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Figure 4. Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, Soviet Pavilion, International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, Paris, 1937

Wikimedia Commons

him to claim 35 percent of the profit,12 the internationally known Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow convincingly declares that the concept of erecting a cultural center 12

After being vigorously criticized for this move, Wade decided to donate the money to a charity organization led by his daughter. De Jong and Foucher comment: “Le chef de l’État comme artiste en chef qui défend ses droits d’auteur, curieux écho stalinien dans une époche néolibérale.” (The chief of the state as chief artist who defends his author’s rights, a curious Stalinist echo in neoliberal times) (De Jong/Foucher 2010: 190).

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

on top of Les Mamelles had been his, an idea he had presented to Wade long before his presidency. His idea had already included a sculpture of an African man who climbs out of the volcano. According to his plan, a corresponding sculpture of an African American slave climbing into a tunnel leading toward the Atlantic Ocean was to be built in the South of the United States (Sow, Ousmane 2011, personal communication, April 2011; also Sy 2010: 6-7). Sow is known for his work with local material on African topics. He created, for instance, clay sculptures showing African ethnic groups that were semantically highly appropriated in colonialist discourse, such as the Peul, Nouba, Massai, or Zulu (Sow/Bertrand 2006). Even though the central elements of both versions of the project are the same, the one that Wade realized stands out because of its monumentalism and its disturbing aesthetics that link it with yet another countermodel to the American one: that of the Soviet Union. Aesthetically and stylistically the African Renaissance Monument is, as Ferdinand de Jong and Vincent Foucher write, a strange hybrid of differing iconographic references:13 13

“The statue is a curious hybrid of iconographic references. The style is undoubtedly socialist realist …. The man’s massive body evokes Vera Mukhina’s famous statue Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937), but there are also references to the European topos of the mighty muscles of the Black man. The man’s face is African, the hat that he wears is similar to the one of the panAfrican hero Kwame Nkrumah. The child has also an African appearance, but its expression of high consciousness and its finger pointed towards an undetermined goal are reminiscent of the representation of Christ in the Renaissance’s Madonnas with child. The Monument seems to adopt another Christian heritage, the legend of Saint Christopher, the giant who carries a child through a dangerous river before finding out that the child is Christ himself. The woman’s light clothing, her revealed right breast evoke Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), a painting that inspired the Marianne of the French Republic; but these elements remind also of the slightly erotic post cards which the metropolitan male of the colonies consumed or also of the African maternity that informs the ‘traditional’ sculptures which are in Dakar cheaply sold to Western tourists and African consumers alike. The Monument is also reminiscent of the iconography of the European anti-slavery movement with its topic of the freed slave—a monument to Amistad (1997), Steven Spielberg’s film on the history of a mutiny on a slave trade vessel. One more reference that seems to be present is the colonial lyrical imagery of the White man’s burden and his fight against savagery—this time with an African as hero.” (La statue est un curieux hybride de références iconographiques. Elle est indubitablement de style réaliste-socialiste … . Le corps puissant de l’homme évoque la célèbre statue de Vera Mukhina, L’Ouvrier et la Kolkhozienne (1937), mais c’est aussi un renvoi aux topos européens de la musculature puissante de l’homme noir. Le visage de l’homme est africain, et le bonnet qu’il porte ressemble à celui que portait Kwame Nkrumah, héros panafricain. L’enfant apparaît également africain mais son expression de conscience aiguë et son doigt tendu vers un point indéterminé rappellent la figuration du Christ dans les Madones à l’Enfant de la Renaissance. Le Monument semble emprunter à un autre héritage chrétien, la légende de Saint Christophe, le géant qui a porté un enfant au travers d’un ruisseau avant de découvrir qu’il s’agissait du Christ en personne. La vêture légère de la femme, le sein droit

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Probably, not all of the many references that the statue incorporates are equally familiar to all of its different audiences, they include an ensemble ranging from christianity to socialism, while passing the colonial exotic, from anti-slavery movement to touristic consumption, from French republicanism to Pan-Africanism. It is a simulacral hybrid that escapes a precise localization in the history of European monumental sculpture or in the visual culture of emancipation and African nationalism. (De Jong/Foucher 2010: 191) The striking similarity with Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman that de Jong and Foucher also refer to is not the only stylistic reference that can be identified. The repertoire goes from socialism to Christianity, as they sum up; it includes colonialist stereotypes as well as the antislavery movement and it incorporates French republicanism as much as pan-Africanism, just to name a few. The identification and interpretation of the different references depend on the spectator. The resemblance to one of the key monuments of Stalinism has not only been noted but was one of the points of criticism articulated in the Senegalese public sphere (Fofana 2010; Sym 2010: 7; Niasse 2010: 4). Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, the Senegalese architect in charge of the project, acknowledged the “Stalinist style,” but nevertheless condoned it.14 But how can this strange reference to Stalinist aesthetics be explained? What are the similarities, and which apparent differences can be found? Both statues share significant traits in their monumental, hyperrealist imagery: 1) the male and the female figure with their arms stretched out into the sky and backward at the same time; 2) clothing that is blown by the wind, indicating the overall dynamics of the whole movement; 3) the sheer size of the monumental statues; and 4) their erection on a high solid base. The relationship between a man and a woman is more egalitarian in the Soviet version of the sujet,15 and there is no volcano. In

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révélé évoquent la Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) de Delacroix, peinture qui a inspiré la Marianne de la République française; mais ces éléments rappellent aussi bien les cartes postales légèrement érotiques que consommaient les mâles mêtropolitains des colonies ou encore la maternité africaine telle que traitée dans les sculptures ‘artisanales’ bon marchés vendues à Dakar aux touristes occidentaux comme aux consommateurs africains. Le Monument semble aussi renvoyer á l’iconographie du mouvement anti-esclavagiste européen au thème de l’esclave libéré—un monument à Amistad (1997), le film de Steven Spielberg sur l’histoire d’une mutinerie à bord d’un bateau-négrier. Une autre référence semble présente, l’imaginerie coloniale lyrique de fardeau de l’homme blanc et de la lutte contre la sauvagerie avec cette-fois un Africain pour héros) (De Jong/Foucher 2010: 190–91). In 2010, Arte produced an interactive web project on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the postcolonial independence of many African countries. One of the clips produced showed Atepa in the African Renaissance Monument with this statement (Afrique ArteTV 2010). Feminist critiques of the African Renaissance Monument were very discontented with the position of the woman who is held by the man and stands behind him, thus suggesting a model of female dependence and male guidance (Laye 2009: 28). Fatou Kiné Camara (2010) calls the

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

the Senegalese version the Soviet hammer and sickle, both symbols for a glorious communist future, are substituted by the child, which equally symbolizes days to come.16 Both versions feature a sexualized female figure that is (just like the man) decidedly more naked in the Senegalese version. Given these similarities, a first question to ask would be if this is a case of a conscious citation or translation. This, however, is very unlikely. The monument is neither consciously citing Stalinist aesthetics nor alluding to any of its ideological contents. A more convincing explanation tells another story, one of the global (semantic) migration of (socialist) aesthetics in time and space. This story, on the one hand, eventually leads back to Vera Mukhina’s sculpture without explicitly referring to it. On the other hand, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman can already be read as a socialist answer to the Statue of Liberty, which also holds high a symbol of the future: a torch.17 Therefore, at least the socialist anticolonial message contained indirectly in the Soviet model might be read as having been translated into the Senegalese neoliberal version. Yet most commentators attribute the monument’s style not directly to Vera Mukhina but to the stylistic influences of those who were involved in its construction. First drafts were made by the French-Romanian artist Virgil Magherusan, who finished his education in 1979 in socialist Bucharest. He is known for neoclassicist sculptures and lives in France. His model already consists of the man, the woman held by him, and the baby raised to the sky.18 The final shape was given to the monument by the company trusted with the construction works: the North Korean Mansudae Overseas Group. In Africa, the Mansudae Overseas Group not only carries out construction work in Senegal. They erect different buildings and have construction projects in several African countries such as Namibia, Angola, Botswana, and Mozambique. In the case of the African Renaissance Monument, the Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby Atepa served merely as the local coordinator of the project, not as the main architect in charge. North Korea is globally perceived as the last ‘Stalinist’ socialist country in the world. Therefore, it seems only logical to attribute the “Stalinist” shape, as Atepa

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idea of an African renaissance itself an illusion, one that finds its expression in a triumphant sculpture of machismo devoid of any reference to ancient traditions of matriarchy in African societies. Therefore, it represents, more than anything else, the degradation of women in many African countries. Even though a child is not common for socialist realist sculpture, it can appear in a characteristic manner in the socialist realist novel. According to the masterplot as analyzed by Katerina Clark (2000), in the finale (or celebration of incorporation) the glorious future that awaits future generations is announced. This is conceived as a counterpoint to sacrifice and death. Thus, the glorious future may be symbolized by the birth of a child (260–261). Primarily, it originally countered fascist aesthetics. At the Paris Worldʼs Fair in 1937, the statue was erected opposite the German pavillion with its Nazi symbolism. The official brochure of the African Renaissance Monument features a picture of this model.

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called it, to the North Korean influence on the project. Politically, this contribution was of course widely discussed. Neither in Frankfurt (where the Mansudae Overseas Group was involved in the restauration of the Fairy Tale Fountain [Märchenbrunnen]; Amt für Wissenschaft und Kunst 2006 and, more critically, Riebsamen 2005: 64)nor in Dakar (Gaye 2010: 10; Diop 2010: 10) was it self-evident and unanimously decided that public money for the constructon of public monuments should be granted to a company from a totalitarian country. In the case of the African Renaissance Monument, this was further complicated by the fact that the statue was seen as a counterpiece to the Statue of Liberty, that it was to represent liberation from slavery and suppression, and to celebrate the subsequent postcolonial national independence. The public question was: How can such a monument be built by a North Korean state company? How can it be realized in aesthetics that point back to the Stalinist Soviet Union as one of the cruelest regimes of the twentieth century? Of course, an official explanation exists that is basically a liberal one: money and capability. Representatives of Atepa’s bureau claimed that the Mansudae Overseas Group were simply the cheapest and the only ones willing and able to build the colossal statue that Wade had planned.19 North Korea’s official visual socialist representations offer yet another local variation of the global socialist paradigm. And here, to turn back to the Stalinist aesthetics, their contribution can indeed be directly traced to Vera Mukhina’s sculpture, as there actually seems to be a direct line from Moscow to Dakar via Pyongyang. North Korean official art shows astonishing parallels to canonical Soviet socialist realist paintings or topoi. For instance, a painting showing Kim Il Sung among admiring children (Kim Rin Gwon, The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung among Children, 1969) cites a painting of Stalin who is equally surrounded by children (Boris Vladimirskii, Roses for Stalin [Rozy dlia Stalina], 1949). Even the dictator’s fatherly gestures appear identical. Both slightly embrace a boy, placing their hands on the children’s backs, which are turned toward the spectator. Another painting entitled The Always Burning Light of the Party (1980, by Kang Hun Yong) shows Kim Il Sung working at night. It cites the topos of Stalin who never sleeps, whose lights are always burning in the Kremlin. Another direct reference of this kind to Soviet art can be found in Pyongyang in a sculpture, which, in 1982, was also built by the Mansudae Overseas Group. The Tower of the Chuch’e Idea to which it belongs dominates today’s Pyongyang’s public space and is one of its national symbols. It looks like the missing link between Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman and the African Renaissance Monument in

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Generally, there was a large debate over the project’s funding that included a dubious land deal with North Korea, for more details see de Jong/Foucher (2010: 187–204).

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

Figure 5. Boris Vladimirskii: Roses for Stalin, oil on canvas, 100,5 x 141 cm, 1949. The website Virtual Museum of Political Art lists a number of recent publications on the picture

Unknown source

Figure 6. Kim Rin Gwon: The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung among children, 1969.

Noever (ed.) 2010: 57

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Figure 7. Kang Hun Yong: The endlessly burning light of the Party Center (Kim Jong Il), 1980

Noever (ed.) 2010: 45.

Dakar. Frank Hoffmann writes that the context of the statue in Pyongyang signaled a change of official paradigms. At the end of the 1970s, Marxism-Leninism was substituted by the chuch’e ideology. Chuch’e means independence, according to Hoffmann, which meant that national interests became more important than international revolutionary goals. The change of paradigm included a Koreanization and nationalization of the arts. But apparently this did not necessarily mean a turn toward traditional aesthetics, though at this point socialist realism had already officially been discarded (see Hoffmann 2010: 221). In the North Korean version of the monumental man and woman, they together also hold up a hammer and a sickle but are stylized differently than the Soviet version. It is supplemented with a brush positioned between the hammer and the sickle.20 The movement is not as dynamic as in the Soviet and Senegalese versions. Both the male and the female figures hold books in their other hands. The woman is, as in the Senegalese version, positioned slightly behind the man, but not supported by him. It is not within my scope or my competencies to explain the semantic shifts that occured when the monumental sujet was transferred and translated into the North Korean cultural context. It must suffice to say that a global circulation can

20

“Chuch’e ideology and its principle of being ‘national in form’ brought a decisive shift away from Western oil painting towards East Asian brush painting, now even nationalized under the term chosŏnhwa (josonhwa), Korean-style painting. Reversing the situation in the colonial period, brush painting now pressured oil painting to modernize” (Hoffmann 2010: 221).

