Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe 0810129108, 9780810129108

Citation preview

rites of place

rites of place Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe

Edited and with an introduction by

Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson

nort hw e st e r n un iv ersit y pr e s s e vanston, i l l i noi s

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2013 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2013 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rites of place : public commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe / edited and with an introduction by Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8101-2910-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Collective memory—Former Soviet republics. 2. Political customs and rites— Former Soviet republics. 3. Public architecture—Social aspects—Former Soviet republics. 4. Public spaces—Social aspects—Former Soviet republics. 5. National characteristics. I. Buckler, Julie A. II. Johnson, Emily D., 1966– DK293.R58 2013 947—dc23 2012051267 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992.

C ont e nt s

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson

3

Part 1 Reconstituting Urban Space Transporting Jerusalem: The Epiphany Ritual in Early St. Petersburg Michael S. Flier

15

Prague Funerals: How Czech National Symbols Conquered and Defended Public Space Marek Nekula

35

“A Monstrous Staircase”: Inscribing the 1905 Revolution on Odessa Rebecca Stanton

59

Jubilation Deferred: The Belated Commemoration of the 250th Anniversary of St. Petersburg/Leningrad Emily D. Johnson

81

Part 2 The Art and Culture of Commemoration The Portrait Mode: Zhukovsky, Pushkin, and the Gallery of 1812 Luba Golburt

105

An Island of Antiquity: The Double Life of Talashkino in Russia and Beyond Katia Dianina

133

From Lenin’s Tomb to Avtovo Station: Illusion and Spectacle in Soviet Subterranean Space Julia Bekman Chadaga

157

From Public, to Private, to Public Again: International Women’s Day in Post-Soviet Russia Choi Chatterjee

183

Part 3 Military and Battlefield Commemorations Taking and Retaking the Field: Borodino as a Site of Collective Memory Julie Buckler

203

Who to Lead the Slavs? Poles, Russians, and the 1910 Anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald Patrice M. Dabrowski

225

Moscow’s First World War Memorial and Ninety Years of Contested Memory Karen Petrone

241

Part 4 Commemorating Trauma Memory as the Anchor of Sovereignty: Katyn and the Charge of Genocide James von Geldern

263

Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space Between Stalin and Hitler Serguei Alex. Oushakine

285

Prisons into Museums: Fashioning a Post-Communist Place of Memory Cristina Vatulescu

315

Contributors

337

I l lust rat ions

Figure 1. Epiphany ritual, Moscow River Figure 2. Palm Sunday ritual, Red Square, Moscow Figure 3. A. I. Rostovtsev, Trinity Square on City Island, St. Petersburg Figure 4. Odessa Steps, classic postcard view Figure 5. Odessa Steps, view from below Figure 6. Odessa Steps, view from above Figure 7. Cossacks on the Odessa Steps from The Battleship Potemkin Figure 8. View from the top of the Odessa Steps from The Battleship Potemkin Figures 9 and 10. Scenes from Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Steps Figure 11. George Dawe, Portrait of Matvei Platov Figure 12. George Dawe, Portrait of Alexander Seslavin Figure 13. Grigorii Chernetsov, The War Gallery of 1812 Figure 14. George Dawe, Portrait of Field Marshal Mikhail Barclay de Tolly Figure 15. Liudmila El’chaninova, monument to M. K. Tenisheva Figure 16. Teremok in Flenovo, designed by Sergei Maliutin Figure 17. P. E. Shcherbov, “The Idyll” Figure 18. P. E. Shcherbov, “Salzburg” Figure 19. Konstantin Mel’nikov’s designs for Lenin’s sarcophagus Figure 20. Avtovo station when service began in 1955 Figure 21. Avtovo station in 1958 Figure 22. Plan of the Moscow Fraternal Cemetery Figure 23. Grave in Moscow Fraternal Cemetery Figure 24. Entrance to the Memorial Park Complex Figure 25. Obelisk in the Memorial Park Complex Figure 26. Bells of Khatyn’ commemorative pin Figure 27. The Unvanquished Man, Khatyn’ Memorial Figure 28. Road sign pointing to Khatyn’ Memorial Figure 29. Outline of a burned house, Khatyn’ Memorial Figure 30. Cemetery of Incinerated Villages, Khatyn’ Memorial Figure 31. Prisoners’ clothes, Sighet Memorial Museum Figure 32. Prisoners’ shoes, Sighet Memorial Museum

18 21 28 64 64 65 66 67 75 112 113 118 124 135 138 144 145 160 169 172 242 243 251 254 288 289 291 292 293 324 325

A c k now l e d g m e n t s

The editors wish to thank their home institutions for support provided for the publication of this volume. We also extend our grateful appreciation to acquisitions editor Mike Levine at Northwestern University Press for all his help and guidance. And finally, we thank our daughters, Cerria Johnson and Natalie Korzh, for their patience.

rites of place

Introduction Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson

Changing times demand new symbols, rituals, and public spaces. During the twenty- plus years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, governments, civic groups, religious authorities, and private interests across Eastern Europe and Eurasia have worked to preserve, restore, reclaim, and reshape reemergent sites seen as central to collective memory. As part of this process, familiar landscapes have taken on unexpected new functions, long abandoned rites have resurfaced, and activities formerly considered central to state culture have been reconceived or eliminated. Buildings destroyed long ago have been re- created at great expense and with painstaking attention to detail; victories and tragedies that seemed all but forgotten have found reflection in new commemorative practices. Let us look at one central and particularly striking example. Red Square, the great open space abutting Moscow’s Kremlin, has served for centuries as Russia’s most important public gathering place. Red Square has been a key site for ritual expression of the relationship between the Russian people and their political and religious leaders. From the circular stone platform known as Lobnoe Mesto near the southern end of the square, heralds proclaimed the edicts of Russia’s rulers, rebels faced execution, and during the mid- 1570s, Tsar Ivan the Terrible famously performed public penitence for the excesses of his reign. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, on Palm Sunday, the tsar led a donkey bearing the Russian patriarch across the square as part of a religious procession, a rite understood by many to illustrate the primacy of church over state. 



julie buckler and emily d. johnson

Two major cathedrals were built on the square to commemorate key military victories: the iconic Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat, known popularly as St. Basil’s, was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to honor the capture of the Kazan Khanate and thus the end of Mongol rule over Russia; the Cathedral of Kazan, financed by Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, memorialized the expulsion of the Poles from Russian territory and the installation of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. Later constructions on the square, including the late nineteenth- century Historical Museum and Trading Rows, served a different monumentalizing function: built in the pseudo- national style preferred by Russia’s last two tsars, these buildings echo and rework the architectural forms employed to such spectacular effect in St. Basil’s, projecting a carefully constructed, ideologically charged image of “Russianness.” During the Soviet era, Red Square accommodated new rituals and reflected different values. Immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow, the new government ceremonially interred in the Kremlin walls the bodies of those who died during the struggle, an act that, inasmuch as it defied Orthodox canons of burial, seemed calculated to strip the surrounding area of its old ritual significance and subordinate it to the new symbolic order. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, this trend accelerated: a mausoleum was constructed to hold the mummified body of the great leader, transforming Red Square into the chief holy site of what amounted to a secular religion. Just as devout Muslims strive to participate in the annual pilgrimage known as the hajj at least once before dying, so good Soviet citizens were taught to long for a glimpse of Lenin’s body. Red Square served as the site of the victory parade that marked the end of World War II in 1945 but also witnessed pivotal human rights demonstrations during the late Soviet period. Red Square has changed dramatically since the end of the Soviet period in 1991. Structures torn down in the 1930s to improve the flow of traffic during military parades, including the Cathedral of Kazan, the Resurrection Gates at the northeastern entrance to the square, and the Chapel of the Virgin of Iversk, were all reconstructed during the 1990s. Their presence, along with the reconsecration of St. Basil’s Cathedral, has helped to revive Red Square’s significance as a center of Orthodoxy, highlighting the greater prominence of religious faith in contemporary Russian civic life. In contrast, the Lenin Mausoleum, although still open to visitors, has seemed increasingly marginal to life on Red Square. The long lines of eager pilgrims snaking toward it have largely disappeared, along with the goose- stepping honor guard that once flanked its entrance. Moreover, Lenin’s tomb no longer functions as an official dais on state holidays: in 2008, when the Russian

introduction



government revived the Soviet tradition of holding Victory Day parades on Red Square, the mausoleum was hidden behind a carefully positioned backdrop. Russia’s president and prime minister watched the passing troops from a reviewing stand near ground level along with other noted guests, rather than from the isolated and elevated position that Soviet leaders traditionally occupied. In the face of widespread concerns about the emergence of a Putin “cult of personality,” this change underscored the new regime’s self- proclaimed distance from the traditions of Soviet political life. In addition to parades, contemporary spectacles and entertainments on Red Square include rock concerts, hockey games, and figure skating exhibitions. These events, which revive the tsarist tradition of holding popular festivals just outside the Kremlin, help bolster the regime’s populist credentials and function as gifts from the state to its citizenry, allowing Russia’s leaders to present themselves as men of ordinary tastes. The changes that have taken place on Red Square since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and, for that matter, the entire history of Red Square, provide an ideal illustration of the themes, problems, and processes that interest us in this volume. A sense of historical continuity has eluded Russia since the early eighteenth century when Peter the Great brutally implemented a top- down reform of traditional Russian culture and institutions. Known as the “Petrine revolution,” this traumatic period left behind a sense of rupture so profound that Russian writers and social thinkers continue to debate the merits of the reforms even today. Concerns that abrupt change had somehow thrown Russia from its natural course of historical development only grew during later periods of social and political upheaval, including the chaos that followed the 1861 Emancipation, decades of widespread migration from the countryside and industrialization, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, civil war, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the Second World War, destalinization, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Given this, one might argue that by commemorating both imperial and Soviet milestones, post- Soviet Russia attempts retrospectively to construct a sense of historical continuity that never existed. The other independent states that comprise present- day post- Soviet cultural space have also seen great changes in modern times. Modern Central and East European states such as Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania have emerged from imperial and Soviet domination as independent political states that recapitulate the old thwarted nineteenthcentury dream of “nation” with all concomitant rituals and symbols. In the current post- Soviet period, all these territories are nevertheless haunted by their lack of historical continuity, pervaded by nostalgia for imperial and Soviet ideal imagined pasts, and dogged by contested recon-



julie buckler and emily d. johnson

structions of history. Many of the essays in this volume thus explore the complexity of post- Soviet perspectives and the contemporary situation of symbolic indeterminacy. In this volume, we examine sites like Moscow’s Red Square that are resonant for national identity and cultural memory. Each site is a culturalhistorical palimpsest: successive political and religious power structures have claimed them, in each case substantially overwriting its predecessor’s cultural- historical narrative, but also leaving traces of the rejected past that then became incorporated into the whole. The site of a pagan temple becomes a cathedral following the introduction of Christianity and then emerges, centuries later, as a potential locus of imperial pageantry, or displays of World Communist or neo- nationalist spirit. At each transition, public ritual plays a vital role in transforming the meanings of a familiar site. Jubilee and anniversary celebrations, memorial rites, and commemorations of key political transitions consecrate “sacralized” landscapes that bind disparate individuals together into communities with a shared symbolic vocabulary. In returning time and time again to signal locations to perform elaborately choreographed sequences, participants articulate a common vision of an imagined past that shores up solidarity in the present. This volume seeks to illuminate the commemorative rituals in Russia and neighboring nation- states that have invested public spaces with significance over the last several centuries. We ask how cultural memory may preserve, alter, or erase the past, and investigate the reinterpretation to which commemorative sites are subject in the wake of major sociopolitical changes. The essays in this volume explore how commemorative sites are incorporated into everyday life, given alternative meanings by different sectors of society, and figured in representational forms such as paintings, literary works, and stage productions. Because we understand public space as essentially pluralistic, our discussions treat local, private, and minority group observances as well as unofficial perspectives on centrally orchestrated rituals and oppositional practices.1 This volume treats sites of commemoration such as cities; public squares and boulevards; churches; conventional monuments and postmodern counter monuments; memorials such as cemeteries, mass graves, mausoleums, and battlefields; museums and galleries; spaces of performance; and the communicative space articulated by public discourse. We treat the founding moments and subsequent histories of these sites—rising and falling fortunes, destruction, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and re- remembering.2 Repeated acts of public commemoration orient an ever- changing present toward a fixed cultural reference point in the past. We consider ceremonies marking the anniversaries of coronations, military victories, funerals, key



introduction

speeches, the unveiling of monuments, and the founding of cities, and we include “spontaneous” commemorations as well as those officially planned and staged. Thus we situate ourselves in both public time and public space. We give significant attention to observances that honor long- suppressed tragedies and traumas, since such commemorations have emerged as a vital part of contemporary cultural politics in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.3

Commemorations and Cultural Memory Nearly every type of repeated rite has its origin in sacred ceremony. “Jubilee,” for example, referred to the year of celebration and forgiveness that both Jews and Christians marked every fifty years, but came to mean a major anniversary of dynastic rule, such as the Golden and Diamond Jubilee celebrations held for Queen Victoria in 1887 and 1897. Although such celebrations may seem overtly secular, they invariably retain elements of the old religious forms with rulers perceived as “divinely appointed.” Whether primarily political or religious, commemorative displays are often part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms “invented traditions,” practices “normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”4 Modern states introduced invented traditions in response to rapid social transformation, as older traditions disappeared. The French, European, American, and Russian revolutions, the rise of nationalism, and the period of modernization that preceded World War I all created a cultural climate that called for the political mobilization of mythic pasts. In his 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” Ernest Renan famously declared: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.”5 For Renan, a “heroic past” represents “the social capital upon which one bases a national idea.” But it proved much more difficult for systems of rule such as dynasties (Habsburg, Romanov) to manage “citizens” rather than “subjects.” Accorded more personal agency as political systems evolved, common men and women began to choose their own affiliations and more frequently found their obligations to the state in conflict with allegiance to class, church, or nationality. Public ritual offered a way to impose a sense of shared values on a po-



julie buckler and emily d. johnson

tentially divided or recalcitrant population. French social theorist Henri Lefebvre thus defines the function of monumental space as effecting social consensus by rendering it concrete. Monumental space thereby transforms individuals into subjects and converts repression into exaltation.6 Acoustic, gestural, and ritual movements grouped into “ceremonial unities” work at the “affective level” (the body), creating a monumental whole. Just as an object on a theatrical stage is transformed into a sign, an object transferred into monumental space becomes holy, ceremonial, and authoritative. For Jacques Derrida, the monumental in its immensity signifies “unrepresentability” beyond the boundaries of human meaning, and authority beyond questioning.7 Commemorative activity may appear consensual, but usually, in the words of John Gillis, results from “intense contest, struggle, and, in some instances, annihilation.”8 This was the case for modern national commemorations in Europe and North America, which were only gradually accepted and institutionalized, and it is now the case in many post- Soviet nations. National commemoration is a response to pluralism, and citizens “are bound together as much by forgetting as by remembering,” since modern memory dates from a time marked by “a massive effort to reject the past and construct a radically new future.”9 And now, although national traditions have lost some of their power in this increasingly transnational world, they still remind groups of the potential to “negotiate their respective differences.”10 Commemoration can also serve the purposes of counter- memory, in support of beleaguered civil society or elusive national independence. It can also be ironic or playful, healing in its unofficial spirit, as in the post- Soviet sculpture parks of Lithuania, Hungary, and Moscow, where visitors can touch or even climb on the statues of once- venerated Communist leaders. In this spirit, social space becomes an arena where authoritative “strategies” are counterbalanced by canny and improvisational tactics, the latter a form of “intended- use” subversion.11 The twentieth century saw a major shift in practices of commemoration, due to an increasing democratization of cultural memory on a truly global scale, but also to the disruption and diverse legacies of genocide, trauma, postcolonialism, migration, and diaspora, and to the pervasive rise of nostalgia in response to accelerating processes of change.12 During the second half of the twentieth century, a booming public interest in “heritage,” preservation and restoration, “vernacular” landscapes, and local “microhistories” has established each of us as both commemorator and commemorated. We all have a stake in these cultural practices now. The formal term “history” does not seem appropriate to our purposes in this volume, whereas the looser notion of “cultural memory” may bet-

introduction



ter serve as an organizing principle for studying modern practices of commemoration. Cultural memory is a capacious concept, embracing a seemingly infinite range of objects expressed in any media, its study extending across diverse disciplines and methodologies. Cultural memory reifies the interrelationship of present and past in a sociocultural context, expressed by diverse practices and representations. We can consider cultural memory in terms of what a group chooses to memorialize, but also in what this group chooses not to memorialize. (Alon Confino asks, “Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail?”)13 Cultural memory is dynamic, always the product of dialogue and interplay. Wishful fantasies of cultural memory as unified and authentic are countered by the long processes of negotiation that give rise to it. Indeed, James E. Young coined the term “collected memory” precisely to emphasize the fragmented nature of cultural memory, whose shards are gathered together in common spaces and practices.14 Theorists of cultural memory no longer subscribe to Maurice Halbwachs’s belief that collective memory “evolves according to its own laws, and any individual remembrances that may penetrate are transformed within a totality having no personal consciousness.”15 Researchers now acknowledge the varied ways in which cultural subgroups and individual citizens inscribe themselves into official commemorative rituals and spaces. These particularist practices represent an important part of the larger field of cultural remembrance and hence a productive avenue of scholarly inquiry. Most of the essays in our volume take as their locus a particular cultural memory site. We are indebted to the work of Pierre Nora for the literal and figurative “location” of memory through his notion of lieu de mémoire, “any significant entity, whether material or nonmaterial in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.”16 For Nora, lieux de mémoire arise from our sense that “there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally.” 17 Lieux de mémoire are paradoxical phenomena—asserting continuity and permanence, they simultaneously figure their absence. As a result, lieux de mémoire are highly productive generators of meaning, manifesting a “capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning, and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.”18 With the decline of the orderly “classical” model of national commemoration and its epic view of history and the nation- state, commemorative practices make increasingly variable reference to the past, and this cultural development is especially acute in contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe.



julie buckler and emily d. johnson

Overview Our volume opens with “Reconstituting Urban Space,” a cluster of four essays that variously explore the rituals, practices, and architectures that reframe urban public space in St. Petersburg/Leningrad, Prague, and Odessa. Such rituals can be sacred or sacralizing, secular, nationalist, dominant- official, revisionist, counter hegemonic, or hybrid combinations of these ritual modes. In all cases, new physical practices and repurposed structures redraw the semiotic or ideological map of a city, usually at some significant culturalhistorical juncture. The second set of essays, titled “The Art and Culture of Commemoration,” considers rites of place enacted through artistic and architectural style, and festivals of culture. These essays interrogate stylistic developments and behaviors that accompany emerging patterns of identity—national- heroic, folk- traditional, utopian- idealist, and contemporary- feminist. More generally, these articles investigate commemorative practices aimed at producing an aesthetic and affective response. These essays range across cultural production from different periods—“Golden Age” imperial Russian classical and romantic approaches to history, modernism’s idealization of the primitive, futuristic early Soviet technologies, and contemporary commercial and media practices, including the Internet. The third set of articles, “Military and Battlefield Commemorations,” considers sites dedicated to iconic military figures, events, and traditions, some largely invented, others long forgotten. Authors look at how such sites were created and examine their evolving significance in national historical narratives. Mythic heroic moments in a group’s history hold especially potent unifying force, but these military rites and spaces also seem particularly liable to revisionism and to appropriation for political purposes in the present. Countering sites associated with the commemoration of military victories and other heroic feats, our volume includes a series of articles under the rubric “Commemorating Trauma,” which treat monuments and rituals recalling “unspeakable acts” such as campaigns of terror, crimes against humanity, mass executions, and genocide. These essays raise complex issues about the memorialization of traumatic events. Our authors show how modern states can either inhibit or encourage the emergence of such memorials as part of a larger drive to promote the formation of a new kind of national identity. These essays also explore the ways in which long- delayed commemoration of trauma can raise difficult questions, but may provide a measure of recompense in officially acknowledging twentieth- century crimes and victims. And so our volume ends on a sober but hopeful note. Acknowl-



introduction

edging and memorializing long- suppressed traumatic events from the past allows these memories to circulate freely through contemporary physical and public spaces, whose heterogeneous meanings we attempt to trace.

Notes 1. Recent scholarship on modern Russian history has taken increasing account of space as a key aspect of cultural identity. See, for example, Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 2. See Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), for an extended treatment of memorial sites overtaken and obscured by history. 3. Note the appearance of studies that chart the contestation of commemoration, such as The Art of Commemoration: Fifty Years After the Warsaw Uprising, ed. Titus Ensink and Christoph Sauer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003). See also David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012). Other recent studies excavate through layers of cultural mythology to uncover the construction of collective memory, as in Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), and Lisa Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. 5. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19. 6. Henri Lefebvre, “The Monument” (excerpted from The Production of Space), in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 139–42. 7. Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 136–38. 8. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Ibid., 20. 11. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xi–xxiv. 12. Perhaps the best- known work on post- Soviet collective nostalgia is Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), which focuses largely on modern Russia. For a perspective on Eastern and Central Europe, see Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, eds., Post- Communist Nostalgia (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010). 13. Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 390. 14. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), xi.



julie buckler and emily d. johnson

15. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. F. I. and V. Y. Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 51. 16. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xvii. 17. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter- Memory (Spring 1989): 12. 18. Ibid., 19.

Part 1 Reconstituting Urban Space

Transporting Jerusalem: The Epiphany Ritual in Early St. Petersburg Michael S. Flier

In 1776, Gavrila Derzhavin, the court poet laureate during the reign of Catherine II, wrote an ode, “To Peter the Great,” that encapsulated a broad perception of the emperor’s relationship to Russia’s medieval past: Russia, clothed in glory, Wherever it turns its gaze, Everywhere, with exultant joy, Everywhere beholds Peter’s works. Carry the voices to heaven, O wind: You are immortal, Great Peter! He, conquering our ancient gloom, Established the sciences in the midnight land; Lighting a lamp in the darkness, He also instilled in us good manners and morals.1

One has only to consider words such as darkness and gloom in Derzhavin’s characterization of medieval Rus’ to ask what precisely Peter might have wished to use from the past in rites of commemoration. After all, the Petrine era in Russia is commonly considered to represent a sharp break with the obscurantist, medieval past, a “new” culture that looked not to the indigenous East, but to the European West, for artifacts to emulate. Yet, as 



michael s. flier

Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskii made clear more than three decades ago, the Petrine myth of a total rupture with the past, while understandable, is simply inaccurate. Peter’s reformed culture was structured not so much on a European model as on an inverted model of the old culture, the superficial results of which were labeled as European, namely, Other.2 For example, in his effort to illuminate the way out of religious ignorance into secular enlightenment, Peter surely has predecessors in Vladimir I (d. 1015), who illuminated the way out of tenth- century paganism into enlightened Christianity, and in Iosif Volotskii (d. 1515), who exposed the dark heresies of the Judaizers, illuminating the path toward true Orthodox belief in his late fifteenth- century work “The Enlightener.” An interesting example of commemoration as cultural inversion can be found in the realm of religious ritual, a cultural artifact not commonly associated with the secular- minded Peter I. As background, we note that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the tsar participated directly or indirectly in five major rituals performed annually in Moscow in accordance with the church calendar: the New Year ritual on September 1, the Fiery Furnace ritual on the first or second Sunday before Christmas, the Epiphany ritual on January 6, the Last Judgment ritual on the Sunday before Shrovetide (Maslenitsa), and the Palm Sunday ritual on the Sunday before Easter.3 All were conducted within or near the Moscow Kremlin and through the medium of that architectural complex were associated metaphorically or metonymically with other places, including Jerusalem and Babylon. When Peter I moved his capital to St. Petersburg in 1712, he did not transfer these rites of place to the northern site, with one exception—the Epiphany ritual. The Palm Sunday ritual, in which the tsar on foot led the procession for the metropolitan mounted sidesaddle on an ass in celebration of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, resurfaced only as the basis for parody at the hands of the Most Comical All- Drunken Council. The New Year, Fiery Furnace, and Last Judgment rituals apparently disappeared from public view at court. By contrast, the Epiphany ritual, including the Blessing of the Waters, remained a significant and vital rite in the evolution of Petersburg from its founding to the revolution. In the present study, I will explore the semiotic implications of this selection in light of the compositional metaphors relevant to Moscow and Petersburg that gave shape to Peter’s ideas about kingship and reform. Before discussing the move to Petersburg, however, we need to have a clear sense of the relationship between site and ritual in Moscow. We do so by examining more closely the two most important rituals involving the heads of church and state witnessed there in the sixteenth century: the rites for Epiphany and Palm Sunday. We have more information about these specific ceremonies because they were the most lavishly produced and sol-

transporting jerusalem



emnly presented, making a deep impression on the spectators in attendance, especially on foreigners, who later described the proceedings in varying detail, depending on access and interpretation. The most thorough description of the Epiphany ritual is from Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, in which the British explorer and trader Anthony Jenkinson describes the ceremony of January 6, 1558: The 4. [sic] of Januarie, which was Twelftide with them, the Emperour . . . came . . . out of the Church, and went with the procession upon the river, being all frozen, and there standing bare headed, with all his Nobles, there was a hole made in the ice, and the Metropolitan hallowed the water with great solemnitie, and service, and did cast of the said water upon the Emperours [per]sonne, and the Nobilitie.4

A second anonymous description of the same event offers even more detail: First and foremost there goe certain yong men with Waxe tapers burning, and one carrying a great lanterne: then follow certaine banners, then the crosse, then the images of our Ladie, of S. Nicholas, and of other Saints, which images men carrie upon their shoulders: after the images follow certaine priests to the number of 100. or more: after them the Metropolitan who is led between two priests, and after the Metropolitan came the Emperour with his crowne upon his head, and after his majestie all his noble men orderly. Thus they folowed the procession unto the water, & when they came unto the hole that was made, the priests set themselves in order round about it. And at one side of the same poole there was a scaffold of boords made, upon which stood a faire chaire in which the Metropolitan was set, but the Emperours majestie stood upon the ice. After this the priests began to sing, to blesse and to sense, and did their service, and so by that time that they had done, the water was holy, which being sanctified, the Metropolitane tooke a little thereof in his hands, and cast it on the Emperour, likewise upon certain of the Dukes, and then they returned againe to the church.5

The ritual move from Cathedral Square in the center of the Kremlin to the banks of the frozen Moscow River just to the south beyond the walls was called the Procession to the Jordan (Khozhdenie na Iordan’, figure 1).6 The analogue on Palm Sunday from Cathedral Square to Red Square on the east, outside the Kremlin walls, was the Procession on the Ass (Shestvie na osliati), during which the metropolitan in imitation of Christ rode on the



michael s. flier

Figure 1. The Epiphany Ritual, Moscow River south of the Kremlin, January 6, 1662 (O.S.). Engraving from Friedrich von Adelung, Al’bom Meierberga. Vidy i bytovye kartiny Rossii XVII veka (St. Petersburg: Izd. A. S. Suvorina, 1903), pl. 74, detail.

back of a horse disguised as an ass preceded by the tsar on foot holding the reins (figure 2).7 To the still Catholic Jenkinson, the events on the Jordan and on Red Square signaled inequality between the heads of church and state, the latter viewed as subordinate to the former: The Metropolitane is next unto God, our Ladie and S. Nicholas accepted: for the Emperours majestie judgeth and affirmeth him to bee of higher dignitie then himself: for that saith he is Gods spirituall officer, and I the Emperour am his temporall officer, and therefore his majestie submitteth himself unto him in many things concerning religious matters, as in leading the Metropolitans horse upon Palme Sunday, and giving him leave to sit on a chaire upon the 12. day [Epiphany], when the river Mosko was in blessing, and his majestie standing on the ice.8

The iconographic basis for both rituals—that is, their specific association with the icons of the two major feast days and the role of the principals in each—was lost on the English; hence the characteristic Western reading of the metropolitan (later patriarch) being of “higher dignitie” than the

transporting jerusalem



tsar in the superficial interpretation. In fact, the tsar in the Epiphany ritual performs the role of Christ undergoing baptism at the hands of John the Forerunner, who pronounces a blessing over the bare head of the Savior standing in the River Jordan. In the Palm Sunday ritual the tsar instantiates the role of John the Forerunner as the angel of the desert who leads the way for Christ as savior. In both instances, the tsar can be said to perform a topos of humility, in imitation of Christ, a podvig. The foreign observers judged the tsar’s role only on the level of performance, missing the larger semiotic value present in the public humility of the awesome (groznyj) tsar.9 Even so, there are interesting changes in the Epiphany ritual that seem to allude to the hierarchical relationship between ruler and prelate. In the seventeenth century there were variations introduced into the Epiphany ritual that might be taken as fluctuations in relative status and respect, now the chief prelate standing and the tsar seated on a throne, now the opposite.10 Although the activities of sitting or standing during the Blessing of the Waters may have been governed to an extent by liturgical practice, there is little doubt that Patriarch Nikon for one might have altered the ritual to elevate his position relative to the tsar.11 He was, after all, responsible for the innovations in the third variant of the Palm Sunday ritual in Moscow in 1656, in which the chief prelate takes on a larger role. Nikon’s overreaching ambition relative to the tsar’s authority would ultimately cost him his position as patriarch.12 The military also apparently played a greater role as spectators in the seventeenth century, as shown in the Baron von Meyerberg engraving from 1662, in which the royal security guards (strel’tsy) are shown bowed before the Palm Sunday procession in Red Square. The young Peter himself, reared in a Western- oriented environment, was profoundly averse to religious ritual and would likely have reached a similar, “Western” conclusion in his viewings of both ceremonies. He was not eager to participate in such exercises of “royal humility” and once firmly ensconced on the throne, parodied them, sidestepped them, or avoided them completely. From the death of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in 1676 we find no record of Peter’s attendance at either the Palm Sunday or Epiphany rituals until 1694 when he and co- tsar Ivan V participated in the Epiphany ritual on January 6, apparently for Peter’s last time in Moscow as ruler. In subsequent appearances in Moscow, if Peter participated at all, it was as a member of the military and not as part of the ecclesiastical procession, in which he would have acted only as tsar. After Peter’s mother, Natalia Naryshkina, died on January 24 of that same year, neither Peter nor Ivan participated in another Palm Sunday ritual. Peter attended the Easter services on April 8, 1694, but that was the extent of his involvement with the old ceremonies



michael s. flier

that year. The co- tsars were absent from the Epiphany ritual of 1695 as well.13 Given his history with the two most important royal ecclesiastical ceremonies, it is striking that Peter decided to transport specifically the Epiphany ritual to Petersburg while abandoning the others. The answer no doubt lies in the place of the ritual in the lives of the Orthodox faithful.

The Function of the Epiphany Ritual Among the five royal rituals mentioned at the outset, the Epiphany ritual was the only one that could be considered ubiquitous. Whereas the rituals for the New Year, the Fiery Furnace, the Last Judgment, and Palm Sunday were restricted to large cathedral settings, the Blessing of the Waters on Epiphany day was not only a royal ritual but also a general rite performed by prelates great and small across all of Muscovite Rus’. The vast majority of Russians may never have seen the tsar, let alone watched him lead the Procession on the Ass on Palm Sunday. But every Russian within the range of an Orthodox church, no matter how small, had witnessed the Blessing of the Waters. Although we have no date certain for its origin among the East Slavs, we can be reasonably sure of its existence in Muscovy by the first quarter of the sixteenth century, as confirmed by references to it in the writings of Maximus the Greek.14 The sheer numbers of Muscovites who are recorded as rejoicing in the blessed water in the belief that it conveyed good health and well- being for the year to each of them, their families, and their domestic animals provide compelling evidence that this was an annual rite felt to be absolutely necessary for enhancing one’s chances for a happy, healthy year ahead. Paul Bushkovitch is undoubtedly correct in seeing the Epiphany ceremony as a high culture response to a previously existing Slavic pagan rite of rebirth and renewal associated with water during sviatki (the twelve days of Christmas) and Ivan Kupalo (the festival of midsummer), that is, during the temporal boundaries marked, respectively, by the winter and summer solstices.15 One notes as well that the Epiphany ceremony is not one that elicited a parodic response (compared with the Palm Sunday ritual) from Peter’s Most Comical All- Drunken Council. In other words, in light of Ernest Zitser’s conception of Peter’s “transfigured kingdom,” the Epiphany ritual was not reconfigured to both mock the church and render more cohesive the elect company of acolytes the tsar gathered around himself to refract royal charisma and ensure the tsar’s authority.16 Unlike the other major rituals, the Epiphany ceremony had to be continued. The issues for Peter were in what guise, in what space, and in what royal context? Many modern commentators have noted the military presence at the

transporting jerusalem



Figure 2. The Palm Sunday Ritual, Red Square, Moscow, March 23, 1662 (O.S.). Engraving from Friedrich von Adelung, Al’bom Meierberga. Vidy i bytovye kartiny Rossii XVII veka (St. Petersburg: Izd. A. S. Suvorina, 1903), pl. 73, detail.

Epiphany ritual in the seventeenth century, apparently one that increased over time as those forces became better organized and mobilized. What has not been sufficiently appreciated is the deftness with which Peter used the military to reformulate the relationship of the ruler to the ceremony itself. Recalling once again the strel’tsy in Meyerberg’s engraving of the Palm Sunday ritual (figure 2), we see them arrayed on both sides of the procession that features Patriarch Nikon as Christ mounted on the back of the ceremonial ass with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich on foot in front holding the reins. The tsar’s military forces are all on their knees, heads bowed down to the ground in veneration of the Entry into Jerusalem tableau vivant, all banners, instruments, and weapons lowered as well. When Peter returned to the Epiphany ritual after an absence of many years, he presented his armed forces on his terms, with himself in command. Many regiments marched to the ceremony, but remained in their own formations, save for the few who served as escorts during the procession to keep the crowds of people at bay. These were not token representatives: fourteen thousand troops are noted for the ceremony in Moscow in 1722, and 9,960 in St. Petersburg in 1724.17 The military men and their royal commander were observers who benefited from the blessings of ceremony without ceremonial humiliation. Their battle standards were blessed



michael s. flier

as before, a desirable outcome for any fighting force of the faithful. In sum, however, the large military presence at the ceremony made the day as much a holiday for the royal regiments as it was for Orthodoxy’s annual blessing. For Peter the military was a central preoccupation, as evidenced in his childhood “war games” and in his extensive involvement in the planning and execution of military operations. He felt so strongly about royal competence in the nation’s armed forces that he eliminated his son Aleksei as the rightful heir to the throne because of the latter’s indifference to military matters. As noted by Ernest Zitser: Chief among his reasons is the heir apparent’s unwillingness even “to hear anything about military affairs, [even though it is precisely] by this [that] we have come from darkness into light, and from anonymity into world renown.” Singling out the art of war as the only way a young, inexperienced monarch can learn about order and defense—the two things he deems absolutely necessary for the divinely appointed task of ruling a well- ordered realm—the tsar acknowledges that, despite Aleksei’s royal blood and sacred vocation, the heir apparent is unqualified for his future imperial post.18

In the Epiphany ceremony of 1693, for example, Peter was apparently absent, but foreign officers like Patrick Gordon marched with their men to the Kremlin for the event. And, as if celebrating a military victory, Peter ordered a fireworks show the following day.19 In 1699, Johannes Korb noted the presence of foreign officers and regiments, and that of the tsar himself. But Peter did not stand bareheaded on the ice receiving the blessings of a high prelate. Instead he led the Preobrazhenskii regiment in their new green uniforms.20 Be that as it may, the simple inclusion of the military at the Epiphany celebration was seemingly insufficient to allay Peter’s discomfort with being present. The association with ritual humiliation of the emperor visà- vis the officiating clergy was apparently still too strong, as evidenced by his inconsistent attendance.21 Transporting the royal Epiphany ritual from Moscow to Petersburg, however, revealed the power of place in determining Peter’s attitude toward this annual Orthodox rite of purification and renewal. The metaphorical distinction between Jerusalem and Rome is key to understanding his plan of implementation.

The Context of Jerusalem In what way would Muscovites, specifically members of the court, have understood the major rites of place in this specific urban context? In the

transporting jerusalem



grand scheme of things, the apparent introduction of the Epiphany and Palm Sunday rituals into the royal repertoire in Moscow was apt, given the increasing references to Muscovite Rus’ from the fifteenth century on as the New Israel and of Moscow as a new Jerusalem.22 In expectation of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment in the year 7000 (1492), the beginning of the eighth millennium in the Byzantine calendar, interest in Palm Sunday and its celebration of the General Resurrection grew. Elsewhere I have indicated the emergence of a cycle of resurrection holidays during Great Lent and Eastertide that ultimately produced the remarkable Russian shift of the inherited name for Sunday from nedelia to voskresen’e by the beginning of the seventeenth century.23 The liturgical receptacles known as zions (siony) were introduced into the accoutrements of Moscow’s Cathedral of the Dormition, iconic reproductions of a hybrid edifice associated with Jerusalem, conflating the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple and the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection. Like many medieval cities, Moscow had grown concentrically outward from the original Kremlin fortress, surrounded by ramparts, and later by walls. The heart of the city was the semiotically charged space of Cathedral Square, embraced by the main cathedral church (Dormition), the royal necropolis (Archangel Michael), the palace church (Annunciation), the throne room ensemble (Golden Hall), the reception hall (Faceted Hall), and the Kremlin bell tower (Ivan the Great). Ceremonies associated with Jerusalem and environs were easily accommodated within and without this ancient walled Russian city adjacent to a mighty river. To process from Cathedral Square to the Jordan or to lead the metropolitan’s Procession on the Ass over the moat and into the walled city was to instantiate Jerusalem in a Russian key. When Ivan IV won a major Christian victory over the Muslim infidels of Kazan’ in 1552, the victorious return of the tsar and his troops to the capital produced a military analogue to the Palm Sunday ritual. Ivan ultimately sponsored the building of the Church of the Intercession on the Moat (later known as St. Basil’s Cathedral) on Red Square near the Savior Gate, the main entrance into the Kremlin. The striking composition, nine separate chapels on a single base, resembled a city in microcosm. The westernmost chapel, dedicated to Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, became one of the major stations for the Palm Sunday ceremony, and many foreigners came to refer to the entire ensemble as Jerusalem.24 A raised dais called Golgotha (Lobnoe mesto, “the place of the skull”), adjacent to the Intercession, was used for official proclamations. By 1598–99 at the latest, this initially wooden structure had been rebuilt in masonry.25 The identification of Moscow with Jerusalem in physical as well as metaphorical terms was so strong that Boris Godunov had plans to replace the



michael s. flier

Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral with a replica of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The enlargement of the Ivan the Great bell tower in 1600 may have been the initial project of this sweeping reconstruction plan.26 What Tsar Boris failed to do during his short reign (1598–1605) was taken up by Patriarch Nikon in the 1660s as part of a larger plan to emphasize the more historical, commemorative Antiochene focus on the life of Christ over the Alexandrian theophanic perspective.27 Nikon sent Arsenii Sukhanov to Jerusalem to take exact measurements of the Holy Sepulcher. Using those results plus a detailed plan by the Italian architect Bernardino Amico, Nikon commenced construction of his New Jerusalem Monastery in Istra, thirty- five miles to the west of Moscow, where he reproduced other structures from Jerusalem as well.28 It is this tangible presence of artifacts representative of Jerusalem in and around Moscow that would have magnified the effect of ceremonies like the Epiphany and Palm Sunday rituals with specific references to Jerusalem itself. They simply confirmed what the purveyors of medieval Muscovite culture believed: that Moscow had become a new Jerusalem, a bastion of the true faith. And with the likelihood of the Apocalypse in the near future, Moscow was prepared to view itself in the context of the New Jerusalem of Revelation, a refuge for the righteous facing the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. It is undoubtedly the heavily freighted Orthodox spirituality of Moscow that stimulated the secular- minded Peter, imbued with enlightened order and rational science of the West, to seek various means of avoiding such ceremonies whenever possible.

The Context of Rome As for Petersburg, Peter conceived his new capital in a semiotic framework completely different from that of Jerusalem- inflected Moscow. Amsterdam may have inspired the architecture and the network of canals that were used in the earliest construction of the city, but it was Rome that held pride of place in the mythic basis of the city’s long- term development. Long, straight avenues, picturesque squares, classically inspired sculpture, grand secular and military ceremonies involving the Roman pantheon of gods, and impressive fireworks displays all provided the desired background for Peter to shine as ruler, reformer, statesman, and soldier.29 Lotman and Uspenskii have seen echoes of Rome, specifically Moscow Third Rome, in the ideology of Peter, but it is reasonable to argue that the very characteristics of Rome important for Moscow were not those most valued in Petersburg.30 The notion of “Moscow–Third Rome” was of a fairly late vintage, traceable back to documents from the 1520s and 1530s

transporting jerusalem



underscoring Moscow’s role as a new center of Orthodox spirituality, one to be respected in the face of government encroachment on land and property. Constantinople was the New Rome, the Orthodox center that succeeded Old Rome, once the city of the emperors lost its way in corruption and heresy. Moscow at the end of the fifteenth century was a second Constantinople or a Third Rome; there would be no further successor before the Apocalypse. The idea of Moscow Third Rome as an empire is actually a quite late, nineteenth- century notion.31 Rome does figure in the “Tale of the Vladimir Princes,” in which the lineage of the Muscovite ancestors is traceable back to Prus, a brother of Caesar Augustus. This connection was advanced for foreign consumption, to support the idea that the official title of the Muscovite tsar was justified, equivalent in authority to emperor.32 But Rome as an urban landscape did not exist for Moscow; nor for that matter did Constantinople. There are no attempts in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries to shape Moscow in Roman terms, to construct an Appian Way, erect a Colosseum, reproduce the Circus Maximus, or convert the center of the city into a Roman forum or a Constantinopolitan Hippodrome. It is certainly true, however, that Rome was an inspiration for Peter the Great, and the Lotman- Uspenskii comparison of Moscow and Petersburg against that background is illuminating. They are surely correct in pointing to Peter’s conception of Petersburg not as a spiritual center, but as a political center and thus logically tied to Rome as an imperial capital.33 The sanctity of Petersburg was bound up not in its holy sites so much as in its state authority as governing center, its gosudarstvennost’: “The authenticity of Petersburg as a new Rome consists in the fact that holiness does not hold sway within it, but is subordinated to the system of state. State service is transformed into serving the Fatherland and simultaneously worshipping God, leading to the salvation of the soul. Prayer in and of itself, in isolation from ‘service,’ is hypocrisy for Peter, while state service is the only authentic prayer.”34 Furthermore, it is important to recall that it is not so much the direct influence of ancient Rome that informs Peter’s vision, but rather a latter- day baroque myth of Rome filtered through West European interpretation that Peter encountered during his embassies to the West or heard about in contact with foreigners or sophisticated Russians. In building Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland, Peter was emulating King Louis XIV, not Emperor Nero.35

The Epiphany Ritual in St. Petersburg From existing documentation, it appears that from 1700 to 1710, Peter was not present at the Epiphany ritual in Moscow.36 Peter’s apparent intentional



michael s. flier

absence from the ceremony provides a remarkable lead- up to the year 1711. Perhaps in anticipation of St. Petersburg being named the official capital of Russia in 1712, the ceremony was performed in St. Petersburg, and it is here that Peter’s attitude changes in interesting ways, as evidenced by information based on foreign accounts and later, more detailed Russian descriptions. The most telling shift comes from the informative report of an anonymous German traveler, H. G., whose penchant for detail lives up to the first words of his lengthy title, Exacte Relation.37 The fairly complete account is worth repeating in full because of the relevance of specific points it elucidates that have been overlooked by previous investigators who have referred to this text: In this year of 1711 just gone by, on the aforementioned day [ Jan. 6— MSF], I observed the ceremonies accompanying this sanctification. Early in the morning, in accordance with Russian custom, many bells in churches and chapels began to ring out and the liturgy was conducted with particular solemnity. At the same time on the big river Neva, covered over with very thick ice, an infantry regiment moved into the formation of a large square, as if enclosing a circle. In the center [of this square] a large rectangular opening had been chopped through the ice, like a well, roughly three to four feet square in area, and surrounded by railings covered with coarse red cloth. A wooden, cross- shaped arch towered over it, coming to a point at the top. A wooden dove swayed on a ribbon beneath it, no doubt representing God, the Holy Spirit. A table or altar was placed next to the opening as well, at which higher clergy and priests were performing their ceremonies. Right about 10 o’clock, after the conclusion of the service in the fortress church, the archimandrites and higher clergy in full array moved in procession from the fortress to the place mentioned on the river. His tsarist majesty, ministers, and many thousands of noblemen and commoners followed after them. On arriving there, they sang prayers and then the leading archimandrite performed the ritual of the blessing of the waters, after which he sprinkled with an aspergillum the distinguished noblemen and the rest who had stood round; they also gave them water in vessels for drinking. Thereupon, cannons were fired off from the fortress, and the troops in formation saluted. After this, his majesty with many of the most distinguished noblemen set off for their homes.38

Several points are worthy of note. First, after more than a decade of apparent absence from the ceremony, Peter was prompted to participate after the move to his capital- to- be. Second, unlike the tsar as soldier in 1699

transporting jerusalem



when he attended the ritual as the head of the Preobrazhenksii Guards, remaining distant from the details of the ceremony, Peter participated again as ruler in the royal court ritual in 1711 (contra Bushkovitch), that is, processing after the clergy onto the ice and, along with the nobility and commoners, being sprinkled afterward with the sanctified water.39 Third, the fortress church of SS. Peter and Paul was selected as the site of the liturgy and the origination point of the procession to the Iordan’, when there were other options, including the Church of the Trinity across the strait from the fortress, and St. Isaac’s near the Admiralty on the Big Neva. The common thread that helps to explain the motivation for Peter’s change in attitude is clearly the shift in locale, from the old capital to the new. In ancient Moscow, brimming with symbolic, indexical, and iconic representations of Jerusalem, Peter experienced most profoundly the deep integration of Orthodoxy and the potential for diminishing the image of the ruler in ceremony. There he rejected outright most of the church’s rituals, ignoring some and turning others into parodies that focused attention on the ruler’s role as all- powerful reformer and creator of a newly imagined secular world of modernity. On the rare occasions that he did participate, he was associated with the military forces and could remain aloof from any suggestion of humility before the church, all the while receiving its blessing along with the army he built and inspired. But in Petersburg, a city he himself founded, a city created in an image determined by him, there was no traditional Orthodox spatial organization to contend with. If the procession for the royal Epiphany ritual began inside a fortress and ended at the Iordan’ on the Neva, it was a fortress of his creation, his design, and his strategy. Peter could actively participate in this important ritual of health and well- being for the state and for himself because it was all done on his terms in accordance with his precise demands. And unlike Moscow, St. Petersburg was devoid of any permanent allusions to Jerusalem. The Iordan’ was a Jerusalemic site that vanished annually with the melting of the Neva. Jerusalem would not be permanently transported to the north.40 The royal Epiphany ritual apparently endured in this guise in St. Petersburg for one more year.41 The old wooden Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul was demolished in the spring of 1712 to make way for its replacement in masonry by the Italian architect Domenico Trezzini. The foundation was laid on Peter’s birthday, May 30, 1712, but the church would not be completed until 1733. Therefore, the service preceding the procession to the Iordan’ would have to be held elsewhere. Peter ultimately chose the Trinity Church on City Island (later the Petersburg side) as the new, main cathedral of his capital. Built of wood in September 1703, it was dedicated to the Holy Trinity in recognition of



michael s. flier

Figure 3. Aleksei Ivanovich Rostovtsev, Trinity Square on City Island, St. Petersburg (Trinity Church in the center and the Mercantile Arcade [Gostinyi dvor] in the background), engraving, 1716.

the day on which St. Petersburg itself was founded, May 16, 1703, Trinity Sunday. The tiny church was enlarged in 1705, the same year a refectory and a bell tower were added but officially dedicated only on July 10, 1711. In 1714 the Trinity Church was enlarged again to include greater northern and southern bays and a large porch, dubbed Krasnoe kryl’tso, “Red [or Beautiful] Porch,” appended to the refectory at the main entrance, where the royal family and courtiers stood during services and from which royal proclamations were read.42 Trinity Square, in front of the church, was the primary square of the capital at the time, the site of the main harbor, the Mercantile Arcade (Gostinyi Dvor), the Customs House, the Senate, the Synod, and the ministries (kollegii) (figure 3). Trinity Church was Peter’s favorite church in St. Petersburg, very close to his first cottage or domik in the new capital. He attended services there every Sunday and all major holidays, even participating in singing and in reading from the Apostol (Acts and the Epistles). It was at the Trinity Church that all prayer services of thanksgiving for military victories were conducted. Peter took the title of emperor there on October 22, 1721, and it was there that Catherine I, Peter II, and Anna Ioannovna took their solemn oaths as sovereign.43 Therefore it was appropriate that the service for the Epiphany ritual and the procession to the Iordan’ following would be shifted to Trinity Church. From existing records, foreign and domestic, it is difficult to know ex-

transporting jerusalem



actly in what way Peter participated in the Epiphany ritual each and every year he was in the city. According to records reprinted in Pokhodnyi zhurnal in the middle nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Peter was able to combine his role as leader of the regiments with that of ruler, participating in some years in the procession itself. On January 6, 1713, Peter was inspecting fortifications near Hamburg and thus not even in the capital.44 In 1714, the journal makes no mention of him attending services in the Trinity Church but does note his presence on the ice with the regiments.45 In 1715, the procession is described as passing before the tsar’s regiment and receiving his salute in return.46 There is no mention of Peter’s participation in the Epiphany ceremony in the years 1716–20. In 1721, Peter is again described as being part of the military parade, a function he carried out in Moscow in 1722.47 In 1723, he limited himself to a service at his suburban Moscow estate in Preobrazhenskoe.48 By 1724, Peter is described as attending the matins service on January 6 at St. Isaac’s Cathedral, named after the feast day of Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, celebrated on Peter’s birthday. After the service, he led the regiments in formation past the Admiralty along the banks of the Neva to the Post Office, after which they marched down onto the frozen river to the Iordan’ at the Trinity harbor. At this point Peter and other members of the royal family heard the Mass at Trinity Church and apparently joined the procession to the Iordan’ for the Blessing of the Waters.49 In 1725, the same route was followed, but there is no explicit mention of the tsar attending the Trinity Church service; he seems to have remained in formation with his regiments and left with them after the end of the Divine service and the firing of guns and cannons.50 Whatever the individual details of each year’s Epiphany ceremony might have been, it is clear from the information at our disposal that Peter was completely comfortable with the annual Epiphany ritual once it was performed in the city of his making. In Moscow, if he did participate, it was only together with his regiments as military commander. In Petersburg, he marched in the procession to the Iordan’ as ruler at first, and then, after the service was moved from the fortress cathedral to Trinity Church, he varied his role, now as regimental commander and ruler, now as regimental commander alone. It would remain thus throughout his reign. Significantly, all the churches involved—SS. Peter and Paul, Trinity, and St. Isaac’s—were not only houses of worship but also, by their very naming, indices of Peter and his role as founder and ruler—his patron saint, his capital’s foundation day, and his birthday saint. Now marshaled to ensure the well- being of the emperor, of his capital city, and of his state, the Epiphany ritual had become a rite that met all the criteria of gosudarstvennost’ so central to Peter’s understanding of state service.



michael s. flier

Notes 1. G. R. Derzhavin, “Petru Velikomu,” in Sochineniia Derzhavina s ob”iasnitel’nymi primechaniiami, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: N. F. Mertts, 1895), 1:10. The translation is mine. 2. Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, “Rol’ dual’nykh modelei v dinamike russkoi kul’tury,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, no. 28 (1977): 25. 3. Konstantin Nikol’skii, O sluzhbakh Russkoi tserkvi byvshikh v prezhnikh pechatnyx bogosluzhebnykh knigakh (St. Petersburg: Tip. Tovarishchestva Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1885), 45–158, 214–36, 287–96; Michael S. Flier, “Political Ideas and Rituals,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, 3 vols., vol. 1, From Early Rus’ to 1689, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 401–7. 4. The reports of Anthony Jenkinson and his entourage (1557–58) were published in 1589 in Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, facsim. ed., intro. David Beers Quinn and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 336–37. 5. Ibid., 341. I have suggested that the reference to the “Emperours sonne” in the Jenkinson account is the result of erroneous transmission. The passage should read “the Metropolitan . . . did cast of the said water upon the Emperours [per]sonne, and the Nobilitie.” This interpretation is in accord with the anonymous description, which describes the metropolitan casting water on the tsar and makes no mention of the tsar’s son. See Michael S. Flier, “The Iconology of Royal Ritual in Sixteenth- Century Muscovy,” in Byzantine Studies: Essays on the Slavic World and the Eleventh Century, ed. Speros Vryonis Jr. (New York: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1992), 75n12. 6. The special word Iordan’, with a soft final n’, referred to that part of the river exposed by the large opening in the ice. 7. See Michael S. Flier, “Breaking the Code: The Image of the Tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual,” in Medieval Russian Culture, II, ed. Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 213–42. 8. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 343–44. 9. Note the interpretation of the Council of 1678 in determining the need to limit the Palm Sunday ritual to Moscow alone; see Akty, sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh Rossiiskoi Imperii Arkheologicheskoiu ekspeditsieiu Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 4, 1645–1700 (St. Petersburg: Tip. II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1836), no. 223:308–9. 10. Paul A. Bushkovitch, “The Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Russian Review 49 (1990): 9–10. 11. I have indicated previously the Orthodox practice of priests sitting (Old Testament) or standing (New Testament) during the reading of the Paremii included in the service. See Flier, “Iconology,” 70–72. 12. See Michael S. Flier, “Court Ceremony in an Age of Reform: Patriarch Nikon and the Palm Sunday Ritual,” in Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 83–88. 13. Bushkovitch, “Epiphany Ceremony,” 15. 14. Ibid., 11–12. 15. Ibid., 12. In the Orthodox calendar, the feast day of the birth of John the Forerunner (the Baptist) is celebrated on June 24. This day coincided with the pagan celebration of Kupala or Kupalo (from the verb kupat’sia, “immerse in water”), the

transporting jerusalem



magical force of water and fire (heat and light) in preserving life, a power honored during the summer solstice, the maximum period of the sun’s appearance. The holiday called Ivan Kupalo represents a syncretism of Ivan, the popular form of John, and Kupala/Kupalo. 16. Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1–7. 17. Dnevnik kamer- iunkera F. V. Berkhgol’tsa. 1721–1725, 5 parts, rev. and exp. ed., trans. I. F. Ammon (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1902–3), pt. 2, 1722- i god (1902), 14, and pt. 4, 1724- i god (1903), 5–6. 18. Zitser, Transfigured Kingdom, 142–43. 19. Dvortsovye razriady, 4 vols., vol. 4 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. kantseliarii, 1852–55), 749. 20. See J. G. Korb, Diary of an Austrian Secretary of Legation at the Court of Czar Peter the Great, trans. and ed. Count MacDonnell, 2 vols. (London: F. Cass, 1863/1968), 1:224–28, and also I. A.  Zheliabuzhsky, “Zapiski,” in A. B.  Bogdanov, Rossiia pri tsarevne Sof ’e i Petre I (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1990), 267. 21. Peter was absent from Moscow in January of 1698 during his Grand Embassy to Western Europe and was waging war against the Swedes in Ukraine in January of 1709. He was occasionally out of Moscow on other business in early January. But such irregular occurrences cannot explain Peter’s fairly consistent absence from the Epiphany court ceremony around the Moscow Kremlin between 1695 and 1710. One must draw the conclusion that he intentionally avoided it. In 1708, for example, he heard a vespers service on January 6 at his Preobrazhenskoe estate, before visiting an English merchant in Moscow, and then leaving for Mozhaisk. See Pohkhodnyi zhurnal 1708 goda (St. Petersburg, 1854), 1. 22. Daniel Rowland, “Moscow—the Third Rome or the New Israel?,” Russian Review 55 (1996): 602–3; Michael S. Flier, “The Golden Hall and the Makarian Initiative,” in The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland, ed. Valerie Kivelson, Karen Petrone, Nancy Shields Kollmann, and Michael S. Flier (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica Publishers, 2009), 63–75. See also Andrei Batalov and Aleksei Lidov, eds., Ierusalim v russkoi kul’ture (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), and Michael S. Flier, “Till the End of Time: The Apocalypse in Russian Historical Experience Before 1500,” in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice Under the Tsars, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 156–58. 23. Michael S. Flier, “Sunday in Medieval Russian Culture: Nedelja versus Voskresenie,” in Medieval Russian Culture, ed. Henrik Birnbaum and Michael S. Flier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 105–49. 24. See an analysis of the composition and the naming of the separate chapels in Michael S. Flier, “Filling in the Blanks: The Church of the Intercession and the Architectonics of Medieval Russian Ritual,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): 120–39. 25. Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei 34 (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1978), 202; B. A. Uspenskii, Tsar’ i patriarkh: Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model’ i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1998), 455n52. 26. M. A.  Il’in, Kamennaia letopis’ Moskovskoi Rusi: Svetskie osnovy kamennogo zodchestva XV–XVII vv. (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo universiteta, 1966), 56–58;



michael s. flier

William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 139. 27. Fairy von Lilienfeld, “Russisch- orthodoxe Kirche,” in Konfessionskunde, ed. Friedrich Heyer (Berlin, 1977), 44–66, esp. 44, cited in Karl Christian Felmy, Die Deutung der göttlichen Liturgie in der russischen Theologie: Wege und Wandlungen russischer Liturgie- Auslegung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), 16. As two of the four patriarchates of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Alexandria and Antioch adhered to different traditions regarding the divinity and humanity of Christ. Alexandria, with its early tradition of the Monophysite heresy, tended to emphasize Christ’s divinity as overshadowing his humanity, whereas Antioch placed great stock in the Logos made Man in every sense, including having a soul. The Antiochene view would therefore show greater interest in Christ’s time on earth as a man, including the historical sites associated with his mission. 28. Il’in, Kamennaia letopis’, 176–204. The very name New Jerusalem introduces the relevant theme of the Apocalypse, a motif ever present since the late fourteenth century in expectation of the End Times. The other Eastern patriarchs were critical of Nikon’s hubris in this respect, see N. Gibbenet, Istoricheskoe issledovanie dela patriarkha Nikona, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1882–84), 2:196–97, 367; and L. Lebedev, “Novyi Ierusalim v zhizni sviateishego patriarkha Nikona,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, no. 8 (1981): 70–74, cited in Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, “Otzvuki kontseptsii ‘Moskva—Tretii Rim’ v ideologii Petra Pervogo: K probleme srednevekovoi traditsii v kul’ture barokko,” in Khudozhestvennyi iazyk srednevekov’ia, ed. V. A. Karpushin (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 238. 29. See Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols., vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 2. 30. Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, “Otzvuki,” 237–39. 31. Compare the Lotman- Uspenskii interpretation (“Otzvuki,” 237) to that of Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross- Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589, chap. 10, “Third Rome: Delimiting the Ruler’s Power and Authority” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219–43. 32. Thus Lotman and Uspenskii cite a letter from Ivan IV to Swedish King Johann III alluding directly to his ancestor Caesar Augustus to underline his royal legitimacy, “Otzvuki,” 236. 33. “Otzvuki,” 239. 34. Lotman and Uspenskii, “Otzvuki,” 241. 35. See Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 16–21. 36. Cornelius de Bruyn witnessed the Epiphany ceremonies of 1702 and 1703, describing the scene in great detail, but lamenting the loss of solemn dignity he had noted on previous occasions and noting the absence of the rulers and the nobility. See Cornelius de Bruyn, Travels into Muscovy, Persia, and Part of the East Indies: Containing an Accurate Description of What Is Most Remarkable in Those Countries, 2 vols. (London, 1737), 1:22–24. In 1710, the Danish ambassador Just Juel described the Muscovite Epiphany ceremony presided over by Stefan Iavorskii, metropolitan of Riazan’ and representative of the patriarchate. Peter was absent, even though he may have been in Moscow celebrating sviatki. See “Zapiski Iusta Iuela, datskogo poslannika pri Petre Velikom (1709–1711),” Chteniia v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete, nos. 2–3 (1899), pt. 3, 128–29, 135–38.

transporting jerusalem



37. The report bears the unwieldy title “Exacte Relation von der von Sr. Czaarschen Majestät Petro Alexiowitz, an dem grossen Newa Strohm und der Ost- See neu erbaueten Vestung und Stadt St. Petersburg, wie auch von dem Castel Cron Schloss und derselben umliegenden Gegend, Ferner Relation von den uhralten russischen Gebrauch der Wasser Weyh und Heiligung, Nebst einigen besondern Anmerkungen auffgezeichnet von H. G.” (Leipzig, 1713). The translation is mine [MSF]. 38. Ibid., 109–10. 39. “Epiphany Ritual,” 15. Here, it is true, Bushkovitch refers to Peter’s attendance at the Moscow River, but the implication is that Peter did not participate in the Epiphany ceremony for the rest of his life in his role as ruler, only as soldier, an assessment that is clearly mistaken, as shown in the 1711 ceremony. 40. It is ironic that nearly two centuries later, Tsar Alexander III would reject the results of two competitions to erect a church over the site of the mortal wounding of his father, Alexander II, in 1881. The Church of the Resurrection of Christ, more commonly known as the Savior on the Blood, was based on the architectural metaphor of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher in a key redolent of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Muscovy. See Michael S. Flier, “The Church of the Savior on the Blood: Projection, Rejection, Resurrection,” in Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, 3 vols., ed. Boris Gasparov et al., vol. 2, Russian Culture in Modern Times, ed. Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 25–48; Michael S. Flier, “Tserkov’ Spasa na krovi. Zamysel, voploshchenie, osmyslenie,” in Ierusalim v russkoi kul’ture, ed. Andrei Batalov and Aleksei Lidov (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), 182–204; Michael S. Flier, “At Daggers Drawn: Al’fred Parland, Archimandrite Ignaty, and the Church of the Savior on the Blood,” in For SK: In Celebration of the Life and Career of Simon Karlinsky, ed. Michael S. Flier and Robert P. Hughes (Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1994), 97–115. 41. The royal court is noted as being at the Iordan’ (“byli na vode”) on January 6, 1712. See Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1712 goda (St. Petersburg, 1854), 53. 42. It is surely no accident that this name is identical to that of the royal porch used to frame the entrance of the tsar and his entourage from the upper palace level onto Cathedral Square in the Moscow Kremlin. 43. S. Shul’ts ml., Khramy Sankt- Peterburga: Istoriia i sovremennost’ (St. Petersburg: Glagol, 1994), 37. 44. Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1713 goda (St. Petersburg, 1854), 2–3. 45. Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1714 goda (St. Petersburg, 1854), 1. 46. Friedrich Christian Weber, The Present State of Russia, 2 vols. (London, 1722– 23), 1:86. 47. Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1721 goda (St. Petersburg, 1855), 16; and Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1722 goda (St. Petersburg, 1855), 23. See also Dnevnik Berkhgol’tsa, pt. 2, 12–19 and pt. 3, 8. 48. Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1723 goda (St. Petersburg, 1855), 2. See also Dnevnik Berkhgol’tsa, pt. 3, 8. 49. See the journal account for 1724 in A. N. Filippov, Odin iz neizdannykh “iurnalov” petrovskogo tsarstvovaniia za 1723–24 gg. (Kiev, 1912), 30–31. See also Dnevnik Berkhgol’tsa, pt. 4, 5–6. 50. Pokhodnyi zhurnal 1725 goda (St. Petersburg, 1855), 1.

Prague Funerals: How Czech National Symbols Conquered and Defended Public Space Marek Nekula

Introduction This paper analyzes the semiotics of nineteenth- and twentieth- century national commemorative ceremonies and memorial culture by applying the theoretical models developed by Yuri Lotman, Roland Posner, and Vladimír Macura, which can be situated within the interpretative theory of culture.1 National commemorative ceremonies and memorial culture played an important role in the emergence of the modern nation, a process spearheaded by the urban bourgeois middle classes in the period that concerns me in this essay. That’s why urban public space figured so prominently in national commemorative rituals. Urban space, moreover, proved a fertile breeding ground for collective memory: temporary public actions such as demonstrations, burials, or anniversary celebrations of various kinds as well as permanent installations such as monuments and buildings whose decoration, function, or both reflected liberal national ideology all gave rise to shared memories and common values. These events and symbolically freighted architectural landmarks served to inscribe the national narrative into the urban landscape, especially in city centers, and contributed to the appropriation of urban public space by the liberal nationally oriented middle classes and their ideologies. In the case of capital cities, this process also implied control over the surrounding country (or prospective independent state) as a whole. 



marek nekula

National commemorative ritual represented an alternative to religious and dynastic commemorations, particularly in the city center. In the Bohemian case, because German and Czech populations were interspersed, this process also took place in opposition to another ethnicity’s culture: the other nationality’s iconography had to be removed from urban public space. National commemorative ceremonies and memorial culture are in many ways quite similar to religious and dynastic commemorations, so similar, in fact, that they can at times make use of the same sites and edifices. The French national Pantheon in Paris was situated in a former church that was thereby transformed in both its iconography and its function. Moreover, like later civic commemorative ritual, dynastic commemoration can also pay homage to the nation as the buildings of Walhalla (near Regensburg, opened 1842), Ruhmeshalle (Munich, opened 1853), and Befreiungshalle (near Kelheim, finished 1863) do. But the national iconography of these buildings, sponsored by the Bavarian prince and later king Ludwig I, centers on the person of the ruler and hence is different from liberal commemorations of the nation, which focus attention on the folk and construct the nation from below. As Jürgen Habermas notes, the representative public sphere of the feudal era is very different from the bourgeois public sphere in that the latter is shaped by liberal values and negotiation.2 In the feudal period, the populace at large inhabited the representative public sphere relatively passively and played the part of audience; in the bourgeois public sphere ordinary citizens play a much more active role, take part in the negotiation of beliefs and values, and hence help shape the public sphere itself. A similar difference separates feudal and bourgeois urban centers and the way in which these sites were used in commemorative ceremonies and memorial culture. The commemorative ceremonies and memorial culture of the Czech national movement drew inspiration from German models. German liberal commemorations started in the first half of the nineteenth century. National bourgeois urban memorial culture can be traced to the monument for Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, unveiled in front of the German National Theatre in Weimar in 1857. The statue of the supposed old Czech (Slavic) hero Záboj was erected in Dvůr Králové (Queen’s Court) in the same year. But the public space of Prague—the capital city of Bohemia, the holy center of Czech culture, and the center of Bohemian lands—which was controlled by the Habsburg dynasty at this time, stayed iconographically ambivalent for a long time, especially as the liberal revolution of 1848 was defeated. After the fall of Minister of the Interior Alexander von Bach in 1859, national movements again began to play a more prominent role in the Habsburg Empire. But even under the more liberal conditions of the 1860s

prague funerals



and following decades, representatives of the Czech national movement lacked the power to create an ethnically defined political autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, they had to content themselves with culture—their will to political autonomy was manifested in art and public rituals. Czechs did not have their own state, separate administration, school system, or economic and cultural institutions at this time. For just this reason, symbolic politics played an important role in this period: the battle for the liberation of the Czech people was fought through literature and print media, the composition of history textbooks, and the transformation of physical space into public space by means of national monuments. Public commemorative events, such as the funerals of prominent Czech leaders, were also used to symbolize and promote a Czech national program. The efforts of Czech nationalists to create a new ethnic pattern of “national” identity and to cultivate sources of ethnic pride were extremely successful, even if they could not gain political control of the whole territory of Bohemia, an integral part of the Habsburg Empire that was inhabited by both Czechs and Germans. The politics of national mobilization were probably most effective on the local level, in the election of municipal authorities. This was the case in Prague, where Czech parties obtained control over the city government in 1861. In the following decades, Czech national symbols began to take over the public space of Prague, gradually transforming it—both visually and mentally—into a “Czech” (or “Slavic”) city, despite the fact that Prague was the capital city of demographically mixed Bohemia and itself contained a significant German population. In this paper, I will examine one event that played a key role in the successful Czech national appropriation of Prague’s space: the funeral of Václav Hanka in 1861. Not just any funeral could have served as the occasion for such a national mobilization. Václav Hanka (1791–1861), a poet, Slavic scholar, and, starting in 1818, librarian of the Patriotic (later National) Museum, was—after and alongside Josef Jungmann (1773–1847)—one of the leading figures in the early period of the Czech national revival in the 1810s and 1820s. The commemoration of Hanka’s death provided an opportunity to project the Czech national program back into the past, presenting it as the legitimate continuation of “natural” historical development in Bohemia, which was understood more and more as “Czechia” with respect to its long Czech (Slavic) tradition.3 Václav Hanka’s own career helped to make this kind of historical projection possible. On September 16, 1817, he claimed to have discovered a fragment of a thirteenth- century Old Czech codex in the Bohemian town of Dvůr Králové. Another manuscript, found in Zelená Hora (Green Mountain) and allegedly written in the ninth century, was sent to Count Kolowrat, a representative of the Austrian emperor in Prague, in



marek nekula

1818. These texts were seen as comparable to The Nibelungen Tale (with which Hanka was familiar) and The Igor Tale (translated by Hanka in 1821). Thanks to these “Old Czech” manuscripts, a small stateless nation could be identified and presented by the Czech national movement as an old, culturally autonomous nation with its own state tradition and political and cultural autonomy, comparable with other ancient and culturally developed European nations. The manuscripts were appreciated by luminaries such as Goethe, who read them in German translation. Similar to The Igor Tale, The Nibelungen Tale, and other “national” epics, the “Old Czech” manuscripts thus played a crucial role in the construction of the modern (in this case Czech) nation; they became a dominant topic in national art, history, politics, and rhetoric for the rest of the nineteenth century. But ever since their publication in 1819, serious doubts had been expressed about the authenticity of these manuscripts by Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829) and German scholars as well. In 1858, David Kuh (1818–1878), the editor in chief of Tagesbote aus Böhmen, claimed that Hanka himself had forged the manuscripts. Patriots forced Hanka to file a lawsuit defending himself, which he won, although the manuscripts are now almost universally recognized to have been the extremely skillful forgeries of Hanka and his colleague Josef Linda. The “struggle for Hanka” was in some sense a struggle for the success of the Czech national revival. Hanka’s funeral was not the first public memorial rite to be used for the purposes of national mobilization, but it played a particularly important role because of its timing: it coincided with the beginning of a new constitutional era in the Austrian monarchy and with the preparations for local, municipal, and state elections in 1861. In Prague, the Czech National Party enjoyed success in these elections and would dominate the municipal government from 1861 on. Under these conditions, Hanka’s funeral could serve as a catalyst and model for the successful use of public space for the national program. The widespread commemorative ceremonies held in Hanka’s honor ultimately led to the foundation of the Svatobor society in 1862, intended to permanently establish Czech national values in public space, to influence a linguistically and politically heterogeneous public through visual monuments, and to homogenize that public by reimagining public space in a way that aligned with the Czech national program. Svatobor also helped a new “imagined” social reality gradually come into being by providing financial support for Czech authors and commemorating them after their deaths.4 One of Svatobor’s early projects was the erection of a Czech national pantheon, called Slavín, on Vyšehrad hill. This site had a long Slavic tradition: that is why Hanka had been buried here and why a monumental grave tomb was dedicated to him, the first Czech national



prague funerals

monument erected in 1863 in Prague (albeit in its periphery, since at the time Vyšehrad was on the outskirts of the city). Svatobor was also responsible for the prominent statue to Josef Jungmann in the center of Prague; the Jungmann Memorial (foundation 1873, erected 1878) started an avalanche of Czech national memorials that soon spread throughout the city. Hanka’s funeral was thus one of the first public ceremonies that aimed to redefine public space and to create places and spaces of public commemoration.5 These spaces often came into being as a result of commemorative events such as funerals or demonstrations, which gave a new semantic charge to the locations in which they took place, transforming their meaning. The placement of monuments in these sites later served to fix this new meaning more firmly. To understand this public function of funerals, I will conclude my paper with a description of the 1939 reburial of the nineteenth- century romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha. Mácha’s “second funeral,” which took place at the Slavín cemetery on Vyšehrad, where Hanka had been honored some seventy years earlier, became the first mass Czech national demonstration against the Nazi occupation. If Nazi propaganda placed Prague and the Bohemian lands solely within the context of the German Third Reich, Mácha’s second funeral was an attempt to defend Prague as the “Czech” space it had become in the late nineteenth century.