The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism

Figure 8. Tower of the Chuch’e Idea, Pyongyang, 1982

Noever 2010: 189

be observed, which essentially begins with Vera Mukhina’s countermodel to the Statue of Liberty, then leads to North Korea, and in this case ultimately ends in Dakar. In any case, it is an astonishing chain that leads from a non-socialist, capitalist context to its modernist countermodel that nationalizes the universalizing, internationalizing claims in North Korea. For the moment this connection ends in Dakar, where the circle with direct reference to the Statue of Liberty is closed. It seems more than ironic that in the African Renaissance Monument competing models

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of socialism (Senghorian African, North Korean, and Soviet) appear to be reunited under the auspices of neoliberalism—which, by the way, also saw a renovation of Worker in Kolkhoz Woman in Russia.

Reflections of the Paradigm in Mamadou Traoré Diop’s Lyrical Appraisal In the last section of my analysis of the Senegalese African Renaissance Monument I will extend my analysis onto Mamadou Traoré Diop literary contribution to the African Renaissance Monument that is equally embedded in the entangled dynamics of the global and local (post)socialist paradigms. In 2002, Diop was counselor to Abdoulaye Wade and thus one of the supporters of the monument (Dia 2002: 381; Toh Bi Tié 2013: 167–181, whose analysis can serve as a document to the ambivalences of Diop’s position toward Négritude). In 2010, he published the long poem Prophecy of the Almadies or the Negro of Freedom (Prophéties des Almadies ou le nègre de la liberté) in which he in accordance with the intended symbolism of the monument hymnically reads the African Renaissance Monument as an incarnation of a pan-African pantheon of African heroical martyrs. These include quasi-mythical personnages from Patrice Lumumba and Ken Saro Wiwa to Barack Obama’s ancestors, from Ernest Ouandié to Jomo Kenyatta. Europe and America are warned that Africa will rise in the dawn of the new century. The poem is dedicated to Abdoulaye Wade, who is addressed as the genius of the most courageous and most revolutionary symbol of the twenty-first century, the African Renaissance Monument. It is equally dedicated to the founding fathers of the Négritude movement, as well as to the young people of today who fight for the pan-African United States of Africa, and finally to all those who have died as martyrs for these ideals. The poem contains the idea of revolution, a revolution initiated by Négritude and that will be continued by those who stand in for an African renaissance today and follow Abdoulaye Wade’s path. Most interestingly, in his young years, Diop stood out as a communist and an admirer of the Soviet Union. In 1974 he published a travel account to the Soviet Union where he had accompagnied Ousmane Sembene, whom he speaks of as a friend, to a festival. This situates Diop in the opposition to Senghor at that time. Using stereotypical communist phrases, Diop praises the Soviet Union as the most developed society in the world, devoid of racism of any kind, a country where man and all his needs are provided for, a place where the New Man has come alive. In the Soviet Union man is not alienated by his work any more, Diop writes; here one finds a man who lives not by bread alone but who

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also needs and gets culture. The Soviet model, rejected by Senghor, proves Senghor to be right.21 In a programmatical statement on the role of poetry published in the same year as this travel account, Diop acknowledges the accomplishments of Négritude, Senghor, Césaire, and Damas, saying they have created great African poetry that has fulfilled its historical role. But in fact, Africans “have never been dispossessed of their true culture” (Diop 1974a: 177) as this generation asserted. In the contemporary neocolonial situation, poetry must therefore consequently fight imperialism and the feudal structures of its own society to erect a truly socialist society. The fight against neocolonialism and old feudalisms under the auspices of socialist critique of Senghorian politics is exactly the line of argument that can be observed in a film from about the same time. In Mahama Johnson Traoré’s film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General (Revizor) titled Lambaaye, a traditional socialist reading of the play is staged in structures characterized as determined by precolonial feudal structures that in the end contribute to neocolonial exploitation. Here, the precolonial past is no longer the precondition for socialism, but rather an obstacle to it (for a detailed analysis see Drews-Sylla, in print). In a play of his own, Homeland or Death (La patrie ou le mort), published in 1981, Diop develops a countermodel, a way to include the structures of the past into a revolutionary fight for freedom. The play circles around Amilcar Cabral and the events that led to the armed uprising and subsequent civil war in Guinea-Bissau that had, at the time of the play’s writing, just ended with independence from Portugal, the last colonial power in Africa. Cabral is shown as a true socialist who prefers peaceful struggle and believes in the power of culture and education, of emancipation and learning, but is forced to resort to armed resistance. The culmination of the play shows him winning traditional society, represented by old men, over for his cause. The men are convinced that their suffering can only be ended by terminating colonialist-capitalist exploitation. In the same way as his programmatic statement, his travel account, and his first poems My God Is Black (Mon dieu est noir, 1975), the play uses standard Cold War topoi of communism. His ode to the African Renaissance Monument drops this immediate socialist context, but still uses a revolutionary gesture. Now, an old Diop looks back on sacrifices that have been made for African ideals and reasserts a pan-African revolution to come. 21

“Work has not alienated the New Man, it has really liberated him from all constraints by disproportionately broadening his horizon. Life in Moscow is formed by work, culture, and leisure. Man lives not only from bread alone. Culture, isn’t it at the beginning and the end of development, as Léopold Sédar Senghor said so rightly?” [Le travail n’a pas aliéné l’homme nouveau, il l’a véritablement libéré de toutes les servitudes, en élargissant démesurement ses horizons. Travail, culture et loisirs font la vie des Moscovites. L’homme ne vit pas seulement de pain. La culture, n’est-elle pas au début et à la fin du développement, comme le dit si bien Léopold Sédar Senghor ?] (Diop 1974: 31).

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To sum up, we can say that also in the case of Diop’s appraisal of the African Renaissance Monument the strange hybrid of socialist language, ambivalence toward the shadows of Senghorian thought, and monumental language can be found. Wade is stylized as the successor to Senghor and all the martyrs that the cause has already tributed. Socialism as a paradigm and counterparadigm alike forms part of the hybrid that the African Renaissance Monument constitutes; its variations form one of its cores of which Diop’s appraisal testifies as much as the monument’s aesthetic reminiscence of Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman.Thus, the African Renaissance Monument can be read as a very specific post-socialist localization of a global socialist and post-socialist paradigm alike that is structured by both its synchronic and diachronic local and global dimensions alike. With the monument being the strange hybrid that it is, my analysis shall, however, end with a hint to another set of references in the global post-socialist world. While in the monument’s case the public expressed disturbance at the strange resemblance to Vera Mukhina’s Stalinist sculpture, further fueled by the fact that it was a North Korean company that constructed it, another resemblance has gone unnoticed. In a post-socialist world, the African Renaissance Monument might as well be compared to the work by Zurab Tsereteli, the infamous Russian-Georgian artist and sculptor whose monumental work has significantly shaped public space in post-socialist Moscow. This is, however, another topic.

References Ashcroft, Bill/ Griffiths, Gareth/ Tiffin, Helen (2000): Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, London/New York: Routledge. Benga, Ndiouga (2010): “Mise en scène de la culture et espace public au Sénégal,” Afrique et Développement XXXV (2010), 4, 237–260. Camara, Fatou Kiné (2010): “La renaissance africaine? Epitre pour redonner son sens à un mot chargé d’histoire et porteur des enseignements du passé,” Le Matin, 5 Jan. 2010, 7. Clark, Katerina (2000): The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cohen, Joshua I. (2015): “African Socialist Cultural Policy: Senegal under Senghor, 1960–1980,” Paper presented at the conference Writing and Screening Socialisms in an Entangled World, Tübingen, July 3–4, 2015. De Jong, Ferdinand (2008): “Recycling Recognition: The Monument as Objet Trouvé of the Postcolony,” Journal of Material Culture 13:2 (2008), 195–214. De Jong, Ferdinand/Foucher, Vincent (2010): “La tragédie du roi Abdoulaye? Néomodernisme et Renaissance africaine dans le Sénégal contemporain,” Politique africaine 118 (2010), 187–204.

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Dia, Hamidou (2002): Poètes d’Afrique et des Antilles. Anthologie, Paris: Éditions de la Table Ronde. Dieng, Momar (2010): “Escroquerie sur un truc!” Le Quotidien 2169, 6 Apr. 2010, 9. Diop, Mamadou Traoré (1974): Au pays de Lénine (carnet de voyage), Dakar: Sapress. Diop, Mamadou Traoré (1974a): “Poetry and the struggle for national liberation, socialism and peace,” Lotus. Afro-Asian Writings: Quarterly Review of the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers 21:3 (1974), 174–178. Diop, Sédar (2010): “Faudra-t-il déboulonner la statue?” Walfadjiri 5411, 2 Apr. 2010, 10. Drews-Sylla, Gesine (in print): “Wolofisierung und weltliterarische Vernetzung (mit Russland): Mahama Johnson Traorés Lambaaye als Verfilmung von Nikolaj Gogol’s Revizor im Kontext von Pathé Diagnes Literaturübersetzungen,” in: Schamma Schahadat, Erhard Schüttpelz, and Annette Werberger (eds.): Weltliteratur in der Longue durée. München (2020) Fofana, Bachir (2010): “‘Ce monument n’en est pas un, c’est une statue,’” Le populaire, 5 Jan. 2010. Garscha, Karsten (2002): “Négritude/Black Aesthetics/créolité,” in: Karlheinz Barck et al. (eds.): Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, Band 4, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 498–537. Gaye, Adama (2010): “Monument-bi,” Walfadjiri 5401, 22 Mar. 2010, 10. Harney, Elizabeth (2004): In Senghor’s Shadow. Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995, Durham/London: Duke University Press. Heerten, Lasse (2008): “Léopold Sédar Sedar Senghor als Subjekt der ‘Dialektik des Kolonialismus’. Ein Denker Afrikas und die imperiale Metropole,” Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 15 (2008), 87-116. Hoffmann, Frank (2010): “Painting in the DPRK,” in: Peter Noever (ed.): Blumen für Kim Il Sung: Kunst und Architektur aus der Demokratischen Volskrepublik Korea/Flowers for Kim Il Sung: Art and Architecture from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 219–221. Irele, Abiola (1986): “The Negritude Debate,” in: Albert S. Gérard (ed.): EuropeanLanguage Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, Budapest: Akad. Kiadó, 379–393. Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay (1969): Soviet Perspectives on African Socialism, Rutherford et al.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Laye, Aissatou (2009): “Un sexism révoltant,” La Gazette du pays et du monde 16, Jul. 2009, 2–9, 28. Lengvold, Robert (1970): Soviet Policy in West Africa, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moore, David Chioni (2005): “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,“ in: Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (eds.): Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Berg, 514–538.

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Murdoch, H. Adlai (2011): “Négritude and postcolonial literature,” in: Ato Quayson (ed.): The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1100–1126. Murphy, David (2000): Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction, Oxford: James Currey, and Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Murphy, David (ed.) (2016): The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Niasse, Moustapha (2010): “‘Ce monument reproduit une sculpture de 1937 en Russie,’” Walfadjiri 5413, 6 Apr. 2010, 4. Noever, Peter (ed.) (2010): Blumen für Kim Il Sung: Kunst und Architektur aus der Demokratischen Volskrepublik Korea/Flowers for Kim Il Sung: Art and Architecture from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst. Potekhin, Ivan I. (1964):“On African Socialism: A Soviet View,” in: William H. Friedland / Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. (eds.): African Socialism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 97–113. Raja, Ira/Bahri, Deepika (2011): “Key journals and organizations,” in: Ato Quayson (ed.): The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1155–1188. Rexer, Raisa (2013): “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: L’Étudiant noir, Communism, and the Birth of Négritude,” Research in African Literatures 44 (2013), 4, 1–14. Riebsamen, Hans (2005): “Fünf Tage in Pjöngjang: Rätselraten um eine Geheimreise nach Nordkorea,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 294, 12 Dec. 2005, 64. Schmeisser, Iris (2006): Transatlantic Crossings Between Paris and New York, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Seibert, Niels (2008): Vergessene Proteste: Internationalismus und Antirassismus, 1964–1983, Münster: Unrast. Senghor, Lamine (2012): La violation d’un pays et autrees écrits anticolonialistes, edited by David Murphy, Paris: LʼHarmattan. Senghor, Léopold Sédar (1964): “Eléments constitutifs d’une civilisation d’inspiration négro-africaine,” Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme, Paris: Seuil, 252–287. Senghor, Léopold Sédar (1964a): “African-Style Socialism.” In: William H. Friedland / Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. (eds.): African Socialism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 264–267. Senghor, Léopold Sédar (2001): “Nationhood: Report on the Doctrine and Program of the Party of African Federation,” in: Okwui Enwezor (ed.): The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, Munich/London/New York: Prestel, 396–412. Sow, Ousmane/Bertrand, Jacques A. (2006): Ousmane Sow. Photographies Béatrice Soulé, Arles: Actes Sud.