Hanka’s Funeral After the depressing years of Bach’s neoabsolutist regime, the spirits of “true Czech patriots” were revived by the October Diploma of October 20, 1860, which promised the end of absolutism and the creation of a more democratic political system. Nevertheless, sad news followed soon after, in January 1861: “Our illustrious Hanka is gravely ill and was administered the last rites on the night of January 6th. The venerable patriarch’s strength has long been undermined by unsubstantiated yet ever more mendacious attacks, calumnies and other insults. For over a year he has been pining away.”6 As we can see, apart from reverence and sadness, this report of Hanka’s illness also revealed bitterness at the uncertain results of his lifelong work as one of the “fathers” or “saints” of the Czech national revival, and as the “discoverer” of the Queen’s Court Manuscript, whose authenticity was disputed by “a pack of critical Herostrati.”7 In fact, this news report also revealed bitterness at the fact that Czech national feeling or “Czechness” could still not be taken for granted. Hanka died on January 12, 1861, mourned not only by Lumír magazine but also—according to this magazine—by the “entire nation.”8 The poet, journalist, and, later, politician František Schwarz (1840–1906) published a poem “To Hanka!” on the front page of Lumír on January 17, 1861. Printed



marek nekula

inside a black frame, as if it were a death notice, the poem envisioned grief over Hanka’s demise spreading across the whole Slavic world and the Slavic nation, of which patriotic Czechs deemed themselves to be part—from the “Bohemian Forests” in the mountainous Šumava region (between the German- speaking Kingdom of Bavaria and the Bohemian Kingdom, here perceived as “Czech”) across “to the Tatras” in Slovakia (at this time a part of Upper Hungary) and all the way “to the chilly Baltic” and to the Volga.9 The patriots’ grief was understandable. Just as the Habsburg regime was liberalizing enough to allow for a more intensive implementation of the national program, the one person who had—as Schwarz’s poem says— “resurrected the Czech nation” had passed away. For many, it was the discovery of the Manuscripts that had “directed our poets in a wink to a truly national path.”10 After his death in 1861, Hanka thus became public property, and a struggle began to resurrect him as a symbol of the (still uncertain) resurrection of a Czech nation. Hanka’s funeral was meant to serve as “proof of zeal and our power.”11 The contemporary description in Lumír on January 17, 1861, clearly shows that Hanka’s funeral was observed by the general public, and that the procession consisted of representatives of the museum and educational institutions (Prague’s university, schools of various levels, learned societies, and so on) as well as representatives of the Prague and Bohemian political elites, including the governor. A delegation from the town of Dvůr Králové, where the Queen’s Court Manuscript had been “discovered,” also attended; in subsequent days and weeks, other towns and cities of the Bohemian Kingdom followed suit with their own remembrance ceremonies and requiem Masses, thus giving “proof of zeal and our power” not only in Prague but also in the rest of Bohemia.12 Not all the attendees, however, meant to support a Czech national program. We could hardly say that the Bohemian governor Antal Forgács (1819– 1885), the Hungarian chancellor in Vienna since 1861, would knowingly attend a funeral to emphasize the size of a collective that defined itself as Czech primarily through its language. The same applies to the aristocracy, which tended to retain a more universal orientation, or at least one that expressed loyalty to the conception of a Bohemian province in which both Czech and German were spoken.13 Still, the obituary in Lumír mentioned a number of aristocrats (Prince Hugo of Thurn and Taxis, Count Lažanský, Prince Karl of Schwarzenberg, and Count Jindřich Jaroslav of ClamMartinice) who, at least at this time, sympathized with the Czech movement, and supported Czech language and culture in one way or another. As Hanka’s obituary states, some aristocrats joined the chanting at the funeral; and “some younger members of the nobility started to . . . learn the Czech

prague funerals



language” after attending the ceremonies.14 The aristocracy, however, played second fiddle at Hanka’s funeral. The Czech middle class tried to dominate the ceremonies. The tails of the bier cover were carried by the leading middle- class protagonists of the Czech national movement in 1848 and in the 1860s: František Palacký (replaced on the way by František August Brauner), Václav Vladivoj Tomek, Josef Wenzig, František Ladislav Rieger, Josef František Frič, and the “proletarian” Prince Rudolf Thurn and Taxis. The aristocracy was demoted to the role of bit players in this spectacle, just as they were in other contexts. Therefore, when Lumír claimed that the demise of the “immortalized excellent man” was mourned by “the entire nation in universal grief,” it was not referring to the collective of Bohemians (Czechs and Germans) but to the collective of Czech patriots, united by their language.15 The aristocrats who participated in the funeral procession, conversely, wanted to pay respect to a prominent representative of the Patriotic Museum (founded by Count Kaspar Maria von Sternberg in 1818), who, though he had “worked mainly for only one of the two national tribes in the country . . . benefited and glorified the whole country.”16 Hanka had, after all, been honored for his work even by “crowned heads,” as noted in the obituary.17 The funeral itself was central to Czechs living in Bohemia, Vienna, and Buda and in exile in the capitals of other European countries. Nevertheless, the Czech press created the impression that this event was of international importance and had been noted with respect in most of Europe’s capital cities, as if the whole continent were mourning Hanka. Lumír provided detailed descriptions of requiem Masses and memorial services in other European capitals such as Vienna, Buda and Pest, Petersburg, Paris, Zagreb, and Cetinje/Montenegro, where the memorial ceremony was even attended by “Prince Nikolai with his court, the senate, the commanders and captains of all the people of Montenegro.”18 Lumír likewise emphasized the multitude of translations and international recognition of the Queen’s Court Manuscript, especially by Goethe and “the foremost German romantic, Friedrich Baron de la Motte- Fouque.”19 It was as if these foreign luminaries were not only paying tribute to the artistic quality of the manuscripts and the editorial mastery of Václav Hanka, but also recognizing—through the manuscripts and Hanka—the whole Czech nation. In the same way, his funeral was portrayed not only as an opportunity to pay respect to a man but also—and primarily—as “proof of the zeal and multitude” of the Czech nation and its acceptance in Europe. A number of symbolic moments made it clear that the funeral was a Czech national demonstration. A central role was given to the Queen’s Court Manuscript, the “holy scripture” of patriotic Czechs, which symbolized all



marek nekula

the values mentioned earlier and was carried by the young Count Václav of Kounice.20 The ceremony repeatedly highlighted Czech songs, sung both in the museum courtyard, where the funeral procession began, and at the base of Vyšehrad hill. Quite logically, Hanka’s funeral procession proceeded from the museum toward Slovany (“Slavs’ ground”), the fourteenth- century Slavic monastery founded by Charles IV for Croatian Benedictine monks who practiced the Slavic liturgy, and then to the cathedral on “ancient Vyšehrad,” the plateau near Prague. Hanka was buried there as if he were a king, close to the remains of the supposed royal crypt of the first Přemyslid (Slavonic) king Vratislav and his successors. Vyšehrad is also associated with the mythical princess Libussa, the central figure of the Green Mountain Manuscript, and with Charles IV, who chose Vyšehrad as the starting point for the coronation procession of the king of Bohemia.21 Very subtle in this respect was the function of laurels in the funeral, “eagerly snatched by the crowds.” Laurels were a symbol of “vítězosláva” (glorious victory), and this word at the time alluded to one of the possible etymologies of the word “Slav,” which was variously derived from “slovo” (word), “sloboda”/“svoboda” (freedom), and “sláva” (glory). The Slavic character of the funeral ceremony was underlined by the coat of arms and motto of the Knights of St. Vladimir on the funeral hearse. Václav Hanka had been a “commander of the Russian Order of St. Anna, and knight of the Order of St. Vladimir, third class.”22 It is highly symbolic that his Austrian orders and medals were not displayed at the funeral, and were never explicitly mentioned in the obituary. The obituary also strikes a Slavic note when it states that “the last words [Hanka] uttered were in Russian.”23 Not by accident did “the entire Slavic nation,” as František Schwarz wrote in his poem, “grieve a loss so great.”24 It is instructive to look at who was actually filling the categories of the “Slavs” and the “Slavic nation.” In the case of the requiem Mass organized by the “Slavs in Paris,” the term actually referred to just two Czechs settled in Paris, Josef Václav Frič (1829–1890) and a tailor by the name of Hulek.25 In Zagreb, Moscow, and Petersburg, as well as Buda, Pest, and Vienna, we find that the memorial events were not a demonstration of the sympathy of the ruling elites in these capital cities and their nations (as Lumír’s list of capital cities was meant to suggest), but were merely an initiative of local Czech students or other Czech residents. In other words, the supposed grief of the “Slavic nation” and “Europe’s” participation in the memorial celebrations were fully orchestrated by Czech activists abroad. Czech activists played a similar synecdochic game in Bohemia, where they took up Lumír’s appeal that “requiems for Hanka [should] take place throughout the country.”26 Lumír reported on commemorative ceremonies and requiem Masses in various cities: Prague, Písek, Jičín, Hradec Králové, Jaroměř, Česká

prague funerals



Skalice, Budějovice, Roudnice nad Labem, Nová Paka, Litomyšl, Tábor, Klatovy, Čáslav, Mšeno, Dobříš, Děčín, Nové Město nad Metují, Dolenní Bousov, Turnov, Slaný, Brno, Prosek, Chrudim, Pardubice, Nový Bydžov, Kutná Hora, Malešov, Jindřichův Hradec, Kladno, Ledeč, Česká Skalice, Tuchoměřice, Pelhřimov, Beroun, Bavorov, Třeboň, Houstoň u Prahy, Hlinsko, Rožmitál, and others. All these “commemorative ceremonies” and requiems were meant, first of all, to document the fact that the entire country and its population acknowledged the Czech national program represented by Hanka. In this way, “Czech” towns were seen as joined together into a national territory. Second, special attention was devoted—and not only in this context—to towns and villages in predominantly German- speaking or mixed territories, or on “language borders” between Czech- speaking and German- speaking areas. The Czech national program, in other words, would not recognize any language borders inside the Bohemian lands; projecting the national program not only through time but also through space, it wanted to claim the entire country. Apart from Prague, the town of Pardubice offers a good example of the struggle to establish a Czech space and redefine a town as “Czech,” taking into account only one of its communities, albeit the majority one. As a part of the campaign leading up to local and state elections, Czech patriots in Pardubice organized a magnificent requiem for Hanka, a strategy that was seen as vindicated by their success in the later election: The [Czech] National party won a complete victory and dominance. Now the heartless voices that proclaimed Pardubice to be a halfCzech, half- German city will finally be silenced; it has been demonstrated that the town is Czech, and God willing, it will soon prove itself as such through ample deeds.27

Just as the results of the Pardubice election were meant to prove the Czechness of the entire town, the wave of requiem Masses was meant to prove the Czechness of all of Bohemia. In this respect, it is characteristic that the requiem rituals were carried out according to a common template, as described in Lumír: From Pardubice . . . Near the catafalque, where in the midst of a wreath decorated with the Slavic tricolor lies the “Queen’s Court Manuscript,” there stood about thirty younger townsmen with candles, and sixteen more townsmen, holding lit torches, stood in a line in the center of the church. Gathered in the large crowd were “kaiserlich und königlich” [imperial and royal] officials, the town council, teachers and pupils, as



marek nekula

well as many devout folks. . . . The national element, which has long been hiding in the shadows due to long years of oppression from certain parties, is coming splendidly to the fore; the people here subscribe to many Czech journals and read them assiduously.28

Detailed descriptions have survived of requiem Masses and commemoration ceremonies in other towns such as Jindřichův Hradec, Nový Bydžov, and Kutná Hora; despite minor variations, all of them follow the template of the Prague funeral.29 They were said to demonstrate “our multitude and zeal,” as represented by all social classes and age groups, although accentuating the middle- class elite and the younger generation. They also were seen as emphasizing Slavic or Czech national symbols such as the redwhite- and- blue tricolor (a symbol of Czech protest) or the Old Slavonic alphabet. They further accentuated Hanka’s contributions to nation building based on language, by displaying either a copy of the Queen’s Court Manuscript, or—as in Hlinsko—a quotation from Hanka that later appeared on his Vyšehrad gravestone: “Nations will never perish / While the language still lives!”30 The attempt to mobilize those who were nationally undecided or whose national consciousness had not yet been “awakened” played an important role in all the commemorative ceremonies: “I hope that this sad ceremony has revived many a dormant spirit, and strengthened many in their love for the nation and country.”31 Hanka was thus “resurrecting” the dormant nation through his death and funeral. To encourage people to internalize Hanka’s legacy in a more private context as well, copies of Jiljí Vratislav Jahn’s wistful poem on Hanka were distributed, memorial copper funeral coins with images of “our” Hanka were minted, copies of statuettes by the talented sculptor Tomáš Seidan were made, and Hanka’s poems were set to music and published.32 Very resourcefully, two such songs were joined to the popular song “Where Is My Home?” (which later became the Czech national anthem) and printed as a “Funeral March,” whose frontispiece depicted “the grieving bard Lumír standing in front of the time- honored Vyšehrad, which is soaring to the skies. Three Cyrillic words are inscribed onto three wreaths of laurel, oak and roses: ‘Glory, Polza [Benefit], Honor.’ Profits will be used to fund the construction of a memorial for the illustrious Václav Hanka.”33 On the one hand, Hanka’s funeral and the multimodal commemoration of his work doubtlessly drew on methods and devices perfected through religious commemorations of the miracles of the Virgin Mary and various saints: processions, the creation of a sacral space where relics and keepsakes could be deposited, the casting of statuettes or minting of memorial coins for “private” contemplation, the composition of poems and songs, the print-

prague funerals



ing of vignettes and pictures, etc. On the other hand, it perfected a model for a “funeral rally” that was to become a paradigm for future national memorials and commemorations: an emphasis on “our” multitude and homogeneity and on the use of the Czech language; many- faceted symbols (including tricolors and banners) referring to Czech narratives of identity; the symbolism of flames and candles; the inclusion of Vyšehrad and other “nationally relevant” places such as the Slovany monastery, the museum, or—later— the National Theater; the distribution of poems and other intertextual references; and the founding of memorial societies, fund- raising campaigns, and so on. In Hanka’s wake, the burial ground on Vyšehrad slowly turned into a “national cemetery.” The next famous personality to follow Hanka to Vyšehrad cemetery was the writer Božena Němcová (1820–1862), who, as a “mere woman,” received much more modest and unpretentious funeral honors.34 Nevertheless, her funeral copied the funeral of Hanka. Others followed—for example, most of the leading middle- class Czechs who had participated in Hanka’s funeral and some of their relatives (such as the son of Josef František Frič) can be found on Vyšehrad. In Hanka’s case, as well, it was obvious from the very start that a person of his “excellence and renown” deserved more than just Tomáš Seidan’s portable statuettes for home parlors. Already at the time of Hanka’s funeral, Matice česká started a fund- raising campaign to build a memorial for Hanka, and the first collections “in favor of Hanka’s memorial” took place as early as during the requiem Masses: “The public interest in the establishment of V. Hanka’s memorial has been attested in the Czech and Slovak lands by voluntary collections and by balls, gatherings, theater performances and other social events, whose net proceeds have been dedicated to this noble purpose.”35 These fund- raising campaigns were ritualized in the 1860s and 1870s as a way of constructing the national collective; this ritualistic function was more important than the—somewhat limited—financial success of these campaigns. In Hanka’s case, Czech patriots desired the construction of an adequate monument to Hanka on Vyšehrad—ideally, they wanted nothing less than his interment in a national pantheon to be called “Slavín.” 36 Indeed, it was Hanka’s funeral in Vyšehrad cemetery that gave rise to the idea that Vyšehrad—which at the time was rather desolate and dilapidated—was the best place to build a national pantheon.37 Following a failed attempt to establish Slavín in Tupadly near Liběchov, other sites had been discussed, such as “Volšany Fields,” the “regular” Olšany cemetery in Prague.38 But “Volšany Fields” was not a patriotic space with a long national history, and the Svatobor society, which was formed to commemorate the memory of Hanka and others, soon revealed a shift in expectations: the idea of Slavín was associated with diverse nationally and historically important



marek nekula

locations such as Vyšehrad, Levý Hradec, Žižkov, and Šárka.39 Vyšehrad was a likely location because it was connected with Libussa in the Green Mountain Manuscript, as well as with the Slavic- oriented Přemyslid King Vratislav and his successors. The staging of Hanka’s funeral further accentuated the opposition between the Slavic Vyšehrad on the periphery and Prague Castle, dominated by the “foreign” Habsburg rulers, in the center of Prague. Ultimately, the name Slavín began to refer, not just to the pantheon of the most famous Czechs in the Vyšehrad cemetery, but to the cemetery as a whole. Svatobor also aimed to support the building of national monuments in other locations in Prague, especially in the city center. At that time, the center was dominated by bronze monuments to Charles IV (1848), Franz I (1850), Marshal Radetzky (1858), and others who were associated with the Habsburg imperial dynasty.40 Czech national symbols were present only as temporary installations. National symbols that were, in the discourse of the time, perceived as “Czech” might be used to decorate halls for parties, balls, and other occasions; but these symbols—for example, busts or allegorical figures—were constructed of plaster and were portable, lightweight, and cheap: Many years have passed since such a splendid national celebration was last seen in Prague as this year’s grand party at Žofín. . . . Between the Great and Small Halls, the busts of Josef Jungmann and Karel Havlíček Borovský stood side by side. . . . In the middle of some allegorical figures, the statue of Czechia (‘Čechie’) was prominent along with her faithful lion, and several reliefs in the form of medallions stood out on the walls . . . next to the life- sized bust of King Jiří, very successfully rendered.41

It was Božena Němcová’s 1862 funeral on Vyšehrad that breathed new life into plans to build an adequate monument to Hanka. No less than one week after Němcová’s funeral (and almost precisely a year after Hanka’s), plans were publicly announced to found Svatobor, a society whose objectives were, as we know, to erect a memorial to Hanka, to found the Czech pantheon Slavín, and to support Czech writers and playwrights. At Svatobor’s meeting in July 1862, various speakers discussed the possibility of a “common national tomb . . . a monumental building with passageways whose walls are filled with compartments in the style of honeycomb cells, where the deceased are buried. Our national tomb for writers and poets might perchance be constructed in a like manner.”42 The organic reflection of an ethnic (national) collective bound by both blood and language is striking. It is also present in the inscription “Nations will never perish / While the language still lives!” on Hanka’s gravestone, a quotation from Hanka first used as an epitaph during a requiem Mass for him.

prague funerals



Hanka’s grave therefore became not only the first Czech national memorial on Vyšehrad but also the starting point for the gradual transformation and domination of the Prague urban space by Czech national symbols. Svatobor went on to finance the monument to Josef Jungmann (the foundation stone was laid in 1873, the statue unveiled in 1878) in the center of Prague on Ferdinand (later National) boulevard, a Czech promenade.43 The other end of the promenade was dominated by the Provisional Theater (1862), which was replaced in the 1880s by the monumental National Theater.44 Svatobor thus not only commemorated the other leading personality of the early period of the Czech national movement but also gave an example for other Czech national monuments in central public places and started the transformation of Prague into a Czech (or Slavic) city. As political and other conditions grew more favorable for the Czech national movement during the second half of the nineteenth century, the transformation of Prague’s public space soon began to receive funding from local municipal authorities and from private patrons such as Josef Hlávka. Some monuments in Prague were decorated with the Svatobor emblem, which became a visible marker of their semantic interconnection, a syntagmatic intertextual link joining individual national monuments (“texts”) into an organic whole. In the end, only a few monuments were marked with this emblem, but other monuments can be seen to have been paradigmatically interlinked even without the Svatobor marker, using specific period symbols that referred to the language- based national categories dominating the national discourse of that period. This process was accompanied by articles in the press and references in novels and poetry, as well as by the renaming of public places. Bilingual German and Czech street signs were changed into signs written only in Czech and decorated with the Czech red- white- andblue tricolor.45 Czech monuments were in implicit or explicit conflict with pro- Habsburg monuments such as the ones mentioned; this confrontation became more and more open in the 1910s and especially after 1918. Czech activists and the Prague municipal authorities succeeded, for example, in preventing the construction of a “German” monument to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and in “overpowering” other German monuments—for example, the splendid new Czech Municipal House overshadowed the German House nearby. Many “German” monuments were removed or destroyed after the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918, such as the Marian Column on the Old Town Square, which was understood as a symbol of re- Catholicization and of the Catholic- dominated Habsburg Empire; the monument on the Lesser Town Square to Johann Joseph Wenzel Graf Radetzky, who represented the Bohemian nobility’s fight for the preservation of the Habsburg



marek nekula

Empire; or the monument to Emperor Franz I on the Vltava embankment. The pantheon of busts and statues in the Bohemian Museum was cleansed of the statues of Franz Joseph I and his wife after 1918, and the museum was renamed the National Museum.46 Of course, the transformation of Prague’s public space was not purely symbolic. The “rebirth” of Prague—from a city whose iconography was proimperial, and a city seen as linguistically and politically ambivalent—into an apparently homogeneous “Czech” city was certainly also made possible by the migration of Czech- speaking workers to the city, a demographic shift that influenced the national composition of Prague’s municipal councils. The splitting of institutions and of the educational system into Czech and German parts also played a role. Nevertheless, without the iconographic transformation of Prague from a “German” city into a “Czech” or “Slavic” one, and the transformation of public communication in favor of the Czech language, Prague would hardly have become—even for Czechs—the Czech (Slavic) Prague of Libussa.47 And Prague is only one example, albeit a prominent one. It can be viewed as a model for the iconographic and linguistic transformation of many other towns that had previously been nationally indifferent into “Czech” towns, as well as a model for the rhetorical, discursive transformation of Bohemian territory from the linguistically heterogeneous or ambivalent “Bohemia” to a linguistically homogeneous, or at least Czech- dominated, “Czechia.” This process culminated in the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.

Mácha’s Funeral The Munich Agreement of 1938, the German occupation of what was left of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and the subsequent establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia placed the independence and even the existence of the Czech nation under a most grave threat. As freedom of assembly and association were severely limited, the dissenting Czech public tried to reassert its existence and its mutual national bonds not just by turning back to its history, to Czech literary classics and the commemoration of its past fame and glory, but also by organizing demonstrations and funerals aimed at mobilizing the nation.48 Opportunities for funerals to turn into public demonstrations were much more rare under the repressive protectorate regime than they had been under the Habsburg Empire. Nevertheless, the reburial of Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836) in the Vyšehrad cemetery in 1939 became a great demonstration against the Nazi Protectorate. It was followed in the summer 1939 by the national funeral of Alfons Mucha (1860–1939), whose Slavic orientation was well known to Czechs and the

prague funerals



Nazi administration, which was taking control of Bohemia and Moravia: the ever- tightening screws of oppression under the German occupation gradually made further such protests impossible. From the perspective of the twentieth century, Karel Hynek Mácha can be seen as the most important Czech poet of the nineteenth century. Although his contemporaries criticized him for being too “Byronic,” he was an inspiration to later generations of poets and writers, for example, the group “Májovci” in the 1850s, which drew its name from Mácha’s poem May (Máj, 1836). This poem is seen as the classic work of Czech romanticism. The centennial anniversary of Mácha’s death in 1936 had renewed interest in his work, presenting him as a national poet and the founder of modern Czech poetry. At the end of the 1930s, he became a powerful national symbol. Mácha had died and was buried in the town of Litoměřice; his grave was thus in the Sudetenland, the predominantly German- speaking area that the Nazis had annexed as a result of the Munich Agreement of 1938. As German troops were occupying the annexed territory, the Czechoslovak government decided, on the morning of October 1, 1938, to “save” at least Mácha’s remains and bring them to Prague, so that they could be reburied on Czechoslovak—his and their “own”—soil.49 The exhumation was organized by Prague mayor Petr Zenkl and his assistant A. Žipek, who asked the Burial Institute of the City of Prague to carry out the disinterment. Other representatives of Czechoslovak institutions in Litoměřice and the Czechoslovak Army were also mobilized to save Mácha’s remains and gravestone. In the afternoon of the same day, Mácha’s remains were deposited in the Strašnice crematorium. Later, they were examined and preserved more carefully by Jiří Malý of the Anthropological Institute of the Charles University. Starting in January 1939, they were put on public display. The funeral ceremony took place on May 6 and 7, 1939, almost two months after the Nazi occupation and declaration of the protectorate in March. Thus, the burial and various accounts of it must also be seen as an event and texts reflecting the new political situation. On March 6, Mácha’s remains were displayed in the pantheon of the National Museum, in front of which the proclamation of both the Czechoslovak Republic (in 1918) and of the Nazi Protectorate (in 1939) had been read. Josef Kopta has left a detailed account of the funeral, one that I have drawn on extensively. Even though his report was published one year later and had to undergo stricter censorship, it still provides a reliable description because he was a direct participant in the reburial. Although Mácha was not actually buried in the museum pantheon, it was decorated expressly for the occasion by city architect Vlastimil Hofman, with blue curtains bordered by a red- andwhite garland.50 A “large flag” was hanging in the background; the coffin



marek nekula

was wrapped up in another flag.51 Normally, at a state funeral, uniformed soldiers would have accompanied the coffin. Since the Czechoslovak Army had been dissolved in the protectorate and “soldiers in the uniform of the national army” could not stand guard, students with rapiers stood vigil instead.52 Greek fires burned in front of the National Museum, and the requiem Mass in the pantheon was broadcast on the radio.53 Kopta emphasizes the deep silence, similar to the numbed silence mentioned in many reports of President Masaryk’s burial in 1937.54 Flags—symbols of the state and the political autonomy that Czechs had lost—were everywhere: “the bright colors of large state flags smiled from high poles,” wrote Kopta, speaking of Mácha’s “ceremonious return to his native town, which had very quickly been decorated by flags without any official requests.” Kopta said that “there probably were not any houses, not even in the periphery, which remained undecorated. . . . Anyone who did not know [about the funeral] was instructed by neighbors and took part zealously in this great task, whose language does not consist of words, but of symbols.”55 Kopta published his text in 1940, and so he could not mention explicitly that the flags were Czechoslovak state flags; nevertheless, projected into the whole Prague public space, they symbolically declared it as a homogeneous Czech national space. Likewise, the active participation of “every” individual was manifested by the display of Czechoslovak flags: Nobody wanted to be absent from this enormous circle, which— through the remains of Karel Hynek Mácha—encircled the whole spiritual heritage of the Czech land as if by a powerful wall; everybody believed firmly that he would be alive forever in this sign.56

Kopta also declared the homogeneity of the nation and the ideological unity between living and dead Czechs: The nation in all its wholeness, in which the living includes the dead and the unborn, waited for the moment whose beginning was approaching . . . in a silent, longing betrothal of every Czech soul with the immortal Genius of the Czech land.57

Approximately fifty thousand “true Czechs,” including the State President Emil Hácha, came to the National Museum to pay homage to Mácha, and the streets were lined by 150,000 to 200,000 people.58 The funeral procession, accompanied by the sound of “all the bells in Prague,” slowly walked down Wenceslas Square, turned left at the monument to Josef Jungmann, and continued along National Avenue to the National Theatre, where it was

prague funerals



greeted by fanfares.59 It then moved along the Vltava River past the Slovany monastery to Vyšehrad. The nineteenth- century opposition between Prague Castle, which had once represented Austrian rule and now once again represented a “foreign” power, and the Slavic Vyšehrad was apparent.60 The funeral procession followed, in reverse, the fourteenth- century coronation route designed by King Charles IV, and the staging of Mácha’s burial was also “royal” in other ways. For example, his remains were covered with a copy of a cloth found in the coffin of Charles IV; his coffin was “greeted” at Vyšehrad by the Royal March from Bedřich Smetana’s opera Dalibor, and it was buried near the royal crypt of the oldest Přemyslid kings.61 Theology students stood an honor guard beside the coffin through the night. The morning Mass included Josef Foerster’s choral “Holy Wenceslas, our leader, save us.”62 The coffin was covered by a “tricolor flag.”63 Official guests and representatives of national societies, cultural institutions, writers, poets, scholars, scientists, and artists took part, but Kopta does not name them in his text, presumably because he did not want to cause trouble for them. After the Mass, the funeral procession walked around Vyšehrad. Leading Czech cultural and political personalities took turns as pallbearers. Smetana’s Prayer was played, and Václav Vydra, a prominent actor from the Czech National Theatre, recited Mácha’s famous poem May over the grave.64 Just as in Hanka’s funeral, “land” and “soil” played an important role in this declamation: In the azure vault of heaven the blanching mists are dancing, In light dissolving zephyrs tattered, And on the far horizon scattered White cloudlets over the placid sky go glancing. The grieving prisoner greets them as they race: “You clouds, who in your wandering course embrace Like secret circling arm the earth her own course keeping, You dissolutions of stars, shades in the blue of heaven, You mourners ever to mutual sorrow given, Who know so well the ways of silent weeping— Bear you my charge, of all things that have birth. Where you pass from me on your long, wide way To the distant shore, there for a moment stay, There, pilgrim clouds, greet reverently the earth. Ah, well- beloved earth, beautiful earth, My cradle and grave, the womb that gave me birth, My sweet, sole land, left to my spirit’s keeping, Ah, vast and single of beauty as of worth!”65



marek nekula

Mácha’s Czech word země carries all the connotations that appear in the English translation, as well as in Kopta’s and my usage: it can mean “soil,” “land,” “country,” and “earth.” The motif of the land, connected with the spatial projection of the nation and with the struggle for national space in the time of Mácha’s youth, was also present on the ribbon on the wreath, which read: “Once more in the youth of my country.”66 Rudolf Medek (1890–1940), an ex- legionary and the director of the National Liberation Monument, also used the motif of the “hard” and “firm” země (soil, land, country) in his eulogy; for him the land was identical with, and in this sense destined for, the “hard” and “resolute” Czech nation. He also emphasized the importance of the place where Mácha was buried: The soil in which we bury you is not light. The whole destiny of our nation has been harder than this soil. But we lived, we worked, we fought. The location of this land has predestined it for heroism. You were born from the soil of the royal city of Prague. And you return to it as the prince of a poetic, noble tribe, as a dauphin. And just as your monument on Petřín hill is covered each month of May by the flowers of young and loving hearts, so also will your grave, to which every Czech heart will go on a pilgrimage, surely be covered by them. When you say in your verse: “Oh, and only the soil is mine,” it really is the most loyal and firmest soil here on the cliff of Vyšehrad that belongs to you. And we all hear the words and the song of Smetana’s Libussa: “My dear [Czech] nation shall not perish.”67

As the coffin was lowered into the grave, a choir of Prague schoolmasters sang the national anthem; “Its last sentence confirmed [the words Medek had spoken]: The Czech country is my home.”68

Conclusion The similarities between Hanka’s funeral and Mácha’s reburial are truly striking—Mácha really was returning to “the youth of his country.” The processions followed the same route to the same place, the Vyšehrad cemetery; the remains of both were displayed in the museum (albeit in different places); attendance was enormous, with the involvement of a Czech public representing the whole “people”; the funeral was staged as a royal ceremony; the national colors, songs, and rallying speeches all evoked similar national symbolism. What’s more, both funerals were used to project the nation into a space, in this case into the public space of Prague, and to construct a social reality that did not really exist at the time. But in the first case, at Hanka’s burial



prague funerals

in 1861, Czechs were trying to create this social reality; in the second case, at Mácha’s reburial in 1939, they were compensating for its decline. Hanka’s funeral inaugurated the transformation of public space into a Czech public space; Mácha’s reburial attempted, under a new political system, to halt its most recent transformation and to preserve its “original” Czech character.

Notes I am grateful to Jonathan Bolton, Julie Buckler, and Emily Johnson for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this essay. 1. See Iu. M. Lotman, “Über die Semiosphäre,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 12, no. 4 (1990): 287–305; Iu. M. Lotman, Die Innenwelt des Denkens. Die semiotische Theorie der Kultur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010); Roland Posner, “Kultur als Zeichensystem. Zur semiotischen Explikation kulturwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe,” in Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument, ed. by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991), 37–74; Roland Posner, “Kultursemiotik,” in Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften, ed. by Ansgar and Vera Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 39–72; Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: České obrození jako kulturní typ (Prague: H and H, [1983] 1995). 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 3. Bohemia and Moravia, both part of Bohemian Kingdom, had been inhabited by both Czech and German speakers for centuries. Some thinkers such as Bernard Bolzano promoted a conception of Bohemian patriotism that paid no attention to language and was based instead on the historical prerogatives of the Bohemian crown. The growing Czech national movement, however, pushed for a conception of “Czech” identity based on language use and claimed Bohemia (and Moravia) for Czech speakers. See Jiří Kořalka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich und in Europa 1815–1914: Sozialgeschichtliche Zusammenhänge der neuzeitlichen Nationsbildung und der Nationalitätenfrage in den böhmischen Ländern (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991); Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, ed. Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001), 112–52. 4. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edition (London: Verso, 1991); Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe.” 5. See Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006). 6. Lumír, 1861, 42. 7. Ibid., 93, 163, 115, and 87. Note also the glorification of Hanka in the following poem: “As did he, may you defend / forever our Czech motherland, / While from heaven he will send / Blessings true to guide our hand” (ibid., 92). 8. Ibid., 61. Hanka’s obituary, not counting poems and reports of posthumous commemorative events, occupies eight pages (ibid., 61–64, 86–87, 134–36), whereas even the longest obituaries usually took up no more than one and a half pages. 9. Ibid., 49.



marek nekula

10. Ibid., 89. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Ibid., 65. 13. Such an orientation was pointedly declared, for example, by Count Josef Mathias Thun (1794–1868), one of the translators of Hanka’s forged manuscripts, who was active in the movement for the political autonomy of Bohemia, but who nevertheless recoiled from radical Czech and Slavic national tendencies in 1848, and moved to Salzburg. 14. Lumír, 1861, 63. 15. Ibid., 86, 61. 16. Ibid., 62. 17. Ibid., 62. 18. Ibid., 91, 112, 184, 184, 91, 209. The Czech public finally got a state or semistate funeral on the occasion of Palacký’s death in 1876, where the army was replaced by members of the Sokol gymnastic society as well as by armed municipal brigades. According to Kořalka, the funeral was perceived as the greatest since the funeral of Charles IV in 1378. See Jiří Kořalka, František Palacký (1798–1876): Životopis (Prague: Argo, 1998), 539; Jiří Rak, “Pohřeb jako národní manifestace,” in Fenomén smrti v české kultuře 19. století, ed. Helena Lorenzová, Taťána Patrasová (Prague: KLP, 2001), 56–64, here 58. 19. Lumír, 1861, 134, 87. 20. The semiotic activation of a book can be seen as an imitation of Jungmann’s funeral in 1847, where the coffin was decorated by a copy of his monumental CzechGerman dictionary. In Jungmann’s case, the main funeral was also accompanied by a wave of requiem Masses in towns where Czechs were a majority (on Jungmann’s funeral, see Jiří Rak, “Pohřeb jako národní manifestace.”) 21. For more details on Vyšehrad, Libussa, and Slavín, see Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: České obrození jako kulturní typ, 2nd ed. (Prague: Český spisovatel, H and H, 1995); Vladimír Macura, Český sen (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1998); Marek Nekula, “Die deutsche Walhalla und der tschechische Slavín,” brücken N.F. 9–10 (2003): 87–106. 22. Lumír, 1861, 62. 23. Ibid., 134. 24. Ibid., 93. 25. Ibid., 112, 184. 26. Ibid., 65. 27. Ibid., 235 and following. 28. Ibid., 115. 29. In Třeboň, the young ladies wore not just a tricolor ribbon, but full red- whiteand- blue outfits; in Vienna, Hanka’s name was written “in Old Slavonic letters,” and so on. See Lumír, 1861, 164, 141, etc. 30. Ibid., 188. 31. Ibid., 116. 32. Ibid., 91, 114, 210. 33. Ibid., 161. 34. Ibid., 118. 35. Ibid., 90, 117, 161. 36. Ibid., 86–87. The neologism “Slavín” was derived in accordance with old mor-

prague funerals



phological models, semantically probably by analogy with the Germanic Walhalla, to designate a place of fame (sláva) where celebrated Slavs would be assembled, as well as a meeting place with the goddess Sláva (glory, fame). See Nekula, “Die deutsche Walhalla.” On Czech pantheons, see Marek Nekula, “Tschechische Pantheons im europäischen Kontext,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Ethnologie 4 (2009): 29–52. 37. Note the description of Vyšehrad in the short story Innocens (1865) by Ferdinand von Saar (1833–1906), who lived in Prague in the early 1860s. Reprint in Ferdinand von Saar, Innocens: Erzählungen aus dem alten Österreich (Leipzig: Rupert- Verlag, 1940). 38. Lumír, 1861, 211. See also Nekula, “Die deutsche Walhalla,” and Nekula, “Tschechische Pantheons.” 39. Lumír, 1862, 695. 40. In Prague, the social hierarchy is also reflected in the center- periphery of public space, as Richard C. Wortman claims in Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). For the staging of Petersburg, see Julie Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 41. Lumír, 1861, 114. Josef Jungmann (1773–1847) was a leading figure in the early period of the Czech national movement. Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821–1856) was a satirical poet, journalist, and radical politician, who nevertheless acted within legal limits. His journal Slovan (The Slav), founded 1851, was suppressed by state authorities, and Havlíček was then exiled to Brixen. King Jiří z Poděbrad (1420–1471) became a very important symbol for Czech liberal and national politics in the late nineteenth century because he was the first and only elected Bohemian king (1458). As a “hussite” king, he also represented a political and cultural alternative to the Catholic (Austrian) Empire, based on dynastic principles. 42. Lumír, 1862, 695. The transformation of Vyšehrad cemetery into a national commemorative burial site started in the 1860s; however, it was not until 1889–93 that Antonín Wiehl (1846–1910) was able to construct the Slavín pantheon and the commemorative “campo santo” in the Neo Renaissance style. It was originally planned in the Romanesque “old Christian” style. See Marie Benešová, “Funerální architektura v tvorbě českých architektů druhé poloviny 19. století,” in Fenomén smrti v české kultuře 19. století, ed. Lorenzová and Petrasová (Prague: KLP), 92–105. 43. The construction of a monument had already been discussed after Jungmann’s death; these discussions gained strength at the beginning of the 1860s, after Svatobor was founded and the Provisional Theater was built. 44. See also Zdeňka Benešová, et al., The History and Present Day of the Building (Prague: Národní divadlo, 1999). 45. See Marek Nekula, “Language and Territory in Modern Czech Literature,” in Literatura a Střední Evropa/Landschaft ohne Eigenschaften: Literatur und Mitteleuropa, ed. Petr Bílek and Tomáš Dimter (Prague: Gutenberg, 2007), 134–68. On street names and other urbanonyms, see Václav Ledvinka, “Úvod,” in Pražský uličník: Encyklopedie názvů pražských veřejných prostranství, ed. Marek Laštovka and Václav Ledvinka, 2 vols. (Prague: Libri, 1997), 1:7–32; Marek Nekula, “Hus—Husova, Žižka—Žižkov . . . Toponyma a ideologie,” in Jazyk a jeho proměny. Prof. Janě Pleskalové k životnímu jubileu, ed. Michaela Čornejová and Pavel Kosek (Brno: Host, 2008), 178–94. 46. On the memorial to Mozart and Radetzky, see Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Pokorný, Pomníky a zapomníky (Prague: Paseka, 1997). On the memorial to Jan Hus and the



marek nekula

Marian Column, see Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Pokorný, Pomníky a zapomníky; Cynthia Paces, “Religious Heroes for a Secular State: Commemorating Jan Hus and Saint Wenceslas in 1920s Czechoslovakia,” in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, ed. Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001), 209–35; Cynthia Paces, “The Fall and the Rise of Prague’s Marian Column,” in Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, ed. Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa M. Knauer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 47–64; on the Charles Bridge, see Marek Nekula, “Prager Brücken und der nationale Diskurs in Böhmen,” brücken N.F. 12 (2004): 163–86; on the memorial to Franz I, see Václav Ledvinka and Jiří Pešek, Praha (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2000). For other destroyed “German” memorials, see, for example, Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Pokorný, Pomníky a zapomníky, or Nancy Meriwether Wingfield, “Conflicting Construction of Memory: Attacks on Statues of Joseph II in the Bohemian Lands After the Great War,” Austrian History Yearbook 28 (1997): 147–71. On the Museum, see Nekula, “Tschechische Pantheons.” 47. Gary B. Cohen describes the social structure of “Germans” in Prague, who lived as neighbors of “Czechs.” See Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). On the rhetoric of Prague as a Slavic city and the transformation of the municipal authorities, see Ledvinka and Pešek, Praha; Hana Svatošová and Václav Ledvinka, eds., Město a jeho dům: Kapitoly ze stoleté historie Obecního domu hlavního města Prahy (1901–2001) (Prague: Obecní dům, 2002). 48. On the importance of literature and other arts, including literature referring to national history such as Pictures from the History of the Czech Nation by Vladislav Vančura, Božena Němcová’s Fan (1940) or Stone Bridge (1944) by Jaroslav Seifert, or Our Lady Božena Němcová by František Halas, see František Červinka, Česká kultura a okupace (Prague: Torst, 2002); Jiří Doležal, Česká kultura za protektorátu: Školství, písemnictví, kinematografie (Prague: National Film Archive, 1996). 49. Concerning Mácha’s heritage, see Jan Mukařovský, ed., Torzo a tajemství Máchova díla (Prague: PLK, 1938); for more facts about the funeral, see Josef Kopta, “Ještě jednou v mladosti mé kraje . . . ,” in Věčný Mácha. Památník českého básníka (Prague: Čin, 1940), 181–94. Kopta discusses articles and reports written by H. Aubert, F. Sekanina, K. Horký, M. Novotný, and J. Malý. For another interpretation of the events, see Václav Maidl, “Karel Hynek Mácha. Sein Leben, sein Tod und seine zwei Begräbnisse als Metapher der tschechischen nationalen Erneuerung,” in Das Gedächtnis der Orte: Sinnstiftung und Erinnerung, ed. Elisabeth Fendl (Freiburg: JohannesKünzig- Institut, 2006), 215–38; Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 50. Kopta, “Ještě jednou,” 189. 51. Ibid., 189, 191. 52. Ibid., 190–91. 53. Ibid., 191. 54. Ibid., 189. See Jonathan Bolton, “Mourning Becomes the Nation: The Funeral of Tomáš Masaryk in 1937,” Bohemia 45, no. 1 (2004): 115–31. 55. Kopta, “Ještě jednou,” 189. 56. Ibid., 190. 57. Ibid., 191. 58. Ibid., 189.

prague funerals



59. Ibid., 191. 60. At first, the possibility of burying Mácha in the royal crypt of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague Castle was considered, but, since official circles were refusing this support for the burial, this was hardly possible. Another possibility was Prague’s Olšany cemetery, where Mácha would have been assigned “based on his address” when he lived in Prague (ibid., 187). 61. Ibid., 188, 192. 62. Ibid., 192. 63. Ibid., 193. 64. Ibid., 193. 65. See Karel Hynek Mácha, May, trans. Edith Pargeter (Prague: Orbis, 1967). Italics mine. 66. Kopta, “Ještě jednou,” 194. 67. Ibid., 193. 68. Ibid., 194.

“A Monstrous Staircase”: Inscribing the 1905 Revolution on Odessa Rebecca Stanton And the grand staircase, as wide as a broad street, two hundred low, lordly steps; it seems there’s no other one like it in the world, and if you tell me that there is, I wouldn’t go to see it. — vladimir jabotinsky, The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn - of - the - Century Odessa (1935)

Russia’s revolutionary unrest of 1905 spawned narratives set in various locales, including the two imperial capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg; but it was in comparatively sleepy, provincial Odessa that the most vivid—albeit fictional—images of the 1905 revolution were composed. As this essay will argue, it was these images of 1905, captured on film by Sergei Eisenstein and in literature by such writers as Isaac Babel, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Valentin Kataev, that established Odessa as an important site of Soviet political and cultural memory. The canonical, yet imaginary, version of history to which these images allude lives on in the architectural spaces of Odessa to this day, installed there by Eisenstein’s landmark film The Battleship Potemkin (1925), which has acquired several generations of fans and emulators, and reinforced by Odessites’ pride in the rich literary heritage of their city. City mythologies occupy a privileged place in Russian culture, and the two most celebrated “city- texts,” those of Moscow and St. Petersburg, have been extensively documented and explored by literary and cultural scholars.1 Without recapitulating that body of work, it is worth remarking that what brings these cities to life as significant places in the collective memory is a fundamental tension or contradiction at the heart of their mythol



rebecca stanton

ogy: thus, Petersburg is the site both of “Pushkin’s drawing- room” and of “Dostoevsky’s slum”; Moscow is simultaneously an overgrown village and Filofei’s “Third Rome.”2 Like its more celebrated counterparts, the comparatively understudied Odessa mythology rests on an uneasy consciousness of the city’s dual identity, well established by the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, Odessa stood as a monument to imperial Russia, complete with palaces and boulevards that, like those of Petersburg, boast an Italian pedigree and the distinction of having been frequented by Pushkin (during the latter’s extended exile from the capital); on the other hand, it was a notorious den of thieves, peopled by a hardy tribe of stevedores, smugglers, and swindlers who plied their interconnected trades amid the cosmopolitan atmosphere and mercantile bustle of Odessa’s international port.3 Architecturally, the first, “Pushkinian” Odessa was symbolized by its colonnaded opera and ballet theater, which first opened in 1810 but was rebuilt later in the nineteenth century following a disastrous fire, and by the Italianate palace of the governor general Mikhail Vorontsov, whose wife was said to be suspiciously intimate with Pushkin during the latter’s Odessan exile in 1823–24.4 The second Odessa, that of the workers and thieves, took as its architectural metonyms two spaces that were literally “below stairs”: the bustling, black- marketeer- friendly seaport, and the famous “Gambrinus” tavern, located in a basement on Preobrazhenskaia Street, and immortalized by Aleksandr Kuprin in an eponymous 1907 short story.5 Basements and cellars play a significant role in literary works about Odessa, symbolizing a figurative “underworld” of unlawful activities as well as a social space literally beneath the notice of the aristocratic drawing- room society.6 In contrast to the lonely lair of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground, Odessa’s “below- stairs” spaces are characterized as sites of social encounter rather than of isolation; they represent a milieu in which—at best—weedy intellectuals rub shoulders with brawny laborers, Jews with Russians, and Odessa’s signature tricksters with the naive rubes on whom they ply their trade. In “Gambrinus,” which focuses on the events of 1905, Kuprin offers a portrait of the tavern’s clientele that might almost serve as a casting call for extras in a film about that eventful year: Sailors of various nations, fishermen, stokers, merry ships’- boys, harbor thieves, machinists, workers, boatmen, dockers, divers, smugglers—they were all young, healthy, and steeped in the strong odor of sea and fish; they understood hard work, loved the allure and terror of daily risk, and valued above all strength, prowess and the sting of strong language.7

“a monstrous staircase”



It is perhaps not a coincidence that Eisenstein was working with Babel on a film scenario devoted to that quintessential Odessan gangster, Benya Krik, at the same time that he was working on the script of his epic film for Goskino, The Year 1905—a project that was intended to give, like Kuprin’s “Gambrinus,” a sweeping account of “the most important events of 1905, from the Russo- Japanese war and the Bloody Sunday massacre in January to the tsar’s manifesto establishing the Duma, the widespread strikes and the fighting on the barricades.”8 While the Benya Krik collaboration never came to fruition, Eisenstein did end up making an iconic Odessa movie, one that arguably combined the local color of the Benya Krik project with the political content of the equally unrealized 1905 project. This was The Battleship Potemkin. With this film, released in 1925, Eisenstein took the events of 1905 in Odessa—events already narrated in Kuprin’s “Gambrinus,” and later to be immortalized in other works of Odessa literature, including Isaac Babel’s childhood stories, Valentin Kataev’s A White Sail Gleams (Beleet parus odinokii, 1936), and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five (Piatero, 1935)—and “added the heroic gloss that turned Odessa into the avant- garde of revolutionary change, providing a usable prehistory for the Bolshevik Revolution and, by extension, for the new Soviet state.”9 The Battleship Potemkin blended these ingredients into a visual narrative that served at once as a public event, an architectural document, and a mythologizing history, perpetually renewing the connection between place and event for successive generations of viewers, both within and outside the Soviet Union.

“A Monstrous Staircase” The success of Eisenstein’s cinematic paean to the workers of Odessa rested in large part on the director’s inspired reading of the city’s most striking architectural monument, the vast marble staircase that mediates between the “two Odessas.” Not yet built in Pushkin’s time, this staircase arguably represents the culmination of the nineteenth- century building program that produced the “Pushkinian Odessa” of palace and opera house. During the productive year that Pushkin himself spent in Odessa, working on a draft of Eugene Onegin and the seduction of an assortment of local beauties, the aristocratic milieu of Odessa’s palaces and boulevards must have been taking shape before his eyes, under the supervision of the Sardinian- born architect Francesco Boffo. Boffo, who served as architect of the commune of Odessa from 1822 to 1844, is credited with the construction of Odessa’s “marine façade”—that is, the edifices from which the “above stairs” contingent of Odessa society



rebecca stanton

looked out at the sea—in a classical style.10 His tenure saw the erection of numerous landmark buildings and thoroughfares, including Primorskii Boulevard, now an elegant tree- lined promenade; the Stock Exchange (1829–37); several luxury hotels; a theater (completed 1822); the Lutheran Church (1824); and Governor General Vorontsov’s palace (1828). Boffo’s most famous design, however, was not a palace or a church but the so- called Gigantic Staircase (Gigantskaia lestnitsa) leading from the elegant Primorskii Boulevard down to the port. Almost everyone who describes the steps expresses their function precisely that way—that they lead from Primorskii Boulevard down to the port—never in the opposite direction. The stairs lead down; they do not lead up.11 In A White Sail Gleams, his children’s novel about the tumultuous year 1905 in Odessa, Kataev describes the sense of distance between the “below stairs” world of the port and the “above stairs” wonderland of palaces and elegant leisure: They drove past the famous Odessa Steps. At the apex of its triangle, in the passage between the silhouettes of two semicircular symmetrical palaces, against the bright background of the nocturnal sky, stood the small figure of the Duc de Richelieu, his ancient arm stretched toward the sea.12 Petya knew that there above, beyond the Nikolayev Boulevard, was the brightness and the heartbeat of that extremely enticing, unapproachable, tenuous something that in the family circle of the Batcheis was referred to with a shade of contemptuous respect as “in the centre.” In the centre lived “the rich,” that is, those special people who rode first class, who could go to the theatre every day, who for some strange reason dined at seven o’clock and who instead of a female cook had a chef, instead of a nurse they had a “bonne,” and frequently even had “their own horses,” which surely exceeded human imagination.13

In Pushkin’s time, the Odessa of the palaces and the Odessa of the smugglers and stevedores were connected only by a steep cliffside path, later augmented by crude wooden stairs; apparently, the desirability of connecting the promenades of aristocratic Odessa to the port that supported them did not occur to anyone until it was suggested by Tsar Nicholas I on a visit to the city in 1837. The episode is acerbically described by Gustave de Molinari in his 1877 Lettres sur la Russie: The city of Odessa had no paving. Prince Vorontsov did not for a moment entertain a notion of procuring for the city this object of primary

“a monstrous staircase”



necessity; on the other hand, he ordered the construction of a monstrous staircase [un escalier monstre] of which no one felt any need. The history of this staircase is rather characteristic. The emperor Nicholas was visiting Odessa. He arrives on the boulevard, which gives onto the sea at a remove of some forty meters from the beach. “How does one get down there from here?” asks the emperor. “I don’t see any staircase.” The prince says nothing, but he hastens to have constructed a Babylonian staircase, which costs the city a good million rubles and is used by fewer than ten people a day.14

Completed in 1841, the staircase is “monstrous” in more ways than one: not only is it vast in size, but it is also about as graphic an architectural representation of class warfare as one can imagine. The architectural trick consists in a pair of related optical illusions. First, the top step is nine meters narrower than the bottom one, creating a false perspective. To an observer looking up the stairs, the top seems farther away than it really is, whereas to one looking down them from the top, the base of the stairs seems closer than it is in reality.15 In other words, an aristocratic Odessite peering down from the perspective of the Duc de Richelieu sees an easy path to the port below; the lowly dockworker gazing up from below, however, sees a forbidding journey. A second optical illusion is created by the disposition of the landings that break up the flights of steps; though clearly visible from an aerial perspective (figure  4), from the bottom of the steps these landings are completely invisible, contributing to the overwhelming fatigue engendered by just looking up the staircase: in the event that one actually begins to climb the steps, the trick of perspective makes them look progressively steeper and steeper (figure 5). From the vantage point of the Duc de Richelieu, on the other hand, it is the steps themselves that are invisible; a person looking (or walking) down the stairs encounters the inverse of the climber’s experience, seeing only the broad, comfortable landings (figure 6). The net effect of these illusions is an architecture that clearly articulates a response to Tsar Nicholas’s question: “How does one go down?” while firmly suppressing the converse question, “How does one go up?” So powerful was the impression produced on Eisenstein, at first sight, by the combined force of these architectural effects that he immediately reorganized his filming plan to incorporate the staircase, laying the groundwork for the scene that would become the centerpiece of The Battleship Potemkin and one of the most quoted sequences in world cinema. In this scene, a crowd of people has gathered to wave and cheer as local fishing boats deliver food to the mutineers on board the Potemkin, when—heralded by the title

Figure 4. The “monstrous staircase,” in a classic postcard view (circa 1900). From http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001697474/.

Figure 5. The view from below obscures the landings that offer a respite from climbing; the statue of the Duc de Richelieu (center) blends into the crowd of people admiring the view from the top. Photograph by the author.

“a monstrous staircase”



Figure 6. From above, only the landings are visible. Photograph by Taivo55. From Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Potemkin _Steps-top_view.JPG.

card “and suddenly”—the cheery, sunny mood is shattered: the crowd begins to run, and in some cases fall, down the steps, and a few seconds later it is revealed that their headlong flight is occasioned by a detachment of armed Cossacks, who inexorably advance, firing continually as the crowd spills down the steps before them.16 As Eisenstein would later observe, the scene brings to life a narrative whose shape appeared to him at first sight in the very architecture of the staircase: The Odessa Steps themselves were our third on- the- spot find.17 . . . No scene of shooting on the Odessa steps appeared in any of the preliminary versions or in any of the montage lists that were prepared. It was born in the instant of immediate contact. . . . It was the very movement of the steps that gave birth to the idea of the scene, and with its flight roused the fantasy of the director to a new “spiraling.” And it would seem that the panicky rush of the crowd, “flying” down the steps, is no more than a materialization of those first feelings on seeing the staircase.18



rebecca stanton

Figure 7. The vertiginous architecture of the steps as seen from below accentuates the “panicky rush” of the fleeing crowd, creating the effect of a seething human waterfall. From Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin (Kino International, 2007), 46:30–46:35.

Eisenstein harnesses the inherent “movement” of the steps—their “downward” current—to create one of montage cinema’s most famous contrasts: between the waterfall- like, pell- mell descent of “the people” (filmed from below, to maximize the vertiginous effect of the steps’ architecture; figure 7) as they flee, leaping and tumbling, from the firing Cossacks, and the deliberate, stolid advance of the Cossacks themselves (filmed from above, maximizing the grandeur and exploiting the “static” view of the staircase; figure 8). The Duc de Richelieu himself, initially almost seeming one of “the people,” smiling and waving to the boats along with them, subsequently appears to be calmly presiding over the massacre.19 Indeed, from Richelieu’s perspective, it is hard to tell that a massacre is taking place at all, since the optical illusion of the staircase erases both the steps and the people fleeing down them; the Cossacks appear almost to be marching along a flat surface

“a monstrous staircase”



Figure 8. In contrast, the view from the top of the steps, with only landings visible, appears to show the Cossacks marching along a flat, solid surface; along with the steps themselves, the mass of fleeing people is all but erased from the picture. From Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin (Kino International, 2007), 47:03–47:05.

toward a church that occupies the center of the frame (figure 8). The director alternated these two main variations on the theme of “downward movement” with great care to create a mood of “mounting emotional intensity”: First, there are close-ups of human figures rushing chaotically. Then, long shots of the same scene. The chaotic movement is next superseded by shots showing the feet of soldiers as they march rhythmically down the steps. Tempo increases. Rhythm accelerates.20

After establishing the main contrast—between the “chaotic movement” of the fleeing, falling people and the “rhythmic” marching of the soldiers on



rebecca stanton

their illusory horizontal plane—Eisenstein punctuates it with two grace notes, also based on movement, which he identifies as the main “structural and compositional means” in the scene. These two moments swiftly bring the abstract principles of content (violence) and form (“downward progress”) down to the level of the personal and maternal: first, there appears “the solitary figure of a mother carrying her dead son, slowly and solemnly going up the steps”; then, the inverse image of a dead mother with a still- living infant whose perambulator, left without an attendant, careens down the steps in a heart- stopping and much- imitated sequence.21 Both images serve to interrupt the “headlong rush” down the steps that Eisenstein saw as simply a “materialization of those first feelings on seeing the staircase,” but they only do so momentarily, to impress the principle of “downward movement” the more firmly on the viewer. The slow ascent of the mother carrying her dead son impresses by its very impossibility; palpably, this effort to defy the downward pressure of the scene’s form, content, and architectural setting cannot last long.22 The descent of the perambulator, an inanimate object merely obeying the laws of physics, “imitates” and accentuates the downward flight of the crowd, even as it enlists the viewer’s hope against hope that the infant inside will miraculously escape unscathed. Eisenstein dashes this hope, but obliquely; we see the perambulator begin to overbalance, then cut to a different scene of violence. A remarkable feature of the scene is the sheer volume of downward-rushing people: this imagined massacre engulfs not only the original crowd of handkerchief- waving onlookers but also a seemingly endless stream of fleeing townspeople, who appear on the staircase almost as if generated by “the very movement of the steps” that so struck Eisenstein. One of them, the mother whose abandoned, careening perambulator becomes an emblem of the massacre, is killed as she pauses at the top of the steps to consider the logistics of getting a pram down them. Thus, the physical structure of the steps, their effect on the movement of people and objects, becomes as important a part of the scene as their symbolic structure (a staircase leading down, not up). While the architecture itself motivates the dramatic content of the scene, this in turn motivates the staircase- like cinematic “architecture” of the scene’s visual construction: The visible steps of the stairs marking the downward progress of action correspond to steps marking qualitative leaps but proceeding in the opposite direction of mounting intensity. Thus, the dramatic theme, unfolding impetuously in the scene of shooting on the steps, is at the same time the structural leitmotif, determining the plastic and rhythmical arrangement of the events.23



“a monstrous staircase”

Boffo’s staircase is thus translated onto celluloid at the level of form as well as content; and the “escalier monstre” becomes the site of an escalating monstrosity.

Story and History As it happens, Eisenstein’s famous montage was not the first time the cinematic potential of the staircase had been exploited in precisely this way. According to Richard Taylor, “In 1922 Vladimir Gardin, veteran director and first head of the State Film School, [had] re- created a massacre on the same spot for his film A Spectre Is Haunting Europe [Prizrak brodit po Evrope, 1923].” Eisenstein’s cameraman, Eduard Tisse, had also recently shot a dream sequence—significantly, about a fantasy of social mobility— on the steps for Alexander Granovsky’s Jewish Luck (Evreiskoe schast’e, 1925), an adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s “Menachem Mendl” stories with title cards by Babel. Although Gardin’s film was neither widely released nor of particular interest to the contemporary filmmaking avant- garde, his film “was reviewed in both Pravda and Izvestiia, and . . . may at least have made Eisenstein aware of the possibilities that Odessa offered as a suitable location for a massacre.”24 This possibility opens up intriguing parallels between Eisenstein’s creative process in constructing the “Odessa Steps” scene and the method followed by Isaac Babel that same year—1925—in constructing a similarly iconic episode of violence, also centering on the 1905 unrest in Odessa. Like Eisenstein, Babel had both the motive and the opportunity to adapt for his purposes a scene from an earlier work devoted to a similar topic. The pivotal episode of Kuprin’s “Gambrinus” shows what can happen when the “savage enjoyment” of young, strong, but politically impotent workers like those frequenting the Gambrinus Tavern finds an outlet in mob violence. Intoxicated, a Russian stonemason vents his inchoate political rage on the tavern’s popular Jewish fiddler, Sashka: Suddenly he noticed a nervous little white dog that snuggled up to Sashka, trembling. He stooped down quickly, grabbed it by the hind legs, lifted it high, dashed its head against the paving stones, and started to run. . . . Belochka’s brains were scattered over Sashka’s boots. He wiped them off with his handkerchief.25

In Babel’s quasi- autobiographical “Story of My Dovecote” (“Istoriia moei golubiatni,” 1925), the plot similarly turns on a moment of violence in which



rebecca stanton

a pet animal is “sacrificed” as a surrogate for its owner.26 Babel intensifies the emotional impact of the scene by narrating it in the first person (from the point of view of a ten- year- old child identified with the author himself), and increases its symbolic potency by replacing Kuprin’s “little white dog” with a dove—the universal symbol of peace—which the narrator’s assailant smashes directly against his forehead, so that the surrogate victim of the assault doubles as the weapon: “He struck me a swinging blow, his hand now clenched; the dove cracked on my temple. . . . I lay on the earth, and the entrails of the crushed bird trickled from my temple. They flowed down my cheeks, coiling, splashing and blinding me.”27 As in “Gambrinus,” the human target of this onslaught is permitted to survive; but, because the child getting beaten up is explicitly identified with Babel himself, the attack on him is implicitly an attack on the very fabric of the text in which it occurs. Thus, Babel’s scene becomes—like Eisenstein’s—both a virtuoso showcase for “the importance of cutting and editing as a creative process” and a commentary that draws our attention to the construction of the narrative medium itself.28 A further similarity between Babel’s narrative and Eisenstein’s is the astonishing success of both texts’ substitution of story for history, or as Jay Leyda puts it: “One of the curious effects of the film has been to replace the facts of the Potemkin mutiny with the film’s artistic ‘revision’ of those events, in all subsequent reference, even by historians, to this episode.”29 Babel’s use of the autobiographical mode conditioned readers to receive his stories (both here and in Red Cavalry) as a form of testimony, despite the selfconscious “constructedness” of his narratives. Eisenstein, too, aimed to achieve a reportage- like quality in his footage even as he organized his narrative into five acts and used the formal technique of montage to manipulate the viewer’s emotions. Later, he reported with satisfaction that “Potemkin looks like a chronicle (or a newsreel) of an event, but it functions as a drama.”30 One might say with equal truth that Potemkin looks like a drama, but has functioned in some respects as a vintage newsreel of the events it chronicles; although audiences have always known that it depicted a thoroughly fictionalized version of history, its images are the first to come to mind when the Potemkin mutiny is mentioned, and the “debunking” of these images has not rendered them any less canonical.31 The conflation of fiction and reality, or more specifically the intrusion of fictional material into the domain of “real life,” was a recurring trope in Odessa narratives. A central part of the Odessa mythology was the fluidity of the boundary between fiction and truth, a phenomenon most vividly noted by Konstantin Paustovsky when he reported that he had “witnessed the true ending of the story ‘Gambrinus’: the funeral of Sashka the Musi-

“a monstrous staircase”



cian. Life itself wrote this ending in Kuprin’s stead.”32 In his memoir, A Time of Great Expectations—itself an ambiguously veracious narrative that “looks like a chronicle . . . but functions as a drama”—Paustovsky describes his confusion on first reading, in the newspaper, a death announcement for “Sashka the Musician from ‘Gambrinus’”: Up until then I was convinced that almost all literary heroes were made up. Life and literature never flowed into each other in my imagination. So the announcement about Sashka the Musician’s death confused me. . . . I could hardly believe that Sashka the Musician, who had been for me since childhood a literary hero, had really lived just next door, in the garret of an old Odessa house.33

Paustovsky discovers how porous the boundary is between “life” and “literature” (or between “story” and “history”) in Odessa when confronted with the realness of “Sashka’s” death—and, even more concretely, the funeral procession in his honor. In this commemorative rite “the whole of working- class Odessa from the docks and the suburbs followed Sashka the Musician to the cemetery,” pausing in front of the “Gambrinus” tavern to sing “Sashka’s favorite song,” a blatnaia pesnia titled “Good-Bye, My Odessa.” It is this public ritual, connecting the body of the literary hero to the storied public spaces of Odessa, that catalyzes for Paustovsky the realization that “life and literature” do indeed “flow into each other.” Tellingly, the text responsible for this epiphany is again Kuprin’s “Gambrinus,” the ur- narrative of Odessa’s role in the events of 1905. Moreover, Paustovsky’s negotiation of the boundary between story and history, like Kuprin’s, Babel’s, and Eisenstein’s, requires a blood sacrifice: Sashka, whose dog was sacrificed in his stead in Kuprin’s story, finally meets his own end in Paustovsky’s. This fusion of fiction with the narratives of “real life” did not go unremarked by contemporary viewers and readers. Commander of the First Cavalry Semyon Budyonny, whose “Red Cavalry” formed the milieu for Babel’s eponymous story cycle (also scheduled to be filmed by Eisenstein, but, alas, abandoned for the Year 1905 project), was outraged by Babel’s use of “imagination” when writing about historical events: “He invents things that never happened, slings dirt at our best Communist commanders, lets his imagination run wild, simply lies.”34 Conversely, Eisenstein was accused of “plagiarism” by “a certain comrade who claimed to have been a participant in the mutiny” and identified himself as one of the sailors “under the tarpaulin during the shooting on the quarterdeck.” This accusation was truly bizarre, given that the film was ostensibly indeed based on real events



rebecca stanton

(so that “plagiarism” would seem not to come into the matter), and, moreover, so far as Eisenstein was concerned, the shooting under the tarpaulin was, like the Odessa Steps scene, his own “improvisation.” Indeed, according to the director, he had installed this “improvisation” in the screenplay over the objections of the actor playing Matyushenko, a former naval officer who warned that such a thing “was never done” in real life and that the scene would make them “a laughingstock.” If nothing else, though, the accusation of plagiarism provided Eisenstein with satisfying evidence that his inventions possessed a “verisimilitude” that allowed them to become “the very flesh and blood of historical events.”35

“A Glorious Monument” The distinction between “verisimilitude” and veracity was noted in contemporary reviews of Potemkin, but on the whole critics seemed inclined to agree with Eisenstein’s choice of the former over the latter, even arguing that the fictional version of events portrayed by Eisenstein was “truer” than the mere historical version: “We must not make petty historical demands on Potemkin. It may well be that the mutiny on the ‘Potemkin’ did not take place exactly as portrayed on the screen. But what does this matter when the director Eisenstein, in collaboration with his cameraman Tisse, has managed to express the very spirit of the revolution, its profound dynamics, its gigantic rhythm?”36 Another reviewer opined: “Between the work of Eisenstein and history lies a proper interval. And Eisenstein, like Potemkin, with the revolutionary flag, passes through history. The success of the film is complete.”37 A third wrote: “Potemkin is monumental. The everyday precision, the authenticity of the stripes and badges that is favored by others, left [Eisenstein] virtually unmoved. . . . For all its terrible concreteness and its absolute vitality, Eisenstein’s art is symbolic and it is great enough to act like gigantic generalizations.”38 This third reviewer, Adrian Piotrovsky, saw Eisenstein’s film in explicitly architectural terms, not only as “monumental” in its own right, but also as “the first stone of a heroic epic of the revolution,” a “monumental fragment” that must be built upon “stone by stone” until “a glorious monument to Soviet film style” had been erected.39 The theme of monumentality was picked up by the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, the second reviewer cited and a champion of both Eisenstein and Babel as well as other Odessa writers. Shklovsky argued that the principle of narrative selection employed by Eisenstein enabled the director not only to surpass history, but also to construct a dramatic edifice comparable in its architecture to the Odessa staircase itself:

“a monstrous staircase”



Eisenstein is a colossal master. He used his liberties. His first success was where he narrowed down the theme of the film, skillfully choosing his facts, not the whole year 1905, but only the battleship Potemkin, and from all of Odessa—only the Steps. . . . The flight of steps is the plot. The landings on the stairs play a role of arrested moments, and the flight of steps is organized according to laws, the esthetic laws of Aristotle’s Poetics; drama’s peripeteia is born in a new form.40

Shklovsky’s contention that The Battleship Potemkin is not only a monument, but also a monument the same shape as the Odessa Steps, is borne out by the afterlife of the film in the canon of world cinema. The reception of the film, both within the Soviet Union and abroad, has been richly chronicled by Richard Taylor, and there is little to be gained by attempting to recapitulate that chronicle here.41 As Taylor summarizes: “The Battleship Potemkin secured for itself and for its young director a unique place in the history of cinema. Neither could subsequently be ignored by anyone who took the medium seriously and, broadly speaking, neither has been by anyone who has done.”42 Initially blocked by censors in every country to which it traveled, the film eventually created a sensation among viewers in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. When it premiered in New York—heralded by posters that cited various Hollywood luminaries lauding it as “The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made”—a review in Photoplay magazine approvingly noted its combination of verisimilitude (“you’d swear it was a prehistoric newsreel”) and dramatic structure (“action vivid and swift enough to satisfy any box office demand for drama”). The reviewer went on to pronounce: “The scene in which the Cossacks pursue the populace down a long flight of steps, shooting into the crowd, is unforgettably impressive. When enough of our directors have seen this episode, you’ll find it duplicated in home- made dramas.”43 This prediction proved sound: the list of American and other films that contain tributes—ranging from the serious to the parodic—of Eisenstein’s iconic Odessa Steps scene is long. It includes some of Hollywood’s most eminent directors: Alfred Hitchcock (a shooting on steps in Foreign Correspondent, 1940), Woody Allen (a political assassination on steps in Bananas, 1971), Francis Ford Coppola (a mob killing on steps in The Godfather, 1972), Terry Gilliam (a direct parody in Brazil, 1985, with a floor polisher in place of the careening pram), and Brian De Palma (a shoot- out on steps involving a careening pram in The Untouchables, 1987). Via The Untouchables, the scene has made it into at least one Bollywood film, N. Chandra’s Tezaab



rebecca stanton

(Acid, 1988); and into at least one television commercial (for a breakfast cereal, 2009), where it serves less as “a glorious monument to Soviet film style” than as a kind of comically unmonumental tombstone. What could underline the triumph of capitalist values over revolutionary ones more sharply than a revision of Eisenstein’s pram scene in which an individual hero chases after the pram, now transformed into a shopping cart, and halts its precarious descent just in time to rescue, not the squalling infant in the kiddie seat, but the box of name- brand cornflakes in the grocery section? A curious feature of the cinematic quotations that include the careening pram is that they all end with the pram, and its infant cargo, safe and sound—a happy ending, and degree of closure, that Eisenstein does not provide to his audience. In context, of course, this is only sensible: a dead baby is no way to market either cornflakes or the larger- than- life heroism of Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor. But this approach also “rescues” the viewer from the chief effect of the massacre scene created by Eisenstein: its brutal inhumanity. Zbigniew Rybczynski, in his short video feature Steps (1987), explores the implications of this “de- horrorized” engagement with Eisenstein’s work. In Rybczynski’s film, a group of American tourists is led on a “tour” of Eisenstein’s massacre scene by a Soviet tour director (figures 9 and 10). The tourists, in garish color, wander through Eisenstein’s black- and- white scene, tastelessly gawk at its participants, eat snacks, and photograph themselves against the background of firing Cossacks and dying townspeople, and, at the end, “rescue” the baby, who is propelled out of his overturned pram and into the full- color world of the tourists. The ending of the film is ambiguous: while the tour director is called to “the control room,” the tourists apparently disappear, not having completed the transition from Eisenstein’s world back to their own before the end of the scene. Only the baby remains in 1987, seemingly the sole survivor of the massacre on the steps. Rybczynski’s film is superficially about the worst aspects of two societies (authoritarian Russia and shallow, individualistic America) and, as Rybczynski himself claims, about the evolution of filmmaking technology from the 1920s to the 1980s. But it is also a commentary on the relationship between a film and its viewers, the way a series of moving images can take on a life of their own when they are released from their original context to become part of an ever- evolving visual canon. Rybczynski captures two important aspects of Potemkin’s legacy. First, the crossing over between “story” and “history” is here vividly brought to life in the conundrum posed by the tourists who enter Eisenstein’s film: which group of characters in the scene is more “real,” the black- and- white participants or the in- color spectators? Second, and relatedly, Steps illuminates the implications of real- life tourism

“a monstrous staircase”



Figures 9 and 10. Scenes from Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Steps (1987), in which American tourists visit the setting of Eisenstein’s massacre and—in several cases—record it for themselves, using written notes, a conventional camera, and home video equipment. From Zbigniew Rybczynski, Steps (Zbig Vision/KCTA-TV [PBS]/Channel Four, 1987), 10:20–10:27.

to the Odessa Steps. While the staircase must have been something of a landmark since its completion in 1841, it was one among many architectural treasures boasted by the city, and one designed for transit rather than lingering. It was Eisenstein’s film that really put the steps on the map, quite literally: on maps and tourist materials produced after The Battleship Potemkin, the staircase is labeled “Potemkin Steps.” The many cinematic quotations, parodies, and homages that have helped keep the image of the Odessa Steps and their inherent “movement” and “flight” alive in the minds of successive generations of moviegoers around the world have also contributed to the aura of Eisenstein’s original and to the mystique of its real- life setting, the “monstrous staircase” that leads



rebecca stanton

down to Odessa’s port. Tourists to Odessa flock to the staircase as a matter of course, and while the technology does not exist to insert them literally into the scene of Eisenstein’s massacre, as in Steps, they go there to see and be photographed at a site that is charged with narrative; in effect, to insert themselves into a setting that still resonates with the significance Eisenstein imparted to it. If, as Shklovsky asserts, “the flight of steps is the plot,” then to walk onto the steps is in some sense to enter the plot of Eisenstein’s film, to enact one final crossing of the border between story and history. Just as the very architecture of Odessa’s “monstrous staircase” wrote itself, so to speak, into Eisenstein’s screenplay, the resulting scene in turn inscribed the stirring narrative of injustice against honest workers onto the very architecture of the steps, converting them into a stage set of such symbolic power that it colonized history itself. In this way, Eisenstein’s film transformed an imperial landmark, the “Grand” or “Richelieu” Staircase, into a national and international monument, “the Potemkin Steps”—so called not after Catherine’s famous general, who conquered the territory on which they stand, but after Eisenstein’s film about the battleship named in his honor: a memorial in the fourth degree (steps, film, ship, man). Tourists visiting this monument today participate in a collective and ongoing public ritual of commemoration—even if it is the commemoration of an event that never took place.

Notes The epigraph to this essay is from Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn- of- the- Century Odessa, trans. and ed. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 198. 1. See, for example, Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Emily D. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006); Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1995); Caroline Brooke, Moscow: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); B. Tench Coxe, “The Role and Image of Moscow in Soviet Film and Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2007). The concept of the city- text, or city as text, is proposed by V. N.  Toporov in his article “Peterburg i ‘peterburgskii tekst’ russkoi literatury,” in the volume Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul’tury. Peterburg (Tartu: Uchenye zapiski tartuskogo gorodskogo universiteta, 1984). On Odessa’s dual (or multiple) identities, see Tanya Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); and Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

“a monstrous staircase”



2. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 25; Coxe, “The Role and Image of Moscow,” 2 and following. 3. Odessa enjoyed free port ( porto franco) status from 1817 to 1857, which imparted a significant impetus to its harbor trade. See Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History 1794–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 39. 4. Ibid., 63–64, 119, 266. Regarding Elizaveta Vorontsova, the wife of Governor General Mikhail Vorontsov (governor 1823–45), and the relations of both Vorontsovs with Pushkin, see also Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 93–97; David Bethea and Sergei Davydov, “Pushkin’s Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, ed. Andrew Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15–16. 5. A. I. Kuprin, “Gambrinus,” in Granatovyi braslet: Povesti i rasskazy, ed. I. Parina (Moscow: Kudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984). These days a living memorial to the original “Gambrinus” exists in the form of a beer hall by the same name at the more upmarket address of 31 Deribasovskaia Street, as well as a café in New York’s “little Odessa,” Brighton Beach. 6. For a fuller exploration of this topic, see my article “From ‘Underground’ to ‘In the Basement’: How Odessa Replaced Petersburg as Capital of the Russian Literary Imagination,” in American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, ed. David M. Bethea (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2008). 7. Kuprin, “Gambrinus,” 205. Translations from Russian are my own unless otherwise noted. 8. Richard Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion (London: I. B.  Tauris, 2000), 2–3. 9. Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: Norton, 2011), 196. King argues that The Battleship Potemkin is “the single most important cultural artifact in Odessa’s modern history,” a contention with which I respectfully disagree: Babel’s Odessa Tales and Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender novels, as well as the hit songs of Leonid Utesov, must have a claim at least equal to Eisenstein’s. But there is no denying that Eisenstein’s film created a powerful set of images that became indelibly inscribed on certain of the city’s public spaces. 10. Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 133 and following, and Odessa Memories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 12, 94–95. 11. As Patricia Herlihy puts it: “This city on a hill needed direct access to the harbor below it” (Odessa: A History, 140). Roshanna P. Sylvester, alone among the sources consulted for this essay, suggests the opposite: “for those arriving by sea,” the staircase “immediately invited ascent from the port to the city center” (Tales of Old Odessa, 31). 12. Armand- Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu (1766–1822), appointed governor of Odessa by Alexander I in 1803, is memorialized in a bronze statue by Ivan Martos—nowadays, probably the sculptor’s second most famous work, after his Monument to Minin and Pozharsky (1814) that stands on Red Square. The Richelieu statue predates the steps by over a decade, having been finished in 1826. “Clothed inexplicably in a toga”—a symbol at the time closely associated with the French Revolution and its inheritor, Napoleon—the statue seems imbued with an ambiguously foreign aura of authority, though perhaps Richelieu’s costume is simply intended to match the neoclassical colonnades of the surrounding palaces. See Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 21. 13. Valentin Kataev, Peace Is Where the Tempests Blow [translation of Beleet parus



rebecca stanton

odinokii], trans. Charles Malamuth (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 65–66. I have excised one paragraph, marked by an ellipsis. 14. Gustave de Molinari, Lettres sur la Russie (Paris: Libraire de la Société des gens de lettres, 1877), 229–30. 15. According to Herlihy, the respective widths of the top and bottom stairs are 12.5 meters and 21.5 meters. See Odessa: A History, 140. 16. The first part of the scene is factual enough. As Robert Weinberg notes, the Odessa public “warmly received the sailors and used launches and rowboats to sail up to the Potemkin and provision the crew. . . . The crowds [on shore] grew unimpeded for most of June 15 and numbered several thousand by evening.” Eisenstein departs from historical fidelity by omitting the elements of drunkenness, looting, arson, and violence on the part of the crowd that eventually led to the massacre of up to a thousand civilians. And the site and portrayal of the massacre as an organized event taking place on the staircase in bright mid- afternoon sunshine is Eisenstein’s invention. See The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 132–33, 136. 17. The first two “on- the- spot finds” were the famous “rampant lions,” filmed at Vorontsov’s luxurious Alupka Palace in the Crimea, and the clouds on the bay, eventually used in a visual “requiem symphony to the memory of Vakulinchuk.” See Herbert Marshall, ed., Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin” (New York: Avon, 1978), 42–43. 18. Iskusstvo Kino, no. 4 (1950), 16; quoted in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 194–95. 19. In a shot of the waving crowd at 45:40, Richelieu is clearly visible, but in a very similar shot taken from slightly closer in a few seconds later (45:43), he is not. This progression suggests that he has been temporarily absorbed into their ranks. Of course, as a symbol of tsarist authority, he cannot be mistaken for an ally for long. 20. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (New York: Dover, 1970), 59. 21. Ibid., 60, 59. 22. The Battleship Potemkin (film), 49:18 and following. The image also has obvious symbolic resonance as a Pietà, albeit a pointedly secular one: the church behind the grieving mother—so prominently featured in shots of the Cossacks marching—is firmly excluded from the frame here. 23. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director, 60. 24. Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin, 6. 25. Kuprin, “Gambrinus,” 224. 26. A similar, but more detailed, examination of the afterlife of Kuprin’s story in the works of Babel and Paustovsky is undertaken in my article “From ‘Underground’ to ‘In the Basement.’” 27. Isaac Babel, Collected Stories, trans. and ed. David McDuff (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 38. 28. Leyda, Kino, 196. 29. Ibid., 199. My emphasis. 30. Eisenstein, “The Structure of the Film” (“O stroenii veshchei,” Iskusstvo Kino, 1939), trans. Jay Leyda, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 162.

“a monstrous staircase”



31. Although the focus of this paper is on the famous “steps” scene, various other episodes depicted in the movie are similarly fictional. For a concise summary of the historical events, and of Eisenstein’s departures from history, see King, Odessa: Genius and Death, 189–92. 32. K. G. Paustovskii, Vremia bol’shikh ozhidanii (Odessa: Maiak, 1977), 149. My emphasis. 33. Ibid. Paustovsky “remembers” the musician’s real name as Aaron Moiseevich Goldstein, but subsequent research has identified him as Aleksandr Iakovlevich Pevzner, which suggests that Kuprin intended his protagonist to represent a “real person” (with a real, identifiable name) rather than a character based on one (Mikhail Binov, “Kto on, Sashka iz ‘Gambrinusa’?,” Odessa, no. 4 (1996); reprinted at http://www .odessaglobe.com/russian/people/pevsner.php. 34. First Cavalry Commander Semyon Budyonny, “Open Letter to Maxim Gorky” (Krasnaia gazeta, October 26, 1928), trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew, in Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years 1925–1939: Unpublished Stories and Correspondence, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), 385. 35. This account, and all the quotations given, are drawn from Marshall, Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin,” 39–40. Jay Leyda reports a different version of the same story, in which the former mutineer thanks Eisenstein instead of accusing him (Kino, 199). It is hard to know now what the true story was: the director Alexander Dubrovsky, in remarks published in the February 1926 issue of Kinozhurnal ARK, dismissed the tarpaulin scene as “unconvincing,” saying “I do not recall this moment from history” and asserting that it “could only have occurred aboard a pirate ship in an adventure film” (Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin, 92). On the other hand, James Goodwin suggests in Eisenstein, Cinema, and History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) that Eisenstein was lying about having made up the scene of shooting under the tarpaulin, since the incident “in fact is included in eyewitness accounts of events shipboard” (58). Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, it is now obscured by the undisputed canonicity of Eisenstein’s version—a common pattern in the reception of Babel’s works as well. 36. Nikolai Volkov, review of The Battleship Potemkin in Trud, January 1, 1926; quoted in Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin, 69–70. Of course, the claim that a politically correct fictionalized narrative was “truer” than a historically accurate one would become a commonplace of socialist realist criticism, and Volkov’s review is frankly political; but in 1925 significant critical dissent was still possible, and one imagines that Eisenstein might just as easily have been pilloried, as Babel was, for falsifying important history. 37. Victor Shklovsky, “Five Essays About Eisenstein” (orig. dated 1926–28), in Marshall, Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin,” 250–52 (trans. and reprinted from N. I. Kleinman and K. B. Levina, Bronenosets Potemkin—Shedevry Sovetskogo Kino [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969]). 38. Adrian Piotrovsky, review of The Battleship Potemkin in Krasnaya gazeta (Leningrad), January 20, 1926; quoted in Richard Taylor, trans. and ed., and Ian Christie, ed., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139. 39. Ibid. 40. Marshall, 250–52.



rebecca stanton

41. See Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin, 65–120. 42. Ibid., 118. Taylor goes on to note that “in a series of international surveys of film directors and critics Potemkin has persistently emerged as one of the most highly regarded films in cinema history,” and is indeed “the only film to have appeared in all ” of the five separate “Best Films of All Time” lists he surveys (119–20). 43. Ibid., 117.

Jubilation Deferred: The Belated Commemoration of the 250th Anniversary of St. Petersburg/Leningrad Emily D. Johnson

Compared to the extravagant festivities staged around the globe in connection with St. Petersburg’s tercentennial in 2003, remarkably little was done in 1953 to mark the city’s 250th anniversary. Some publications on regional history appeared, local museums organized a few Leningrad- related exhibits, and postwar restoration work continued at sites in and around the capital, but in virtually all cases authors and organizers carefully avoided connecting their activities to the anniversary. Guidebooks to the city and pamphlets describing specific tourist attractions issued in 1953 devote scant attention to the year in which Russia’s old imperial capital was founded. In the official catalog to the seventeen- room exhibit of architectural sketches, paintings, and engravings depicting city monuments mounted at the Hermitage in the fall of 1953, curators never once referred to the anniversary although the exhibit showcased works of art created, in some instances, in honor of previous city jubilees.1 Leningradskaia Pravda did not publish a single announcement regarding the anniversary over the course of the entire year. The kind of splashy celebration one might perhaps have expected in honor of such a significant date did not occur until four years later. In June 1957 Russia marked the 250th birthday of Leningrad with every possible attention: the city was granted the Order of Lenin, many of its foremost citizens received special awards and honors, the mint issued a special commemorative medal, a new Lenin monument opened on Uprising Square (Ploshchad’ 



emily d. johnson

vostaniia), the Finnish government gave the city the train that had carried Lenin back to Petrograd in October 1917, the foundation stone was laid for the Second World War monument that now graces Victory Square, and a grand official celebration with marching bands, acrobats, theatrical presentations, and flags took place at Kirov Stadium. Academics and technical personnel participated in special field- specific conferences. Dozens of commemorative volumes appeared, including guidebooks, albums of photographs, conference proceedings, and serious works of local history. Khrushchev and other party leaders dutifully arrived to offer official congratulations and distribute medals at the end of the first week of July, somewhat later, it is true, than initially planned—a coup attempt organized by Georgi Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lazar Kaganovich had delayed their departure from Moscow by two weeks. In all other respects the 1957 jubilee went off without a hitch and must count as fairly successful: many local inhabitants, at least in hindsight, recognize the celebration as a key turning point. The jubilee, they suggest, represented a long overdue acknowledgment of Leningrad’s contributions to the Soviet economy, its sacrifices in World War II, and also its unique place in revolutionary history.2 At the time of these festivities, the pall cast over the city by attacks on local cultural elites such as Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko during Andrei Zhdanov’s postwar anticosmopolitanism campaign and also by the Leningrad Affair, a vicious purge of the region’s party apparatus that took place between 1949 and 1951, at last lifted. Leningraders could once again take pride in their city’s unique history and cultural identity without worrying that expressions of local patriotism might attract censure as manifestations of anticentrist and anti- Soviet attitudes. Why was the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Leningrad postponed until 1957? Were elaborate plans for a May 1953 celebration derailed by Stalin’s death in March, as both Russian and Western historians have traditionally suggested, or did the political climate in the old imperial capital in the wake of the Leningrad Affair preclude any discussion of the jubilee until after the onset of destalinization? These questions, which reemerged as subjects of both scholarly research and journalistic inquiry in St. Petersburg on the eve of the city’s three- hundredth jubilee in 2003, are significant because of their connection to larger historical issues. By investigating which institutions and political figures actively sought to commemorate Leningrad’s jubilee and when, we can learn a great deal about attitudes within and toward the old capital during the last years of Stalin’s life and the first years of the Thaw. We can also gain a better understanding of how regional political and cultural figures interacted with the central government in Moscow. To some extent, of course, the issue of relations between Leningrad/St.

jubilation deferred



Petersburg elites and the authorities in Moscow represents one of the great constants of Soviet and indeed post- Soviet Russian history: it has attracted the attention of researchers interested in a wide range of periods and specialized topics. In the postwar period, however, this theme stands out especially prominently because of the Leningrad Affair. Although historical narratives by authors based in the old imperial capital as well as local myth often suggest that the central state had it in for Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg from the moment the capital shifted back to Moscow in 1918, repeatedly implementing campaigns specifically designed to annihilate the city’s intelligentsia and break its spirit, the strongest evidence for such geographically motivated persecution dates to the postwar period. Local elites arrested in connection with the Leningrad Affair really did face charges that they had placed regional interests ahead of loyalty to the Soviet state. For this reason, relations between Leningrad political and cultural leaders and the center in this period are typically depicted as unusually fraught and clearly merit scholarly analysis. This essay uses material drawn from a variety of Russian archives to reconstruct the story of Leningrad’s belated 250th jubilee celebration in as much detail as possible. Although, as this chapter will make clear, some questions regarding this event remain difficult to answer definitively, a great deal of new information can be garnered from readily accessible records. Documents found in connection with this research project contradict, in important respects, both traditional explanations for the four- year delay in the anniversary’s celebration and newer, revisionist approaches to the study of the jubilee. They also provide a tantalizing portrait of both the scope and potential pitfalls of local initiative in the late Stalin period and show how jubilee celebrations could provide opportunities for the explication of relations between the Soviet Union’s center and the periphery. For local groups, a proper birthday celebration for Leningrad promised to confer all sorts of benefits, including resources for restoration and construction projects, awards for prominent individuals and institutions, and publicity for local economic and cultural achievements. For this reason, a decision on a national level either to celebrate the city’s holiday with fanfare or ignore it held great significance for a wide range of Leningrad- based institutions, organizations, and individuals. In the years preceding both the actual date of Petersburg’s 250th jubilee and the anniversary’s belated celebration in 1957, local political and cultural leaders made repeated efforts to ascertain the intentions of the central Soviet government concerning the holiday and to advocate for projects they viewed as a necessary prelude to any public commemoration. These persistent inquiries highlight an interesting aspect of everyday Soviet social life. Although we often think of Soviet agitation and propaganda as fundamentally transparent and assume that the kind



emily d. johnson

of individuals who rose to leadership positions in cultural and educational institutions during the late Stalin period could, without trouble, identify the political watchwords and trends of the day from leading newspaper articles and diatribes against the party’s current enemies, in fact, in even the most repressive periods of Soviet history, when the machinery of state control had reached its zenith, the way the wind blew was sometimes surprisingly unclear to mid- tier officials operating outside the main corridors of power. This analysis of the events that led to the belated celebration of Leningrad’s 250th jubilee builds on earlier scholarly studies focusing on the importance of jubilees in Soviet cultural life and on the way that both local interests and the central state apparatus helped shape these public commemorations. As scholars such as Karen Petrone and James von Geldern have shown, jubilees played a tremendously significant role in Soviet culture.3 Each year national commemorative rites marked the anniversaries of the births and deaths of prominent historical figures such as Lenin and Pushkin; victories achieved in the October Revolution and World War II; as well as other milestones in Russian and Soviet development.4 This cycle of anniversaries represented a secular replacement for the Orthodox calendar of feasts and fasts as well as for prerevolutionary dynastic holidays such as the name day of the emperor. Commemorative rites reminded Soviet citizens of state priorities and reinforced official historical narratives. They also encouraged Soviet citizens to look past personal suffering and material deprivation and focus on the positive: examples of great achievements from the past that testified to the inevitability of human progress and presaged for the Soviet Union an ever more radiant future.5 Although jubilee celebrations functioned as propaganda tools, it would, however, be a mistake to view them as entirely top- down communication. As James von Geldern notes, these spectacles were participatory and hence inevitably involved a measure of “give- and- take”: “Propaganda was a dialogue, with the audience as the silent interlocutor. . . . The interaction was idiosyncratic, fluid, elusive; propaganda rarely conveyed a single message but offered potential messages on many levels. Sometimes they were contradictory. Spectators rejected and distorted particular symbols and ideas; and their stubborn habits of misinterpretation often thwarted understanding between state and people.”6 Von Geldern’s comments pertain directly to the festivals of the civil war period, years in which the Soviet regime was still consolidating its authority and when Russian political culture remained very much in flux. Even in later, more settled periods of Soviet history, however, the state struggled to control the experience of ordinary citizens at jubilees and to ensure that these public events, regardless of how far from Moscow they might take place, clearly conveyed current ideological imperatives.

jubilation deferred



In part for this reason, the central Soviet government worked assiduously to monitor and shape local commemorative activity. For important national celebrations, Moscow- based organizing committees provided detailed models for local leaders to follow: the grand parades and demonstrations organized in the capital were often reprised on a smaller scale in provincial towns.7 As Svetlana Malysheva notes, however, local interests also shaped celebrations: regional leaders often tried to “emphasize the unique features of local holiday traditions” with an eye to encouraging popular participation.8 Moreover, the primary impetus for many small- scale tributes clearly initiated locally: academic institutions, factories, and organizations commemorated their own anniversaries and achievements; cities marked key moments in their development and celebrated the lives of their most illustrious inhabitants. Such local tributes boosted morale and offered an excuse for conviviality. They also conferred prestige, publicized regional successes, and helped justify budgetary requests. In connection with a jubilee, a local body might ask for funding to build or renovate a museum or monument or, for that matter, for financial support for publications, special exhibitions, or educational films.9 In part, doubtless, because they yielded such practical benefits, jubilees proliferated in all spheres of Soviet life, multiplying to such an extent that they attracted criticism as occasions for wasteful spending and lax labor discipline. At both the end of the 1920s and in April 1941, Sovnarkom issued decrees intended to curtail the proliferation of jubilees.10 Despite such regulatory efforts, however, anniversaries remained a ubiquitous feature of Soviet culture right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Karen Petrone notes in her landmark study of Soviet public celebrations, for all the central state may have aspired to control every facet of social life, its real reach, even at the height of the Stalin period, was never absolute: local constituencies and social subgroups always retained some agency and managed in a variety of ways to advance their own interests.11 Played out in an intensely politically charged period, amid regime changes, reform campaigns, and coup attempts, the story of Leningrad’s belated 250th anniversary celebration represents a particularly evocative example of these larger trends: it shows how jubilees could serve as a forum for the articulation and reevaluation of relations between regional elites and the Soviet state as a whole.