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Sy, Farba Alassane (2010): “Monument de la Renaissance africaine: Les mille facettes de la nouvelle curiosité mondiale,” Kotch 140, Apr. 3–5, 2010, 6–7. Toh Bi Tié, Emmanuel (2013): “Poésie et tradition chez les oralistes africains: Les exemples de Joachim Bohui Dali et de Mamadou Traoré Diop,” in: Clément Dili Palaï / Alain Cyr Pangop Kameni (eds.): Littérature orale africaine: Décryptage, reconstruction, canonisation, Paris: L’Harmattan, 167–181. Vaksmakher, M. et al. (eds.) (1973): Poeziia Afriki, Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Wade, Abdoulaye (2005): Un destin pour l’Afrique: l’avenir d’un continent, Neuilly-surSeine: Éditions Michel Lafon. Young, Robert (2001): Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Malden, MA/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell Publishing.

Other Sources Afrique ArteTV (2010), http://afrique.arte.tv/#/trip/SEN/1168/ (accessed August. 8, 2015). Amt für Wissenschaft und Kunst (ed.) (2006): Märchenbrunnen: Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main. Place du Souvenir Africain, www.placedusouvenirafricain.sn/ (accessed October 14, 2016). Virtual Museum of Political Art, http://horvath.members.1012.at/ vladimirski.htm (accessed June 1, 2017).

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The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65 Andre Schmid

New spaces create new anxieties. After the devastation of the Korean War (195053), one of the key new spaces to emerge in the northern half of the peninsula was the apartment unit. Like in many other countries around the world, North Korean architects and engineers turned to pre-fabricated, panel construction to rebuild housing stock and meet the demand for mass housing (for a survey of prefab construction in key global cities, see Urban 2012). This meant the wide scale introduction of the classic four to five-story, multi-unit building, as in contemporary Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. By the end of the 1950s, the cityscapes of North Korea had been radically transformed by projects that gave cities like Pyongyang an unprecedented sense of verticality. The very success of this building effort led to new challenges for a young, decolonizing Party-state eager to harmonize lifestyles with the goals of socialist construction. A new type of apartment living, Party-state authorities believed, would enable and nurture postwar national construction—or would it? As the Party-state began to place greater emphasis on the lifestyles of the population—what they called the “New Living” (saesarim; sinsaenghwal)—with the goal of socialist construction, apartments took on a number of divergent meanings. At first, authorities simply celebrated the erection of the new buildings. They quickly became one of the most visible material testaments after the devastation of war to proclaim the superiority of a postcolonial socialism, especially when measured against the continuing housing crisis in its chief rival, South Korea, and when seen as part of construction trends in the socialist bloc. Yet as people began moving into these spaces, authorities became concerned that apartments might, in fact, work against certain national priorities, in particular the mobilization of women’s wage labor. Apartment interiors came to be feminized and linked to the national labor shortage. Such critiques had a distinctive spatial vision, rooted in a division of inside/outside, where the former was represented as both feminine and unproductive. According to this deeply gendered view, apartments threatened to become self-indulgent spaces, encouraging women to be “dependent’, and do little but “eat and play”—in short, waste the potential of their labor power.

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Yet at the same time that this critique sought to get women “out” of their apartments for wage labor, writers working for the magazine, Korean Women (Chosŏn nyŏsŏng), developed ways of articulating a rich culture of domesticity centered on these same apartment interiors. In subtlety countering the dominant critique, these writers appealed to alternative Party-state goals and took advantage of the general silence of the top male leadership on issues relating to lifestyles of apartment interiors. Unable to directly contradict or argue against the dominant critique, these writers often used the same language and conceptual framework of the central Party-state to represent a different spatial logic, one that affirmed rather than denied the value of domestic activities in these new spaces while explicitly showing how the meanings of domesticity moved beyond the confines of their residences.1

A Postcolonial, Socialist Home The history of housing in North Korea cannot be separated from the history of colonialism and the contemporary politics of Cold War division. Beginning in 1955 and accelerating in 1958, the building of worker apartments transformed North Korean cities, both large and small. Annual reports record the hundreds of thousands of square metres of new apartment space produced every year and the visual record of the era includes a constant stream of photographs of newly and half-built sites. Yet perhaps the best testament of the astounding pace of transformation can be found in a two paneled cartoon published in 1957 and illustrated by Wŏn Kwangsu (1957: 51; see figure 1). Entitled “The Fast Pace of Construction,” Wŏn depicted in the cartoon’s first panel a worker leaving his neighborhood in the morning for his job. In the second panel, when the worker returns home at the end of the day, Wŏn shows him with his hat falling off in surprise and a large question mark hovering over his head. “I can’t see where our house is!” he proclaims with surprise. So many new houses had been erected during the day, he gets lost. In capturing this modernist them of the tumult of urban change, Wŏn’s humor rested on the fact that his audience had themselves experienced the dizzying transformation of cityscapes captured in his cartoon (for the much later developments in South Korea, see Gelezeau 2003; Namil 2008). Like in other parts of the world after the Second World War, pre-fab construction techniques appeared to be a panacea for the creation of mass housing. Korean architects deployed new technologies to design what became a shared ideal of architects around the world: the ideal small home (for one use of this term, see 1

‘Korea’ is usually used to denote the Republic of Korea (South Korea). In this paper, unless otherwise noted, ‘Korea’ refers to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

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Figure 1. Wŏn Kwangsu, “The Fast Pace of Construction.”

Wŏn Kwangsu, “Pparŭn sokto kŏnsŏl” (The Fast Pace of Construction), Ch’ŏngnyŏn saenghwal July 1957: page 51.

Honggu 1965: 17-19). These designs sought to navigate the contradictory demands of minimizing the use of state resources while maximizing the comfort of residents. There were many disagreements as to how this would be achieved, with even Kim Ilsung offering his architectural thoughts on the matter (for one of the more critical pieces on contemporary design, see Tŏkkŭn 1956: 8-17. Kim Ilsung made two speeches on architecture, the first in 1954 and then in 1956). Yet as the plans of built and proposed apartment units published in the journal, Architecture and Construction (Kŏnchuk kwa kŏnsŏl), revealed, one design assumption underpinned all these spaces: they featured two bedroom apartment units, each with its own kitchen, bathroom, and storage space, as well as a door to shut the unit off from the gaze and sound of other residents (see Figure 2) (Tŏkkŭn 1956: 9). This approach rejected the longstanding socialist vision, pursued first in post-revolutionary Soviet Union and subsequently, after 1949, in the People’s Republic of China, of using communal apartments to heighten collective sensibilities (for the USSR, see Harris 2013; for China see, Li 2015). No evidence exists suggesting that Korean architects ever considered using architectural design to rethink the material conditions of the family. To be sure, the extended family or clan had been much criticized in the peninsula as far back as

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Figure 2. Three variant floorplans for apartment units.

Kŏnch’uk kwa kŏnsŏl April 1956: page 9.

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the 1890s, yet as this critique developed over subsequent decades, it never moved to question the social or political basis of the nuclear family itself (see Chandra 1988; Schmid 2002). Quite the opposite. Virtually every political stripe of nationalism since the early twentieth century envisioned a reformed nuclear family as providing the basis for regaining and establishing the sovereignty of the country. This commitment continued in Korea (both north and south) after liberation. As a result, the nuclear family did not become the target of critique in North Korea and, unlike in immediate post-revolutionary USSR or PRC, was never deemed as a bastion of bourgeois values (see Miryang 1991). Revolution did not extend to the nuclear family. In addition, because the family had been used by colonial authorities as part of their ruling strategy, the Korean Workers Party (KWP) presented itself as the postcolonial savior of the Korean family. Only under the Party’s care, after years of colonial duress, could the family emerge to take its proper form and social place, according to official ideology. In this sense, the postcolonial affirmation of the nuclear family as representing sovereignty trumped the history of international socialist critique of the family. In providing the material conditions for family living, the Party-state could claim with justification that it was realizing a popular goal that had been denied to the vast majority of the people during the colonial era. Model living stories made this colonial connection, presenting apartment living as a form of experiencing liberation. In one such published account, Yi Sunhak recounted his move into a new home in 1956, explaining his happiness through his personal travails. He described life in the colonial period, when he lived with many people in a single room “as small as a crab shell.” Everything he owned went up in flames during the war, but now he occupied a “large and convenient” space with his wife, daughter and son. “How is it possible,” he asked incredulously, “that we have been able to enjoy in such a short time this kind of stable livelihood?” He went on to emphasize his own class background, “For our type of working family, living in this type of amazing house was nothing but a dream.” With its contrast of colonial versus sovereign, deprivation versus comfort, Yi’s representation of his move into a new apartment framed itself within the categories of the KWP. In the eyes of the Party-state—and likely much of the population who experienced similar transformations—living in these new residences became the everyday, physical experience of decolonization. So too did their design reaffirm the ideology of the heteronormative nuclear family and, for the first time in Korean history, make the material conditions for its widespread realization possible in the cities. The meaning of the new apartments also developed within a second, Cold War context. Rather than looking back in time to colonialism, this second dynamic viewed current social conditions vis à vis capitalist South Korea and the broader socialist world. In the 1950s and 1960s, North Korea still identified closely with its socialist allies. Various forms of circulation—from films to literary translations, from

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academic to technical cooperation—shaped everyday life in the north. Housing stood paramount among these exchanges. East Germans helped rebuild the provincial city of Hamhung. Korean architects regularly attended conferences in the socialist bloc (for one report of a conference in Moscow, see Ŭigŭn 1955: 46-49; for Berlin see Chesŏn 1957: 30). Photograph and design exhibitions of postwar Eastern European urban reconstruction efforts circulated (for the review of one such exhibition, featuring the reconstruction of Stalingrad, see Minju Chosŏn August 27, 1955). And the style of two bedroom apartment units transforming Korean cityscapes shared much in common with what came to be known as the khrushchevka, the Soviet leader’s answer to the housing crunch (Harris 2013). In this sense, the rebuilding of postwar Korean cities was widely understood, due to wide publicity of these ties, as a particular socialist form of housing. That the use of the pre-fab architectural forms crossed the Cold War divide—be it in Brasilia or Chicago—was unreported and irrelevant. Indeed, commentators invoked the technology of using standardized, industrially mass-produced panels to rapidly produce large numbers of building as representing a type of socialist ethos of construction. By the end of the 1950s, regular reports highlighted the percentage of housing across the nation that consisted of pre-fab, a statistic that continued to rise—from 32.4% in 1957 to 70.5% six years later in 1963 (see Chosŏn chungyang nyŏn’gam [The Korean national yearbook] 1964: 324). Yet as significant as the transnational context was for the formation of the specifically socialist meaning of these buildings, far more important was the context of the peninsula’s division. Since the Korean War had left the country split in two, after the cession of fighting the north and south immediately began to engage in a propaganda war. Much like the rivalry between the two Germanies sought to assert their claim of being the sole, legitimate government (for one treatment of division culture, largely from the perspective of the south, see Grinker 1998). Yet on the Korean peninsula, the economic situation was the opposite of the two Germanies: in the 1950s it was the socialist north that led the capitalist south. Being ahead, no North Korean leader needed to promise, as did their East German allies, that their country would “catch up” with the production levels of the other half. Nor did this dynamic replicate the Soviet-American “kitchen debate,” which was never reported in Korean newspapers. In that famous case, Nixon and Khrushchev met in Moscow and debated which country could best deliver consumer commodities to their citizenry. This competition over the superiority of kitchen appliances assumed a standard of living unavailable in most developing countries like the two Koreas, where the very existence of kitchens in which to place ‘superior’ appliances was not guaranteed (to cite a few in a growing literature, Castillo 2009; Reid 2005: 289-316 and Reid 2002: 211-59). In the much poorer Korean peninsula, the contention between north and south rested over the provision of housing—not what went under the roof but the roof itself. On this front, North Korea quickly moved

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ahead of the south in the years after the war—and was not shy about flaunting it.2 To this end, the North Korean media featured extensive coverage of the housing crisis in Seoul. Photographs of shantytowns, comics based on the life of a homeless mother and son, illustrations of old men using sewage pipes as housing, photospreads proclaiming “Heaven” (Pyongyang apartments) and “Hell” (Seoul shacks)—all these and more reduced the competing political systems to the single question of which side was providing adequate housing for its population (on the longrunning comic strip, see Chosŏn nyŏsŏng January 1962: 41; on the two page feature, “Ragwŏn kwa chiok” [Heaven and Hell], Nodongja sinmun 1959.4.29). So fundamental had this comparative enterprise become that virtually any photo of a newly opened residence in a North Korean city implicitly carried this form of comparative meaning. This dynamic gained force over the 1960s. In this way, simply living in one’s own familial apartment came to represent, according to official ideology, not just the possibilities of liberation from colonialism, but also the superiority of the North’s socialist system.