Explaining the Timing of the 1957 Jubilee The strange timing of Leningrad’s 250th anniversary celebration passed largely without comment in 1957. The dozens of volumes issued in connection with the anniversary and, for that matter, reports printed in the



emily d. johnson

newspapers and journals of the day do not provide any explanation for the four- year delay. In fact, writers and speakers go to great lengths to avoid raising the issue: in almost all instances they refrain from giving an exact date for the city’s foundation. Publications released in 1957 note vaguely that Petersburg was born “two hundred and fifty years ago,” “at the beginning of the eighteenth century,” or sometime after the fortress of Nineshants was seized—not in May 1703.12 Later historians, while willing to acknowledge the four- year delay in the celebration of Leningrad’s 250th jubilee, have generally provided fairly cursory accounts of its cause. In studies of the Thaw period, both Russian and Western historians have traditionally suggested that Stalin’s death in March 1953 derailed plans for an elaborate celebration that had occupied local cultural institutions for months. For the next few years, scholars suggest, power struggles among the party elite, the need to control Lavrenti Beria and the state security apparatus, destalinization, and the economy had to take precedence: it was not until 1957 that celebrating the Leningrad jubilee seemed appropriate.13 There have always, however, been problems with this explanation. First and most obviously, the period of mourning that followed Stalin’s death was in all actuality quite brief. By mid- March 1953 Soviet newspapers had shed their black banners and again bristled with jubilee announcements and reports on other public festivities. In spring 1953 the Soviet people marked a seemingly endless string of anniversaries, including the Russian Museum’s fifty- fifth birthday, eighty- five years from the date of Maxim Gorky’s birth, sixty years since the birth of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and 140 years since the death of Mikhail Kutuzov.14 They also celebrated the First of May with at least as much fanfare as usual: newspaper accounts note acrobats, dancing girls, movie openings, outdoor public celebrations (narodnye guliania), and special grocery shipments.15 The decision not to commemorate Leningrad’s 250th anniversary, in other words, stands out as unique; it cannot be understood as part of a larger pattern of cancellations announced in the wake of Stalin’s death and must be explained by some other means. As scholars have gained access to new archival material on the operations of both the Communist Party and the Soviet state during the late Stalin and Khrushchev years, alternative explanations for the timing of the celebration of the northern capital’s 250th anniversary have begun to emerge. In 2003, the historian V. Iu. Afiani published a series of documents pertaining to the jubilee that he found in the Party Archive, including, most important, a letter that V. M. Andrianov, the secretary of the Leningrad regional committee of the Communist Party, sent to Malenkov on May 14, 1953, requesting permission to commemorate the city’s anniversary.16 In a brief note accom-

jubilation deferred



panying the publication, Afiani emphasized both the modest phrasing and the timing of Andrianov’s appeal. If Leningrad party leaders, Afiani argued, had really been planning an elaborate public celebration of the city’s jubilee before Stalin’s death, they would have had to write to the Central Committee for permission in 1952. They waited until two months after Stalin’s death and ten days before May 26, the date generally listed as the city’s anniversary, because until this time, Afiani suggested, mentioning the jubilee was inconceivable. The Leningrad Affair, the sweeping purge of the local party apparatus launched following the death of Leningrad party boss Andrei Zhdanov in 1948, had rendered all forms of local boosterism impolitic: some of those arrested and executed, after all, had faced charges that they had promoted a local patriotic agenda instead of the interests of the Soviet state and had conspired to transform Leningrad into the capital of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Responsible, more than any other event, for the perception that Stalin nursed a special antipathy for the old imperial capital, the Leningrad Affair dragged on until 1951 and, even at the time of the great dictator’s death, continued to unfold: some of those arrested still sat in prisons awaiting the execution of their sentences.17 Given this, Afiani suggests, even in mid- May 1953, celebrating the Leningrad jubilee represented an inherently dubious endeavor and neither the tentative nature of Andrianov’s last- minute appeal nor its failure should surprise us. With Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, and the rest of the party elite jostling for power, a public celebration of the city’s anniversary would have served as a dangerous reminder of earlier struggles and a possible opening for a conversation on the role of Stalin’s principal henchmen in the purges for which few, at the time, were prepared.18 No serious preparations for a celebration of the Leningrad jubilee, Afiani argues, were made either during or before spring 1953. Afiani’s argument depends on a number of assumptions. He assumes, based on an absence of similar earlier documents in the Party Archive of the Russian Federation, that Andrianov’s mid- March 1953 memo represents the first effort of Leningrad party leaders to advance the idea of celebrating the city’s 250th anniversary. Looking back on the late Stalin period with the benefit of hindsight, he also depicts political developments as both clear and inevitable. Russia’s northern capital, he notes specifically, remained so obviously under the pall cast by the Leningrad Affair between 1950 and 1953 that “celebrating the city jubilee was scarcely opportune.”19 It is reasonable to ask, however: were things really so clear on the ground? To what extent did the city’s cultural and political elite continue to perceive themselves and their city as under attack in this period? Did no one really raise the issue of celebrating the jubilee prior to Stalin’s death?



emily d. johnson

Preparing for the 250th Jubilee In fact, documents in St. Petersburg archives suggest that a long list of local cultural institutions were actively engaged in planning a 250th anniversary celebration between 1950 and 1952 and that they had received at least some support and encouragement from local party leaders and organs of municipal government. The idea for this initiative seems to have originated with the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments of Leningrad (GIOP). In fall 1950, this organization put together an elaborate plan for marking the northern capital’s 250th anniversary that listed dozens of restoration projects that the inspectorate proposed completing in time for the jubilee. Presented over the course of the next few months to a variety of local cultural organizations including the Leningrad affiliates of the Academy of Architecture and the Union of Architects, Lenizdat, and the Leningrad Studio of Popular Scientific Films, the plan gradually expanded to include proposals for the creation of new monuments and museums, the publication of guidebooks and scholarly monographs, and the production of documentary films on the city’s history and cultural treasures. The result apparently entirely of local initiative, this plan reads as an elaborate funding request, pushed forward by a coalition of cultural workers attached to various institutions and organizations, each of which had its own priorities and needs.20 The plan was broadly inclusive in the vision of city history that it hoped to celebrate. As one might predict, given the organizations most involved in its development, the plan emphasized the city’s wondrous architecture and, in general, its role as a center of prerevolutionary culture. It called for special instruction in local architectural history for students in the upper grades of the city’s schools and also for cycles of public lectures on similar topics. The bulk of the publishing projects and all the films included in proposals focused on prerevolutionary architectural monuments and architects. Revolutionary history and issues directly connected to party ideology also, however, received some attention. The plan envisioned the creation of a new Lenin monument on Revolution Square (today again known by its prerevolutionary name, Troitskaia ploshchad’) and also included improvements to the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism in the former Cathedral of Kazan. Planned films about the Tauride Palace and Smolny were to contain sections on the political events that had taken place in these buildings during the immediate prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary periods.21 Some versions of the plan also called for the erection of a new monument to Alexander Nevsky, a prerevolutionary Russian military hero who, during the 1930s, had emerged as a key figure in Soviet patriotic pro-

jubilation deferred



paganda as Russocentric nationalism increasingly replaced internationalist sentiment in state and party rhetoric.22 More surprisingly, the plan also paid significant attention to the city’s role in World War II and included projects specifically designed to memorialize the blockade. It called for the erection of permanent triumphal arches at the site of the city’s historical borders (zastavy) in memory of the Soviet victory over the Nazis and for the placement of monuments on the mass graves in which victims of the siege were buried in 1941–44.23 Individuals working on the plan would certainly have known that, during the Leningrad Affair, local leaders and cultural institutions had come under attack for depicting the city’s experience during World War II as exceptional in both its nature and significance rather than as part and parcel of a common struggle that affected all Soviet citizens equally and for failing to emphasize adequately the role that Stalin and the party’s central apparatus in Moscow had played in organizing the defense of Leningrad.24 They would have heard that the enormously popular Museum of the Defense of Leningrad had closed in August 1949 shortly after Malenkov denounced its exhibits as “anti- Soviet.”25 They would have seen that the kind of lavish celebration marking the anniversary of the liberation of the city from the Nazi siege that had taken place each January between 1945 and 1949 had not occurred in 1950, and they might have noticed that publications on the siege had abruptly ceased to appear.26 Nonetheless, they clearly did not consider the blockade as a topic off-limits. Surviving correspondence and the protocols of meetings reveal no sign that those involved in planning for the jubilee perceived celebrating city history and local achievements as risky, despite the attacks on local particularism, regional pride, and mythic representations of the Nazi siege specifically that had taken place at the onset of the Leningrad Affair in 1949.27 In fact, if anything, cultural workers seem to have worried that inaction might lead to criticism: they fretted openly in correspondence related to the jubilee and in meeting minutes that they might face censure if, at the last moment, the state called for a celebration, and they were unprepared.28 Given the frequency with which jubilees were celebrated in the late Stalin period, such fears were not unreasonable. A variety of factors might have led local cultural leaders to believe that—despite the attacks on local partisanship that had figured in the Leningrad Affair—the city’s anniversary would almost certainly receive a fitting commemoration. Since the late 1930s, Soviet historians had recognized the old imperial capital’s founder, Peter the Great, as one of the great heroes of the prerevolutionary period and the westernization campaign that had achieved its most perfect expression in the city of St. Petersburg as this tsar’s greatest accomplishment.



emily d. johnson

Moreover, even at the height of the purge of Leningrad’s party structures in 1949–50, the central authorities continued to treat the city’s architectural and historical monuments as national treasures and dedicated significant resources to their restoration.29 Under the leadership of the head of the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments, the group behind the jubilee plan began sending regular memos to P. F. Ladanov, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet; V. M. Andrianov, the secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee; and Frol Kozlov, the secretary of the Leningrad City Party Committee, in fall 1950.30 They won at least tentative support and, in May 1951, permission to create an official planning committee which would be chaired by the city architect under the aegis of the Directorate of Architectural Affairs of Lengorispolkom.31 With the approval, apparently, of the Leningrad City Party Committee, GIOP began ordering films and arranged to have the scripts for four documentaries on local architecture added to the 1951 annual plan for the Leningrad Studio of Popular Scientific Films.32 GIOP obtained scarce film stock for its projects from the Ministry of Filmmaking.33 It also helped local publishing houses finalize plans for jubilee- related editions and, along with the Leningrad City Soviet, began furiously petitioning for additional funding to expedite various jubilee- related restoration and construction projects.34 In memos sent to the chair of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation, officials at the Leningrad City Soviet argued that the upcoming jubilee made the completion of restoration work at the palace- park complexes outside Leningrad “urgently necessary” and complained that persistent shortages of funding were creating delays.35 GIOP and the city architect pressed V. M. Andrianov to authorize competitions for the design of the monuments included in the 1950 jubilee plan.36 Word of preparations for the jubilee made it to Moscow- based creative associations, and groups of artists began petitioning the jubilee planning committee to add publications focusing on the work of specific artists, such as Anna Ostroumova- Lededeva, to the list of commemorative projects.37 All these developments suggest that GIOP, the Leningrad City Soviet, and other local bodies involved in planning for the city’s 250th anniversary believed that some sort of jubilee celebration would take place. Over time these hopes seem to have gradually dissipated. In the first half of 1952, the volume of correspondence concerning the jubilee in the files of GIOP and other local cultural organizations steadily diminishes and queries to Leningrad party and city officials grow progressively more tentative. The problem seems, in part, connected to the April 1941 decree limiting the celebration of jubilees that was mentioned earlier in this chapter. Issued

jubilation deferred



by Sovnarkom and the Central Committee of the Communist Party as part of one of the center’s periodic efforts to rein in unnecessary spending and tighten labor discipline, this document sharply condemned the excesses in the celebration of anniversaries common to all spheres of Soviet life: In recent years an unhealthful tendency to celebrate every possible manner of jubilee has become quite widespread. . . . Jubilees are announced in connection with completely arbitrary dates: groups celebrate the third, fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth- year anniversaries of the foundation of organizations, enterprises, and institutions. In the case of private individuals, jubilees are organized to mark the same arbitrary stretches of time and for all sorts of reasons—to celebrate the number of years the person has worked in a particular institution, the length of time he has been employed in a particular profession, or his age. Often no real accounting is taken of the honoree’s professional accomplishments, and a bacchanalia of jubilee- celebrating results. Jubilees are organized without the permission of appropriate government organs, and vast sums of state and public funds are spent on them.38

Anxious and, indeed, almost hysterical in tone, the decree seems motivated, at least in part, by puritanical concerns about the fragility of the socialist moral order: absent careful central regulation, it suggests, the peaceful, regimented expressions of “happiness” that dominated official Stalinist culture could all too easily devolve into mass, alcohol- fueled orgies and occasions for profligate spending. The text of the decree goes on to demand that in future organizations obtain permission from both Sovnarkom (later the Council of Ministers) and the Central Committee in Moscow for all jubilee celebrations and any associated expenses. Correspondence in the archive of the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments in Leningrad indicates that in the early 1950s this decree was to some extent being enforced and that an elaborate protocol governed the way in which petitions advanced from local organizations to the central authorities in Moscow.39 Depending on the kind of anniversary they hoped to celebrate, local bodies passed requests for approval on to either local municipal and party leaders or to a central administrative body in Moscow. From there, petitions moved on to the party’s Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. Although, in practice, local organizations seem to have been allowed to begin planning work and sign preliminary agreements for jubilee- related projects before securing formal approval for a celebration, they could not pay bills directly related to the festivities or undertake other kinds of essential operations until they had Moscow’s sanction in hand.



emily d. johnson

In the case of the Leningrad jubilee, final authorization for a celebration from Moscow was not secured in a timely fashion; by early 1952 organizers had almost reached the limits of what they could do without receiving formal approval from the Council of Ministers, and preparations began to stall. The fact that local party and municipal authorities had authorized the formation of a jubilee planning committee and allowed cultural organizations to place orders for jubilee- related projects suggests that in 1950 and early 1951 they were optimistic that approval for a celebration would be granted. Over time, however, local party leaders, at least, must have begun to question the wisdom of pressing forward too assertively given the charges that had so recently been raised against the city’s wartime leadership and cultural institutions: they may have lobbied behind the scenes in Moscow for a decision on the jubilee, but they apparently did not send a direct request for written approval for the celebration to the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. At the same time, however, they chose not to inform their colleagues in city government and the leaders of local cultural organizations that the jubilee might not take place after all: preparations for the celebration continued; progress simply slowed. For over a year after the formation of the jubilee planning committee in May 1951, Lengorsoviet and Leningrad’s leading cultural organizations waited for the authorization and funding they needed to move forward with more extensive preparations for the celebration: they petitioned local party officials constantly for information and expressed increasing nervousness as lead time before the anniversary ebbed away. By summer 1952, Leningrad cultural and city agencies were in what was clearly an uncomfortable position. Were they or were they not going to celebrate the jubilee? Both taking and not taking action to prepare for the holiday carried obvious risks: if they pressed forward, they might be accused of proceeding without authorization; if they continued to do nothing, they might be later damned for inefficiency. They had to be able to carry out at least a stripped-down version of their plan if Moscow at the last minute granted approval for the festivities. Documents from the period reflect this uncertainty. The Leningrad City Soviet’s correspondence regarding the preservation, reconstruction, restoration, and construction of monuments contains numerous references to the need to expedite specific projects in order to complete them in time for the jubilee.40 At the same time, however, quietly behind the scenes, the Soviet’s Executive Committee seems still to have been agitating for a decision from above. In July 1952, when Vladimir Bonch- Bruevich, who was serving as the director of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism in the Kazan Cathedral, wrote a letter complaining about the deplorable condition of his facilities, the committee

jubilation deferred



responded positively. The issue was, they noted, quite timely given the upcoming jubilee. Bonch- Bruevich, perhaps at the initiative of the committee, promptly composed a personal letter to Stalin requesting funds and tactfully reminding the Generalissimo of the upcoming Leningrad anniversary.41 Even this appeal, however, apparently did not prompt Moscow to provide the necessary authorization and financing for the celebration. As the organization that had proposed the original jubilee plan and had done the most preparatory work, the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments in Leningrad was doubtless in a particularly difficult position. It had signed contracts with film companies and publishing houses ordering Leningrad- related materials for the jubilee and, if the celebration did not go forward and no money was forthcoming from Moscow, would almost certainly face real difficulties. On July 10 the head of the inspectorate again wrote to V. M. Andrianov for clarification. Noting that preparations had stalled because of the lack of a clear directive from Moscow, he begged for instructions regarding planned restoration work specifically and also the fate of the jubilee proposal as a whole. With less than a year left before the jubilee, he noted, little had been done. He again requested authorization and funding to move forward with a short list of restoration projects that GIOP deemed particular priorities: monuments dating to the Petrine era such as the Twelve Colleges, the Menshikov Palace, the Summer Garden, and the Alexander Nevsky Monastery as well as additional repairs in Lomonosov (Oranienbaum) and Petrodvorets (Peterhof ). This work, N. N. Belekhov noted, “can and should be undertaken regardless of the decision made regarding the commemoration of the jubilee.”42 By late fall 1952 most cultural workers who had played a role in drafting the original plan seem to have reconciled themselves to the fact that the jubilee would not take place. Either they had received a definitive negative response to their appeals that is not documented in the archives or perhaps, as seems more likely, they had come to the realization that no answer in this situation constituted a de facto ban on the celebration. The head of the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments began crossing out references to the jubilee in drafts of official correspondence.43 At meetings concerning restoration work at the suburban palace- park complexes, no one mentioned the anniversary any more. At public lectures on local history and architecture, prominent specialists gave increasingly vague answers to questions from audience members about when and how the jubilee would be celebrated.44 Although ultimately no celebration of the city jubilee took place in Leningrad in 1953, it would not be correct to say that the event was entirely forgotten. The archive of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City



emily d. johnson

Soviet does contain a forty- eight- page file of congratulatory telegrams received from city councils and party committees in a whole list of countries, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Mongolia. In Bratislava, the Slovakian Committee of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party and the city council reported that they had organized a meeting of local workers to commemorate the jubilee of the “heroic city of Leningrad” and that representatives of the Soviet consulate had attended.45 Outside the confines of the Soviet Union, word that the city of Leningrad had not received permission to celebrate its jubilee apparently did not reach everyone.

Celebrating the City in 1957 Given all the work that had gone into preparing for the jubilee in 1950–52, it is not surprising that V. M. Andrianov made one more ultimately unsuccessful attempt to gain authorization to recognize the city’s birthday, as Afiani documents, in May 1953, after the death of Stalin. It also should not surprise us that Frol Kozlov, by this time the secretary of the Leningrad Obkom, and N. I. Smirnov, the chair of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, chose to repeat this request to the Presidium of the Central Committee and Nikita Khrushchev in August 1956. Clearly the jubilee mattered to the city’s cultural and political elite. A proper commemoration, Kozlov and Smirnov argued, would “throw light on the Revolutionary past of Leningrad,” demonstrate the significance of the “great feats of labor performed by Leningraders in the years of peaceful socialist construction,” and would show “the heroic role of the city’s defenders” in World War II.46 In other words, belated remembrance of the city’s achievements and triumphs was better than no celebration at all. Such a commemoration, local leaders doubtless understood, would supply more than recognition and financing for civic improvements: it would conclusively show that the cloud that had hung over the city in the last years of the Stalin period had entirely dissipated. In the context of the Khrushchev Thaw, Leningrad party leaders seem to have understood the central government’s failure to authorize a jubilee celebration in 1953 as another injustice that required, to the extent possible, redress: following Stalin’s death, the state had released the surviving defendants of the Leningrad Affair; should it not also allow the old capital its overdue celebration? In August 1956, Leningrad party leaders finally received permission from the presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to organize a jubilee celebration.47 Working, from all appearances, in part from the plans drawn up a half dozen years earlier, they launched into feverish preparations. Given everything that needed to be done, the jubilee probably

jubilation deferred



could not reasonably have been scheduled for any time before spring 1957. For symbolic reasons alone, however, organizers might well have wanted to wait with the celebration. A spring date meant that the jubilee could occur at the time of year in which the city had actually been founded. Moreover, holding the jubilee in 1957 helped to emphasize that it was Leningrad, the city of the revolution, that was being celebrated and not imperial Petersburg. The last digit of the year evoked 1917—not 1703—and hence, on some level, the timing of the jubilee seemed to suggest that the city’s origin resulted from the Bolshevik seizure of the Winter Palace as opposed to Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes. Speeches delivered during jubilee events and jubilee- related publications encouraged audiences to make this connection: rhetoric often cast the city’s anniversary as a prelude to the upcoming celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution.48 Although many of the projects included in the plans that local cultural organizations had drawn up for a 1953 celebration were realized as part of the great 1957 jubilee, the focus of commemorative activity shifted dramatically.49 The city’s great eighteenth- and nineteenth- century architectural ensembles, its granite- swathed river banks and canals, and its “stern and stately look,” which, in 1950–52, had represented the safest aspect of local life to commemorate, received acknowledgment in 1957 but no longer served as the primary focus of the celebration.50 Publications issued in honor of the 1957 jubilee emphasize the city’s role in the revolutionary and civil war periods, its connection to Lenin, and its heroic resistance to the German siege in World War II. The story of Peter the Great’s conquest of the Neva delta from the Swedes and of the city’s difficult initial construction, in these texts, reads as one more example of the heroic resolve of the Russian population to defend itself against foreign invaders and achieve triumphs over nature, even at the risk of terrible suffering and loss of life.51 Texts from 1957, in other words, depicted Leningrad as meriting celebration not so much for its prerevolutionary beauty, but rather for its role in the political and economic life of the Soviet Union. The fact that commemorative publications issued in conjunction with the jubilee and the speeches of visiting dignitaries from Moscow specifically praised the contributions of Leningrad’s workers and party members during the first decades after the revolution and World War II signaled an important turning point: the view that the city as a whole had represented a center of opposition to Soviet power no longer held weight. Leningraders could now take pride in their city’s role in Soviet- era history once again. The celebration of the 250th anniversary paved the way for a sharp revival of interest in local studies in Leningrad and for the rebirth of the city’s once vibrant kraevedenie (local historical studies) movement. Under Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, lo-



emily d. johnson

cal patriotism, in both Leningrad and the Soviet Union as a whole, ceased to be viewed as a potentially divisive force: instead, educators and organizers actively promoted love of one’s native city and home region as a path to broader feelings of attachment to the Soviet state and Communist Party. Although, as Lisa Kirschenbaum notes, a detailed public discussion of the horrors of the German siege of the city did not take place as part of the 1957 jubilee commemoration, Leningrad’s contributions to the war effort were acknowledged repeatedly in more general terms over the course of the celebration.52 In conjunction with the anniversary, the first permanent monuments to the war were erected in the city, including re- creations of wartime warning signs on Nevsky Prospect and the foundation of what became the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad at the end of Moskovsky Prospect. In addition, the first new publications of memoirs and historical accounts of the blockade since the immediate postwar period appeared.53 The title “hero- city,” which Leningrad received in 1945, echoes through jubilee publications, standing as a clear reference to the city’s wartime sacrifices.54 Modernization of housing stock, improvements to sanitary conditions in working- class districts of the capital, technological progress, and scientific breakthroughs also receive significant attention in 1957 texts. Remembering conditions in prerevolutionary slums, authors praise the progress that has occurred and look forward to even greater improvements. “Leningrad residents,” we are told, “not only carefully preserve the architectural heritage of the past, they also add to this legacy.”55 Speeches Nikita Khrushchev delivered at jubilee- related gatherings of workers and collective farmers promised that the Soviet Union would soon surpass the United States in the amount of meat, butter, and milk it produced relative to the size of its population and called for the construction of new schools, nurseries, and clubs.56 Jubilee- related publications commented enthusiastically on the first Leningrad metro line and noted that new stations would open in the following year.57 In keeping with the contemporary focus of much jubilee- related rhetoric, celebratory events and projects in 1957 were dispersed throughout the city, as opposed to concentrated in the central historic districts. Meetings and demonstrations took place in the Tauride Palace, Kirov Stadium, Palace Square, and at factories throughout outlying districts of the city. New monuments opened or the foundations for future monuments were laid at Finland Station (the train engine that brought Lenin to St. Petersburg), on the Square of the Arts (Mikhail Anikushin’s famous monument to Pushkin), on Uprising Square (the foundation for a monument to Lenin, which was never

jubilation deferred



completed), on Nevsky Prospect (re- creations of World War II warning signs), and at the southern entrance to the city (the foundation for the great victory monument). A large fireworks display took place along the Neva. It was almost as if the whole of Leningrad, in addition to receiving the Order of Lenin for its contributions to the defense of the fatherland, was, through the many, geographically dispersed public rituals conducted in connection with the jubilee, reconsecrated as a park of monuments to Soviet and, to some extent, Russian achievements. The celebration paid homage to the city’s legacy of great cultural and scientific accomplishments, the victory of the working class and the party in the revolution, the victory over the Nazi invaders, and successes in the struggle to improve the living conditions of average Soviet citizens, which represented a state priority during the Khrushchev era. As this description perhaps makes clear, the 1957 celebration of Leningrad’s 250th anniversary represents a key turning point in two different respects. First, it signaled that the political and ideological attacks of the postwar era were at an end: by rectifying one of the hidden consequences of the Leningrad Affair, the noncelebration of a key milestone, the central authorities showed that they no longer regarded Russia’s second city as a potential threat or center of opposition. Second, the holiday also ushered in a new era in the city’s official representation. In published texts and speeches prepared in connection with the jubilee, the old imperial capital emerges as a quintessentially Soviet city, a place more important for its role in the construction and defense of socialism than for its prerevolutionary architectural panorama or its connection with the rise of a modern Western- looking Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 1957 jubilee celebrated Leningrad, not historical St. Petersburg: in its emphasis on the contemporary era, it differed markedly from the unrealized plans for a 1953 commemoration. This shift in focus to achievements of the Soviet period and the current efforts of the state and the Communist Party to raise living conditions reflected the larger political trends of the day. In the wake of the revelations contained in Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech about the abuses of power that had occurred under Stalin, Soviet leaders desperately needed to shore up popular support for the Communist regime and thereby stabilize the political system. They did so by reworking the official narrative of Soviet history to highlight episodes that could still be regarded as triumphs, including the October Revolution itself and the civil war, postrevolutionary educational campaigns, industrialization, and, more than anything else, the victory over the Nazis in World War II. Speeches, history textbooks, news-



emily d. johnson

paper commentary, and other forms of cultural commentary ceaselessly reminded Soviet citizens that these great achievements represented the result of both popular sacrifice and of the enthusiasm and astute guidance of the leading force in Soviet society, the Communist Party.58 They asserted the existence of an unshakable concord between the Communist Party and the Soviet people: with the party in the forefront, the Soviet people marched forward to an ever brighter future, which promised benefits in which all would share, inasmuch as all had sacrificed. As part of its effort to forge a new compact with its citizens, the Soviets launched a massive campaign to raise living standards through the construction of new housing and the increased production of scarce consumer goods. Improved transportation, the vast complexes of five- story apartment buildings erected under Khrushchev, and the often poorly conceived efforts by the Soviet state to revive and modernize the flagging agricultural sector and hence ensure that more high- quality foodstuff reached Soviet dinner tables all constituted part of this effort. The regime played the role of the caring parent, concerned for the well- being of ordinary citizens; it wooed the populace with gifts, belated praise, and long- overdue acknowledgment of sacrifices rendered; it issued pronouncements that provided strict timelines for eliminating persistent shortages and, through frenzied initiatives, gave every sign that it intended to make good on these promises.59 In its breadth, its promise to provide necessities such as decent clothing, a nourishing diet, and above all, housing to every citizen, the Khrushchev- era campaign to raise living standards differed markedly from the system of rewards that had existed under Stalin, which had, as Vera Dunham noted in her classic study of the postwar period, allowed certain groups within society to enjoy comforts but did not extend to the Soviet population as a whole.60 Occasions such as Leningrad’s oddly timed 250th jubilee offered the Khrushchev regime an ideal opportunity to present its new approach to the public in a key population center. All the self- congratulatory rhetoric, the medals and awards dispensed, the construction projects both completed and announced sent a powerful message. They reassured the Soviet public that the Communist future was bright and that the promises of the October Revolution would be fulfilled, that any “mistakes” that had been made under Stalin were in the past and that the party and the people now shared common goals. The jubilee celebration focused on postrevolutionary achievements and on urban improvement, industry, and development because, following Khrushchev’s secret speech, twentiethcentury history and the future were at issue, not the distant prerevolutionary past.



jubilation deferred

Notes I would like to thank Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, and the two anonymous readers for this volume for their help in revising this essay. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. The city plan created by the Academy of Sciences in 1753 occupied a prominent position in the second room of the exhibit. Putevoditel’ po vystavke: Arkhitektura Peterburga- Leningrada v pamiatnikakh izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva i arkhitekturnykh chertezhakh, Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh: putevoditeli po vystavkam (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1954), 12. 2. Several bibliographers at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg expressed this view to the author during research for this project. 3. Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 1; James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2–3. 4. As a number of authors have noted, the Soviet jubilee tradition built on prerevolutionary antecedents. Even before the revolution, anniversaries of the birth and death of famous writers, city jubilees, and centennials of key battles were celebrated. In the Stalin period, however, the number of celebrations expanded exponentially, creating calendars so crowded with red letter days that writers began to satirize the phenomenon. On the prerevolutionary jubilee tradition, see William Nickell, “Tolstoi in 1928: In the Mirror of the Revolution,” in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, ed. Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenburger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 18–19. For examples of satiric treatments of Soviet jubilee celebrations, see Mikhail Zoshchenko, “What I Would Like to Say About the Late Poet,” in Epic Revisionism, 221–24; Mikhail Zoshchenko, “Pushkin,” in The Galosh and Other Stories, trans. Jeremy Hicks (New York: Overlook Press, 2006), 120–21; Daniil Kharms, “Prazdnik” in Polet v nebesa (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), 327. 5. See, for instance, Stephanie Sandler’s article on the 1937 Pushkin jubilee, which connects “the public performance of happiness and achievement required by the jubilee” to the larger Stalinist ethos of “urgent gaiety” and notes the grim contrasts occasioned by the fact that the anniversary took place during the great purges: “The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee as Epic Trauma” in Epic Revisionism, 193–95. 6. James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 13, 10. 7. For a detailed description of the system for organizing mass celebrations in the Soviet Union, see Mal’te Rol’f, Sovetskie massovye prazdniki, trans. V. T. Altukhova (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), 104–15. 8. Svetlana Malysheva, Sovetskaia prazdnichnaia kul’tura v provintsii: prostranstvo, simvoly, istoricheskie mify. 1917–1927 (Kazan’: Ruten, 2005), 27–28. See also Mal’te Rol’f, Sovetskie massovye prazdniki, 9, 26, 116–24. 9. As Mal’te Rol’f notes, in some cases requests were fraudulent: in advance of jubilees, organizations sometimes asked for money to fund already completed projects. Sovetskie massovye prazdniki, 194. For additional examples of the ways in which provincial officials used jubilees to advance local economic and political interests, see 224–28 of the same volume. 10. Ibid., 228. 11. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades, 4.



emily d. johnson

12. Iubilei Leningrada (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1957), 5, 19; I. V. Spiridonov, Leningradu 250 let (Moscow: Gosizdat politicheskoi literatury, 1957), 5. 13. See, for instance, Al’bert Aspidov, “Neobychnyi iubilei,” Sankt- Peterburgskie Vedomosti, May 24, 2003, http://www.spbvedomosti.ru/2003/05/24/aspidd.shtml?print. 14. See the coverage of these events in Leningradskaia pravda on the following dates respectively: March 19, 1953; March 27, 1953; April 7, 1953; April 29, 1953. 15. See Leningradskaia pravda for April 22–May 4, 1953. 16. V. Iu. Afiani, “Pokazat’ rukovodiashchuiu rol’ Kommunisticheskoi Partii vo glave s V. I. Leninym: o podgotovke prazdnovaniia 250- letiia Leningrada. 1953–57 gg.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 3 (2003): 41–46. 17. Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Strobe Talbott (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 245; William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 263–64. 18. In a study published in the same year as Afiani’s article, Elena Hellberg- Hirn also connects the four- year delay in celebrating the city’s 250th anniversary to the Leningrad Affair and to the struggle for power that followed Stalin’s death. Imperial Imprints: Post- Soviet St. Petersburg (Helsinki: SKS, Finnish Literature Society, 2003), 310–11. 19. Afiani, “Pokazat’ rukovodiashchuiu rol’ . . .,” 41. 20. See the version of the plan attached to “Vypiska iz protokola No. 50 Uchenogo Soveta po okhrane pamiatnikov Leningrada,” September  16, 1950, KGIOP, d. 9, Perepiska po kul’t- massovym voprosam, unnumbered pages, organized chronologically. 21. See “Annotatsiia k stsenariiu kinofil’ma ‘Tavricheskii dvorets,’” dated March 20, 1951, and a letter from N. N. Belekhov, the head of the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments, to A. Fedorov, the head of the Main Directorate for the Production of Scientific and Educational Films, dated March  17 [1951], in KGIOP, d. 9. 22. See the version of the plan attached to a letter from N. N.  Belekhov to V. M. Andrianov dated July 10 [1952], in KGIOP, d. 9. For more on Alexander Nevsky in Soviet art and propaganda, see David Brandenburger and Kevin M. F. Platt, introduction to Epic Revisionism, 5. 23. A triumphal arch was supposed to be placed on Stalin Prospect in the area of Sredniaia Rogatka. See the letter from A. I. Naumov, the head city architect, and N. N. Belekhov to V. M. Andrianov, the secretary of the Leningrad Obkom, which is dated August 20, 1951, in KGIOP, d. 9. 24. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myths, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 143–45. 25. Steven Maddox, “Healing the Wounds: Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of Leningrad’s Imperial Heritage, 1941–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2008), 245. 26. On the commemoration of the anniversary of the lifting of the Leningrad Siege in this period, see ibid., 205–17, 231–44. 27. For information on the closure of the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad and the attacks on Leningrad particularism that took place at the end of the 1940s, see ibid., 231–49. 28. See, for instance, the letter from Belekhov and Mederskii to A. Fedorov, the head of the Main Directorate for the Production of Popular- Scientific and Educa-

jubilation deferred



tion Films, dated March 17, [1951] and the letter from Belekhov and Smolianova to N. N. Lokteva, the assistant to the chair of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet, dated May 17, 1951, both in KGIOP, d. 9. 29. On changing views on Peter the Great in Soviet historiography, see Kevin M. F. Platt, “Rehabilitation and Afterimage: Aleksei Tolstoi’s Many Returns to Peter the Great,” in Epic Revisionism, 47–68. On restoration work in this period, see Steven Maddox, “Healing the Wounds,” 217. 30. See, for example, the letter from Belekhov and Smolianova to V. M. Andrianov, F. R. Kozlov, and P. F. Ladanov dated September 4, 1950, in KGIOP, d. 9. 31. TsGALI, SPb, f. 341, op. 1, d. 308, ll. 48–49. 32. Letter from Belekhov and Mederskii to A. Fedorov, the head of the Main Directorate for the Production of Popular- Scientific and Educational Films, dated March 17 [1951], in KGIOP, d. 9. 33. See the draft of a letter from the chair of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet P. Ladanov to the minister of filmmaking I. G. Bolshakov dated February 29, 1952, in KGIOP, d. 9. 34. Letter from L. N. Akisimov, the director of the Leningrad branch of the State Publishing House for Architecture and City- Planning, to GIOP dated March 1, 1951, and the reply from Belekhov dated April 2, 1951, in KGIOP, d. 9. See also the letter from Belekhov and Mederskii to S. M. Pavlov of the State Publishing House for Literature about Construction and Architecture dated July 5, 1952, from the same source. 35. See the letter dated January 12, 1952, from Ladanov, the chair of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet, to B. N. Chernousov, the chair of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR: TsGALI, SPb, f. 277, op. 1, d. 1433, l. 27. 36. See the letter from Belekhov and A. I. Naumov, the city architect, to V. M. Andrianov dated August 20, 1951, in KGIOP, d. 9. 37. See the letter sent to Naumov by a group of Moscow artists dated November 20, 1951, and the letter from Belekhov and Naumov to V. M. Andrianov dated August 20, 1951, in KGIOP, d. 9. 38. Decree dated April  10, 1941. A copy of the decree is preserved alongside memos related to plans for the Leningrad jubilee in the archives of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet: TsGA, SPb, f. 7384, op. 29, ed. khr. 711, l. 235. 39. See, for example, the letter dated June 2, 1951, from Belekhov to A. G. Mordvinov, the president of the Academy of Architecture in Moscow, protesting the latter’s refusal to petition for the approval of jubilees for the architects N. L’vov and A. Kokorinov. Beketov notes that Mordvinov’s inaction has placed GIOP and the Leningrad branches of the Academy of Architecture and the Union of Architects in “an extremely difficult position”: without authorization from the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, banks will not issue them any funds for jubilee expenses. The implications of the letter are clear: Leningrad organizations had already made plans entailing certain expenses and yet could not themselves request approval to celebrate the jubilees. That had to be done by the Academy of Architecture in Moscow. KGIOP, d. 9. 40. TsGA, SPb, f. 7384, op. 29, ed. khr. 713, ll. 45, 70, 138, 169. 41. TsGA, SPb. f. 7384, op. 29, ed. khr. 711, 223–34. 42. KGIOP, d. 9.



emily d. johnson

43. Memo to Comrade Zakharov, the assistant head of Lengorlit, dated October 18, 1952, from KGIOP, d. 9. 44. See the stenographic report on an October 1952 lecture by L. A. Mederskii on “The Foundation of Petersburg and City Architectural Monuments from the Petrine Era”: TsGALI, SPb, f. 341, op. 1, ed. khr. 335, ll. 47–48. 45. TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, ed. khr. 1875, l. 15. 46. “Pokazat’ rukovodiashchuiu rol’ . . . ,” 43. 47. Ibid., 45. 48. See, for instance, Iubilei Leningrada, 67, 163. As Elena Hellberg- Hirn notes, visual cues also helped to reinforce this connection: some decorations created in 1957 for the 250th anniversary of the city were recycled in the fall for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the revolution. Imperial Imprints, 311. 49. Examples of key elements of the 1957 celebration that figured in plans for 1953 include the revival of the tradition of firing a cannon in the Peter and Paul fortress every day at noon, work on new monuments to Lenin, and permanent war memorials. See the version of the plan for the 1953 jubilee attached to “Vypiska iz protokola No. 50. Uchenogo Soveta po okhrane pamiatnikov Leningrada,” September 16, 1950, KGIOP, d. 9. See also Iubilei Leningrada, 207. 50. For an example of a typical passage in praise of the city’s architectural heritage, see I. V. Spiridonov, Leningradu 250 let, 8. The reference to the city’s “stern and stately look,” which appears in the Spiridonov passage I cite, is a quotation from Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman. 51. I. V. Spiridonov, Leningradu 250 let, 5–6. 52. The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995, 161. 53. Ibid., 161–68, 186–88. 54. See, for instance, F. I. Sirota, “Gorod- geroi,” in Gorod velikogo Lenina (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1957), 94–125. 55. I. V. Spiridonov, Leningradu 250 let, 8. 56. Ibid., 73, 98. 57. Ibid., 58–59. 58. On Thaw- era statements regarding the respective roles of the party and the Soviet populace as a whole in the victory over the Nazis, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 108–9. 59. On Khrushchev- era efforts to improve Soviet living standards and end the housing shortage specifically, see Christine Varga- Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity During the Thaw,” in The Dilemmas of De- Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones, BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies (London: Routledge, 2006), 101–16; Mark B. Smith, “Khrushchev’s Promise to Eliminate the Housing Shortage: Rights, Rationality and the Communist Future,” in Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev, ed. Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith (London: Routledge, 2009), 26–45; Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 59–136. 60. Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). On this point, see also Christine Varga- Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front,” 102.

Part 2 The Art and Culture of Commemoration

The Portrait Mode: Zhukovsky, Pushkin, and the Gallery of 1812 Luba Golburt

The aim of any commemoration is to define and perpetuate popular historical knowledge. Thus, the forms commemoration takes are also essentially forms of knowledge that entail different modes of engagement and different objects of knowing, and the study of commemoration is of necessity also an epistemological project. Originating from these general premises, this essay considers a specific commemorative genre—the portrait; a specific period when it emerges as one of the most compelling such genres in Russia and all across Europe—the early 1800s; the history of the best- known Russian commemorative space that has housed portraits for nearly two centuries— the War Gallery of 1812 in St. Petersburg; and the epistemological mode that focalizes the issues of access to and representation of history raised by the portrait and the gallery—what I will here call the portrait mode.1 ——— One of the most powerful symbols of post- Napoleonic Russian nationhood, the War Gallery of 1812 was commissioned in the fall of 1818 at the Aachen Congress, in the midst of negotiations over the withdrawal of Allied troops from France and the confluence of several spectacular royal entourages.2 The congress put on display the victorious faces of European power and became the venue where many portrait painters sought lucra



luba golburt

tive commissions. A painter who arrived in Aachen in the retinue of the Duke of Kent, George Dawe (1781–1829) met Tsar Alexander I through the intercession of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), the most famous English portraitist in attendance, and quickly received an invitation to travel to St. Petersburg and execute some 332 portraits of Russian generals who had fought in the Napoleonic campaign. The Gallery of 1812 was to be an entirely new undertaking, comparable in spirit only to Windsor Castle’s Waterloo Chamber, which was then in its early stages of construction and was to showcase fewer than thirty portraits of the conquering European royalty and High Command, as commissioned from Lawrence by the future King George IV in 1814. Far exceeding the Waterloo Chamber in size, the Russian gallery—in its portraits’ sheer numerousness, broad membership, and orderly alignment—articulated new and distinctive conceptions of history, commemoration, and the national body, even as it also aimed to conserve and affirm earlier, monarch- centered and rank- based hierarchies of heroism. The gallery space was designed by Carlo Rossi (1775–1849), the Italianborn Russian architect responsible for many of St. Petersburg’s empire- style buildings. It opened with great pomp on December  25, 1826, the date (Christmas) deliberately chosen to commemorate the banishment of the Grande Armée from Russian territory. The product of an international creative team—Rossi, Dawe, and his Russian assistants Vasilii (Wilhelm) Golicke (1802–1848) and the serf painter Aleksandr Poliakov (1801–1835)— the gallery was an artistic and political manifesto as much for foreign as for domestic consumption. It paraded a nation and a leadership that were numerous, uniform, masculine, and heroic, while also ritualizing a particular form of engagement with national history: through the idealized and theatricalized faces of romantic portraiture, experienced both one at a time and en masse. Much about the gallery was new and unique, but its commission also crystallized preexisting and ongoing developments in high- art circulation, historical representation, and commemorative practice—all subjects of ambivalence and conceptual flux that this essay seeks to define. The gallery’s evolution through the past two centuries reveals it as an uncontested patriotic space, a stable yet accommodating commemorative model that has suited very dissimilar political regimes and changed little over time.3 Leaving aside the gallery’s two- hundred- year- long history and its resulting present- day palimpsestic structure, this essay reconstructs its conceptual origins in the post- Enlightenment explorations of new historical forms and pinpoints the cultural assumptions that the gallery as a space and as a genre shared with Russian romanticism, particularly with the single most influ-



the portrait mode

ential lyric articulation of the 1812 campaign: Vassily Zhukovsky’s “The Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors” (“Pevets vo stane russkikh voinov,” 1812). The conception of history underlying the gallery was ambiguous. It emphasized, on the one hand, the power of ordered and ranked assemblies united in a single national cause and the resultant image of a homogeneous nation and yet, on the other, ascribed agency to individual great men and raised questions of personality and personhood implicit in each portrait, questions on which I will focus at the end of this essay when I turn to Alexander Pushkin’s poignant lyric meditation on the gallery in “The Commander” (“Polkovodets,” 1835). ——— A latecomer to the world of Western European painting, Russia had since the Petrine reforms been mostly concerned with acquiring and learning about art. By the early 1800s, Russian intellectuals began to approach their own culture by posing the romantic questions of historical genre and national form. As in the eighteenth century, the crown set trends for the visual arts, now foregrounding the nation and its history. At the beginning of his reign, Alexander I issued an addendum to the Charter of the Russian Academy of Arts (1802) announcing his intention to choose subjects of national pride (particularly heroic individuals) for the academy’s yearly competitions: In accordance with the true and most noble purpose of the arts, which consists in making virtue appreciated, rendering immortal the fame of great men who have earned our fatherland’s gratitude, and igniting hearts and minds to follow in the paths of our [great] countrymen, we consent to having the Academy of Arts follow our personal selection and designation of that great Russian man who deserves this honor above all others or that famous event which has had an effect on our state’s wellbeing, and assign annual programs in painting, sculpture, etc.4

In a period that still abided by the classicist preference for history painting, the explorations of new historical and artistic content and form were inextricably linked: history was seen as inviting visualization, and the visual arts as requiring historical subject matter.5 Alexander’s program found immediate resonance in Russian cultural circles and particularly the press, for which the nation’s historical pantheon became one of the most popular subjects.6 Otherwise distinct in their ideological flavor, periodicals, such as Vestnik Evropy (1802–30), Severnyi vestnik



luba golburt

(1804–5), and Ruskoi vestnik (1808–20, 1824), framed their biographical sketches of famous men (another increasingly popular genre) as potential pictorial sketches. The great men and events from Russia’s pre- Petrine history were chosen particularly frequently, appearing more suitable than the recent (and hence ambiguous) past as sources of unequivocal epic heroism. Anticipating the appearance of actual paintings as well as of his own verbal portraits of the past in the History of the Russian State (1816–26), Nikolai Karamzin proposed, as early as 1802, settings, poses, gestures, and costumes for Oleg, Olga, Sviatoslav, and Vladimir, invariably highlighting the sentimentalist pairing of national character with “the life of the heart.”7 The enthusiasm and detail in Karamzin’s verbal paintings attest not so much to the rivalry between verbal and visual representation often implicit in ekphrastic description particularly in the preceding classicist period, as to the commonality of these arts’ objectives and the allure of historical imagination in this period, a congruence that we shall observe throughout this essay.8 The modernizing eighteenth century was virtually absent from these discussions, and the 1812 campaign became the first contemporary, rather than distant, historical event to suit the kind of edifying artistic appropriation sanctioned by Alexander in the 1802 addendum and imagined by Karamzin. The campaign, as is often noted, was unprecedented in stirring Russian patriotic sentiment, but in fact Russian intellectuals had already been looking for historical material to capture in a form both accessible and educational, sentimental and patriotic. The discourse was there, and now came the subject matter. The first successful attempt to use the 1812 campaign as a prism for discovering a resemblance between Russia’s past and modern- day defenders, and for locating the continuity of Russian history in its citizens’ heroic patriotism, took place in poetic form. Zhukovsky’s immensely popular “The Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors” (1812) emerged out of the same context as, and anticipated the shape of, the War Gallery commissioned six years later. Zhukovsky’s poem came to the fore as the most evocative and popular articulation of the campaign very early on, not in the least because of its inclusion of multiple figures and overall generic ambiguity.9 In the literary output of 1812, the ode remained the dominant genre accounting for some 80 percent of the poetry written.10 Although the genre inherited a state- centered focus from the eighteenth century, the early nineteenth- century ode also accommodated the new discourse of the Russian nation, conceiving of recent events as manifestations of the Russian national character and the Russian God.11 Zhukovsky’s “Bard” shared this evolving conception of national history with the ode, but no longer ascribed all historic action to a single heroic individual. The poem modeled a new

the portrait mode



capaciousness of the commemorative mode (much like that in the future gallery) and rendered history in a more democratic form that, in its diction and expanded character cast, tended toward the epic and, in its emphasis on the unity among the poet, soldiers, officers, and the tsar, toward a new conception of the nation as family and as more fully integrated.12 At 672 lines, the poem toasts various Russian historical and contemporary figures; celebrates abstract notions such as love, vengeance, and the soldiers’ sacred brotherhood; and culminates in a prayer. If by the end Zhukovsky recognizes divine providence as the force behind Russian victories— a move consonant with both Alexander’s messianic ideological program and Zhukovsky’s own sentiments, the poem achieves its greatest lyrical intensity in its middle section where it turns to honoring twenty- six flesh- and- blood Russian generals who fought in the campaign. The poem’s main structuring device is the list, a form that foregrounds the homogeneous numerousness and semblance of Russian history’s individual actors: from “our forefathers” (nashi dedy) in the first toast to Tsar Alexander in the third, to the heroes of 1812 in the fourth and fifth, and Russian poets in the ninth. Including the tsar as only a participant in this epic cast, the list pulverizes the ode’s traditionally hierarchy- bound focus and binds the members of the polis together. Disposing of the ode’s more limited focus, Zhukovsky develops a new procedure for writing history: not quite narration, which the Russian lyric learned to accommodate only later, but a mode that put new emphasis on multiplicity and specificity of historical action. It has been suggested that the list, a form virtually unknown to Russian civic poetry in the eighteenth century, responded to the campaign’s unprecedented mobilization of great numbers of troops, the communal patriotic spirit, and personal initiative.13 While the list, indeed, offered a new structure both for sizing up nineteenth- century modernity’s growing crowds and for representing individual agency, Zhukovsky also apprehends the multitude only as it is constituted by specific individuals. The poem discovers the desired new national form in the perfect alignment of the numerous and the singular. This new mode of commemoration departs most vigorously from earlier poetic forms and, in my view, bequeaths to the future Gallery of 1812 its inclusive structure.14 The Bard catches his fellow soldiers at a moment of night respite and leads the “warriors” (voiny/ratnye/ratniki/brannye—all terms that reference medieval, rather than modern warfare) in raising their “goblets” (kubki ), each toast echoed by the soldiers’ approving four- line refrain. Just as the Bard models patriotic language for his audience, the warriors, in turn, model readers’ reactions. Their response—both an echo and an answer—instantiates the commemorative poetic form’s shift toward increased affective im-



luba golburt

mediacy and hortatory force, which was propelled by the 1812 campaign and later reproduced by Dawe in the visual medium. Zhukovsky successfully resolves an issue central to romantic historical representation: the poet’s place vis- à- vis the world he chronicles. “The Bard” minimizes the tension between the classicist pact of poet and patron and the romantic contract of poet and nation, giving place to both within its loose, sequential structure. The act of naming specific leaders relies on the readers’ recognition of the named, either through reports of their military feats or through personal encounters and familial bonds within the extended aristocratic and officer networks. Zhukovsky transposes the mechanisms of interpersonal knowledge common to aristocratic and private- circle sociability onto the nation’s knowledge of itself and its history. Resounding at the poem’s climactic center, the fourth and fifth toasts announce its heroes to the nation and at the same time acknowledge the nation’s prior familiarity with its heroic pantheon: “our [nash] Konovnitsyn,” “our Palen,” etc. A similar doubling of the not yet known and the already known within the same historical material was already at work in Karamzin’s ekphrastic sketches and would eventually inform the early viewers’ experience of the War Gallery, anticipating the pathos of Pushkin’s representation of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly in “The Commander” as a hero who is both well known and in need of discovery, both commemorated and misremembered. “The Bard” creates an impression of the immediacy of the poet’s engagement with the history he celebrates. Zhukovsky’s inventories catch their heroes in the present tense of rapid movement. The most common metaphor here is that of flight: the “whirlwind” officers (vikhri ), like “eagles” (orly), “fly” (letiat) “on their winged steeds” (na koniakh okrylennykh), or “gallop” (skachut) and rush into action at full speed (mchatsia). The poem refuses to monumentalize its heroes completely, underscoring, instead, the raw dynamism of their aura. Consider, for example, the following two poetic portraits: one of the Cossack leader M. I. Platov (1753–1818) whose representation draws on the familiar notions of the Cossacks’ unbridled freedom; the second, of A. N. Seslavin (1780–1858) who became famous for his leadership of the Russian guerrillas: Khvala, nash Vikhor’- ataman; Vozhd’ nevredimykh, Platov! Tvoi ocharovannyi arkan Groza dlia supostatov. Orlom shumish’ po oblakam, Po poliu volkom ryshchesh’,

the portrait mode



Letaesh’ strakhom v tyl vragam, Bedoi im v ushi svishchesh’; Oni lish’ k lesu—ozhil les, Derev’ia sypliut strely; Oni lish’ k mostu—most ischez; Lish’ k selam—pyshut sely.15 [Praised be you, our whirlwind- ataman; / the leader of the unharmed, Platov! / Your charmed lasso / is terror for the enemy. / As an eagle you swish through the clouds, / As a wolf you prowl in the fields, / As fear you fly to the rear of the enemy, / As disaster you screech into their ears; / They dash to the woods—the woods come alive, / And trees shed arrows; /They dash to the bridge—the bridge disappears; / They dash to the villages—the villages are aflame.] Seslavin—gde ni proletit S krylatymi polkami: Tam broshen v prakh i mech, i shchit, I ustlan put’ vragami.16 [Seslavin—wherever he passes / With his winged regiments: / There both sword and shield are turned to dust, / And the road is paved with enemy bodies.]

The effect of both heroes on their surroundings borders on the elemental. Paying no heed to his heroes’ physical appearance, the poet is enthused by their irrepressible, even destructive, momentum, rendered as much through the verbs that shuttle swiftly between the second person of direct address and the third person of admiring observation as through the impulsive dashes that attempt to catch up with the quickening battle. Portraiture cannot dispose of that physical and biographical likeness that is only incidental to poetry, nor is it fully equipped (especially in the bust composition prevalent in the gallery) for capturing the figures’ dynamism. What portraiture represents, to quote Hans- Georg Gadamer, is “the occasion for which [it is] intended. . . . The portrait is related to the man represented, a relation that is not just dragged in but is expressly intended in the representation itself and indeed makes it a portrait.”17 The immediacy of portraiture thus comes first and foremost from its “occasionality,” that is, from the likeness that it purports to contain and, second, from the strategies it musters to create presence. The gallery portraits corresponding



luba golburt

Figure 11. George Dawe, Portrait of Matvei Platov, no later than 1825, the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Courtesy of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photograph copyright © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

to Zhukovsky’s (figures 11 and 12) differ considerably in their approach to their subjects. Dawe does not go beyond the oblique orientation of the three- quarter view to attenuate Platov’s stasis. Seslavin, by contrast, is caught in medias res, his cheeks flushed, his overcoat flung casually onto his shoulders, his body tilted to the left as if to draw the sword while his head turns in the opposite direction, casting a gaze of noble ire at the unseen enemy. The

the portrait mode



Figure 12. George Dawe, Portrait of Alexander Seslavin, 1823, the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Courtesy of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photograph copyright © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

viewer of Platov’s portrait is invited to share the psychological space with its subject; Seslavin, on the other hand, is portrayed with that theatricality that pretends to be oblivious of its beholder, but in the process produces an all- the- more- dramatic display.18 If Platov seems aware of being portrayed and looks in studied concentration beyond the canvas toward the presumed observer, Seslavin’s pose—his arm extended across the foreground in an attitude that excludes the viewer—demarcates a boundary between the sitter



luba golburt

and the observer and suggests a distinction between the conditions of action and viewing, or between the historical knowledge of a participant and a retrospective observer. Unlike Platov’s, Seslavin’s portrait offers contact with the great event rather than primarily with the Great Man. It is as if Seslavin is there, on the battlefield, in the present tense of Zhukovsky’s poem, while Platov dwells entirely in the past tense of a commemorative medium.19 As we shall see, the gallery’s temporality is uniquely pitched to evoke the sense of history as both present and past, as taking place in the generals’ animated faces and being remembered in their lifeless effigies.20 Perhaps Zhukovsky’s greatest rhetorical achievement lies, by contrast, in avoiding this temporal ambiguity, bringing even the most distant historical planes into the present tense and envisioning historical representation as coincident with historic action.21 In part, this temporal concentration is achieved in the figure of the soldier- poet who finds himself amid a military camp, composing verses while the outcome of the war is still uncertain. In the period during which a special premium is placed on the artist’s direct involvement in history, Zhukovsky’s poet- warrior brings to the reader the illusion of unmediated personal experience, yet also effectively reduces the individual—both poet and warrior—to his role as servitor to the nation. Motivating each other’s achievements, poets and warriors also ensure the continuity of Russia’s history and the regeneration of its heroes: Pevtsy—sotrudniki vozhdiam; Ikh pesni—zhizn’ pobedam, I vnuki, vnemlia ikh strunam, V slezakh diviatsia dedam.22 [The bards are the leaders’ collaborators; / Their songs are the life of the victories, / And grandchildren listening to their strings, / In tears marvel at the grandfathers.]

Here the present of Zhukovsky’s immersion in battle is rethought in terms of its future reception. Ostensibly memorializing the past, commemorative texts and spaces are equally oriented toward furnishing rituals for the future, ensuring the past’s continued exemplary force. Similar to Zhukovsky’s Bard- warrior and his many heroes, Dawe’s portraits, in spite of their attention to physical accuracy, are directed toward the production of a new, model Russian subject: first and foremost a synecdoche of the nation, individuated yet legible only within a multitude. We will soon see Pushkin resist all of these tendencies in his elegiac rethinking of the gallery. In the



the portrait mode

meantime, suffice it to say that both “The Bard” and the gallery, precisely by virtue of their didactic intent and occasionality, affect the temporal and ideological identity of patriotic historical representation and its object, the identity that Pushkin will refuse to accept. ——— As we have seen, the gallery commission has to be placed not only among other European, and specifically English, efforts to memorialize the victory over Napoleon, but also within the context of Alexander’s earlier agenda in the sphere of the visual arts, the explorations in Russian history that this agenda both acknowledged and propelled, and the new rhetoric of commemoration introduced most notably by Zhukovsky in “The Bard” and enthusiastically received by Russian society, from royalty to the soldiers. The gallery’s responsiveness to this manifold artistic context is what distinguishes this first important public monument to the victory over Napoleon to be completed from Alexander’s and Nicholas I’s subsequent commemorative undertakings: the triumphal arch of the General Staff Building and Alexander’s Column in St. Petersburg, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, or even the Borodino Field Museum whose complex history is the subject of Julie Buckler’s “Taking and Retaking the Field” in this volume. Unlike the gallery, a formal experiment akin to “The Bard,” these later monuments appear more traditional and definitive in their agenda, memorializing a historic location or taking classical and Christian commemorative forms—the arch, the column, the church—rather than testing recent or new ones.23 Portraiture was a recently revalorized genre whose memorial power the War Gallery of 1812 fully substantiated and even tested. How does portraiture succeed as a formal structure for this early commemoration of the 1812 victory? Even though both Alexander I and the Russian Academy of Arts continued to privilege large- scale history painting well into the nineteenth century, the portrait genre and the gallery space respond much more directly to the call for images of both the individual “hero” and the communal “nation.” A genre previously underrated by the classicist academic hierarchy, in the early 1800s portraiture comes to rival history painting as the purveyor of succinct and compelling historical meaning. In England, where this shift first occurred, portraits and their exhibition spaces responded to the representational demands of the new eighteenth- century bourgeoisie.24 The Russian gallery was a transplant of the genre into a context where it was applied to prebourgeois social structures, representing Russian history through the images of its elite.



luba golburt

The shift from history painting to portraiture is comparable to concurrent developments in Russian belles lettres: the destabilization of the ode and new conceptions of the individual, emergent in the elegy and in such generic hybrids as “The Bard.” Classicist history painting is at its core universalist and illustrative: it extracts from the historical or mythological narrative at its base, the most vivid or emblematic fragment, a “moment” that allows the painter to arrest the bodies of its participants in attitudes that are formalized and clearly legible to a well- read viewer.25 Condensing well- known literary narratives, history painting invites a similarly narrative decipherment; indeed, this is how the genre conveys historical meaning, and it is this kind of sequential decoding that constitutes the key procedure in its appreciation. Portraiture, by contrast, offers a closeness with history that is unmediated by any text, and the viewing process that is modeled on engagement between the sitter and the beholder, for which the pictorial surface serves as an unobtrusive catalyst and for which there exists no definitive script. This type of viewer response resembles the one elicited by icons in a churchgoer, and we will have further occasion to consider the gallery’s devotional dimension. The portrait provides a ready mode of access to what it represents, while ultimately remaining open to multiple interpretations. If classicist history painting relies on textual prototypes and emphasizes parallels among myth, the past and the present, portraiture—particularly in the romantic period—strives to capture the individual rather than the analogous and prototypical. And yet, portraiture, too, points beyond itself, connoting—via generalization rather than analogy—national character, social system, historical period, human condition, that is, corporate identities that range greatly in scale and sharpness of definition.26 As Christopher Rovee explains about the genre’s function in turn- of- the- century England: “Portraiture flourished . . . as a flexible discourse spanning the visual and verbal divide, whose myriad incarnations manifested a pressure to remake the nation in the image of a private individual.”27 If only by virtue of this implicit discursive range, Dawe’s portraits effectively preserve the exceptionality of the 1812 campaign and the biographical identity of its heroes while offering a participatory model for consuming historical representation. As a place where hundreds of portraits were mounted together, the gallery called attention precisely to the collective magnitude of the events it commemorated, endorsing through its enormous cast the participatory experience of the viewer, even as each portrait also encouraged attention to the individual. The precise nature of this participation for mid- nineteenthcentury visitors to the gallery is difficult to reconstruct. Partial at best, the modern- day viewer’s recognition of the names and faces on its walls is, after all, filtered by War and Peace and particularly by Tolstoy’s repeated dis-



the portrait mode

avowal of heroism as a tenable category in historical narration and skepticism about the correspondence of official discourse to his characters’ actual purpose even in battle. Portraiture, too, harbors a contradiction between its “private dimension and public expression.”28 Nevertheless, even though the overall trend in the portraiture of the period was to disengage the individual self from its social standing and public representational value, the War Gallery, on the contrary, forcibly bound up private interest and character with public heroic discourse. In this respect, the gallery closely resembled Zhukovsky’s earlier commemoration, enlisting individual difference (the midnineteenth- century viewers could recognize many of the portrayed faces) in the representation of an ideal national identity.29 Relevant here is another genre context that would have been undoubtedly activated for the early Russian gallery visitors. Even though the gallery was thoroughly secular in its intent and execution, an assembly of this many portraits, their geometrically proportioned arrangement, and their bust- length composition recalled Orthodox iconostases, and we might further consider the distinction between the particular general’s face and the ideal face of the nation as mapping quite perfectly onto the distinction between the face (litso) and the countenance (lik) in Orthodox icon painting.30 More overtly, the gallery’s portraits all display a dual generic affiliation as portraits of character and portraits of condition, capturing the sitters’ identity as both individual and corporate, and their attachment to the nation as manifested in both affective and official bonds. ——— When it opened in 1826, the War Gallery was the most inclusive collection dedicated to a single historical event (figure 13). Napoleon himself, with his unprecedented enthusiasm for collecting and grand- scale, multifigure displays, could be said to have cast the mold for the most ambitious monument to his vanquishers: a picture gallery of unprecedented magnitude. Fashioning new models of individual agency and historical consciousness, the Napoleonic era also brought about new visions of human multitudes, faceless crowds and fully individuated assemblies. Devised at the chronological end of this turbulent epoch and as its symbolic reassessment, the gallery contained the imagination of multitudes in a well- ordered, almost military, formation and located it squarely within the realm of legitimate royal authority, before the entrance to the Grand Throne (St. George’s) Hall of the Winter Palace.31 The communal structure that the space re- created, however, relied just as much on mechanisms of ordering and exclusion. Like any museum, it embodied a selective vision of the nation.32 The gallery’s location and design underscored the centralized power behind its commission: it was the tsar’s

Figure 13. Grigorii Chernetsov, The War Gallery of 1812, 1827, the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Courtesy of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photograph copyright © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

the portrait mode



room, as Pushkin recognizes in the opening of “The Commander”: “The Russian tsar has a chamber in his palace” (U russkogo tsaria v chertogakh est’ palata).33 The head- and- shoulders portraits of uniform size (71 × 62 cm) were arranged in five neat rows: higher ranks, beautifully detailed and individuated and usually painted by Dawe himself, were placed in the lowest two rows, most visible to the viewer, while the generals of the lowest included rank (major generals) faded in the dim candlelight just below the ceiling.34 Further reinforcing the hierarchy, a full- body representation of Alexander I served as the gallery’s centerpiece, the portrait one faced upon first entering the gallery.35 The two long walls of generals’ portraits—whose homogeneity was only occasionally punctuated by a full- figure portrait of a more prominent commander, such as Kutuzov or Barclay de Tolly—extended on both sides of the emperor, advertising the generals’ simultaneous subordination and companionship to the tsar. Both the gallery’s vertical and horizontal hierarchies confirmed, though never overstated, the social order with which the entire nation was supposed to comply, the order that was particularly in need of endorsement just a year after a different crowd, featuring some of the same military elite, threatened to upset it on Senate Square in December 1825.36 The choice to represent exclusively the generals of the campaign, rather than a selection of heroes from various ranks, might have been further polemically motivated. Following the revolution and all throughout Napoleon’s time in power, French visual propaganda took much- vaunted notice of history’s lesser participants: low- ranked officers and soldiers, who became more prominent in French painting of the period.37 On the one hand, the Russian gallery explicitly reaffirmed the ancien régime world order, featuring a very specific, rank- based version of national heroism. On the other, its broad scope and overwhelming focus on the Russian military explicitly contrasted with the Waterloo Chamber’s limited number of portraits and celebration of the monarch- centered international political alliances. If much in the Waterloo royal portraits was symbolic, the Russian commission seems to have emphasized close resemblance of the portraits’ actual prototypes. Those generals who had retired to their estates or were otherwise engaged away from St. Petersburg were ordered to appear in Dawe’s studio; those who could not attend in person sent their portraits instead; relatives of the deceased generals were likewise asked to produce any remaining images. Dawe was famous for his preternatural ability to capture likeness in a few quick brushstrokes. His reliance on this skill was recognized in the press and brought him many private commissions, eventually making his stay in St. Petersburg into a notorious moneymaking venture.38 Pavel Svin’in, who had established himself as the Russian press’s most vocal



luba golburt

art critic and the gallery’s most frequent reviewer, offers an unfavorable assessment of resemblance in Dawe’s work: If the striking resemblance (for which Mr. Dawe should be duly acknowledged) can substitute for the value of careful finish and pleasant coloring in family portraits, for portraits comprising the War Gallery . . . the sacrifice of the principal rules and attractions of painting for the sake of resemblance alone is, in my opinion, not in the least bit necessary; for the visages of these heroes have to reach posterity, which will be little concerned with the striking resemblance of such- andsuch a General, but will instead remember only his deeds in looking at the representation.39

If for Svin’in the endurance of historical portraiture hinges upon its artistic effect, the gallery’s initial plan emphasized precisely the opposite: the portraits’ resemblance to the actual figures. To collapse Svin’in’s dichotomy, the gallery can be said to reconfigure the public domain as familial and communal, while leaving unclear the role of the individual within these negotiations of scale and historical durability. In the few cases where neither the generals nor their likenesses were available, space was still reserved for them, but in the form of green silk screens enclosed in the same gilded frames as the actual portraits. Partial or fictive resemblance, even for the sake of a more coherent artistic space, was clearly not an option, nor was the elimination of the blank frames. This practice testifies to the symbolic precedence of the gallery’s documentary over artistic function, a bias that in fact characterizes many early nineteenth- century gallery spaces. But it also betrays the difficulty of maintaining within a large- scale commemorative venture the primacy of the individual that portraiture ostensibly champions: on the one hand, no one is forgotten; on the other, what better symbol of faceless corporate identity than an empty gilded frame? The gallery’s visual lacunae are paradoxically made to signify the completeness of its historical record. It is tempting to speak of the War Gallery as a ritual space, an embodiment of the transition from sacral to secular images of cultural authority: a giant iconostasis, whose meaning is generated at once by the communicative potential of the individual face and by each image’s insistence on indexing a spiritual power beyond itself, the Nation and the State.40 Yet, for all its tangibility, the gallery’s devotional quality is also highly problematic. For in the orderly celebration of patriotic multitudes, one also catches a glimpse of fading and absence: the discoloration on some of the all- too- quickly finished paintings, the expulsion of the Decembrist Sergei Volkonskii’s portrait, the empty frames and green cloth. The space was further tainted



the portrait mode

by the well- known commercial nature of Dawe’s enterprise. After all, if a portrait (particularly if one follows the English romantics) was supposed to capture not just the physical, but, more ambitiously, the spiritual likeness of the sitter, how could that spirit be revealed in each of the 332 portraits, a number that grows exponentially when one considers all the copies that Dawe produced for concurrent private commissions? Finally, how does the individual continue to signify once inscribed within an overwhelming and uniformly pictured assembly? Is the assembly itself capable of inspiring transcendent spiritual experience? What historical knowledge is enabled by the gallery? And is the personal spiritual core preserved within the frames of the patriotic nation, the regularizing state, and commemorative distance? How closely should one look for it? ——— One can read Pushkin’s “The Commander” as a reflection on these questions.41 In the 1830s, in his role as court historiographer and student of such symbols of the conflict between the individual and the state as Peter I and Emelian Pugachev, Pushkin repeatedly finds historical and biographical narrative compromised by competing personal and communal agendas, national and state discourse, censorship, and the unreliability of historical records and memory. As a domain designed to shape the Russian memory of 1812 and its individual heroes, the gallery ritualized a narrative that was both compelling and unsatisfying. Pushkin’s alternative to the gallery’s master narrative is not simply poetry’s ekphrastic competition with portraiture, but rather a critical navigation and remythologization of the gallery. The speaker plots a gradual entry into the gallery space and, later, beyond the portrait surface into the ethical and emotional life of one of its subjects, thereby removing the gallery’s multiple homogenizing glosses and enabling a different kind of historical knowledge.42 The opening line announces the main authority against which the speaker will have to position his own, as yet unarticulated, subjectivity: the “Russian tsar” who owns the gallery. Negating all the predictable visual associations with opulence and decorative rococo genres that the mention of a royal chamber invites, the poem nevertheless establishes the gallery primarily as a decorative space: “from top to bottom, in all its length, throughout, / With his free and wide brush / A quick- eyed painter has covered it with drawings” (sverkhu do nizu, vo vsiu dlinu, krugom, / Svoeiu kistiiu svobodnoi i shirokoi / Ee razrisoval khudozhnik bystro- okoi).43 Mural- like, captured in their unity, the portraits appear as the chamber’s undifferentiated ornaments, secondary to the space itself and to the authority that



luba golburt

owns it. Coupled with the ambiguous and rather widespread compliment to Dawe’s “quick- eyed” (bystro- okoi) skill, “covered it with drawings” (razrisoval) points to the ornamental quality of the project and, less explicitly, to the artist’s mercenary motivations. This sense of the gallery as an essentially ornamental and quickly executed official commission continues to frame the poem, even as it gradually penetrates past the ornamental surface, past the “coats and swords” ( plashchi da shpagi) toward the subjects’ “faces full of martial valor” (litsa, polnye voinstvennoi otvagi ). When, in the poem’s second half, Pushkin moves to revalorize M. B. Barclay de Tolly, he does it not only at the expense of Mikhail Kutuzov, nor even solely, as Oleg Proskurin has persuasively argued, opposing Barclay to the cult of Alexander I.44 The revisionist narrative of “The Commander” presents an alternative source of historiographic insight: not the tsar who commissions, frames, and owns the celebratory space, but the poet- historian who enters it in search of self- reflexive engagement with the past (a revisionary take on the participatory model that we have identified earlier in the gallery’s commemorative intent). Hence the abrupt shift from the unfocalized view of the surface- gliding opening section to the insistent focalization when the speaker finds himself transfixed before Barclay’s portrait (figure 14): No v sei tolpe surovoi Odin menia vlechet vsekh bol’she. S dumoi novoi Vsegda ostanovlius’ pred nim—i ne svozhu S nego moikh ochei. Chem dolee gliazhu, Tem bolee tomim ia grustiiu tiazheloi. On pisan vo ves’ rost. Chelo, kak cherep golyi, Vysoko losnitsia, i, mnitsia, zalegla Tam grust’ velikaia. Krugom—gustaia mgla; Za nim—voennyi stan. Spokoinyi i ugriumyi, On, kazhetsia, gliadit s prezritel’noiu dumoi.45 [But in this stern crowd / One [(general)] beckons me more than others. With a new thought / I always stop before him—and can’t take / my eyes off him. The more I look, / the more I am tormented with a heavy sadness. / He is painted in full figure. His forehead, as a naked skull, / shines highly, and, it seems, there lies / a great sorrow. All around—a thick darkness; / Behind him—a military camp. Calm and sullen, / He, it seems, gazes in scornful thought.]

Andrew Kahn has drawn attention to the empathetic echoing of the viewer’s and general’s thoughtfulness (duma) and sadness (grust’ ) in this

the portrait mode



section.46 Indeed, the more Barclay is apprehended by the speaker, the more fully the speaker’s own subjectivity comes into view. In addition to signaling “an emotional bond between viewer and object,” this passage also charts the speaker’s affective immersion into the painting, which now becomes much more than a fragment of a flat decorative surface. The poem’s alternative portrait of Barclay abounds in lexical choices that have to do with depth, comprehension, and impenetrability: the viewer is unsure of his insights (“it seems”—mnitsia, kazhetsia); Barclay is a “lone” hero (odin, odinoko) in a “foreign land” (zemle chuzhoi ), the very sound of whose name is “alien” (chuzhdyi ); he is “inscrutable to the gaze of the wild mob” (nepronitsaemyi dlia vzgliada cherni dikoi ) and is only occasionally understood (though inevitably censured) by a truly “sharp mind” (tot, chei ostryi um tebia i postigal); he saves the Russian people “mysteriously” (tainstvenno), acts “imperturbably” and “silently” (nekolebim, bezmolvno), and thinks “deeply” (gluboko). Barclay’s fate—reconstructed or imagined—is to disappear, alone amid a multitude. He “vanishes alone in the regimental ranks” (i v polkovykh riadakh sokryt’sia odinoko), a statement that can describe with equal poignancy Barclay’s biographical predicament and the dissolution of the subject’s— both general’s and poet’s—personhood within the overpopulated gallery space. In short, the biographical Barclay, whether indeed slighted and misjudged by his contemporaries or unduly idealized by Pushkin, grounds the poem’s fundamental query about the scope of historical engagement available to the gallery’s visitor—ranging in focus from official to personal and, in quality, from perfunctory to absorbed and meditative. By the end of the poem, Pushkin exhausts the entire spectrum, beginning in the ruler’s physical space and ending in the subject’s mental one: from the Russian tsar’s chamber in the poem’s first line (“The Russian tsar has a chamber in his palace”) to the poet’s rapture in the last (“[The Great Man’s visage] will transport the poet to rapture and deep emotion”; poeta privedet v vostorg i umilen’e).47 How does Pushkin manage to map this progression so economically? And is the possibility of experiencing this range of engagement already built into the portrait gallery itself? To answer these questions, let us consider the transition from the gallery’s opening description to the meditation on Barclay, the section that first introduces the lyric “I”: Tolpoiu tesnoiu khudozhnik pomestil Siuda nachal’nikov narodnykh nashikh sil, Pokrytykh slavoiu chudesnogo pokhoda I vechnoi pamiat’iu dvenadtsatogo goda.

Figure 14. George Dawe, Portrait of Field Marshal Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, 1829, the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Courtesy of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photograph copyright © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

the portrait mode



Neredko medlenno mezh imi ia brozhu I na znakomye ikh obrazy gliazhu, I, mnitsia, slyshu ikh voinstvennye kliki. Iz nikh uzh mnogikh net; drugie, koikh liki Eshche tak molody na iarkom polotne, Uzhe sostarelis’ i niknut v tishine Glavoiu lavrovoi.48 [In a crowded throng the painter has arranged / Here the leaders of our popular forces, / Covered in the fame of the wondrous campaign / And the eternal memory of eighteen- twelve. / Quite often slowly I roam among them / And look at their familiar images, / And, it seems, I hear their bellicose cries. / Among them many are no more; others, whose visages / Are still so young on the bright canvas, / Have grown old and in silence wither / their laureled heads.]

Figured as a crowd rather than an orderly formation, the generals as if surround the speaker, who recognizes them and wanders among them, almost as part of their realm, almost hearing their voices. Pushkin, after all, subscribes to the same strategies of aristocratic interpersonal knowledge as Zhukovsky, with the difference that the understated acknowledgment of “familiar” images (znakomye) in “The Commander” sidesteps the celebratory rhetoric of listing and naming. It facilitates the move from “eternal memory” to a memory that is undercut by the passing of time and the discrepancy between the eternally youthful portraits and their aging and dying subjects. We have already observed this ambivalent temporality differentiating Dawe’s otherwise similar images when we juxtaposed Platov’s and Seslavin’s portraits. In the context of the gallery’s overall idealizing bias, it is not surprising that Dawe tended to make his subjects look younger, closer to their imagined appearance in 1812, rather than a decade later when he actually painted them. Thus, throughout the history of their creation and reception, the portraits encoded an uncertainty about presence and absence, the uncertainty that, I suggest, resurfaces in Pushkin’s tentative “it seems” (mnitsia, kazhetsia). The portraits could only pretend to capture the individual expression of a fleeting moment, but the commemoration, unlike that in Zhukovsky’s “Bard,” was always already irrevocably removed from the commemorated action. The romantics were, of course, accustomed to experiencing this disjuncture in their engagement with history, as evidenced by a whole range of their favorite genres, from the fragment to the elegy to the historical novel. This disjuncture, too, lies at the center of Pushkin’s



luba golburt

poem, as the speaker imagines the voices of those who are no more or ponders the contradiction between their eternal painted vigor and their biographical vanishing. It is within this disjuncture that Pushkin also locates the autobiographical twenty- year lifespan of his poetic self: from the “Recollections at Tsarskoe Selo” (“Vospominania v Tsarskom Sele,” 1814), which offers his virtually immediate reaction to the 1812 campaign, to The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, 1821–1824) and Eugene Onegin (1823–31), of which “Among them many are no more” (iz nikh uzh mnogikh net) in “The Commander” is a recognizable echo, to “The Commander” (1835) itself. The poem intuits and draws out the elegiac (historical and personal) temporality of the celebratory odic/epic—essentially Zhukovskian—space of the tsar’s gallery. Pushkin resists the ossification of commemorative discourse in his portrait of Barclay and reinscribes Dawe’s portraits with the ambiguity, not of their occasion, which was never in doubt, but of their original generic polyvalence and potential either for individuation or for representing the nation. The speaker’s absorption in the gallery follows a ritualistic pattern— he visits the gallery “often” (neredko), examines the paintings “slowly” (medlenno), and even the novelty of his reflections on Barclay is presented as a habit (“With a new thought I always stop before him”; s dumoi novoi vsegda ostanovlius’ pred nim). Through the rehearsal of an unvarying process of beholding, the speaker reaches past the familiar public content of the gallery toward an internalized and even polemical—rather than communal and regimented—account of perception, commemoration, historical knowledge, and, obliquely, the nation. Writing of museums as ritual spaces, Carol Duncan highlights “the achievement of a marked- off, ‘liminal’ zone of time and space, in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience.”49 Pushkin’s speaker seems to reach for precisely this kind of liminality when he enters the gallery and attempts to abstract himself from all its worldly signifiers; indeed, the poem’s entire first half can be read as tracing the entry into a “different” spatiotemporal and emotional state. Yet, the portrait gallery insistently reminds its visitor of its real- life referents, of the ideologies that dictate its layout and membership, and of the multiple discursive frames that surround it as a public space and erode its affective force. Portraiture and its exhibition space prove particularly productive of the anxiety over both grounded knowledge and spiritual transcendence, for they confront the beholder with their conflicted modalities and constituencies: as portraits of character and condition, the individual apart from and as part of the nation, the particular and the symbolic, presence and absence, and the past and its future significations, expressed at once in the odic, epic,



the portrait mode

elegiac, and biographical modes. As we have seen throughout this essay (and nowhere more grippingly than in Pushkin’s lyrical immersion in the gallery), the Gallery of 1812 was a commemorative space that, despite its public legibility and its ostensibly unequivocal edifying effect, was founded upon these unavoidable, indeed formative, rifts.