Wage Labor and the Unhappy Housewife Apartments were not meant just to be constructed but also to be residences—the New Living, in contemporary parlance. Yet it quickly became apparent that addressing the question of apartment living was much less straightforward than the meaning of construction. The very successes of apartment construction quickly elicited new anxieties. At the same time as Party-state authorities hailed the building program, they could not help but wonder what was going on inside these spaces? As historians of domesticity have long appreciated, dichotomies of inside/outside and private/public reflect less the organization of social life into separate realms and more the formation of ideological projects that invoke this very separation for political reasons.3 The emphasis on apartment interiority in the postwar years reflected a specific spatial vision of domesticity rooted in contemporary labor demands, one that positioned interiors as both feminine and unproductive space. This was, in part, possible because dominant celebrations of gender equality generally emphasized the growing participation of women in wage labor and the various opportunities, such as education, that supported this trend. The work of women at home, while valued as efficient managers and scientific mothers, was rarely framed in the

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Comparative articles were so standard in anti-South writing that eventually an entire magazine devoted to this theme, The Problems of South Korea (NamChosŏn munje), began to publish in 1965. It is important to point out that in this period Koreans did not draw the distinction of private versus public.

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much-vaunted term used for proletarian wage labor—nodong.4 Instead, “household affairs” (kasa) was used, the distinction a hierarchical one, which clearly made the latter subordinate. Domestic work, in the categories of the era, did not merit being considered labor per se. This simple lexical division shows how the spatial assumptions underlying the question of the New Living—what type of living should be nurtured in such novel settings?5 —became entangled with the macro-economic labor power challenges of the era. The family apartment emerged as the primary locus for the type of ‘happiness’ (haengbok, kippŭm) the mass media promoted as what was to be ideally enjoyed under socialism. As in Soviet ideals, individual happiness was seen in official discourse as fusing with those of the collective—a conjoining that was neither monolithic nor imposed unilaterally by the state (Balina/Dobrenko 2009). Effusive declarations of happiness—“We are happy!” as one illustration announced over a two-page center fold depicting the activities that made this possible (see Chosŏn nyŏsŏng)—could be found throughout the media and literature in the postwar years. Stories of happy couples, happy homes, and happy families accompanied the photographs of families enjoying the interior space or strolling together outside their apartments (“Haengbokhan kajŏng” [A Happy Home], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng January 1959: 30-32). This surfeit of happiness was depicted as taking place in and around this singular new space, the apartment. The contrapuntal theme to all this effusive happiness was, ironically, unhappiness—or more specifically, the emergence of the figure of the unhappy housewife who became intimately tied to these new apartment buildings. As a form of representation in the official press, the image of the unhappy housewife reflected the spatial anxieties of this dominant critique. More specifically, it was the potential separateness of the family unit, living in a space whose door could shut out other political and socio-economics relations, that raised the alarm bells of authorities. For in this era, when socialist construction had been made into the unquestionable national priority, requiring the participation of the entire population, these celebrated spaces were simultaneously deemed a threat to the mobilization of women. The concern, reaching up to the highest levels of the party, was that the new apartments might be too comfortable and too enjoyable of a space. This fear contrasted with the politics of apartments in contemporary Soviet Union. By the late 4

5

Usages were not consistent across the Korean Women. An example of a rather rare case of the use of the word “household labor” (kasa nodong) in a letter submitted by an anonymous, unemployed mother, who cites Kallinin “Kajŏng puindŭrŭn ŏttokkoe sahoejuŭi kŏnsŏl-e ch’amgahal kŏsinga?” [How can housewives participate in the construction of socialism?] Chosŏn nyŏsŏng (July 1957: 4-5). For an example from a different newspaper, “Tach’ung cht’aek-eso ŭi saesarim” [The New Living in Multi-Level Apartments] Minju Chosŏn, September 29, 1955 and “Saenghwal-e dŏuk chŏkhamnan kujoro” [Towards a Better Living Design] Minju Chosŏn, August 30, 1955.

The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65

1950s, the Soviet de-Stalinization movement had entered into the confines of the home to offer a new aesthetic for design and a new priority on creating cozy homes. Ascetic design sensibilities became passé (see Reid 2009).No such shift occurred in 1950s Korea. At a time when tens of thousands of families were moving for the first time ever into apartments the main women’s magazine, Korean Women rarely even raised the question of how to decorate the new spaces. Interior design was less a priority than ensuring that residents did not become overly comfortabe in their new apartments. Authorities remained anxious to get women out of the homes into which they had just moved and which had been built in the name of the Party’s care for the livelihood of families. These anxieties were rooted in a specific economic challenge of the postwar—a labor shortage. As central planners constantly pointed out, there were not enough bodies available to provide the labor power to fulfill reconstruction plans (see Ŭnggi 1958). Undoubtedly this lack arose, in part, by the inefficiencies of central planning, as many non-socialist economists have pointed out (most famously Kornai 1980; interestingly, surplus labor or unemployment is rarely deemed an inefficiency). So, too, did it have much to do with the mass death of war and the continued manpower needs of a large military on a still divided peninsula, where US troops were stationed less than 200 kms away from the capital (Wŏnbong 1956: 39-49). In comparison to major combatants of the Second World War, only Poland suffered more deaths as a proportion of its population as did the DPRK during the Korean War. Population in 1953, as reported in official statistics, fell by more than 12 per cent measured against 1949, with the disproportionate death rate of men leaving a gender imbalance of 46.9:53.1.6 As the economy grew, the demand for labor only increased—as did the pressure on women, seen by economic planners as the single largest reserve of surplus labor. By 1956, the inability to stem the continual flow of labor from rural to urban areas led central planners to turn to a gendered solution for this imbalance (On the issue of mobility between rural and urban areas, see Schmid 2018; one example of the gendered solution to labor mobility, see Rodong sinmun, “Kŭllojadŭrŭi puyang kajogŭl chikchang-e kwangbŏmhi iniphaja” [Let’s broadly bring workers’ dependent household members into the workplace] Rodong sinmun January 7, 1956). If urban women joined the urban workforce, the logic went, there would be fewer unfilled positions in the city and thus, it was believed, fewer opportunities for rural men to migrate and exacerbate conditions in the countryside. Women ensconced in the comfortable spaces of their new apartment buildings, economic planners argued, offered a solution for the rural-urban imbalances of labor.

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This figure would also account for defections to the south (Chosŏn chungyang nyŏn’gam [The Korean national yearbook], 1964: 316).

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It is in this context that the image of the unhappy housewife began to emerge. By the late 1950s, as more apartments were completed, the press featured a flurry of stories on what came to be called “dependent family members” (puyang kajok), famly members who did not take part in wage labor. These stories shared a disciplining logic: without wage work, domestic bliss was unachievable. Such was the case with Kim Yŏngsuk, featured in a rather unremarkable 1960 first person story in the pages of Korean Women. “After I got married, all I did was isolate myself in my home, not even reading a single book and always complaining to my husband,” she selfdeprecatingly wrote (Yŏngsuk 1960: 34-35). Devoting all her time to family affairs, including the raising of children, she turned down the possibility of becoming a neighborhood hygiene inspector. Her story was one of self-indulgence. She went on to admit that at the time she did not even realize the joys she was missing out on by refusing to participate in social activities, let alone the paid labor force. It was, she described, a “colorless existence.” She was unhappy. Nor was she alone. By 1958, women constituted only 34.9% of wage laborers in the country (see Chosŏn chungyang nyŏn’gam [The Korean national yearbook] 1961: 341). This figure was at once celebrated and lamented: celebrated as the highest rate ever, yet lamented because questions lingered as to why the figure was not even higher. Given that in this same year, it had been announced that all the means of production had been finally collectivized, all the conditions for full participation of women in wage labor were, in theory at least, present. How to explain this disparity? Ever since the 1946 series of statutes known as the Gender Equality Laws were inaugurated, the low rate of participation in paid labor on the part of women had been blamed by authorities primarily on socioeconomic structural problems (for a treatment of these statutes and their implementations, see Kim 2013: 183-188). This was, after all, the presumption of the legislation, namely that laws could alter the conditions inhibiting women’s wage labor. Throughout the 1950s, a wide swath of biographical stories as well as social analysis discussed the types of remaining obstacles, often in sweeping tones or in the specific details of the lives of individual women. Accessibility to nearby jobs, work of a suitable skill level, the continued reluctance of enterprises to hire married women, the challenge of what we would today call the double burden, less than encouraging husbands and families—all these came to be analyzed as possible reasons (on the issue of the double burden, see Kim 2013: 190-95). Many detailed the particular challenges of mother workers: the rhythms of round the clock factory work, the paucity of quality daycare, the challenge of breastfeeding while working, the insufficient and bad quality of public cafeterias and laundries. The list was long. All of these social conditions, out of the control of individuals, came to be seen as the still remaining barriers to full employment, excluding women as unwilling “dependent family members.”

The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65

In order to raise participation levels, the gendered segregation of labor became a central planning strategy. Certain types of work, usually in light and service industries, were naturalized as more “suitable” for women. In 1958, a cabinet decision set employment targets that gave preference to women in education and public health. It also recommended that enterprises survey their units for jobs appropriate for women but currently occupied by men with an eye to moving them to jobs deemed “suitable” for men, especially direct production in heavy industry. In theory, this policy would open up more opportunities for women (Cabinet decision #84, as explained in Rodong sinmun July 20, 1958). Photographs of factory shop floors in a number of sectors, such as food processing or retail work, confirm the frequency of segregation (See photos in Rodong sinmun October 5, 1954; August 2, 1955; April 16, 1956). No man, for example, would have been seen as a regular worker on the floor of the Pyongyang Porcelain factory (for a photo of the Pyongyang porcelain factory, see Rodong sinmun November 27, 1959). Breaking down segregated work places was not seen as part of the task of official gender equality policies. Segregation became instrumentalized to maximize participation. The question for women centered not on what type of work she did but whether she was, as one common phrase put it, “hiding out at home” or working for wages.7 Yet in her account of why she had remained at home after marriage, Kim Yŏngsuk did not invoke these types of structural obstacles or conditions. Rather, she blamed herself. She explained that it was not that she did not have opportunities to earn a wage, just that she had been too selfish and narrow-minded in her “colorless existence.” The solution, she offered, also rested in her own hands since, once she became aware of her situation, she simply “made up her mind” (kyŏlshim) to “correct her lifestyle and raise her level of culture,” (Yŏngsuk 1960: 35). Kim’s inward turn to her own individual ideological commitment reflected two trends that shaped the dominant logic about home interiors and the value of domestic activities. First, from the inception of the regime, there had always been a capital shortage for social investments. After the war, the Party-state’s decision to give priority to the development of heavy industry only exacerbated the situation. These financial limits became further pronounced as the ‘Fraternal Assistance’ from its socialist allies declined, particularly as memories of the Korean War faded and donor fatigue set in (for the politics surrounding assistance after the war, see Szalontai 2005; Lankov 2002). Some money was invested in social services such as daycare, to name one, but not enough. Between 1953 and 1958, the number of daycares increased in

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The Rodong sinmun commonly used this phrase, as can be seen in the story about the Sinŭiju based, Ri Hyesŏn: “A Woman Hiding Out at Home” [Kajŏng-e p’amuthinŭn nyŏsŏng], Rodong sinmun (April 6, 1955). For one example of a woman saying she did not want to “hide out at home” Rodong sinmun (December 13, 1955).

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Pyongyang from 4 to 182, which did not come close to meeting needs, especially outside the larger enterprises (Chosŏn chungang nyŏn’gam 1959: 236). As a result, the central Party-state quickly abandoned its early promises to offer daycare itself. The initial solution was to transfer the organization of childcare to work enterprises, making them responsible for the care of their own workers’ children. Yet, factory managers, too, resisted. Hard pressed to meet production targets and short on capital, enterprise heads rarely chose to invest their own scarce resources into day care—and especially not quality care, as countless women complained in the press (for a letter to the editor that compares a good versus a bad daycare, see Am 1956). It is perhaps not in the least surprising, then, that the responsibility for daycare ultimately came to be downloaded onto the shoulders of working mothers themselves. Downloading was the cheapest solution for both the Party-state and the enterprises. By the late 1950s, model stories began to feature women who, together with their neighbors, organized their own daycare centers (one example is “Ŏmŏnidŭri chojikhan yuch’iwŏn” [A Daycare organized by mothers], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng January 1956: 13). Rotating days between their paid labor and tending the children, these women received much praise as reflecting the virtues of self-sacrifice and self-sufficiency when, in fact, they were taking over the official responsibilities of the state. The limits on the central state meant individual women would have to make due for themselves. Making due, taking initiative, and self-problem solving—in short, exactly what Kim’s story of unhappiness sought to promote—could themselves be celebrated while the ineffectiveness of state planning was glossed over.8 Such an emphasis on self-responsibility connected to a second, arguably more important factor in Kim Yŏngsuk’s inward turn: a gradual shift in the Party-state’s approach to ideology. From its inception, the KWP had articulated a form of working class ideology that emphasized the self-reforming impetus of the individual to self-scrutinize and take initiative. This onus on the interiority of the striving individual was a modernist ideology par excellence, here harnessed to notions of a socialist subject that did not depend on classic Marxist understanding of the relationship between class and ideology. This was about ideology reflecting not one’s relationship to the means of production but one that was acquired, studied, cultivated and put into practice. Its most obvious manifestation was the proliferation of advice literature and self-help manuals (for one example see Yŏng-sik 1965). Not unlike Soviet notions of kulturnost—yet also similar to the colonial era notions of “cultural life” (munhwa saenghwal)—this approach to ideology applied to both genders and had always been part of the solution to the Women’s Question (on the Soviet concept, see Volkov 2000; in Japan, see Harootunian 2000). However, with 8

This shift can already be seen in the Rodong sinmun shifting editorial approach to International Women’s Day, where by 1958 it is placing the burden almost exclusively on women’s drive to improve their ideological stance. See the editorial for March 8, 1958.