Notes I am thankful to Julie Buckler, Anne Dwyer, Emily Johnson, Andrew Kahn, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. 1. In a book that came to my attention only after this article had been completed, Elizabeth Fay coins a similar term—the “portraitive mode”—to explore portraiture as an ideological practice that in the romantic era articulates the troubled and troubling relationship between the private and public, inner and outer selves. See Elizabeth Fay, Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010). 2. On the gallery’s history, see V. M.  Glinka and A. V.  Pomarnatskii, Voennaia galereia zimnego dvortsa: k iubileiu Otechestvennoi Voiny 1812 goda (Leningrad: Isdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 1963). In their seminal article on Pushkin’s “The Commander,” Manuilov and Modzalevskii also offer a brief history of the gallery’s commission and coverage in the Russian press. V. A.  Manuilov and L. B. Modzalevskii, “‘Polkovodets’ Pushkina,” Vremennik Pushkinskoi Komissii, nos. 4–5 (1939): 125–64. 3. Thus, the Soviet period brought only minor additions to the gallery’s nineteenthcentury collection: to celebrate the war’s popular dimension, two battle paintings by Peter von Hess (originally commissioned by Nicholas I for the Winter Palace) and four grenadier portraits, painted by Dawe but not included in the original gallery, were added, dispersing the gallery’s deliberately elitist focus; in 1949, the gallery also acquired a subtle textual frame, a marble plaque with lines from Alexander Pushkin’s “The Commander.” See Glinka and Pomarnatskii, Voennaia galereia, 7. 4. P. N.  Petrov, ed. Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Imperatorskoi S.- Peterburgskoi akademii khudozhestv za sto let eia sushchestvovaniia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Gogenfel’dena, 1864), 576. All translations of Russian texts, both prose and poetry, are mine. 5. For a theoretical reading of the early nineteenth- century “desire for history” and the visual discourses it engendered, see Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1995). 6. A. G. Vereshchagina, “Nachalo XIX veka. ‘Vestnik Evropy’ i ‘Severnyi Vestnik’. Spor o geroe,” in Kritiki i iskusstvo: ocherki istorii russkoi khudozhestvennoi kritiki serediny XVIII- pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow: Progress- Traditsiia, 2004), 214–42. 7. Nikolai Karamzin, “O sluchaiakh i kharakterakh v Rossiiskoi istorii, kotorye mogut byt’ predmetom khudozhestv,” Vestnik Evropy 6, no. 24 (December 1802): 301. Quoted in Vereshchagina, “Nachalo XIX veka,” 221. 8. Several romantic genres offer collaborations between verbal and visual media: in poems written “to the portrait”—for example, Pushkin’s “K portretu Zhukovskogo” (1818), “K portretu Chaadaeva” (1820), and “K portretu Viazemskogo” (1824)—the text does not compete with, but rather comments on the image; the primarily British



luba golburt

picture- gallery book form displays what Elizabeth Fay calls the “cross- indexing and dialogue of countering information” between image and text. Elizabeth Fay, “Portrait Galleries, Representative History, and Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 2 (2002): 151. 9. Andrei Zorin suggests that the “Bard’s” popularity was due to its unprecedented personal tone. Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla . . . Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII—pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001), 273. 10. Nikita Okhotin quotes this figure from M. A. Tsiavlovskii’s unpublished manuscript “Otechestvennaia voina 1812–1815 gg. v zhizni i tvorchestve Pushkina” (1945). Tsiavlovskii found 567 poetic texts on the subject by 182 authors, not less than 80 percent of which were odes, and if one counts lines rather than entire texts, the dominance of the ode is even more striking. N. G. Okhotin, “1812 god v poezii i poeziia v 1812 godu,” in Russkaia slava: russkie poety ob Otechestvennoi voine 1812 goda (Moskva: Kniga, 1987), 44–45. 11. On the ode of this period, see Okhotin, “1812 god v poezii,” 25. On the phrase “Russian God” in the patriotic literature of the period, see S. A. Reiser, “Russkii Bog,” Izvestiia AN SSSR: Otdelenie Literatury i Iazyka 20, no. 1 (1961): 64–69. 12. On the nation as family in the contemporary rhetoric of the Archimandrite Filaret (Drozdov) and A. S. Shishkov, see Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, 262. On the hybrid generic makeup of “The Bard” (ode, epic, ballad, drinking song), see A. S. Ianushkevich, “Zhanrovyi sostav liriki otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda i ‘Pevets vo stane russkikh voinov’ V. A. Zhukovskogo,” Problemy metoda i zhanra, no. 9 (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta, 1983), and his “Put’ Zhukovskogo k eposu,” in Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura: sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. R. V. Iezuitova (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 170. 13. L. M. Arinshtein, “Zhukovskii i poema o 1812 gode Roberta Southey,” in Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura, 322. Irina Semenko links the leaders’ numerousness with Russian “communal patriotic enlivenment” around the campaign. I. M.  Semenko, “V. A.  Zhukovskii,” in V. A.  Zhukovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 4kh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959), 1:xx. 14. Only one officer mentioned in the poem, A. S. Figner (1787–1813), did not live to become a general in the campaign and therefore was not portrayed by Dawe. 15. V. A. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moskva: Iazyk russkoi kul’tury, 1999), 1:231. All quotations of the poem and commentary are from this edition. 16. Ibid., 233. 17. For Gadamer, “occasionality” constitutes the ontological basis of portraiture: “Occasionality means that [the portrait’s] meaning and contents are determined by the occasion for which [it is] intended.” Hans- Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 1989), 138. 18. The conceptual apparatus of Michael Fried’s influential Absorption and Theatricality is useful here. Fried emphasizes portraiture’s “inherent theatricality,” reducing “the basic action depicted in a portrait [to] the sitter’s presentation of himself or herself to be beheld.” Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 109. On theatricality and emotionality in romantic portraiture, see Kenneth Garlick, “The Beginnings of the English Romantic Portrait,” Studies in Romanticism 2, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 65–86.

the portrait mode



19. Because Platov had died before Dawe’s arrival in Petersburg, Dawe had to copy his likeness from the work of another popular English portraitist, Thomas Phillips (1770–1845). 20. On temporal hybridity and its complex philosophical underpinnings in the works of such English portraitists as Sir Joshua Reynolds, see the classic essay of the Warburg Institute art historian, Edgar Wind, “Hume and the Heroic Portrait,” in Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth- Century Imagery, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1986), 1–52. On anachronism in portraiture, see Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 1991), 137–38. 21. The poem shares this temporality with the Pindaric ode, for which the present tense is motivated by the poet’s lyrical afflatus, rather than any actual participation in the events. 22. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1:239–40. 23. Richard Wortman discusses the Cathedral of Christ the Savior as the principal monument of the campaign. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 236. 24. There is no doubt that Alexander I invited Dawe to Russia as much for the prodigious and popular corpus of British portrait painting that stood behind him (Sir Joshua Reynolds alone had produced around three thousand portraits in the course of his career) as for his own talent demonstrated in Aachen. 25. On the “moment” in classicist history painting, see Francis Dowley, “The Moment in Eighteenth- Century Art Criticism,” in Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 5:317–36. On the codification and legibility of gesture in Academic French painting, see Norman Bryson, “The Legible Body: LeBrun,” in Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 29–57. 26. Nadia Tscerny traces the critical reevaluation of portraiture in late eighteenthcentury England and the new value placed on the likeness that now has to “be both mimetic and synthetic, temporal and static, scientific and artistic, superficial and profound.” Nadia Tscerny, “Likeness in Early Romantic Portraiture,” Art Journal 46, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 193. 27. Christopher Rovee, Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3. 28. Sébastien Allard, “Portraits de condition,” in Portraits publics, portraits privés, 1770–1830 (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux, 2006), 90. 29. The romantics produced some of the most important statements on this dual scope of portraiture, at once particular and general, mimetic and symbolic. Illustrating his theory of representation of the unrepresentable, Schelling writes that portraiture “by imitating nature, simultaneously becomes the translator of its significance, turns the interior of a figure toward the outside and renders it visible.” F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 146. 30. On this distinction, particularly in the icons of the imperial period, see Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. Robin MilnerGulland (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 224–32. Tarasov also demonstrates that icons in the early 1800s often exhibited compositional similarities to ceremonial portraits (280). It would not be surprising if portraits in turn gained in appeal precisely because of their resemblance to sacred images. This would be one way to inscribe the gallery among Alexander’s other post- 1812 projects, which centered much more ex-



luba golburt

plicitly, as both Wortman and Zorin have demonstrated, on the messianic significance and commemoration of the campaign. 31. While remaining the tsar’s private property, the Hermitage stopped being a private collection with the enthronement of Paul I (reign: 1796–1801) who abandoned the Winter Palace, but continued to support the picture gallery. In the early years of Alexander I’s reign (1801–25), further arrangements were made for turning the Hermitage into a properly functioning museum. Still, the museum remained under the governance of the royal palace administration until 1917 and even came under the tsar’s direct supervision during Nicholas I’s reign. On the history of the Hermitage collection, see V. F.  Levinson- Lessing, Istoriia Kartinnoi Galerei Ermitazha (1764–1917) (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1985). 32. Here again the gallery resembles Zhukovsky’s poem, whose selection of heroes went through many revisions. See commentary in Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1:598–99. 33. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 17 tomakh, vol. 3, part 1 (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1948), 378. 34. Shortly after the gallery’s opening, Grigorii Chernetsov (1801–1865) documented its original appearance before the reconstruction that followed the fire of 1837. The value of this painting (figure 13) as a testament to the original viewers’ experience is compromised, however, since it positions the unseen painter/viewer above the gallery floor (possibly on a staircase), depicts more than can be perceived at a single glance, and illuminates the gallery evenly, with little regard for the light sources placed within the painting. Chernetsov thus presents an idealized version of the gallery, a fantasy of complete and equal representation. 35. Dawe came from a tradition of exhibition arrangement where painters and viewers knew how to interpret the placement of paintings, especially large- scale portraits. For an illuminating case study, see Mark Hallett, “Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the Royal Academy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 581–604. 36. Though painted in September 1825, the portrait of S. G. Volkonskii, the only general who participated in the Decembrist Uprising, was censored out of the gallery and exhibited only at the beginning of the twentieth century. 37. On the expansion of social representation in Napoleonic- era history painting, see Susan Locke Siegfried, “Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Post- Revolutionary France,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 ( June 1993): 251; and Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine- Jean Gros’s “La Bataille d’Eylau” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 38. For his entrepreneurial excesses, Dawe was ordered to leave Russia before completing the gallery. This is when Pushkin met him and composed a short piece “To Dawe ESQ” (1828) in response to the portraitist’s pencil sketch of him. In Britain, portrait painting had long been accepted as a business requiring commercial acumen. For a fascinating history, see Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth- Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 36–52. 39. P. P. Svin’in, “Vystavka v Akademii Khudozhestv,” Otechestvennye zapiski 2, no. 90 (1827): 138–39. 40. On museums as ritual practices, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995).

the portrait mode



41. The poem’s immediate reception (starting with the refutation by Mikhail Kutuzov’s nephew Loggin Ivanovich Golenishchev- Kutuzov who took offense at Pushkin’s ostensible preference for Barclay over his uncle) seems to have set the course for most future discussions of “The Commander” along biographical and political/ historical lines. For the most informative explorations of these aspects of the poem’s creation and reception, see Manuilov and Modzalevskii, “Polkovodets Pushkina”; Georgii Koka, “Pushkin o polkovodtsakh dvenadtsatogo goda,” Prometei 7 (1969): 17–37; N. N. Petrunina, “Polkovodets,” in Stikhotvoreniia Pushkina 1820–1830- kh godov: Istoriia sozdaniia i ideino- khudozhestvennaia problematika (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974), 278–305; and a revisionist interpretation by Oleg Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, ili podvizhnyi palimpsest (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 243–62. To my knowledge, Andrew Kahn’s recent reading of the poem as being “about painting as a type of historiography, and therefore about the connection between representation and truth,” is the only one that emphasizes Pushkin’s concern with artistic mediation in the production of historical knowledge. Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 268. Benefiting from this reading, the analysis I propose draws attention to the ways in which the lyric subject inhabits the gallery as a historiographical space and establishes rituals for the historical imagination. 42. On portraiture’s complex blend of public display and private interiority, and specifically on the late eighteenth- century public’s “desire to unpeel the layers of a renowned individual’s public façade” (222), see Shearer West, “Eccentricity and the Self: Private Character in English Public Portraiture,” in Representing Private Lives of the Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Kahn (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 219–50. While most of West’s sources on the history of British portraiture could serve to frame Dawe’s portraits within the tradition to which they properly belong, it is important to emphasize that Pushkin, though extremely proficient in foreign cultural codes, formulated his own portrait of Barclay in a culture with a less (or differently) evolved conception of the private self. What the poem ultimately articulates is not so much Barclay’s private self, as, more crucially, the private individual’s discovery of private historical knowledge within a public commemorative space. 43. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 17 tomakh, vol. 3, 378. 44. Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, 249. 45. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 17 tomakh, vol. 3, 378–79. 46. Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, 266. 47. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 17 tomakh, vol. 3, 380. 48. Ibid., 378. 49. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 20.

An Island of Antiquity: The Double Life of Talashkino in Russia and Beyond Katia Dianina

National consciousness—this firmament of the people’s spirit—is strengthened by the contemplation and examination of monuments of a bygone life, and we are happy that our fatherland can still gather and store in safe haven many objects that have great importance in the worldwide appreciation of the arts. — mariia tenisheva

Until very recently, much has remained uncertain about Princess Mariia Klavdievna Tenisheva (née Piatkovskaia, 1858–1928), a patron of the arts and an artist, including the year of her birth.1 Tenisheva was involved in several key art events around turn of the century, among which The World of Art journal and the Russian handicrafts department at the 1900 international exhibition in Paris stand out. The artists’ colony at Tenisheva’s estate, Talashkino, one of the major centers of the national art revival, was part of her artistic heritage, too. Tenisheva organized extensive handicrafts workshops that employed some two thousand peasant women and, in 1898, founded the Russian Antiquity Museum, which housed over seven thousand items and was later gifted to the city of Smolensk. She donated her collection of watercolors and drawings to the Russian Museum and curated several 



katia dianina

temporary exhibitions of folk art and handicrafts in Russia and abroad. She supported individual artists (among them I. Repin, M. Vrubel, K. Korovin, and S. Maliutin) and entire movements, as in the case of the revival of handicrafts and the advancement of balalaika music. She also created many fine works of art of her own, in a variety of media, including wood carving and enamel. But her main talent, as one researcher has summarized recently, was the “unprecedented determination to invest means, energy, knowledge, and soul in the development of culture.”2 Today there is effort underway, long overdue, to restore to Princess Tenisheva the honor that she deserves for her many accomplishments in the revival of Russian folk art. The rhetoric of revival, the recovery of the bygone past, which underscored Tenisheva’s collecting activity, attends much of the scholarly discourse aimed at rehabilitating her legacy today. In 2008, the 150th anniversary of Tenisheva’s birth was celebrated in cultural centers across the country. The Russian Museum in St. Petersburg launched a commemorative exhibition, which for the first time afforded an opportunity to view over a hundred works from Tenisheva’s collection of watercolors that she donated to the museum in 1898. This collection includes artworks by such prominent artists as A.Venetsianov, P. Fedotov, K. Briullov, Vrubel, V. Serov, N. Roerich, and E. Polenova.3 Another exhibition devoted to Tenisheva took place in the State Historical Museum in Moscow: “Princess Mariia Tenisheva in the Mirror of the Silver Age.”4 In June 2008, a monument to Tenisheva was unveiled in Talashkino in front of the museum complex Teremok (figure 15).5 The jubilee at Talashkino brought together folk groups, actors, artisans, and tourists; presiding over the festivities was the governor of Smolensk region who honored Tenisheva as a unique woman and outstanding patriot of Russian national culture. The full story of Tenisheva’s life, complicated by missing or destroyed archival materials, remains to be written, however. This essay does not attempt to reconstruct Tenisheva’s biography accurately. On the contrary, it draws upon publicly available information, however partial and incomplete, to map the strange fate of Talashkino in the Russian public sphere and consider this slice of culture as it was being written in a dialogue between a variety of publications and persons. ——— Talashkino was the locus of many of Tenisheva’s creative undertakings. Her second husband, industrialist V. N. Tenishev (1843–1903), bought this family estate near Smolensk in 1893. Prince Tenishev, whom Mariia Klavdievna married in 1892, was popularly known as the “Russian American” for his

an island of antiquity



Figure 15. Liudmila El’chaninova, Monument to M. K. Tenisheva (2008).

energy and enterprising spirit. He was a wealthy entrepreneur, who founded rail and iron works in Briansk, although he distinguished himself equally as an ethnographer.6 At the international exhibition in Paris in 1900, he was appointed general commissar of the entire Russian section. He wasn’t a collector himself, but until his death, he generously (if often begrudgingly)



katia dianina

subsidized Tenisheva’s endeavors in the sphere of art patronage. After his death in 1903, Tenisheva lived mostly at Talashkino until immigrating to Paris in 1916. Talashkino is best known for the propagation of a particular version of Russian national culture, which in the first decade of the twentieth century caught the imagination of Western audiences and made Russian folk art not only popular but indeed fashionable. Much of what we take today to be traditional crafts and decorative arts was first produced in the workshops of Abramtsevo, Savva Mamontov’s famous artists’ colony near Moscow, and several decades later in Talashkino. Talashkino initially attracted international attention in 1900, when twelve balalaikas, decorated by Tenisheva, Vrubel, Maliutin, N. Davydova, and A. Golovin, received much publicity at the world’s fair in Paris.7 After this initial success, Tenisheva displayed objects from her Russian Antiquity Museum in the French capital and then put products from her workshops on sale in Paris and Prague.8 She also demonstrated some of her enamel works in London.9 Between 1905 and 1908, the Russian folk arts enjoyed unprecedented success in Europe, where Tenisheva received the acclaim that she longed for. She also claimed, not without reason, to have influenced French fashion: “Both of my Parisian exhibitions greatly affected style and accessories in ladies’ fashion. A year later I noticed in ladies’ fashion an obvious influence of our embroidery, our Russian dresses, sarafans, shirts, headdresses, homespun coats, even the name ‘blouse Russe’ appeared, etc. In jewelry, too, our Russian craftsmanship found reflection, which only delighted me and justified all my efforts and expenses.”10 In Russia, however, many of these accomplishments were met either with indifference or ridicule during her lifetime and, during the Soviet period, were disregarded entirely. The more admirable her achievements, the more incomprehensible is the blindness of society, which failed to see them. Tenisheva observes in her memoirs painfully that Russia had always been a stepmother to her, in contrast to the warm reception that she invariably enjoyed in the West.11 Even when she attempted to donate her collections, she faced obstacles, as was the case with her collection of watercolors, which the Russian Museum refused to accept in its entirety, or the Russian Antiquity Museum in Smolensk, which took years to find a new owner. During the Soviet era, Talashkino suffered the familiar fate of an estate belonging to a wealthy patron. After 1917, it endured neglect and then was largely destroyed during World War II, so that, until recently, not much remained of this landmark site of Russian national culture. Tenisheva’s collection was broken up in 1919–20, and few objects from her Russian Antiquity Museum, which was renamed the Art Gallery, remain on display there today.

an island of antiquity



Overall, what Wendy Salmond concluded a decade ago remained true for the duration of the twentieth century: “In the long run, the cultural oasis on which Tenisheva had lavished so much love and money appears to have made little lasting impression on the surrounding area.”12 What fascinates me about Talashkino the most is the yawning gap between the grandeur of its material accomplishments, well recognized in Western Europe, and its virtual invisibility in the contemporary Russian public sphere, between what it was and how it was present in Russian society. Only today, almost a century after the artists’ colony and handicrafts workshops were abandoned and fell into disrepair, Talashkino has returned to modern Russian culture as a part of post- Soviet efforts to recover a lost or forgotten national heritage. Thanks to major restoration work by the volunteer group New Acropolis several years ago, reconstructed architectural landmarks at Talashkino have reopened to visitors as part of the Smolensk museum complex.13 The shifting fortune of the island of Russian antiquity that Princess Tenisheva founded on her provincial estate is a story worth telling. Talashkino is a paradoxical site of memory: today the former artists’ colony turned museum complex is being restored to a prominent place in the Russian public sphere, which it never occupied during its owner’s lifetime. That Talashkino returns today as the center of genuine Russian antiquity is also ironic in that this site of culture was an invented tradition in the first place. The revival of peasant crafts at the turn of the twentieth century was not a spontaneous movement of craftsmen but a concerted effort on the part of select privileged patriots like Tenisheva, and it is her contributions as a prominent collector, artist, designer, and patron that are being commemorated today. What is at work in Talashkino today is a certain undoing of counter- memory, which had erased this center of folk arts from Russia’s cultural landscape for nearly a century. Later I consider some reasons behind this forgetting. By dwelling on the century of amnesia that preceded the post- Soviet revival of Talashkino, this article explores paradoxes of memory- making that underlie the recent rite of commemoration as well. Why did such a visible, even ostentatious, site of national tradition fail to become a part of public culture in late imperial Russia? Several reasons can and have been offered as an explanation, including timing, fashion, gender stereotypes, and collecting practices of the time. Researchers have also noticed that history has been unfair to Tenisheva. All these aspects played a role, but there is also an element of sheer randomness that doesn’t fit these categories neatly. I would like to suggest that Talashkino owes its strange fate to the whims of the contemporary press, which played a greater role in shaping the image of a fairy- tale estate and its owner than any other factor.



katia dianina

Figure 16. Teremok in Flenovo, design by Sergei Maliutin (1900s). From Sergei Makovskii, Talachkino: L’art décoratif des ateliers de la princesse Ténichef (St. Petersburg: Édition “Sodrougestvo,” 1906).

The fact that Talashkino’s reputation depended so much on fickle discourse draws attention to the constructedness of cultural memory and its dependence on the ongoing dialogue between the rhetoric of remembrance and amnesia. ——— Talashkino operated between 1893 and 1914. Tenisheva’s artists’ colony was clearly modeled on S. Mamontov’s Abramtsevo, which opened more than two decades earlier, and similarly included a school for peasant children, a church, handicrafts workshops, a theater, a collection of folk arts and antiquities, a balalaika orchestra, and a shop in Moscow called the Wellspring (Rodnik) for the sale of peasant handicrafts. It was, as the princess herself described Talashkino, a unique and separate site of culture: “a whole little world of its own, where at every step life bubbled, every nerve throbbed, something was being created; link by link, an intricate chain was being forged and connected.”14

an island of antiquity



Talashkino derived its special appearance from several landmarks that drew heavily on motifs from fairy tales and folk ornament. These included the famous Teremok in the nearby hamlet (hutor) Flenovo, built by the artist in residence S. V. Maliutin (figure 16); the artist’s studio and house in Talashkino; the entrance gates to Talashkino; and the chapel in Flenovo, with its grandiose mosaics by Roerich, which Tenisheva herself took an active part in creating. Maliutin also designed the Russian Antiquity Museum in Smolensk, with the participation of V. M. Vasnetsov and Tenisheva in 1904–5. Russian Antiquity, founded in 1898 and opened in 1905, was an extension of Talashkino in a sense. In aggregate, all these structures served as a physical implementation of the creative principles that guided Princess Tenisheva’s estate. Talashkino was an entire museum in the open air, a prototype of modern heritage and frontier- type museums, with underlying double temporality. In imperial Russia, Talashkino was a special location of culture, indeed a “fairy- tale kingdom,” as the journalist N. Breshko- Breshkovskii called it.15 The metaphor is particularly well suited to describe what was essentially an island of Russian antiquity in the midst of a rapidly industrializing nation. Associated with nostalgia, beauty, fantasy, and longing, Talashkino was highly desirable yet fundamentally unreal. This fairy- tale island of culture existed in striking contrast to the impoverished and underdeveloped mainland of provincial Russia, and the princess admitted as much: “One feels somehow guilty to live in our cultured Talashkino in finery and prosperity and to endure indifferently the dirt and ignorance and impenetrable darkness everywhere around.”16 As much as Tenisheva explicitly intended to revive the genuine national culture of the peasantry, statements like this one implicitly equate the peasantry with backwardness. The narod in her account is the opposite of the “cultured layer of society” (kul’turnyi sloi obshchestva): the bearers of the precious vernacular tradition that she worked so hard to emulate in Talashkino are still the dirty and uncultured masses. The contradiction in this statement helps explain the main paradox of Talashkino: on the one hand, it existed to preserve tradition; on the other, that tradition first needed to be created and refined. Talashkino then was a center of refined peasant culture, a museum version of a tradition that, in its everyday guise, was interpreted as actually lacking the very culture that was being rescued from oblivion. If the whole imperative of the national revival was to bring traditional handicrafts back into daily use, the form in which they returned—purposefully crude, uncomfortable, and impracticable for use in everyday environment—was fit only for museum display. Tenisheva also referred to Talashkino as “an oasis of culture” (kul’turnyi



katia dianina

ochag). Lamenting the collapse of her artists’ colony under the storm of revolutionary changes, she writes: “Criminals, criminals. . . . Blind, unscrupulous people. . . . And they are those who advocate for the people, scream about the benefit of the people—and then destroy with light heart what little, what rare oases of culture, that the isolated hard efforts of individual persons have created. They destroy what has been done for those people with love, initiative, and big monetary expenditures. But they themselves, what can they give to the people? And do they really love the people . . . ”17 Tenisheva tried to restore her “oasis of culture” in emigration, establishing “a small Talashkino” in 1920–28 near Paris where she set up a workshop for enamel and inlaying, which she made her specialty. But much as it could satisfy the princess’s private ambitions, the Parisian version of the Russian fairy- tale kingdom remained a local phenomenon, well regarded in artistic circles but not widely known beyond. A “fairy- tale kingdom,” an island of antiquity, “an oasis of culture”—all these metaphors point to Talashkino’s special but separate status, its essential disconnect from the rest of society, which the estate maintained even at the time when the workshops were operating successfully. Somehow any bridges with the mainland that Tenisheva attempted to put up didn’t hold. Several contemporaries were keen to expose the unfeasibility of Tenisheva’s undertaking in Talashkino fairly early. Alexander Benois, whom Tenisheva employed in the mid- 1890s as a curator for her growing collection and a consultant was, for instance, frankly skeptical of Tenisheva’s determination to refine the national style in Talashkino: “The Princess herself at that time turned entirely to a new idea: the creation of an art center on her estate that would help create the notorious [preslovutyi ] national style. Much like all other similar amateur undertakings this one was also destined to fail. Style, and especially one meant to express the very soul of the people, does not depend on the good intentions of separate persons, but forms on its own following only some mysterious organic laws.”18 In his introduction to the Talashkino catalog, which Tenisheva commissioned in 1905, S. K. Makovskii, too, underscored the lack of viability of fancy objects in the antiquated style in the modern age, pointing that they could only remain curious collectible toys.19 The predicament of the museum island Talashkino was that it could not integrate into the modern environment and thus remained merely a souvenir of Russian antiquity. In contrast to Europe, where Talashkino’s wares were in demand and where several exhibitions and sales that Tenisheva organized enjoyed unprecedented success, the public’s response to Tenisheva’s undertakings in Russia was lukewarm at best. While in Talashkino proper, multifarious activities were in full swing, Tenisheva’s forays into the larger

an island of antiquity



cultural sphere in Russia inevitably brought disappointing results, be it in the form of a poorly attended exhibition or a failed retail store. For beyond the controlled fairy- tale zone of her estate and the narrow artistic circles, this special “oasis of culture” was largely invisible to much of Russia. For instance, in December 1901, Tenisheva organized an exhibition of handicrafts from her Talashkino workshops in the regional center, Smolensk. She put on display the best of her students’ works: embroidery, benches, pipes, balalaikas, frames, towels, and sleds, decorated with fancy carving and painting. Despite the minimal price of admission (ten kopeks), not more than fifty visitors attended the exhibition in the course of an entire month. In her memoirs, Tenisheva openly admits to this public failure: “Overall our objects did not cause exaltation but only silent surprise, which we were unsure how to interpret: as a sign of recognition or denial of this sort of production, an indication of sympathy or reproach.”20 The one capacity in which Talashkino became the talk of the nation was as an object of controversy. It was on account of a public scandal, in which Tenisheva’s Russian Antiquity Museum was implicated, that Talashkino made headlines several years after the failed exhibition. In a noble gesture, Tenisheva wanted to donate her museum to the city of Smolensk, but found the city authorities reluctant to accept her charity, the sole purpose of which was, in Tenisheva’s words, to bequeath to her motherland a serious collection, recognized by the European press as “the pride of the Russian people.”21 Instead, Tenisheva’s name got entangled in a spiteful, protracted, and petty public exchange with one military investigator (voennyi sledovatel’ ), Aleksandr Vladimirovich Zhirkevich, who accused the princess of pilfering some “sacred relics” from a local church and placing them in her museum. Responding to Zhirkevich’s many accusations, Tenisheva published an open letter in the newspaper Rus’, which was reprinted in the local Smolensk Herald (Smolenskii vestnik). Among other things, it said: “Vituperating at me, Mr. Zhirkevich is trying to accuse me of all but sacrilege. The purchase of Orthodox antiquity for the sake of its preservation is sacrilege. But then I would like to know the origins and contents of the collections of the Moscow Historical Museum, the Museum of Alexander III (the Christian department), the Tretiakov Gallery (the department of icons), as well as Stroganov’s and Shchukin’s in Moscow?”22 The public exchange with Zhirkevich, which culminated in a series of trials, lasted several years. Tenisheva described the ordeal in painful detail: “And so for the duration of two years, there was not a single newspaper, from the extreme left to the extreme right, to say nothing of the periodical journals, which would not heap the crudest slander and the most unceremonious accusations on me, distorting, falsifying, and confusing facts beyond repair.”23



katia dianina

Tenisheva was keen to observe that the scandal grew like a snowball, with layer upon layer of sensational slander adding to its size as it moved from one periodical to the next. And this was the image of Princess Tenisheva and her collecting efforts that the Russian general public got to know. In early 1909, Tenisheva wrote to Roerich, commenting on Zhirkevich’s decision to sue her: “You cannot imagine how much this man has frayed my nerves and soul, how many wrongs I have suffered from him, entirely undeserved and unfair ones. I’ve racked my brain entirely trying to figure out how to get rid of this noxious pestering fly; tried to stay quiet, tried to retort.”24 Several of Tenisheva’s supporters joined the debate, including E. K.  Sviatopolk- Chervertinskaia, who defended Tenisheva in the newspaper Rus’; N. Shigaleev, who published an interview with Tenisheva in the newspaper Word (Slovo); I. F. Barshchevskii whose open letter appeared in Russian Land (Russkaia zemlia); and A. I. Elishev, who wrote a large article for the newspaper Russia (Rossiia), “How they drive out people from Russia” (Kak vyzhivaiut liudei iz Rossii). Roerich likewise responded in defense of the princess with an article called “The Golgotha of the Arts” (Golgofa iskusstva). What Tenisheva found to be particularly painful was that Zhirkevich openly recommended that the citizens of Smolensk decline Tenisheva’s gift of the Russian Antiquity Museum. Tenisheva hoped that the public would rise to her defense and respond. But she was bitterly disappointed: “In vain did I wait for this word, but nobody thought about it, nobody expressed the slightest sympathy. Then having taken offence at the residents of Smolensk, I myself responded in one of the newspapers that if Smolensk did not need my museum, I could always find somewhere else to place it.”25 Indeed, several people and institutions, both in Russia and abroad, expressed strong interest in Russian Antiquity. Despite lucrative offers, however, the patriotic princess was reluctant to let her collection leave Russia for good. It was not until 1911 that Tenisheva’s gift was accepted on her conditions by the Smolensk branch of Moscow Archaeological Society. One reviewer chided the local Smolensk authorities for their lack of culture: “Princess M. K. Tenisheva’s name will assume, of course, a place of honor in the history of Russian culture and art, and the city of Smolensk’s behavior will forever remain an anecdotal example of how cultured contemporary Russia actually is.”26 In celebration of the museum’s opening, I. F.  Barshchevskii, who was in charge of Tenisheva’s museum, prepared a speech, which underscored the importance of such an institution for education and the development of patriotism among the general public. The museum comes across in Barshchevskii’s presentation as a treasure-house of precious

an island of antiquity



objects that tells visitors about “the level of Russian people’s culture” and acquaints them with the era in history when Russians “took pride in being Russian.”27 Barshchevskii’s laudatory speech was never published, however. Among the few publicly available impartial evaluations of the museum was A. Rostislavov’s article in Bygone Years (Starye gody), in which the author appreciated the collection as rich, solid, and “saturated with real artistry.”28 Tenisheva’s most loyal supporter was probably Roerich, who referred to her respectfully as “the creator and the gatherer” (sozdatel’nitsa i sobiratel’nitsa). Against a trickle of now more, now less favorable critical reviews, scandal invariably drew attention to Tenisheva and her multifarious charitable activities. Not that the princess herself provoked scandal; in many regards, she was a follower rather than a trendsetter in radical developments on the art scene. But one way or another, she was implicated in several conspicuous controversies in the Russian art world around the turn of the century. The prolonged exchange with Zhirkevich and the series of trials that followed were some ways in which Tenisheva and her passion for collecting figured in the Russian public sphere; others were the scandalous caricatures that appeared in the St. Petersburg journal The Jester (Shut) mocking her ill- famed association with the World of Art group. A lot has been written about Tenisheva’s connection with the World of Art group, both by contemporaries and modern scholars. Tenisheva subsidized the journal World of Art in its first year jointly with Mamontov whose artists’ colony Abramtsevo the journal promoted in several of its early issues. Tenisheva’s only return, however, was public disgrace, when a drawing by Pavel Shcherbov representing the princess as a cow milked by Sergei Diaghilev was published in the satirical monthly The Jester (figure 17). This caricature, called “The Idyll” and featuring, in addition to Tenisheva and Diaghilev, other key players in the World of Art group, became instantly famous. Contemporaries could easily read the story enciphered in this piece of graphic art: Tenisheva- the- cow and Diaghilev- the- milkmaid are represented as surrounded by the latter’s associates—D. V. Filosofov, M. V. Nesterov with embroidery, and L. S. Bakst- the- cockerel—as well as the veteran artist Ilya Repin, who initially collaborated with the World of Art group, hurrying to deliver the laurel wreath to the cow. The company is positioned against a background stylized in the manner of the journal World of Art’s cover. In the background, one finds a mammoth (an allusion to Mamontov) and two Finns drinking beer (an allusion to Diaghilev’s debut, the exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists). Art critic Vladimir Stasov, for one, was positively ecstatic about this masterpiece of graphic art. In his letter to Shcherbov in March 1899 he wrote: “Such a caricature is one hundred times more important than any articles against the decadents.



katia dianina

Figure 17. P. E. Shcherbov, “The Idyll” (Idilliia), Shut, no. 13 (1899).

This is real hydrocyanic acid [sinil’naia kislota], which kills like a burst of thunder!”29 This is when Princess Tenisheva acquired the reputation of “the mother of decadence” (mat’ dekadentstva). In another caricature titled “Salzburg,” Shcherbov represented Tenisheva as dressed in scruffy peasant clothes, bargaining with Diaghilev over an old rag (figure 18). This drawing alludes to the 1898 exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists organized by Diaghilev, which took place in the part of St. Petersburg known as the “salt city” (solianoi gorodok), or Salzburg in German. The numbered items among scattered debris correspond to the artworks from the exhibition listed in the catalog. The rag that the dirty baba (Tenisheva) considers is Mikhail Vrubel’s panel “The Morning.” If any ambiguity remained as to how this drawing should be read, Stasov dispelled it by spelling out that the “junk” for sale in the caricature represented “paintings in the style of manure and decadence” (kartiny navoznogo i dekadentskogo stilia).30 Art represented as junk compromised the aesthetic judgment of the buyer as much as it called into question the exhibitor’s talent. Benois, who played a key role in organizing Tenisheva’s personal collection of watercolors, was concerned about how this brilliant but admittedly sordid caricature might affect the princess, who took her “mission to advance the new Russian art” very seriously.31 Tenisheva’s feelings were certainly hurt. To judge by her memoirs, however, it almost appears as if

an island of antiquity



Figure 18. P. E. Shcherbov, “Salzburg,” Shut, no. 6 (1898).

Tenisheva emerged unscathed from this public disgrace. This is how she recorded the scandalous episode: At the exhibition, by the way, figured a large panel by Vrubel “The Mermaids.” Knowing society’s unfriendly attitude to Vrubel, especially the Itinerants’ hostility, knowing how much grief and unfairness this man has suffered and how badly off he was, I acquired this panel, having a suitable place in my house for it. But at the same time, the World of Art was received so belligerently, that even this acquisition of mine was confronted with a whole gauntlet of troubles. All this found reflection in the most sordid caricatures by Shcherbov, who worked for The Dragonfly. They say, he was looking for me everywhere to paint a life drawing [s natury], but since he didn’t chance to meet me, he always represented me from the back or allegorically.32

These are just a few accounts of one incident. The subjective nature of the memoirs, coupled with the exaggerated opinions of tempestuous critics, such as Stasov, produce a skewed picture. As the point of view shifts from one version to the next, an element of fiction in these stories and the basic unreliability of their narrators become apparent. What we have is the plurality of opinions that were available to contemporaries and that multiplied over time, when reminiscences and retrospective surveys joined contemporary newspaper reviews. And this is how Talashkino was present



katia dianina

in the Russian public sphere: as a bundle of contradictory, often scandalous utterances. It was in Europe that Princess Tenisheva made a name and her Talashkino gained its reputation as one of the best known national revival centers. During her first temporary exile in Paris (1905–8), Tenisheva put on display in 1907 some of the treasures from her Russian Antiquity Museum in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, where the exhibition enjoyed great success, attracting seventy- eight thousand visitors during the five months of its operation.33 Summarizing the unequivocally favorable reception of her collections and her art abroad Tenisheva noted that a whole guestbook could be compiled of the positive reviews that the French, the English, and the Czechs had authored. The princess reflected on her success in Europe: “I’m happy and proud that it fell to my lot to introduce our antiquity, our art to the West, to show that we had a touching and magnificent past.”34 But she never tired of emphasizing that her ultimate ambition was to be of service to Russia. In one letter to Roerich, for instance, Tenisheva lamented what she called the “criminal disregard for everything national” among “supposedly cultured” society in Russia: its members loved everything Western but were absolutely clueless about their national heritage.35 If domestic accounts of Talashkino reeked of scandal, in Europe, the rhetoric of fortuitous discovery permeated critical reviews. Thus one critic observed: “Russian plastic art, as well as Russian music, today turns towards the past, so rich in wonders, and on which the very soul of the people sets a most individual and original seal.”36 K. R. Cain noted the return of the “lost magic.” Drawing on the familiar romantic assumption that folk art expresses the spirit of the nation, the critic wrote: “Few things are more intimately expressive of the inner life and ideals of a nation than the art of its peasant people.” 37 Fortuitous discovery was also a prominent leitmotif running through much of this exalted writing, according to which a country with no artistic tradition to call its own, suddenly discovered a distinct cultural identity in the art of its own peasantry. C. de Danilovicz explained the “miracle”: “Towards the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to ethnographical researches, thanks to the birth of a truly nationalist artistic movement, exempt, however, from all trace of Chauvinism, this great truth was, so to speak, discovered that Russia has not the least need to seek her inspiration from the Occident, that without going to make her pious genuflexions . . . she can live and prosper artistically on the immense capital bequeathed her by past centuries.”38 Sudden as the discovery of this “immense capital” was, it was represented as part of an organic life cycle, thus the imagery of natural wonders, like the rebirth of spring and the reawakening of the nation.



an island of antiquity

Foreign reviewers didn’t fail to notice the studied naïveté of the Talashkino wares, but unlike critics at home, they celebrated the primitive exotica of the Russian tradition: “The objection has often been raised that ornamentation, drawn in part from the actual sources of peasant art, and in part from the rare remains of the ornamental art of past centuries, gave an almost barbaric note to the productions of the Talashkino ateliers. Yes, if you will, there is a stammering essay at speech, but it is a stammering in which the spelled- out sentences have the spontaneity and frankness of those melodies, of those poems of the people, in which the soul of the race perpetuates itself.”39 The overall effect that we glean from foreign reviews can be summarized as the poetic charm of Russian barbarity. Shortly thereafter, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes rode to fame and fortune on this same wave of appreciation for Russian exotica. ——— Remembrance of Talashkino in Russia and abroad cannot be more different. Change of location (between Talashkino, Smolensk, Moscow, and Paris) accounts for fluctuating interest in Russian folk arts. The case of Talashkino also demonstrates the unease with which provincial museums and other sites of culture on the periphery entered the Russian public sphere. Shifts in aesthetic taste and timing in general should also be taken into consideration. By the time Tenisheva’s Talashkino began producing handicrafts, the revival was no longer big news in Russia, and the Russian style was everywhere, in public architecture as well as on exhibition and shop floors. Moreover, the prerevolutionary years, which brought turmoil to Tenisheva’s fairy- tale kingdom and forced the premature closure of her workshops, were a difficult time in which to preserve anything, let alone antiquity. Gender stereotypes obviously played a big role in the Talashkino scenario, too. For instance, contemporaries often blamed Tenisheva’s “difficult character” for the strange place that Talashkino came to occupy in the Russian public sphere. This is how Repin, who painted her many times, described her willful personality: “She herself would love to seize the entire world, so that it could sit there quietly on the shelf, ready to be of service to her.”40 Or at the very least, she might fashion the world around her and then put it on display in Talashkino, her personal museum in the open air, for which she was at once director, curator, and audience. The volume of Tenisheva’s memoirs, which reveals a complex and frequently discontent author, does not lend itself to an unambiguous reading either. Indeed, she seems to have alienated many, for a variety of reasons. And many more betrayed her.



katia dianina

Contemporaries as well as modern scholars have also read such stereotypically “feminine” sentiments as jealousy and rivalry with her husband into Tenisheva’s motives for collecting and art patronage. Her memoirs suggest that perhaps indeed such feelings were not foreign to her. A frank desire to prove her husband wrong runs as a leitmotif through her memoirs. Tenisheva’s account of the fate of her collection of watercolors, part of which eventually ended up in the Russian Museum, is a good example. She writes: “My collection of watercolors grew bigger and richer every year, and it was becoming more and more difficult to use. . . . As a practical person, the Prince told me directly that I would never be able to shove [sunut’] anywhere all this ‘rubbish’ that I’ve been collecting, and, if I think that what I do is an investment, then I am greatly mistaken, because I’m made to pay a high price, but I would never be able to find buyers. These words hurt me to the quick, egged me on, and I wanted to prove to my husband that of course I would find where to place it.”41 She was painfully aware of her subordinate role, which she saw as an impediment to her full self- realization. In her memoirs, the contrast between her private ambitions and the conventional role that her husband envisioned for her is telling. “I wanted to become a comrade, a colleague of my husband, his assistant, a like- minded fellow. . . . It seemed to me that I was so strong and so sensible that I could become a good adviser to him.” Despite her numerous attempts to become her husband’s colleague and adviser, all that was expected from her, Tenisheva laments, was to be an elegant salon hostess (nariadnaia khoziaika).42 One cannot help but sympathize with the lot of this woman, who was boxed into her role by social conventions, was hyperconscious of it, and yet helpless to change her fate. Collecting and art patronage afforded Tenisheva an opportunity to fashion an alternate public identity. Scholars have speculated, not without reason, that collecting served as means of self- ennoblement for Tenisheva, who was, after all, an illegitimate child, then a poor bride (bespridannitsa), and then a divorcée. Regarding her motives for art patronage, L. Zhuravleva expressed the accepted view as follows: “Having become a Princess, a rich woman, Tenisheva in the meantime all her life strove to restore her position; they remembered in high society that she was an illegitimate child and a woman who had abandoned her first husband. . . . She had only one way of reaching high status—and that was through engagement in broad social and charitable activities.”43 The idea of self- fashioning via art also finds support in the sheer number of portraits of herself that Tenisheva commissioned. Never satisfied with any of the available images, Tenisheva kept ordering new paintings as if in search of the ideal self, only to be disappointed again and again. In

an island of antiquity



memoirs, she recalls her exasperation following the completion of Valentin Serov’s portrait (1898): it joined the “long sad line of portraits” (grustnaia epopeia portretov) that included works by Ia. Tsionglinskii, A. Kurennoi, A. Sokolov, several canvases by Repin, and a bust by P. Trubetskoi, which cost her four thousand rubles and incurred the wrath of her husband. She notes: “But how was I myself supposed to feel when, after all this misery of posing, after all the endless tortures, expenses, and sacrifices, I did not get a single even passable portrait. This was positively outrageous.”44 Tenisheva however was hardly the first or only woman to pursue art patronage, nor was her multifarious activity particularly controversial. Catherine the Great, to take one prominent example, had used her massive collection of Western European art at the Hermitage as a means of self- validation in the capacity of a legitimate and enlightened ruler. Elizaveta Mamontova, Tenisheva’s immediate predecessor, ran the Abramstevo workshops and estate very successfully, and the Abramtsevo shop in Moscow made a profit. It is true that, unlike these two other women collectors, Tenisheva didn’t enjoy either unlimited power or the unconditional support of her spouse, which made a great difference. At the same time, by the end of the nineteenth century, more and more women were entering professions and undertaking activities previously reserved only for men, be it medicine or terrorism: art patronage was far from the most extreme occupation that a woman could engage in. In other words, Tenisheva’s project in Talashkino, placed against the background of the well- established tradition of women patronizing literary salons and the arts, in Russia as well as abroad, was useful, admirable, but in no sense exceptional. It was society’s response to her many charitable pursuits that was extreme. Tenisheva herself clearly blamed Russian society, which wasn’t ready to take the woman patron and collector seriously. “My God, how hard it is for a woman to do anything on her own. She is blamed for everything, her every step is misinterpreted; anyone can judge her, accuse her, and insult her without punishment. And especially if this woman ventures to create something of her own. No matter how noble her goals might be, no matter what the results of her activity—even a lazy person considers it his duty to throw stones at her.”45 Indeed, the Russian general public was not particularly receptive to innovation and originality, as Makovskii, who in 1905 compiled a deluxe catalog to publicize the Talashkino workshops, observed. “In Russia, one needs to have extraordinary power to deliver one’s talent to the treasury [sokrovishchnitsa] of native culture. That’s why it is buried in the ground so often. The best efforts at creativity are marked by malicious laughter here. And in this way the ‘Russian decadence’ of Talashkino was ridiculed too.” Makovskii concluded that Talashkino remained on the margins of culture



katia dianina

because the Russian “middle,” or the general public, could not stand anything exceptional and instinctively shied away from it.46 Moreover, the efforts of a noble amateur didn’t meet with much sympathy in society in the context of the professionalization of the arts and the proliferation of critical art discourse. Benois, for instance, makes a straightforward observation that the princess was eager to “earn the noble glory of the patron of the arts,” but lacked the competence and experience to do so on her own. Thus she hired Benois to systematize and further develop her collections, which consisted of mass acquisitions purchased yearly at watercolor exhibitions. Benois admitted that he wanted to influence Tenisheva’s choices and did not hesitate to suggest purchases that reflected his own preferences and probably spent as much time and effort on acquisitions as the princess did. Benois also insinuates that the initiative actually belonged to Tenisheva’s close friend, Princess Sviatopolk- Chetvertinskaia, who preferred to stay in the background and shied away from demonstrating her knowledge and expertise in collecting.47 The resultant collection reflected the different tastes and opinions of the owner and her advisers. Thus Tretiakov, who viewed Tenisheva’s collection of watercolors more than once and possibly considered buying it, thought that the collection was somehow incomplete and lacked a distinct “physiognomy.”48 Tenisheva’s amateur enthusiasm looked especially misguided next to young and ambitious people from the World of Art group, who deemed themselves experts and with whom the princess associated as one of the primary sponsors of the new art journal. Benois recalls that Tenisheva wanted to “personally” (his emphasis) participate in the production of the World of Art journal: “She was incidentally taken by the idea to create a cover [for the journal] and she spent several hours a day in the room that served as her workshop searching for a composition that would express the main goal of the edition. But poor Mariia Klavdievna never earned the honor to contribute to her own journal. Serezha [Diaghilev] mercilessly and irrevocably dismissed this effort and, one must say, he was absolutely right.”49 In yet another reversal of fortune, Tenisheva, who was never allowed to contribute to the World of Art, was nevertheless fully implicated in its scandalous reputation, since her name appeared in every advertisement for the new journal. In Benois’s memoirs, Tenisheva comes across as a misguided collector and an unfortunate casualty of public taste. Thus in preparation for her first exhibition in late 1896, Tenisheva insisted on displaying as many items as possible, instead of selecting for the show the best examples from the collection, as Benois had advised her. As a result, and despite the elegant catalog prepared, again, by Benois, the reception of the exhibition was lukewarm at best. Benois was sincerely sympathetic to her fiasco: “Unfortunately, poor

an island of antiquity



Mariia Klavdievna was not destined to reap the success that she had expected. The exhibition, which occupied the whole bottom part of a large two- tier hall, turned out fairly impressive, and a fair number of invited visitors gathered for the opening, including some of their ‘highnesses,’ but broad masses of the public considered it with utter indifference—overall, the exhibition went simply unnoticed.”50 Nor did Tenisheva succeed in organizing a viable outlet in Moscow for the realization of handicrafts produced at Talashkino. Her shop the Wellspring, which offered for sale a great variety of peasants’ art handicrafts, including lace collars, tea cloths, doilies, birch- bark frames and boxes, peasant costumes, carved wood cabinets, and sledges, didn’t thrive and soon had to be closed due to mismanagement.51 Tenisheva narrates this sad episode, full of betrayal and the dishonesty of others, with great disappointment and pain. Although in the capital cities handicrafts from Talashkino were received with more interest than in Smolensk, these few examples of a positive reception paled in comparison with the abundance of negative publicity that this major site of a national culture revival experienced in the popular press. Arguably, Talashkino also stood apart from similar centers for the revival of folk arts and crafts because it was less dependent on the market than other outlets for handicrafts. Financial solvency was not an issue at Talashkino, which remained estranged from the network of monetary operations on the mainland. Significantly, Maliutin, the creator of colorful Teremok and other fairy- tale landmarks on the estate, was not a guest at Talashkino but a salaried artist in residence. Aside from Maliutin, several other professionals worked alongside Tenisheva in Talashkino. Archaeologist V. I. Sizov, art historian A. V. Prakhov, and photographer I. F. Barshchevskii assisted the princess in turning her collection of antiquities into a modern museum. If her management skills proved poor in the case of the Wellspring, her career as a creative artist was forgotten entirely in Russia: her compatriots never accepted her as a professional artist. By contrast, in Europe she was recognized as a major specialist in enamel, and in the last decade of her life, she exhibited her enamels with much success in Paris, Rome, and Prague. It was also in Prague that her dissertation, Enamel and Incrustation, which she defended in 1916, was published posthumously in 1930.52 Tenisheva compared the position of the amateur artist in Russian and abroad: An artist or a woman artist, who has the means and belongs to a certain milieu, is recognized abroad both by society and the art world. But in Russia, unfortunately, artistic circles are hostile to people coming from a different milieu, especially wealthy people, and especially women. A society woman has a very hard time creating a name for herself, break-



katia dianina

ing through the layer of indifference, discrimination or visible aversion. People look at her as a conceited petty tyrant [tshcheslavnaia samodurka] or else suspect that her work is done by others. And in her own milieu she passes for an oddball, an eccentric, wishing to pose; here they do not forgive her endeavors and judge her much more strictly than regular professionals.53

Tenisheva is understandably bitter about the disregard for her artistic and charitable activities that she faced in Russia. But one also gets a sense that her voice did not harmonize with the time. For instance, she criticizes the upper echelons of Russian society for neglecting the fine arts and insists indignantly that an open disregard for all things Russian still rules the scene. One cannot help but question such an observation, made after the national idea in the arts had manifested itself time and again, in the Tretiakov Gallery, at Mamontov’s Abramtsevo, at the costume balls in the style à la russe, not to mention the international triumph of the Ballets Russes. Tenisheva goes on to admit sarcastically that ballet is the only art of distinction in Russia, though she does so only to hint at some dubious “real” reasons for its popularity.54 What should we make of her claim that she was the first to recognize the unique value of the Russian style? “I had long hoped to implement another idea in Talashkino. The Russian style, as it had been understood previously, was forgotten entirely. Everybody looked at it as something antiquated, dead, incapable of resurrection and without any place in contemporary art.”55 By the time architectural landmarks were designed and built in Talashkino, the Russian style was so widespread as to border on a cliché. Here, too, her voice sounds out of sync with the critical discourse that had been going on in the public sphere for the past few decades. At a time when even mass newspapers had written for years about the return of Russian antiquity, Tenisheva’s claim to having made a new discovery could not have been taken seriously. Although her love of Russian art is deeply felt and sincere, her statements about it were not part of professional or semiprofessional discourse. And this is the main reason, I would like to suggest, why Tenisheva and her island of antiquity in Talashkino remained estranged from the Russian public sphere a century ago. ——— The contemporary press was the factor that influenced the fate of Talashkino the most; it was also the least subject to reason or to Tenisheva’s control. Her gender combined with ambition and visibility made her an easy

an island of antiquity



target for attacks in the press. Even then, the amount of public controversy that surrounded this woman was excessive, considering that her collecting was not controversial per se. Of course, Tenisheva was hardly the only one to come under attack in the popular press. Let’s return to Shcherbov’s caricatures for a moment. The images of the veteran art critic Stasov with his ridiculous trombone and bast shoes or the revolutionary World of Art impresario Diaghilev in ballet slippers and tutu—and this is precisely how Shcherbov represented them—may have also appeared offensive, but both of these men seemed to know the unwritten rules of public discourse and used even the ill fame with which they disgraced each other to attract attention and support to their respective causes. Filosofov reminisced, for instance, that Stasov actually liked to read defamations in the press and then contemplate elaborate rebuttals to his offenders. It was as if to handle the attacks of the contemporary press one needed to speak the same language. Since public debates about art had become a steady presence in the popular press beginning in the 1860s, a common practice for mediating them had emerged, which called for a highly opinionated, loud, and aggressive dialogue. Tenisheva’s habitual defensiveness, as well as her poorly concealed hurt feelings, only excited her critics and invited further attacks on her undertakings as being incomplete, misguided, or ill- used. The rhetoric of self- vindication, so apparent in her memoirs, seethes through public statements as well; it was as if, with her every word, she wanted to rehabilitate her reputation. The press thrived on Tenisheva’s vulnerability and her recurring attempts to justify her motives and actions. Thus we have a paradoxical scenario according to which, even as Tenisheva’s name circulated widely in a variety of contexts, the fairy- tale kingdom that she ostensibly cultivated for the benefit of her country remained estranged from Russian public life. In the final analysis, as much as Princess Tenisheva succeeded in fashioning and advertising the oasis of Russian antiquity in Talashkino, she could not control the discourse in the fickle popular press, which cast a shadow of doubt on many of her noble undertakings. The double life of Talashkino in the imperial period reveals the ability of what passed for public opinion to influence the fate of cultural monuments. Recent restoration activities, coupled with public recognition in Smolensk and beyond, as well as the upsurge of scholarly interest—all this leads one to believe that Talashkino is finally beginning to turn into the public site of culture that Tenisheva envisioned more than a century ago. Indeed, Talashkino seems to have finally found a meaningful resonance in post- Soviet Russia, and the attitudes toward women patrons have changed as well. As modern journalists, specialists, and activists create new layers of meaning and fashion a



katia dianina

new reputation for Talashkino and its noble hostess, they help build a permanent bridge between this fairy- tale island of Russian antiquity and the post- Soviet mainland, where the quest for cultural identity is as pressing as ever. Importantly, the place itself and many material artifacts belonging to it have endured despite calamities of the previous century. But unlike physical objects on museum display, memories about them change with each new interpretive community. Commemorative rites anchor these interpretations and initiate the newly fashioned tradition of remembering. Now that Tenisheva is celebrated as a national hero and her Talashkino is recognized as a sacred site of culture, tributes to her proliferate, as evidenced by yet another monument to Tenisheva, this time with her husband, planned to be unveiled in conjunction with Smolensk’s 1,150th anniversary. Each new public site of memory grounds the heritage of Mariia Tenisheva, previously dispersed abroad, in the local context. The celebratory discourse accompanying these exhibitions and monuments helps rewrite the century of forgetting and bring Tenisheva and her Talashkino home. It is as part of this novel tradition that Tenisheva—a fondly remembered public figure today—leisurely strolls among locals and visitors to her island of antiquity, seemingly forever, the way that the 2008 Talashkino monument represents her. Tenisheva’s permanent place in the pantheon of national heroes of culture depends on the persistence of this memory.

Notes 1. The epigraph to this essay is cited in L. Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva (Smolensk: Poligramma, 1994), 256. L. Zhuravleva published extensively on different aspects of Tenisheva’s life and art. Her publications include Teremok (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1974), “Pridite i vladeite mudrye—” (Smolensk: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990), Talashkino: Ocherk- putevoditel’ (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1989), Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva (Smolensk: Smolenskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut imeni K. Marksa, 1992), and Tenishevskii muzei “Russkaia starina” (Smolensk: [n.p.], 1998). See also A. I. Frolov, “Mariia Tenisheva,” in Osnovateli rossiiskikh muzeev (Moscow: RGGU, 1991), 62–79; A. A. Aronov, “Mariia Klavdievna Tenisheva (1867–1928),” in Zolotoi vek russkogo metsenatstva (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta kul’tury, 1995), 56–77. 2. Irina Verkhovskaia, “Sobranie kniagini M. K. Tenishevoi,” in Sobranie kniagini M. K. Tenishevoi: K 110- letiiu Russkogo muzeia (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2008), 6. 3. See the catalog issued in conjunction with this exhibition, Sobranie kniagini M. K. Tenishevoi: K 110- letiiu Russkogo muzeia (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2008). 4. This exhibition operated between June 24 and September 15, 2008. It was organized in conjunction with 125th anniversary of the State Historical Museum. See

an island of antiquity



also the exhibition catalog, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva v zerkale Serebrianogo veka (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei, 2008). 5. The bronze figure of Tenisheva (figure 15) was created by sculptor Liudmila El’chaninova and was unveiled on June 21, 2008, in Flenovo. 6. Programma etnograficheskikh svedenii o krest’ianakh Tsentral’noi Rossii: Sostavlennaia na osnovanii soobrazhenii, izlozhennykh v knige V. N. Tenisheva “Deiatel’nost’ cheloveka,” kniazem V. N. Tenishevym pri uchastii gg. V. N. Dobrovol’skogo i A. F. Bulgakova (Smolensk: Gubernskaia tipografiia, 1897). See also B. M. Firsov and I. G. Kiseleva, Byt velikorusskikh krest’ian- zemlepashtsev: Opisanie materialov etnograficheskogo biuro kniazia V. N. Tenisheva (na primere Vladimirskoi gubernii) (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo doma, 1993). 7. As Salmond points out, “These Talashkino balalaikas received added publicity from the presence in Paris of Andreev’s Great- Russian Balalaika Orchestra, which Princess Tenisheva patronized and promoted.” Wendy R. Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117. 8. Mariia Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia moei zhizni (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2006), 362. 9. Dzhesko Ozer [ Jesco Oser], Mir emalei kniagini Marii Tenishevoi [Princess Maria Tenisheva and Her World of Enamels] (Moscow: [n.p.], 2004), 34. 10. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 362. 11. Ibid., 378. 12. Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia, 142. 13. Nikolai Medvedev, “‘Novyi Akropol’’: Volonterskii desant v Talashkino,” “Rabochii put’”: Smolenskaia obshchestvenno- politicheskaia gazeta, no. 166 (24035), July 24, 2003. 14. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 226. 15. N. Breshko- Breshkovskii, “V skazochmon tsarstve,” Novyi mir 23 (1905). 16. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 214. 17. Ibid., 344–45. 18. Alexandre Benois, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 197. 19. S. K. Makovskii, Talashkino: Izdeliia masterskikh kn. M. Kl. Tenishevoi (St. Petersburg: Sodruzhestvo, 1905), 54. 20. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 234. In a rhetorical maneuver fairly typical for her reminiscences, following this account, she adds that soon Talashkino works attracted the attention of art critics and were reproduced in the World of Art and in foreign art journals as well. 21. Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 305. For more on the museum, including a description of its original ample holdings in 1911, see her Tenishevskii muzei “Russkaia starina.” 22. Kniaginia M. K. Tenisheva, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Smolenskii vestnik, no. 239 (October  12, 1907). For more on this exchange, see A. Zhirkevich, “K voprosu o smolenskom tserkovno- istoricheskom muzee i sobornoi riznitse (pis’mo v redaktsiiu),” Smolenskii vestnik, no. 193 (August 15, 1907); S. T- v, “Pis’mo kn. Tenishevoi,” Smolenskii vestnik, no. 233 (October 5, 1907); A. Zhirkevich, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Smolenskii vestnik, no. 234 (October 8, 1907). See also Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 251–56.



katia dianina

23. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 377. 24. As cited in Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 253–54. 25. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 377–78. 26. A. Rostislavov, “O tenishevskom muzee,” Starye gody, July–September 1911, 202–3. 27. I. F. Barshchevskii, “K otkrytiiu muzeia kniagini Tenishevoi,” in Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva v zerkale Serebrianogo veka (Moscow: GIM, 2008), 150–53. 28. Rostislavov, “O tenishevskom muzee,” 202. 29. As cited in A. Savinov, Pavel Egorovich Shcherbov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1969), 72. 30. Ibid., 58. 31. Benois, Moi vospominaniia, vol. 2, 189. 32. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 244. Note the discrepancy in details, including the titles of the painting and the journal. 33. The exhibition “Objets d’art russes anciens faisant partie des collections de la Princesse Marie Tenichév exposés au muse des arts décoratifs” took place May 10– October 10, 1907. Ozer, Mir emalei kniagini Marii Tenishevoi, 33. 34. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 366. 35. As cited in Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 243. 36. C. De Danilovicz, “Talashkino: Princess Tenishef ’s School of Russian Applied Art,” International Studio 32, no. 126 (August 1907): 135. 37. K. R. Cain, “Talachino [sic]: A Home for Russian Folk Art,” Craftsman 27, no. 1 (October 1914): 95–96, 92. 38. De Danilovicz, “Talashkino,” 135–39. 39. Ibid. 40. As cited in Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 110. 41. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 201–4. 42. Ibid., 237. 43. Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 49. 44. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 248. K. Korovin also painted Tenisheva’s portrait (1899), as did Vrubel’ (1899). 45. Ibid., 291. 46. Makovskii, Talashkino, 64–65. 47. Benois, Moi vospominaniia, vol. 2, 193, 52–53. 48. As cited in Zhuravleva, Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva, 114. 49. Benois, Moi vospominaniia, vol. 2, 210. 50. Ibid., 161. 51. “Rodnik”: Khudozhestvennye krest’ianskie izdeliia (Moscow, 1903). 52. M. K. Tenisheva, Emal’ i inkrustatsiia (Prague: Seminarium kondakovianum, 1930). 53. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniia, 275. 54. Ibid., 400–402. 55. Ibid., 225.

From Lenin’s Tomb to Avtovo Station: Illusion and Spectacle in Soviet Subterranean Space Julia Bekman Chadaga

How do our material surroundings correspond to and shape the world of ideas, our beliefs, and our behavior? This question is particularly interesting to ask about the Soviet period from the 1920s through the beginning of the Thaw. Architecture played a prominent role in the culture of that time, and such rhetorical constructions as “building socialism” and “living in Communism” were once prevalent ways to imagine the goal for which the party was striving.1 This essay focuses on glass as a specific type of building material and shows how it was used, for both pragmatic and symbolic ends, by those who strove to literally build Communism. In the years of Stalin’s ascendancy and rule, the Soviet state put glass to strategic use in settings from the sublime to the subterranean. Key examples of the former are the spire of Moscow State University—a mirror made of yellow glass and aluminum that resembles gold when it catches the sun; and the Kremlin stars—gigantic lamps of ruby- red glass.2 This essay, however, examines two underground interiors—Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow, and Avtovo metro station in Leningrad—and considers how glass was implicated in the complex commemorative practices that unfolded within these spaces. In each case, the presence of glass transformed the interior into a spectacular space and a setting for ritualized behavior. Glass enabled the symbolically rich interplay of light and darkness that helped to invest these spaces with communal value and meaning. While the com



julia bekman chadaga

memorative function of Lenin’s tomb is apparent, that of the metro station requires explanation. The grand opening of the Avtovo station was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the October Revolution; the glass columns of Avtovo were built to honor Leningrad’s survival of the siege, and by extension, the Soviet Union’s hard- won victory in the Second World War. Nowadays, the interior decor of the station also serves to commemorate several turning points in Soviet history that were marked by irrevocable change and utopian longing. The optical properties of glass combined with the magical associations around this material gave rise to the image of glass houses that would transform the consciousness of those who dwelled within and gazed from without, and this image fueled flights of utopian fantasy in the nineteenth century and beyond.3 Nikolai Chernyshevsky embodied this fantasy in the Crystal Palace, indebted stylistically to Fourier’s phalanstery and Paxton’s emporium, at the center of his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? The ideal of the glass house persisted into the twentieth century; thus, in his 1914 manifesto Glass Architecture, German poet Paul Scheerbart argued that replacing brick buildings with glass ones would “improve mankind in ethical respects” and bring about “a paradise on earth.”4 Scheerbart’s contemporaries at home and abroad shared his belief in the transformative potential of glass architecture. In the early Soviet period, constructivist architects championed glass and embraced the idea of engineering bodies and psyches through the (re) built environment; workers would live together in transparent dwellings whose very form symbolized the ideals of openness and democracy, bathed in natural light thanks to the endless expanses of windows.5 But in 1924, the idea of the all- glass house became embodied not in a communal dwelling but in a domicile for one with the construction of Lenin’s glass sarcophagus. In what follows I trace the ideas and desires that informed the creation of this object, identifying the myths it was meant to propagate as well as the discourses and responses that it generated; I then juxtapose it with another example of spectacular glass in an underground interior—the Avtovo station, the last stop on the first line of the Leningrad metro. Today the station remains in a strange half- finished state, its visual style marking the end of Stalinism and the beginning of the Thaw. Lenin’s tomb, opened in 1924, and Avtovo station, unveiled in 1955, are at opposite ends of a thirty- year time line that traces Stalinist illusion- making from its beginnings to its end. The glass decor of Avtovo station created an impression of opulence that was accessible to all Soviet citizens. The press coverage around the grand opening of the new stations stressed that these were “palaces” for everyone, and crystalline Avtovo was the fairest of them all. These palaces, however,

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



were underground; and hence, authorities took pains to reassure the public that these stations did not resemble crypts. A close look at how the Soviet state attempted to tap the ideological potential of spectacular spaces reveals how fraught with anxiety and contradictions this endeavor turned out to be.

Lenin as Sleeping Beauty: The Crystal Coffin Soon after Boris Yeltsin took office in 1991, he vowed to bury the architect of the Bolshevik Revolution; while this promise remained unfulfilled in his lifetime, many in Russia today support his view.6 In 2005, top government official Georgii Poltavchenko raised the idea of removing Lenin’s body from the mausoleum, arguing that as the instigator of strife that tore the country apart, Lenin did not deserve to remain in such a place of honor. Leading cultural figure Nikita Mikhalkov seconded the idea, arguing that “vast funds” should not be squandered “on a pagan show.” In response, Communist leader Gennadii Ziuganov warned that any attempts to bury Lenin would constitute “an attack on our history and culture” and would be met with large- scale civil disobedience. Svetlana Orlova, a Duma deputy speaker, appealed to Lenin’s followers to consider “Lenin’s soul, which has been searching for peace for nearly a century.”7 Two years later, a member of Putin’s administration called for a national referendum on the issue, putting the power ostensibly in the people’s hands.8 And in July 2008, new calls to close the mausoleum came from a movement called Vozvrashchenie—the name evoking a return to wrongly abandoned values, as well as the return of Lenin to the dust whence he came.9 Let us turn now to the glass heart of the mausoleum. In 1924, while embalmers hurried to preserve Lenin’s body, workers fashioned a sarcophagus from the plate-glass window of a restaurant called the Ravine (figure 19).10 In August of that year, Lenin’s body was placed on display, housed underground in a stone mausoleum on Red Square, his incorruptible remains an allusion to the immortality of Soviet power.11 The visibility of Lenin’s unchanged image was crucial to maintaining the Lenin cult that developed in the years that followed. Glass was the essential element in this ideological spectacle. The decision to place Lenin’s body on permanent exhibition stemmed in part from “the overwhelming popular response to Lenin’s lying- in- state,” which took place on January 21, 1924.12 The temperature outside was forty degrees below zero. The Hall of Columns at the Trade Union House was decorated with palm trees; both the trees and Lenin’s body were covered with frost. Despite the bitter cold, visitors flooded in from Russia and abroad to bid farewell to Lenin. A Pravda correspondent depicted vari-



julia bekman chadaga

Figure 19. Konstantin Mel’nikov’s designs for Lenin’s glass sarcophagus. From S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Pionery Sovetskogo Dizaina (Moscow: Galart, 1995).

ous such pilgrims, from a little old man from a pharmaceutical factory to a printing-press operator with his six- year- old son in tow. The last visitor described is a young man who went blind in 1921 when he burned his eyes in an accident at his workplace, a glass factory. He wears blue- tinted spectacles and carefully steps forward, supported by two coworkers, feeling his way with a cane. Someone asks him why he has come—he won’t be able to see anything, so why bother? The blind man pauses to gather his thoughts, then speaks breathlessly, uttering words that could have come from Andrei Platonov’s pen: “Don’t worry, I will see the silence and feel Il’ich. After all, he is my own kin, and though I may be blind I recognize all my kin. Even a blind man can recognize Il’ich.” As the mourners crowd around Lenin, hungrily seeking out a glimpse of him, the blind man circles the coffin and tries to pull apart the scar tissue around his eyes, as if attempting to see. The correspondent concludes his article thus: “But he did manage to say goodbye to Il’ich. The blind man saw Lenin.”13 In this mythmaking reportage, the body of Lenin has already become a wonder- working relic—it restores the blind man’s vision, if only for a moment. Even so soon after Lenin’s death, the official coverage already makes him a saint.

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



As Nina Tumarkin shows, the focal point of the Lenin cult was the leader’s preserved body, which “made him simultaneously a proven saint with visibly incorruptible remains and an immortal.”14 Even before Lenin had died, Stalin voiced the idea of putting the leader’s body on display to fellow members of the Politburo. He suggested that “certain comrades in the provinces” would see cremation as an insult to Lenin’s memory, and that it would be better to embalm Lenin’s body and make him accessible to visitors. This suggestion infuriated Trotsky, for whom the idea of embalming Lenin evoked the practices of the Russian Orthodox Church, specifically, the worship of saintly relics: “Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Serafim of Saratov; now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Il’ich.”15 Just a day after Lenin’s death, three oddly similar letters appeared in the Moscow daily Rabochaia Moskva under the headline “Lenin’s Body Must Be Preserved!” Each one called for Lenin’s body to be embalmed and displayed under glass. One letter said, “Under no circumstances can we give to the earth such a great and intensely beloved leader as Il’ich. We suggest his remains be embalmed and left under glass for hundreds of years. . . . Let him be with us always.”16 It later became a commonplace of Soviet historiography that the “immortalization” of Lenin was a response to a groundswell of popular support. According to the official version of events, the Burial Commission received thousands of telegrams from workers, and it was this outpouring of emotion from the populace that led to the decision to preserve Lenin’s body in a crypt accessible to visitors. One such telegram from a group of Donbass coal miners reads: “The chance to see our beloved leader, even if [he is] immobile, will partially alleviate the grief of losing him and will inspire us to further battles and victories.”17 When the crypt was opened to visitors in February 1924, the design of the coffin foreshadowed the sarcophagus that would eventually be built: “In the lid of the coffin, glass panes were installed through which one could see Lenin’s face, illuminated by two chandeliers suspended from the ceiling.”18 Boris Zbarskii, one of Lenin’s original embalmers, wrote in 1946 about the miraculous preservation of Lenin’s features: “In the Mausoleum one can see him just as he was in the moments after death. Vast numbers of people have streamed, are streaming, and will stream [stekalis’, stekaiutsia, i budut stekat’sia] to this place.”19 The repetition of the verb stekat’sia, literally “to flow together,” evokes the noun steklo, glass, which covers the beloved leader and whose presence manifests itself in Zbarskii’s language. Both words, stekat’sia and steklo, contain the notion of flow, and at the same time, the word steklo means “that which has flowed together” as if evoking the merging of melted particles and freezing the very moment at which this



julia bekman chadaga

has happened. The features of Lenin “just as he was in the moments after death” are likewise frozen forever in the crystal coffin.20 If Lenin were to be eternally visible, by analogy the party and philosophy he founded would last forever. Lenin’s embalmers insisted that there was “nothing miraculous” about what they had done; yet it certainly appeared that way to those inclined to believe in miracles.21 Scholars have cited such sources of inspiration for the Lenin display as the Russian Orthodox belief about incorruptible remains as proof of sanctity and the “educational exhibit” inaugurated by Peter the Great and his Kunstkamera.22 As long as Lenin’s features remained unchanged, and viewers could attest that this was so, the preserved leader would serve as a symbol of both the sanctity and the scientific might of the Soviet state. New York Times reporter Walter Duranty visited the mausoleum (or as he called it, the “shrine”) days after it was first opened. He described his descent down red- carpeted steps into the tomb’s interior, and he reported that a gallery ran around the room, from which one could gaze at Lenin, “lying as if asleep in a hermetically sealed pyramid of cut glass so transparent that one knows it’s there only by the flash, along the surface, of the shaded lights above. . . . His face is serene.”23 Thus transparency was a critical feature of Lenin’s sarcophagus: visitors would see the unchanging Lenin and even seem to have direct access to him. But the glass container did not only make Lenin visible; it also made him radiant. An important strategy of the Lenin cult was the association of Lenin with light, a traditional attribute of the divine. This was done by emphasizing his role as the one who brought light to the Soviet people through the electrification campaign and his “little lamps” (lampochki Il’icha); furthermore, poems and works of visual art portrayed Lenin as a source of heavenly light. A poem from the 1920s refers to Lenin as “another heavenly body . . . the second sun of our days, our little earthly sun,” while another calls him “our red sun.”24 In a written testimony by glassworker Nikolai Tkachev, the appearance of living Lenin coincides with a dazzling light show. Tkachev came to Moscow in 1919 with his fellow glassmakers, bearing gifts for Lenin: a crystal version of the Soviet Constitution as well as pitchers, inkwells, and vases engraved with portraits of Marx, Liebknecht, and Lenin himself. In Tkachev’s account, the anticipated speech from the great man is somewhat of a letdown, but it is compensated by the display of radiant light that appears as Lenin’s inevitable attribute: We spread out the gifts on a desk. The sun pouring through the big window lit up our crystal, making it sparkle with different- colored lights and reflect the sun beautifully in every direction. It looked like

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



there was no crystal on the desk, just a shimmering golden radiance. At that very moment Vladimir Il’ich steps out of his office, glances at the desk, and declares in a jolly sort of way, “Oho, if only those whiny aesthetes could get a load of these fantastic thingamajigs!” [“Ogo, vot by nytikov estetov siuda, poliubovat’sia etimi chudesnymi veshchitsami!”] I never forgot those words. Later on, folks explained to me about the aesthetes.25

Katerina Clark notes that socialist realist art has used the image of a sudden flash of light to confer sacred qualities upon political figures. Such a flash of light typically accompanied the moment at which the positive hero encountered the Great Leader or found himself in a sacred space.26 Tkachev’s account certainly adheres to this convention. A variation on the techno- hagiographical discourse in Tkachev’s narrative appears in Nikolai Bukharin’s obituary for Lenin on the front page of Pravda on January 24, 1924. The text begins: “Lenin has died. Never again will we see that colossal brow, that wondrous head radiating revolutionary energy in every direction.”27 Bukharin creates a descriptive link between Lenin’s legendary head (whose phenomenal frontal lobe already suggests the dome of a lightbulb) and the “little lamps” for whose creation he was (mythically) responsible. Fittingly, Konstantin Mel’nikov’s design for Lenin’s sarcophagus presents the leader as a light source. Mel’nikov’s initial plan called for a purely glass construction, with no metal frame.28 The coffin would resemble, in Mel’nikov’s words, “a crystal with a radiant play of light in the interior.”29 In the early 1920s Mel’nikov was intrigued by the German expressionist celebration of crystals as embodiments of order and perfection; he owned a Russian translation of a poem by Scheerbart whose final image was that of light that “suffuses the Universe / And comes alive in the crystal.” S. Frederick Starr concludes that Mel’nikov designed a crystalline coffin as an apt container for Lenin, “the light that illuminated the Revolutionary order.”30 The form of Lenin’s mausoleum as a dark passageway in which Lenin serves as the source of guiding light was echoed in Mel’nikov’s design for the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition. Here, the visitor moves through the dark into “a light- filled sanctuary. . . . The building is thus transformed into an ancient temple, in which the public would undergo a rite of purification so as to emerge in the end into the dazzling light of Soviet life.”31 Progression through a dark passageway is a key component of Masonic rites, which had enjoyed popularity in tsarist Russia for centuries; in particular, the initiation ritual requires the candidate to make his way, blindfolded, through a sacred space toward the revelation of a luminous truth.32



julia bekman chadaga

Lenin’s sarcophagus underwent several reconstructions, and each time, designers paid great attention to the lighting of the body. In the current version, forty- four projectors with special incandescent lamps are mounted inside, softly illuminating Lenin’s face; the body is elaborately lit with tiny lamps of rose- colored glass and reflector lamps concealed in the ceiling contribute to the overall effect.33 A 1963 poem by Andrei Voznesensky responds to this version of the sarcophagus, the model that brought to technical perfection the “radiant” idea that was already present in the first version. In the poem, visitors emerge from the darkness toward the light that Lenin embodies; but Lenin’s brightness is becoming excessive. Voznesensky compares the leader to an X- ray machine, and the architectural ideal of seethrough buildings from decades past is revived in a demand for personal transparency: “We are x- rayed by Lenin. . . . With a sunny and passionate light, his transparent brow blazes like a lamp.” The queue of visitors is compared to film celluloid: “We move out of the darkness amidst the rustle of film reels. Tell us, Lenin, is this how you expected us to be?”34 These lines underscore the transparency of the visitors and the spectacular nature of the ritual whereby the viewers themselves become the object of the gaze. Displaying Lenin under glass made sense from several perspectives: the transparency made Lenin visible and seemingly accessible to visitors; at the same time, the capacity of glass to capture light was used to illuminate the dead leader, creating continuity with his image as propagated by the myth of “radiance.” But glass has other characteristics that interfered with the transmission of the message that the spectacle was meant to convey. In a curious counterpart to the proliferation of Lenin’s images in the years following his death, visitors to the mausoleum would see the leader himself and two reflections, thanks to the unusual tilt of the glass walls.35 A new sarcophagus, completed in 1945, took the form of “a rectangular prism made of crystalline glass that does not generate reflections. Thanks to the angle at which they tilt, the glass panes are absolutely transparent.”36 During the war, Lenin’s body had been secretly evacuated to the Urals, then returned to Moscow in April 1945; on September 16 of that year, the mausoleum was again opened to the public. Boris Zbarskii wrote on the occasion: “The Soviet people once again see the beloved face of Vladimir Il’ich, whose every dear little feature is familiar. . . . There is something wondrous about the new sarcophagus: when you look at Lenin, you forget that Lenin’s bed [leninskoe lozhe] is under a crystal dome.”37 Glass allows for the “wondrous” way in which the new sarcophagus seems to disappear, giving visitors the illusion of direct access to Lenin; the presence of glass seems to enable forgetting, a curious thing in such a commemorative setting. Glass was also instrumental behind the scenes in keeping Lenin’s body

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



on display, in hidden lamps and climate- control devices.38 The body underwent chemical treatments in special tubs made of glass (which, unlike metal, is nonreactive), and was thus perpetually transferred from one glass case to another.39 The interior of Lenin’s tomb, then, was the site of public rituals of political veneration, but also of other rituals that took place under the cover of night. As we shall see, these rituals of preservation had a negative counterpart in antirituals of destruction that were hidden from the public for decades. The body of Lenin was a spectacle that demanded reverence but generated ambivalent responses. Some, like Stalin, intended it to evoke saintly relics under glass. To others, though, the display called forth folkloric associations that invited mockery, not reverence. When the mausoleum was first opened to the public, the secret police took note of a certain clerk Antipov joking that “Lenin will lie in his coffin like a ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”40 To complicate the matter, the designer of Lenin’s sarcophagus meant this association in earnest. In addition to Scheerbart’s adoration of the crystal, Mel’nikov was inspired by the glass coffin of Sleeping Beauty when he designed Lenin’s resting place.41 When interviewed in 1967, the architect affirmed that “he intended this comparison to be taken literally.”42 Yuri Olesha picked up on this fairy- tale allusion in a poem he wrote in 1926 as his alter ego, Zubilo (The Chisel), for the proletarian newspaper Gudok. Throughout the poem, Olesha insists that while Lenin was mortal, his deeds and influence live on, and that Lenin’s posthumous fate is more wondrous than any fairy tale. In an image recalling the “blind man who saw” the leader at his lying- in- state, the poem claims that the very word “Lenin” is powerful enough to restore vision. Lenin’s name has ascended over the country “forever and ever” and outshines the polar rainbows; it inspires the people and calls them to battle. These lines elevate Lenin to the status of a divinity. Yet at the same time, Olesha dwells obsessively on the mortal body on display. The poem begins: “His earthly envelope lies in a glass coffin, as if in a fairy tale” and returns thrice, spellbound, to contemplate Lenin’s “earthly envelope” (zemnaia obolochka) that itself lies enveloped in an invisible crystalline skin.43 There is something not quite right about the poem’s repetition of “zemnaia obolochka” in reference to Lenin’s body. The feminine noun unsettles the gender of the corpse, and again reminds us of the female Sleeping Beauty; it seems part of a strategy to point out the discontinuity between the displayed “earthly envelope” and the transcendent deeds and spirit of Lenin. In “Zubilo” ’s ostensibly panegyric poem, we can glimpse Olesha’s veiled dismay over Lenin’s display. When Duranty first saw Lenin in his sarcophagus, the leader seemed smaller than life: “The body is in a perfect



julia bekman chadaga

state of preservation, its lineaments as natural as life, but now shrunken and small.” Obolochka is a feminine word and a diminutive one—thus Lenin is twice- diminished by being put on display. The next stanza of the poem depicts Lenin as “buried” in glass (V steklo pokhoronennyi ). The choice of the word “buried” emphasizes the leader’s mortality, and thus contradicts the customary rhetoric, reproduced in the same poem, proclaiming that Lenin “is more alive than the living.” Olesha draws attention to the glass surrounding the leader’s body, and the material, with its unpredictable behavior, makes us see Lenin in a defamiliarized way. Olesha’s poem thus becomes irreverent in spite of itself, turning from ritual to antiritual. Olesha’s famous novel Envy, published a year after his pseudonymous poem appeared, offers another unsettling portrayal of Lenin’s crystal coffin in the image of a glass cube with a body inside. This image also holds a potential explanation for antihero Kavalerov’s estranged way of seeing; as he recounts: “When I was a schoolboy, I was taken to a wax museum. There, in a glass cube, was a handsome man in evening clothes, a still- smoking wound in his chest, dying in someone’s arms. My father explained: ‘That’s the French President Carnot. He was shot by an anarchist.’ . . . A splendid man, his beard thrust upward, was lying in a greenish cube. . . . I decided to become famous, so that one day my wax double, filled with the drone of time that only a few can hear, would be just as elegantly poised in a greenish cube.”44 In the wax museum, the young Kavalerov simultaneously becomes aware of his own mortality and comes to see spectacular display as the way to triumph over death. An impressionable youth, he sees an edifying exhibition that shapes him irrevocably—thus testifying, it would seem, to the power of visual propaganda. Yet the effect of this wordless spectacle is unpredictable, and in Envy, it has a sinister outcome: Kavalerov imagines that his wax double will remind viewers of a “despicable crime” that he once committed.45 The description of the waxworks display in Olesha’s novel bears a number of allusions to the displayed body of Lenin, hinting that the figure in the mausoleum is, by analogy, not the authentic body of the leader but a copy. Such a suggestion is scandalous in itself: after all, the preservation of Lenin’s body was touted as yet another scientific triumph that could only be possible under Soviet power. Olesha’s subtle iconoclasm can be seen as a discursive counterpart to other forms of irreverence aimed at Lenin in his tomb. Not long after Lenin’s body was put on display, a folktale titled “Sly Lenin” was published in the journal Novyi mir. It was apparently fabricated by writer Rodion Akul’shin, but said to have “circulated in 1925 among the

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



peasants of the Viatka countryside.” Lenin worries about how his country would fare without him, so he “asks ‘the chief Soviet physician’ to render him dead ‘not completely, but just for appearances’ [dlia vidu].” That way he can travel around incognito and see how Soviet Russia is doing. The doctor tells Lenin, “We will put you . . . in a spacious room, and we will cover you with glass so that no one can poke you with his finger.”46 In addition to the hint at how Doubting Thomas digitally verified Christ’s divinity, there is some ambiguity in this narrative about why a visitor would try to reach out and touch Lenin—with good or not- so- good intentions. The folktale anticipates the attempted violations that were to take place in the mausoleum in the decades to come. These acts were a subversive response to the officially sanctioned ritual behavior that was meant to take place in that sacred space—visitors paying their disrespects, as it were. Paradoxically, the glass around Lenin both protected him and made him more vulnerable. A series of attacks on the sarcophagus took place, one as early as 1934. In March of that year, collective farmer Mitrofan Nikitin entered the mausoleum and aimed a revolver at Lenin’s corpse. When guards prevented him from shooting, he turned the gun on himself. A search at his house turned up “a letter he had written about atrocities connected with the famine of 1933. . . . ‘Our leaders, entrenched inside the walls of the Kremlin, won’t see that the people don’t want this sort of life. . . . Leaders, where are you leading the nation? We are on the slippery slope to the abyss.’ ”47 The reference to the Kremlin walls is notable here. Nikitin is trying to shoot through the sarcophagus, which becomes a metonymic stand- in for the Kremlin. The leaders in the Kremlin are alive, but unresponsive, as if dead. The display of Lenin’s body thus generated another unintentional effect— in this case, a dangerous misreading. The attacks continued. In 1959, a man whose name is lost to us flung a hammer—one- half of the omnipresent Soviet emblem symbolizing the union of workers and peasants—at the sarcophagus; it smashed through the glass and landed on Lenin’s chest, covering the leader with slivers and shards.48 In the following year, a certain K. N. Minibaev pulled a stunt of the sort that Kavalerov could only dream about as a passport to eternal notoriety. He leaped up on the barrier adjacent to the sarcophagus and shattered the glass with a kick. Once again, Lenin’s face and hands became covered with numerous glass fragments. Those charged with maintaining Lenin’s appearance had to repair a centimeter- long tear above his right eyebrow.49 In 1963, a twenty- seven- year- old woman named Smirnova spat at Lenin’s sarcophagus, cursing “Take that, you scum!” then broke the glass with a stone wrapped in a handkerchief.50 Il’ya Zbarskii (the son of Boris Zbarskii, who carried on his father’s work) reports that someone set off



julia bekman chadaga

an explosion inside the mausoleum; a guard was injured, but Lenin’s body remained intact.51 What could account for all these attacks on something so sacrosanct, at such obvious risk to oneself? One must consider not only political convictions but also the motivation—visual, tactile, and auditory—for breaking glass, and in particular, a light source encased in glass. Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes about the anarchic ritual of lantern smashing in seventeenthand eighteenth- century Paris, which offered the disenfranchised a symbolic way to smash the authority that these lights represented, as well as a more visceral thrill: “The sound of breaking glass is like an explosion. Something that a moment ago was solid, an object with a highly symbolic significance, is suddenly wiped out. The desire to wreak such destruction and also to experience a symbolic sexual release in the loud splintering of breaking glass were probably the deeper motives behind lantern smashing.”52 Recalling the mythical image of Lenin as a light source can further help to explicate the behavior of the visitors who lashed out at the ideological spectacle before them, placing their hopes in the destructive potential of the very material that protected and deified the leader.

Avtovo Station: The Underground Crystal Palace Anxiety about breaking glass manifested itself in press descriptions of Avtovo station, the showcase stop on the first line of the Leningrad metro that newspapers dubbed an “underground Crystal Palace” when it opened in November 1955 (figure 20).53 Glass that newspapers assured readers was “stronger than marble” is the main material in the ornamentation of the interior, in mosaics, bas- reliefs, and columns with images of stars, banners, spears, and sheaves of wheat carved into the surface, illuminated by small projector lamps concealed in the ceiling.54 There were plans to create glass barriers and a colored glass floor. Eventually, however, only sixteen of the forty- six Avtovo columns ended up being covered in glass: work on them ceased when Stalin died, and the rest of the station was executed in a plain, unadorned style.55 Like its Moscow cousin, the Leningrad metro was an ideologically charged space. The first train departed from Avtovo station on November 6, 1955, the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution (a connection the press coverage emphasized). On November 15, the day when the metro was opened to the public, the front- page editorial in Leningradskaia Pravda, titled “For the Good of the People,” called the metro a “wondrous gift” to the city from the Communist Party and the Soviet government: “The stern, genuinely artistic beauty of these underground palaces is lit up and

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



Figure 20. Visitors (by special invitation) to Avtovo station on November 6, 1955, the day when the first train departed from the station, an event that was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Photograph by I. Baranov and V. Kapustin. Reproduced from V. A. Gariugin, Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy 1955–1995 (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 1995).

warmed by a great love for mankind.” The use of the word “love” in the official declaration signals an attempt to use spectacle to form an affective link between the state and its citizens. The evocation of love is also central to the official ritual around Lenin’s body; recalling the fairy- tale associations that have haunted the display since its debut, it is striking to find that love linked with spectacle is a key ingredient of the Sleeping Beauty myth, including the version that circulated among the Eastern Slavs: “The maiden is placed in a transparent coffin, a tsarevich sees her and falls in love; she comes back to life.”56 Avtovo station works its affective magic by appealing to multiple senses. A longtime resident of Leningrad recalls that as a child, she liked to run her fingers over the smooth shapes on the glass columns of Avtovo.57 Her fellow passengers, who tended to lean on the columns while waiting for the next train, likewise would have experienced the station decor not only as visual spectacle but also in intimate, tactile terms. As Leningradskaia Pravda proclaimed, it was concern for “the workers of the city” that guided the “architects, sculptors, and artists who adorned the metro stations in marble, bronze, and crystal, illuminating the subterranean



julia bekman chadaga

darkness with the light of electric suns.”58 These images of light and heat present the party in a victorious struggle against the darkness and cold of the underground. Glass still serves to create an ideological spectacle of light, but the discourse around that spectacle has subtly changed; in Lenin’s tomb, the light served to denote the leader’s divinity and appeared to issue from his body, whereas now the light is dispersed throughout a sanctified space that embodies the radiant future. The crystal columns were themselves designed to be light sources: the original plan called for them to glow from within. The glittering decor of Avtovo station was meant to convey the feeling of light and thus the conquest of darkness. In a speech before the grand opening of the Moscow metro (the stylistic model for the first line of the Leningrad metro) in May 1935, Lazar Kaganovich contrasted the subways in capitalist nations, whose dirty and dim interiors were “crypt- like,” with the Soviet metro, which would be not only convenient but also “palatial,” imbuing the travelers with a feeling of joie de vivre.59 To this end, as Karen Kettering recounts, “Architects of the Metro’s first line were required to create brightly lit, high- ceilinged halls. . . . Soviet planners made mathematical calculations to ensure that the light would reflect from the marble with the desired brilliance”; and Avtovo station epitomized the metro builders’ attempt to create a spacious, sunny space underground.60 The call for a bright environment in the metro was a matter of creating continuity with the ideal of the “bright future” toward which Soviet citizens were striving. Catherine Cooke points out that “in the standard phrase which encapsulated Stalin’s promise to his people, their labor would deliver a svetloe budushchee: a radiant future.” For those who worked to create such a future, “a svetloe material environment was both the ideological activator and the ultimate reward.”61 Another meaning of the well- lit interior of the Avtovo station can be glimpsed in the press coverage of the grand opening: here, the metro becomes a place for romantic trysts, and we catch a glimpse of everyday surveillance, an act in which all are invited to participate: “The aboveground vestibule keeps growing more populated and more animated. All the public telephone booths are occupied and—let’s listen in! hear that?—someone is already designating a rendezvous in the metro. Where, where? Ah, by the second chandelier on the left in the central hall of the Technological Institute station.” In this voyeur society, light makes everyone visible. As Gaston Bachelard formulates it, “Everything that casts a light sees.”62 Indeed, Voznesensky’s poem presents Lenin as both a light source and a symbol of surveillance. Avtovo station serves as a meeting place in a number of ways; akin to Lenin’s tomb, to which visitors “stream” from all points on the globe, the metro brings disparate people together, a fact underscored by the press

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



description of the materials used in the construction of the interior: “the warm red and glistening gray marble of the Caucasus, the sunny- yellow and white, delicately veined marble from the Urals, and the pink and black granite from Ukraine.”63 With its decor of natural stone from far- flung regions, the metro becomes a microcosm of Soviet imperial spaces. In the press coverage following the launch of the metro, photographs of Avtovo station appeared more frequently than those of the others. A frontpage image in Leningradskaia Pravda shows the glass column at center stage, flanked by smiling passengers on one side and a speeding train on the other. These columns were indeed the focal point of the station. They were a modern reply to tsarist- era columns for which the city was famous, such as the massive malachite columns in the Winter Palace.64 Palatial architecture was thus appropriated from the aristocracy of old, an especially important strategy in a city such as Leningrad, the former tsarist capital. A November 15 letter to Leningradskaia Pravda betrays anxiety about measuring up to the West: “I had the chance to travel abroad, and I saw the foreign subways with my own eyes. Our subways—both the Moscow and the Leningrad ones—are immeasurably better and more beautiful”; another letter from the same issue echoes the palatial epithet: “I can’t find the words to express my admiration for these splendid underground palaces. What beauty, what grandeur!” The columns also conferred on the station interior the aura of classical antiquity. Their spiral design evoked that of the great Trajan column of Rome as well as the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris (itself modeled on the Trajan column).65 It is appropriate that in a period when neoclassicism dominated the decorative arts, the designers of the Avtovo station would emulate the Trajan column, which was not only a monument of classical antiquity but also a war monument. During the siege of Leningrad, the first line of the city’s defense lay close to the future site of Avtovo station; two years after the war, party officials stipulated that the design of the station should commemorate the city’s defense.66 The cupola of the station’s aboveground pavilion proclaims: “Eternal glory to the valorous defenders of Leningrad who fought for our hero- city.”67 Sculptural panels decorating the exterior and the interior of the station link the defense of Leningrad in 1941–43 with that of Petrograd in 1919. Martial emblems such as laurel wreaths and swords appear throughout the station; a mosaic panel titled “Victory” shows a woman holding a child, the banner above them reading “peace to the world” (miru mir).68 A recent description of Avtovo notes that when the station’s ceiling is completely lit up, it “shimmers with every color of the rainbow”; according to A. Sokolov, the main architect of the Lenmetroproekt, “The interior decor of the station conveys a joyous feeling of triumph at the great victory of the



julia bekman chadaga

Figure 21. Avtovo station in 1958. Both column designs are visible. Photograph by D. Sholmovich. From V. A. Gariugin, Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy 1955–1995 (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 1995).

Soviet people.”69 The visual style of the station speaks of victory against a seemingly omnipotent aggressor, as well as over nature itself: the Soviet people are able to create a well- lit environment underground, and even a subterranean rainbow! The station serves to commemorate another kind of war as well: a war between ideologies. Work on the ornate glass decor was abandoned when the Lomonosov factory in Leningrad could not fulfill the order in time; subsequently, the “monumental- pompous style” associated with Stalinism became politically incorrect and the station was left unfinished. The resulting mix of styles visually marked the temporary triumph of liberalizing Khrushchev—the cultural Thaw that he instigated was only temporary, but the stylistic dissonance inside the station serves as visual evidence commemorating that moment of transition (figure 21). There is a curious tension in the press accounts between praising the lavish decor of the new stations and the campaign against “excesses” in building being trumpeted

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



in the same pages.70 This discrepancy attests to the complexity of the situation: Soviet citizens were not uniformly willing to assimilate the rhetoric of destalinization and give up the fairy- tale dream of the previous era. The Avtovo project began in a period that Helena Goscilo characterizes as “dominated by the brutally utopian slogan: ‘We were born to make fairy tales come true.’ . . . No other era in Soviet history embraced folklore for pragmatic ends with comparable gusto and effectiveness.”71 While Stalinism ended, the utopian dream persisted. On November  5, 1955, the Leningrad metro was given a trial run. “Hundreds of Leningraders, mostly schoolchildren,” received tickets inviting them to ride the first trains. The press reported how “schoolchildren filled the underground palaces of the metro”; the children sat in the skyblue train cars “as if enchanted”; they got out at each stop to admire the “stateliness and unique beauty” of the stations.72 The formula “underground palace”—an epithet that would be repeated in subsequent press coverage— evokes the “underground kingdom” ( podzemnoe tsarstvo) of Russian fairy tales, turning the metro into an otherworldly, folkloric space. Indeed, the first visitors (children—the predominant consumers of fairy tales) appear to be “enchanted” as they take in the sights and sounds of the metro. References to the fairy- tale nature of Soviet reality were a dominant motif in Stalin’s time and beyond. Marina Balina argues that the central message of socialist realist fairy tales was that “residents of Soviet reality need no magic, for their reality is, in fact, the fulfilled utopian dream.”73 The “fairy- tale” motif recurs in subsequent press accounts of the Leningrad metro, intertwined with references to the well- lit interior. Thus, a first- time visitor wrote: “One underground palace after another rose up before us, as if by magic. . . . It was cloudy outside, but underground at every station there is so much light and air that it seems as if the sun is shining brightly. It’s all just like in a fairytale!”74 Popular reactions to the metro recorded in the comment books at every station reiterated the folkloric motifs of palaces and magic. L. Parfil’eva proclaimed: “The Leningrad metro is beautiful! You can’t help but feel moved when you look at its palaces. This is far better than the best fairy tale.” And an elderly woman with the last name Chevleva testified that the subterranean space resembled its polar opposite: “I’ve been to the metro—it’s like being in heaven [kak v raiu]. Now I am not even afraid to die.”75 An article in Leningradskaia Pravda by architect L. Shimakovskii written soon after the grand opening claims that the Avtovo interior creates an “impression of extraordinary spaciousness. . . . You cannot help but forget that you are underground.”76 This spaciousness was one of the ways in which the metro served as a utopian alternate reality—the mirror reversal of the



julia bekman chadaga

cramped surroundings in which Soviet citizens lived.77 Shimakovskii’s article states that the Avtovo station has quickly become known as the “Crystal Palace.” Readers would doubtless pick up on the utopian associations of this image; but how many would also remember Dostoevsky’s attack in Notes from Underground on the utopianism of Chernyshevsky, who dreamed up a Crystal Palace for Russia and who served as such an inspiration for Lenin?78 Notably, in Dostoevsky’s novel, his antihero launches his attack on the Crystal Palace and all that it represented—the denial of free will, the advent of industrial capitalism, false unity, and the triumph of materialism over spirituality—from the underground; that space of rebellion was quickly usurped with the advent of Soviet power.79 The Avtovo station, like the Lenin mausoleum, was created to inspire wonder and otherworldly associations, as attested by the religious and folkloric rhetoric that proliferates in descriptions of these spaces. Both spaces served as conduits of visual propaganda, but also as sites for ongoing processes and one- time- only rituals. Lenin’s mausoleum was a reliquary, a pilgrimage site, a place to become indoctrinated or strengthen one’s faith, and a tribune for the living leaders; the tomb intentionally resembles the tombs of the pharaohs, while Lenin himself is both man and monument. The Avtovo metro is not only a means of travel but also a historical monument to the hero- city surviving the siege; as in the case of the mausoleum, the design of the station alludes to overcoming nature, defying mortality; and it “transports” people in several different ways.80 Soviet citizens had very limited options for travel outside their country, but they were given the chance to be “transported” inside these fantasy spaces. Both Lenin’s tomb and Avtovo station were set apart from everyday Soviet reality in spatial as well as temporal terms. The fairy- tale discourse around both spaces not only emphasizes their magical qualities but also points to the alternative temporality that they offer. As the showpiece station of the Leningrad subway system, Avtovo, akin to Lenin’s tomb, served as the site of organized processions throughout the Soviet period, as foreign dignitaries, including U.S. Vice President Nixon and Indonesian President Sukarno were paraded through the station. A metro worker recalls how Sukarno’s visit served as the catalyst for a momentary breach of protocol: “During his visit it was strictly forbidden to have any noise coming from the loudspeakers in the vestibules. But we decided to have some fun. We blasted the record ‘My Indonesia’ at full volume. The faces of our party chiefs turned red, but the president of Indonesia started to sing along and did a few dance moves! Then the bosses relaxed a little, but later we still got a reprimand.”81 In his analysis of the St. Petersburg metro, Robert Ian Duncan observes that “Avtovo is reminiscent of a ballroom one

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



might find in the Hermitage”82—a telling comparison. The military march and the ballroom dance both consist of ritualized movement with curious parallels, as Tolstoy shows in his story “After the Ball.” Thus the martial decor of Avtovo coexists peacefully with its palatial opulence; the columns stand in ranks like soldiers, or members of the beau monde ready to waltz. In Lenin’s mausoleum, people move in a procession—a train, as it were—through a dark tunnel toward the source of light embodied in the embalmed leader; in Avtovo station, the sought- after light is that of the train, which emerges from a dark tunnel as people wait on the platform. Both of these spectacular sites ritualize human activity. In the fixed ceremony of mausoleum- going, visitors have to keep on moving, and reflection is not allowed. In the words of architectural historian Selim Khan- Magomedov, “A person does not simply go to the Mausoleum as to a museum, and does not stand before the sarcophagus, but seems to participate in a funeral procession in which people walk in mournful silence to bid farewell to the great leader. . . . Nowadays we cannot even imagine any other ritual of attending the Mausoleum.”83 Khan- Magomedov underscores the intention behind the Lenin display to recall and reenact the leader’s lying- in- state that took place in January 1924—the memorable and moving spectacle at which “the blind man saw Lenin.” Boris Zbarskii wrote of Lenin’s features remaining “just as he was in the moments after death.”84 This moment of freezing time resonates with Khan- Magomedov’s idea of reenacting the lying- in- state ritual. For those to whom Lenin represented the revolution’s ideals, the preservation of Lenin’s body is a wish- fulfilling act.85 The ritual of Lenin’s lying- in- state is perpetually reenacted as if to freeze that moment of hope and potential and to imagine history not moving forward on its tragic trajectory.86 The Lenin tomb thus seeks to bring the past into the present, while Avtovo seeks to bring the future into the present. However, it is important to draw a distinction between the station in the Soviet period and in the present day. The latter version contains a superimposition of temporalities and evokes both the transition from Stalinism, in the split personality of its interior design, and the transition from socialism as represented by the Soviet and post- Soviet elements of the metro that coexist in the same space. Duncan argues that these metro stations are “filled with meaning for the Russian national narrative. . . . The glass stars on the columns of Avtovo seem like relics, as if the ‘post’ in post- Soviet is a point of no return, but they are not empty of their symbolic and political importance.”87 The Russian metro is a tomb of Soviet aesthetics and ideology as well as a monument to military and technological achievement to which Russians can lay claim regardless of their political views.88



julia bekman chadaga

While politics and human retribution have motivated the attacks on Lenin’s tomb, nature poses the greatest threat to Avtovo station, whose caretakers struggle to keep the watery element at bay. In this sense Avtovo is inscribed into the narrative of nature lashing out against human hubris that is at the heart of the St. Petersburg myth. A newspaper account from 2006 registered the alarm of passengers and of a shopkeeper working inside the metro who, seeing the tracks covered in water, worried that the station might get flooded and “repeat the fate” of another station that was catastrophically flooded a decade ago.89 Her reference to history repeating itself recalls the echoing inscriptions in the station linking the two defenses of the city; now the station has to defend itself. Repairs have been going on inside Avtovo since 2007, and the glass columns built to commemorate the city’s survival of its wartime encirclement are themselves encircled in protective wooden shields. The interior of both Lenin’s tomb and Avtovo station can be characterized as the decor of denial: denial of death (Lenin is made to look as if he is alive, and furthermore, he is a light source just as he was in life), and denial of depth (the bright lighting and impression of spaciousness belies the fact that the visitor is deep underground). Both spaces rely on the conjunction of light and glass to create visual effects that underscore their respective functions.90 At the same time, the delicate glass decor of both spaces draws attention to the instability of the ideological messages embodied in spectacular objects; the possibility of multiple interpretations and unfettered actions arises by virtue of the physical properties of glass—its fragility and unpredictable play of light.

Notes 1. See Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 4. 2. For details on the MGU spire, see Dmitrii Semenov, “Pervyi sovetskii neboskreb,” Moskovskaia Pravda, May 18, 1991; and “Etazhi so znakom minus,” Moskovskaia Pravda, October 12, 1991. I analyze the Kremlin stars alongside with electric light bulbs as attempts by the Soviet state to lay claim to the domain of light in my article “Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 82–105. 3. See Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Interpretation of the Glass Dream—Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 49 (March 1981): 20–43. 4. Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, trans. James Palmes, ed. Dennis Sharp (New York: Praeger, 1972), 46.

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



5. For example, see the article “Steklo v sovremennoi arkhitekture” in the constructivist journal Sovremennaia arkhitektura 3 (1926): 63. 6. See the poll data for 1994 through 2006 in Graeme Gill, “‘Lenin Lives’: Or Does He? Symbols and the Transition from Socialism,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 2 (March 2008): 173–96. 7. The references are from C. J. Chivers, “With Lenin’s Ideas Dead, What to Do with His Body?,” New York Times, October 5, 2005 (Poltavchenko, Mikhalkov, Orlova), and “Russia: Lenin’s Removal from Mausoleum Premature, Gorbachev,” ANSA English Media Service, October 12, 2005 (Ziuganov). 8. Vladimir Kozhin, cited in Barbara Frye, “Russia: Goodbye Lenin?,” Transitions Online, November 26, 2007. 9. See “Activists Propose Removing Lenin’s Body from Red Square,” Russia and CIS General Newswire, July 2, 2008. 10. S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 81. 11. Architect Aleksei Shchusev designed the temporary wooden structure to house Lenin’s body in 1924; this structure formed the basis for the permanent granite mausoleum—also designed by Shchusev—completed in 1930. See Blair A. Ruble, “Moscow’s Revolutionary Architecture and Its Aftermath: A Critical Guide,” in Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Architecture; Utopian Dreams, ed. William Craft Brumfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 138. 12. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 179. 13. Boris Malkiel’, “To, o chem nikogda ne zabyt’,” Pravda, January 27, 1924. 14. I follow Tumarkin’s definition of “Lenin cult” as “organized reverence” for the leader (Lenin Lives!, 169). For discussions of possible conceptual sources for the Lenin mausoleum, see Alexander A. Panchenko, “The Cult of Lenin and ‘Soviet Folklore,’” Folklorica: Journal of the Slavic and East European Folklore Association 10, no. 1 (2005): 28–29, and Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 120. 15. Cited in N. Valentinov ( Vol’skii), Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika i krizis partii posle smerti Lenina: gody raboty v VSNKH vo vremia NEP; vospominaniia (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1971), 91. 16. Cited in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 173. 17. Cited in B. I. Zbarskii, Mavzolei Lenina (Leningrad: Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1945), 27. Olga Velikanova challenges the Soviet historiography, arguing that the decision to embalm and display Lenin had been made before any “proposals ‘from below.’” See her Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin (Gottingen: Münster- Schmidt Verlag, 1996), 58, 67. 18. B. I. Zbarskii, Mavzolei Lenina, 25. 19. Ibid., 46. 20. For details on the preservation of Lenin’s body, see I. B.  Zbarskii “’Zhizn’’ mumii i sud’ba cheloveka. Iz vospominanii khranitelia tela Lenina,” Otechestvennaia istoriia 5 (1993): 26; Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 61; and I. B. Zbarskii, “Ot Rossii do Rossii,” in Pod “kryshei” mavzoleia, comp. E. E. Zaitseva (Tver’: Polina, 1998), 237. 21. Cited by Walter Duranty, “Lenin Is Lifelike as He Lies in Tomb,” New York Times, August 4, 1924.



julia bekman chadaga

22. These ideas appear in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 179, and Panchenko, “The Cult of Lenin and ‘Soviet Folklore,’” 29, respectively. 23. Duranty, “Lenin Is Lifelike as He Lies in Tomb.” 24. These lines are from Egor Nechaev, “Velikomu vozhdiu” (1922), and Vasilii Kamenskii, “Lenin—nashe bessmertie” (1924). Both poems appear in P. B. Val’be, ed., Lenin v sovetskoi poezii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970), 100 and 120, respectively. For a detailed discussion of the light imagery around Lenin, see Chadaga, “Light in Captivity.” 25. Quoted in Iurii Koginov, Almaznaia gran’: Dokumental’naia povest’ (Moscow: Profizdat, 1977), 149. 26. Katerina Clark, “Sotsrealism i sacralizatsiia prostranstva,” in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Hans Gunther and Evgeny Dobrenko (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), 126. 27. Nikolai Bukharin, “Tovarishch,” Pravda, January 24, 1924. 28. Starr, Melnikov, 81. 29. S. O.  Khan- Magomedov, Mavzolei Lenina: Istoriia sozdaniia i arkhitektura (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1972), 57. The sarcophagus ended up as a simpler coneshaped pyramid. 30. Starr, Melnikov, 249. 31. Ibid., 202. 32. See Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in EighteenthCentury Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), 98–99. 33. Andrei Kotyrev, Mavzolei V. I. Lenina: proektirovanie i stroitel’stvo (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1971), 137–38; I. B. Zbarskii, “Ot Rossii do Rossii,” 236; A. Abramov, Mavzolei Lenina (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1963), 50. 34. Andrei Voznesenskii, “Lonzhiumo,” in Lenin v sovetskoi poezii, 665. The poem originally appeared in Pravda, October 13, 1963. 35. See “Protestuia ot imeni millionov trudiashchikhsia SSSR, krest’ianin Nikitin vystrelil v sarkofag s telom Lenina, a zatem ubil sebia,” Fakty i kommentarii, October 22, 1999, http://fakty.ua/archive/index?d=19991022&ArticlesItem_page=3. 36. Kotyrev, Mavzolei V. I. Lenina, 137–38. 37. B. I. Zbarskii, Mavzolei Lenina, 46. 38. For example, the light fixtures had protective glass filters to absorb heat energy: Abramov, Mavzolei Lenina, 60. 39. See I. B. Zbarskii, “Ot Rossii do Rossii,” 236. 40. Reports from the OKARTU (Okrug Artillery School) (n.d.), cited in Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 97n17. 41. Starr, Melnikov, 81. 42. Ibid., 249. In the Grimms’ “Glass Coffin” tale, the sleeping beauty lies in a glass coffin and in a subterranean setting; “the brightness of her complexion . . . left no doubt that she was alive.” In Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales, trans. Margaret Hunt (London: George Bell, 1884), 2:238–43. According to Panchenko (“The Cult of Lenin and ‘Soviet Folklore,’” 27), the tale of Sleeping Beauty was “hugely popular in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian culture.” 43. Zubilo [Iurii Olesha], “I pesni i skazki chudesnei . . . ,” in Lenin v sovetskoi poezii, 359. 44. Iurii Olesha, Zavist’, in Ni dnia bez strochki (Minsk: Izd. BGU im. V. I. Lenina, 1982), 21. Mikhail Vaiskopf also sees this glass cube as a “veiled, but still easily recon-

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



structed motif of the mausoleum” (although he does not discuss the glass sarcophagus). See his article “Andrei Babichev i ego proobraz v ‘Zavisti’ Iuriia Oleshi,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk, Seriia Literatury i Iazyka 53, no. 5 (1994): 73. 45. Iurii Olesha, Zavist’, 21. 46. “Khitryi Lenin,” Novyi mir, no. 11 (1925), 125. See also Panchenko, “The Cult of Lenin and ‘Soviet Folklore,’” 27. 47. Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin’s Embalmers, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Harvill Press, 1999), 93–94. 48. I. B. Zbarskii, “’Zhizn’’ mumii i sud’ba cheloveka,” 160. 49. This information comes from a memorandum marked “Secret” from the USSR Minister of Health to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, dated July 16, 1960. Reproduced in Neizvestnaia Rossiia XX vek, ed. V. A. Kozlov, vol. IV (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1993), 465. 50. This attack is cited by historian Alex Gusev in the documentary Forever Lenin, directed by Xavier Villetard (Icarus Films, 2005). 51. In the wake of this incident, bulletproof glass was installed, as were electronic devices for the detection of weapons and explosives. See I. B. Zbarskii, “Ot Rossii do Rossii,” 268–69. 52. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 98. 53. The station bears the name of the village that was once in the area; the word Avtovo is derived from the Finnish autto, meaning “empty place.” This information is found at http://spb- gazeta.narod.ru/line1.htm. 54. The claim that the glass of the columns is “stronger than marble” is echoed in M. Sokolov, Stantsii Leningradskogo metro (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izd- vo literatury po stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture, 1957), 24, and in Pavel Kann, Leningrad: A Guide (Moscow: Planeta, 1990), 11. The information about the station interior is from E. A. Levinson et al., Khudozhestvennoe steklo i ego primemenie v arkhitekture (Leningrad: Gosud. izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture, 1953), 138–39. 55. The information about the columns is from A. M. Baskakov, ed., Metropoliten Leningrada- Peterburga: stranitsy istorii (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1995), 164. 56. Cited in L. G. Barag et al., Sravnitel’nyi ukazatel’ siuzhetov: Vostochnoslavianskaia skazka (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1979), 179. 57. Maria Zavialova, personal correspondence, May 29, 2009. 58. “Dlia blaga naroda,” Leningradskaia Pravda, November 15, 1955, 1. 59. See Karen Kettering, “An Introduction to the Design of the Moscow Metro in the Stalin Period: ‘The Happiness of Life Underground,’ ” Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 8–9. 60. Ibid. A book issued on the forty- year anniversary of the Leningrad metro claims: “When you are inside the metro station, you do not feel that you are deep underground” (Baskakov, Metropoliten Leningrada- Peterburga, 193). 61. Catherine Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to the ‘Radiant Future’: Responses of Soviet Architecture,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 147. 62. Cited in Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 98. 63. Cited in Leningradskaia Pravda, November  15, 1955, 1. Mike O’Mahony documents the intention to make the Soviet metro an “all- Union” phenomenon in



julia bekman chadaga

his article “Archaelogical Fantasies: Constructing History on the Moscow Metro,” Modern Language Review 98, no. 1 ( January 2003): 138–50. 64. I am grateful to Julie Buckler for this idea. A letter to the editor of Leningradskaia Pravda from November 15 characterized the “station- palaces” as a Soviet answer to the tsarist legacy and called the metro “one of the greatest monuments of our epoch.” 65. Nikolai Kachalov, Steklo (Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1959), 358. 66. See Peterburgskii metropoliten: ot idei do voploshcheniia. Al’bom- katalog (St. Petersburg: GMISPb, 2005), 20. 67. Cited at http://spb- gazeta.narod.ru/line1.htm. 68. For a description and recent information about the Avtovo station, see http:// www.all- transport.spb.ru/metro/1line/avtovo/. 69. Metropoliten Severnoi Stolitsy, ed. V. A. Gariugin (St. Peterburg: Izd. “Liki Rossii, 1995), 85. 70. See Susan Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953–1963,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 177. 71. Goscilo, foreword to Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales, ed. Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), x–xi. 72. “Leningradskii metropoliten priniat v ekspluatatsiiu,” Leningradskaia Pravda, November 6, 1955. 73. Marina Balina, introduction to Part II of Politicizing Magic, 112. 74. E. Simakova and V. Bobarykina, letter to Leningradskaia Pravda, November 15, 1955 (emphasis added). 75. Cited in Baskakov, Metropoliten Leningrada- Peterburga , 22. 76. L. Shimakovskii, “Proizvedenie iskusstva,” Leningradskaia Pravda, November 15, 1955. 77. W. Bruce Lincoln elaborates on the idea of the Soviet metro as utopian third space in Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 316–17. 78. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour demonstrates that Chernyshevsky’s novel anticipates “the obsession with palaces that came to dominate Soviet aesthetics” in her article “Architectural Discourse and Early Soviet Literature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 3 ( July–September 1983): 487–88. 79. I am grateful to Julia Vaingurt for this insight. For an overview of the meanings that the Crystal Palace took on in Russia, see Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 203. 80. Jane Friedman argues that the Moscow metro provided “imagined and ideological transport” in her article “Soviet Mastery of the Skies at the Mayakovsky Metro Station,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 48. 81. Mariia Vas’kova, “‘My pozhenilis’ v metro!’” Smena, November  15, 2005, http://smena.ru/news/2005/11/15/6270/. 82. Robert Ian Duncan, “Beneath Transition: Dialogic Landscapes of Modernisms and the St. Petersburg Subway” (M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 2004), 58. 83. S. O.  Khan- Magomedov, Mavzolei Lenina: Istoriia sozdaniia i arkhitektura (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1972), 117. 84. B. I. Zbarskii, Mavzolei Lenina, 46.

from lenin’s tomb to avtovo station



85. Gill observes that for the Communists and their supporters, Lenin’s body symbolizes “the continuing political community of communism of which they are part, while its retention in the mausoleum represents communism’s spiritual survival in the new era.” (“‘Lenin Lives,’” 190). 86. Vladislav Todorov describes Lenin’s body as one “through which time does not pass, nor does history.” See his insightful study, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 135. 87. Duncan, “Beneath Transition,” 84. 88. Until 2005, Avtovo station housed the Metro Museum of St. Petersburg, a fact that underscores the designation of this subterranean space as a site of memory. Mariia Vas’kova, “’ ‘My pozhenilis’ v metro!’” 89. See Ol’ga Riabnina, “Budet li v Pitere novyi razmyv?,” Smena, June 23, 2006, http://smena.ru/news/2006/06/23/7871/. 90. Metro architect Alexei Dushkin makes an argument about the power of architecture to convey messages that is particularly applicable to the subterranean spaces under discussion: “Architectural works exert a continuous ideological influence that is not weakened by the passage of time. On the contrary, historical events accumulate in the architectural monument, supplementing and enriching its essential meaning.” Cited at http://www.metro.ru/library/architecture/81/.

From Public, to Private, to Public Again: International Women’s Day in Post-Soviet Russia Choi Chatterjee

On March 8, 2000, Kukly (Puppets), the satirical show, sponsored by the then- independent and outspoken Russian television channel NTV, aired a segment called “Women’s Day.” The sly puppets in the show had built a considerable following across the Commonwealth of Independent States by savagely lampooning celebrities and politicians, and were popular among a vast audience who delighted in the wicked caricatures and satirical representations of Yeltsin, Putin, and other political figures. The creators of Kukly had effectively used popular historical analogies and literary references to ridicule modern politics and politicians. But this time it appeared that the show had overstepped the bounds of both satire and good taste. It featured Putin as a playboy, surrounded by leading Russian politicians dressed as prostitutes and brothel owners, all eager to service him. As Putin cruised down Okhotnyi Riad and Tverskaya in his limousine clad in a Japanese robe, famous politicians turned prostitutes crowded around the car, clamoring for his favors. The leader of the Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, appeared as an expert in sadomasochism, dressed in a tight black skirt and brandishing a whip. Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the Yabloko Party, on the other hand, was shown as an inexperienced virgin, too nervous to flaunt his/her charms openly. At the end of the show, as the politicians turned prostitutes began to disrobe in anticipation of a mass orgy, each part of the body that they unclothed seemed to dematerialize. As soon as a hat 



choi chatterjee

was lifted off a head, the head itself disappeared. And when a glove was removed, the hand it had covered vanished. At the end of the show, Putin, having observed what had happened, said that the prostitutes seemed to have a problem with their internal content. Alexander Voloshin, head of the presidential administration, replied that they seem to have “a deficit of male essence.”1 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the iconic Soviet Woman, once a mighty pillar of the Bolshevik symbolic universe and an incarnation of feminine virtues both Russian and Soviet, suffered a downfall. Throughout the better part of the twentieth century, the new Soviet Woman had been praised in song and verse, commemorated in various media for her heroic achievements, and eulogized in state- sponsored rituals for her heroic sacrifices.2 Even when she had exhibited un- Bolshevik attitudes during NEP—the New Economic Policy of the 1920s—or during collectivization, it was ascribed to a political backwardness born of a lack of education, rather than a desire to sabotage or intentionally harm the nation.3 She had participated in campaigns to raise industrial production and agriculture, fought the Germans at the front, kept the home fires burning through desperate economic times and military sieges, and raised generations of good Soviet citizens.4 Later, in the years following the Second World War, when she occasionally faltered as a mother and was blamed in state discourse for the social deviance and crimes committed by the youth, it was regarded as something that could be rectified through paternalistic state intervention. State dicta repeatedly reminded the emancipated Soviet Woman about her maternal and housewifely obligations.5 After 1991, the course was reversed, and the events of the decade had a particularly adverse impact on both the material status of women and their symbolic referents. Not only did women suffer from high rates of unemployment in the disintegrating economy of the 1990s, but also, as the Soviet welfare state retracted, women lost access to unemployment benefits, state subsidized child care, and medical services. Russian women were forced into the informal sectors of the economy as illegal purveyors of black market goods. The explosion of pornography in the media led to the increasing representation of Russian women as hypersexualized objects. Violence against women grew at an alarming rate, and Russian women were trafficked and coerced into international prostitution on a large scale. At the same time conservative politicians and sections within the Orthodox Church called on Russian women to repudiate both the Soviet and Western legacies of emancipation and feminism and to return to their roles as mothers and caregivers within the family, presumably to reclaim their once heroic and sacred stature.6

from public, to private, to public again



In the 1990s and into the new millennium, the Russian Woman was repeatedly represented in both intelligentsia discourse and commercial culture as a capitalistic prostitute, a transnational whore who had sold out her husband, her home, and her nation in her relentless search for hard currency, consumer goods, and the good life in the West.7 In the Kukly skit, Russian politicians can engage in unspeakable acts of sexual deviation that in turn represent unspeakable acts of national betrayal only when dressed as women; creatures that lack “the male essence.” The iconic reversal of women’s status in the system of gender representation merits further investigation, and in this essay I use the media commentary associated with International Women’s Day to track the symbolic fortunes of the New Russian Woman at various discursive sites that feature the commemoration of cultural memory, and at physical sites where the enactment of new social rituals affect the ways in which the past is remembered. I argue that the diversity of messages about women and the proliferation of representational practices are intimately connected to the expansion in the number of public spaces, both real and virtual, in post- Soviet Russia. The availability of new commercial sites such as nightclubs, bars, spas, beauty salons, and restaurants allowed for novel forms of celebration. New leisure practices that emphasized Western- style consumption emerged alongside time- honored gatherings of friends and family members. Media spaces such as television, newspapers, and journals, which had been the monopoly of the state till 1991, became confusing locations that broadcast multiple messages in various formats. The addition of the Internet stretched the borders and the access of media empires, and many interest groups that included representatives of the state, feminist organizations, and commercial enterprises attempted to impress their own ideological reading on the holiday. The Internet also emerged as an important site for the formulation of group identity, and members used memory of a shared past as a mechanism to foster cohesion and promote progressive politics. While the cacophony of voices tended to dull the import of some of the messages, at the same time they mirrored the proliferation of identities in post- Soviet space.

Prostitutes in the Kremlin While the Kukly skit about political prostitution tested the limits of media freedom under an increasingly authoritarian Putin administration, the fact that the creators of the show used International Women’s Day to air their political commentary is significant. For the first time in history, Russian viewers had the option of viewing both the official Women’s Day ceremonies at the Kremlin as well as other oppositional activities sponsored by



choi chatterjee

groups that strove to invest the holiday with their own particular understanding of contemporary political events. The discursive space created by television became an arena for multiple dialogues that were generated by the holiday. In other venues such as city centers, official government buildings, universities, nightclubs, restaurants, spas, Internet discussion groups, and at private parties, the holiday elicited conversations and commentary in the modes of commemoration, nostalgia, satire, irony, and denunciation, as well as postmodern polyglot, one that cleverly camouflaged the authorial intent by means of radically juxtaposed interpretive frameworks. In the 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty- first century, leaders in the Kremlin continued the Soviet practice of advertising state- sponsored affirmative action policies for women, and used the platform of Women’s Day to enunciate didactic gender norms that, they believed, should regulate women’s lives. Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s marked the occasion with complimentary speeches about Russian women, and Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have continued the same political tradition. Yeltsin was careful to use his Women’s Day addresses to praise Russian career women for their achievements in various fields of the economy, politics, culture, and science. But he simultaneously commended Russian women for their traditional female ability to foster warmth and cordiality within the family, nurture and cherish unappreciative husbands and children, and sacrifice themselves for the good of the community and the nation. Putin and Medvedev, while noting the important role played by women in the workplace, have often called particular attention to their contributions as wives and mothers in holiday addresses. When the list of national holidays was revised by the Duma in November of 2005, it jettisoned a series of Soviet celebrations but retained International Women’s Day, the celebration of worker solidarity on May 1, and Victory Day on May 9.8 Putin continued his predecessor’s policies of inviting women to the Kremlin on International Women’s Day and showering them with fulsome praise and kind words. Often the guests included heroic mothers of large families, as well as famous artists, members of the intelligentsia, and female officers in the armed forces. In an attempt to burnish his feminist credentials, Putin likes to joke that he is surrounded by women at home, as he has a wife and two daughters. Putin then adds that even his dog is female! While festivities in the Kremlin and those sponsored by politicians are often unimaginative and follow a set procedure, in the Russian provinces local governments vie with one another in creating original celebrations for Women’s Day. In 2006 the city of Perm held a kissing contest in an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the “largest number of si-

from public, to private, to public again



multaneously kissing couples.”9 And in 2007 the city of Yekaterinburg held a poetry marathon for over a hundred women poets who competed from twelve cities in the Sverdlovsk region. During the 1990s other political groups also utilized Women’s Day to advance their own electoral agendas and promote opposition to the postSoviet state. The Communist Party often organized rallies of women on March 8 who protested the high prices of food by banging empty pots and pans in the central thoroughfares of Moscow. And on Women’s Day they demanded the resignation of the Yeltsin government for catastrophic job losses and hyperinflation. At the other end of the political spectrum, some members of the Russian Orthodox Church denounced Women’s Day as a Jewish holiday started by a Jewish woman, Klara Zetkin. They called on Orthodox Christians to boycott the covertly semitic festivities.10 During the presidential campaign of 2000, politicians across the spectrum, including the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, used Women’s Day celebrations to court sections of the female electorate.11 In his annual address in May 2006, Vladimir Putin, in a speech to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, outlined a major policy position on the demographic crisis in Russia and proposed concrete policies formulated in response to it.12 The alarming rise in rates of male mortality due to increases in cardiovascular diseases, alcoholism, drug addiction, and poor medical care, as well as the simultaneous fall in fertility rates among the Russian population, had started long before 1991.13 But these trends had been severely aggravated toward the end of the century, especially in the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan. Putin said that the loss of population could only be offset by adopting interlocking measures to lower death rates, increase immigration to Russia, and increase fertility rates. In the rest of his speech, Putin focused primarily on the ways that the state could help Russian women increase their fertility rates. It is instructive to remember that as early as the 1930s Stalin had claimed that motherhood was a matter of great social significance and that women could significantly strengthen the nation by raising large families.14 Motherhood and the responsibilities for parenting were fixed as an essential trope of exemplary Soviet womanhood, and it is interesting to see the persistence of this discourse in post- Soviet times. But the Stalinist state tried to limit reproduction within the confines of the patriarchal family by re- creating the category of illegitimate children, and by enjoining men to provide child support and alimony to abandoned wives and children. By contrast, Putin, in his speech, barely mentioned the role of the father in promoting fertility rates across the nation. He cited material poverty, inadequate housing, and the high cost of education and health care as reasons



choi chatterjee

that prevented women from giving birth to more than one child. But he made little attempt to criticize absent fathers, and did not discuss paternal responsibilities for raising children. “What do I refer to specifically? I propose a program to encourage childbirth. In particular, I propose measures to support young families and support women who decide to give birth and raise children. Our aim should be at the least to encourage families to have a second child.”15 In the rest of the speeches while Putin referred to “families” several times, it was clear that he was addressing mothers who may or may not have been part of a nuclear family. The father was conspicuously absent from the rest of the speech as Putin proposed concrete measures to increase the birth rates. He called on the government to significantly increase maternity benefits, and he also pledged monetary support to women to compensate them for lost income from waged work. Putin also promised that a maternal capital, a substantial sum of 250,000 rubles, would be paid to women when their second child turned three. Finally, Putin called for a significant increase in the availability of government- sponsored medical services and health care facilities for pregnant women, also a prominent plank in the Stalinist gender contract. Putin reiterated the key points of his speech on the demographic crisis in his Women’s Day address at the Grand Kremlin Palace on March  7, 2008, a year that was also celebrated as the “Year of the Family” in Russia.16 At the same event, Dmitry Medvedev, current president of the Russian Federation, stated that the federal budget had allocated six billion rubles to help support women with children. He claimed that 850,000 women already received child support benefits in Russia and promised to extend them to an additional 270,000 unemployed women. Medvedev boasted that the family- friendly policies of the present government had led to a 1.3 percent increase in fertility rates in Russia. Medvedev, following Putin, also promised increased government spending for preschool facilities, and called for greater allocations in the federal budget for subsidized mortgages for families with children. Like Putin, Medvedev refrained from mentioning the role of fathers in increasing birth rates, and was content to reiterate the obligations and commitments of the state to increase family size in Russia. The creation of a new post- Soviet holiday: the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity (den’ sem’i, liubvi i vernosti), which was first observed on July 8, 2008, under the Putin presidency with widespread support from the Orthodox Church, highlighted this gradual shift in official rhetoric concerning the role of women in Russian culture. While the holiday is apparently intended to celebrate conjugal felicity and fidelity within heterosexual unions, it reinforces many of the overtly pro- natalist policies adopted by the current government.

from public, to private, to public again



Putin’s 2006 speech brought forth vociferous and varied responses from the educated public, especially from feminist activists and scholars in academia. While some felt the amount of money pledged by the state to be grossly inadequate, others distrusted the ability of the Russian state to distribute benefits equitably to the women who needed it most. Elena Gapova, senior researcher at the Center for Gender Studies at the European Humanities University (initially at Minsk, Belarus, and subsequently moved to Vilnius, Lithuania, due to political exigencies) lambasted the president’s speech for once again relegating women to home and reproduction. She criticized Putin for refusing to consider paternal responsibility for child rearing, and took issue with the fact that the demographic policy was formulated at the highest levels of the government without the advice of and consultation with women’s groups. Finally, Gapova was incensed that in his speech Putin refused to consider the impact of reproduction on women’s professional development.17 In comparison, Gapova’s colleagues at the Gender Studies Program in the European University in St. Petersburg were more cautiously optimistic about the speech. They believed that the model of the working mother was once more being validated by the state. Unlike the prevailing cultural conservatism of the 1990s, there was no longer an attempt to enshrine the woman in domesticity and reproduction exclusively.18 According to the scholars, “Few other politicians of this level, anywhere in the world, have so strongly endorsed women’s economic independence. The same approach can be found among the socialist classics such as Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, and notably the Russian Alexandra Kollontay, who regarded state support to women as mothers as the main tool of family policy.”19

Feminisms Reproduced and Multiplied The Soviet state on International Women’s Day throughout the century had always reminded women that bourgeois feminism had little or no role to play in Soviet politics. Since the state guaranteed women’s rights and was continually involved in promoting their welfare, Soviet women could advocate for their own issues within the parameters of a state paternalism and express feminist interests through the dominant framework of authoritarian masculinity.20 Feminism was continually represented as the selfish expression of a privileged cohort of man- hating women (thinly coded as lesbians), who pushed their narrow, racist, middle- and upper- class interests against those of proletarian workers. Feminist struggles for trans- class issues in the West such as equal pay at the workplace, equal access to education, progressive family legislation and divorce laws, laws curtailing violence against women, and for increased government funding for social services



choi chatterjee

were continually ignored in the Soviet media. And Western feminists were shown to be angry, defeminized women who advocated for the excesses of a perverted sexual liberty. After 1991, as groups fought to create women’s studies centers, organizations, and networks, the Russian authorities faced the specter of many forms of feminism, each with its own distinctive agenda and political strategy.21 The Russian government, used to dealing with small circles of passionate dissidents with clearly defined positions, was faced with the disorganized, sprawling, and boisterous marketplace of public opinion. The articulate denizens of this public space were particularly adept at using the new electronic media and had unprecedented access to Western academia and the international press. Russian politicians publicly and repeatedly expressed their disgust for masculine women (feminists) who engaged in the political sphere and adopted aggressive tactics.22 But despite a consistent effort to label native Russian feminists as pawns of Western organizations and donor institutions, the state could not hold back the tide of feminism and the exponential growth in feminist scholarship. And Russian women, even those who expressed open contempt for the term “feminism” and “feminists,” expressed a clearly delineated sense of female selfhood and strong feminist convictions. What follows is a brief outline of some of the more outspoken feminist discourses that were aired on International Women’s Day. “The government likes us to talk about gender politics on Women’s Day. Perhaps on other days, citizens and bureaucrats are busy with important problems relating to pensions, army funding, and international affairs.”23 Whether in response to government pressure or not, Women’s Day usually leads to a slew of feminist publications in the press. Some are overtly angry, denouncing the feminization of poverty in Russia, the inadequate representation of women in policy making at both the provincial and the national level, degrading objectification of women in the media, and the violence against women within the family. Other, more scholarly voices use the occasion to present information from their research on the current state of gender relations in Russia. Dr. Elena Iarskaia- Smirnova, formerly the head of the Department of Anthropology and Social Work at Saratov State Technical University, and currently faculty member at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, in an insightful article has analyzed the contents of editorials in Izvestiia and Kommunist on the occasion of Women’s Day from 1920 to 2001. She concludes that after 1991, the holiday became significantly depoliticized. The revolutionary zeal associated with the celebrations was replaced by a consumerist ethos, and rampant commercial advertising promoted practices of gift giving instead of raising women’s consciousness. Iarskaia- Smirnova writes sarcastically that on Women’s Day, women re-

from public, to private, to public again



ceive, “instead of female solidarity—mimosas, instead of rights—holiday postcards.”24 Feminist journalist Nadezhda Azhgikhina often uses Women’s Day to write incisive and highly critical articles about the conditions and status of women in contemporary Russia.25 Azhgikhina, like other feminists in Russia, is trying to restore a sense of women’s history, feminist genealogy, and feminist outrage to International Women’s Day. Responses to both an Internet survey that I conducted myself and other more formal opinion polls reveal that most young Russians have little knowledge of the revolutionary history of the day and view it as an occasion that signifies spring, romance, and gift giving. Activists such as Azhgikhina are trying to work against this willful denial of a feminist past and historical amnesia.26 Other Russian scholars are also trying to restore a sense of balance about the legacy of the Soviet Union especially in women’s affairs but without whitewashing any of the excesses of the Stalinist past. Much of their discourse is intentionally state centered rather than male centered, and like the members of the Russian government, feminists avoid blaming misogyny or even the patriarchal social structure for their oppressed conditions and gender inequity. While eschewing Marxist essentialism, many Russian feminists nonetheless believe that economic inequality and severe disadvantages in the workplace, rather than male oppression, are the main reason for the depressed status of women in Russia. Many journals on Women’s Day highlight the fact that Russian women are poorly represented in the higher reaches of the government and academia, and in most positions of power and authority. But even in those articles that blame Russian men for fearing educated and competent Russian women, the authors call for government intervention to rectify the situation.27 Furthermore, these critics believe that the Russian state must guarantee women’s right to work and help women achieve some kind of gender parity in income and wages. In her Women’s Day article, Azhgikhina explained that while women’s wages lagged behind those of men in most industrialized nations in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the Soviet Union was the first country that introduced the concept of equal pay for equal work. She also approvingly cited the many heroines of labor who were honored in Stalinist Russia in Magnitgorsk, in the Moscow metro, and on collective farms. She noted, however, that income parity was never really achieved in the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, moreover, women suffered from catastrophic job losses. In 1992, women formed 75 percent of the total number of unemployed people even though on an average they had high qualifications and professional education. Following Gorbachev’s lead it was popular for politicians and business leaders to say that women should be given the choice of staying at



choi chatterjee

home, but in the grim economic conditions of the 1990s, women exercised very few choices. According to Azhgikhina, the media represented women either as the virtuous housewife or as the supermodel, friend of the businessman. In reality few families could survive without women’s financial contributions, and many households with children depended exclusively on women’s wages. Although rates of female unemployment have fallen since 1992, men have achieved much higher levels of income across the board. There has been widespread feminization of poverty and catastrophic cuts in state support for women with children. Reflecting on the arc of Soviet history, Azhgikhina ended her article with a provocative question: “Was everything bad during the Soviet years? Can we salvage nothing from those days?” Feminist commentators across the board agree that conditions for women deteriorated sharply after the fall of the Soviet Union, and most feel that the causes of women’s deteriorating conditions are rooted in economic conditions. But while there is agreement at this fundamental macroeconomic level, scholars advanced other reasons for the backward status of women. Academic turned politician Galina Mikhaleva, doctor of philosophy and high- ranking member of the opposition party Iabloko, conceded that despite the quota system in the Soviet era, there were very few high- ranking women within the party, and women were poorly represented in large organizations and government offices. But with the abolition of formal quotas after 1991, women’s representation in politics fell even more sharply. Sexual harassment grew at an astonishing rate in the workplace as did overt gender discrimination. But Mikhaleva took women to task for this sorry state of affairs. Despite the exponential growth in women’s movements in Russia, Mikhaleva felt that there were very few organizations that were composed of Western- style radical feminists. Most of them were afraid to advocate for an exclusively feminist agenda, and instead were content to work with invalids, children, and pensioners. Women’s organizations spent their energy in doing useful social work rather than publicly agitating for women’s rights.28 Similarly, in 2005, Azhgikhina asked why Russian women weren’t outraged by government’s indifference to women’s issues, their lack of access to circles of power, and their declining wages. According to her, “the biggest threat facing Russian women is their own modesty and shyness. They work unbelievably hard. . . . They sacrifice everything for their loved ones. Yet they can’t seem to respect themselves and demand others do so, too.”29 An article in the liberal and influential newspaper Izvestiia in 2007 went even further and chastised women roundly for shirking their political duties and responsibilities. The author asked why women were content with

from public, to private, to public again



flowers and desultory help from men with the housework on Women’s Day. She demanded that society view women as warriors, ready to fight shoulder to shoulder with men on boards of directors, in parliamentary debates, and in presidential campaigns.30 The article was accompanied by a poster from 1950 showing a woman giving a lecture at the podium and flanked by other seated women. An ominously large portrait of Stalin looms in the background, but in case we misunderstand the message, the caption accompanying the text reads that the self- proclaimed equality of women was never really achieved in either the government or the Central Committee of the party in Stalin’s time. While there are laments aplenty on the degraded status of women from academics and feminist politicians, some of the more popular glossy magazines such as Russian Vogue and Cosmopolitan publish accounts of the fabulous lives of Russian celebrities such as Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of the former mayor of St. Petersburg, in connection with International Women’s Day. Other publications use the holiday to showcase the achievements of select Russian women, who, in spite of the pervasive gender discrimination, have risen to the top of their professions. These include high- ranking female executives at corporations such as Microsoft, as well as the owners of small businesses such as advertising agencies, restaurants, and beauty salons. The fact that many of these occupations did not even exist prior to 1991, and that women have successfully built up these commercial organizations and are running them, is quite praiseworthy.31 There was widespread coverage of Valentina Matvienko, who served as the deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation for Welfare till 2003, and then became the governor of St. Petersburg. Despite her widespread unpopularity in St. Petersburg because of her political loyalty to Putin, she was often featured in various lavish photo- ops on International Women’s Day, as a successful female politician who had a flair for clothes and looked good on camera.32

Post-Soviet Consumption Practices The Women’s Day sketch aired by Kukly was considered offensive not only because it openly mocked the deep corruption that beset the highest levels of Russian governing circles, but also because the corruption was couched in terms of commerce, of buying and selling of both sex and the soul. In a didactic subtext, the show warned viewers that an excess of commerce led to the death of the body and the disappearance of the self. In post- Soviet Russia, however, Women’s Day is associated with lavish consumerism and the consumption of specific items and articles. Descriptions of Women’s Day gifts in various articles in the press highlight the class differences in



choi chatterjee

contemporary Russia in terms of unequal access to material goods. And the commentary on consumption also educates readers on what are the desirable objects of consumption and how to consume these new goods in an acceptable manner. Advertisements on the array of goods and services available for Women’s Day signal the emergence of postsocialist female consumers differentiated by age, education, wealth, and taste. Traditionally, in the Soviet period, men gave wives, sweethearts, mothers, and female friends token gifts of perfume (Red Moscow or Scythian Gold), chocolate (Red October), and of course bouquets of mimosas and tulips to express their love and appreciation. In the context of widespread shortages and the limited availability of personal items of consumption in the Soviet times, these gifts were welcomed and considered appropriate. In post- Soviet Russia even the flower trade has become embroiled in the tentacles of the black market. The police routinely arrest smugglers who attempt to bring in cheaper flowers from Ukraine as bouquets for Women’s Day can cost as much as $180.33 The repertoire of Women’s Day gifts has expanded considerably to include cosmetics, aromatic candles, imported French perfumes, jewelry, lingerie, china, household appliances, music, theater tickets, and books. Gift giving has taken on commercial dimensions as businesses and private firms often use the occasion to give female employees presents of champagne and chocolate. Often Women’s Day leads to the creation of whimsical and imaginative gifts. On International Women’s Day the best chefs in Saratov created iced cakes that featured the faces of wellknown criminals being overpowered by heroic female police officers.34 And in 2002, St. Petersburg designer Janis Chamalidy took it upon himself to design a wardrobe of thirteen outfits for Russia’s first lady, Liudmila Putin. The outfits were accompanied by coordinated accessories, and cosmetics, and were sent as a commemorative gift to the first lady, on March 8.35 In the contemporary era, gift giving and shopping for gifts have become a battle between the sexes, and often Russian women complain that their male partners continue to gift candy and bouquets of flowers for Women’s Day, instead of producing unusual and exotic gifts. According to Masha Dugina, a journalist, “On March 8, Russian women mostly think of two things: their appearance and gifts: hairdressers and cosmetologists are scheduled weeks in advance; you’d want to receive all those presents and gifts in your best shape.”36 Even women who don’t particularly care for Women’s Day take offense if their boyfriends forget to present them with gifts on that day.37 And some women feel that Russians should throw Klara Zetkin, the socialist founder of Women’s Day, overboard and replace her with Scarlett O’Hara as a real model of womanhood, untroubled by thoughts of emancipation and feminism. Some clubs and nightclubs have even staged satirical

from public, to private, to public again



and provocative performances about famous socialist heroines such as Klara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg as a postmodern commentary on the Soviet practices associated with Women’s Day.38 In the first decade of the twenty- first century, when Russia was flush with oil wealth, Women’s Day became an occasion for decadent and conspicuous consumption for the new elites in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. A survey of eight hundred men in St. Petersburg and Moscow revealed that 5 percent of the male respondents planned on spending over ten thousand rubles, or $440, for Women’s Day gifts. Some of these men even planned to surprise their wives and or girlfriends with Air France tickets for two to Paris.39 Advertisements on the fashionable Tverskaya Boulevard suggested that a car was an appropriate gift for Women’s Day. Upscale hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs arranged events for Women’s Day that featured famous rock stars, jazz bands, and string orchestras. One of the exclusive nightclubs in Moscow arranged a fashion show organized by the internationally acclaimed fashion designer Igor Chapurin. Another nightclub held a poetry recitation by Eduard Limonov, well- known writer turned ultranationalist politician, in honor of Women’s Day. Restaurants often included complimentary champagne cocktails with dinner for women.40 Many of these events were by invitation only, and others were affordable to a select few who were willing to spend up to $500 for an evening’s worth of entertainment. Some Women’s Day extravaganzas even started with Viagra cocktails for women, and featured male striptease shows, auctions of male slaves, and men competing in wet underwear contests.41 Zhenya Debryanskaya, one of Russia’s first publicly self- proclaimed lesbians, even arranged an exclusive female strip show for women at the Dyke Club on Trubnaya Ploshchad in Moscow.42 The overt sexualization of the Women’s Day entertainment helped create the counterimage of the Russian woman as a sexual voyeur and consumer, rather than the sexual object exclusively. Male pornography and eroticism long available in the West now had found a new market: distributors found new venues to exhibit their wares and created a new cohort of consumers. In contrast to the leisure practices of the wealthy few who are able to afford the Viagra cocktails and the gifts available at sophisticated and exclusive stores in St. Petersburg and Moscow, my Internet survey reveals that among academic professionals gifts are less important, and often gift giving is a means to reaffirm relationships and cement existing emotional bonds. Many correspondents played down the monetary value of the gifts, and most expressed pleasure at receiving bouquets of flowers from their male partners. They looked forward to an opportunity to spend a romantic evening together, visit a café, or even have dinner at a favorite restaurant



choi chatterjee

on March 8. The intelligentsia’s affirmation of emotional and nonmaterial values is a way to signal their distance from the growing commercialization of Russian society, and to show their distaste for the hypermaterialism and consumerism of the New Russians. At the same time, with few exceptions, very few of those correspondents seemed aware that Women’s Day had any revolutionary or feminist connotations. Most believed that it is a holiday intended to express appreciation toward mothers, grandmothers, female friends, and coworkers. In response to this rapid loss of public memory about the state- sponsored feminist movement in the Soviet Union, Dr. Elena Iarskaia- Smirnova uses the occasion to wish other feminists well, and works with students to produce wall newspapers—newspapers designed to be displayed in public places—with articles about women’s rights as a way to restore a history of feminism to the holiday celebrations.43

Conclusion In this essay I have used a wide- angle lens to analyze discourses across the media spectrum, rather than evaluate the internal consistency and continuity within a single mode. International Women’s Day provides the space for a variety of gendered talk that includes feminist voices, official voices, media commentary, and the opinions of private individuals. The holiday, while retaining the Soviet- era official receptions at the Kremlin honoring heroic women and fecund mothers, has spawned a variety of rites, rituals, and practices that are associated with both the new global consumerism and new forms of feminism. The occasion continues to attract considerable media interest in the post- Soviet period, both at the provincial and the national level. And it often serves as an informal platform for the discussion of various issues related to women and changing gender norms in contemporary Russia. The multiplicity of voices signals two major transformations in Russia. First, the transition to a multivocal society in which discourse has moved beyond simple binary oppositions of that produced by the state and the dissidents, and second, the multiple representations of Russian women signal the emergence of a female self who can inhabit more than one subject position.44 The question of women evokes passionate testimony, acrimony, ironic commentary, and political criticism in post- Soviet Russia. Feminists are angry about pervasive gender discrimination, the feminization of poverty, degrading objectification of women in the media, sexual harassment, and inadequate government support for working mothers. They mourn the collapse of the Soviet welfare state and note that, though deeply flawed, the old system guaranteed employment for women and ensured at least some basic

from public, to private, to public again



level of social protection. They feel betrayed by the transition to a market economy and criticize the consumerist ethos that it promotes so relentlessly. The post- Soviet state, like its predecessor, is deeply interested in raising birth rates through the promotion of what superficially can be perceived as pro- natalist policies. As state and feminist groups struggle with the complicated legacies of the Soviet past, we can see the clear reemergence of the much maligned Soviet gender contract. The contract that sought guarantees for the sustenance of women and children within the parameters of a welfare state is making a tentative comeback both in state and oppositional discourses. At the other end of the spectrum, the new market economy has generated multiple identities and subject positions for women: as consumers, as professionals, and as potent symbols in media and advertising. As feminists, we might deplore some of these obscene symbolic manifestations of women as seen in the segment of Kukly, but at the same time the proliferation of referents within discourse is the sign of a functioning civil society. We can see the clear emergence of the Russian woman as a liberal self, with the potential to become a self- actuating civic subject. Not a mere repository for national virtues, not the maternal guardian of hearth and home, not the dependable workhorse who combines motherhood and career with admirable aplomb, but the site of myriad possibilities and identities. The new rituals that have emerged from Women’s Day celebrations in post- Soviet Russia foreground these new possibilities even as they mark the disappearance of a Soviet feminist past. Is it possible that the loss of grace for the iconic Russian Woman might actually mean more freedom for the Russian woman to express her multivalent selfhood, and experiment with new markers of self and subjectivity?45

Notes 1. Yulia Solovyova, “The World’s Oldest Profession,” Moscow Times, March 18, 2000, 5, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 2. Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). 3. Lynne Viola, “Bab’y i Bunty and Women’s Protest During Collectivization,” Russian Review 50, no. 1 ( January 1986): 23–42; Sharon Kowalsky, “Gender, Deviance and the Development of Soviet Social Norms in Revolutionary Russia,” Russian Review 62, no. 3 ( July 2003): 366–86.



choi chatterjee

4. Lisa Kirschenbaum, “Gender, Memory, and National Myth: Ol’ga Berggol’ts and the Siege of Leningrad,” Nationalities Papers 28, no. 3 (September 2000): 551–64. 5. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Deborah Field, “Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and the Conceptions of Private Life in Khrushchev’s Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 4 (October 1998): 599–613. 6. Mary Buckley, Post- Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Janet Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, eds., Living Gender After Communism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 7. Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007). 8. “Russian Holidays, Old and New,” RIA NOVOSTI, November 25, 2005, http:// www.lexisnexis.com. 9. “Urals Attempt to Set Kissing Record on Women’s Day,” RIA NOVOSTI, March 8, 2006, http://www.lexisnexis.com. 10. Andrei Zolotov, “Orthodox Russians Blast Holiday,” Moscow Times, March 9, 1999, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 11. Catherine Belton, “Putin Walks His Way into Women’s Hearts,” March 9, 2000, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 12. http://www.kremlin.ru/appears/2006/05/10/1357_type63372type63374type 82634_105546.shtml. 13. L. L.  Rybakovskii, “Demograficheskoe budushchee Rossii i migratsionnye protsessy,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 3 (2005): 71–81. 14. David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 15. http://www.kremlin.ru/appears/2006/05/10/1357_type63372type63374type 82634_105546.shtml. 16. http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2006/05/10/1823_type70029type82912 _105566.shtml. 17. Elena Gapova, “Vy rozhaite, vy rozhaite, vam zachtetsia,” May 25, 2006, http:// www.grani.ru/Politics/Russia/President/m.106127.html. 18. Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova, “Who Helps the Degraded Housewife? Comments on Vladimir Putin’s Demographic Speech,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14, no. 4 (2007): 349–57. 19. Ibid., 353. 20. I thank my colleague and scholar of French history Dr. Cheryl Koos for introducing me to this concept of authoritarian masculinity as an organizing principle in twentieth- century European politics. 21. Julie Hemment, Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGO’s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Norma Noonan and Carol Nechemias, eds., Encyclopedia of Russian Women’s Movements (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001); Elena Zdravomyslova, “Overview of the Feminist Movement in Contemporary Russia,” Diogenes 49, no. 2 (2002): 35–39. 22. And the Moscow Patriarchate handed out medals of maternity to fecund mothers on International Women’s Day in a desperate attempt to stem the explosive growth of women professionals who practiced birth control to limit family size. “Mother- Heroines Awarded with Patriarch’s Medal of Maternity,” March 8, 2007, ITAR- TASS News Agency, http://www.lexisnexis.com.

from public, to private, to public again



23. Aleksandra Samarina and Ivan Rodin, “Zhenschinam snova pobeschali ravnopravia,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 7, 2006, http://www.ng.ru/politics/2006- 03- 07/ 2_gender.html. 24. Galina Karpova and Elena Iarskaia- Smirnova, “Gendernaia ideologiia and sotsial’naia politika v ofitsial’nom diskurse. Mezhdunarodnogo zhenskogo dnia, 1920–2001,” in Zhenschiny v istorii: vozmozhnost byt’ uvidennymi (Minsk: BGPU, 2002), 261–89. I thank the authors for generously sharing the results of their research with me. 25. “Zolushki perestroiki i rynochnikh reform,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, March 7, 2000, http://www.ng.ru/politics/2000- 03- 07/1_cinderellas.html. 26. See surveys on International Women’s Day conducted by the organization Fond Obschestvennoe Mnenie, available at http://bd.fom.ru/cat/humdrum/holiday/ 8march. I thank Elena Gapova for directing my attention to this website. 27. Natalia Rimashevskaia, “Gendernye stereotypy i logika sotsial’nikh otnoshenii,” Svobodnaia Mysl, no. 3 (2006), 100–110; “Zhenschiny, ikh mesto v elitie kak pokazatel’ razvitiia natsii,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 7, 2007, http://www.ng.ru/ editorial/2007- 03- 07/2_women.html. 28. “Pochetnaia forma diskriminatsii vmesto ravnopraviia,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 7, 2002, http://www.ng.ru/politics/2002- 03- 07/2_discrimination.html. 29. “The Decisive Day After Women’s Day,” Moscow Times, March 9, 2005, http:// www.themoscowtimes.com. 30. Ksenia Velichko, “Zhenskaia ‘boi’tsovaia’ dolia,” Izvestiia, March  15, 2007, http://www.izvestia.ru/obshestvo/article3102056/. 31. Olga Promptova and Sergei Rybak, “Women in Business,” Moscow Times, March 10, 1998, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 32. Evgenii Lesin, “Vitse- prem’er- vsem prochim primer,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 7, 2003, http://www.ng.ru/saturday/2003- 03- 07/21_photoreport.html. 33. Anatoly Gordeyev, “Flowers Smuggled in Large Amounts from Ukraine to Russia,” March 7, 2006, ITAR- TASS News Agency, http://www.lexisnexis.com. 34. Vladimir Barsukov, “Women Policemen in Saratov Get Cakes Showing Criminals,” March 8, 2003, ITAR- TASS News Agency, http://www.lexisnexis.com. 35. “Russian Designer Advises Lyudmila Putin on Clothes and Make- Up,” NTV, Moscow, March 7, 2002 (BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union–Political supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring), http://www.lexisnexis.com. 36. “A Carnation Is Not a Present,” Moscow Times, March 6, 2006, http://www .themoscowtimes.com. 37. Elena Gapova and Serguei Oushakine have circulated a set of questions that I drafted relating to the forms of celebration of International Women’s Day on various Internet discussion sites, and about fifty respondents from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have been kind enough to reply. Answer to IWD questionnaire. Correspondent is an Internet editor in Moscow and is currently enrolled in a graduate program. 38. Galina Okulova, “Den’ bez kastriuli. 8 Marta kak klubnyi’ prazdnik,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 7, 2003, http://www.ng.ru/accent/2003- 03- 07/23_celebrate .html. 39. Alex Bratersky, “It’s a Woman’s World: Flowers for Men, Viagra for the Ladies,” Moscow Times, March 5, 1999, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 40. Elena Semenova, “Zhenskii den’ pod skrezhet stankov. Kak otmetit’ Vos’moe



choi chatterjee

marta v Moskovskikh klubakh,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 3, 2006, http://www .ng.ru/accent/2006- 03- 03/23_8march.html. 41. Galina Okulova, “Zaschitnitsy Rodiny,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 5, 2004, http://www.ng.ru/accent/2004-03-05/23_defenders.html; “From Revolution to Revelry,” March 7, 2003, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 42. Chloe Arnold, “Roses Are Red, Russian Women Are Blue,” Moscow Times, March 7, 1998, http://www.themoscowtimes.com. 43. The sole exceptions were female academics many of whom felt that the holiday should carry feminist connotations and serve to remind women of their solidarity in the face on gender oppression. I especially thank Dr. Elena Iarskaia- Smirnova for her detailed responses to the survey. 44. Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone coauthored “Models of Self and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 967–86. 45. My argument owes much to work of other scholars such as Hilary Pilkington who have pointed to the variety of masculine and feminine types in post- Soviet Russia. Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (New York: Routledge, 1996). See also Yana Hashamova, “Castrated Patriarchy, Violence and Gender Hierarchies in Post- Soviet Film,” in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth- Century Russian Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 196–224.

Part 3 Military and Battlefield Commemorations

Taking and Retaking the Field: Borodino as a Site of Collective Memory Julie Buckler

Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837) marked the twenty- fifth anniversary of the 1812 battle fought on Russian soil against Napoleon’s Grand Armée.1 The poem, familiar to every Russian schoolchild, stages an encounter between a youth and an old veteran. In the opening stanza, the youth asks, “Tell me, Grandfather, isn’t it true that fire- scorched Moscow was not without cause [nedarom] given over to the French? There were battles over it—they say these were something!” This gambit elicits the story of Borodino, and the old veteran recounts his experience in more than a dozen stanzas of folksy speech. The poem’s oft- quoted line “Nedarom pomnit vsia Rossiia pro den’ Borodina” (“With good cause all Russia remembers the day of Borodino”) underscores the ritual nature of the veteran’s narration and the younger generation’s indebtedness to its elders. Lermontov’s poem enacts the sharing of a legacy, thereby renewed, drawing its readers along with the youth and the veteran into a community of remembrance. “All Russia remembers Borodino,” and with this declaration Lermontov’s poem enacts the workings of collective memory and reinforces knowledge of the historical event. Well known during the nineteenth century, Lermontov’s poem was a good fit for the Soviet period, when it was much anthologized, memorized, and recited. And “Borodino” also suits the imperial nostalgia of the postSoviet period, with its lavish annual celebrations and battle reenactments. 



julie buckler

The oral legend conveyed by the old veteran remains public property, a meeting place for history and the present. The story of Borodino purveys a potent national myth, celebrating the selfless patriotism and shared suffering of the Russian people, and asserting the Russian nation’s special status, both divinely and world- historically conferred. Lermontov’s was not the only poetic injunction to remember Borodino. In contrast to Lermontov’s populist paean, Denis Davydov’s 1829 elegy “Borodinskoe pole” (“The Field of Borodino”) emphasizes the shared memories of an elite group. Seventeen years after the battle, an aging hussar visits the deserted Borodino field and mourns the dwindling number of living witnesses to the battle. He longs to join his fallen comrades in their death- sleep. In contrast, Lermontov’s youth prompts the veteran to retell a beloved story that the youth himself doubtless knows by heart. These two poems delineate modes for commemorating Borodino that have both been prevalent since 1812. While it might seem that Lermontov’s collective and largely triumphalist style of commemoration won out over Davydov’s more private and elegiac version, the field of Borodino has proved sufficiently capacious to encompass both responses, as well as many others. The nationalist myth of Borodino has been celebrated in a spirit of modesty and reverence, as well as with grand imperial bombast. Battlefield sites such as Borodino, Waterloo, Gettysburg, or the Somme have a special energy. Battlefield sites often eschew burial places for human remains, instead using physical memorials as place markers for the absent bodies. Indeed, the powerful sense of absence, not only of the dead bodies but also of the physical traces a battle leaves upon a natural landscape, transforms the visitor into a spiritual medium, alert to a palpable sense of what cannot be seen.2 A battlefield site such as Borodino is in every sense larger than the sum of the individual monuments there. Approximately 120 kilometers west of Moscow, the Borodino museumpreserve is the oldest battlefield museum in the world, founded in August 1839, and receiving some three hundred thousand visitors annually.3 The history of Borodino field since 1812 illustrates the internal contradictions at the heart of the mythology; the battle’s monumental status has remained a constant, whereas the commemorative site has been prey to the vagaries of time and circumstance. Today, there is a poignant contrast between the worn physical artifacts at the museum- preserve and the unquestioned significance accorded to the battle as historical event, and this contrast itself may be Borodino’s most salient feature. The veteran in Lermontov’s poem prefigures this contrast when he compares the heroic past (his own “powerful and ferocious tribe”) to the impoverished present (the youth and his ilk, a poor substitute for “bogatyr- warriors”). For Davydov’s hussar, similarly,

taking and retaking the field



the battle’s recollected sights and sounds are more vivid than the silent, unresponsive landscape that confronts him at Borodino in 1829. The imaginative work required of the visitor to Borodino—bridging the distance between monumental myth and largely absent physical evidence, and closing the gap between individual experience and shared meaning— may be precisely that which has kept the myth alive, as in the poems by Lermontov and Davydov. What can we learn from the paradoxical and uneven commemorative afterlife of 1812’s most significant battle in Russia across imperial, Soviet, and post- Soviet times?