The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65

the complete collectivization of the means of production in 1958, this new approach became progressively prevalent. After all, with the means of production socialized there were few good structural reasons, in theory, for women not to participate. The only plausible explanation lay with their individual ideological levels. That some women were at home, isolated and not engaged in wage labor, was seen according to this logic as indicating that they had not steeled themselves sufficiently, that their ideological preparedness was still lacking and, in a term commonly used in this era, reflected their “outmoded thought” (nalgŭn sasang). This was not quite the same as blaming housewives for their own problems but it came precariously close. Indeed, in the hands of illustrators working for Korean Women the situation could be poked fun at, as was the case in a comic contributed by a kindergarten teacher, Son Ŭngnan (1960: 40). In the first panel of one comic, Son depicted a mother comfortably sleeping in late under her covers while her son tries to awaken her (see Figure 3). In the next scene, the mother is awake yet she takes her time getting her makeup right as she sits in front of her commode while her son, frustrated, waits for her to finish. Son finishes the comic showing the mother hurrying along the street, nearly dragging her son along while complaining that she is late for work. In the hands of Son, the trope of a self-indulgence enabled by the comfort of a new apartment sought to elicit a warm, sympathetic chuckle while still serving as a critique. Yet what served as gentle satire of home life could quickly be made, in less generous hands, into more disparaging treatment. This was the case with a letterto-the-editor in a national newspaper by Ra Chaeguk, a son in one working family, who clearly perceived there was cultural capital to be gained by boasting about one’s family ‘happiness’. Reporting proudly that everyone in his family was either gainfully employed or studying at school, he pointed out that there was not a single member of his family who was merely “playing and eating” around the home (nolgo mongnŭn saram) (Chaeguk 1957). Variations of this expression became a way of sometimes jokingly, sometimes not, denying the social value of the domestic life of women. By 1965, it had become so common that even Kim Ilsung could use the notion of women “playing at home” in its most demeaning and dismissive sense (see Ilsung 1965). In these types of usages, there was no mixed message or sense of sympathetic satire. The blame for what was seen as their selfish idleness fell entirely on the shoulders of women, who came to be seen as ‘hidden’ in the interiors of their apartments, which in turn were seen as unproductive spaces. In this critique that rested on a stark division between inside/outside, a more productive lifestyle meant escaping the very apartment spaces that were simultaneously celebrated as one of the grand achievements of the young regime (this change can be seen in full force in 1965 in the national newspaper’s editorial policy, “Sahoejuŭi kŏnsŏl kwa nyŏsŏng munje” [Socialist construction and the woman issue], Rodong

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Figure 3. Son Ŭngnan, “The wishes of Yŏngnam.”

Son Ŭngnan, “Yŏngnam ŭi sowŏn” (Yongnam’s wishes) Chosŏn nyŏsŏng November 1960: page 40.

sinmun, November 13, 1965). Accordingly, individual ideological explanations now largely trumped the structural explanations for the gap in wage employment. This turn to the explanatory device of individual ideological “levels” became more prominent at the same time that large numbers of urbanites moved into the new-style apartment units. The anxiety on the part of top level officials—“what was happening in these new spaces?”—came largely to burden the women in these spaces, especially in cases where they had not taken up paid wage labor outside the home. The old trope, prevalent around the globe and with a long history in the first of half of the peninsula’s 20th century, of “backward” women merely received a new socialist twist. Kim Yŏngsuk was not alone—and her “unhappiness” became only one of the many ways of relating individual ideology to interior spaces. A large number of biographical profiles emerged in the press, reproducing a similar

The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65

logic in a wide variety of individual cases. Puyang kajok—those dependent family members—were shown getting their acts together and finding work, be it Yi Poksil finding a job in the same tobacco processing plant as her husband or the 1500 married women, who were hired in four months to meet the expansion needs of one textile factory (see Sangrok 1959; “Puyang kajoktŭri ilhanda” [Dependent family members are working], Rodong sinmun, December 13, 1955). Variations on the model workers stories –model housewife stories—ranged widely, exploring the many idiosyncratic histories of the local social worlds of women yet always returning to an evaluation of an individual’s ideological fortitude, one measure of which remained her relation to the interior of her home. Despite the great pressure placed on women to take up wage work, results were decidedly mixed. In 1959, the national participation rate actually dipped slightly before rising nominally in the early 1960s.9 How was this possible? Given what is often assumed about the totalizing power of the Party-state together with the priority placed on mobilizing women’s labor for economic reconstruction, how did close to one third of women stay out of the paid labor force? This figure gives us some sense of the limits of Party-state power. It also likely suggests that the many structural and discriminatory conditions, which by the late 1950s were being underplayed in the media, still remained powerful factors well into the 1960s, if not longer. Another factor deserving attention is the rise of new forms of socialist domesticity promoted by the woman’s magazine, Korean Women that offered diverse ways for women who were not participating in daily wage labor to legitimize their domestic activities.

Articulating a Socialist Domesticity Within the same pages and at the same time that it published stories about unhappy housewives, Korean Women began simultaneously to valorize new styles of apartment living that rested somewhat uneasily with dominant emphases on wage labor. These features of the New Living implicitly broke with the idea that socalled “dependent family members” inside their apartments were necessarily unproductive. While the dominant emphasis on wage work was overt, even brash, this second strand was less assertive and made fewer sweeping claims—all the while still being framed within the category of New Living. That there was room for articulating the value of domestic activities had much to do with the fact that senior levels of leadership did not express overt interest in domesticity beyond its implications for the labor market. To be sure, the “Women 9

Absolute numbers of women participating were up, but as a percentage of the rising population, these were down.

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Question” always maintained a high profile in the self-legitimizing ideology of the Party, yet in fact few members of its upper echelons extended this interest across the threshold of the nation’s new apartments, other than in the most perfunctory ways. Kim Ilsung seemed satisfied during his prolific postwar career of speechmaking and essay writing to deal with the Women Question almost exclusively within speeches on the economy and within the context of the labor shortage. He did not even bother to address the Womens’ Federation annual congress until twelve years after the war (see Ilsung 1965).10 The Party’s main theoretical journal, Laborer (Kŭlloja) did not feature a single article devoted exclusively to the Women Question, let alone any discussion of the New Living in the new apartments in its first dozen years of publication after 1953. In leading economic journals, the extent of discussion remained tied to labor mobilization, though even here economists preferred to deal with the technocratic problem of raising worker productivity as a solution to labor demands rather than the more nettlesome social problem of mobilizing women (Anonymous 1962).11 In a time of momentous change, these high level office holders—mostly men—stuck to a restricted definition of the “Women Question,” deeming the activities within the household either unworthy of their attention or possibly less glamorous in a time of exciting change. The “Women Question”, in their eyes, was a question for women. The New Living appealed as a general category, yet at these higher levels it remained an amorphous one, left to others to articulate. By default, the editors of Korean Women did just that. At the same time as they continued to publish stories with light criticisms of “dependant family members,” they began in the late 1950s and increasingly in the 1960s to develop a rich culture of domesticity that escaped tropes of idleness and centered on apartment interiors as spaces with productive potential. This was possible because writers took advantage of two key issues—motherhood and production culture (saengsan munhwa)—which had been discussed since the end of the war. In the mid-1950s, whenever Party leaders commemorated the proclamation of the 1946 gender laws or celebrated International Women’s Day—whether in a speech or in print—there was almost always mention of the importance of motherhood, however briefly (for a classic example, see the Rodong sinmun March 4, 1955 featuring the Party Central Committee‘s response to the oath set on International

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There was one exception, beginning in the early 1960s Kim Ilsung began to pick up on postwar motherhood discourse, making a speech at the All-Nation Mothers Congress of 1961, see Chŏn’guk ŏmŏni taehoe [All-nation mothers congress] (1961). Kim Wŏnbong puts the issue of women’s labor last after a long list of considerations. “Roryŏk munjeŭi ollŭn haegyŏrŭn kumho kyŏngje kŏnsŏl-esŏ kajang chungyohan munjeŭi hana ida” [The proper resolution of the labor problem is one of the most important problems facing future economic construction], Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl (March 1956: 39-49).

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Women’s Day).12 Typically, such mentions framed motherhood within longstanding 20th century tropes of mothers nurturing the nation’s future generations, with the added socialist caveat that these children would be the vanguard leading the transition to a communist society. In these speeches and editorials, motherhood remained subordinate to wage labor issues, usually arising near the end of the statements, almost as if an afterthought. Nevertheless, the very acknowledgement of this role became politically significant for the Federation for it offered an opening to push the bounds of what was deemed proper motherhood, which in turn enabled writers to venture more broadly in discussing life in the new apartments.13 The second issue, production culture, captured the Party’s deep commitment to prioritizing economic growth above all else. This wide-ranging term, one of the newfangled neologisms of the young socialist regime, sought to subordinate all culture to the economy by establishing cultural norms that would, at minimum, not interfere with, and ideally, assist with increasing production. A favorite of central planners, production culture included efforts to keep the morale of workers high, ensure that infrastructure was used to the maximum, fine tune wage levels to give appropriate materials incentives, ensure the rational order and hygiene of factories, and raise the technical knowledge of workers—to name just a few (for one explanation emphasizing technical knowledge and administration of technology, see “Saengsan munhwa” [Production Culture] Kyŏngje chisik July 1962: 24-33). Yet the idea of production culture also moved beyond the workplace. Writers began linking issues such as worker absenteeism or tardiness, alcoholism and hygiene standards, to the proper management of domestic life. This connection between productivity and homelife brought the New Living into play with the workplace. However little this connection may have been discussed in economic journals, this notional turn to the household nevertheless—like the brief mentions of motherhood—provided the Women’s Federation with an officially sanctioned, ill-defined realm of activity with which to explore the directions the New Living might unfold. Unlike motherhood, this was not specifically a women’s issue, yet the Federation made it one. By the end of the decade, writers in Korean Women used the openings provided by ideals of motherhood and production culture to devote extensive coverage to domestic issues that might have only the most tangential relationship to the question of wage work and workplace-defined equality.

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The subsequent editorial reproduces this approach, “The Glory of the Republic’s Women,” Rodong sinmun (March 8, 1955). There was another international dimension to the rise of motherhood discourse, the 1955 World Congress of Mothers, which in its critique of war through the symbolic appeal of the association of mothers with peace carried special resonance for a country newly emergent from war. For one report, see “Segye mosŏng taehoe” [World Congress of Mothers], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng (August 1958: 8-9).

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In pushing a vision of domesticity, Korean Women also implicitly questioned the dominant vision of apartment interiors as unproductive. Proper domesticity at home, they suggested, remained a vital part of socialist construction. Activities were never recommended for their own sake but always linked to higher objectives, which themselves had been approved by the Party-state. Sewing at home, which photographs promoted as a special feminine activity, could show a mother and daughter working to help alleviate the shortage of consumer goods while realizing ideals of self-sufficiency (Chosŏn nyŏsŏng June 1956: inside back cover). Flower arrangement for inside the house or on the balcony could be presented as a form of socialist aesthetics, which in turn had the potential of instilling in children the emotional sensibilities needed to lead the country on a future progressive path (“Kko’t changsik” [Flower arrangement], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng August 1959: 33). Recipes for nutritious side dishes could be published with an eye for satiating the needs of urban workers for more side dishes at a time when the industrialization of food production remained limited. Just as importantly, nutritious food was to be prepared at home for family members when the number of public cafeterias remained limited.14 The proper cultivation of emotional sensibility among children became a gendered means of pursuing class struggle with mothers at the core (“ŏmŏnidŭriyŏ! Chanyŏdŭrŭl kongsanjuŭi sasangŭro kyoyanghaja!” [Mothers—Let’s Raise Our Children with Communist Thought!], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng June 1959: 1-2). Non-working mothers were given special roles in neighborhood committees (inminban) as well as anti-spy campaigns. The exploration of these types of activities within the context of the New Living only expanded over time. Earlier emphasis on wage labor and how to manage the double burden never disappeared from its pages, but by the early to mid- 1960s the pages of Korean Women filled with articles about different features of domesticity—and many were published with little effort to legitimize them by appealing to different Party-state sanctioned goals. Even interior décor—the last holdout—became a regular feature of Korean Women and got taken up by other magazines (e.g. the journal Chollima [Thousand Mile Horse]). Curtain design and window trimmings now became legitimate items of discussion, where notions of taste became an indication of one’s cultural and ideological levels.15 Korean Women’s first issue for 1965 shows the shift. The issue devotes two pages describing thrifty lifestyles (2425), more than a dozen pages for a feature “Love, Marriage, Home” (28-41), a four

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By 1956 a household food column (kajŏng ŭmsik) appeared in the Chosŏn nyŏsŏng with recommendations such as corn tea, see Chosŏn nyŏsŏng (January 1956: 39). As the economy takes off in the early 1960s, this begins to change slightly as can be seen by an article in Chosŏn nyŏsŏng devoted to options in window décor. “Ch’angmun” [Windows], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng (May 1964: 52-53). Also see “Ch’anjang”, Chosŏn nyŏsŏng (January 1965: 134-135).