Borodino: A Monument to Ambiguity On June 24, 1812, Napoleon and his Grand Armée, numbering well over five hundred thousand men, crossed the River Neman and entered the territory of the Russian Empire. Napoleon reached Vilnius on June 28, with Russian forces under General Barclay de Tolly retreating ahead of him, failing to establish a defensive position from which to give battle. Impatient, Tsar Alexander replaced Barclay de Tolly with Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, a seasoned veteran of Catherine the Great’s wars against the Ottoman Empire. Kutuzov continued the Russian retreat—pausing at Smolensk for a mid- August battle—and both armies continued moving inexorably toward Moscow. The long- awaited military confrontation finally took place by the small village of Borodino on September 7, 1812. The fifteen- hour battle at Borodino was the largest and bloodiest singleday encounter of the Napoleonic Wars and the last offensive action fought by Napoleon in Russia. Some 250,000 troops were involved: Napoleon’s 126,000–134,000 men to Kutuzov’s 154,000–157,000, with approximately six hundred cannons on each side. The French succeeded in capturing most of the key positions, but Kutuzov mounted a determined defense.4 At Borodino, 28,000–35,000 men from Napoleon’s army were killed, wounded, or captured, with 45,000–50,000 lost from the Russian side—a total of 68,500–85,000 casualties in all, numbers not matched until the massive battles of the First World War a century later.5 Most of the wounded from both sides were left to die on the field.6 On the evening after the battle, Kutuzov sent a message to the tsar declaring a great victory, but after receiving information about the disordered condition of the Russian troops, he reluctantly ordered a retreat to the south, leaving the Moscow road open to the advancing French. Russian officials ordered Moscow residents to evacuate, and Napoleon took possession of the Russian city on September 14, though Alexander I had not sent him any notice of surrender.



julie buckler

During the five weeks of the Grand Armée’s occupation, looting was rampant and large portions of the city were destroyed by fire. In midOctober, Napoleon and his army left Moscow, and were forced by Kutuzov to travel back along the same route through territory now denuded of supplies. Napoleon and his remaining troops made their way out of Russia, their numbers reduced by snow, starvation, disease, and partisan warfare; as few as twenty- three thousand men from the Grand Armée crossed the border out of Russia on December 14. The unsuccessful invasion of Russia marked the turning point of the Napoleonic Wars, culminating in Napoleon’s October 1813 military defeat and 1814 abdication. Borodino is considered the moment when the war began to turn in the Russians’ favor. Historians will never agree as to whether the Russians or the French won at Borodino, even though the battle is so often termed “decisive.”7 Both sides claim victory, although neither Napoleon nor Kutuzov succeeded in realizing their primary aims: Napoleon was not able to destroy the Russian Army; Kutuzov failed to defend Moscow. Napoleon himself offered an ambiguous characterization of Borodino in a retrospective of his entire military career: “Of the fifty battles I have fought, the most terrible was that before Moscow. The French showed themselves to be worthy victors, and the Russians can rightly call themselves invincible.”8 Despite this ambiguity, the Battle of Borodino occupies a unique place in Russian cultural memory as a central, anchoring event that confers meaning on other major moments in national history through resonant analogies. Napoleon’s army seems to recapitulate invaders from the more distant past, such as the Mongol hordes (thirteenth century) and the Poles (early seventeenth century). The year 1812 echoes 1613, when the Poles were driven from Moscow and Mikhail Romanov was crowned the first ruler in the three- hundredyear Romanov dynastic succession, as attested by the 1818 monument to Minin and Pozharsky on Red Square, installed just a few years after the Russian victory over Napoleon and in the flush of that triumphal spirit. Borodino has also found historical resonance in its prefiguration of the 1941 Nazi invasion. In October 1941, the Borodino environs were at the front defensive line, the site of a battle where Soviet forces held back the Germans for six days in an effort that successfully protected the city while reinforcements could be strengthened around Moscow. The 1941 battle at Borodino has been represented as a corrective rewriting of 1812, with Moscow saved, this time, instead of occupied and burned. One hundred twenty- nine years apart, the invasions by Napoleon and Hitler followed the same route—from Warsaw to Minsk to Smolensk— and the Russians took a stand at Borodino. Two parallel national myths reinforce one another. In both cases, the ancient Russian city of Moscow

taking and retaking the field



was threatened and, with it, the continuity of cultural memory and identity. In each case, a desperate situation called forth a transfiguring self- sacrifice that became an essential element of both Russian national mythology and Soviet patriotic ideology. The initial question posed by Lermontov’s “Borodino” concerns Moscow: “Tell me, Grandfather, isn’t it true that fire- scorched Moscow was not without cause [nedarom] given over to the French?” Before the old veteran begins speaking, the youth has already answered his own question: “Nedarom pomnit vsia Rossiia pro den’ Borodina” (“With good cause all Russia remembers the day of Borodino”). While it may be true that Moscow was given over to the French not without cause (nedarom), it is with very good cause (nedarom) that all Russia remembers Borodino. The twinned use of the Russian word nedarom makes this sentence into a poetic equation of the double negative and the positive assertion. Nedarom also means “not for nothing,” which conveys a different sense of equation, this time as exchange—the French paid dearly in advance at Borodino for the short- lived occupation of Moscow. Borodino serves as the centerpiece to Russia’s history of the Napoleonic Wars, but it makes for a decentered centerpiece. Borodino is more like a nondestination, off to the side, past Smolensk but before Moscow, a place that armies march through rather than toward. The Battle of Borodino preceded the occupation of Moscow in historical time, seemingly as a kind of prologue, but since then, Borodino has been granted historical significance far greater than the Moscow- based events that followed. In essence, commemoration of the Battle of Borodino as a historical event has helped to recoup the shameful loss of Moscow, retrospectively framing victory, in both 1812 and 1941, as inevitable. This constitutes a remarkable historiographical sleight of hand, considering that Borodino ended so inconclusively for the Russians. The veteran gives an enigmatic answer to the youth’s question: “Kogda b na to ne bozh’ia volia/Ne otdali b Moskvy!” (“Had it not been God’s will, we would not have given up Moscow!”). The veteran ends his narration by repeating this assertion for good measure. Lermontov’s poem closes on a note of seeming ambivalence, raising the still- troubling question of the Russian Army’s retreat and Moscow’s occupation by the French, and expressing humility rather than grandiose certainty. On the other hand, the veteran refers to the French as “infidels” (basurmany) at the moment they leave the field of battle, and this suggests his firm belief that God was always on the side of the Russians. These complex and contradictory associations are all part of the cultural mythology surrounding Borodino. Commemorating Borodino makes a virtue of necessity in the same way that Kutuzov’s



julie buckler

military strategy leading up to the battle has been retrospectively valorized as “Scythian”—deliberately avoiding direct military engagement with the French and retreating, not because of indecision, but so as to draw the enemy deeper into Russian territory and farther from its supply bases. In this light, Borodino figures as part of a larger master plan. Borodino became a powerful Russian national myth that was seemingly immune to debunking, drawing added strength from the ambiguity at the myth’s heart. Leo Tolstoy’s historical novel War and Peace characterizes Borodino in just this spirit. In Tolstoy’s view, history is created by the invisible confluence of infinite factors, a design far too complex for the human mind to discern. Tolstoy insisted on the contingent course of events on both the Russian and French sides: “Why was the battle of Borodino fought? Neither for the French nor for the Russians did it make the slightest sense. . . . The Russians were not seeking the best position; on the contrary, during their retreat they passed many positions that were better than Borodino. . . . The position at Borodino . . . not only was not strong, but could no more be considered a position than any other place in the Russian Empire on which . . . one might randomly stick a pin in a map.”9 Unexpectedly, Tolstoy’s deflating characterization reconfirms the heroic mythos rather than deconstructing it. True, Tolstoy’s harrowing account of Borodino emphasizes the sheer stubborn stupidity of two enormous armies fighting at close range with artillery, bayonets, and sabers. But for Tolstoy, the Battle of Borodino is also proof of a mysterious collective spirit in the Russian ranks, a determination to expel the invader from the motherland and a willingness to make sacrifices that served this goal—retreat, enormous loss of life, and the occupation of Moscow: “It was . . . a moral victory, the sort that convinces the adversary of the moral superiority of his enemy and of his own impotence, that was gained by the Russians at Borodino. . . . After the shove it had been given, the French army could still roll on as far as Moscow; but there . . . it was to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound it had received at Borodino. The direct consequence of the Battle of Borodino was . . . the destruction of an invading army of five hundred thousand men, and the destruction of Napoleonic France.”10 Tolstoy and the old veteran in Lermontov’s poem appear to be saying the same thing: no matter what force, ambiguous or definitive, ultimately moves history, all roads lead to Borodino, and Borodino leads only to victory.

Borodino Now Does a visit to today’s Borodino battlefield site convey the mythic and monumental sense of the historical event invoked by Lermontov’s poem? Or

taking and retaking the field



does such a visit recapitulate the sorrowful experience of Davydov’s hussar, underscoring the fragile impermanence of human memory and the fundamentally incommunicable nature of historical events? A weekday visitor can ride the electric train two hours from Moscow to Mozhaisk and take a local bus out to the Borodino museum- preserve. Visitors can explore the primary indoor exhibition at the Borodino Historical Museum and the smaller exhibitions at the Spaso- Borodinskii Convent, and may traverse the battlefield area on foot. At the time of a 2008 visit, the Historical Museum housed the exhibition “Borodino—Battle of Giants,” which opened in 2002 for the 190th anniversary. The exhibition includes portraits and busts, uniforms, banners, weapons, musical instruments, maps, coins, medals, snuffboxes, letters and other documents, nineteenth-century first editions, illustrations, commemorative objects such as porcelain vases and plates, and artifacts found in local archaeological excavations. Among the most notable objects are Kutuzov’s field carriage, Tsar Alexander I’s tunic, and Napoleon’s camp bed. The title of the exhibition, “Battle of Giants,” suggests monumentality, but the experience of moving through the small museum with its carefully arranged artifacts makes the scale of Borodino recede, as though seen through the wrong end of a historical telescope. The uniforms seem small, a reminder of the more diminutive stature of men in 1812—and yet, these are the “bogatyr- warriors” invoked by Lermontov’s veteran and the “Homeric” heroes mourned by Davydov’s hussar. The basic paradox of Borodino is prominently on display in the unsettling contrast between these insufficient physical traces and the monumental proportions of the battle, both in historical actuality and in cultural memory. More than two hundred monuments and memorial sites are scattered across the 110 square kilometers of Borodino field. These memorial objects, all listed in the Russian federal cultural register, are formally divided into three groups. Memorials of witness ( pamiatniki- svidetel’stva) are locations important to the battle, including fortifications and battle positions. Memorial places and objects ( pamiatnye mesta i ob”ekty) include parts of the natural and cultural landscape of Borodino that existed at the time of the battle—roads, rivers, heights, fields, forests, swamps, churches, small estates, and settlements. Memorial signs ( pamiatnye znaki) such as tombstones, monuments, and informational plaques provide information about the battle and its participants. The smallish monuments on the battlefield offer variations on a theme—columns, obelisks, crosses, two- headed eagles, cannonballs, and watchtowers. Traditional monuments on high pedestals keep the worshipper at a distance, such that “approaching the monument is always a sort of transgres-



julie buckler

sion of a sacral zone.”11 The human scale of the numerous Borodino monuments, only a few of which are large or substantial, proposes to the visitor a different sort of communion with the past. Walking around the Borodino museum- preserve creates a sense of intimacy and a quiet, haunted sense of mystery. Perhaps monumental space is functionally diluted when spread across 110 square kilometers, at such a physical remove from the locus of power in Moscow, and in a quiet rural setting. Visitors to Borodino on any ordinary day are few; for those not part of a group tour, the experience is largely solitary. The monuments in their overgrown surroundings are scattered across a territory too large to cover efficiently on foot. The memorial interventions in the landscape at Borodino give a diffuse sense of the battle, nearly two hundred years distant in time. The diverse memorial objects at Borodino, given voice by plaques, inscriptions, brochures, and guidebooks, bear witness and communicate their knowledge of the past to attentive visitors. At the time of the 1812 battle, Borodino was an ordinary place. The area around Borodino field included four villages and a number of smaller settlements, linked by a network of rural roads. Today, the commemorative battlefield appears integrated into the local life of area residents, with rough little houses and messy yards lining the road near the Historical Museum. The Borodino field is not cordoned off as sacred space, but rather reflects the intertwined sacred and homely aspects of the commemorative site. French philosopher Henri Lefebvre finds monuments and their settings to possess a complexity he sees in terms of “texture” within a large space covered by “networks or webs.” He writes, “A monumental work . . . does not have a ‘signified’ (or ‘signifieds’); rather, it has 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.” 12 The multiple meanings of the Borodino site are traced by the diverse array of excursions tailored to suit particular types of visitors—foreign and domestic tourists, military and history buffs, Orthodox believers, monarchists, and lovers of Russian literature. Each of these excursions charts a trajectory of meaning that contributes to the “horizon” as a whole. Alternatively, meandering around the museum- preserve in an unstructured fashion allows the visitor to experience the “texture” of Borodino as a place with a past, existing in the present. This too is part of Borodino’s “horizon of meaning.” Lefebvre also defines monumental space in terms of “what may take place there, and consequently also by what may not take place there (prescribed/ proscribed, scene/obscene).” Signs around the Borodino museum- preserve inform visitors of what they may not do on its territory—cut down or plant vegetation, build fires or set off fireworks, litter, walk dogs or pasture live-

taking and retaking the field



stock, climb on the monuments or write on them, remove archaeological objects from the surface or excavate them, drive or park vehicles off the roads, ride horses, play sports, hold large- group gatherings, picnic, camp. But local wedding parties stage impromptu gatherings in the parking lot, and the brides in their big white dresses climb atop the artillery by the museum entrance to be photographed. Official prohibition thus makes its peace with local practice; in Lefebvre’s terms, both prohibitions and permissions structure the Borodino commemorative landscape, a cultural space that is most striking in its hybrid qualities.

Borodino Then: A Commemorative Journey Through Time How does Borodino today compare to the experiences of visitors at different moments in the landscape’s commemorative history, each of which introduced new memorial markers at the site—1839, 1912, 1962, 1987, and 2002? What about periods when Borodino field suffered neglect or destruction—the years between 1812 and 1839, the second half of the nineteenth century, the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, and the wartime period in the 1940s? Passing back through the territory with Napoleon’s retreating army in late October 1812, French officer Eugène Labaume described the Borodino field several weeks after the battle: “The nearer we approached . . . the more desolate the country appeared. . . . But most horrible was the multitude of dead bodies, which, deprived of burial fifty- two days, scarcely retained the human form. . . . In one place were to be seen garments yet red with blood, and bones gnawed by dogs and birds of prey; in another were broken arms, drums, helmets, and swords. Fragments of standards lay scattered thick around.”13 Such memories of the thousands of men and horses whose corpses were gathered and burned the following spring, persisted for decades thereafter. The twenty- fifth anniversary celebrations at Borodino in 1839 were intended to honor those still- living memories. They might have offered some comfort to Davydov’s hussar, if he had lived another ten years beyond his experience in the poem. At the time of the 1839 commemoration, ownership of the Borodino territory was transferred to the monarchy, which then oversaw the development of the memorial landscape. In 1839, Nicholas I attended the opening of the cross- topped Main Monument on the Raevsky battery at Borodino.14 General Pyotr Bagration’s remains were transferred from his family’s burial site and reburied at the foot of the new monument. A church procession (krestnyi khod ) made its way from the convent to the Raevsky monument, where a special service took place. A parade of 150,000 honored the



julie buckler

new monument, and military troops performed maneuvers on Borodino field with fired salutes. Lermontov’s 1837 poem, too, can be considered a commemorative monument to Borodino. The veteran’s account of the battle includes the gruesome image of bloody bodies piled so high that they interfered with the flight trajectory of cannonballs. This image is, in fact, itself a kind of monument, since it recalls the deliberately piled bodies and skulls that were humanity’s first war monuments—an archaic and mythic practice captured in Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1871 The Apotheosis of War. After 1839, however, Borodino remained much the same for decades, ever shabbier, and no more significant commemorative action took place until 1912. Tsar Alexander II happened to visit the area in 1861, but was not present at the very modest 1862 fiftieth anniversary observations.15 The year 1812 had not grown any less important for Russian national mythology— quite the contrary, as attested by the many monuments honoring 1812 constructed in St. Petersburg and Moscow over the course of the nineteenth century. (Luba Golburt’s “The Portrait Mode” in this volume explores forms of commemoration for 1812 that took place in St. Petersburg.) But Alexander II invested himself in a major program of social reforms, rather than in commemorative tributes to the Golden Age of Russian Empire. As a result of protracted neglect, traces of the Borodino battle in the environs had become more and more indecipherable over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1902, ten years before the 1912 anniversary, one Panteleimon Simanskii published Poseshchenie Borodinskogo polia: Iz letnikh vpechatlenii i vospominanii (Visit to Borodino Field: From Summer Impressions and Reminiscences), an unofficial account that advocated strongly on a private citizen’s behalf for the importance of Borodino as a commemorative site. Simanskii traveled to Borodino from Moscow by train with officers from a grenadier regiment and their regimental priest, who was to perform a requiem by the Main Monument. With relatively few monuments or markers to help him navigate Borodino field, Simanskii was reduced to imagining the battle, projecting text onto terrain with liberal excerpting from eyewitness accounts and historical reconstructions. On the road from the nearby village Gorki to Borodino, Simanskii reflected upon the number of corpses that would have lain there ninety years earlier. On the day of his visit, however, “We came upon only a single body . . . a drunken peasant woman, who had lain down in the middle of the road, with her face pressed in the dust of the roadbed.”16 This jarring comic image counters the horrifying immediacy of descriptions such as Labaume’s 1812 account or Lermontov’s poem. For Simanskii, the drunken peasant woman in the road represents the shameful absence of commemorative observance, even as her

taking and retaking the field



physical disposition recalls that of the battlefield dead. Simanskii also noted with concern the deteriorating condition of the Borodino battle fortifications (flèches): “Another few years will pass and unless measures are taken, the first two flèches will collapse, and the only witness of the past on this part of the Borodino field will be the third flèche. . . . We must hope that someone will take measures to protect these ‘remains,’ witnesses of Russian valor and courage, so that they do not disappear, so that the memory of the Borodino battle too never disappears.”17 Simanskii’s visit recapitulates the experience of Davydov’s hussar—a pained awareness of an eroding legacy of shared trauma and triumph. Before the elaborate 1912 centennial celebrations, a visit to Borodino was a modest affair, relying on the visitors’ own willingness to do the legwork of touring the area and seeking out local resources. As described by the “Tourist’s Companion,” released by the Central Excursion Commission of the Moscow district in 1911, visitors wishing to tour Borodino field would take a night train from Moscow to arrive at Borodino in the morning.18 Visitors would tour the small museum at the Borodino train station and then repair to the nearby tea shop before making the one- hour trip by foot to the Spaso- Borodinskii Convent. The village of Borodino included the small imperial residence constructed in honor of the 1839 anniversary, as well as the Church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God with its traces of bombardment damage. Following a visit to the Raevsky battery and 1839 Main Monument, visitors might avail themselves of the convent’s hospitality for a rest and a meal, before taking the return train to Moscow. The entire trip cost one ruble, fifty- eight kopecks. In contrast, the 1912 commemorations at Borodino were shaped by a late imperial trend that brought wave after wave of commemorative anniversaries honoring military victories and other important national events—the bicentennial anniversary of Poltava in 1909; the taking of Vyborg, Riga, and Revel’ in 1910; the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation in 1911; the centennial anniversary of 1812 in 1912; and the Romanov three- hundred- year jubilee in 1913. In accordance with this trend, the centennial anniversary of Borodino in 1912 was conceived as a major commemoration.19 Tsar Nicholas II personally supervised the preparations, entrusting primary responsibility for funding and establishing new monuments to the armed forces. Thirty- six new monuments were added to Borodino field, more than thirty of them to regiments, divisions, corps, artillery companies, and batteries of the Russian Army. The substantial monument “To the Fallen of the Grand Armée” was built with French government funds. New monuments were created at the central command posts for Kutuzov (1912) and Napoleon (1913), and a major monument constructed from ringed rows of weaponry



julie buckler

was installed just outside the walls of the Spaso- Borodinskii Convent, with the inscription “A Grateful Russia—To Its Defenders.” Military fortifications such as the Shevardino redoubt, the southern Bagration flèche, and the Maslov flèches were reconstructed. The 1912 celebrations featured significant ceremonial observance onsite by the royal family, the Russian military, and the Russian Orthodox Church. On the eve of the celebrations, a religious procession carrying the Smolensk icon reenacted the procession before the actual Battle of Borodino, with a liturgy in the Vladimir Cathedral of the Spaso- Borodinskii Convent. Another religious procession, including the entire royal family and court retinue, made its way to the Raevsky battery for a prayer of thanksgiving, accompanied by soldiers dressed in 1812 uniforms. The tsar’s family signed the guest book at the Borodino Museum: “Borodino. 25–26 August 1912. Nikolai. Alexandra. Aleksei. Olga. Tatiana. Maria. Anastasia.” The 1912 observances replicated the rituals and forms of 1839 on a grander scale, just as the rhetoric in connection with the celebration emphasized continuity and communion. Tsar Nicholas II wrote, “All of us there were suffused by a shared feeling of reverence toward our ancestors. No description of the battle can give such force of impression as that which pierces the heart when one stands on that ground.” And yet, the demonstrative reinvestment of energies in Borodino as a memorial site in 1912 provided no guarantee of the battlefield’s future status. In fact, the late imperial attentions lavished on Borodino proved detrimental to the battlefield museum’s status during the first half of the twentieth century, and only five years later, the 1917 Russian Revolution would herald a series of reversals in Borodino’s fortunes. The battlefield was reclassified, demoted to a cultural institution of local, rather than statewide significance, and handed over to regional administration; the museum lost most of its funding.20 Borodino’s uncertain status during this period was typical of imperial- era cultural properties such as palace- parks and country estates across Russia. People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky was an ardent defender of historic buildings from the imperial era, and late imperial preservationists still wielded influence within major Russian cultural institutions.21 But more often than not, sites like Borodino were neglected during this period, their care and maintenance preempted by more pressing economic and political concerns. The cultural status of imperial- era buildings and monuments declined even more dramatically during the early 1930s. This period saw rampant destruction of imperial landmarks, most famously the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow; built to honor the victory of 1812 and consecrated in 1883, the cathedral was dynamited and reduced to rubble in 1931. At

taking and retaking the field



Borodino, the Main Monument on the Raevsky battery, installed with such triumphal pomp in 1839, was demolished in 1932 along with Bagration’s grave site, a scant seven years before the battle’s 125th anniversary. The “Grateful Russia” monument outside the convent walls—the largest and most important of the 1912 monuments—had been destroyed during the 1920s.22 Compounding the destructive Soviet interventions of the early 1930s, the 1941 German invasion caused significant damage to the Borodino monuments and museum exhibitions. At the same time, however, the invasion afforded a valuable opportunity for reclaiming Borodino as a site of Russian heroism and reconceiving its contents as precious national heritage. This process began even before German troops arrived: just as in St. Petersburg and Moscow at this time, Borodino Museum employees devoted themselves to packing up exhibition objects and evacuating them to remote locales such as the Ural Mountains and Kazakhstan. The 1812 lithographs, uniforms, and weaponry did not suffer the same fate as the Borodino Historical Museum building, which was used to house German livestock and then burned when the Nazis left the area in 1942. And the museum building was energetically repaired in 1944 in time to welcome back its artifacts from storage. Borodino’s restored status as a cultural site was affirmed by new memorials commemorating the 1941 battle, which soon appeared on the battlefield territory. The monument to the Fifth Army—Tank T- 34—stands in a place of pride, clearly visible from the Main Monument on the Raevsky battery. The inscription on the bas- relief reads: “Here, at the edge of the sacred Borodino field in October 1941, the heroic troops of the Fifth Army stood to the death, meeting the furious onslaught of the German fascist invaders.”23 The striking physical proximity of the main monuments to 1812 and 1941 and the explicit connection between the two battles made by the inscription signals Borodino’s rebirth as a Soviet cultural property. Borodino had always embodied the values of loyalty and readiness for self- sacrifice, but these qualities could now be cast as characteristically Soviet. Thus 1941 marked the end of Borodino’s early Soviet status as an imperial artifact in an obscure local setting. The project of reclaiming Borodino as a significant commemorative site increased in scale and emphasis during the later Soviet years. The cumulative damage inflicted first by Soviet wrecking crews and later by German invading forces was repaired under the collective banner of “restoration” beginning in 1961, the year Borodino was officially converted to a museum- preserve in a lead- up to the 150th anniversary in 1962. Practices of commemoration and continued restoration held sway through the end



julie buckler

of the Soviet period, with the triumphal reconstruction of the Main Monument in time for the 175th anniversary observances in 1987. Borodino’s rising status over the decades following the Second World War can be charted by the increased rhetorical fervor in Soviet newspapers during the anniversary celebrations of 1962 and 1987. An Izvestiia article from September 7, 1962, declared, “The battle of Borodino became for all time the symbol of a great heroic populist feat, an expression of the people’s fearlessness in defense of their native land and refusal to yield.” Pravda sounded a stentorian note, suggesting a strong connection between Napoleon and Hitler: “The people of Russia . . . definitively cut off the French grand bourgeoisie’s aggressive aspirations to world domination, routed the hitherto undefeated army of Napoleon, eliminated the threat of Russia’s enslavement by a foreign power, and helped the peoples of Europe reinstate their national independence.” A writer for Sovetskaia Kul’tura in 1962 noted approvingly, “How good it is that on this peaceful field, on the lands of the Borodino collective farm, wheat is ripening. How good it is that here, in the light of the triumphal young pioneer campfires, the inspired words of Lermontov sound out passionately and proudly: With good cause all Russia remembers the day of Borodino!” Borodino’s reclaiming serves as an occasion to recall Lermontov’s poem; the youth who requested the retelling of the famous tale is now a young socialist, sitting with his comrades around a campfire, at rest after their labors at a collective farm. The image of ripening wheat links Soviet- era Borodino with the nineteenth- century agriculture that was the area’s most notable feature both before and after the 1812 battle. Rhetorical intensity mounted higher for the 175th anniversary. On September 4, 1987, Pravda declared, “Borodino is not merely history, but rather one of the eternal springs of patriotism. . . . The epic Borodino battle helps the Soviet citizen penetrate the meaning of history as a true patriot must. . . . Successive waves of generations pass, but the inexhaustible source of patriotism continues generously to nourish heroic consciousness.” Borodino is here enlisted as a symbol of continuity—an ironic choice for a commemorative site whose status had in fact always been so variable, so contingent upon the cultural priorities of a given historical moment. By 1987, the mythos of continuity at Borodino had taken root no less strongly than Russian claims to victory there in 1812. During the post- Soviet period, Borodino has experienced an even greater renewal, with the restoration of several key monuments and a rise in the museum- preserve’s official status. Borodino’s improving fortunes are part of a larger trend, especially marked during the 1990s, of reclaiming Russian imperial heritage by reconstructing (sometimes in their entirety)

taking and retaking the field



notable heritage objects destroyed during the first two Soviet decades. The Spaso- Borodinskii Convent reopened in 1992, and the nearby “Grateful Russia” monument was reconstructed in 1995. With the reopening of the convent and the Church of the Smolensk Icon, a Borodino battlefield landmark restored from ruins in 1961, the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church reestablished its presence in both commemorative and contemporary terms at Borodino. In a major expansion in size and scope for the Borodino commemorative site, a 1994 Russian federal decree demarcated a protected zone of 645 square kilometers around the 110- square- kilometer museum- preserve. The Russian Federation accorded Borodino the highest possible status for a Russian museum in 1995, officially recognizing its special value for national cultural and historical heritage and placing Borodino under direct supervision of the Russian Ministry of Culture.24 Borodino Day (the first Sunday in September), celebrated since 1962, became an All- Russian Military Historical Festival that same year.25 With these developments, Borodino’s cultural status may well have surpassed that of its highest point during the imperial period—the 1912 centennial observances. A new tradition of grand- scale Borodino reenactments has arisen, a Russian version of the “Battle of Three Emperors” reenactments in the Czech Republic, “Battle of Nations” in Leipzig, and “Battle at Waterloo” in Belgium. In 2002, a military- historical encampment accommodated more than two thousand participants from military clubs in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and Western Europe.26 Some one hundred thousand spectators traveled to the area for the festivities, among them many groups of Russian schoolchildren. With these reenactments, Borodino has become a demonstrably “live” collective memory site. The Borodino museum- preserve now places a special emphasis on programs for children, with the stated aim of instilling “military- patriotic education according to the example of our celebrated forefathers’ deeds,” with thematic evenings, restoration work on monuments and fortifications, and a camp for military- school students.27 Not only are Russian children in these programs encouraged to memorize and recite Lermontov’s famous poem, they are also cast in the role of the poem’s obliging youth who repeatedly requests the story of Borodino. Preparations for the 2012 bicentennial at Borodino (September 7, 2012) officially commenced with a Russian Federation presidential decree on December 28, 2007. The 2012 celebrations at Borodino were part of the postSoviet surge in military memorializing, reminiscent of the late imperial trend a century earlier. Large- scale post- Soviet military commemorations began in 2009 with the bicentennial anniversary of Poltava in Ukraine, and



julie buckler

continued in 2010 with the sixty- fifth anniversary of the Second World War victory, and the 630th anniversary of the Kulikovo Battle against the Golden Horde. The seventieth anniversary of the Battle for Moscow in the Borodino environs in 2011 served as a lead- up to the 1812 Borodino battle’s bicentennial anniversary in 2012.28 Borodino Day in September 2012 was the largest- scale commemoration of the 1812 battle to date. The famous Smolensk Icon of the Virgin was paraded around the Borodino battlefield, just as it had been before the battle in 1812 and again during the 1912 celebrations. Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill led a memorial service for a crowd of several thousand worshippers. The next day, the patriarch also led a prayer vigil in Moscow in the presence of the Smolensk Icon at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with 17,000 people in attendance. The 2012 Borodino battle reenactment featured 3,000 participants from numerous countries and more than one hundred military clubs, some 350 of them on horseback, with nearly 150,000 spectators on hand—the most ambitious Borodino reenactment ever. The reenactment also included distinguished descendants of participants, including great- grandsons of both Napoleon and Kutuzov, and former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whose family members also participated in the Napoleonic Wars. Major restoration efforts in preparation for the celebrations renewed many of the buildings and monuments on Borodino field. A new exhibition titled “Glory Forever, Borodino!” (Slav’sia vvek, Borodino!) opened in the Historical Museum, drawing broadly from the museum’s impressive collection of artifacts, documents, and artworks, and featuring a multimedia modeling of the battle. Russian President Vladimir Putin laid a wreath in remembrance of the fallen at Borodino and used the occasion to emphasize Russian unity and patriotism (“the basis of all our major victories”) among Russia’s diverse ethnic and religious groups—a rhetorical counterweight to the bitter Islamic insurgency in Northern Caucasus. Putin also called for unity with European nations in the spirit of the cooperation and common purposes shared in 1812.29 The 2012 commemorative events at Borodino recapitulate in important ways those of the first major anniversary in 1839 and the large- scale centennial celebrations in 1912—the Russian tsar’s hands- on involvement and attendance, ceremonial precedence of the Russian Orthodox Church and the military, unveiling of new memorial markers, reenactments (costumes, military maneuvers, religious rites), acts of commemorative “rectification” (transfer of remains, acknowledgment of past neglect, reconstruction or fortification), and combined numbers of participants and audience that match

taking and retaking the field



the scale of the Borodino battle. The 2012 celebrations added yet another set of commemorative markers—memorial “signs” as well as memorials “of witness”—to the cultural landscape at Borodino. Post- Soviet Borodino as both symbol and physical site now acts as a mustering ground for major cultural and political Russian institutions, among them the monarchy, military, and Russian Orthodox Church. The federal, regional, and Moscow city governments are all variously implicated in the costs and benefits of Borodino. The public educational system sees Borodino as an important teaching tool for Russia’s youth. The National Association of Russian Museum- Preserves uses Borodino as a venue for 1812 specialist conferences and publications, and more important, as a platform to advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage. Today the Borodino museum- preserve is among the “especially valuable objects of cultural heritage of the peoples of the Russian Federation” with only fourteen other museum- preserves and museum- estates in Russia so designated.30 The Russian word zapovednik (preserve) signifies something precious given in perpetuity, the object of a sacred compact that is transferred by the giver along with the gift. The recipient accepts the gift and simultaneously makes a solemn commitment to honor and preserve it. Along with its spiritual resonance, the word zapovednik has legal connotations, related to the right of inheritance by a legal heir. Cultural preserves such as Borodino thus turn a nation into a family that holds properties in common. Borodino has also achieved international recognition as a heritage site. In 2007, UNESCO awarded Borodino the Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes. Accompanying the honor comes wider oversight for preservation at Borodino, international support and visibility that help guard against a future decline in the battlefield’s cultural status. Going forward, Borodino will need to contend with present local needs (real estate values, traffic patterns) as they may conflict with the ideals of cultural conservatorship.31

Conclusion In War and Peace, on the eve of the battle, Pierre Bezukhov ascends a knoll from which the future Borodino battlefield can be seen. Pierre contemplates the “vast panorama” that opens out before him below: “The Smolensk high road wound its way through a village with a white church that lay five hundred paces from the barrow and below it (this was Borodino). . . . In this birch and fir forest, to the right of the road, the distant cross and bell tower of the Kolotsky Monastery shone in the sun. . . . Everywhere there were fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking campfires, villages, barrows,



julie buckler

streams, but not the battlefield he had expected to see; and much as he tried to make it out, on this living terrain he could not find a position and could not even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.”32 Pierre asks a nearby officer what village lies in front of them, and the officer, turning to his companion, says, “Burdino or something?” “Borodino,” the other corrects him. This is Tolstoy’s little joke, showing us that Borodino was not preordained for greatness, but was, as he claimed, a random pin stuck onto the enormous map of Russia, thrust into historical prominence by an infinite number of unpredictable circumstances. But in Tolstoy’s description, Borodino is equally a space of potential, a field for future action, and a source of possible meanings, while remaining essentially unreadable—or endlessly reinterpretable. The poetic tributes by Lermontov and Davydov provide commemorative interventions into the cultural landscape at Borodino, as do the numerous memoirs and guidebooks about Borodino, and the memorial markers that attempt to make the battlefield “legible” to visitors. Despite the presence of the Historical Museum and the many monuments that mark the cultural terrain of Borodino today, however, the territory of the Borodino battlefield has reverted in large part to its earlier aspect as described by Tolstoy—a kind of spacious nowhere. The natural landscape has long since healed its wounds and covered over the traces of this major battle. No amount of commemorative intervention in the form of mass spectacles or monumental markers can eradicate the atmosphere of indeterminacy and mystery that reigns at Borodino on an ordinary weekday. This is perhaps as it should be, since these elusive qualities reflect the ambiguous results of the actual battle in 1812. Borodino’s most recent anniversary celebrations in 2012 provided an opportunity to survey the temporal field—the central goal of this essay. Successive waves of ritual celebration have flowed across Borodino, each leaving material traces. Excavating through the historical layers of commemoration at Borodino is made more challenging, however, by the fact that commemorative periods are interspersed with intervals of willful destruction at the hands of the Soviet government and invading Germans, as well as long periods of neglect during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.33 The history of Borodino field is a complex tale of consecration and construction, neglect and decline, active destruction, heroic rescue, renewed interest, committed reconstruction, hard times, and new development. What is more, each period in the life of this central Russian lieu de mémoire reveals unexpected parallels and resonances across major junctures in Russian history.



taking and retaking the field

Notes 1. Many thanks to those who read (in some cases, multiple) versions of this essay and helped me shape it—Jonathan Bolton, Julia Bekman Chadaga, Luba Golburt, Emily Johnson, Vera Koshkina, Stephanie Sandler, and Cristina Vatulescu. 2. Abraham Lincoln’s address before the Union graves on the Gettysburg battlefield in November 1863 symbolically sacralized military battlegrounds in this spirit: “In a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” 3. As part of a general increase in tourism during the second half of the nineteenth century, organized trips to Waterloo were arranged by travel agents beginning in the 1850s. See Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory After Waterloo,” Representations, no. 69, Special Issue: Grounds for Remembering (Winter 2000). The First World War then gave further impetus to “battlefield tourism” at locales where civilians searched the grass for bullets and other war souvenirs. See David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998), and George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also A. Prost’s essay on “Verdun” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 2, La Nation, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). 4. Western historians speculate that only Napoleon’s failure to commit his Imperial Guard to the action spared the Russian Army a humiliating rout. Adam Zamoyski offers the characteristic Western historiographical perspective on Borodino: “Had Napoleon been in anything approaching his usual form, Kutuzov would undoubtedly have been routed and the Russian army destroyed. . . . Luckily for him, Napoleon was to deliver probably the most lackluster performance of his military career.” Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 257. More recently, Dominic Lieven seeks to counter critical Western historiographical accounts, bombastic Russian cultural mythology, and Tolstoy’s famous antiheroic claims with a more nuanced perspective on the Russian Army at Borodino, giving credit where he believes credit is due. See Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2011). 5. During the spring of 1813, the bodies of fifty- two thousand corpses from both sides were buried or burned, along with the remains of some forty- one thousand horses. See Alexander Mikaberidze, The Battle of Borodino: Napoleon Against Kutuzov (London: Pen and Sword, 2007), 218, for statistics on corpses. Figures vary among sources. 6. The scale of human casualties at Borodino far exceeded that of most other major Napoleonic war battles. The three- day battle at Leipzig in October 1813 was the largest Napoleonic battle of all, but its daily casualty rate was 42,000–45,000, as compared to as many as 85,000 for the single- day at Borodino. Waterloo (1815), with more than 55,000 casualties, was the second bloodiest one- day battle of the Napoleonic Wars. 7. See Mikaberidze’s summary of Soviet- era historiography on the subject on xi– xiii. See also the differences in accounts given by Kutuzov and Napoleon immediately following the battle on 207–17.



julie buckler

8. http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/museums/files/Borodino.asp. 9. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2007), 753–56. 10. Ibid., 819–20. 11. Mikhail Yampolsky, “In the Shadow of Monuments: Notes on Iconoclasm and Time,” in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth- Century Russia, ed. Nancy Condee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93–96. 12. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 222–25. 13. Eugène Labaume, 1812: Through Fire and Ice with Napoleon: A French Officer’s Memoir of the Campaign in Russia, trans. E. Boyce (Solihull, U.K.: Helion and Company, 2002), 121–22. 14. S. A. Malyshkin, “Iz istorii muzeefikatsii Borodinskogo polia 1839–1911 gg. Glavnyi monument,” in Borodinskoe pole: istoriia, kul’tura, ekologiia (vypusk vtoroi), sost. A. V. Gorbunov (Mozhaisk: Gosudarstvennyi Borodinskii voenno- istoricheskii muzei- zapovednik, 2000), 168–74. 15. See I. P. Liprandi, Borodinskoe srazhenie: Zakliuchenie s nekotorymi primechaniiami na istoriiu etoi voiny soch. g. m. Bogdanovicha (St. Petersburg: Tip. E. Pratsa, 1861). 16. P. Simanskii, Poseshchenie Borodinskogo polia: Iz letnikh vpechatlenii i vospominanii (Moscow: Tip. I. N. Kushnerev, 1902), 46. 17. Ibid., 63–64. 18. Tat’iana Markina, “Mestnost’ pervostepennoi vazhnosti: O pervykh ekskursiiakh po Borodinskomu poliu,” in “Slav’sia vvek, Borodino!,” Pamiatniki Otechestva, no. 47, sost. A. D. Kachalova and A. V. Gorbunov (Moscow: Redaktsiia al’manakha “Pamiatniki Otechestva,” 2000), 139–40. 19. For descriptions of the 1912 festivities, see Borodinskoe pole. See also O. Fedorova and V. Ushakov, Pole russkoi slavy. Putevoditel’ (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1979). 20. In 1923, the museum became a branch of the Military Historical Museum, and after 1926 was placed under the supervision of Moscow Regional Executive Committee (Mosgubispolkom), at which point Borodino’s fortunes improved to some degree. Some of the thirty- plus monuments on the grounds were repaired in 1929. 21. For an account of preservationist activities, see Emily D. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 22. The 1930s were generally a time of loss and declining fortune for Borodino, but there were also moments of revaluing and preliminary reclaiming. In 1937, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) acknowledged the historical and artistic value of the Borodino monuments, and plans for restoration and repair work were entrusted to the People’s Commissariat of Defense (Narkomat Oborony). Perhaps the intervention of the war in the early 1940s merely hastened this process of reversing course. 23. Ten memorials to mass graves were established across the territory of Borodino, most dating from the later 1950s. The exhibition at the Spaso- Borodinskii Convent, “Borodino in the years of the Second World War,” was created for the fortieth anniversary of the victory in 1985. 24. Reshenie Moskovskogo oblastnogo Soveta Narodnykh Deputatov ot 27.05.95. No. 6/11. Local and federal authorities disagreed over who should assume owner-

taking and retaking the field



ship of this collective memory site, which also entails financial responsibility for its maintenance. Debates on the matter appeared in Novaia Zhizn’, published by the local district administration, in May 1992 and September 1994. More recently, public controversy has arisen about construction of new cottages around Borodino made possible by lax land regulations and local government policies. Following automatic transfer of land from state to private ownership after the fall of the Soviet Union, the land has been managed by local councils, who were authorized to convert farmland to individual plots for dachas. Parcels of land bordering or even overlapping the Borodino preserve were sold off to private individuals, and dozens of new cottages have been constructed, to the outrage of local residents and museum- preserve staff. See, for example, Vladimir Fedosenko, “Nastuplenie na Borodino,” Rossisskaia gazeta, no. 70, March 30, 2012. 25. Several additional annual celebrations now take place at Borodino: Victory Day (May 9), “Moscow Is Behind Us, 1941” (second Sunday in October), and a children’s holiday called “The Steadfast Little Lead Soldier” (last Sunday in May). 26. Russian President Vladimir Putin was expected, but did not attend, a fact that rumors attributed to the presence of so many armaments and explosives. 27. http://www.borodino.ru/index.php?page=excursions&DocID=109. 28. The Russian federal budget allocated funds for the restoration and repair of existing monuments in all of the regions through which Napoleon’s army passed, as well as for the reconstruction of monuments destroyed during the 1930s and the Second World War. Funds were also allocated to create new monuments. 29. For a range of recent pronouncements about the importance of Borodino made by various luminaries, see “A chto dlia nas Borodino?” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, no. 132, September 7, 2012. 30. G. A. Zaitseva, “Sistema territorial’nykh ob”ektov naslediia Rossii i perspektivy ee razvitiia,” in Ekologicheskie problemy sokhraneniia istoricheskogo i kul’turnogo naslediia (Moscow: Rossiiskii nauchno- issledovatel’skii institut kul’turnogo i prirodnogo naslediia imeni D. S. Likhacheva, 2005), 6–7. 31. Note, for example, the relatively recent case of Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley, which was inscribed as a World Heritage cultural landscape in 2004, but then removed from the World Heritage list in 2009 after a four- lane bridge was constructed there. The bridge was deemed by the World Heritage Committee grounds for revoking their earlier judgment of the valley’s “outstanding universal value.” 32. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 761. 33. M. F.  Prokhorov and E. V.  Pchelov, “Sostoianii Borodinskogo voennoistoricheskogo muzeiia v 1920- e gody,” in Borodino i Napoleonovskoe voiny: Bitvy. Polia srazhenii. Memorialy, ed. A. V. Gorbunov (Mozhaisk: Gosudarstvennyi Borodinskii voenno- istoricheskii muzei- zapovednik, 2008), 103–15.

Who to Lead the Slavs? Poles, Russians, and the 1910 Anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald Patrice M. Dabrowski

Those familiar with the event mentioned in my title may wonder what a battle fought in medieval times between the Teutonic Knights and a motley group of East and Central European allies could possibly have to do with the relationship of Poles to Russians and, ultimately, to pan- Slavism. Yet, the battle of 1410 proved to be a rallying cry for Poles in the first decade of the twentieth century—one that had interesting ramifications for Poles’ relationships with their neighbors. While I have written more extensively on the subject elsewhere, here I’d like to focus on the ways in which commemorations of the Battle of Grunwald provided a forum for discussion of the role played by Poles within the larger East- Central European space.1 In the process, Poles found themselves engaged in the larger issue signaled by my title: who to lead the Slavs? For, unlike many other smaller Slavic peoples, who found pan- Slavism to be an antidote to German or Austrian rule, Poles had a more problematic relationship to this ideal of Slavic brotherhood. Seeing themselves as a historic nation with a proven track record in this part of the world, Poles vied with Russians for the position of leader of the Slavs.2 The celebrations of the five- hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald provide a unique prism through which to view these tensions. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, Poles—especially those living under the relatively benign rule of the Habsburgs in Galicia—had 



patrice m. dabrowski

availed themselves of the opportunity to commemorate publicly a number of round anniversaries of historic events and important individuals.3 The 1910 commemoration was the largest of these events. What we will see is that the early twentieth- century resurrection of public memory of this fifteenth- century battle (annual celebrations of the event had ceased following the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century) was designed to restore Polish confidence in the nation’s intrinsic value as well as to reinforce its sense of mission.4 Marek Nekula’s “Prague Funerals” in this volume explores a comparable example of a Slavic nation’s attempts to use commemorative ritual to create a more cohesive cultural identity. Reaching back half a millennium, Poles conjured up a set of values, which they took to personify who they were as a people. Important for us here, these values were to make Polish leadership in East- Central Europe a more palatable option than that of Russian hegemony. This strategy to win over adherents to the Polish variant of pan- Slavism, often referred to as the “Jagiellonian idea,” ultimately failed. Its failure stems in part from the increasing privileging of ethnic over political nationalism in the region as well as the Poles’ own disagreements over how they might best buttress their position within this area of historic interest. ——— Let me begin by discussing the Battle of Grunwald and how it came to play such an important role in the beginning of the twentieth century. The battle of 1410 was part of a centuries- long clash between the Teutonic Order and the medieval Polish state. The religious order (formerly based in Palestine) had been invited by Conrad of Mazovia, a Polish prince, in the first half of the thirteenth century to help defend his lands against the pagan Prussians along the Baltic Sea. Over the next century or two, the knights’ “conversion” of these pagan peoples ended up decimating their population, while gaining for the order a territorial stronghold on the Baltic. Before long, the Teutonic Order turned its attention to the Lithuanians in the east, whom it hoped to convert and dominate. The fact that the Lithuanians had undergone mass conversion after the royal marriage of Grand Duke Jagiełło ( Jogaila) and the young heir to the Polish throne in 1386 did not keep the Teutonic Order from pressing both countries. The conflict reached a head in the 1410 Battle of Grunwald—known as the Battle of Tannenberg in many Western accounts.5 One certainly could name the battle variously, given that the large triangular field where the two armies met lay between the villages of Grunwald, Tannenberg (Stębark), and Ludwigsdorf (Łodwigowo). The uneven terrain sprinkled with trees,

who to lead the slavs?



small ponds, and marshes proved a hot and dusty site on July 15, 1410. The army of the Teutonic Knights waited for three hours in the heat for the united force comprised of Poles, Lithuanians, and other inhabitants of East and Central Europe. The latter included Ruthenians (roughly equated with today’s Belarusians and Ukrainians), Tartars, Czechs, and Moravians, as well as Moldavian vassals of the Polish state. The force mustered by Poland- Lithuania stood in the nearby woods, biding its time. Only after the grand master of the Teutonic Knights sent two naked swords to the Polish king—reportedly in case he lacked weapons (a clear aff ront)—did the seven- hour- long battle begin. First Lithuanian, then Polish forces went on the attack, ultimately forcing even Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen to join in the fray. (Although threatened at one point, the Polish king Jagiełło directed his soldiers while perched on a nearby hill.) In what was one of the largest and bloodiest encounters of the medieval period, the Polish- Lithuanian Army routed the fearsome Teutonic Knights. The grand master and many other highly placed knights all perished on the field, leaving practically no one to give an account of the battle from their side. While this was an impressive victory for the combined Polish- Lithuanian forces, more important for Poles five hundred years later was what this victory enabled their ancestors to accomplish. As highlighted in the announcement of the committee organizing the 1910 commemoration in Kraków, the victory over the Teutonic Knights led to the further cementing of the alliance with the Lithuanians with the Union of Horodło of 1413.6 Horodło marked the first concrete step toward a more lasting union of the Crown (the Polish state) and Lithuania. Lithuanian nobles were granted the same political and economic rights as their Polish counterparts, emphasized further by the bestowing of membership in Polish heraldic clans. In one step, the political members of the two states literally became one family. Grunwald thus contributed to the making of the unique state that came to be known as the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth—a state that, at its greatest extent, encompassed territories that are part of not only modernday Poland and Lithuania but also Belarus, Ukraine, and even Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century this vision of state building was often referred to as the Jagiellonian idea. The Jagiellonian idea represented a different approach to empire, one that brought peoples together voluntarily, not by force. One commemorative brochure of 1910 defined it as “the unification of the peoples of east and southeast Europe under the motto of liberty and progress in one great federation.”7 In these ideals lay the attractiveness of Jagiellonian rule. They also may have inclined both Czechs and Hungarians to choose monarchs from that dynasty for themselves in that same fifteenth century. The image of the Jagiellonian idea remains power-



patrice m. dabrowski

ful—so much so that Piotr Wandycz chose Jan Matejko’s 1878 painting of the Battle of Grunwald for the cover of The Price of Freedom, his history of the Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian lands.8 The Battle of Grunwald underscored three Polish accomplishments. First, it was a victory over a powerful enemy, the Teutonic Knights, an enemy that sought to downplay the Poles’ own embracing of Catholicism and their right to assist with the conversion of other peoples in the East. Second, it was a victory of cooperation, as the Poles assembled an assortment of allies to fight the enemy, which itself, it should be noted, was also a multinational force. And, third, it was a victory for what Poles later presented as their way of bringing other peoples under their influence: by example and with the goal of maximizing liberty and freedom, not by military force or by domination. All told, early twentieth- century interpretations of the significance of the Battle of Grunwald underscored the Poles’ leadership role and presented what appeared to be a viable option for cooperation within the larger East- Central European space. The Jagiellonian idea, thus, amounted to a sort of Polish “pan- Slavism” avant la lettre—a kind of federalism, Polish style. This focus on the unifying aspect of the anniversary was one of the main themes sounded in 1910. Certainly, Poles gathered in Kraków (the medieval Polish capital, at that time a part of Austria- Hungary) expressed pride in the achievements associated with 1410, whatever they understood them to be. An estimated 150,000 to 160,000 guests from out of town as well as 40,000 members of the Falcons (a Slavic gymnastics organization, variously known as Sokol/Sokół/Sokil) from the three partitions traveled to Kraków for the three- day festivities—the largest such celebration in the Poles’ prewar history.9 All manner of commemorative activities took place: these included thanksgiving Masses and other religious services, even in one of Kraków’s synagogues; numerous commemorative sermons, lectures, and speeches; theatrical and musical performances, congresses and banquets catering to the full spectrum of visitors, upper class and lower class alike; the illumination of the city center, castle hill, and commemorative venues, with fireworks accompanying the traditional midsummer celebration of wreaths on the Vistula River. To give a sense of the size of the crowds: the eight- kilometer parade from the Błonia field to the Wawel Castle on July 17, the final day of the celebration, reportedly took over six hours, with over 100,000 people processing.10 Poles came from all three empires—Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg—as well as from elsewhere in Europe and America.11 Still others sent telegrams to demonstrate national solidarity.12 One of the high points of the festivities was the unveiling of a large bronze monument commemorating the Battle of Grunwald. It was the

who to lead the slavs?



gift of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the world- famous Polish pianist who later would serve briefly as head of state in interwar Poland. In a short but moving speech, which in some ways (including its brevity) resembles a Polish Gettysburg Address, he emphasized that the monument “was born of our love and gratitude to those ancestors who went into battle not for plunder and booty, but took up arms and conquered in defense of a good and just cause.”13 Asking the spirits of the illustrious dead to inspire “all the inhabitants of this land” with “love and concord,” Paderewski exhorted the descendants of those who fought five centuries earlier to “see this Monument as a symbol of our common past, a testimony of our common glory, a stimulus to joint effective work.”14 Yet Paderewski’s high- minded emphasis on the moral superiority and unified stance of the fifteenth- century victors was not the only message transmitted to the gathered masses in the course of the three days. Another highlight was the exercises of the assembled Polish Falcons on the Błonia Field. While these thousands of bodies moving in unison could have been seen as the incarnation of Paderewski’s call for unity (for joining the various Polish formations were their Czech and Croatian counterparts), the exercises—some with lances, clubs, even guns—likewise lent a more militaristic and nationalistic tone to the festivities. These two different approaches reflected varied interpretations of the legacy of the Battle of Grunwald circulating within the public sphere that century. For interest in the legacy of the Battle of Grunwald predated the round anniversary that Poles hoped to celebrate publicly in 1910.15 The largest Polish public commemorations of the prewar period actually built upon a decade of renewed interest in this episode of history. Already in 1900, the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz injected images of 1410 into the collective memory. The soon to be Nobel laureate celebrated his jubilee that year; in the course of the numerous celebrations, he frequently read aloud from his freshly completed historic novel, The Teutonic Knights. Those familiar with Polish history know how powerful Sienkiewicz’s historical novels were in shaping Polish perceptions of their past. This was no exception. While he depicted Poles as peace- loving, he also noted that their austere lifestyle made them better suited to defend their interests. Two years later, memories of this battle were colored by yet another development, one related to the treatment of Poles under German rule. An incident in the town of Września (Wreschen), where Polish pupils were punished for objecting to being taught religion in German, led to a nationwide outcry and—notably for our purposes—sparked spontaneous celebrations of the anniversary of the Grunwald battle. Much was made of



patrice m. dabrowski

the parallel, which cast modern- day Germans as the heirs of the Teutonic Knights. Their way was deemed one of brutality: while centuries earlier, “at the point of a sword . . . [they] wanted to bring the light of the Gospels to baptized Lithuania,” they now beat Polish children for refusing to respond in German.16 Similar views, expressed in a wide range of commemorative publications in the first decade of the twentieth century, attested to the Poles’ belief that the spirit of the Teutonic Knights had “overflowed into Prussiandom.”17 Poles were depicted as victims, as Polish activists sought to appeal to sympathetic ears in the West that might exert pressure on those who oppressed members of the partitioned nation. The ground was prepared for an anti- German movement—one that conceivably could be depicted as Teutons versus Slavs. Which brings us to the Slavic connection. In the face of twentieth- century German aggression, the broader implications of Grunwald for the Slavic nations of Europe did not pass unnoticed. A united Slavdom could defend itself, but—in the words of one commemorative publication—it would have to be united “not in Muscovite style [ po moskiewsku] with the help of the knout and handcuffs, but in Polish style [ po polsku], with the help of liberty.”18 Here we see how the Jagiellonian idea challenged the Russian version of pan- Slavism. In earlier incarnations, Russian- sponsored panSlavism had been unattractive to the Poles, who continued to chafe under tsarist rule. The advent of neo- Slavism in 1905 augured some improvement in this regard, which seemed to be borne out by the Prague Slav Congress of 1908. Present in Prague, the Polish activist Roman Dmowski found a common language with the Russian delegates, perhaps as a result of his own ideas on Eastern Europe: that same year, he published a book titled Germany, Russia and the Polish Question, in which he advocated rapprochement between Russia and Austria- Hungary to hold German expansion at bay.19 Interestingly, the anniversary of Grunwald—July 15—was celebrated in Prague during the congress. Realizing that neo- Slavism would amount to nothing if no alliance were forged between the Poles and the Russians, the Czech organizer of the congress, Karel Kramář, organized a festive meeting of the Poles and Russians present. The little anniversary celebration brought no real progress, however, although conciliatory sounds were made by both sides.20 This was the zenith of neo- Slavism. By 1910, there was little hope of a Polish- Russian rapprochement. The anti- Polish faction within the Russian movement, represented by Vladimir Bobrinskii, Ivan Filevich, and Dimitrii Vergun, came to dominate the congress in Sofia in 1910. That summer, Slavic forces essentially became polarized: instead of Teutons versus Slavs, the conflict pitted Russian pan- Slavs against their Polish counterparts.

who to lead the slavs?



Slavs allied with the Russians went to Sofia, while those supportive of the Polish cause attended the Grunwald celebration in Kraków.21 Yet the split was not a clean one. A handful of Russians traveled to Kraków for the anniversary.22 Their attendance proved more problematic than the presence of Habsburg Slavs, in the form of official delegations from Prague, Ljubljana, and Zagreb. Indeed, responses to the Russian presence demonstrate the lack of consensus on the part of Cracovians. Local Slavic activists like Marian Zdziechowski wanted Russians sympathetic to the Polish cause to participate in the Grunwald celebration. However, Kraków mayor Juliusz Leo protested: “We are on the eve of war with Russia, thus they should not be here.”23 He shared the concerns of the Galician authorities about the appearance of pro- Russian sentiment in the face of an approaching international conflict, which likely would pit Austria- Hungary against the tsarist regime. Yet such objections did not deter several Russian supporters of Polish autonomy: Fedor Izmailovich Rodichev, a founder and member of the Kadet Party, the Rech’ journalist Aleksandr Stakhovich, and Professor Aleksandr Lvovich Pogodin. Pogodin and Rodichev even gave impromptu speeches after the unveiling of the Grunwald monument. While Pogodin, a former professor at Warsaw University, addressed the crowds in Polish, Rodichev reportedly was allowed to speak in Russian— quite a novelty for Kraków: this apparently was the “first time, on the street, before a crowd, here in Kraków, that Russian was spoken.”24 It has been suggested that the two Russians may have been prompted to speak by Roman Dmowski.25 If so, this may have been the only direct involvement of the Polish nationalist in shaping the Kraków celebration. Despite the attractiveness of the anniversary for Dmowski and his National Democrats, the Grunwald commemoration was the work—and triumph— of Paderewski. The latter’s star was rising within the national firmament, as seen from the ovations and praise bestowed upon the bestower of such a generous, “royal” gift of the monument.26 This reception may even have gone to Paderewski’s head: at least, that is how it is presented in a satirical song composed by the writer Tadeusz Boy- Żeleński for his “Green Balloon” cabaret, which began with the words “Today I am Poland’s king.”27 The events of 1910 did more for the future political career of Paderewski than for the cause of any version of pan- Slavism. Statesmanship and moderation ultimately triumphed at that celebration—doubtless attributable in part to the Galician authorities, who (all too cognizant of the political alliance between their state of Austria- Hungary and Germany) had to tread a fine line in the first place in commemorating the battle. Witness the difference in tone between the earlier cited speech and the statement made by Paderewski on the occasion of the laying of the cornerstone of his monu-



patrice m. dabrowski

ment, which took place earlier that year. In that foundation act, the pianist depicted the “Grunwald victory” as “the just retaliation for the nearly two centuries’ long perfidy and plunder exacted on the Slavic and Lithuanian peoples,” one which “for many years put a stop to the insistent pressure of the Germanic element on the eternal seats of these peoples, and mainly on the Polish lands.” Paderewski expressed his wish that “all Poles” would take inspiration from his monument and “persevere in their national tasks and ideals; protecting them and defending them together and harmoniously [łącznie i zgodnie] shoulder to shoulder, defending to the last man [do upadłego] as our great ancestors once did under the leadership of the truly blessed memory of King Władysław Jagiełło.”28 Whereas the foundation act was rife with anti- Germanic sentiments as well as a nationalism bordering on the militaristic, by the speech at the unveiling Paderewski had jettisoned this tone for something kinder, gentler, and more statesmanlike. The patriotic pianist thus proved to be a quick study as well as a master of many keys. No surprise, thus, that Polish interpretations of the legacy of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910 were mixed. The celebration likewise inspired polarizing rhetoric—rhetoric that drew comparisons across partitions and across nations. For example, the participation of Rodichev and his compatriots in the Grunwald festivities gave hope to observers under Russian rule, who drew analogies between their situation and that of the Habsburg monarchy in 1867. According to the Warsaw paper Prawda, “Everything depends on whether this question will be resolved by Rodichev in Jagiellonian fashion or Bobrinskii according to the Teutonic Knights’ formula.”29 Russian pan- Slavs of Bobrinskii’s ilk, thus, were being compared to the Teutonic Knights. Interestingly, this comparison was echoed by the liberal Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, who spoke of the “German character of Russian nationalism”—something he associated with the congress in Sofia.30 “German character” in this instance was not a compliment; rather, it put one on the “Teutonic”—that is, the wrong—side of the pan- Slavic equation. Poles affiliated with the Slavic journal Świat Słowiański seconded the Germanness of the Romanov empire: “Russia never was nor is now a Slavic state, despite the fact that it has a huge majority of Slavic population. The court is German, the ruling family is German in blood and spirit, the bureaucracy is German in spirit and to a great part in blood as well—and the spirit of the culture that controls Russia is some strange mix of Tatar- ByzantineGerman influences.”31 An interesting situation emerges. Contemporary Germans were being equated with Teutonic Knights; but Russians–out of the picture in 1410, but very much seen as an oppressing force in 1910—were also depicted as Germanic. Here of course I should be careful to note that the quotations

who to lead the slavs?



just cited referred to the regime, not to the people at large. From this one might infer that Poles might be a better choice for Slavic hegemon. Indeed, Trubetskoi feared that this Germanic, anti- Polish “Russian nationalism”— so visible in Sofia—kept Russia from convincing Poles and the Slavs of Austria- Hungary that Russia was the “bulwark against Pan- Germanism.”32 Yet did the Poles represent a viable alternative to Russian pan- Slavism? That is, to what extent did the Grunwald festivities represent some sort of Slavic unity? There are several problems with the view that depicts the Grunwald festivities as the pro- Polish counterpart of the pan- Slavic conference in Sofia. One was the participation of nearly one hundred Hungarians, who, although they came uninvited, apparently were well received by the public.33 Hungarians, of course, were not Slavs, and in fact oppressed the Slavic minorities within their half of the Habsburg empire. Historically, however, Hungarians had close ties with Poles, and this friendship apparently continued. One might suppose that their presence in Kraków made the “allied forces” (which also included Czechs, Slovenes, and Croats) seem predominantly Habsburg. But one might also wonder whether it did not presage a more ominous development: the nationalization of the legacy of Grunwald. For another problem proved to be the increasing emphasis on Grunwald as an exclusively Polish, national victory.34 Without the Poles, wrote the historian Wiktor Czermak, Lithuania would have been overrun in 1410; this realization led the grand duchy to seek union with Poland at Horodło in 1413. Even the very design of the monument belied a similar view. Although a pensive Lithuanian grand duke, Witold ( Vytautas), stood over the vanquished grand master of the Teutonic Knights at the front of the monument, the figure of the Polish king Jagiełło towered over the rest of the figures, which represented Polish and Lithuanian forces as well as the peasantry (a peasant breaking out of his chains—an image worth pondering further in this context). Supporters of neo- Slavism, in turn, tendered hopes for the “Slavic idea” based upon Polish culture and policies; the Polish state had been great, they claimed, as long as it took an interest in the lives of the various Slavs within its borders as well as its Slav neighbors.35 Yet, while taking an interest in neighboring Slavs may have represented a positive move for persecuted peoples in the fifteenth century, it meant something very different in the increasingly nationalistic twentieth century. This brings us to the last problem: the Poles’ relations with their “own” Slavs—that is, with the non- Polish minorities within the historic Polish lands, their allies in 1410. How did the latter view Polish aspirations? After all, Poles argued that they had a moral advantage over the Teutonic Knights and their descendants:



patrice m. dabrowski

In a thousand years of this war, only one thing has not changed. Germans always aimed for annexation. Poland always defended its own. In this war, Germans were and are savage and cruel. Poland has no wrongs on its conscience and always had a hand that was soft, even weak [aż do słabości]. In the development of humanity, this is the war of the bad German cause against the good Polish cause.36

Unfortunately for these Poles, despite their positive, inclusionary, “statesmanlike” rhetoric, the 1910 celebration did not bring the desired result: the participation of the Poles’ historic allies, the Lithuanians and the Ruthenians. Yet here one must beware the fallacy of ambiguity: for these terms— Lithuanian and Ruthenian—had multiple meanings. The old geographical/ regional allegiance that allowed Poland’s preeminent romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, to begin his epic poem “Lithuania! My homeland!” (in Polish) or allowed noble citizens to identify themselves as gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus still obtained within the Polonized ruling classes and intelligentsia in these eastern borderlands—the descendants of those who fought at Grunwald. They saw themselves much as did one of our Slavic enthusiasts, Marian Zdziechowski, who felt in his heart of hearts “a citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, indissolubly linked in union with Poland.”37 A resident of Kraków in 1910, the same Zdziechowski authored a carefully worded invitation to those who fit our modern definition: that is, ethnic Lithuanians, whose young intelligentsia was emerging from the ranks of educated villagers. These “descendants and heirs of those, without whom there would not have been any Grunwald,” who were now the “guests closest to us and most desired,” chose, however, to boycott the Kraków celebration.38 It resulted in a paradox—a reconfiguration of alliances. In 1910, Lithuanians turned to the Germans of East Prussia for support against the Poles: they celebrated the anniversary by themselves in Tilsit, and the only news of the Kraków celebrations to make it into the Lithuanian- language press was reprinted from German newspapers.39 An old enemy had now become the Lithuanians’ ally. These same Lithuanians also called into question Polish depictions of themselves as victims. Having seen the usefulness of the press as a “force that creates the opinion of the civilized world and sometimes compels even stubborn governments to cease oppressing conquered peoples,” they waged a small campaign in the foreign press against the Poles, who they claimed were persecuting them.40 A Mr. Rankus published an article in the Parisian paper La Croix in which he asked “why Poles, persecuted by Russians and Germans, have themselves become persecutors.” The irony here is that the



who to lead the slavs?

Poles were receiving worse press than the tsarist regime, which after all ruled over both nations in the empire’s western guberniias. Still, the perception of persecution prevailed: Poles—here, Polish clergymen—were blamed for the language of church services in certain localities being changed from Lithuanian to Polish.41 Ethnic Lithuanians were suspicious of Polish interest in the region: they feared that this Polish “fraternal” embrace would be the type of bear hug that would squeeze the Lithuanian- ness out of the young ethnic nation. They believed that, far from being a multicultural federation, the twentieth- century incarnation of the Jagiellonian idea was imbued with an assimilating, Polonizing, and thus denationalizing, effect.42 Poles, thus, were faced with a predicament. While their own selfperception focused on their status as a persecuted nation as well as on their historical attractiveness within East- Central Europe, their image was being tarnished by others. By the early twentieth century, the Poles’ nearest neighbors, those accustomed to living within the same state—Lithuanians and Ukrainians—actively campaigned to show the Poles in a different, less favorable, light. As the Ukrainian newspaper Dilo attested, “Today, on the 500th anniversary of the Grunwald battle . . . those who hated Poland most were her allies from Grunwald: Ruthenia and Lithuania, seeing in [Poland] the synonym of their bondage.”43 ——— So what can we conclude from all this? The 1910 celebration of the Battle of Grunwald provided no easy dichotomy of Teutons versus Slavs, of pan- Germanism versus pan- Slavism. Poles were uncomfortably wedged between the great powers of Germany and Russia. They cast both as “bad guys”: the Germans were made out to be modern- day Teutonic Knights, while the Germanness of imperial Russia was also underscored. Yet, given that the locus of the celebration was Austria- Hungary, the local authorities sought to temper anti- German sentiment, focusing instead on the positive virtues connected with Grunwald. Although it seemed that the Poles might represent a more attractive means of allying peoples—the Jagiellonian idea, a sort of federalistic “third way”—their former allies cast doubt on the ability of the Poles to transcend the confines of narrow national interest and treat the neighboring peoples—Slavic and non- Slavic alike—as equals. Grunwald, thus, proved to be a lesson in the making and unmaking of alliances. All the Poles’ statesmanship—as seen, for example, in Paderewski’s deeds and words—could not obscure the fact that definitions of Polishness were changing. In fact, this left Poles divided as to how best to remember



patrice m. dabrowski

Grunwald. Were they to emphasize the multiethnic cooperative effort that lay behind the victory, or instead claim for themselves—for the new, modern Polish nation—the accomplishments of centuries past? Depending on where one looked, rhetoric did not always match reality. Their own behavior was demonstrated as belying the peaceful, harmonious stance attributed to those who defended the medieval states and the right of their people to live in peace. It was much harder to see the Poles as victims, let alone as morally superior, if they were engaging in the same repressive policies that Germans in the Second Reich used against them. Yet, are we being too harsh on these early twentieth- century Poles? That is, was not a creeping Polonization built into the earlier arrangement? After all, the acceptance of Lithuanians as members of the Polish heraldic clans did strengthen ties between the peoples as well as make Polish culture (then expressed as part of the unique political system as well) more attractive. One might think of this as part of the legacy of the original Grunwald. Of course, the Polonization of the Lithuanian elites did not happen overnight; it took place in a more natural, organic way, as those elites came to realize the benefits that familiarity with Polish language and culture could bring to members of the premodern “noble nation.” These benefits were much less clear to the young generation of Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalists, who paradoxically saw Poland—a Poland of the mind, yet no less palpable in the cultural realm within the lands of the former Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth—as more of a threat to their identity and independence than the imperial authorities. We might also think of this as a cautionary tale that demonstrates the limits of historical commemorations. Their public nature made them powerful; yet, much was lost in the process of conveying the outlines of history to the masses. It became easy to reduce them to manageable and often simplistic stereotypes—what today we might term “sound bites.” What we see here in part are attempts to stretch the historical legacy of what most certainly was a nonnational event—one multiethnic entity, the Teutonic Knights, pitted against a multiethnic alliance—to fit the procrustean bed of modern nationalism. In this it was successful, as seen from the reception of Paderewski’s deed and speech, designed to unite Poles (broadly understood) of various political persuasions. Grunwald proved a useful metaphor for other collaborative efforts, as the rest of the twentieth century demonstrated. Already in 1914, images of the medieval battle were supposed to spur on Polish forces under Russian leadership—to lend credence to a more traditional pan- Slavic argument: witness the speech of the Russian grand duke, Nikolai Nikolaevich, in which he expressed his belief hoping that “the sword that routed the enemy at Grunwald had not



who to lead the slavs?

rusted.”44 During the Second World War, “Grunwald” became a potent anti- German—and pro- Slavic—slogan. Images of the German/Teutonic menace likewise saturated the postwar period, as seen from the alacrity with which the Communist regime embraced the stereotype. Here the idea of a Slavic brotherhood became infused with a new, “red” ideology, while the Teutons were painted in fascist colors. Perhaps it is time to revisit the Grunwald legacy, to see what those freed of the Communist fetters make of that distant event. Are interpretations of the battle still colored by the knee- jerk pan- Slavism (pan- Communism) of the postwar period? One may hope that the present descendants of those who fought at Grunwald, no longer in need of ideological crutches, will recognize the medieval battle for what it was: a fascinating and complex historic event in a distant and vastly different past. May present and future generations be suspicious of those who would advocate subjecting the Battle of Grunwald to yet another ideological procrustean bed and be wary of such facile analogies, for they do not do justice to the unique historical conjunctures and lessons that lent recollections of the Battle of Grunwald so much power for so many generations within the larger East- Central European space.

Notes 1. Patrice M. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 2. This fact of the Polish- Russian rivalry, as seen in the context of the Grunwald celebrations, has been addressed by Antoni Giza, who wrote much on the subject of the Poles’ relationship to greater Slavdom. See his “Słowiański aspekt obchodów grunwaldzkich 1910 r. w Krakowie,” Studia Historyczne 41, no. 1 (1998): 37–48, as well as other pieces cited here. Unlike Giza, I do not believe that these celebrations significantly advanced the interests of Poland in the context of this larger rivalry. 3. Alison Fleig Frank nicely presents the relatively advantageous situation of the Poles living in the Austrian province of Galicia after the Austro- Hungarian Compromise in her Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 34–37. For information on the large public anniversary celebrations I reference here, see Dabrowski, Commemorations. 4. For nearly four hundred years, the victory had been commemorated in Kraków each year on July 15, the date of the 1410 battle. See, for example, Marian Karol Dubiecki, “Rocznice Grunwaldu,” in Obrazy i studia historyczne, serya 3 (Kiev: n.p., 1915), 50–51. 5. See, for example, the maps of the battlefield in Stephen Turnbull, Tannenberg 1410: Disaster for the Teutonic Knights (Wellingborough, U.K.: Osprey, 2003), 54–55. 6. Announcement of June 26, 1910, Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie (APKr), IT 882; published in Księga pamiątkowa obchodu pięćsetnej rocznicy zwycięstwa pod Grunwaldem w dniu 15, 16, i 17 lipca 1910 r. w Krakowie z dodaniem albumu literackoartystycznego poświęconego wielkiej rocznicy dziejowej, ed. Kazimierz Bartoszewicz (Kraków: Nakładem Franciszka Terakowskiego, 1911), xii–xiii.



patrice m. dabrowski

7. Pomnik króla Jagiełły: Pamiątka uroczystości grunwaldzkich w Krakowie w dniach 15- go, 16- go i 17- go lipca 1910 r. (Kraków: Nakładem i czcionkami drukarni “Prawdy,” 1910), 7. 8. Interestingly, the same painting—which at that time was part of the collection of the Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pieknych (Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts) in Warsaw—was featured as the color centerfold of one of the commemorative volumes from the 1910 festivities, Księga pamiątkowa obchodu pięćsetnej rocznicy zwycięstwa. 9. Anna Treiderowa, Obchody Grunwaldzkie w Krakowie (1410–1910), Kraków Dawniej i Dziś, no. 13 (Kraków: Nakładem Towarzystwa Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa, 1961), 31; Henryk Lisiak, “Z dziejów walki o narodowe przetrwanie: Obchody pięćsetnej rocznicy bitwy pod Grunwaldem,” Życie i Myśl 36 (1988): 12, 32. 10. According to Władysław Wic, “Stosunek Polskiej Partii Socjalno-Demokratycznej Galicji i Śląska do obchodów grunwaldzkich,” in Tradycja grunwaldzka, ed. Jerzy Maternicki (Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski, Zakład Historii Historiografii i Dydaktyki Historii, 1990), 2:178. 11. The Russian partition was better represented than the German, where the celebration was condemned by the authorities. Contact increased this year between the New and Old Worlds, as a result of the newly erected monuments to Kościuszko and Pułaski in Washington, D.C., as well as on account of the Grunwald festivities, attended by several thousand Poles from America. (Treiderowa, Obchody, 28–29.) 12. See Dariusz Radziwiłłowicz, Tradycja grunwaldzka w świadomości politycznej społeczeństwa polskiego w latach 1910–1945 (Olsztyn, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warmińsko- Mazurskiego, 2003), 52. 13. Reactions to this speech suggest that its tone of unity was what was needed after the divisive civil war that took place in the Kingdom of Poland in 1905. See, for example, the letter of July 19, 1910, written by Władysław Reymont, Poland’s second literary Nobel laureate, to Paderewski in Archiwum polityczne Ignacego Paderewskiego, ed. Halina Janowska et al. (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich, 1973), 1:28. 14. Ibid., 27, as well as in many commemorative publications, including Księga pamiątkowa obchodu pięćsetnej rocznicy zwycięstwa. An abbreviated English translation appears in Marian Marek Drozdowski, Ignacy Jan Paderewski: A Political Biography in Outline (Kraków: Interpress, 1979), 55. 15. As I demonstrate in my monograph (see note 1), in the last third of the nineteenth century Poles had commemorated a number of round anniversaries. These included the centennial anniversaries of the Kosciuszko Insurrection, the birth of poet Adam Mickiewicz, the Constitution of May 3, 1791, as well as other dates of particular significance for the nation. 16. “Modlitwa w dzień Grunwaldu: Kazanie O. Zygmunta Janickiego,” Głos Narodu, July 15, 1902. 17. Czesław Pieniążek, Polska i krzyżacy: Opowiadanie historyczne; w pięćsetną rocznicę bitwy pod Grunwaldem napisał . . . (Kraków: Nakładem Księgarni K. Wojnara, 1910), 134. 18. Pomnik króla Jagiełły, 7. 19. Paul Vyšný attributes the development of the movement to the political opportunism of the Young Czech leader Karel Kramář ( Vyšný, Neo- Slavism and the Czechs, 1898–1914 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977], 49). For the Pol-

who to lead the slavs?



ish view of the congress, see Antoni Giza, Neoslawism i Polacy, 1906–1910, Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna w Szczecinie, Rozprawy i studia, vol. 61 (Szczecin, Poland: Wydawnictwa naukowe Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej w Szczecinie, 1984). For the Russian view, see Z. S. Nenasheva, “Slavianskii s”ezd 1908 g. v Prage i ego mesto v formirovanii ideologii i programmy neoslavisma,” in Slavianskie s”ezdy XIX–XX vv., ed. E. P. Aksenova, A. N. Goriainov, and M. Iu. Dostal’ (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk Institut slavianovedeniia i balkanistiki, Nauchnyi tsentr obshcheslavianskikh issledovanii, Mezhdunarodnyi fond iugoslavianskikh issledovanii i sotrudnichestva “Slavianskaia letopis’,” 1994), 99–112. 20. Antoni Giza, “Neoslawiści wobec obchodów grunwaldzkich w Krakowie w 1910 r.,” in Tradycja grunwaldzka, 1:256–67. In another work, Giza terms the encounter between the Poles and Russians on that anniversary “the culmination point of the congress”: Neoslawizm i Polacy, 118. Although he discusses Polish- Russian relations at the congress, Vyšný makes no mention of the anniversary. 21. This, essentially, is the focus of Giza, “Słowiański aspekt.” 22. Wieniec grunwaldzki z 1910- go roku: Wydawnictwo historyczne, pamiątkowe, ilustrowane; zbiór aktów i dokumentów historycznych z 1910 r.; ku uczczeniu 500 letniej rocznicy wiekopomnego zwycięztwa Polaków nad Krzyżakami, ed. Józef Paderewski (Kraków: G. Gebethner i Spółka, [n.d.]), 74–75, 255–56. The nations in attendance in Sofia are mentioned in Giza, “Neoslawiści,” 264–65 and 260. There was some overlap between the individuals and nations in attendance at the congress in Sofia and those at the Grunwald festivities in Kraków. Vyšný, Neo- Slavism, covers the congress in great detail, although he does not mention the Grunwald festivities. 23. Leo’s words were noted in letter of July 4, 1910, of Marian Zdziechowski to Aleksander Lednicki, published in Zbigniew Solak, “Obchody grunwaldzkie w listach Mariana Zdziechowskiego,” Studia Historyczne 36, no. 3 (1993): 355, 363. 24. July 18, 1910, letter of Marian Zdziechowski to his wife, Maria, published in Solak, “Obchody grunwaldzkie,” 366. 25. Drozdowski, Paderewski, 55. 26. Such terms of praise can be found in “Pomnik Władysława Jagiełły w Krakowie,” Tygodnik Illustrowany 51, no. 29 ( July 16, 1910): 586; “Kronika miesięczna,” Biblioteka Warszawska, no. 279 (August 1910), 388. 27. Tadeusz Boy- Żeleński, Słówka: 26–30 tysiąc (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy “Bibljoteka Polska,” 1925), 278. 28. Citations from “Akt fundacyjny pomnika,” Czas 43, no. 315 ( July 14, 1910), evening edition, 3. 29. “Goście słowiańscy w Krakowie,” Prawda, July 30, 1910, cited in Arkadiusz Kołodziejczyk, “Tradycje walki z naporem krzyżacko- pruskim i zwycięstwo grunwaldzkie na łamach warszawskiej ‘Prawdy’ 1880–1915,” in Tradycja grunwaldzka, 2:143. A rabidly anti- Polish pan- Slav of the old school, Bobrinskii had served as chairman of the Slav congress in Sofia. 30. Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, “Natsionalizm’ i slavianskoe edinenie,” Moskovskii Ezhenediel’nik, no. 27 ( July 10, 1910); parts of this were cited in J. Herbaczewski, “Przegląd prasy słowiańskiej,” Świat Słowiański (1910), 283. 31. From Świat Słowiański (1910), 122, cited in Giza, Neoslawizm i Polacy, 210. 32. Trubetskoi, “Natsionalizm’ i slavianskoe edinenie.” 33. Giza, “Neoslawiści,” 266–67; Wieniec grunwaldzki, 76. 34. See, for example, Wiktor Czermak, “Dziejowe znaczenie Grunwaldu,” Czas,



patrice m. dabrowski

July 4, 1910; W. Czermak, “Zwycięstwo jagiełłowe,” Tygodnik Illustrowany 51, no. 29 ( July 16, 1910): 579–81. 35. “Na uroczystości grunwaldzkie,” Świat Słowiański 6, no. 2 ( July–December 1910): 1–2. 36. “Grunwald,” Rzeczpospolita 2, no. 36 ( July 9, 1910): 158. 37. Cited in Solak, “Obchody grunwaldzkie,” 356. 38. Draft attached to letter of May 27, 1910, to the Kraków mayor, APKr, IT 884; published in Solak, “Obchody grunwaldzkie,” 362. 39. J. A. Herbaczewski, “Przegląd prasy słowiańskiej: Z prasy litewskiej,” Świat Słowiański 1910, t. 2, 106; Solak, “Obchody grunwaldzkie,” 358. In turn, the Germans praised the Lithuanians for not participating in the Kraków festivities: Henryk Lisiak, Paderewski: Od Kuryłówki po Arlington (Poznań, Poland: SAWW, 1992), 46. 40. From Viltis, no. 112 (1910), cited in J. Herbaczewski, “Przegląd prasy słowiańskiej,” Świat Słowiański (1910), 278–79. 41. “Polonais et lithuaniens,” La Croix, August 13, 1910, also discussed in J. Herbaczewski, “Przegląd prasy słowiańskiej,” Świat Słowiański (1910), 278–79. 42. See, among others, Radziwiłłowicz, Tradycja grunwaldzka, 60. 43. Cited in “Prasa ruska o obchodzie grunwaldzkim,” Czas, July 1, 1910, evening edition. 44. His statement of August  14, 1914, cited in Dariusz Radziwiłłowicz, “Rola tradycji grunwaldzkiej w działalności wychowawczej niektórych polskich organizacji zbrojnych w latach pierwszej wojny światowej,” in Tradycja grunwaldzka, 5:188.