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page article titled “Mother—the most sublime word” (67-70); several pages featuring advice on raising children properly, including the proper nutrition for a newborn (75-78) and what to do when you catch a child lying (81), a lengthy section analyzed the nutritional content of various foodstuffs (110-18), and five pages explained the basics of sewing replete with patterns (125-130), to name just a few. All these articles barely mention what remained in the view of the central Partystate the pre-imminent challenge of the “Women Question”—getting women out of the apartments and into the workforce. The proportion of coverage focusing on domestic issues was unthinkable just ten years earlier. In showing constantly how housework in all its variety was indispensable to the construction of socialism the implicit message was clear: the future of the revolution rested just as much with women in their apartments. It is difficult not to see a relation between the rise of these new forms of domesticity and the continuing gap in women’s participation rates in wage labor. Despite this evolution in defining the New Living, it is important to note that these emergent notions about socialist domesticity did not work against Party policies, nor did they constitute some sort of private realm, independent of official discourse. Writers did not adopt critical or oppositional language. Nor was this form of New Living offered as a gendered critique of social relations. Aside from some discussions about the need for men to ‘cooperate’ in the household, authors restrained from criticizing dominant masculinities. Although the era’s political culture enabled real-life negative examples to be used publicly to promote change in personal behaviour through group and self-criticism, Korean Women never turned to this practice as a vehicle for gender critiques and refrained from naming or calling out individual men for discriminatory practices. Even the double burden, while lamented, never became the subject of sustained social critique. That such heavy domestic burden might be considered as labor (nodong) on par in status with wage labor also was rarely broached, let alone argued, in its pages. The assertion of new forms of domesticity—no matter how significant for understanding the shifting cultural, gender, and social history of the period—certainly had its limits. For the most part, then, the articulation of these new forms of domesticity engaged deeply with the same language and categories as the Party-state. This dynamic is perhaps best seen in the fact that Korean Women never directly challenge demeaning representations of women “playing and eating,” or “hiding out” in “backward” homes. In fact, in the pages of Korean Women writers and cartoonists continued to deploy these tropes, though usually in a more disarming, humorous vein or in redemptive stories showing what individual women had been overcome. Nevertheless, the minatory example of the idle, housebound woman—so fundamental to dominant perspectives on gendered labor—remained a powerful disciplining tool. In the hands of the editors of Korean Women, such representation together with notions of “cultural levels” created a hierarchy among their members,

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rationalizing the expertise of the Federation’s leaders as the arbiters of the New Living, however newly defined. The image of the unhappy housewife, in short, still had its uses—only now she was contextualized within a wider assortment of possibilities. The construction of apartment complexes after the ravages of the Korean War stands as one of the earliest achievements of the Korean Party-state, one that was undoubtedly welcomed by much of the urban population. Yet just what new lifestyles would be appropriate for a type of architecture novel to Korea was not so straightforward, resulted in much anxiety, and led to extensive exploration. The New Living was a capacious category, open to multiple interpretations. It enabled the coexistence and intertwining of divergent visions with differing understandings of the relationships between living spaces, wage labor and domesticity. Although the Party-state visions of appropriate lifestyles emphasized wage labor and problematized homes as unproductive, this did not foreclose the possibilities for the female residents of these apartments to explore rich alternatives, even if these did not quite constitute an explicit form of opposition or direct critique. Nevertheless, in the hands of these women, the language, metaphors and tropes promoted in official discourse were creatively deployed to legitimate new forms of domesticity, which however linked to the national goal of socialist construction were simultaneously used for their own individual purposes.

References Am, Hyŏn (1956): “Tu Chikchang t’agasoŭi silchŏng” [The state of two work daycares], Rodong sinmun July 15, 1956. Anonymous (1962): “Rodong saengsan nŭngryul ŭi pudanhan changsŏng ŭi pŏpch’ik” [The law of the consistent growth of the labor productivity rate], Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl February 1962, 126-132. Balina, Marina/Dobrenko, Evgeny (eds.) (2009): Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, London: Anthem Press. Castillo, Greg (2009): Cold War on the Home Front: The Power of Mid-Century Design, Minnesota: University Press. Chaeguk, Ra (1957): “Rodong ilgaŭi kippŭmŭl chŏnhamnida” [Passing along the Happiness of one working family], Nodong sinmun January 1, 1957. Chandra, Vipan (1988): Imperialism, Resistance and Reform in Late Nineteenth Century Korea: Enlightenment and the Independence Club, Berkeley: CKS. Chesŏn, Han (1957): “P’yochun sŏlye-e kwanhan sahoechuŭi kukkadŭlkan ŭi hoeűi-e ch’amgahago” [Participating in a socialist countries’ conference on standardized design], Kŏnch’uk kwa kŏnsŏl April 1957, 30. Gelezeau, Valérie (2008): Séoul, ville géante, cités radieuses, Paris: CNRS Editions.

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Grinker, Roy (1998): Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Harootunian, Harry (2000): Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harris, Steven E. (2013): Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press Honggu, Ri (1965): “Choesohan sedae ŭi chut’aek p’yojun sŏlgye-e taehan myŏtkaji munje” [Several problems concerning the minimal standard size of apartment units],” Kŏnch’uk kwa kŏnsŏl April 1965: pp. 17-19. Ilsung, Kim (1965): “Nyŏmaeng chojiktŭrap’-e nasŏnŭn myŏtkaji kwaŏp-e taehayŏ,” [On several tasks arising in the Women’s Federation], Collected Works Volume 35 (September 2, 1965): 415-426. Kim, Suzy (2013): Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-50, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kornai, Janos (1980): Economics of Shortage, New York: North-Holland Pub. Co. Kwangsu, Wŏn (1957): “Pparŭn kŏnsŏl sokdo” [The rapid pace of construction], Ch’ŏngnyŏn saenghwal July 1957: 51. Lankov, Andrei (200): From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 19451960, New Bruswick: Rutgers University Press. Li, Jie (2015): Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Miryang, Yun (1991): Puk Hanŭi yŏsŏng chŏngch’aek [North Korean’s Policies on Women], Seoul: Hanul. Namil, Chŏn (2008): Han’guk chugŏŭi sahoesa [A Social History of Korean Housing], P’aju: Tol Pegae. Reid, Susan (2002): “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61:2, 211259. Reid, Susan (2005): “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the ScientificTechnological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40:2, 289-316. Reid, Susan (2009): “Communist Comfort: Socialist Modernism and the making of Comfy Homes in the Khrushchev Era,” Gender and History 21:3, 465-498. Sangrok, An (1959): “Puyang kajogŭl saengsan-e iniphagikkaji” [Until dependent families enter production], Rodong sinmun February 3, 1959. Schmid, Andre (2002): Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, New York: Columbia University Press. Schmid, Andre (2018): “Historicizing North Korea: State Socialism, Population Mobility, and Cold War Historiography,” American Historical Review 123:2, 439-462. Szalontai, Balázs (2005): Kim Ilsung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Tŏkkŭn, Pak (1956): “Chŏnhu chut’aek-e taehan myŏt kaji ŭigyŏn” [Thoughts on Postwar Housing Design], Kŏnch’uk kwa kŏnsŏl 4, 8-17. Ŭigŭn, Hwang (1955): “Soryŏn kŏnsŏlcha taehoe sosik” [Report on the Soviet Conference of Architects], Kŏnch’uk kwa kŏnsŏl January 1955, 46-49. Ŭnggi, Kim (1958): “Roryŏk munje haegyŏrŭl wihan kinjŏlhab che kwaŏp” [Several pressing problems for the resolution of the labour problem], Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl March 1958, 30-61. Ŭngnan, Son (1960): “Yŏngnam-I sowŏn,” Chosŏn nyŏsŏng November 1960, 40. Urban, Florian (2012): Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing, New York: Routledge. Volkov, Vadim (2000): “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in: Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.): Stalinism: New Directions, London: Routledge. Wŏnbong, Kim (1956): “Roryŏk munjeŭi ollŭn haegyŏrŭn kumho kyŏngje kŏnsŏlesŏ kajang chungyohan munjeŭi hana ida” [The proper resolution of the labor problem is one of the most important problems facing future economic construction], Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl March 1956, 39-49. Yŏng-sik, Hwang (1965): Saenghwal ŭi kŏul [A Mirror on Life], Pʻyŏngyang: Chosŏn Sahoejuŭi Nodong Chʻŏngnyŏn Tongmaeng Chʻulpʻansa. Yŏngsuk, Kim (1960): “Saenghwarŭl kaesŏnhagikkaji” [Until I improved my life]; Chosŏn nyŏsŏng January 1960, 34-35.

Articles “Ch’angmun” [Windows], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng May 1964, 52-53. “Ch’anjang”, Chosŏn nyŏsŏng, January 1965, 134-135. “Haengbokhan kajŏng” [A Happy Home], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng January 1959, 30-32. “Kko’t changsik” [Flower arrangement], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng August 1959, 33. “Kŭllojadŭrŭi puyang kajogŭl chikchang-e kwangbŏmhi iniphaja” [Let’s broadly bring workers’ dependent household members into the workplace], Rodong sinmun January 7, 1956. “Ŏmŏnidŭri chojikhan yuch’iwŏn” [A Daycare organized by mothers] (1956), Chosŏn nyŏsŏng January 1956, 13. “ŏmŏnidŭriyŏ! Chanyŏdŭrŭl kongsanjuŭi sasangŭro kyoyanghaja!” [Mothers - Let’s Raise Our Children with Communist Thought!], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng June 1959, 1-2. “Puyang kajoktŭri ilhanda” [Dependent family members are working], Rodong sinmun December 13, 1955. “Ragwŏn kwa chiok” [Heaven and Hell], Nodongja sinmun 29 April 1959.

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“Roryŏk munjeŭi ollŭn haegyŏrŭn kumho kyŏngje kŏnsŏl-esŏ kajang chungyohan munjeŭi hana ida” [The proper resolution of the labor problem is one of the most important problems facing future economic construction], Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl March 1956, 39-49. “Saenghwal-e dŏuk chŏkhamnan kujoro” [Towards a Better Living Design], Minju Chosŏn August 30, 1955. “Saengsan munhwa” [Production Culture], Kyŏngje chisik July 1962, 24-33. “Sahoejuŭi kŏnsŏl kwa nyŏsŏng munje” [Socialist construction and the woman issue], Rodong sinmun November 13, 1965. “Segye mosŏng taehoe” [World Congress of Mothers], Chosŏn nyŏsŏng, August 1958, 8-9. “Tach’ung cht’aek-eso ŭi saesarim” [The New Living in Multi-Level Apartments], Minju Chosŏnk September 29, 1955. “The Glory of the Republic’s Women,” Rodong sinmun March 8, 1955.

Newspapers & Yearbooks Chŏn’guk ŏmŏni taehoe [All-nation mothers congress] (1961), Pyongyang. Chosŏn chungyang nyŏn’gam [The Korean national yearbook] (1959), Pyongyang. Chosŏn chungyang nyŏn’gam [The Korean national yearbook] (1961), Pyongyang. Chosŏn chungyang nyŏn’gam [The Korean national yearbook] (1964), Pyongyang. Chosŏn nyŏsŏng, January 1956. Chosŏn nyŏsŏng, June 1956. Chosŏn nyŏsŏng, July 1957. Chosŏn nyŏsŏng, January 1962. Minju Chosŏn, August 27, 1955. Rodong sinmun, October 5, 1954. Rodong sinmun, March 4, 1955. Rodong sinmun, April 6, 1955. Rodong sinmun, August 2, 1955. Rodong sinmun, December 13, 1955. Rodong sinmun, April 16, 1956. Rodong sinmun, March 8, 1958. Rodong sinmun, July 20, 1958. Rodong sinmun, November 27, 1959.

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Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes Tong Lam What if the “idea” of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else? (Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 2005)

Unlike the strange death of the Soviet Bloc, China’s transition to the postsocialist era took place over several decades in the form of a mixed economy. Without the sudden breakdown and open disavowal of the socialist past, many socialist-era concepts, lexicons, symbols, institutions, and practices simply continue to exist in the contemporary period, albeit often in mutated ways.1 Using a case of urban renewal in the city of Guangzhou (also known as Canton), this extended photo-essay documents how China’s socialist legacies continue to shape the current politics of forced eviction and resistance, as well as urban transformation in general. In particular, it shows how residuals of socialist ideas and practices are being mobilized and reconstituted for financial gains by resisting residents and for capital accumulation by the state-backed developer. The strategy of the Chinese revolution, according the late Communist leader Mao Zedong, was to “surround the cities from the countryside” (Tse-Tung 1967: 71). However, since beginning of the state-led marketization and privatization in the late 1970s, the prevailing trend has been that of the encircling of the countryside by the cities. By 2011 or approximately six decades after the founding of the People’s Republic, China’s urban population had exceeded 50 percent, and it is expected to reach 70 percent by 2030 (The Economist 2014).

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Needless to say, behind these “continuities” are actually fundamental changes of ideological principles as well as social and political goals of the state. In the Chinese case, as Wang Hui (2009) puts it, this involves a shift from a “party-state” to a “state party” in a wider global backdrop (8-9).

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To be sure, Mao once also predicted that cities would eventually overwhelm the countryside in the advanced stage of socialism. But the current explosion of urban population and urban space takes place in a rather different political and economic context (see Visser 2010). Ideological difference aside, Chinese political leaders, cultural elites, and urban planners nonetheless continue to embrace a particular vision of urban modernity, one that fetishizes gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular architecture. As a result, high-rise developments have become the most ubiquitous landscape in cities, townships, and even new villages across the country. There is perhaps no better place to examine China’s hysterical urban growth in the postsocialist era than Xiancun (Xian Village), an urban village in Guangzhou (also known as Canton) in the southern province of Guangdong. In the late 1950s, during the Great Leap Forward Movement that aimed at launching the nation into a utopian future, Xiancun was turned into a Soviet-style collectivized farmland like much of China’s countryside. However, since the introduction of economic reform in 1978, the story of Xiancun has been characterized as what could be called the “Great Leap Upward” and “Great Leap Outward” of China’s urban modernity. The first major sign of change in Xiancun came in the 1980s. When Guangzhou residents became affluent enough for routine pork consumption, pig farming rather than agriculture quickly became the major income source for the village. Meanwhile, as the state-led economic reorganization deepened, so were the pace of urbanization. In the period between the late 1970s and late 2000s, as the population of the Guangzhou tripled from approximately 4 million to 12 million, the population in Xiancun multiplied even faster, growing from six thousand to forty thousand. Like hundreds of villages that were once located on the outskirts of Guangzhou, Xiancun was quickly swallowed by the ever-expanding metropolis, and was eventually turned into “a village in the city” (chengzhongcun) or urban village.2 Xiancun’s massive loss of farmland intensified in the 1990s when the city planned to build a stadium for the 2001 National Games, and to turn the nearby area into the future Central Business District (CBD). Few villagers felt nostalgic about the vanishing rural lifestyle, however. The loss of agricultural and pig farming incoming was quickly made up by the new trend of building and renting out dormitory-style apartments in the remaining village land for migrant workers who flooded the city from the rest of China. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as China integrated further into the global economy, the factories around Guangzhou, including those in nearby cities of Dongguan and Shenzhen, played a disproportionately vital role in turning China into the so-called “factory of the world.” As millions of migrant workers sought to join the urban workforce, urban 2

As of 2009, there were still 138 urban villages in Guangzhou, see 21CN News (n.y.); Xhung (2014: 256-274); Al (2014).

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villages in affluent coastal cities provided a niche market for those who could not afford formal housing arrangements. In short, unlike rural migrants who drifted across the country in search for a better life, villagers such as those in Xiancun were able to reap the benefits of the changing economy without leaving home. In response to the growing demand for affordable housing, Xiancun villagers adopted a common form of vernacular architecture that aimed at maximizing rental income, in addition to creating better living spaces for themselves. Since the urban villages were historically collectivized self-governing unit, urban planning authorities have very limited jurisdiction over them. Subsequently, these generally four to seven storey walk-up buildings are not just cheap and fast to build, they are also not up to code. Fire safety and sanitation, for example, are substandard. Additionally, there are often very little or even no space left in between buildings, earning them titles such as “kissing houses” (louwenlou) and “handshaking houses” (woshoulou). As the original villagers of Xiancun were made into a sort of local entrepreneurs, landlords, developers almost overnight, Xiancun itself was also transformed into a settlement for some of the city’s most vulnerable and marginalized population. In his book Planet of Slums, urban theorist Mike Davis describes how urban slums around megacities of the global South have become places of hyperalienation. Borrowing Marx’s concept of surplus population, he characterizes these spaces as warehouses for the “surplus humanity” (Davis 2016: 174). In China, to the extent that the ongoing state-guided economic restructuring and privatization since the late 1970s has been part of the global advance of neoliberalism, the explosion of migrant workers is also part of global surge of precarious work. Urban villages such as Xiancun are precisely where the disposable labor force is stored, ready to be mobilized when needed. In fact, by 2009 when the government announced its intention of demolishing the neighborhood, at least three quarters of its 40,000 population were transient migrant workers. But whereas slums according to Davis are located in the sprawling suburb, centrally located urban villages like Xiancun reminds us that slum spaces are far from homogenous. Moreover, Xiancun is also a version of the so-called “arrival city” where migrants struggle to negotiate with their new lives with mixed success (Saunders 2011). Like other “arrival cities”, Chinese urban villages are filled with experimental sociality and shadow economies. Migrant workers who lost the supporting extended family and social networks, for instance, often found new social networks based on common native places and shared regional dialects, even though the transitory nature of their residence may also prevent them from forming longlasting social relationships and communal activism. Unsurprisingly, when the government tried to clear the neighborhood in the name of progress and beautification for the upcoming 2010 Asian Games, the story that surged to the headlines were not those of alienated and marginalized migrant

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workers who made up the overwhelming majority of Xiancun residents. Instead, it was the vocal villagers who laid claim to the use rights of the land. After all, Xiancun has been a long way from its rural past. As an urban village in the city center, it is now surrounded by luxury hotels, shopping complexes, upscale office towers, service apartments, and metro lines. The financial stake, in other words, is tremendously high for the villagers, the developer, and the government. For villagers, this is their chance for extracting the greatest compensations. For the statebacked developer, this is “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2008: 34). With all eyes setting on the future potentials of the land notwithstanding, it is the legacy of the socialist past that informed the politics of the present in Xiancun. First and foremost, the rural land policy from in the Socialist era provided a basic condition for collective actions against the government and the developer. Specifically, like any collectivized agricultural land in China, even a household has accepted the standard compensation package and vacated their own building, the developer has no right to demolish the vacant building, not to mention to start building on the lot. This is because no single household has the exclusive rights to any land. Yet, collectively, they share the use rights of the entire village. Without reaching the legal threshold of securing agreements from 90 percent of the households, any demolish was illegal. The legacy of the socialist state also determined the actors and direction of Xiancun’s urban renewal. For example, the fact that the developer behind the Xiancun project was actually a subsidy of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) certainly did not inspire much confidence that the government was negotiating with the villagers in good faith. The villagers also distrusted the unelected village officials who were supposed to represent them in the negotiation. Instead, they accused these village officials of betrayal and selling off the use rights of many villager lands in the past without their approval. When the allegation was ultimately proven in court, many these village officials had already fled to the overseas with their families (see South CN n.y.). Moreover, large-scale urban renewal projects, especially those associated with mega-events, are carried out routinely by campaign-style mobilizations and violence that resembles those in the socialist era. Using development as the justification, the government expects citizens to make sacrifice for the nation, even though the purposes of these projects are generally about boosting state power, accumulating capital, and making the city globally legible for business and for display rather than collective social betterment (Ong 2011: 205-226; Shin 2012: 728-744). In practice, this often means the uprooting of entire neighborhood with affected residents being relocated to far less desirable suburb away from the city center. In the case of Xiancun, much like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, spectacular mega-events such as the 2001 National Games and the 2010 Asian Games hosted by Guangzhou had

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes

provided the rationale and urgency for social mobilization and radical urban transformation.3 Instead of accepting the government’s compensation proposal, many original Xiancun villagers wanted to exchange their current floor space with equivalent space in new high-rise apartment buildings to be built onsite. Based on that compensation scheme, a household that owns a five-story building would be compensated with multiple suites that together worth millions of dollars. In a nutshell, like many middle-class urban residents, the villagers too hoped to move into a privileged gated neighborhood where lower-class laborers would be excluded. In addition, the villagers also wanted to have an extra plot of land for building a collectively owned property such as an office tower or a shopping center on premises so that they and their descendants could continue to receive communal dividends from these properties in the future. The old spirit of collectivization, in short, has mutated considerably in the postsocialist and neoliberal social and economic ecology. The cozy relationship between the development, the state, and media was in full display in one evening in August 2010, when a contingent of demolition crews and their machines, along with hundreds of police officers and hired gangsters were sent into the neighborhood (see News.163.com 2010). Surprised and unprepared villagers who resisted the forced demolition were beaten by gangers, and some were even arrested. Police arrests and harassment continued for weeks, and among the dozen of villagers detained was a 60 year old man, who was eventually jailed for a year (Based on interviews of various villagers and residents conducted between 2014-2015). The government’s harsh tactics backfired, however. Approximately 30 percent of the households decided to hold up in the ruined neighborhood and continued to occupy the half-destroyed buildings along with their renters. Even months before the violent confrontation, the government had already surrounded the neighborhood with tall propaganda hoardings, making the neighborhood invisible from the street. In the aftermath, check points were also set up to prevent outsiders from entering the neighborhood. Since then, Xiancun has become a dystopian stalemate and a symbol of China’s uneven development. The spectacular Asian Games came and went. And the neighborhood surrounding Xiancun continues to develop in fast pace. Inside Xiancun, however, time stands still. As a contrast to the upscale gated apartment complexes that are surrounding Xiancun, residents of Xiancun are being gated in. Behind the media blockade and hoardings with images of happy people are hardened villagers who are determined to obtain what they consider as the fair share in a high stakes confrontation with the government. Meanwhile, 3

Xiancun had already lost its farmlands due to the construction of a new stadium for the 2001 National Games nearby.

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caught up between the epic struggle are thousands of unskilled migrant laborers who would have nothing to gain regardless of the outcome. With or without the media blackout and decorative hoardings, they remain invisible.4 Literature about postsocialist spaces in Eastern Europe often portrays the region as places of desolation, emptiness, and disappearance. As well, among the younger generation of post-Soviet artists and designers, there is also an emerging “new east” aesthetics in photography, music, and art that engages urban spaces and styles of the former Soviet Bloc in order to search for a new identity (a good source for the “new east” aesthetics is The Calvert Journal). Whereas these imaginaries may function as a cultural trope for nostalgia, the neoliberal policies of austerity have certainly exacerbated the harsh reality of economic insecurity and devastation. The disavowed past, in that particular context, became nothing but aestheticized and commodified for middle-class consumers (Boym 2001; Bach 2017). But just as socialism (or at least the actually existing socialisms) is not monolithic, postsocialist spaces are also multifaceted and diverse. Like the former Soviet Bloc, China has no shortage of socialist nostalgia as evidenced in postsocialist fictions, films, revolutionary memorabilia, and other forms of cultural expression and consumption. Yet, in a country that is experiencing high-speed economic growth and is governed by a still nominally communist government, the revolutionary past inspires more than just literary imaginations and melancholic souvenirs. Amid the nostalgic consumption of the socialist past are also individuals, groups, businesses, and the state that are actively deploying socialist tropes, symbols, and tactics for rapid urban transformation and financial gains. Xiancun villagers, for their part, make recourse to cultural resources from the socialist period such as cultural symbols and the notion of collective land use rights to extract maximum compensation. Likewise, the government also deploys familiar but updated techniques of propaganda, coercion, and violence in its attempts to cleanse the neighborhood. In this sense, Chinese socialism may have failed or even dead. But its ghost is very much alive, haunting the present in a twisted way. The surreal landscape of Xiancun shows how residuals from the past are being reassembled, reinvented, and rebranded by contending parties to advance for their respective vision of the urban future. And just like the socialist era where utopia and dystopia often shadowed one another, the dreamscape and catastrophe are also one and the same in postsocialist China.

4

As of June 2016, after many villager officials were being investigated for corruption and ultimately convicted, the negotiation between the government, the developer, and the villagers has been inching forward. Although many villagers remain skeptical, new high-rise apartments for villagers are being built onsite for their relocation. As of 2018 at least, the stalemate has not yet been broken. Thousands of migrant laborers and villagers continue to live in the ruins that resemble a dystopian movie.

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes

Figure 1 (2014)

  In this aerial view of Xiancun, the landscape of wealth is simultaneously the landscape of the disenfranchised. After a round of forceful and illegal demolitions, only a few thousand residents continued to live in the neighborhood. As a result, Xiancun became even dimmer against the spectacular skyline of Guangzhou’s Central Business District (CBD).

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Figure 2 (2018)

  In a way, Xiancun resembles a scene from a dystopian film. Buildings with red flags are still occupied, at least partially. Once regarded as the symbol of the Communist revolution, the red flags are now used by villagers to show their defiance against the government and the developer.

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes

Figure 3 (2013)

  Time stands still in Xiancun against the rapidly changing backdrop created by global capital. In the 1980s. the early days of China’s economic reform, Xiancun was considered as one of the richest villages in the region.

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Figure 4 (2013)

  After demolishing some of the buildings forcefully, the demolition crews also used the debris to blockade the village’s many alleyways, hoping that the remaining villagers would cave in. Resisting villagers, however, quickly built new paths, like this one marked by a red carpet, to show their determination and also introduce a sense of normalcy in an extraordinary situation.

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes

Figure 5 (2014).

  During its confrontation with the villagers, the government surrounded the village with propaganda hoardings that promised a bright future. However, villagers responded by vandalism and counter messages demanding the end of illegal demolition and the opening of the village accounting books held by corrupt village officials.

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Figure 6 (2013)

  This vacant store was one of the places where villagers gathered during their mobilization against the authorities and the developer. They even used a portrait of Mao to declare the righteousness of their movement.

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes

Figure 7 (2015)

  The violent confrontation with the authorities has strengthen the communal bond among the villagers. Among other things, they regularly held communal dinners and soccer games. The migrant laborers who rented rooms from the villagers have no access to these communal spaces, however.

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Figure 8 (2015)

  Migrant laborers watching TV in one of the alleyways at night. Most migrant workers in Xiancun were male, either single or with their families left behind in their home villages.

Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China’s Dystopic Dreamscapes

References Al, Stefan (ed.) (2014): Villages in the City: A Guide to South China’s Informal Settlements. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Bach, Jonathan (2017): What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Davis, Mike (2016): Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Harvey, David (2008): “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, vol. 53, pp. 23-40. Ong, Aihwa (2011): “Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty,” in: Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds.): Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Malden, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 205-226. Saunders, Doug (2011): Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World. New York: Pantheon. Shin, Hyun Bang (2012): “Unequal Cities of Spectacle and Mega-events in China,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 16, pp. 728-744. Tse-Tung, Mao [Mao Zedong] (1967): “Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Visser, Robin (2010): Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Wang Hui (2009): The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London: Verso. Xhung, Him (2014): “Planning for Chengzhongcun in Guangzhou and Shenzhen: Redevelopment in the Chinese Context,” in: Fulong Wu, Fangzhu Zhang, and Chris Webster (eds.): Rural Migrants in Urban China. London: Routledge, pp. 256274.

Other Sources 21CN News (2009): “Guangzhou Prevents Turning Old Urban Villages into New Urban Villages,” 21CN News: http://news.21cn.com/guangdong/guangzhou/a/ 2009/0514/14/6282919.shtml (accessed June 11, 2016). News.163.com (2010): “How Xiancun’s Demolition Becomes a Stalemate?,” News.163.com: http://news.163.com/10/0826/14/6F177J4M00014AEE. html (accessed May 15, 2016). South CN (2013): “The Commission for Discipline Inspection Confirmed for the First Time that Tianhe’s Xiancun Officials Have Fled and Obtained Australian Citizenship,” South CN: http://www.southcn.com/nfdaily/news/content/ 201312/21/content_87926331.htm (accessed June 11, 2016).

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The Calvert Journal: https://www.calvertjournal.com (accessed November 10, 2018). The Economist (2014): “Building the Dream,” The Economist (April 16th 2014): http:// www.economist.com/news/special-report/21600797-2030-chinese-cities-willbe-home-about-1-billion-people-getting-urban-china-work (accessed June 15, 2016).

Authors

Davor Beganović, PhD, is lecturer at the Slavic Department, University of Tübingen, adjunct lecturer at the Slavic Department, University of Zurich, and at the Slavic Department, University of Konstanz. His research interests cover the theory of literature, especially narratology, studies in cultural memory, and contemporary South-Slavic literatures. Recent publications: Pamćenje traume. Apokaliptička proza Danila Kiša (Sarajevo, Zagreb 2007); Poetika melankolije. Na tragovima suvremene bosansko-hercegovačke književnosti (Sarajevo 2009); Protiv kanona. Mlada crnogorska proza i okamenjeni spavač (Ulcinj 2010). He is the co-editor of Krieg sichten. Zur medialen Darstellung der Kriege in Jugoslawien (München 2007); Unutarnji prijevod. Antologija (Zagreb, Podgorica 2011); and Cultures of Memory in South-Eastern Europe. Spotlights and Perspectives (Bielefeld 2020). Kate Brown is Professor of History in the Science, Technology and Society Department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the prizewinning histories Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004). Brown was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has also been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the NEH, ACLS, IREX, and the American Academy of Berlin, among others. Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, was published 2019 by Norton (US), Penguin Lane (UK), Czarne (Poland), Capitán Swing (Spain). In 2020, it will be translated into Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, French, Chinese, and Korean. Ivaylo Ditchev is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University, Bulgaria. He has worked in the fields of political culture, urban and media studies. His most recent book, Cultural scenes of politics (in Bulgarian), deals with the relation of politics and popular culture today. His new research project will deal with urban imaginaries. Ditchev has taught in France, the US, Germany, and other countries. He publishes an online journal for

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cultural studies in Bulgaria, entitled SeminarBG. Active participant in the public debate, essayist, columnist for Deutsche Welle. Gesine Drews-Sylla teaches Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Tübingen and is currently on a Feodor Lynen Research Scholarship at the Academy of Sciences in Prague. Her main fields of research include world literature, postcolonialism, racism, and processes of cultural transfer and exchange, especially the entanglements of the former “Second” World and the Global South during the Cold War—and its afterlives. Among her publications are Moskauer Aktionismus: Provokation der Transformationsgesellschaft (Munich 2011) several co-edited books (Domdey, J., Drews-Sylla, G., Gołąbek, J. (ed.): AnOther Africa? (Post-) Koloniale Afrikaimaginationen im russischen, polnischen und deutschen Kontext, Heidelberg 2016; Drews-Sylla, G., Makarska, R. (ed.): Neue alte Rassismen? Differenz und Exklusion in Europa nach 1989, Bielefeld 2015) as well as articles and book chapters. Currently, she is editing her habilitation thesis Zwischen Moskau und Dakar: Literarische, filmische und kulturelle Verflechtungen (University of Tübingen, 2018) on entanglements between the Soviet Union and the Global South. She is also engaging in a new project on representations of Roma in contemporary Czech literature and film. Gulzat Egemberdieva. Ph.D. candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin. Research interests: cultural history of pre- and early Soviet Central Asia. B.A. in journalism from the Bishkek University of Humanities (2007) and M.A. from the Centre of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, University of Toronto (2015). Other activities: documentary filmmaker and co-director of Chemodan Films (chemodanfilms.com). Susi K. Frank is Professor of East Slavic Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her current fields of research are: literatures in (post)imperial contexts (Russia/Soviet Union): Russian-language literatures, (trans)national (re)canonization, cultural/literary memory vs./and heritage politics (literature, but also visual culture), copyright and practices of translation, geopoetics and geopolitics, ecological approaches to cultural semantics. Recent publications: “Solovki: Who is sovereign over the interpretation of history?,” in: Shared history, divided memory (Geneva 2020; forthcoming); Arctic archives. Ice, memory, and entropy, ed. together with Kjetil Jakobsen (Bielefeld 2019); “In der Defensive? Russischsprachige Dichtung der heutigen Ukraine,“ in: Sirenen des Krieges. Diskurse und affektive Dimensionen des Ukraine-Konflikts (Berlin 2019); (ed.): Bildformeln. Visuelle Erinnerungskulturen in Osteuropa (Bielefeld 2018). Daniela Koleva is Associate Professor at the Department of History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University. Her research interests are in the fields of oral his-

Authors

tory and anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, biographical and cultural memory, politics of memory and heritage, gender, social constructivism. She has published a monograph on the ‘normal life course’ in communist Bulgaria and a number of book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. She is co-editor of 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievements and Disillusions of 1989 (Frankfurt a.M. 2011), Ageing, Ritual and Social Change: Comparing the Secular and Religious in Eastern and Western Europe (London 2013), From Literature to Cultural Literacy (Basingstoke 2014). She has just completed a monograph on the memory of communism in Bulgaria, which encompasses different regimes of memory: from transitional justice to public commemorations. Thomas Lahusen is Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His research interests cover Russian/Soviet and post-Soviet cultural history and film as a historical source. His publications include How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (1997) and the following (co-) edited collections: Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (1995); Socialist Realism without Shores (1997); Harbin and Manchuria: Place, Space, and Identity (2001); What Is Soviet Now? Identities, Legacies, Memories (2008). He has also (co-)directed a number of documentary films, including Manchurian Sleepwalkers (2017) and Screening From Within (2017), all produced by Chemodan Films. Tong Lam is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and a visual artist. His current research project studies the history of special zones in China’s socialist and postsocialist periods. Particularly, he deploys the lens of media studies as well as science and technology studies to examine the politics and poetics of infrastructural spaces. As an artist, Tong Lam’s research-based visual project focuses on Cold War mobilizations globally and their environmental and social consequences. He has exhibited his photographic and video works internationally. Mark László-Herbert is an archivist at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, where he works with documents on Cold War and post-Cold War European history. In recent years he has been interested in the social history of worker settlements built during the 1950s and 1960s in the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, and Romania. Ekaterina Mizrokhi is a Cambridge Trust Scholar and PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Urban Conflict Research (UCR) in the Department of Architecture. Her doctoral research is focused on the experiences of urban change and demolition in the five-storey Soviet housing districts of Moscow. She investigates everyday domestic and urban life on Moscow’s periphery, and the intersections of temporal, aesthetic and affective experiences that animate how

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post-Soviet transitions have materialized in space. The research further extends to explore how those materializations may be indicators, hinderances or catalysts for reconciling with collective contests pasts, spatially Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Professor at the Department of Anthropology and at the Department of Slavic Languages and Slavic Literatures at Princeton. His research interests include the studies of everyday life, visuality, postcolonialism and decolonization in Soviet and post-Soviet societies, as well as the intellectual legacy of Soviet humanities. He authored Поле пола (The Field of Gender, Vilnius, 2007) and The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, 2009). He also edited collections of essays: О муже(N)ственности (On Masculinity, 2002); Семейные узы: модели для сборки (Family Ties: Models to Assemble, 2004); Травма:Пункты (Trauma: Points; co-edited with E. Trubina, 2009); XX век: письма войны (The 20th Century: Letters of War co-edited with Alexei Golubev, 2016). In 2016, Oushakine edited Formalnyi metod: Antologiia ruskogo modernizma (The Formal Method: An Anthology of Russian Modernism), a three-volume collection of texts written by Formalists and Constructivists. Schamma Schahadat is Professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen. Her research interests cover literary and cultural theory, gender studies, film and photography, translation studies. Places and spaces have been a focus of her work for a while (intimate spaces, spaces of theory, postsocialist spaces); recently she has started a project on literary interieurs. Newer publications: Искусство жизни: Жизнь как предмет эстетического отношения в русской культуре ХVI-ХХ веков (Life as Art. Life as an object of aesthetics in Russian culture from the 16th to the 20th c., Moscow 2017); lately, she co-edited Theory of Literature as a Theory of the Arts and Humanities, Leipzig/Vienna 2017); Erweiterung des Horizonts. Fotoreportage in Polen im 20. Jahrhundert (Broadening the horizon. Polish photo reportage in the 20th century; Göttingen 2018). Andre Schmid is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. His research ranges across Korea’s long twentieth century, including social, economic, and cultural history. He has published on comparative nationalism, colonialism and socialism, including recent publications on the historiography of population mobility [American Historical Review), 123.2 (April 2018) 439-462], the rise of criticism culture in North Korea (International Journal of Korean History Vol.21.2 (2016.8) 121-153), and a gendered history of popular participation and mobilization in North Korea [In Alf Ludtke, ed., Mass Dictatorship and the Everyday. (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2016) 184-201). He is currently preparing a book on the cultural politics.

Authors

Born and educated in the Soviet Union, Serhy Yekelchyk received a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta. He has published seven books on Ukrainian history and Russian-Ukrainian relations. His monograph Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford 2014) was the recipient of the Best Book Award from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies and came out in a Ukrainian translation in 2019. His next project is a history of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1920. A professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk is current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies. 

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Cultural Studies Elisa Ganivet

Border Wall Aesthetics Artworks in Border Spaces 2019, 250 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4777-8 E-Book: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4777-2

Jocelyne Porcher, Jean Estebanez (eds.)

Animal Labor A New Perspective on Human-Animal Relations 2019, 182 p., hardcover 99,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4364-0 E-Book: 99,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4364-4

Andreas Sudmann (ed.)

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms 2019, 334 p., pb., col. ill. 49,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4719-8 E-Book: 49,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4719-2

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Cultural Studies Burcu Dogramaci, Kerstin Pinther (eds.)

Design Dispersed Forms of Migration and Flight 2019, 274 p., pb., col. ill. 34,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4705-1 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4705-5

Pál Kelemen, Nicolas Pethes (eds.)

Philology in the Making Analog/Digital Cultures of Scholarly Writing and Reading 2019, 316 p., pb., ill. 34,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4770-9 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4770-3

Chris Goldie, Darcy White (eds.)

Northern Light Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North 2018, 174 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3975-9 E-Book: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3975-3

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!