Moscow’s First World War Memorial and Ninety Years of Contested Memory Karen Petrone

The calamity of the First World War created an unprecedented number of wartime deaths that radically transformed the commemoration of “the fallen” all over Europe.1 Members of Russian educated society, like the opinion makers in other European combatant countries, stepped forward during the war to honor the dead in ways that affirmed the nation’s patriotism and secured the active participation of social elites in the war effort. Perhaps the most important site of Russian national commemoration of the First World War was the Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery, also known as the All- Russian War Cemetery. The Grand Duchess Elisaveta Fedorovna (wife of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich who had been assassinated in 1905) proposed the creation of the cemetery in September 1914 for the soldiers who had died while being treated in Moscow hospitals. She expressed her desire to comfort the families of the heroic defenders of the motherland by making sure they knew the exact resting places of their loved ones.2 The Moscow city administration enthusiastically embraced her proposal and the cemetery was dedicated on February 15, 1915, on land adjacent to the Church of All Saints in the village of Vsekhsviatskoe, then on the outskirts of Moscow (figures 22 and 23). Today the site is well within the boundaries of the city and just a few minutes’ walk from the Sokol metro station. This essay explores the unique history of the Moscow memorial cemetery from its founding in 1915 to the present day. While the cemetery was 



karen petrone

Figure 22. Plan of the Moscow Fraternal Cemetery. From S. V. Puchkov, Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche (Moscow, Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1915).

created to honor Russian soldiers and nurses who sacrificed their lives for their country, it became the burial place of a heterogeneous group of people. The cemetery eventually held 17,500 dead from the First World War including Allied troops and enemy prisoners of war. After the revolutionary disturbances began in 1917, ten thousand of the revolution’s victims on both sides were also buried in the cemetery. Together with the First World War dead of several nations lay revolutionaries killed by tsarist troops in March 1917, cadets from Moscow military schools who fought against the Bolsheviks in November 1917, Soviet civil war commanders, and victims of the Red terror executed by the Soviet secret police. It was also rumored that later in the 1930s the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) used the cemetery as an execution and burial site.3 After October 1917, the pragmatic use of the cemetery to bury Moscow’s dead vastly complicated the meanings that were created at this site of commemoration. The story of this cemetery is not simply that of a particular geographic location and its fate over ninety years; it is also an account of the struggles that determined which of the dead were worthy of commemoration and which should be forgotten.4 Two conceptual arguments about public

Figure 23. Grave of the nurse O. I. Shishmareva. From S. V. Puchkov, Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche (Moscow, Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1915).



karen petrone

commemoration and memory are pertinent to the discussion of the history of this cemetery and the remembrance of its dead. First, it is important to think about memory as an extremely time- sensitive phenomenon. Commemoration is always specific to the time in which it occurs. In spite of the promises made by the religious rhetoric of commemoration, in a secular context it is not possible to secure “eternal memory” for the dead. In exploring the memorialization of the First World War dead in twentieth- century Russia, one must be attentive to particular historical conjunctures and the way that changing political, social, and military conditions transformed the boundaries and nature of First World War memory. In spite of the seeming fixity of memorials, memory is always in flux. By acknowledging that all memory is “unstable, plastic, synthetic, and repeatedly reshaped,” this essay provides insight into the ever- shifting contours of the memorialization of the First World War dead and identifies the forces behind the reshaping of memory.5 And, in analyzing memory, it is just as important to identify what has been forgotten as it is to examine what has been remembered. Second, one must keep in mind that memory is always and ever contested. This study of the memorialization of the Russian First World War dead begins from the premise that memory is multivocal. Prerevolutionary Russian society offered one particular set of narratives about the Moscow Fraternal Cemetery conditioned by the parameters of heroic discourse in tsarist Russia.6 After the revolution, however, because there were no overarching Soviet First World War myths to guide the process, the contest to construct cultural memory of the First World War was far more fragmented and more open- ended than the creation of tsarist and European First World War myths or the Soviet myths of the October Revolution and civil war.7 Because this notion of contestation is central to an understanding of how all memory works, Alon Confino’s definition of memory as “an outcome of the relationship between a distinct representation of the past and the full spectrum of symbolic representations available in a given culture” is quite useful. Confino’s definition of memory also reminds us that the various Soviet First World War memories gained or lost momentum in relation to other memories of the First World War as well as in interactions with the dominant Soviet myths of the revolution of 1917 and the civil war.8 This notion of contest makes it imperative to define the creators of these distinct representations of the past and to heed Jay Winter’s admonition that it is necessary “to insist on specifying agency, on answering who remembers, when, where, and how?” The actors engaged in the battles over the First World War cemetery included artists, architects, political and civic leaders, clergy, voluntary organizations, government officials, police, and individual mourners. The struggles of these actors to commemorate

moscow’s first world war memorial



the dead of the Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery—or to prevent that commemoration—demonstrate the complexity and the contingency of all acts of commemoration. The All- Russian War Cemetery was created to motivate future Russian citizens to sacrifice themselves for their country. At the 1915 dedication of the cemetery, architect P. I. Klein directly linked the site to civic, national, and patriotic goals: He hoped that “the future generations will here learn love of the motherland and will carry away in their hearts the steadfast resolution to serve for the benefit of the Fatherland.”9 The civic and military nature of the cemetery was to be further developed through plans to include a war museum on the site, highlighting the military achievements of the nation. The plans for the museum were never realized, however.10 The national and civic goals of the site as it was actually constructed were articulated primarily through an Orthodox Christian religious idiom of memorialization; first, a temporary chapel was erected at the cemetery in 1915; then, the prominent architect A. V. Shchusev’s memorial Church of the Transfiguration was consecrated three years later. This mode of memorialization had deep historical roots; the tradition of building churches as war memorials dates all the way back to Byzantium, and until the eighteenth century, “the only war memorials built in Russia were churches.”11 Working within this tradition, the creators of the cemetery tended to define Russian national identity in religious terms. The trustee of the cemetery, S. V. Puchkov, proposed that “the words of the Savior: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,’” be inscribed at the entrance to the cemetery, linking the sacrifice of the dead soldiers to the sacrifice of Christ.12 In commemoration of the great love of the martyred soldiers, the cemetery became a pilgrimage site for the wider public during Easter week in 1916; during the holiest week of the year, city authorities ran special trains that brought visitors to pay their respects both to the honored dead and to the ideal of a national community.13 Although the cemetery was imagined as a site of national commemoration, the memorial church that was actually built on the site was shaped by the grief of one particular family. The couple A. M. and M. V. Katkov donated money for the erection of a church in honor of their two sons who were both killed in battle in August 1914, on the eve of the feast of the Transfiguration. Shchusev designed the memorial Church of the Transfiguration in the Russian style including elements of northern architecture. The side- chapels of Shchusev’s church were dedicated to the Archangel Michael and Saint Andrew the Apostle, in honor of the patrons’ two dead sons, Michael and Andrew. On the first anniversary of their deaths in August 1915, after a prayer service and a religious procession, the cornerstone



karen petrone

of the church was laid. The two side- chapels were consecrated in January 1917, and the main altar in 1918. Thus both the ritual practices surrounding the memorial and its form were directly linked to the commemoration of particular individuals and the mourning process of a specific family.14 As in other European countries, mourners imbued memorial sites with multiple, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory meanings. While individual mourning shaped the Church of the Transfiguration, a second monument that was to be built on the site went beyond the individual and the nation to memorialize the suffering of the entire world. When sculptor I. D. Shadr heard about the Moscow City Duma’s competition for a monument to the victims of the Portugal, a Red Cross hospital ship torpedoed by the Germans in the Black Sea in 1916, he proposed instead a grandiose “monument to world suffering.” Shadr was successful in convincing the Moscow Duma to broaden its vision, and he won the competition. The All- Russian War Cemetery was thus the planned location of a religiously inspired universal monument to all victims of war.15 In 1918, at roughly the same time that Shchusev’s church was dedicated, the early Soviet journal Creative Work published Shadr’s plan for the “monument to world suffering,” despite what editor V. Friche called its “religious- Christian color.” Friche was willing to overlook the religious nature of the design because of its “grandiose monumentality,” its aspiration to combine nature with “all kinds of art—architecture, sculpture, painting and words,” and because the sculptor Shadr was “a son of the people.” According to Shadr’s plan, the visitor entered the monument through the “gates of eternity—tall granite walls inscribed with biblical utterances about the eternity of life.” Four large statues flanked the entrance to the garden, two on either side of a narrow door cut into the stone, representing Birth, Courage, Wisdom, and Eternity. The statues held their bowed heads in mournful reflection or prayer. An inscription reminded the visitors “we are strangers and wanderers on earth”; the words above the narrow door read: “There is one entrance into life and one end for all.” The visitor took the metaphorical journey into life by passing through the narrow passageway into the memorial garden. Here the visitor found two lines of tall and well- proportioned poplars on either side of an open courtyard, and between them a stagnant pool of water, the “lake of tears.” In front of the pool a snow- white marble statue personified Mercy with the mournful inscription: “The human being born of woman is short of days and surfeited with sorrows. Like a flower he blossoms and fades. He runs away like a shadow and does not stay.” On his way to the colossal pyramid at the far end of the courtyard, the visitor passed a statue of a dying youth lying on a granite slab with death (a woman) at his head and his mourning mother

moscow’s first world war memorial



at his feet. The pyramid itself was adorned with an ancient stone cross and the figure of Job, signifying humanity’s “Golgotha with its innumerable steps of suffering.” In the pyramid, the visitor metaphorically descended into the “bottom of the grave.” Then “with trembling hand” he opened the last doors and was “enveloped in an unusual light.” In front of him was the chapel of the Resurrection. Above the visitor’s head was a golden cupola with a mosaic fresco “Praise Eternity.” Inscribed in “fiery” letters on the wall were the words “Your dead will revive; the bodies of the dead will rise.” This powerful message would transform the visitor: “Contented, with a soul joined with destiny and open to goodness, as if having grown sighted and wise, the person returns to the Gates of Eternity.”16 In Shadr’s conception as he communicated it in 1918, the promise of resurrection alone made human suffering bearable. Even though Shchusev’s church was eventually torn down and Shadr’s monument was never built, their notions of memorialization nonetheless crossed the revolutionary divide and were accessible to readers and worshippers in early Soviet Russia. The events between February and October of 1917 profoundly transformed and multiplied the meanings of the cemetery by including a new category of the dead: those who died defending the provisional government. Martyrs of the February Revolution received burial in the cemetery, as did a military cadet from Nizhnii Novgorod who was killed pacifying mutinous soldiers in July 1917.17 After the October Revolution, however, the new Soviet state took a much more utilitarian stance to the cemetery and simply used it as a place to bury the Moscow dead—both revolutionary fighters killed in the struggle for Moscow and counterrevolutionary victims of the street fighting. Over the next four years, ten thousand victims of the Russian civil war including Red Army soldiers and commanders, White prisoners of war, and victims of the Red terror executed by the Soviet secret police were all buried in the cemetery.18 These actions demonstrated that Soviet authorities fundamentally contested the nature of the Moscow Fraternal Cemetery. The dead of the First World War, a war that the Bolshevik leadership stood firmly against, did not merit their own unique resting place. Furthermore, the cemetery was not even a place reserved for the honored dead, as the enemies of Bolshevism were now buried alongside Soviet revolutionary heroes and First World War soldiers. From the Soviet view, the cemetery ceased to be a sacred place or a place of commemoration and was instead simply a location to hold the bodies of the dead. The Bolshevik Revolution not only overturned the tsarist government and ended Russian involvement in the First World War, but also overturned the meaning of the dead as a social category. An atheistic worldview re-



karen petrone

placed an Orthodox Christian worldview, and Soviet propagandists sought to create an alternative philosophical framework that would make revolutionary deaths meaningful in the absence of an afterlife. The Soviet dead served as an inspiration to the living in continuation of the cause. Thus First World War deaths were meaningless because they were in the service of an imperialist war, while revolutionary deaths gained meaning because of sacrifice for the cause. But the bodies of the Soviet heroic dead were also not a high priority for the Soviet government. While concern with proper burial remained a central tenet of Orthodox Christianity because of belief in the resurrection, the official Soviet body had no soul to resurrect, and the remains of the dead became a hygiene problem rather than a religious one. The Soviet government’s desire to detach burial from the Orthodox Christian context of resurrection and its indifference to proper burial translated into a systematic neglect of many Orthodox cemeteries, including the Moscow Fraternal Cemetery.19 The architect of the Fraternal Cemetery’s hope that the site would instill patriotism in future generations was not to be fulfilled. In 1925, burials in the cemetery were ceased, its administrative offices were closed, and it was turned into a park. Relatives of the dead no longer knew where to turn to request permission to repair graves or erect monuments, and gradually the graves began to “fall into decline and lose their inscriptions.” Soon, no one knew where to find the graves of their relatives or of the revolutionary martyrs buried in the cemetery. Openly abandoning their responsibility for the upkeep of the cemetery, Moscow city authorities enlisted the help of a voluntary organization, the Old Moscow Society, to “take the graves of outstanding public figures under its protection.”20 The society, which likely included relatives of those buried in the cemetery, conscientiously protected the site to the best of its abilities. Right before the Old Moscow Society ceased meeting in 1929, when the Soviet government disbanded many voluntary societies, it failed in its appeals to the Sokol district soviet for ten thousand rubles to build a fence around the cemetery to protect it from the students of a nearby school.21 Deprived of both civic and financial support, the cemetery was left to its fate. The members of the Old Moscow Society may have fought a losing battle, but their struggle against early Soviet indifference to the memorialization of the First World War dead deserves to be remembered nonetheless. Information about the destruction of the All- Russian War Cemetery is shrouded in urban legend. According to the testimony of some local residents, the cemetery was desecrated and “neighboring urchins . . . played football with skulls that they dug up from the ground.”22 The grave markers were supposedly destroyed in 1932 on Stalin’s personal orders.23 In another account, it was the building of the Moscow metro that precipitated the

moscow’s first world war memorial



cemetery’s destruction.24 What is certain is that sometime in the 1930s or 1940s, the Church of the Transfiguration and all monuments and grave markers were demolished, with the exception of one. The one grave that remained immune to the general destruction was the monument to Sergei Aleksandrovich Shlikhter, a Moscow university student who was wounded at Baranovichi on June  20, 1916, during the Brusilov offensive and who died on June 25, 1916. The monument mixed the personal and the political. Inscribed on a sculpted stone tablet in new orthography was a quotation from Shlikhter’s war diary: “How good is life. How good it is to live.”25 On the base of the monument were also inscribed the words “To a victim of the imperialist war.” While the first inscription pointed to the irony of war taking the life of this particular exuberant young man, the second inscription set Shlikhter’s death within a Soviet antiimperialist context. How can one explain the survival of this lone Soviet- era monument to a “victim” of the First World War, the last remaining physical evidence of First World War memory in the former territory of the Moscow cemetery between the 1930s and the glasnost era? Once again there is evidence of individual action to protect the memory of the dead. S. A.  Shlikhter was the son of Aleksandr Grigorievich Shlikhter, the Soviet Union’s first people’s commissar of provisioning in 1917 and later the vice president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. According to S. A. Shlikhter’s nephew, his uncle had joined the tsarist army against his revolutionary father’s wishes. Sometime in the early Soviet period, A. G. Shlikhter honored his son with a monument carved by the famous sculptor S. D. Merkurov.26 When the cemetery was being destroyed, legend has it that Shlikhter lay on the gravestone and said, “You will have to destroy me as well.”27 A more prosaic conjecture is that Merkurov’s almost two- ton granite block was left by chance, because it was too heavy to move.28 Whether or not Shlikhter actually intervened in such a dramatic way to save his son’s grave, this particular gravestone was preserved from the Stalin- era bulldozers and allowed to remain standing in the park, continuing to give voice to the tragedy of the First World War. In the late 1940s, as Moscow expanded well beyond the boundaries of the former village of Vsekhsviatskoe, residential and commercial building began in earnest on the cemetery site, the area around today’s Peschanaia Street. Urban legend asserts that the Leningrad Movie Theater was built in 1956 at the location of the Church of the Transfiguration. A portion of the All- Russian War Cemetery remained a park (Leningrad Park), but almost all of the cemetery’s memorial features had disappeared.29 Soviet authorities had first adopted a utilitarian stance toward the memorial cemetery, burying its heroes and enemies indiscriminately; then they practiced demolition of



karen petrone

both tsarist and Soviet graves by neglect; and in the end they almost, but not quite, erased the cemetery from the Moscow landscape. The battle over whether the memory of the First World War would be preserved in Soviet culture seemed to have been decisively won by the Soviet state. Soviet policies mandated a forgetting of the First World War, an erasure of First World War memorials from the landscape, and a desacralization of the Orthodox cemetery that defined national sacrifice as holy. Not only would “future generations” not learn to “love the motherland,” but also when they visited the Moscow Fraternal Cemetery, they would be watching frivolous comedy films and more than likely not even realize that they stood on hallowed ground and the bones of the war dead. Yet Shlikhter’s monument still stood as witness to the earlier First World War narratives, representing the plasticity of memory, the role of contingency, and memory’s persistence through individual agency despite the great odds against it. And thus the site remained from 1956 until the middle of the 1980s and the arrival of glasnost. ——— The battles over the remembrance of the First World War begun in 1914 are still being played out in the Russian Federation today. Remembrance of the First World War remains contested and multivocal. These contemporary contests for memory are, of course, shaped by their own particular cultural, political, and social contexts, in circumstances radically different than those of tsarist Russia or of the interwar Soviet Union; these contexts include the rise of glasnost in the Gorbachev era and the emergence of oppositional civic groups, the fall of the Soviet Union, the search for new legitimizing symbols for the Russian Federation, and the struggle for post- Soviet Russia to come to terms with the complex Soviet legacy. Where the All- Russian War Cemetery once stood in Moscow, today there is the Memorial Park Complex of the Heroes of the First World War, opened in 2004 (figure 24). The history of the restoration of this site is as complex as the history of the cemetery’s destruction, and it illuminates the extent to which First World War and Soviet civil war memory continues to be controversial. The ceremonial opening of the memorial complex in Moscow’s Leningrad Park was modeled after the original opening of the cemetery in 1915 and took place on August 1, 2004, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. The city of Moscow spent ninety- five million rubles to create attractive fencing and to provide a variety of memorial stelae, columns, and plaques. An article written the day before the ceremony anticipated that the opening would be attended by Prime Min-

moscow’s first world war memorial



Figure 24. Entrance to the Memorial Park Complex of the Heroes of the First World War. Photograph by the author, 2008.

ister Mikhail Fradkov, Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov, and the mayor of Moscow Iurii Luzhkov; the top Russian official actually present at the opening was the vice mayor of Moscow V. Shantsev.30 The cemetery was not, evidently, deemed top priority at either the national or local level. To explore the ambiguous place of the cemetery in Russian civil life, this section of the essay will first explore the memorial geography of the site as it now stands and then highlight the roles of the various actors in the process of rebuilding the site. There are currently twelve eclectic monumental pieces spread throughout the territory of the park, including the only monument surviving from the original cemetery—the Shlikhter gravestone. Six of the twelve pieces, including a chapel, are adorned with the Orthodox cross, indicating the centrality of Orthodoxy and the active engagement of the Orthodox Church in Russian national and civic projects of memorialization in the post- Soviet period. The most prominent element in the memorial complex is the 1998 Chapel of the Transfiguration of the Savior (also sometimes called “Reconciling the Nations”), created in honor of the destroyed Church of the



karen petrone

Transfiguration that had once stood in the cemetery. The very small redbrick chapel, in which a requiem is celebrated every afternoon at one o’clock, is decorated with a white concrete emblem of Saint George. The decision to build a chapel on the site of the Moscow War Cemetery was in keeping both with the millennium-long tradition of war memorials in Russia and a vibrant post- Soviet church- building boom.31 The memorial chapel to the First World War thus reestablishes the age- old connection between wartime heroism and spiritual salvation. Part of the former cemetery is once again consecrated as hallowed ground. The Chapel of the Transfiguration of the Savior is a church in miniature, consisting of one lone cupola decorated in the Muscovite style with kokoshniki, arches in the shape of the traditional head coverings of women in the pre- Petrine period. The size of the church no doubt reflects the limited resources available for its erection in the economically tumultuous 1990s. As an example of neo- Muscovite architecture, the building represents a double revival. It recapitulates the Russian style of the last decades of the tsarist era, itself a rejection of the Western classical styles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and a conscious attempt to restore the truly “Russian” architecture of the pre- Petrine era.32 This late twentieth- century church restored the memory of the First World War by reclaiming the Russianness that had first been obscured by the Westernizing Peter the Great and then again by the imposition of atheistic Marxism. Other religious markers are scattered throughout the park. One antiquelooking monument in the shape of a cross seems to be a salvaged grave marker from an Orthodox cemetery; in prerevolutionary orthography and using archaic language, it praises those “leaders and soldiers” who gave their lives for “faith and fatherland.” The use of the word vozhd’ and the absence of the word “tsar” in the formulation of “tsar, faith, and fatherland” suggests, however, that this “old” orthography may have been inscribed in post- Soviet times. A new stone and stucco pillar carved in the outline of the domes of an Orthodox church reminiscent of Shchusev’s original design commemorates the location in the park where a chapel once stood.33 The new stela in honor of Russian nurses also sports a stylized church dome and cross. In post- Soviet Russia, wartime sacrifice in the First World War was definitively situated within a Christian context of eternal memory and eternal reward that had been markedly out of favor during the Soviet period. In additional to Christianity, another recurring theme in the complex is the articulation of the national; the double- headed eagle with an image of Saint George slaying the dragon nestled between its wings was once associated with the Romanov dynasty but now is the central image of the coat of arms of the Russian Federation. This symbol crowns a memorial obelisk

moscow’s first world war memorial



at the south end of the park. Another large ornamental wall prominently displays an engraving of the Russian coat of arms. This monumental wall also evokes nationality in its inscription “to fallen Russian soldiers.” While many of the inscriptions honor “fallen heroes” in general, this wall and the monument to First World War nurses emphasize the Russianness of the dead. Other monuments in the park use the more fluid language of motherland and fatherland to evoke patriotism without specifying either the entity engaged in warfare or the nationality of the warriors. Although the park is dedicated to the “heroes” of the First World War, the complex serves multiple memorial functions, and there is a great deal of flexibility in the definition of its honorees. The park contains one stone marker, similar to a gravestone, specifically remembering the “fallen heroes” of the Second World War. Given the dominance of the Second World War in both the post- Stalin Soviet mindset and the post- Soviet world, no memorial site seemed to be complete without an acknowledgment of the Second World War. There are also multiple ways of defining which First World War dead are honored. One of the most prominent monuments in the complex is a marble column topped by a soaring bronze eagle inscribed “to the fallen in the World War 1914–1918.” The classical form of the column and the symbol of the eagle are not specific to Russia and imply a dedication to all the First World War dead. On a square tablet superimposed on the column there is an “all- seeing eye,” staring out at the viewer, set within a triangle and surrounded by rays of light. This European Enlightenment or Masonic element suggests a universal definition of the fallen. It also stands in contrast to the Orthodox and national imagery of many of the other monuments. The memorial white stone obelisk at the south side of the park sporting the double- headed eagle is emblematic of the syncretic nature of postSoviet monumentalization; its four sides are made out of cinderblocks with a worn surface that looks as if it has been scraped and patched multiple times. There is a design on each of the four sides. Engraved into the stone on one side of the obelisk in a medieval- style script are the words “To those who fell for the freedom and independence of the motherland.” Striking in its inclusivity, this tribute is equally applicable to virtually all of the soldiers who died in the service of either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union (figure 25). The other three sides of the monument reveal a similar inclusiveness that could also be read as a certain kind of incoherence. Two of the other three sides of the obelisk display bronze emblems of the St. George Cross and the St. George Star, high tsarist military honors that were abolished after the Russian Revolution. In the center of the four points of the St.



karen petrone

Figure 25. Obelisk in the Memorial Park Complex of the Heroes of the First World War, inscribed, “To those who fell for the freedom and independence of the motherland.” Photograph by the author, 2008.

George Cross is a circle within which Saint George slays the dragon; the rhombus- shaped star has sunlike rays projecting from the center and a central circle emblazoned with the words “For Service and Bravery.” The last side of the obelisk contains an image of a five- pointed Soviet star with a hammer and sickle between the two bottom points of the star. In a circle superimposed upon the star’s center stands a Red Army soldier holding a rifle, surrounded by the words “Proletariat of the World Unite” and “U.S.S.R.”

moscow’s first world war memorial



The pillar valorized the sacrifices of both tsarist and Soviet soldiers, though the Soviet symbol was outnumbered by tsarist symbols two to one. The multivocal nature of the monument reveals the tensions between retaining Soviet traditions and defining the new heroes of the Russian Federation. The eclectic nature of the memorial park reflects the many battles over its creation. The cemetery first became a point of friction between Soviet authorities and an incipient civil society in 1987 when Erofei Mikhailovich Levshov, an Orthodox Christian veteran of the Second World War, brought a cross from Solovki to be blessed by Patriarch Pimen and placed it in the center of the park. The contention that the park should be treated as “sacred ground” was one of the many battles fought by Soviet citizens who wanted to restore the Orthodox Church to a central place in their lives. In 1989, city authorities gave permission for monuments to be placed in the park. The cemetery was one of the hundreds of thousands of sites of civic activity that eroded the legitimacy of the Soviet state. Those engaged in memorializing the park in the late 1980s and early 1990s sought to restore not only orthodoxy but also tsarist military traditions. They wanted to honor those Russians who fought valiantly for Russia during the First World War, but against the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Along with city and church officials, returning “White” émigrés from abroad and Cossacks participated in the planning of the memorial. The Volunteer Corps and Cadet Corps, White- Guard and monarchist military history clubs, played an active role in ceremonies. The cemetery was an important symbolic location for these groups because in it were buried young cadets from several military schools who died defending Moscow against the Bolsheviks as well as victims of the Cheka. Members of the White organization the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, for example, were executed at the cemetery in the summer of 1918 and buried there in a mass grave.34 The cemetery thus became a site at which to honor those who resisted Soviet rule; for many activists, these dead overshadowed the First World War dead. Yet there were other Soviet civic organizations that contested this new interpretation of the cemetery site. Forces within a newly active Soviet and then Russian civil society rejected the definition of the memorial as a “White” civil war site. In the late 1980s, when the idea of restoring the cemetery was first proposed, the local veterans’ association of Moscow’s Sokol region opposed the plan. These Second World War veterans by and large identified with the Soviet cause, and while some may have been tolerant of and even participants in the Orthodox revival, they roundly rejected the notion of celebrating the actions of counterrevolutionaries. By the middle of the 1990s, the cemetery’s proponents had gained the upper hand. They were able to fend off a plan to construct a commercial



karen petrone

center on the site, and they successfully articulated the notion that the new chapel was to be dedicated in honor of “Reconciliation of Nations,” and in memory of “all the defenders of Russia, who fell during wars for the Fatherland.”35 The memorial thus included the anti- Bolsheviks as well as all the war dead. On November 8, 1998, on the eightieth anniversary of the armistice ending the First World War, the new Orthodox chapel Reconciliation of Nations was dedicated “in memory of the victims of the two World Wars and the Civil War.” For the dedication, the members of the Volunteer Corps club dressed in First World War officer and soldier uniforms, and organized a religious procession from the Church of All Saints to the new chapel, followed by the presentation of military honors. An Orthodox priest then conducted funeral prayers.36 Yet in contemporary Russian society, there still remain sharp differences of opinion about the identities of the honored dead and whether the Whites in the civil war could legitimately be called “defenders of Russia” for fighting against the Bolsheviks. This conflict can be seen in the acts of vandalism that occurred at the memorial site in both 2000 and 2001. On March 28, 2001, vandals defiled the chapel by breaking the windowpanes and doors and throwing garbage and filth inside the church. They threw hydrochloric acid on the obelisk on the south side of the park and tore the bronze image of the St. George Cross off the obelisk and disfigured it. They also destroyed a stone cross by knocking it from its pedestal, and they tore the plaque describing the memorial zone off of the wall.37 This attack targeted the religious and monarchist aspects of the monument in particular. By tearing down the St. George Cross with the inscription “To those who fell for the freedom and independence of the motherland,” they sought to redefine the honored fallen as only those who fought for the Soviet Union. Between 1998 and 2004, the site was the repeated target of radical (presumably left- wing) antifascists. Because of its close association with a second memorial site within the walls of the neighboring All Saints Church that honors both White generals and Vlasovites, the Volunteer Corps has had to send its “Cadets” to the memorial to guard against vandalism each year on the anniversary of the 1941 German invasion of Russia.38 While the activists who fought for the restoration of the First World War cemetery were quite successful in imbuing the memorial site with their Orthodox vision, in recent years they have been less successful in defending their notion that the memorial should include anti- Soviet forces. Recent commemorations at the memorial park have de- emphasized the notion that the burial ground contains victims from both sides of the First World War and the civil war. The park is now called Memorial Park Complex of the Heroes of the First World War instead of Reconciliation of

moscow’s first world war memorial



Nations, and the chapel is known only as the Chapel of the Transfiguration; the park’s dedication to those who defended the Soviet Union is evident in the Second World War monument and in the Soviet crest on the memorial obelisk. While Orthodoxy is still a critical aspect of the memorial park, the major pieces added for the opening in 2004 were classical and secular in nature, emphasizing the civic and national importance of memory alongside its religious significance. The current iteration of the park represents a compromise between right and left, a middle ground that prevents the introduction of too many specifics. The debate about whose memory should be honored and whose memory destroyed continues in present- day Russia, as plans to develop a First World War museum at the site of the Leningrad Movie Theater to mark the centennial of the war in 2014 are being discussed. This debate will take place amid a variety of complex battles for memory. In the Putin era, the 1980s and 1990s have been increasingly viewed as a period of disorder, while there is a growing nostalgia for earlier Soviet stability and even for Stalin as a strong national leader. In this political context, the resurgence of memories of the First World War and the civil war are associated with the period of upheaval in the 1980s and 1990s and continue to be ambiguous. World War I embodies memories of tsarist honor, but also evokes problematic recollections of military failure and political and national collapse. In a period of Soviet nostalgia that continues to contrast Russian values with “Western” ones, the opposition of the Whites to the Soviet Union and their collaboration with foreign forces frame them, too, in potentially negative terms. The 2004 completion of the eclectic and pluralistic memorial park might be seen as an attempt to stabilize memory and forestall further discussion. Yet this essay has shown that attempts to freeze one version of memory in time never last, and there will be future developments and debates. And, in the midst of these debates, the gravestone of S. A. Shlikhter sits silently in the park, representing the persistence of memory and the power of individual actors in the contest for memory throughout both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The gravestone still conveys its poignant message from a victim of the First World War: “How good is life. How good it is to live.”

Notes 1. There is a vast literature on European war memory and commemoration. The notion of “the fallen” as an example of heroic wartime language can be found in Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 22. Other important works include George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Daniel J. Sher-



karen petrone

man, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Portions of this essay have been previously published in Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011) and are used by permission of Indiana University Press. 2. Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche (Moscow: Moskovskaia Gorodskaia Tipografiia, 1915), 3. 3. Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche: Opyt biograficheskogo slovaria, ed. M. M. Alabin, A. C. Dibrov, V. D. Sudravskii (Moscow: Gos. publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, 1992), 10, 45, 48, 52–53; Aleksandr Isakov, “Moskva skvoz’ linzu ob’ektiva: Vsekhsviatskoe,” December 5, 2007, http://www.mosnovostroy.ru/news/ lenta/4576.html. 4. For a discussion of the dead as a social category, see Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany (London: Macmillan Press, 2000). 5. Winter prefers the term “remembrance” because it reminds us of the role of human agency. See Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 3–4. 6. See Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 7. Key works on Soviet mythmaking are Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), and The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Aaron J. Cohen, “Oh That! Myth, Memory, and the First World War in the Russian Emigration and the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review 62 (Spring 2003): 69–86; Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1945: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8. Confino also views memory “as the relationship between the whole and its component parts, seeing society as a global entity—social, symbolic, political— where different memories interact.” See Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102 (December 1997): 1391. 9. N. Zubova and M. Katagoshchina, “Pamiatnik velikoi voiny,” Moskovskii zhurnal, no. 5 (1994), 52. 10. Melissa K. Stockdale, “United in Gratitude: Honoring Soldiers and Defining the Nation in Russia’s Great War,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 468. 11. Nadieszda Kizenko, “The Savior on the Waters Church War Memorial in St. Petersburg,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Joan Neuberger and Valerie Kivelson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 124–25; Isakov, “Moskva skvoz’ linzu ob’ektiva: Vsekhsviatskoe.” 12. Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche, 4. 13. Stockdale, “United in Gratitude,” 468. 14. Zubova and Katagoshchina, “Pamiatnik velikoi voiny,” 52; Dariia Pavlova,

moscow’s first world war memorial



“Vsekhsviatskoe: Pamiati pogibshikh v I Mirovoi voine,” http://www.pravaya.ru/ side/14/4419. 15. O. Voronova, Shadr, Zhizn’ zamechatelnykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1969), 48. 16. Ibid., illustrations following 32; I. D. Shadr, “Pamiatnik miromy stradaniiu,” Tvorchestvo, no. 5 (1918): 21–24. 17. Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche, 45, 49. 18. “Po kom zvonit kolokol,” Kul’tura, no. 42 (7153): November 12–18, 1998, http:// www.kulturaportal.ru/tree_new/cultpaper/article.jsp?number=45&crubric_id=1000317 &rubric_id=201&pub_id=152046. 19. Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth- Century Russia (New York: Penguin, 2000), 136–37. 20. OPI GIM (Otdel Pismennykh Istochnikov, Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Muzei) f. 402, “Staraia Moskva,” ed. khr. 351, ll. 1–2. 21. OPI GIM f. 402, ed. khr. 351, ll. 13–14. The last recorded meeting of the society’s cemetery commission was May 12, 1929. 22. Anna Nikol’skaia, “Geroi pervoi mirovoi,” Vecherniaia Moskva, no. 109 (23907), June 17, 2004, http://www.vmdaily.ru/old/23907/23907nikolskaya_a1.html. See also http://www.vmdaily.ru/article.php?aid=976. 23. “Po kom zvonit kolokol.” 24. Isakov, “Moskva skvoz’ linzu ob’ektiva: Vsekhsviatskoe.” 25. “Kak khorosha zhizn’/Kak khorosho zhit’.” 26. Aleksandr Khokhlov, “Zapozdaloe pokaianie,” Novye Izvestiia, July 30, 2004, http://www.newizv.ru/news/?id_news=8713&date=2004- 07- 30. 27. “Dolg pamiati i chesti,” po materialam saita NF “Pamiat’ chesti,” www.white - guard.ru, Russkii Dom, no. 10 (2004). Accessed online at http://russdom.ru/2004/ 200410i/20041013.html. 28. Nadynrom, “Po sledam bratskogo kladbishche na Sokol,” http://www.liveinternet .ru/community/2281209/post107636155/. 29. Zubova and Katagoshchina, “Pamiatnik velikoi voiny,” 55. 30. “Dolg pamiati i chesti”; Khokhlov, “Zapozdaloe pokaianie”; Sokolovskii, “Zhivaia pamiat’,” Istoriia, no. 33 (753), September 1–7, 2004, http://his.1september .ru/index.php?year=2004&num=33. 31. In a notable variation, the post- Soviet World War II memorial and museum at Moscow’s Poklonnaia Gora, or “Homage Hill,” consists of an Orthodox church alongside a mosque and a synagogue. 32. Kizenko, “The Savior on the Waters Church War Memorial in St. Petersburg,” 124; Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 244–56; I am indebted to Daniel Rowland for the notion that the church represents a double revival. 33. While some sources claim that Shchusev’s Church of the Transfiguration was at the site of the Leningrad Movie Theater at the south end of the park, this monument is in the center of the park. The monument claims to mark the spot at which a chapel stood from 1915 to 1925. Shchusev’s Church of the Transfiguration was not dedicated until 1917–18. There was, however, a temporary wooden chapel built at the cemetery in 1915. While the cemetery was closed to burials in 1925, the Church of the Transfiguration was likely destroyed at a later date. 34. Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche, 10.



karen petrone

35. “V Moskve zalozhen kamen’ na meste stroitel’stva khrama- chasovni v pamiat’ vsekh zashchitnikov Rossii, pavshikh v voinakh za otechestvo,” Interfax online, May 6, 1998, http://www.interfax- religion.ru/?act=archive&div=6657. 36. “Po kom zvonit kolokol.” 37. “Oskvernena Preobrazhenskaia chasovnia na Sokole,” March 31, 2001, www .zavet.ru/news/news- s010401.htm#02. 38. “Kadety okhraniaiut pravoslavnyi memorial primireniia narodov,” http://www .cadetcorps.ru/News/Show.aspx?id=295.

Part 4 Commemorating Trauma

Memory as the Anchor of Sovereignty: Katyn and the Charge of Genocide James von Geldern “Space” means an arena of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority. . . . But “place” is a very different matter. Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations. — walter brueggemann, The Land (1977)

Katyn Cemetery, 2000 Katyn, 1940. Such was the simple inscription in the Polish War Cemetery at Katyn (Russian Federation) at its official opening on July 28, 2000. Similar sites were opened that summer in the Russian town of Mednoe, and Kharkov in Ukraine, other places where Polish officers were slaughtered by Soviet NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) troops in 1940, following their capture in the wake of the Soviet- German partition of Poland.1 Katyn, though, is the singular name by which the massacre is known to Poles, and it was the name they remembered through the long years from 1945 to 1989 when public mention of the massacre was forbidden, and the crimes were blamed on the Germans. The fraternal ties between socialist Poland and the Soviet Union forbade public remembrance of this act of national murder. Few Polish citizens were ever fooled by the official lie, and the inability to publicly observe the national tragedy rankled deeply. Only in 1989, after Mikhail Gorbachev, under pressure from Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski, appointed a commission to investigate this “blank 



james von geldern

spot” in history, were documents published showing conclusively that the crime was committed by Soviet troops.2 Construction of a Polish cemetery in Katyn took years of negotiation and struggle. Although a Polish- Russian agreement was signed in 1994 that gave Polish authorities the right to maintain memorials to Polish victims in Katyn and Mednoe—and the duty to maintain Russian war graves in Poland—progress was slow. Only in 1999 did work on the memorial complex begin. That year the site was host to ceremonies marking the sixtieth anniversary of the crossing of Soviet troops into Polish territory. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski remained silent through much of the ceremony, during which he laid a wreath in the Polish national colors of red and white. In his speech, the focal point of the ceremony, he spoke of the “martyrs of Polish history.”3 The cemeteries in Katyn, Mednoe, and Kharkov were opened by official ceremonies in the summer of 2000. The Katyn Memorial Complex, set in the forest outside Smolensk, is a tasteful construction of quiet paths, muted graves, and low walls.4 It commemorates victims murdered at Katyn, including both Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet secret police between 1937 and 1953 and the Polish officers killed in 1940. The site offers several simple platforms for ritual commemorations: one with a Russian Orthodox cross, one with a Catholic cross, and one without a cross for civil ceremonies. Paths lead from the first ritual platform to the separate Russian and Polish burial sites. Visitors can also walk a common Path of Memory, which leads between the two burial sites to the main ritual platform. The Polish grave site, which was designed by the Poles, is entered through a solemn gate that leads to a memorial wall on which the names of the Polish victims are written. The graves themselves are low mounds framed in reddish cast iron, on which large crosses lay silent. The pits into which the murdered Polish officers were thrown are now covered by large cast- iron plates of the same clayish red, and across from the memorial wall are gravestone- like planks with the symbols of the four faiths that suffered losses at Katyn: a Catholic cross, an Orthodox cross, a Star of David, and the red star of the Soviet Union. The Polish site also features the graves of two generals killed in the massacre and a simple altar that is frequently draped with wreaths of red and white. However, as Karen Petrone shows in “Moscow’s First World War Memorial” in this volume, creation of a public cemetery (in that case, a First World War cemetery in Moscow) is no guarantee that public memory will invest itself in such a commemorative site over time. The opening ceremony was celebrated on the main ritual platform, unmarked with religious or national symbols, and separate from both grave sites. As Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek observed, the public commem-

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



oration offered Poles and Russians a “great chance to make history together without hatred and without lies.”5 Yet Russian President Boris Yeltsin only sent one low- ranking representative, Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko.6 Buzek and Khristenko spoke together, but they might have been speaking of different places. For Buzek, Katyn signified “genocide and a war crime.” Speaking “in the name of the Polish Nation,” he demanded to “know the names of all citizens of the Republic murdered by Soviet authorities and find their burial sites.” More provocatively, he spoke of coupling the crime with punishment. “The Katyn crime must be fully explained. There must also be a full accounting.”7 Khristenko seemed to be looking at a different place as he spoke: the entire Katyn complex, encompassing the graves of over ten thousand Soviet citizens victimized by Stalinist repression. He evoked the memory of the “Soviet and Polish citizens who were victims of totalitarian repression,” and noted that “it was the peoples of the former Soviet Union who became the first and principal victims of the inhuman Soviet machine.”8 He expressed the hope that this common tragedy could become a source of reconciliation for Russians and Poles. This was not to be. There have been no further joint commemorations of the Katyn massacre at the memorial site; and now, as before, when Poles gather to remember the victims and name the perpetrators of the crime, they usually do so on Polish territory. The rites of place examined in this volume and elsewhere provide a community, often identified as a national community, a site to contest the underlying meanings and values that structure its social and cultural life. Claiming the right to name a place and its historical associations is a claim to power, or a share of power. Claiming ownership of place and the event represents a claim to power over the community that engendered it. What happens to a place, and the rites observed there, when they do not belong to the celebrant? Can the gravity of that place be shifted elsewhere; is the stain of the place erased, to remain a historical “blank spot”; or does the moral gravity of the crime so stain the place that none can remove it? What is the power of law, which unearths the memories of victims and participants, reconstructs the event, assigns blame, and metes out punishment, to reanimate the blank spot in the memory, and to bring moral gravity to bear on the geographic site of the crime? Is that power magnified or diminished when the relevant law belongs to the international community, bringing greater attention to the memory, and sharing the victims’ tragedy with the whole of humanity; but in that sharing, refusing victims the power to define their tragedy as they wish? This paper will not be devoted to what occurred at Katyn. Although still a source of controversy between the Russian and Polish governments and



james von geldern

peoples, it seems clear that on March 5, 1940, the Soviet government ordered the execution of over twenty thousand Polish prisoners in several sites across the western Soviet Union, many of them near the village of Katyn. It will instead investigate the consequences of investing ritual meanings in a place that the commemorating nation does not own and of assigning meanings through words that the victim nation cannot define for itself.

Why Is Katyn the Site of Memory? Katyn. In Polish the name stands alone, a focal point for national outrage and woe. The name of the place is the name of the event. In Russian, the event can be named in several ways, and the place name does not stand alone as a reference to the event. Russians sympathetic to Polish grievances will refer to the “Katyn tragedy” (Katyn’skaia tragediia); others simply speak of “Katyn’skoe delo,” literally the thing that happened at Katyn. The place and its name evoke for Poles not only the death of their compatriots but also the subsequent decades wasted under an alien socialist order. For Russians it can elicit compassion, solidarity arising from shared suffering under totalitarian rule, or even indifference and denial. One need not provide a modifier for Auschwitz; the name itself speaks of the acts and suffering that it witnessed. For many Poles, Katyn carries a similar weight. It is a singular source of gravity attached to a complex of grievances that go beyond the events that occurred there and define a particular national consciousness. Evocation of the place acts as a symbol for the national tragedy that occurred there and elsewhere, and for the years of sovereignty lost in its wake. As Buzek told the Polish Sejm later in the year 2000, Katyn was emblematic of a greater attempt to destroy Poland’s existence. “These were not only Polish officers, Poland’s elite, who were buried in the Katyn graves. For many years, Polish sovereignty was buried there as well.”9 Still, one might ask why the Polish government and so many Polish citizens have chosen Katyn, which is not on their territory, to be what Pierre Nora has called a lieu de mémoire, a site of memory.10 Speaking at the Polish military cemetery in Kharkov on June 27, 1998, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski explained, “The crime of Katyn . . . occupies a special place in the collective memory of Poles. It is a great sore, which we have to talk about ceaselessly—just so that it can be healed.”11 Why has this become the tragedy that defines the Polish nation?12 One answer might be found in the fact that this act of willful remembering is accompanied by an act of forgetting.13 The painful truth is that while present- day Poland struggles for the right to commemorate its national tragedy where it occurred, and on the terms it chooses, there are many sites of

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



genocide on Polish territory where many Polish citizens perished. These are of course the infamous death camps: Auschwitz- Birkenau, Bełzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka, designed to exterminate whole races, primarily the Jews. Operation Reinhard, the campaign to murder the Polish Jews in 1942, was so effective that it virtually eliminated the Jewish community in their own villages or at the camps in Treblinka, Bełzec, and Sobibór.14 These are incontestably sites of genocide against Poles, and against many others, yet they do not provide places in which rites of Polish national identity are observed. Surely the most painful obstacle is the shadow of Polish complicity in the killing of the Jews, an accusation brought home in the Claude Lanzmann film Shoah and in Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors. When in 2001 Polish authorities finally recognized and commemorated the pogrom and murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors, their pointed parallels to the massacre at Katyn did not sit well with all Poles.15 Polish- Jewish intellectual Adam Michnik expressed the mixture of confusion, guilt, and hostility felt by many Poles when the issue of complicity arises when he wrote, “I feel a specific schizophrenia: I am a Pole, and my shame about the Jedwabne murder is a Polish shame. At the same time, I know that if I had been there in Jedwabne, I would have been killed as a Jew.”16 Katyn gives Poles a national tragedy of their own that they can claim to be a genocide, and to insert into their narrative of national identity. Their choice points to an unfortunate feature of genocide memory: genocide belongs to a victim people, and its memory is difficult to share. To call Katyn a crime against humanity—a terrible criminal charge in itself, and one that would in fact simplify prosecution of the perpetrators—would be for many a denial of Poles’ specific ownership as the victim people. The crimes against humanity at Katyn included many Russian victims. The power of the word genocide is in identifying Poles as the unique victims of Katyn. That the word provokes profound emotions, opens deep wounds, and instigates displays of national and ethnic identity, might show that few have learned the lessons that the crime should teach about national and ethnic enmity. “Where is Katyn?” is still somewhat an open question. Though this might seem silly, since Katyn is both a real place locatable on the map as well as a historical event, for decades Poles wishing to honor the dead and lay memorial wreaths had reason to ask the question. They could find no such place in their homeland, nor could they find a place that gave testament to the event in the neighboring Soviet Union. Thus it remained for Poles beyond the reach of the political authorities controlling the original site to erect ersatz Katyns throughout the lands settled by the Polish diaspora. There are, for instance, a large Katyn memorial outside of Johannesburg, South Africa; a smaller monument in Can-



james von geldern

nock Chase, Staffordshire (U.K.); a memorial stone outside the Church of Johannes in Stockholm; a dramatic statue in downtown Jersey City, New Jersey.17 There is a magnificent memorial found on Baltimore Harbor, a spiraling golden flame with the heroic figures of three Polish officers (one a woman) at its base, and the figures of such national heroes as Boleslaw the Brave, Kazimierz Pulaski, Jan III Sobieski, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, none of whom can be connected to Katyn in any way.18 “Virtual” Katyns have appeared on the Internet, preserving the memory of the massacre but rendering the site fully disembodied.19 Although these monuments preserve the memory of the event, none could satisfy the need to memorialize Katyn at Katyn, to suture the event to the place. Until the year 2000, opportunities were rare for Poles to venture to Katyn in any but a private capacity; to find a memorial to the events that had occurred in 1940; or find Russians to share the commemoration with them. Such moments were, on occasion, possible in other places. The most striking occurred on August 26, 1993, when Boris Yeltsin visited Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. The postsocialist Polish government had built a Katyn monument there, aligning itself with the popular commemorations that the socialist government had resisted, and it is still the most important reminder of the event on Polish soil.20 Yeltsin’s visit marked a high point in Polish- Russian relations, and demonstrated how Katyn serves as a litmus test for those relations. During his visit Yeltsin and his counterpart Lech Wałęsa seemed able to reach agreement on a number of outstanding issues.21 The Russian leadership withdrew its objections to Polish membership in NATO; promised early withdrawal of Russian troops from Poland; and delivered Soviet files on the Solidarity movement from 1980 that discussed the possibility of invasion. The most striking moment of the sojourn was Yeltsin’s visit to Powązki, where he knelt at the Katyn monument, laid a wreath, and spoke aloud the words “Forgive [us].”22 Following this remarkable event, the two presidents issued a joint declaration that the perpetrators of the massacre would be punished and that efforts would be made to compensate victims of Stalinist crimes. The ambiguity of that last phrase would be the source of tensions in the future. The victims of Stalinist crimes included Russians as well as Poles, and the compensation would join the two peoples in condemning a dark period of the past. It would also make Russians fellow victims to the Poles, rather than the perpetrators of the crimes of Katyn. For Yeltsin and his fellow Russians, his apology was to have “closed the page” of Katyn; but for the Poles, it simply opened the book and began the long process of redress.23 Contrition is an act of internal reckoning and external expression of remorse.24 It can be followed by forgiveness. In 1993, Yeltsin was presented with an Act of Forgiveness by the Federation of Katyn Families, the Polish

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



organization representing the surviving family members of the Katyn victims.25 Contrition, however, is also an admission; when it crosses from the spiritual sphere into the legal world, it begs for prosecution, not forgiveness. Yeltsin and his government had assumed that his act of contrition was the closing chapter to the sad affair. But in September of that same year they were shocked to discover that Polish Justice Minister Jan Piatkowski had initiated an independent investigation into the Katyn massacre and had requested extradition of four former NKVD officers suspected of commanding the operation.26 To the new investigators, it mattered little that Wałęsa himself objected to the investigation; that the Russian Military Procurator’s Office was already conducting an investigation; that the identification of the NKVD officers had arisen from the Russian investigation; and that under international and domestic law, there was not likely to be a legal basis for the extradition request.27 Six years of mounting tension over Katyn ensued, as the Russian government grew increasingly uncomfortable with the extradition demand. The discomfort arose from profoundly different interpretations of the crime. To Yeltsin and his compatriots, Katyn was a Soviet crime. Its victims had, like millions of Russian- Soviet citizens, suffered at the hands of the Stalinist regime, whose successors had been removed from power. The chain of guilt and responsibility had been broken by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event that Yeltsin himself had precipitated. That Russians, who had been the primary victims of Stalinist repression, should accept the responsibility for such acts as the successors of the Soviet state, would seem absurd from this point of view. For Poles, it was obvious that the most culpable party was Russia. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 made little difference, other than allowing greater access to the sites and documents of Katyn. The instigators of the massacre had been Russians; and now the Russians were dragging their feet.

Defining the Nation Through Memory Political power often carries with it the power to create memories and to erase them. Memorial rites speak to both the past and present; and as Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone note in their introduction to Contested Pasts, the memories invoked in such observances can communicate “political agendas which serve particular ideas about the virtues of the nation, the family, or the current government.”28 Public rites of commemoration summon forth images from the “collective memory,” to use Maurice Halbwachs’s phrase; but the celebrator of the rite claims the right to speak for that collective and identifies celebrants with that community.29 The celebrator who gives shape to the memory defines the collective by inclusion in the celebration—and also excludes others from that collective by



james von geldern

implication. Or as John R. Gillis has written, “The parallel lives of [memory and identity] alert us to the fact that the notion of identity depends on the idea of memory, and vice versa. The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.”30 Commemoration is thus an act of power, a “rite of power” as first coined by Sean Wilentz in his groundbreaking collection of essays on the subject.31 But that is not its only possible purpose. Scholars have brought attention to the role of commemoration as a counter- memory, a form of resistance to hegemonic discourses, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault.32 Countercommemorations unearth the biographies of a site that have been buried by hegemonic regimes. They seek to piece together a “legitimate” past to counter the official histories that legitimized those regimes, and to reconstruct a national community based on different values, and with different constituencies.33 Thus official commemorations of Katyn by the Polish government in the postsocialist years have functioned as both memories and counter- memories. Their explicit object is to exhume the silenced history of the Katyn, which was a foundation of the postwar socialist alliance between socialist Poland and the Soviet Union. Implicitly, though, they seek to identify the Polish nation as an ethnic group that shared certain values destroyed by the Soviet atrocity, and to marginalize those who would advocate other values. By identifying the victims of the Katyn massacre with the entire Polish nation, the commemorations erase the differences between those individuals and the Polish nation, and underscore the oneness, the homogeneity of Poles arising from their shared historical experience.34 Katyn was erased from the national discourse of identity by the hegemonic socialist state; and citizens who stubbornly refused to forget were committing inescapably political acts. The subtext of the recovered memory is that it is tied to the recovery of civil society and national independence that began with the Solidarity movement in 1980, and culminated with official recognition of the massacre after 1989. This narrative of national rebirth was reinforced throughout the 1980s, first when Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription “Katyn—1940” that was torn down by the socialist government. Subsequently, a yearly symbolical struggle took place in Powązki Cemetery and elsewhere in Poland, when on All Souls Day (Zaduszki ) similar crosses would be raised by citizens and then removed overnight by police. The connection between Solidarity and Katyn would not seem obvious, yet both are important elements of a narrative of erasure and recovery (of memory and of sovereignty). The connection between memory and the

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



state is embodied by the Institute of National Remembrance—Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (IPN, or Instytut Pamięci Narodowej—Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu), created by the legislature in 1998 and operational since 2000. The IPN performs a number of tasks related to erasures of the national memory between 1940 and 1989, some tasks historical, others prosecutorial. It is responsible for the process of lustration, under which former Communist functionaries and collaborators are investigated and removed from positions of power; for historical research and the publication and preservation of documents; and for public education on the lost pages of history. The IPN charter also vests it with the power to prosecute crimes against humanity—among them genocide. That national memory can be delegated to a governmental body suggests that statehood and memory are intimately linked. Resurrection of the memory of Katyn has been an important component of the recovery of full sovereignty for the Polish state since the fall of socialism in 1989. Poland has suffered several catastrophic erasures of sovereignty through its history, and has survived as a national and political entity by preserving its memories. These memories have been embodied by its culture, its language, its traditions and religious practices; and they are identified with the Polish nation. Thus Poles are deeply wedded to the traditional alliance of nation and state in an era when the nation- state and absolute sovereignty are becoming outmoded. Thus it is emblematic that the Polish government, speaking for the whole of the Polish nation, calls for charges of genocide—the murder of a nation—rather than crimes against humanity. Memory, as embodied by the commission, is associated with prosecution; it becomes a subject of law, and thus a monopoly of the state. Yet it is the national memory, not the memory of the state or present government, that the IPN represents. This creates potential conflicts of interest in a number of places. Perhaps the most painful source is its lustration powers, which make it responsible for the investigation of many Polish citizens who worked within the socialist state. So we must ask what happens to the national memory when it is usurped by the state? What happens when acts of sovereign memory carry legal consequences?

Genocide and Nationhood Most incendiary in Buzek’s Katyn speech in 2000 was his use of the word genocide. To label Katyn a genocide is to say that the crime was committed by one people against another, not by a totalitarian state against many individuals.



james von geldern

Just as Katyn is many things—a place, a sequence of events, and a national tragedy—so too is genocide more than one thing. Genocide is the ultimate act of collective criminality; it is not just mass murder, but killing that implicates the killers as a collective, implicating members of the killer nation who did not actually kill, and identifies the victims as a collective. It elevates the moral onus above all other crimes, including so- called crimes against humanity, which are large- scale atrocities against a population committed during time of war. Genocide, if not by definition then by common understanding, implicates an entire national group. Turks refute the charge of genocide against the Armenians because it stains their national legacy; and Russians resist the claim of genocide that would implicate them as a people. To label Katyn an act of Stalinist repression—a crime against humanity—identifies the criminals as Soviet authorities, lifting responsibility from Russia in its present form. As for the victims, the victims of Stalinist repression would be the Polish officers captured in 1940; the heirs empowered to speak for them would be the Federation of Katyn Families. If the crime was genocide, then all Poland is heir to the victims and can speak for them. Genocide is both a crime and a narrative of nationhood, and carries very different meanings and implications in its two natures. As a crime, genocide has a brief and modern history; the act had not in fact been named or identified as a crime when the killings at Katyn took place. Yet to say that genocide did not exist in 1940 requires a great deal of qualification. The intentional extermination of peoples was not new when the Third Reich began to murder its Jews in the 1930s. Hitler himself cited the extermination of Armenians as evidence that the world would ignore such a crime. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, which used the term genocide in the charges against the Nazi leadership, prosecutor James McHaney cited the massacres committed by Genghis Khan and by Tamerlane as precedents. Ironically, perhaps Yahweh committed the first recorded genocide, when he slaughtered the firstborn children of the Egyptians and compelled the pharaoh to let the Hebrews return to Israel. That act, mythic or real, fully fits the definition of genocide in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention of 1948 as an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”35 Buzek’s accusation of genocide and demand for justice and punishment also creates a conundrum. For a crime to be punished, there must have been a law that defined it as a crime when it was committed. The cold- blooded shooting of the Polish officers unquestionably qualifies as one of the acts listed in the Genocide Convention (killing members of the group, as specified in Article 2a); less clear is whether the Katyn massacres were committed with the intent to destroy the Polish nation as such; and whether they

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



approach the scale where slaughter becomes a killing of the Polish nation in part.36 On the other hand, the category of crimes against humanity did exist in 1940, as the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded. The accusation of genocide points to the peculiar barriers confronting Poles as they seek to celebrate a rite of place in its essential location. When Poles mourn their losses at Katyn, and fix it as a focal point of national identity, they are doing so on foreign land owned by the sovereign state that they accuse of perpetrating the crime. Their accusations rest on a word, genocide, of such moral gravity that it does not belong to them. Although coined by the Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin, the word is almost uniquely international, owned by all and by none. Its definition is fixed by international law and parsed by international courts assessing different conflicts and atrocities. While any people or individual can use the phrase to describe their national tragedy, they cannot use their own definition of it to prosecute the perpetrators in court. The charge of genocide, which has increasing resonance throughout Polish society, rests on a subtle link of claims. Essentially the case would be that the victims were not just Poles, but they were the core elite capable of maintaining Polish sovereign nationhood. Thus the massacre was an attack on the entire nation; as one recent report would have it, “Stalin was seeking to liquidate Poland’s elite to prevent the rebirth of a sovereign Polish state.”37 The claim is most fervently advocated by the Katyn Committee; its head, Stefan Melak, in calling on Russian authorities to recognize the genocide, claims that “Katyn will always remain a symbol of a death sentence passed on Poland.”38 In his film Katyn (2007), Andrzej Wajda subtly underpins this contention when he identifies the perpetrator of the act as “Soviet Russia,” and interweaves the otherwise unconnected story of the extermination of the professoriate of Jagiellonian University with the killings at Katyn. In the film, the unnamed general who leads the prisoners gives his fellow captives a Christmas message, explaining to the intellectuals in their midst, “You must endure, because there won’t be a free Poland without you. The aim for us, ordinary soldiers, is to put Poland again on the map of Europe. Yet you’ll have to make that Poland come true in Europe.”39 Offenses against sovereignty, however, are not acts of genocide, traumatic though they are.40 More problematic for the prosecution would be that genocide had not been classified as an international crime before the war. It is a cardinal principle of international criminal law and human rights law that no criminal prosecution can be brought for an act that was not classified as a crime before its commission. Thus although the indictment at the Nuremberg Tribunal included the word genocide, it was used as a descriptive term under the heading of crimes against humanity, not as a charge.41 One



james von geldern

of the most chilling paragraphs of the Judgment at Nuremberg, in fact, is that in which the court found that it could not render judgment on Nazi officials for the systematic extermination of Jews before the 1939 outbreak of war, the threshold beyond which the court had no jurisdiction.42 The massacre at Katyn was a war crime and could well be considered a crime against humanity.43 The distinction rests on whether the Polish officers at Katyn were prisoners of war in an ongoing conflict or whether they were civilians who had resided on lands now incorporated into other states, citizens of a country that no longer existed. War crimes would have been committed against prisoner officers; crimes against humanity against civilians during a time of war. The Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal established that both charges carried force of law throughout the period of the German- Russian partition of Poland; and both crimes carried heavy penalties, including the death sentence. Thus, as the charges leveled by Polish authorities and the public cascade toward genocide, the likelihood of a case being brought and justice served diminishes. Regardless of the feasibility of a case for genocide being brought in any court, the legal maneuvering has only exacerbated the deep- seated tensions between the two states and nations. Criminality and prosecution have entered the public debate, where they escalate in exchanges of accusation and denial. Tensions heightened in 2004 when “Russian authorities announced that they were discontinuing their own investigation into the Katyn murders because none of the decision- makers from that time are still alive.”44 This same statement also claimed that the crimes at Katyn were neither genocide, nor crimes against humanity, nor war crimes, but simple murders, for which the fifty- year statute of limitations had run out.45 This was a long way from the spirit of reconciliation of 1993, and even from the concessions that led to construction of the Katyn Memorial. The outrage felt by Poles offered a window of opportunity for Polish authorities. On December 1, 2004, the Institute of National Remembrance opened its own investigation, using powers given to it by the Polish Sejm.46 The acts to be investigated by the Departmental Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation were described as “the mass execution, by shooting, of not less than 21,768 Polish citizens, carried out for the purpose of liquidating part of the Polish ethnic population.”47 Among the terms used by the commission to describe the massacre at Katyn were “war crime and a crime against humanity.” But the primary accusation of the commission was that Katyn was an act of genocide: The selection of persons for extermination was also characterized by the fact that they formed part of the intellectual elite of the Polish

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



nation that, under the appropriate conditions, could assume leadership. The physical elimination of these people was meant to prevent the rebirth of Polish statehood based on their intellectual potential. Therefore the decision of elimination was taken with the intention of destroying the strength of the Polish nation and liquidating its elites. Therefore one can conclude that the murder of Polish prisoners of war and Polish civilians by the NKVD was dictated by a desire to liquidate part of the Polish national group. Hence, this action assumed the status of genocide as described in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention.48

The accusation treads on the equivocal territory of the Genocide Convention’s definition of the crime as the intent to destroy a particular group “in whole or in part.” That the crimes of Katyn were directed against Polish citizens is undoubted; that this was part of a plan to destroy the Polish nation is not substantiated. Although Russian cooperation in the extradition of the perpetrators was already unlikely, this accusation eliminated any chance that the Russian Federation would violate its own constitution to extradite any living perpetrators of the crimes. The legal complications that arise from the accusations of genocide speak less to the sustainability of the charge than to the role of memory in securing sovereignty for a nation- state in an era of globalization and internationalism. Why does the Polish government, speaking for the whole of the Polish nation, wish to classify the crimes of Katyn as genocide? Herbert Hirsch notes: “Nation- states in particular use, create, or respond to myths about themselves that they wish to perpetuate, and, in turn, the myths are used to justify or rationalize policies that the leadership of the state wishes to pursue. National self- image is enhanced by memory—in particular, memory about how the state responded to a crisis situation.”49 One of the anchors of sovereignty is law, while nation- statehood is founded in memories, sometimes historically factual, sometimes legendary. Thus by seeking to control the memory of Katyn as an element of nation- statehood, and to define Katyn by law as an act of genocide, the Polish government has created an irresolvable dilemma. The primary purpose of the charge seems to be less justice than to frame the events of Katyn as a crime against the entire Polish nation, and the proper naming of the act to represent the final and full recovery of the national memory. Thus Katyn must be genocide, an act against the nation, rather than a crime against humanity as a collective of human beings. The insertion of legal solutions into the matters of national identity that are more properly addressed by rites of commemoration has led to a series of increasingly absurd acts, namings, and accusations associated with



james von geldern

lieux de mémoire. The Polish Sejm stepped into the fray following closure of the Russian investigation and opening of the IPN case. In March 2005, it passed a resolution demanding that the Russian government recognize the killings at Katyn as genocide.50 The resolution had no legal force, nor could it have, but it became another irritant in a relationship already damaged by Polish accession to the European Union, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Chechen conflict. The pomp and pride displayed by the Russians during the sixtieth anniversary of the victory over the Nazis, in which the annexation of the Baltic states and partition of Poland went unmentioned, were further irritants. An unofficial boycott of a touring Russian ballet troupe, which canceled its tour after facing a series of empty theaters, was a popular response to the Russian war commemoration. The tussle was ended by a duel of rites of place, when Poland announced in 2005 that “it planned to name a square in Warsaw after the slain Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. Moscow responded by threatening to rename the street in which the Polish Embassy has its seat in Moscow after Mikhail Muravyov, a Russian army general nicknamed the ‘hangman’ for his ruthless suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863.”51 Thus each sovereign state used its rights of sovereignty and rites of commemoration to antagonize the other, and made the mutual and common remembrance of Katyn and its tragic massacre impossible. The Poles are left to remember their dead and their national tragedy at home, and to build new memorials to Katyn, as they have done at Katowice, and yet again in Warsaw, atop Święty Krzyż (Holy Cross), the high mound that houses the national television tower.

Conclusion: A Refugee Rite To understand rites to be an appendage of power, à la Foucault, an act by which a state or power subjects a place and the memories attached to it to its disciplines, enforcing meanings that are unambiguous and become instruments of discipline, is to remove the individual from the process of collective memory. States of the socialist era, by erasing the memory; the present Russian government, by denying essential features of the memory; and the present Polish government, by placing the memory under the control of a state institution: all would seemingly agree on the binding relationship between historical memory, power, and sovereignty. The charge of genocide assigns victimhood and guilt to collectives. In the debate over Katyn, these collectives have been nations. Genocide elevates the crime, but the power of the word can also erase the individual tragedies of the murdered victims and their families. So too the word genocide empowers states to mobilize law to define and exact punishment for

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



the acts, which thereby enter the realm of state control. The individual is excluded as a site of autonomous memory and can only participate in the rites of place as they are defined by the sovereign. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben opposes the sovereign, who lives completely within law, in the sense that his acts are empowered and regulated by legal regimes, and outside law, in that he can suspend law through a state of emergency, to Homo sacer, the person whose crimes have excluded him from law and its protections, and yet whose exile is defined by the laws that exclude him from society.52 Agamben argues that the modern state, with its vast powers of exclusion and exception, has constricted the space between the political being (the citizen) and “bare life,” the being born into the world to be absorbed by the political order, which cannot however be fully subsumed by the state. Thus ironically, Homo sacer, excluded by the sovereign and unprotected by law, lives closer to bare life than the citizen or sovereign. Elsewhere, following Hannah Arendt, Agamben argues that the modern figure of the refugee, excluded from one society, living in another place but having no country, has an existence analogous to Homo sacer. Agamben argues that in an era where the nation- state is threatened by global forces, refugees and their status of exclusion should not be seen as exceptions, but as the model of the human being: Given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation- state and the general corrosion of traditional political- juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today—at least until the process of dissolution of the nation- state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion. . . . Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of state- nation- territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history.53

Perhaps similarly we should consider Katyn to be a fugitive or refugee site, situated in a place that denies the event a national identity. Katyn and the crimes committed there will continue to live outside the law; the acts will escape criminal definition, jurisdiction, prosecution, or any act of justice. The heirs of the victims, be they the families of the slain officers or the entire Polish nation, will continue to celebrate their rites of Katyn as they wish in the memorial sites of their own country, or in uneasy community with Russians mourning all victims of the Stalinist state. Those who choose to celebrate the rites provided by their states in the sites provided by their states will be enmeshed in the conflict of sovereigns. The voices of those



james von geldern

who enter these places as refugees, commemorating the massacres as a human rather than a national tragedy, will for the time being be muted. That Katyn the place will remain a site of contestation seems beyond doubt. The meanings of the acts of Katyn seem destined for a similar fate. Poland will not gain sovereignty over the land on which Katyn and its victims rest; its government cannot force the Russian government to name Katyn a place of genocide or to prosecute its perpetrators. Individuals can, if they choose to mourn as members of a nation, recognize the place as a site of lost sovereignty and contemplate the continuing absence of sovereignty over this memory. Perhaps this is an apt if unwelcome commemoration for a people whose history has been marked by long periods of lost sovereignty and who have lived for many years as refugees and exiles. Or perhaps they can recognize their own humanity beyond their inclusion in a nation- state, their “bare lives” so like those snuffed out in 1940, the lives of Poles but also of individual human beings. And then the mourners can recognize that genocide and crimes against humanity are not antithetical, but that genocide is just a species of crimes against humanity, the most terrible. Then they can commemorate their rites of place in Katyn both as Poles and as human beings, allowing them to share their rites with others. ——— The above words were, needless to say, written before the tragic events of April 10, 2010. An airplane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife, and eighty- seven other high- ranking officials crashed in Smolensk, en route to a memorial service at Katyn to mark the seventieth anniversary of the massacre. Kaczyński was to deliver an address to honor the victims, note the role that the massacre had played in postwar Polish- Soviet relations, and then emphasize the need for reconciliation between Russia and Poland. This would follow upon another ceremony that had taken place on April 7, when prime ministers Donald Tusk and Vladimir Putin stood together to commemorate and condemn the massacre. The plane crash would seem to have revived the cycle of the Katyn tragedy just when it seemed that the two societies had found the strength to both remember and reconcile. The incident offered all the elements for a conspiracy theory. The Polish officials had been flying on a Russian- made plane, landing in a Russian airport. Immediate reactions reflected the sense that Katyn would forever stand as an open wound, a site that would never receive its proper commemoration. Former President Aleksander Kwasniewski called Katyn a “damned place. It sends shivers down my spine.” Surely he spoke for many when he added, “This is a wound which will be

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



very difficult to heal.”54 Lech Wałęsa called the crash “the second disaster after Katyn,” and noted, echoing a phrase from Andrzej Wajda’s film, “They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished.”55 At this juncture, a surprising thing happened. The two nations stepped back and resolved that Katyn and its history would not dictate their actions. Poland mourned the loss of its leadership with dignity, not anger, and with a trace of pride in its ability to function as a democratic nation after such a shattering event. Putin and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offered deep and sincere sympathy to all Poles, a sympathy that resonated with the Polish public because it was substantiated by actions. The Russian leadership launched a full and thorough investigation of the crash, which exonerated Russian personnel involved in the incident, yet managed to satisfy a skeptical international public that remembered all too well the investigation that had concealed Soviet guilt for years. The Wajda film on Katyn, which had been shown on Russian television prior to Donald Tusk’s visit, was shown again, making it difficult for Russian deniers of the massacre to continue to do so. Finally, on May 8, the Russians handed over the evidence collected during the thorough investigation of the 1990s, comprising over sixteen thousand pages of materials. This would be the step that would place indelible proof of the tragedy and its perpetrators in Polish hands. While this was not the same thing as a permanent memorial under Polish control, it did anchor the memory of the tragedy in a permanent repository of facts.56

Notes 1. A series of photographs of the memorial complexes at Katyn and Mednoe can be found at “The Polish ‘Katyn Massacre’ Memorial Site at Mednoye/Ymok, North of Tver, Russia,” http://www.geocities.com/athens/troy/1791/mednoye.html, and “Katyn Forest Massacre,” http://www.geocities.com/athens/troy/1791/ iwona.html. 2. The crimes of Katyn have been well documented, although many of the investigative materials come with a heavy bias. A striking collection of photographs of the disinterred corpses can be found in the German publication Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn (Berlin: Zentral Verlag der NSDAP, 1943). The U.S. Congress published its investigative materials at the height of the Red Scare: The Katyn Forest Massacre: Final Report of the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre Pursuant to H. Res. 390 and H. Res. 539, Eighty- Second Congress, a Resolution to Authorize the Investigation of the Mass Murder of Polish Officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952). A great deal of secondary literature on the subject has been produced; only recently have some, but not all, of the necessary primary materials been published. Notable here are Katyn: Plenniki neobiavlennoi voiny,



james von geldern

ed. R. G. Pikhoi and A. Geishtora (Moscow: Demokratiia, 1997), and more recently Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, ed. Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 3. “Poland Remembers Katyn Dead,” BBC News, September  17, 1999, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/450271.stm. 4. The official Russian memorial site can be viewed at Katyn: “Memorial’nyi kompleks ‘Katyn’: offitsial’nyi sait,” http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/katyn/start.htm. 5. Cienciala et al., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, 352. 6. “Poland Remembers Katyn Dead,” BBC News, September  17, 1999, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/450271.stm; also “Last Week in Poland,” Central European Review 1, no 14 (September 27, 1999), http://www.ce- review.org/99/14/ polandnews14.html. 7. Ciencala et al., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, 351. 8. Cienciala et al., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, 352–53. 9. Joanna Rohozinska, “God’s Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre,” Central European Review 3, no. 11 (March 19, 2001), http://www.ce- review .org/01/11/books11_rohozinska.html. 10. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 11. George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory (London: Routledge, 2005), viii. 12. Pierre Nora, Rethinking France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xii–xiii. 13. See also here Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate: Mourning and Genocide,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1–2 (Spring 1997); Adam Katz, “The Closure of Auschwitz but Not Its End: Alterity, Testimony and (Post)Modernity,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998). 14. Timothy Snyder notes that the campaign against Eastern European Jews was so effective that virtually none survived the war to bear witness. This is much different from the Western European Jews who were shipped primarily to Auschwitz, some of whom survived and left vivid testimony. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books 56, no. 12 ( July 16, 2009). 15. “Round- Up of Reactions to 1941 Pogrom Memorial Ceremonies,” Polish Press Agency, July 10, 2001. 16. Adam Michnik, “Poles and the Jews: How Deep the Guilt?,” New York Times, March 17, 2001. 17. Links to websites with photographs of these and other Katyn memorials can be found at “Katyn Forest Massacre,” http://www.katyn.org.au/memorials.html. 18. Frank Fox, “Monumental Massacre Memorialized,” Washington Times, May 6, 2001. The National Katyn Memorial Foundation was first organized in 1989; and the memorial was dedicated on November 19, 2000. See “National Katyn Memorial Foundation,” April 27, 2008, http://www.katynbaltimore.com/memorial.html. 19. See “Virtual Katyn Memorial Wall,” January 1, 2009, http://www.electronic museum.ca/Poland- WW2/katyn_memorial_wall/kmw.html; “The Kresy- Siberia Memorial Wall,” http://www.kresy- siberia.org/memorial. 20. For photographs, see Janusz Krasicki, Powazki Military Cemetery, in Warsaw, http://www.geocities.com/athens/troy/1791/krasicki.html.

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



21. Jane Perlez, “Yeltsin ‘Understands’ Polish Bid for a Role in NATO,” New York Times, August 26, 1993. 22. “Russian President Lays Wreath at Katyn Monument,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Polish TV1, August 27, 1993. See also “Russian President Pays Tribute to Victims of Soviet Wartime Crime,” Polish Press Agency, August 25, 1993. 23. Edward Pilkington, “Yeltsin Learns Diplomacy of Contrition from His Hosts,” Guardian (London), October 13, 1993; “Yeltsin Says His Visit to Poland a Success on the Whole,” ITAR- TASS, August 25, 1993. 24. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 19–20. 25. “Russian President Places Wreathes in Poland,” ITAR- TASS, August  25, 1993. 26. “Polish Justice Ministry Announces Independent Katyn Investigation,” PAP News Wire, September 2, 1993; “Poland Opens Investigation into Katyn Massacre by Russians,” Associated Press, September 2, 1993. For the surprised reaction of Russian officials, and some Polish officials, see “Yeltsin’s Adviser Criticizes Poland’s Decision to Reconsider the Katyn Case,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Polish Radio 1, September 8, 1993. 27. The Russian military prosecutor ultimately sought charges of genocide against former NKVD officers for the Katyn massacres but was rejected by the military court. See Katynskii sindrom v sovetsko- pol’skikh i Rossiisko- pol’skikh otnosheniiakh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), 487–94. 28. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 29. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 38–39. 30. John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. 31. Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages, ed. R. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 32. Karen E. Till, “Memory Studies,” History Workshop Journal 62, no. 1 (2006): 327–30. 33. See, for instance, Nigel Thrift, “Entanglements of Power: Shadows?,” in Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), 269–78; Karen Till, “Post- Totalitarian Identity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia,” Social and Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 357–80. 34. Gil Eyal, “Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory,” History and Memory 16, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 7, notes that “two different types of ‘will to memory’ now operative in Eastern Europe, each of which specifies the goal of collective memory quite differently. In fact, they correspond to two different understandings of the functioning of memory in the individual psyche, that is, of what memory is supposed to do for individuals: in one version, memory is the guarantor of identity and maintains it through time—it is the mechanism of retention responsible for the experience of being a selfsame individual moving through time; in the other version, however, memory plays a role in overcoming psychic trauma and the processes of dissociation it sets in motion.”



james von geldern

35. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2, December 9, 1948, 102 Stat. 3045, 78 U.N.T.S. 277, 280 (entered into force January 12, 1951) (hereinafter Genocide Convention). 36. Ibid. 37. Ela Kasprzycka, “Poles Commemorate the 65th Anniversary of the Massacre at Katyn Forest,” Associated Press, March 5, 2005. 38. Ibid. 39. Katyn: aka Post mortem, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 2007. 40. Robert M. Hayden, “ ‘Genocidal Denial’ Laws as Secular Heresy: A Critical Analysis with Reference to Bosnia,” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 387, notes that “the word genocide . . . connotes exceptional evil, more than other war crimes and mass killings. To those who firmly believe that genocide has occurred, questioning that belief is an immoral, perhaps even a ‘vicious’ act.” He notes elsewhere (419) in reference to another such reinterpretation of the meaning of genocide, that “paraphrasing is normal in history and anthropology but is simply not acceptable in law, where every word is important.” 41. United States, Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 755–56. 42. Quoted in H. Lauterpacht and C. J. Greenwood, International Law Reports: Annual Digest of Public International Law Cases, 1946–1947 (London: Butterworth and Co., 1951), 213. 43. The definitions relevant to Katyn would be those of the Nuremberg Tribunal in Article 6 of its charter. This can be easily accessed at the Avalon Project: avalon .law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp. 44. Wojciech Kosc, “Poland- Russia: Colder than Cold,” Transitions Online, October 5, 2004, http://www.ciaonet.org/pbei- 2/tol- 1/tol_2004/sep28- oct4. 45. Wojciech Kosc, “Poland: An Old Wound Reopened,” Transitions Online, November 30–December 6, 2004. 46. “Investigation Opened into 1940 Massacre,” Boston Globe, December 2, 2004. For details, see Media o IPN: Przegląd mediów—2 grudnia 2004 r., http://www.ipn .gov.pl/portal.php?serwis=pl&dzial=18&id=2766&search=379. 47. File no. S 38/04/Zk, Decision to Commence Investigation into Katyn Massacre, November 30, 2004, http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/en/2/77/Decision_to_commence _investigation_into_Katyn_Massacre.html. 48. Ibid. 49. Herbert Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 26. 50. Adam Easton, “Poland Lobbies Russia over Katyn,” BBC News, Warsaw, March 23, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4374591.stm. 51. Claire Bigg, “Russia: Rights Group Urges Moscow to Reopen Polish Massacre Investigation,” RFERL, April 7, 2005, http://www.rferl.org/Content/Article/ 1058316.htm. 52. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 53. “Beyond Human Rights,” in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 16, 22.

memory as the anchor of sovereignty



54. Nicholas Kulish, Ellen Barry, and Michal Piotrowski, “Polish President Dies in Jet Crash in Russia,” New York Times, April 10, 2010. 55. Ibid. 56. The repercussions of the Katyn plane crash, and of the original massacre that magnified its historical significance, will continue for many years. For the further consequences of the event for Polish politics, see the well- informed, and less optimistic, account in Joanna Niżyńska, “The Politics of Mourning and the Crisis of Poland’s Symbolic Language After April 10,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010).

Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space Between Stalin and Hitler Serguei Alex. Oushakine You know, it was always like that: the French, the Germans, the Swedes, they all went through the Belarusians, back and forth, pushing us, pressing us, kicking us. One day Russia includes us in its empire, another day—Rzeczpospolita, and so on; plus all those permanent wars that went for years. . . . So all that shaped us in such a way . . . you know, so that we have to think, always to think. —aleksandr lukashenko, 2005

To describe the timing of a past event, Belarusians would usually say that it happened “under [ pri] the Poles,” or “under the Germans,” or “under the Soviets.” The mother tongue contains no categories marking the people’s independent existence in their own land. —valiantsin akudovich, 2008

History is rarely predictable in the world of postsocialism. Historical institutions are even less so. Things that were taken for granted for decades might lose their credibility overnight. And regain it few years later. Historical figures quickly become national stars and—just as quickly—fall into complete oblivion. For the last two decades, postsocialism has been driven by a desire to build a market economy and political democracy, just as much as it has been an attempt to work through a complex and contradictory history of the socialist experience. Couched in a language of occupation, new national histories and commemorative rituals are frequently motivated by 



serguei alex. oushakine

the desire to draw a clear line between the “Soviet” and the “national” to reclaim sources of authenticity outside the discursive realm of state socialism.1 Often, these histories and rituals of commemoration are grafted onto the material legacy of the recent past. Important locations are 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.”2 What strategies of signification, symbolic recycling, or both can be used in regard to such structures? When demolition is not feasible, when stylistic gutting or retrofitting of the inherited historical forms is not possible, how, then, can the hardscape of state socialism be incorporated into nonsocialist or even antisocialist discursive frames? In this essay, I take a close look at public debates associated with two historical sites in Belarus.3 One is the Khatyn’ Memorial built near Minsk in the 1960s to commemorate the victims of the war that is usually described in Russian as “the Great Patriotic War” and is meant to single out the period of the Second World War (1941–45) when the USSR and Hitler’s Germany were directly fighting with each other. Just like the Russian Katyn, the place of mass executions of Polish prisoners by the Soviet secret service in 1940, the Belarusian Khatyn’ is also a killing site. A crucial part of the Soviet narrative about the atrocities of the war with fascism, Khatyn’ became an object of heated discussions in Belarus during and after the collapse of the USSR. The other place is the Kuropaty grave site, on the outskirts of the Belarusian capital. Discovered in 1988, Kuropaty contains the bodies of people executed in 1937–41. In the end of the 1980s through the early 1990s, the emerging anti- Stalinist and, eventually, anti- Soviet movements turned the grave site into their crucial emblem. Since perestroika, intense historical and political discussions about the significance of these two locations have had a considerable impact on the process of national identification in Belarus. Remarkably, though, this intensive “memory work” did not produce a narrative that could unite the nation- in- the- making. No new national history emerged; no positive values were articulated. Instead, two martyrological projects compete with each other, trying to present one of “the regimes of occupation” (Stalin’s or Hitler’s) as the nation’s ultimate enemy. I suggest that this martyrological perception of the recent past is crucial for understanding the ways through which memory and history are deployed now in former socialist states. Remembrance and commemoration are aimed not so much at rescuing people and events from oblivion. Rather, these mnemonic practices are structured by a desire to contain and distance the traumatic past. The two debates that I will discuss reveal a key problem with writing new (postcolonial) histories after Communism: the drive to equate the

postcolonial estrangements



“Soviet” with the “colonial,” as Maria Todorova astutely pointed out, “often serves as a cover for the perpetual lament of self- victimization.”4 In this essay, I will approach such laments seriously—as a particular symptom of a new form of postcoloniality that is taking shape in former Soviet space. As a form of historical critique, post- Soviet postcoloniality is less preoccupied with uncovering sources of subaltern agency within the structures of domination that became so characteristic of postcolonial studies of South Asia.5 The paradigm of resistance is not the main driving force for postSoviet postcoloniality. Instead, studies of the colonialist past are predominantly done to demonstrate the brutality of the colonizers. If anything, the portrayal of the colonized is used negatively—to highlight their nonpresence in the history of the Soviet experiment. A potential history of Soviet subalternity is replaced here by a chronicle of subalternation, documenting successions of occupation regimes. Current accounts of past suffering, then, will be read as parables of domination narrated from below, as stories about the “fatality of exteriority.”6 I will also attempt to demonstrate that these perpetual laments of self- victimization index the double nature of current historicist engagement with the Soviet period: retrospective discoveries of coloniality in the socialist past are intertwined here with discursive practices of postcolonial estrangement from this past.

Incinerating Memory Our present is somebody else’s past. Our future is somebody else’s present. — igar babkov, 2005

In spring 2010, during a field trip to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, I spotted a small pin in one of the local museum shops. The bronze rectangle showed a church bell squeezed by two vertical columns, with a sign underneath: Khatyn’. True evidence of the ubiquity of Soviet agitprop, the bells of Belarusian Khatyn’ found their presence in the middle of Central Asia, more than two thousand miles away from their original location (figure 26). The pin was a small part of a major campaign of late socialism, aimed at creating a wide network of spatio- symbolic memorials that would acknowledge the losses of the Great Patriotic War. The last edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1969–78, had the following to say about Khatyn’: Khatyn’—an architectural and sculptural memorial complex created on the spot of the former village of Khatyn’ (the Minsk region, the



serguei alex. oushakine

Figure 26. The Bells of Khatyn’, a metal pin commemorating the victims of the Khatyn’ massacre. Photograph by Serguei Oushakine, Bishkek, 2010.

Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic). It was unveiled on July 5, 1969 to commemorate the inhabitants of the Belarusian villages and settlements that were completely erased by the Fascist invaders. Simple sculptural forms make up a laconic architectural composition . . . imbued with great drama and heroic pathos.7

Pravda’s official correspondent was more descriptive in his report from the unveiling ceremony: A sculptural group erected on the spot where a village and its inhabitants were incinerated: a man, shaken by the horror and pain, carries a teenager on his arms. This is not a scene imagined by an artist. The sculptor S. Selikhanov depicted a real episode of the Khatyn’ tragedy, when, wounded and bleeding, Iosif Kaminskii rescued from the fire his dying son, who had been shot by a bullet [figure 27]. Miraculously, Iosif survived and now he stands next to me, facing the spot where his house used to be. In front of us, there is a symbolic chimney, the remains of the burned down house. The top of the chimney has a bell; periodically it rings disturbingly. Iosif looks up at the bell and drops, as if unwillingly: “They ring and ring; but nobody will come back.” Yes, they will never come back; those who were killed twice by the Fascists—first with guns, then, again, with the fire. But the bells of Khatyn’ ring not to resurrect the dead. Instead, they appeal to the survivors and their successors: “Be vigilant. Preserve the peace!”8

postcolonial estrangements



Figure 27. The Unvanquished Man, the Khatyn’ Memorial complex, architects Yu. Gradov, V. Zankovich, and L. Levin; sculptor S. Selikhanov. Courtesy of Elena Baraban.

The Khatyn’ Memorial was an emblematic example of a quick and remarkably successful memorialization campaign that the Soviet government started in the mid- 1960s. On April 26, 1965, Pravda published a landmark decision that signified a radical change of the attitude toward the Great Patriotic War. Without any additional explanation, a concise ukaz of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR simply announced that “from now on” (vpred’ ) May 9 shall be “a nonworking day” reserved to celebrate the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War.9 Restoring the



serguei alex. oushakine

situation that existed from 1945 to 1948, this decision significantly influenced the remaining twenty- five years of the USSR’s history. The official holiday became a temporal anchor around which a broad network of memorial complexes was created around the country. Within a very short time, this combination of a specifically designated day and specifically created spatial settings produced a variety of new Soviet rituals and forms of affective exchange associated with the Great Patriotic War. Khatyn’ was an integral part of this process. Already in December 1965, following the dominant trend, the Belarusian Ministry of Culture drafted an extended program for “the perpetuation [uvekovechivanie] of the memory of fallen warriors, partisans, and victims of Fascism” in Belorussia. Within three weeks, the program was approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia.10 On March 3, 1966, the ruling board of the Union of Belarusian Architects announced an invited competition for a series of memorial projects (potential participants were given three weeks to create and submit their drafts of monuments).11 To emphasize the restorative and historical aspect of the memorial in Khatyn’, official documents initially described the future complex as “a museum- preserve” (muzei- zapovednik).12 The winning project fully responded to this vision. Designed by a group of young architects from Minsk, the initial proposal grew out of the landscape of the “former village.”13 Surrounded by a forest, the original Khatyn’ was populated by 153 residents. The village’s three short streets were made up by twenty- six houses, four wells, and several barns and woodsheds used for storing hay and keeping animals. In one of these barns, 149 residents of Khatyn’ were shot and then burned (some alive) on March 22, 1943.14 A few days later, residents from a neighboring village buried the bodies on the edge of the forest. Preserving the historical plan of the village, the authors of the memorial decided to restore the traces of the main structures, fortifying them with concrete. Yurii Gradov, a member of the architect team, recollected: “We changed nothing whatsoever in the outline of the [burned down] village. All the houses stayed where they were.”15 Leonid Levin, the leader of the team, in his recent book also insisted that the landscape of the village (trees included) was “left untouched” (netronutyi ).16 Nonetheless, the architects decided to add to each footprint of the burned houses two identical symbolic elements: a concrete gate and a concrete chimney with a bell on the top (figure 29). Each chimney carried a plaque with the names of inhabitants who lived in the house. Perhaps, the most striking “documentary” element of the memorial was a six- meter- tall expressionistic sculpture of The Unvanquished Man (Nepokorennyi chelovek). The features of The Unvanquished Man resembled those of Iosif Kaminskii,

postcolonial estrangements



Figure 28. A road sign pointing to the Khatyn’ Memorial, Khatyn’. Photograph by Yuri Baidakov. Courtesy of the author (http://darriuss. livejournal.com).

the only adult witness of the Khatyn’ tragedy.17 Soon after the opening of the memorial, Kaminskii would even resettle in one of the houses not far away from the museum’s campus. Until his death in 1973, he would often accompany official tour guides, offering visitors his account of the events that happened at the site.18 As Leonid Levin explained retrospectively, the complex initially was supposed to convey just that: a historically conscious attempt to commemorate a village that vanished during the war. Yet, the documentary status of the museum- preserve did not last for too long. In late December 1968, Belorussia celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and a large group of party leaders from Soviet republics was taken to the “unofficial” opening of the memorial. Impressed by the memorial, Piotr Masherov, the head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, decided to radically change its scale and persuaded the team of architects to start working on a “second phase” of the memorial, which would “convey the tragedy of the entire Belarusian people through the tragedy of Khatyn’.”19 As a result, the “memorialdocument” quickly evolved into a vast spatio- symbolic ensemble that now occupies seventy- five acres and includes several large- scale structures.20



serguei alex. oushakine

Figure 29. An outline of a burned house re-created by artists, the Khatyn’ Memorial complex. Photograph by Yuri Baidakov. Courtesy of the author (http:// darriuss. livejournal.com).

In response to this new task, the architects supplemented the documentary features of the complex with several metaphorical elements, creating a powerful emotional effect. Next to the grave of the residents of Khatyn’, a new complex arose: an unprecedented “cemetery of villages,” containing 185 “graves” of settlements that, like Khatyn’, were incinerated along with their citizens and were never rebuilt. Each “grave” contains a capsule with “ashes” brought from the former settlement (figure 30). Next to these uniformly repeated headstones for the “killed villages,” the architects placed several metal trees that listed 433 “villages that were resurrected” after being completely destroyed during the war. Nearby, a 225- footlong Wall of Sorrow exhibited sixty- six names of major concentration camps and killing sites (out of 260 total) that existed in Belorussia during the war. In the middle of a forest, removed from distracting urban noises, the memorial does succeed in forcing its visitors to pause and contemplate the fate of the village, and, by extension, the fate of the Belarusian people. Providing a contextual link, specially designed signs remind the visitors that

postcolonial estrangements



Figure 30. The Cemetery of Incinerated Villages, the Khatyn’ Memorial complex. Photograph by Elena Baraban. Courtesy of the author.

Khatyn’ was only the most emblematic example of a more comprehensive policy of “scorched earth” (vyzhzhenoi zemli ). As the composition of the memorial’s eternal flame vividly indicates, “every fourth” Belarusian was killed during the three years of occupation (2.2 million people altogether).21 In the early 1970s, along with a handful of complexes such as Mamaev Hill in Volgograd and the Brest Fortress in Brest, the Khatyn’ ensemble became a major Soviet memorial to the losses of the war. Fifty kilometers from Minsk, the Khatyn’ Memorial was also turned into a key destination (figure 28). Richard Nixon went there; Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat visited the place, too.22 From 1969 to 1993, more than thirty- three million people saw the place. In 1988, the memorial probably had the highest attendance in its history—two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, 1.7 million people visited Khatyn’.23 Inflated as these official numbers might be, they do reflect the prominent role of the Khatyn’ Memorial within the cultural industry of war memorialization in the USSR. Rewarded in 1970 with the Lenin Prize, the highest state award, the place was a source of inspiration for multiple songs, poems, novels, films, a symphonic oratorio, a vocal cantata, and so on.



serguei alex. oushakine

The site’s (and memorial’s) reputation as a major document of the war’s atrocities reached its apex when Ales’ Adamovich, a former partisan and a famous Belarusian writer, published two books motivated by the Khatyn’ tragedy. His Khatyn’ (1971) presented a semi- fictionalized account of the war through the eyes of a teenager who gradually loses his sight after the trauma of Khatyn’.24 Adamovich’s second, coauthored, volume, I Am from a Fire Village . . . (1977), solidified the evidentiary status of Khatyn’ even more. The book presented a collection of interviews with people whose settlements, like Khatyn’, were burned down during the war. Quite unusually for the time, the book was accompanied by two small audio discs with excerpts from accounts of eyewitnesses recorded by Adamovich and his colleagues. Containing shocking pictures of atrocities, suffering, and survival, both books presented the war as a nightmare whose overall scope is doomed to remain incomprehensible but whose horrific impact, nonetheless, could be felt through details that stuck forever in people’s memories. One of the respondents, Ivan Savitskii, for instance, recalled how his village of Zbyshin was burned down by the German troops. Unlike his sister and his father, he and his mother managed to escape the worst; they returned to the smoking village the next day: My mother started looking for her daughter, my sister. I managed to hold myself together when I was burying my father, but when we got to the place where the women were burned to death, I was about to lose it; I was on a verge of collapse. . . . I said, “Let’s stop searching.” And we went to the place where the men were burned to death. What I remembered for the rest of my life was my cousin’s son. There was a barn, so he hid in the barn’s empty oven, and was burned there. And his legs were sticking out, charred. . . . Twenty- five relatives of mine were killed on that day. And two hundred ninety-six people altogether, in Zbyshin.25

Another witness, a woman, also recalled an episode from what Adamovich termed later the “incinerating [ispepeliaiushchaia] memory” of the war: “My neighbor saw Germans encircling the village and heard somebody crying, ‘They will kill us, too!’ Suddenly she asked her eight- year- old son: ‘Sonny, why did you put these rubber shoes on? Your feet would smolder forever. In rubber shoes.’ ”26 By focusing almost exclusively on the ethnography of everyday atrocities, Adamovich in the end placed the Khatyn’ tragedy within a global geography of war violence: “Buchenwalds, Khatyns, and Hiroshimas.”27 Or

postcolonial estrangements



slightly differently: Songmi [My Lai] in Vietnam, Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Oradour- sur- Glane in France, and Khatyn’, “hundreds and hundreds of Khatyns.”28 This striving to multiply and, by multiplying, to replace the specificity of a particular historical experience with its topological qualities is important. As Adamovich seemed to suggest, the specific genealogy of a particular act of violence—significant as it is—could neither justify nor explain what happened. The project, in other words, was less driven by a desire to collect historical evidence. Instead, narratives were perceived as fragments of a large epic about the brutality of war. Equated by death, all these sites were seen as documenting the repetition of the same basic story about one group of human beings purposefully exterminating another. It was this version and vision of the Khatyn’ tragedy that became canonical in the 1970s, entering popular memory and mass culture, propagandistic clichés and academic discourses. Streamlined and simplified, the basic 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.”29 History, as it turned out, was much more complex. On November 10, 1990, in the midst of glasnost revelations, Rabochaia Tribuna, a major Moscow newspaper, published the article “The Unknown Khatyn’ ” on its front page. The subtitle promised a sensation: “Only today can we say it: the Belarusian village was burned down by Bandera’s supporters [banderovtsy] and the fascists.”30 Using testimonies of a closed military trial that took place in 1986 in Minsk, the author of the article convincingly demonstrated that the famous tragedy was organized and implemented by the Special 118th Punitive (karatelnyi ) Battalion, one of the police formations that were created by the Nazis in the occupied territories. Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118 consisted mostly of Ukrainians; but it also included Russians and Belarusians. Some had served in the Red Army and joined the Nazis after being taken prisoner in the very beginning of the war; others enlisted voluntarily for political or opportunistic reasons. Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118 had a double leadership: 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 who were used initially in Ukraine and were transferred to Belorussia in early 1943.31 Along with the Khatyn’ massacre, the 118th Battalion took part in a series of antipartisan “pacification” operations in Belorussia, until it retreated with the Nazi troops in 1944.32 At the time of its publication, this radical revision of the canonical story



serguei alex. oushakine

got somewhat lost in the midst of more pressing reports about the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, news about the recently unified Germany, and information about the collapsing Soviet economy. Yet, the topic, sanctioned by the Moscow newspaper, was quickly picked up in Minsk. In less than two weeks, Vo slavu Rodiny, a Belarusian newspaper published by the Ministry of Defense, printed an interview with Viktor Glazkov, a retired lieutenant colonel, who had presided over the 1986 military trial. The publication was titled affirmatively “Khatyn’ Was Burned by Polizeis.”33 Refuting the link between the 118th Punitive Squad and Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Glazkov put it plainly: “The truth is: Khatyn’ was destroyed not by Germans but by the 118th punitive battalion. . . . Yes, these traitors were fascists. The atrocities that they committed had no limits. 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 accept.”34 It is precisely the acceptance of the fact that the village was incinerated by “our own compatriots” (nashi s vami sootechestvenniki), as one newspaper put it, that proved to be very difficult.35 A clear- cut story about German invaders and the Belarusian popular resistance was gradually turning into a messy narrative about a civil war, in which relatives were split between partizany and polizeis, and neighbors switched sides almost on an hourly basis.36 Increasingly, what happened in (mostly Catholic) Khatyn’ was looking more and more like the pogrom in the village of Jedwabne (Poland), where Polish residents murdered three hundred Jewish neighbors on July 10, 1941, soon after the Nazis established their control over the territory.37 The interview with Glazkov and a subsequent stream of publications revealed another puzzling fact. While ordinary Soviet citizens might have had no clue about the actual perpetrators of the Khatyn’ massacre, this was hardly a secret for the professionals from the KGB, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Justice. Documents from the archive of the Belarusian KGB, for instance, demonstrate that as early as April 1961 (at least four years before the decision to memorialize Khatyn’ was made), the republican KGB had investigated cases of collaboration between the locals and the Nazis, interrogating several members of the 118th Battalion who participated in the destruction of Khatyn’. F. F. Graborovsky, a former member of the punitive squad, disclosed during his interrogation in August 1961: We arrived at Khatyn’. We rounded up all the residents who did not manage to escape, and pushed them down to a barn of sorts. Whose barn it was, I have no idea. I do not remember how many people I

postcolonial estrangements



personally brought to this barn but I know that I rounded up a few families several times. When all the villagers were collected by the barn, we pushed them into the barn, and then shot them down on the order of the Germans. I had a rifle, so I also shot at the barn. After the killing of the citizens in the barn, the barn with corpses and the rest of the village were set on fire. I do not remember who started the fire. . . . I do not remember anyone escaping the barn.38

In 1973–75 more members of the battalion were put on trial in Belorussia, and, finally, in 1986, the KGB arrested Grigorii Vasiura, the chief of staff of the 118th Battalion, and brought him to Minsk. Until then, Vasiura had lived as a successful member of the Soviet nomenklatura in a small Ukrainian town, even serving as an honorary cadet in a Kiev military school.39 Given this—well- documented—history, it is hard to explain (and to understand) now why Khatyn’ was selected as the emblematic site for the perpetuation of the losses of the war. Anna Van’kevich, a historian from the Belarusian Museum of the Great Patriotic War, who was charged with preparing background materials for the memorial complex, put it simply: “In 1966, when the decision to commemorate Khatyn’ as a symbol of the villages destroyed in Belorussia was made, we knew very little about the place.”40 Viktor Glazkov, who presided over the Vasiura trial in 1986, explained that publications about the involvement of Grigorii Vasiura in particular and the 118th Punitive Squad in general were blocked at the time by Vladimir Shcherbitskii and Nikolai Sliun’kov, the party leaders of Ukraine and Belorussia, respectively, out of the fear that this news could provoke interethnic conflicts between the two republics.41 Other historians and journalists insist that the very plan of the Khatyn’ Memorial from the very beginning was supposed to be a large- scale deception. Pointing to the phonetic resemblance between Khatyn’ and Katyn, the supporters of this version have maintained that the tragedy of the Belarusian village was used to deflect attention from the massacre of Polish soldiers and officers conducted in 1940 by the NKVD in the Katyn forest not far away from the city of Smolensk (Russia).42 Plausible as it might be, this version, however, lacks any evidentiary basis and relies almost completely on the phonetic parallelism and negative evidence.43 Perhaps, the true history of the Khatyn’ Memorial will never be known. Yet the important thing about the Khatyn’ affair is not so much its status as a compromised historical document. Along with ongoing debates about the Stalinist legacy, discussions about Khatyn’ and its memorialization helped shape the colonial problematics and (post)colonial identity in contemporary Belarus. More specifically, the debates pointed to a core dilemma of



serguei alex. oushakine

postcoloniality, with its radical split (if not a complete separation) between subjectivity and agency, between an ability to reflect and the possibility to act.44 The Khatyn’ debates forced (some) Belarusian intellectuals to conduct a rhetorical realignment of the national history along new narrative and ethical lines. In the next section, I will show how this realignment resulted in the material production—or retrieval—of alternative sites of historical memory. I want to finish this part by demonstrating how this realignment has been manifested through a particular rhetoric of postcolonial estrangement, through what Helmut Lethen calls in his study of Weimar Germany “the regulating practice of distance.”45 The Khatyn’ controversy hardly changed the outline of the traditional (official) narrative about war violence and its victims. Recent guides to the Khatyn’ Memorial—restored and updated in 2004—continue to use the blanket term “fascists” to describe the perpetrators of the Khatyn’ massacre. The Khatyn’ revelations, however, made increasingly problematic the existing tradition of locating the accounts of suffering and atrocities during the Second World War within a larger framework of the popular partisan resistance to the fascists. Belarusian pop culture and serious academic publications alike demonstrate the same fundamental paradigm shift: the trope of “resistance” is gradually being replaced by the trope of “occupation.”46 Discursively, such a rhetorical move helps to externalize possible sources of violence and domination; it legitimizes the perceived lack of agency or moral choice, too. Valiantsin Akudovich, a leading Belarusian philosopher, historicizes the new ontological foundation 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 atmospheric pressure.”47 This language of subalternity is not accidental. From the end of the 1990s, Belarusian intellectuals have been developing their own versions of postcoloniality, trying to redefine their relationship with historical narratives that routinely framed their past as a part of somebody else’s history, be it Poland, the Russian Empire, or the USSR.48 Postcolonial studies in Belarus are far from homogeneous, and different scholars pick different key points in their constructions of alternative histories. Yet, it would not be a stretch to say that for postcolonial studies of occupation the meaning and the role of the Great Patriotic War have become paramount.49 Within this “mode of validation of conscious existence,” the war—seen from a distance—is conceived of as a traumatic historical experience that imposed an unhappy choice “between Stalin and Hitler,” as a recent film about Khatyn’ framed it.50 This rhetorical framing makes possible the next important move: the problematic histories of resistance and collaboration are dismissed as

postcolonial estrangements



equally meaningless. It is the nature of occupation, not the experience of subjection, that becomes the site of principal intellectual investments. As a result, the partisan movement in Soviet Belarus is recoded as an enforced heroism, as an imposed form of agency that contradicted each and every rational calculation of the local population. Valiantsin Akudovich explains: “Spearheaded by Moscow, the partisan movement provoked the Germans to act with 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 view of a natural drive 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 vitally necessary.”51 If earlier attempts to question reckless and dangerous aspects of the partisan movement ( partizanshchina) were usually framed as attempts to approach the history of the Great Patriotic War also as a history of a civil war within one nation, 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.52 Postcolonial estrangement is realized as a retroactive expulsion. For instance, in her recent study of “the concept of the partisan,” Daria Sitnikova neatly juxtaposes “the Soviet” and “the Belarusian,” concluding that “the Belarusian national myth of partisan(ship) is, in fact, a Soviet/ imperial myth of partisanship, in which the Belarusians (as a nation) were to perform a subservient function as ideological fighters against the empire’s enemies.”53 Just like the fascist, the partisan becomes a sign of invasion, in this case—from the east. To some extent, these structuralist interpretations of occupation reproduce the already familiar logic of Adamovich’s writings about Khatyn’. Back in the 1970s, perceiving violence only in terms of its effect, Adamovich also avoided the uneasy task of having to differentiate between various wars. The trope of “hundreds of Khatyns” was instrumental in putting aside questions of the motivation of violence or its selective application. In today’s Belarus, postcolonial historicists in a similar structuralist move bracket off specific circumstances that brought to life specific forms of the deployment of power. In this approach, the subaltern state is a reversed version of domination, with subjectivity understood as something eternally given, not contextually produced. 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. Unlike subaltern studies of South Asia, which aim to perceive imperial structures of domination also as a source of colonial agency that displaces and destabilizes these very structures from



serguei alex. oushakine

within, postcolonial historicists limit their criticism mostly to the gesture of withdrawal from the experience that should not have happened in the first place.54 In his study of structurally similar tendencies of social and symbolic disassociations in Weimar Germany, Peter Sloterdijk offers a conceptualization that I find extremely useful for understanding the logic of postcolonial estrangements in contemporary Belarus. Dealing with artistic and social examples of “combatant consciousness,” Sloterdijk defines this socio- symbolic positionality of self- evacuation as “strategic immoralism.”55 For Sloterdijk, this “cynical structure” is a form of social behavior and a genre of discursive production—a “procedural possibility” and a “poetic opportunity”—that enables performances of social alienation, unmasked by imaginary fantasies, and promises of a brighter future.56 The strategic immoralism of this kind of subalternity is a form of aesthetic and ethical disengagement from situations that could not be controlled and from frameworks that could not be changed. Not able to secure a safe location, strategic immoralism, nonetheless, manifests a discursive fissure between the structures of domination and those who have to embody them. As I have tried to show, post- Soviet postcoloniality is motivated by a similar feeling of being beholden to a historical locality. Like Sloterdijk’s cynical structure, this form of postcoloniality also stems from an implicit recognition of the absence of other spatial alternatives, while being driven by a desire to experience and express a certain noncorrespondence between “the state of occupation” and a state that preceded the moment of radical alienation from one’s own history. There is one crucial difference between Sloterdijk’s “functionalist cynicism” and postsocialist subalternation, though.57 For Sloterdijk’s strategic immoralists, their “nonaffirmative form of affirmation,” their cool embrace of the structures they cannot avoid, was all there was.58 Distancing was practiced as a lack of complete identification with the structures of domination, not as a form of complete self- erasure. For Belarus’s postcolonial historicists, their performances of discursive alienation from the structures, which they could not flee, are still wrapped in clothes of romantic nationalism.59 Nostalgic and retrospective, the postcolonial critique is understood here mainly as an opportunity for the “information retrieval” of identities and practices of the past, which have been silenced.60 Distancing from the Soviet past is envisioned as a temporal escapism. To put it simply: the postcolonial is equated here with the preimperial and precolonial, with a time that had no place either for polizeis, or for partisans. The Khatyn’ affair was helpful for reformatting the nation’s war legacy in postcolonial terms, but it was neither the first nor the most significant at-

postcolonial estrangements



tempt to revisit the Soviet past. The key toponym of the postcolonial version of socialism—“between Stalin and Hitler”—which emerged so prominently during the Khatyn’ debates, was initially formulated in the late 1980s when mass graves were discovered on the outskirts of Minsk. With its clearly emphasized politics of distancing and rhetoric of detachment, the analytical space claimed “between Stalin and Hitler” interestingly epitomized a widespread attempt to conceptualize the experience and consequences of being a part of the two most brutal regimes of the twentieth century. A symptom of the upcoming collapse of the USSR, this toponym was a form of refusal to be associated with either of these regimes. By the end of the 1990s, this search for an autonomous domain, for a subject position, which would not be reducible to the structures of occupation (whatever this occupation might be), evolved into diverse intellectual debates. The initial space “between Stalin and Hitler” was reframed and abstracted as the “borderland space” ( pamezhzha), as ontological and epistemological “in- between- ness,” called upon to represent the core feature of the Belarusian nation.61 I want to emphasize this characteristic feature of post- Soviet postcoloniality: attempts to revise history along the axes of colonial narratives so far have not produced a clearly articulated vision of post- Soviet subalternity. To push it even more: instead of subalternity, with its Foucauldian emphasis on the simultaneity of the repressive and productive effects of power, we see the work of a mechanism of subalternation that focuses on the final outcome of subordination, while leaving aside the internal principles and dynamics of this process.62 The Schmittian perception of politics as an ability to make a clear distinction between friend and enemy undergoes a radical change here: “strategic immoralism” knows no friend.63 Within this approach, postcolonial condition, then, is a form of retrospective oscillation between external sources of power and domination, a perpetual alternation between different enemies.

No Place for Historical Truth The Kuropaty tragedy is as big as the Khatyn’ tragedy is. It should and it will be thought through by generations of people. . . . Like the crucifixion of Christ. — zianon pazniak, 1994

In comparison to the Khatyn’ case, the debates associated with the killing site in Kuropaty were less driven by a desire to revise already existing master narratives. Postcolonial narratives had to be created from scratch. However, just as in the case of Khatyn’, the participants of the Kuropaty debates



serguei alex. oushakine

grounded their stories, their arguments, and their commemorative practices in the spatial structures inherited from the past. New national narratives, in other words, are still inseparable from the landscape of history. Space, not time, continues to dominate stories about the nation’s past and future. In October 2009, Pavel Iakubovich, the editor in chief of the main governmental newspaper Sovetskaia Belarus, appealed to the participants of a roundtable gathered in the newspaper’s editorial office: “Let’s think about Kuropaty; but let’s do it outside the traditional and well familiar framework of ‘the battle of worldviews’ [mirovozzrencheskaia bitva]. It is about time for all of us to realize—regardless of our personal opinions—that Kuropaty is not a place to look for historical truth [istoricheskaia istina]! Kuropaty is a tragic lesson for our society.”64 The transcript of the roundtable, published on October 29, the day on which the Belarusian political opposition and human rights activists commemorate the victims of Stalinist repressions each year, was an unusual move on the part of the state- run newspaper. For more than two decades “Kuropaty” had been a divisive issue in Belarus, splitting apart those who were firmly rooted in the Soviet past and those who wanted to leave this past behind. In a sense, Iakubovich’s version of el pacto de olvido—the pact of forgetting in the name of general reconciliation—with its clear appeal to abandon all attempts to establish a final and definite version of what happened, reflected historical fatigue following twenty years of intense historical debates.65 Perhaps more important, this epistemological surrender—regardless of its actual political motivation—pointed to a gradual acceptance of the fact that the political and ethical ambiguity of the nation’s recent history could not be overcome. Multiple interpellations and contradictory forms of subjectivity produced by the past could not be streamlined. The promise of analytical autonomy that the space “in- between” offered in the late 1980s had turned out to be illusory. Historical uncertainty and political undecidability were increasingly seen as a position from which new forms of national belonging could be imagined and articulated. Unlike the Khatyn’ ensemble, the Kuropaty Memorial emerged spontaneously—as a popular attempt to remember victims of the Stalinist terror. Yet despite this difference, the mnemonic practices associated with these two sites demonstrate a striking affinity of their development: in both cases, the initial desire to commemorate victims was transformed into a persistent striving to memorialize victimhood. The term Kuropaty entered public debates in Belorussia on June 3, 1988, when a local newspaper Litaratura i mastastva published an exposé written by Zianon Pazniak, an archaeologist and historian of theater from the History Division of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, and Yauhen Shmyhalou, an engineer with a strong passion for history.66 In their essay “Kuropaty—

postcolonial estrangements



The Road of Death,” the two men described how they discovered several mass graves in a forest near the Minsk Ring Road in the spring of 1988. Zianon Pazniak insisted that he had known “subconsciously” about these graves since the 1970s, but could publicize the information only during the glasnost period.67 The graves contained skeletons and gunshot skulls as well as various objects: ceramic mugs, clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, combs, and so on. Some of the objects provided clues about the timing of the murders: a leather purse contained Soviet coins, with the latest dated 1936; rubber galoshes bore imprints of Soviet factories and a date “1937.”68 Interviews with residents of neighboring villages confirmed the idea that the grave site emerged before the Nazis occupied Minsk in June 1941. Combining all their evidence, Pazniak and Shmyhalou concluded that Kuropaty (as they called the place) was a site of mass executions conducted by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) between 1937 and 1941, and suggested that the site might hide “thousands of bodies.”69 The article caused a major social explosion. In ten days, on June 14, 1988, the Office of the Republican Prosecutor opened a criminal case, citing mass murders as the main reason; the Belarusian Parliament followed up by creating a special commission. Iazep Brolishs, appointed by the general prosecutor in charge of the special group of investigators, recalled later that the criminal case had no precedents in the Soviet history: while the crime scene was clearly present, it was totally unclear “who or what the investigative team should be searching for.”70 Nonetheless, during several months of searches and excavations, the investigators established that a seventy- acre wooded area had 510 ditches, possibly containing the bodies of people executed before the Nazi occupation. Selective exhumations revealed the remains of 356 bodies. Objects found in these graves indicated that the executed were predominantly from Belorussia, but some were, most likely, from the Baltic region. Based on these data, the group suggested that the site might contain “no less” than thirty thousand bodies.71 None of the bodies could be identified, and all efforts to find any documentation concerning mass executions in the archives of the republican KGB failed.72 In November 1988, the Office of the General Prosecutor closed the case, stating that the mass executions at Kuropaty took place “no earlier than 1933 and no later than June 1941.” The final report provided a list of names of NKVD officials of various ranks who were involved in mass executions. However, as the report explained, “it was impossible to interrogate people involved in these executions. [Because] all the heads of the NKVD and other officials responsible for these repressions, either have already been executed [by the NKVD in the 1930s and 1940s] or are dead.”73



serguei alex. oushakine

Very quickly Kuropaty became a place of spontaneous pilgrimage: on June 19, 1988, two weeks after the initial publication of the essay, up to ten thousand people gathered at this previously unknown place for a “meetingrequiem.” Their slogans read “We’ll not forget! We’ll not forgive!” and “Keep alive the memory of genocide victims!”74 “Dziady- 88,” another major march to Kuropaty on October 30, 1988, became, arguably, the first mass Soviet demonstration that was dispelled by the police, using tear gas.75 Eventually, these spontaneous acts of commemoration gave rise to organizations that determine the political landscape of independent Belarus. The initial association, Martyrology of Belarus, created after the publication of the essay on Kuropaty, became a launching pad for a political organization called the Belarusian Popular Front (the BNF), a party that was the core of the Belarus opposition for almost two decades. As Pazniak put it later, “Kuropaty marked the beginning of a new political revival for Belarus. . . . Kuropaty marked the beginning of the collapse of communism” in the republic.76 In 1989, the government decided to memorialize the victims of Stalinist repressions at Kuropaty by establishing a monument there.77 In 1993, the state registered Kuropaty as a site of “historical and cultural value,” granting it the official status of a landmark- memorial (“The killing field of victims of political repressions”).78 Somewhat predictably, this national revival, which the BNF anchored around two major traumas—the Chernobyl disaster and the Kuropaty grave site—produced its own resistance. Yet the main objection was not the overall attempt to frame the national revival through the tropes of victimhood. It was the source of oppression, it was the cause of suffering that became a subject of major disputes. The BNF’s resolute view that the mass murders at Kuropaty were conducted by the Soviet authorities incited “the battle of worldviews,” a “battle” that has been going on and off in Belarus ever since. War veterans and former partisans were, perhaps, the most vocal opposition to the anti- Stalinist reading of the grave site. With the Khatyn’ revelations in the background, more evidence of the fact that one group of compatriots executed another group of compatriots was hard to digest. Dismissing the decision of the governmental investigators as biased, they created their own independent public commission. Their search had some unexpected results. In August 1991, several newspapers published the testimony of Mikhail Pozniakov, a former partisan, who insisted that Kuropaty was a killing camp created by the Nazis in August 1941 to exterminate Jews brought to Minsk from Poland, Austria, and Germany. Vechernii Minsk, the city’s major newspaper, for instance, ran a front- page article, in which Pozniakov explained in detail that, as a prisoner of war, he was forced to dig up common graves and bury the bodies after the executions in Kuropaty.79

postcolonial estrangements



Under the pressure of the independent public commission, the general prosecutor reopened the case and conducted two rounds of additional investigations in 1992–93. No new evidence resurfaced, and in 1995 the case was closed again. In its final statement, the general prosecutor dismissed the version of the public commission by explaining that archival searches conducted in Israel and Germany provided no support for the idea that Kuropaty was used as a site for the mass extermination of Jews.80 What I find important about these opposite readings of the same site is the similarity of their motivation. Regardless of their concrete political views, both sides were interpreting the murders at Kuropaty within the same framework of external occupation: the enemy, the perpetrator always comes from the outside. Evil is always done by the other. The metonymic logic of this postcolonial lament produced another interpretative parallel: both sides agreed that Kuropaty was only the tip of a much larger political campaign. The language of genocide, quickly adopted by each side, located the Kuropaty victims within a broad master narrative about purposeful ethnic annihilation. “Genocide,” in other words, provided a rationalizing structure for understanding and normalizing murders that might have had no rational basis in the first place.81 “Genocide” also delineates a specific subject position of this form of postcoloniality—the position of the victim, devoid of agency to resist/evade the regime of occupation but fully capable of reflecting on its effects. Despite their structural similarities, the two sides differed dramatically in their views on the subject of culpability and the status of the victim. Former partisans, war veterans, and their (usually Russo- phonic) supporters internationalized the tragedy. The dead at Kuropaty were persistently described as “innocent citizens” of the USSR and foreign countries who became “victims of the Hitler’s [gitlerovskii] genocide.”82 By and large, the tragedy in Kuropaty was inscribed within the framework of the familiar story about the Central European Holocaust. The other side, increasing the estimated number of people buried at Kuropaty to 200,000–250,000, was more discriminating about the ethnic makeup of the victims. In this version, the location was a symbol of “the Russo- German Communist- Fascist cooperative work aimed at exterminating the Belarusians.”83 As Pazniak characterized it in 1991, “This genocide was even bigger than the genocide conducted against the Serbs and the Jews. The only difference was—they suffered at the hands of the fascists, while the Belarusians suffered at the hands of the communists.”84 Despite the fact that none of the victims at Kuropaty were identified, the supporters of this view presented the grave site as the national necropolis, where the best and the brightest of the Belarusians were killed en masse.85



serguei alex. oushakine

For a decade or so, neither side could win the battle of worldviews, in which Stalin’s Terror was juxtaposed to Hitler’s Holocaust. To some degree, the denial of prewar political terror by one group was neutralized by the nationalist attempt of the other to rhetorically exploit unidentified bodies. Meanwhile, the place itself remained almost in its original condition. Commemorative projects were undertaken exclusively by volunteers who raised “crosses of suffering” along the “road of death.”86 After 1994, during the presidency of Aleksandr Lukashenko, the polarizing reformatting of the past slowed down somewhat. Pazniak’s emigration in 1996 left the opposition with no charismatic leader able to mobilize the masses around a powerful national cause. By the late 1990s, the situation had reached a state of equilibrium of sorts: each side relied on its own evidence and testimonies, and emphasized blank spots and logical gaps in the other side’s narratives. Therefore, the general prosecutor’s 1998 decision to reopen the case took many by surprise. The fourth round took about two years. The final report in this criminal case—the last one to date—was never disclosed. However, in 2001, the general prosecutor’s office publicized a press release that drew a line. Confirming earlier conclusions about the NKVD’s involvement in mass executions, the release, at the same time, included several points that until then had not been a part of the standard official narrative about Kuropaty. First, the release pointed out that there were accounts indicating that some murders “were also committed by the German occupational authorities during the Patriotic war. However, these accounts could not be corroborated.” The document also confirmed earlier statements by the prosecutor’s office regarding exaggerated estimates of the number of victims buried at Kuropaty. Citing new evidence—out of twenty- three graves opened during this round of investigation, only nine had human remains—the release stated that “the number of victims initially associated with the graves, was overestimated by several orders.” It did not provide new estimates, however.87 The prosecutor’s office left unexplained another major point of contention. Multiple household objects and pieces of clothing found in the graves indicated that they were produced abroad—in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Not taking responsibility for any final interpretation, the release suggested that these objects could have belonged to the citizens of western Belorussia as well as to those foreigners who were “brought over by the Germans from Europe.” Finally, the prosecutor’s office did not offer any ideas as to how to interpret the seemingly incongruous objects found in some graves such as knives, razors, gun parts, and pieces of equipment that could be used for producing ammunition. Without naming

postcolonial estrangements



names, the release remarked euphemistically that “lapses of this sort were totally uncharacteristic for the NKVD’s style of work.”88 The release did produce one major piece of new evidence, though. During one of the excavations, the investigators discovered prison receipts acknowledging the confiscation of money during the arrests. Written in Russian, the receipts were dated by October 1939 and June 1940. However, as the office of the general prosecutor clarified, the names listed in the receipts—Moshe Kramer and Mordehai Shuleskis—left no criminal paper trail in the available state archives and therefore provided no clue for further investigations.89 In a sense, the general prosecutor confirmed the status quo, leaving each side in a state of suspension. In its own idiosyncratic way, the prosecutor articulated the point that Pavel Iakubovich would formulate in 2009: “Kuropaty is not a place to search for historical truth.” Commenting on the new decision on the case, one Belarusian weekly translated it in terms of postcolonial pragmatics: “In the end, it is not that important who is buried at Kuropaty. They were victims of repression. Let history decide whether these repressions were Stalin’s or Hitler’s. The most important thing is— this is a necropolis.”90 Started as an attempt to construct a critique of Stalinism by appealing to the memory of the dead, the debates about commemoration of the victims at Kuropaty gradually transformed into an act of symbolic distancing from both Soviet socialism and the Nazi occupation. However, this search for a safe subject position, uncontaminated by the legacies of the oppressors, has ended (for now) with a social and discursive deadlock. Initially perceived as a space of relative autonomy, the space “in- between” resembles more and more a space of double exposure, a space for the social and symbolic conflation of contradictory historical legacies.91 To some degree, this move—from a fantasy of autonomy to the recognition of double subjection—does reproduce the intellectual trajectory of the subaltern studies of South Asia in the 1980s. Back then, the initial attempts to retrieve the silenced voices and unnoticed histories of the subalterns resulted in a discouraging recognition of the basic fact that the history of the subalterns is the history of their repeated failures. Summarizing the first decade of subaltern studies, Gyan Prakash, for instance, wrote in 1994, “The desire to recover the subaltern’s autonomy was repeatedly frustrated because subalternity, by definition, signifies the impossibility of autonomy.”92 This recognition, then, produced two distinctive moves. The emphasis on the impossibility of subaltern authenticity forced scholars to assume “a position of critique,” aimed at identifying “a recalcitrant difference that arises



serguei alex. oushakine

not outside but inside elite discourses to exert pressure on forces and forms that subordinate it.”93 In turn, a desire to retain a more nuanced vision of identity pushed other scholars to construe authenticity not in ontological but in performative terms—for instance, as cultural practices of “validation, perpetuation, and aesthetic evaluation” that are not coeval with that of occupational regimes.94 While none of these positions were clearly articulated during the twenty years of the Kuropaty debates, the very impossibility of coming to terms with this location is prominent evidence of the futility of efforts aimed at carving out in colonial history a space untouched by the imperial presence. ——— In this essay I have tried to follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience was reflected in various gestures of withdrawal and distancing. I have suggested that these discursive and mnemonic moves—from commemorating victims to memorializing victimhood—could be seen as signs of the emergence and development of postcolonial reasoning in post- Soviet Belarus. The postcolonial estrangement that these historicist projects have produced is a consequence of a utopian search for sources of authenticity outside the power structures imposed by “occupation regimes.” So far, this retrospective quest for a safe place “in- between” has resulted in a series of dead ends. Instead of bringing the nation together, it has polarized the society. Instead of providing an attractive alternative to the moral duplicity of state socialism, it has offered a historical justification for ethical relativism. These deadlocks and false turns of postcolonial studies of socialism can be seen as reflecting the early stage of this intellectual movement. Alternatively, they may signify the emergence of a different—conservative and nostalgic—form of postcoloniality. In either case, these debates helpfully outline the uneasy process of the retroactive creation of colonial subjectivity, demonstrating how the act of reclaiming an important historical place can become indistinguishable from being beholden to this place. More significantly, though, these debates also allow us to perceive postsocialism not only as an operation that dismantles key configurations produced by seven decades of the Soviet way of life, but also as a form of intense investment in these structures, conventions, and forms—an investment that makes the very critique of these historical forms and their originary narratives possible.



postcolonial estrangements

Notes I would like to thank the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) for funding my fieldwork in Minsk. I am also grateful to Elena Gapova, Irina Solomatina, Alexei Bratochkin, Tatiana Bembel, and other friends and colleagues from Minsk for their help, advice, and generosity during my stay in Belarus. My special thanks to Olga Gnilomiodova for her assistance with the library search. Earlier versions of this text were presented at Princeton University, Columbia University, Humboldt University of Berlin, Irkutsk State University, Miami University, New York University, and Johns Hopkins University; I am indebted to the participants of these discussions for their comments, questions, and suggestions. Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson were extremely helpful in turning this article into a publishable text, and I am grateful for their editorial advice and comments. 1. For more on new national historiographies, see Natsional’nye istorii na postsovetskom prostranstve—II. Desiat’ let spustia, ed. Falk Bomsdorf and Gennadyi Bordiugov (Moscow: Fond Fridrikha Naumanna, 2010). 2. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 3. Throughout the essay, I will follow the emerging tradition of using “Belorussia” to describe the Soviet part of the country’s history, while retaining “Belarus” for referring to its independent status. 4. Maria Todorova, “Balkanism and Postcolonialism, or On the Beauty of the Airplane View,” in Marx’s Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine (New York: Lexington Books, 2010), 181. 5. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6. On the fatality of exteriority, see Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar, “In Praise of Creoleness,” Callaloo 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 890. 7. See the entry “Khatyn’” in Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia- online, http:// www.big- soviet.ru/759/86409/%D5%E0%F2%FB%ED%FC. 8. N. Novikov, “Kholm bessmertiia,” Pravda, July 6, 1969. 9. Ukaz Presidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, “Ob obiavlenii 9 maia nerabochim dnem,” Pravda, April 26, 1965. 10. Uvekovechivanie pamiati zashchitnikov Otechestva i zhertv voin v Belarusi. 1941– 2008 gg., ed. Vladimir Adamushko et al. (Minsk: NARB, 2008), 148–50, 150–52. 11. Khatyn’. Tragediia i pamiat’. Dokumenty i materialy, ed. Vladimir Adamushko, Igor Valakhanovich, and Natalia Kirillova (Minsk: Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Belarus’, 2009), 138–39. 12. See Uvekovechivanie pamiati, 133. 13. Mariia Eismont, “Memorial ‘Khatyn’ sozdavali tridtsatiletnie rebiata,” Narodnaia volia, July 16, 1999. 14. See a detailed account of the event and the survivors: Elena Kobets- Filimonova, Raspiataia Khatyn’ (Minsk: Bellitfond, 2005), 114–16. 15. Vladimir Padaliak, “Nizki paklon . . . ,” Golas Radzini, July 2, 2009. 16. Leonid Levin, Khatyn’. Avtobiograficheskaia povest’ (Minsk: Asobny Dakh, 2005), 58.



serguei alex. oushakine

17. See Viktor Leshchenko, “Tainy Khatyni,” Narodnaia gazeta, February  20, 2003; Alla Van’kevich, “Pravda o Khatyni,” Narodnaia gazeta, February 20, 1993. 18. Levin, Khatyn’, 46; Mariia Zalivskaia, “Vstrechu s Kaminskim ne zabyvaiu,” Narodnaia gazeta, June 16, 1993; P. Kosmynin, “Ia iz sozhzhennoi derevni,” Vo slavu Rodiny, April 2, 1992; Ludmila Selitskaiia, “Ia iz vognennai veski,” Sovetskaia Belorussiia, April 20, 2004. 19. Levin, Khatyn’, 92. 20. For an outline and a virtual tour, see the museum’s website: http://www.khatyn.by. 21. Khatyn’ (Minsk: Belarus, 1973). A recently published guide to the Khatyn’ Memorial provides the updated data: during the occupation, 209 cities and towns were destroyed; 9,200 villages were burned down; 2.6 million people were killed (that is, every third person). Natallia Kirilava, ed., Khatyn’. Khatyn. Chatyn (Minsk: Belarus, 2007), 14. 22. M. Shimanskii, “Kolokola Khatyni,” Izvestiia, September 21, 1981; Viachaslav Dubinka, “Daroga na Khatyn’: Natatki fotakarespandenta z khatynskikh yrazhanniav,” Nasha svaboda, August 6, 2002. 23. N. Kuts, “Kolokola Khatyni,” Vo slavy Rodiny, March 27, 1993. 24. The book was used as the basis for the film Come and See (Mosfilm and Belarusfilm, 1985), directed by Elem Klimov. For an interview with the film director, see Elem Klimov, “Bezdna,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 5 (2004), 86–88. 25. Ales’ Adamovich, Ianka Bryl’, and Vladimir Kolesnik, Ia iz ognennoi derevni . . . (Minsk: Mastaska literature, 1977), 186. 26. See Adamovich, “Cherty literatury poslednikh let,” Voprosy literatury, no. 5 (1976): 100; Adamovich et al., Ia iz ognennoi derevni, 80. 27. Ales’ Adamovich, Khatyn’skaia povest’. O voine i mire (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1973), 186. 28. Ibid., 186, 200. 29. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 207. 30. V. Roshchin, “Neizvestnaia Khatyn’,” Rabochaia Tribuna, November 10, 1990, 1, 4. Banderovtsy refers to the supporters of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists headed by Stepan Bandera. For details, see David Marples, “Stepan Bandera: The Resurrection of a Ukrainian National Hero,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 4 (2006): 555–66. 31. Sergei Krapivin, “‘Izbytochnaia’ pravda o Khatyni,” Trud v Belarusi, March 20, 2003. 32. For an excellent review of the history of the 118th Battalion, see Per Anders Rudling’s essays: “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, no. 8 (2011): 195–214; and “The Khatyn Massacre in Belorussia: A Historical Controversy Revisited,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 29–58. 33. “Polizei” ( politstai ) is normally used to refer to Soviet citizens who collaborated with the Nazi regime, usually in the form of implementing close police control in occupied territory. 34. Vasilii Zdaniuk, “‘Khatyn’ sozhgli politsai’: Interv’iu s Viktorom Glazkovym,” Vo slavu Rodiny, November 20, 1990. 35. Vasilii Zdaniuk, “‘Khatyn’ sozhgli politsai’,” Svobodnye novosti- plius, no. 12, March 22–29, 1996.

postcolonial estrangements



36. For a detailed account of the Khatyn’ tragedy see Kobets- Filimonova, Raspiataia Khatyn’. 37. See Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 38. “Iz protokola doprosa obviniaemogo F. F. Graborovskogo. August 14, 1961,” in Khatyn’. Tragediia i pamiat’, 65. The description is almost identical to the testimony about the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne quoted in Jan Gross’s Neighbors (1–7). 39. Mikhail Tokarev, “Khatynskaia tragediia. Obviniaet glavnyii svidetel’,” Vo slavu Rodiny, March 20, 1998; Zdaniuk, “‘Khatyn’ sozhgli politsai’,” 3; “Zdes’ ubivali luidei,” Sovetskaia Belarus, March 22, 2008; “Kto szheg Khatyn?” The program was aired by ONT (Obshenatsional’noe televidenie), Minsk, June 20, 2008. 40. Van’kevich, “Pravda o Khatyni,” 7. 41. Zdaniuk, “‘Khatyn’ sozhgli politsai.’” 42. Sergei Shapran, “Pervoe otkrovenie,” Belorusskaia delovaia gazeta, July 2, 2004. See also Gasan Gusseinov, D.S.P. Sovetskie ideologemy v rossiiskom diskurse 1990- kh (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2003), 73–75; Pravda Khatyni (BelSat, 2008, 35 min.); Alexandra Goujon, “Memorial Narratives of WWII: Partisans and Genocide in Belarus,” East European Politics and Society 24, no. 1 (February 2010): 17–18. 43. In my correspondence with two active supporters of the link between Khatyn’ and Katyn, Igor Kuznetsov, the consultant of the film Pravda Khatyni, and Gasan Gusseinov, a Moscow philologist, confirmed that they had neither documentary evidence corroborating this version nor any oral confirmation of the purposeful link between Khatyn’ and Katyn. 44. Ritu Birla, “Postcolonial Studies: Now That’s History,” Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 88. 45. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 96. 46. For a paradigmatic example, see the feature film Okkupatsia. Misteria, directed by Andrei Kudinenko (Navigator, 2003, 90 min.). 47. Valiantsin Akudovich, Kod otsutstviia. Osnovy belaruskai mental’nasti (Vilnius: Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Litovskoi respubliki, 2008), 69. For a similar use of the trope of “occupation” in contemporary Latvia, see Kevin M. F. Platt, “Okkupatsia vs. kolonizatsia: istoriia, postkolonial’nost’ i geograficheskaia identichnost’. Sluchai Latvii,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 3 (2010), http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/3/k5- pr.html. 48. Igar Babkov, “Etika pamezhzha. Transkulturnast ak bearuski dos’ved,” Fragmenty, nos. 1–2 (1999): 75–88; Vladimir Abushenko, “Kreol’stvo kak ino- modernost vostochnoi Evropy,” Perekrestki, nos. 1–2 (2004): 124–56. 49. Elena Gapova, “On Nation, Gender, and Class Formation in Belarus . . . and Elsewhere in the Post- Soviet World,” Nationalities Papers 30, no. 4 (2002): 646–47. 50. On modes of validation, see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcoloniality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 17. The film referenced is Pravda Khatyni (Belsat, 2008). 51. Akudovich, Kod otsutsviia, 71, 72. 52. Iadviga Uiferova, “Nas tak dolgo uchili liubit’ cheloveka s ruzh’em,” Izvestiia, February 29, 1996. 53. Dar’ia Sitnikova, “Partizan: Prikliucheniia odnogo konstepta v strane bol’shevikov,” Belorusskii format: nevidimaia real’nost’, ed. Almira Ousmanova (Vilnius: Evropeiskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2008), 433.



serguei alex. oushakine

54. Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1483. 55. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 389. 56. Ibid., 441. 57. Ibid., 434. 58. Ibid., 441. 59. Akudovich epitomized well this approach in the following description: “By taking part in the expansion of communism all over the world, Belarusians compensated themselves for the lack of that supreme [vysokoi] Belarus (Great Lithuania) that they were deprived of by fate.” (Kod otsutstviia, 96.) For useful reviews of national debates in Belarus after 1991, see Gapova, “On Nation, Gender, and Class,” 639–62; Grigory Ioffe, Understanding Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 60. Multiple scenarios of counterfactual history that try to “activate” alternative legacies and genealogies (mostly linked with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) are a perfect example of such informational excavations. For a discussion, see Nelly Bekus, Struggle over Identity: The Official and the Alternative “Belarussianness” (Budapest: CEU Press, 2010). For more on informational retrieval, see Rosalind C. Morris, introduction to Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections, 2. 61. The journals Perekrestki and Fragmenty are the two main examples of this approach. See Andrei Dyn’ko, “Mezh bratskoi Rossiei i mirnoi Evropoi,” Perekrestki, nos. 1–2 (2006): 182–219; see also Aleksei Dzermant’s “Metaphizika ‘tuteishesti’,” and Oleg Breskii’s “Lokal’nost’,” Perekrestki, no. 1 (2008): 105–29, 130–49; Igar Babkov, “Etika pamezhzha. Transkulturnast ak bearuski dos’ved,” and Adryian Melenik, “Belaruskaia ideia iak germafradytyzm natsyi: Z pavagai da teoryi, akaia lychila satsialism khvarobai,” in Fragmenty, nos. 1–2 (1999): 75–88 and 235–45, respectively. 62. Following William of Ockham, Steven J. Livesey explains subalternation as a particular form of knowledge production in the following way: “Subalternation in the strict sense of occurs when a principle is known in one science and the conclusion in another.” William of Ockham, “The Subalternate Sciences, and Aristotle’s Theory of Metabasis,” British Journal for the History of Science 18, no. 2 ( July 1985): 141. 63. On the distinction of friend and enemy, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36–37. 64. “Kuropaty: Mir pod sosnami,” Sovietskaia Belarus, October 29, 2009. 65. The pact of forgetting was a tacit collective agreement to avoid major public debates about the fascist past in the name of a peaceful transition toward democracy in post- Franco Spain. See Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in the Twentieth- Century Spain (London: Routledge, 1990). 66. Zianon Pazniak and Yauhen Shmyhalou, “Kurapaty—doroga smerti,” Litaratura i mastastva, no. 23 ( June 3, 1988). For an English translation, see Kurapaty, ed. Pazniak, Shmyhalou, M. Kryval’tsevich, and A. Iov (Minsk: Tekhnalogia, 1994), 78–92. 67. Zianon Pazniak, “Kuropaty. Dzdesiats gadov pas’lia,” Nasha Niva, no.12 (1998). 68. Pazniak and Shmyhalou, “Kuropaty—The Road of Death,” 90. See also Pazniak Zianon, “Astiarozhna, ‘Stalinism!,’” Litaratura i mastastva, no. 33 (August 19, 1991). 69. Pazniak and Shmyhalou, “Kuropaty—The Road of Death.” For a detailed discussion, see David R. Marples, “Kuropaty: The Investigation of a Stalinist Historical Controversy,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 513–23.

postcolonial estrangements



70. As quoted in Igor Kuznetsov, “Zabyt’ znachit predat’,” Belorusskaia delovaia gazeta, April 16, 2004. 71. Kuznetsov, “Zabyt’ znachit predat’,” 12. See also Georgii Tarnavskii, Valerii Sobolev, and Evgenii Gorelik, Kuropaty: sledstvie prodolzhaetsia (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia litereatura, 1990), 196–97. 72. Tarnavski et al., Kuropaty: sledstvie prodolzhaetsia, 44, 160. 73. Ibid., 262. 74. Anatol’ Viarstinski, “Kurapaty: tsiazhkaia daroga da praudy,” Litaratura i mastastva, July 5, 1998. 75. For recent testimonies and photo- documents, see Vspomni Dziady 88, a web page created by Radio Freedom, http://www.svaboda.org/content/Article/1331330 .html. 76. Sergei Pul’sha, “Kuropaty—aposhniaia pesnia,” Belarus maladezhznaia, November 16–25, 2001. 77. Anatol’ Viarstinski, “Akim byt’ pomniku v Kurapatakh,” Litaratura i mastastva, December 3, 1989. 78. “Zaiava gramadzkoi initsyatyvy ‘Za vratavan’ne memaryialy Kurapaty’,” Nasha Niva, October 1, 2001; Dar’ia Mal’kovskaia, “Kurpaty ne mogut byt’ nicheinymi,” Narodnaia volia, July 23, 2003; Viktor Korbut, “Kuropatam sueta protivopokazana,” Sovetskaia Belarus, August 28, 2003. 79. Mikhail Pozniakov, “Ia—ochevidets, ia—zhivoi svidetel’,” Verchernii Minsk, August 2, 1991; Aleksandr Sanich, “Kuropaty: zhivoi svidetel’ tragedii priekhal iz Maikopa,” Belorusskaia niva, August 10, 1991; M. Pozniakov, “Budu srazhat’sia za pravdu o Kuropatakh,” Vo slavu Rodiny, August 16, 1991. 80. V. Kondrat’ev, “Kuropaty: prokuratura eshche raz podvertzhaet,” Svaboda, no. 46 ( June 21, 1996). 81. For more on the use of the language of genocide for building national identities, see James von Geldern’s essay in this volume. 82. Valentin Korzun, “Kto i v kogo strelial v Kuropatakh,” Sem’ dnei, November 24, 2001; V. Korzun, “Pora skazat’ pravdu,” Belaia Rus’, July 1, 1994; V. Korzun “Esche raz o Kuropatakh: Fakty protestuiut,” Tovarishch, no. 20 (May 19, 1995). See also A. Zalesskii, “Delo o Kuropatakh: I vse- taki fashisty,” Tovarishch, no. 3 ( January 19, 1996); Ivan Zagorodniuk, “Kuropaty: Istina vsegda odna,” Minskaia Pravda, December 15, 1994; Maria Osipova, “V dele o Kuropatakh tochku stavit’ rano,” Tovarishch, September 20, 1996. 83. Pazniak, “Kuropaty. Dzdesiats gadov pas’lia.” 84. Zianon Pazniak, “Biazvinnaia krov ne znikae biassledna,” Belaruskaia maladezh, no. 7 (1994). 85. Svetlana Klimentsenka, “Kurapastkiia tsulpany,” Narodnaia volia, May 21, 2004. 86. For a brief discussion of the history of the Kuropaty monumentalization, see Valiantsina Trygubovich, “Narodnaia memarializatsya,” Kurapaty: Zbornik ma͡ Kurapaty,” teryialov (Minsk: Hramadskaia initsyiatyva “Za u˘ratavanne memaryialu 2002), 61–68. See also a collection of documents about the concept of the memorial at Kuropaty published in the same volume (84–112). 87. As Viktor Somov, the chief investigator in the case, put it, “we cannot speak of 250,000 victims, as was previously reported; not even of 30,000.” Georgii Vasil’ev, “Kuropaty: Sledstvie prodolzhaetsia,” Ugolovnoe delo, no. 4 (1998). 88. “Adkaz Prokuratury pra Kuropaty,” Nasha Svaboda, December 17, 2001. For a



serguei alex. oushakine

detailed commentary, see Sergei Malinovskii, “V Kuropatakh rasstrelivalo NKVD,” Komsomol’skaia Pravda v Belarusi, December 15, 2001. 89. Igor Kuznetsov, “Kuropaty: Sledstvie zakoncheno?,” Narodnaia volia, April 18, 2001; “Adkaz Prokuratury pra Kuropaty.” For a detailed rebuttal of the decision, see Igor Kuznetsov’s “Da likvidatsyi prystupits” and “Bez pavedamlennia prychynav smersti,” published in Kurapaty: Zbornik materyialov, 36–45 and 45–50, respectively. 90. Aleksandr Kaval’skii, “Finita la tragedia,” Zgoda, November 12–19, 2001. 91. For more on competing historical legacies in postsocialist world, see Todorova, “Balkanism and Postcolonialism.” 92. Prakash, “Subaltern Studies,” 1480. 93. Ibid., 1481. 94. Kalpana Seshadri- Crooks, “At the Margin of Postcolonial Studies: Part 1,” in The Pre- Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal- Khan and Kalpana Seshadri- Crooks (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 8–11.

Prisons into Museums: Fashioning a Post-Communist Place of Memory Cristina Vatulescu

What happened to Communist political prisons and camps in the twenty years following the fall of the Iron Curtain? For years many of my travels through Eastern Europe were driven by this question. This drive to see the material remains of those sites of suffering even outlasted the gradual realization that as they now stand or crumble, these places often have more to say about our present than about their traumatic past. The question posed by Serguei Alex. Oushakine in his contribution to this volume, “When demolition is not feasible, when stylistic gutting or retrofitting of the inherited historical forms is not possible, how, then, can the hardscape of state socialism be incorporated into nonsocialist or even antisocialist discursive frames?” is nowhere more burning than in the case of prisons and camps.1 Whether they represent, as Tzvetan Todorov argues, “the emblematic,” “quintessential concentrate” of Eastern bloc societies, a postsocialist urban planning nuisance, or a coveted business opportunity, these are ubiquitous material structures that take up significant place in the present.2 As Thomasz Kizny’s haunting collection of Gulag photographs shows, many camps slowly turn into ruins, or disappear altogether, leaving few legible marks of their past: a watchtower severed from the earth by the disappearance of the staircase, a few beams sticking out of the snow, probably not for much longer, in the place of a bustling prisoner barrack.3 Some have returned to their pre- Communist origins, for instance, by being turned 



cristina vatulescu

back into monasteries or churches. Others have continued to serve as overcrowded prisons, sometimes seeing entrepreneurs battle to turn them into something profitable—factories, storage houses, or even a theme hotel. But even for those prisons and camps that undergo an attempt at official commemoration through a museum or memorial, those points of commemoration are typically just a small, indeed marginal, part of their afterlife. The rooms turned memorial are often encased in a larger structure; sometimes that larger structure is crumbling into ruin and sometimes it has returned to previous uses or been repurposed for new ones. Sometimes all these scenarios happen at the same time. This is especially true in the case of large sprawling campsites or central prisons, whose sheer size often has a way of surpassing any particular memorial project, and instead spawns multiple, sometimes warring afterlives. The present- day fate of Solovki, arguably the most infamous Russian camp, memorably dubbed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “the Gulag’s alma mater,” is a striking illustration of this trend.4 The monumental remains of the camp have been returned to their original use as a monastery, with a few cramped rooms dedicated to the history of the camp. When I visited the site in 2001, the museum and local entrepreneurs were battling over deserted buildings. Pierre Nora has influentially traced contemporary society’s preoccupation, if not obsession, with the creation of places of memory as a reaction to the acceleration and ruptures of modern times: “Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills.”5 Even though in the last twenty years Eastern Europe has epitomized drastic historical rupture, the creation of places of memory out of places of confinement seems to present the opposite picture from the commemoration frenzy described by Nora: few and far between, such Eastern European places of memory are often literally as well as figuratively at the edge of the map, far from the centers perpetually taken over by the bustling amnesiac present or by nostalgic returns to farther removed, safer pasts. This essay focuses on one of the most instructive exceptions to this culture of amnesia, the creation of the Sighet Memorial Museum in Romania.6 At a high- level conference titled “Remembrance and Citizenship” the Council of Europe Secretariat cited just two concrete examples of European sites that exemplify Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire: “the concentration camp at Auschwitz/Birkenau and the Sighet Prison.”7 More than one audience member must have wondered: “What and where is this Sighet Prison?” Some might have made the connection between Sighet and Auschwitz if

prisons into museums



they were familiar with the biography of Elie Wiesel, the native of Sighet and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who coined the term Holocaust. Others might have known that the Sighet Prison was the penitentiary where Romania’s pre- Communist political elite was decimated in the 1950s. But nearly everyone present likely wondered about the choice of this over other Eastern European Communist prison and campsites, such as the more famous Solovki or Kresty. After all, this is one area where Eastern Europe and Russia did not experience any of the shortages that plagued most other aspects of life under Communism. But somehow this prison in the remote town of Sighet on Romania’s northern border with Ukraine has come to stand for the innumerable places of confinement of the Communist era in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Council of Europe’s appreciation of the memorial goes well beyond the 2010 conference assessment. The council is to this date an active supporter of the project, which it has embraced since the project was conceived in 1992 by the poet and dissident Ana Blandiana, who together with a remarkable team of historians, architects, and designers worked on its creation for over a decade.8 Since its inception, the Sighet project has gained an impressive stream of admirers, including Vaclav Havel; Vladimir Bukovski; and Stephane Courtois, the author of The Black Book of Communism, who noted that all other similar projects he had visited in his wide- ranging travels in Eastern Europe were far from the “quality and breadth” of the Sighet project and should take the latter as “their model.”9 This essay investigates how the Sighet Prison, opened in 1897 as a Habsburg penitentiary, then used as a repatriation center for war prisoners in 1944, then a Communist political prison (1948–55), penal prison (1955–77), broom factory, and salt storage facility, and finally abandoned as a disaffected ruin, was turned into a flagship memorial museum.10 Much has been gained by its transformation into a museum, including the recognition of Sighet as a major place of memory. This essay also ponders what might have been lost in the creation of the museum’s master narrative—alternative stories/histories, tension- ridden differences among prisoners as among visitors, and maybe even loss itself, the sense of the irrecoverable absence that the ruined prison used to evoke so powerfully.

From Ruined Prison to Memorial Museum I had the rare chance of first visiting the ruined prison in 1996, when the museum was still an ambitious paper project and no significant work on the building’s structure was visible (WA 1–2).11 Fascinated, I have returned many times since. The first of these returns took place in 1997, soon after the official opening of the museum, when I found the site utterly different from my



cristina vatulescu

recollections of it. Looking for an explanation for this change, I immediately assumed that I must have first taken black- and- white photographs, whose repeated viewings must have replaced in my memory the bright colors and sharp blacks and whites of the museum that I now saw. I checked the previous year’s pictures—no colors indeed and no sharp contrasts between glittering black and white paint, just shades of gray. And yet, the film stock had been color, and the images had not faded. It was the museum itself that had dramatically changed, thanks to the clean paint and the striking installations that caught the eye. Noticing my surprise, the museum guard said, “Yes, the museum is almost completed, quite a change.” It turned out he was overly optimistic about the completion of the museum, which took quite a few more years. But he was right about the change: “quite a change.” During my first visit in 1996, the entrance door—where the young guard now sold postcards and other prison memorabilia—had been locked. On a small piece of paper someone had written in pencil: “If you want to see the prison, call the following number . . . I’ll be there in five minutes.” A former prisoner, who had become a museum guide, came and unlocked the doors for me, taking me on a mostly silent tour of the building. The walk through the dozens of almost identical empty cells radically undermined the very possibility of articulating a story against the emptiness and uniformity that had replaced those once detained here. The guide’s own stories based on his prison experiences were continuously interrupted by pauses and often ended in question marks. His hesitant diction seemed like a fitting mode of representation for the history of this prison, whose most famous victims were shoved in unmarked common graves at uncertain dates and in even more uncertain circumstances. On the door of one particular cell, the former prisoner showed me the name of the leader of the opposition, Iuliu Maniu, next to a question mark (WA 3). He then said: “That might have been the cell where he died.” During my first visit in 1996, the initial museum, with its silences, question marks, and shades of gray accumulated through the dusty passage of time rather than through the agency of human hands, seemed to unwittingly approach what Jean- Louis Déotte described as “a museum which would not be narrative, a museum for those victims for whom no judge will ever be able to do justice.”12 Such a museum “questions the possibility of storytelling and even of chronology.”13 The ruined prison drew attention to the limits of memory often glossed over in institutionalized remembering, in museums that aim to render the past present for the visitor. Sighet in 1996 seemed to prompt the visitor to “feel that which cannot be remembered: [in the sense of both re- collected and re- presented] the immemorial.”14 The chalk question mark next to Maniu’s name, querying the absence of a secure version of history, together with the few inches of dirty paint that

prisons into museums



accumulated as a remainder between the present and the traumatic past of the prison, were painted over in the larger process of creating the memorial museum. The transformation of the ruined prison into a memorial museum struck me at first as an attempt to erase temporal gaps and impose a master narrative over an entangled, elusive past. Starting in 1997, the visit through the new memorial has been less trying for the visitor. One’s gaze, formerly wandering uneasily along the blank walls that made the eyes fumble like hands, is now carefully directed from exhibit to exhibit. An entry from the 1998–99 Visitors’ Book of Impressions pithily comments on the new museum: “Flowers . . . of mold/evil [Flori . . . de mucigai]. Now the visit is pleasant.”15 The succinct comment links the memorial to a whole aesthetic tradition, making a clear reference to Tudor Arghezi’s Flori de mucigai, the stunning Romanian response to Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Published in 1931, this collection of poems set out to create poetic beauty out of the poet’s actual experience of imprisonment. The visitor’s comment not only links the memorial with this classic aestheticization of evil but also shifts the attention to its effect on the present- day visitor, exposing a pleasure that appears to be, to say the least, out of place. Apparently oblivious of this note, another visitor delivers a cliché that nonetheless confirms the former’s critique: “We remained pleasantly impressed,” to which the next comment bristles: “As opposed to the above note, I remain profoundly pained.”16 Profoundly pained, pleasantly impressed, or moved to make subtle aesthetic associations, the memorial’s visitors are now prompted, by The Visitors’ Book of Impressions, as by the whole design of the memorial museum, to articulate their experience. As we have seen, they even enter a dialogue that can become opinionated polemic. We have come a long way from the former prisoner’s searching pauses, ellipses, and question marks, and from my (and, I imagine, other early visitors’) difficulty in finding the right words in response to a tour of the prison. From a memorial immemorial, we have turned to a memorial museum. For those advocating the first type of memorial, like Déotte, the word museum often has dubious connotations, as a site prescribing what should be forgotten as much as what should be remembered. Furthermore, like the reference to the flowers of mold/evil, such critiques also fault memorial museums for covering up irrecoverable absences or traumas with comfortingly intelligible, maybe even aesthetically pleasing, stories. However, as Eva Hoffman reminds us, asserting that historical trauma— in her discussion, the Holocaust; here, Communist repression—“is both incomparable and incomprehensible has by now become, through sheer reiteration, an encouragement to the sort of automatic response that is itself a kind of forgetting.”17 Dominick LaCapra has also expressed concern over the ways in which “some of the most powerful forms of modern art and writing,



cristina vatulescu

as well as some of the most compelling forms of criticism (including forms of deconstruction) may involve the feeling of keeping faith with trauma in a manner that leads to a compulsive preoccupation with aporia, an endlessly melancholic, impossible mourning.”18 Furthermore, he cautioned that this “impossible mourning that continually loops back into inconsolable melancholy [provides] little room for even limited processes (including political processes) of working through problems.”19 Instead, LaCapra advocates a “mourning understood not simply as isolated grieving or endless bereavement but as a social process that may be at least partly effective in returning one to the demands and responsibilities of social life.”20 Adding a new dimension to this concern, Giorgio Agamben has also cogently cautioned against the cult of unsayability, shifting the focus instead to the tenuous space of testimony, a space “between the unsayable and the sayable, between the outside and the inside of language.”21 For Agamben, testimony is inextricably rooted in language, in words spoken or written in close attendance to what threatens to remain unsayable and which can under certain conditions be conveyed but also betrayed by language. A memorial can only hope to turn that elusive space between the unsayable and the sayable into a literal space. But is this turning literal ever possible, or is it a self- defeating enterprise? If the unsayable can leave its traces in language, can it ever leave traces in a memorial building where unsaid and potentially unsayable traumatic events took place? Memorials like Sighet often paint over traces and question marks, whether written out in chalk or hovering unarticulated. They often crowd out the space that could potentially host new testimony with what has already been said and has congealed into a particular narrative. However, even when we try to criticize the univocal narrative of the museum, it is still easy to follow this master narrative too closely. In the attempt to make sense of the museum experience, one is tempted to gloss over the interruptions and detours in the visit through the museum that might challenge both the univocal museum narrative and one’s critical argument. As Andreas Huyssen notes, museums “inevitably will construct the past in light of the discourses of the present and terms of present- day interest.”22 However, Huyssen continues, “no matter how much the museum, consciously or unconsciously, produces and affirms the symbolic order, there is always a surplus of meaning that exceeds set ideological boundaries, opening spaces for reflection and counter- hegemonic memory.”23 While identifying and critiquing the master narrative that structures the Sighet Museum, this paper does not follow it exclusively but rather in conjunction with two more threads guiding us through the museum and sometimes pulling us in different directions: the documentary impulse that fills the exhibition with written exposés, documents, and artifacts, and the strong artistic bent that powerfully shapes

prisons into museums



the project. These three threads are spun and woven together by museum curators, historians, artists, workers, and visitors, sometimes in complicity, sometimes in isolation, and sometimes in tense conflict. Despite its symbolic connotations, three is an accidental number: more or fewer threads could be followed. But even limited to three, the threads are sure to get entangled in the course of our visit. I dwell on the intersections, crossovers, conflicts, and knots of the three story lines. And since these places of contact often revolve around the material remains of the former prison, the essay is anchored around close analysis of such objects.

An Illustrated Tour of the Sighet Memorial Museum Soon after entering the museum, the visitor faces a map of Romania that introduces some of the main questions that will inform our visit through the museum (WA 4). The map marks with black crosses the more than 230 places of confinement in use between 1945 and 1989 in Romania.24 This approximate figure “includes places of interrogation, detention, selection, as well as labor and deportation camps.”25 In the course of the museum’s subsequent remodeling, this map has been moved into a room of its own, at present the first exhibition room, which has been organized around it and called the Map Room. Besides the central map, the Map Room presents “the different categories of places of confinement in detail in six smaller maps, next to images of the main prisons” and a yearly chronology of repression.26 The work of the museum curator consisted of adding the slight relief of the white frame that subtly transforms a piece of the white prison wall into a map of the country, and then painting, directly onto the prison wall, the black crosses that mark the places of confinement. It takes some knowledge of Romanian geography to identify Sighet—the highest cross on the northwestern border of the map—among the many other identical crosses that crowd the map. This is only fitting for a museum that wishes to commemorate not just the Sighet Prison, but the entire country’s experience of Communist repression. As such, particular cells focus on one major aspect of repression: forced labor, collectivization, deportation, torture, solitary confinement, daily life in prison, the history of the Securitate from 1948 to 1989, Yalta, and so on.27 This first image maps the museum visit as a trip onto the national “geography of repression and history of suffering.” In the process, the visitor’s experience of the prison shifts. We are no longer simply considering one particular fragment of the prison wall; we are also considering a sign—a cross—that represents this prison as an entity among many others.28 This exhibit pulls the visitor back and forth between a consideration of the particular material remains of this prison and the stylizing view



cristina vatulescu

of the national cartographer and historian, which has turned the wall into a map of the country. The direction of this stylization is memorializing, putting crosses instead of the sites of repression, and marking the map with the color of mourning. Furthermore, the caption below the map, authored by the founder of the memorial, Ana Blandiana, notes, “When justice cannot be a form of memory, only memory can be a form of justice,” thus casting the memorial as a corrective for the many blanks in legal justice. This image already suggests that for barbed wire to be woven into the yarn of a story, and further of history and of legal judgment, it has to be bent in certain decorous ways that bring it closer to writing. The map sets an agenda for the museum that registers a difference and a refinement from the initial agenda articulated in the museum brochure that the guide gave out to visitors in 1996: The cells of the old prison at Sighet will be transformed into a museum of the Romanian gulag and of Romanian resistance against Communism. Going through this museum will be equivalent to a passage through a hell of the most savage repression and terror. At the end of this road, the authors of the project had the idea to create in the prison’s interior court a space of recollection, which will be the only entirely new construction of the Memorial, and which aims at providing (with the means of architectural art), the conclusion of this initiatory experience. And since the profound conclusion of all prison memoirs can be summarized by the phrase: “I would have not resisted/survived, had I not believed in God,” this phrase has become the theme of the architectural contest initiated this year.29

This 1996 brochure projects the visitor’s experience as an initiation leading from a substitute hell to a guaranteed Christian salvation. It carefully plans the visitor’s literal path as well as the metaphorical meaning that should be derived from it before he or she even enters the museum. The visitor’s initiation into “the hell” of a Communist prison and the redemption staged at the end of the visit are explicitly modeled on the experience of the prisoners, or rather, on the museum’s take on the experience of the prisoners. Indeed, the museum brochure paints a unified picture of the prisoners who speak in one voice as survivors fortified by Christian faith; the brochure prompts the visitor to identify with this narrative, leaving him or her no other choices. This voice, as well as the whole narrative (of initiation into “the hell” of Communism followed by Christian redemption) that structures the memorial, unjustifiably excludes the prisoners and visitors who may not identify with this redemptive Christian scenario. Indeed this rhetoric comes dangerously close to participating in a “blame the victim” rhetoric. For, is

prisons into museums



the underside of “I would have not resisted/survived, had I not believed in God” the implication that the many who did not resist and did not survive perished because they failed to believe (enough) in God? Furthermore, this rhetoric also uncritically excludes the dark sides of the history of many prisoners who were animated by such militant Christian rhetoric. As Gabriela Cristea reminds us, “Most of the interwar leaders imprisoned in Sighet were responsible for the glorious unification of Romania, but also for the anti- Semitic laws. . . . Interwar Romanian politics was very nationalistic and anti- Semitic.”30 Even when it provides otherwise rich information on the biographies of Sighet’s victims, the museum does not address the problematic aspects of their biographies and politics, such as widespread antisemitism. Instead the museum chooses to paint a unifying portrait of the victims as faultless national heroes, smoothing over the complex, sometimes unsavory politics of the prisoners as well as their actual diversity. This teleological narrative leading from initiation into “the hell” of Communism straight to Christian redemption was not rigidly adhered to in the actual creation of the museum, where the cornucopia of exhibits and the multitude of contributors challenge such linear trajectories. Visitors, like the museum’s creators, fortunately get sidetracked, experiencing constant contractions and expansions of memory and time as they take in historic overviews spanning fifty years or get stuck on particular objects, some no larger and no less potent than Proust’s madeleine. There is no reference to the initiation- redemption scenario in the exhibits in some of my favorite rooms, such as “Prisoner’s Clothes,” “Deportations to Bărăgan,” and “Everyday Life Under Communism”; indeed, their arrangement follows no teleological narrative. In “Everyday Life Under Communism,” a veneer bookshelf crowds plastic flowers next to Jules Verne volumes and a prized tape deck, while a photomontage of gray figures waiting in line faces a wall of carefully chosen cutouts from official newspapers. Gasoline canisters were stored inside cramped living rooms as some of the most coveted goods during perpetual gasoline crises. In many exhibits, as well as in later museum brochures, only traces of the teleological narrative of initiation and redemption are visible. Thus, while most of the rhetoric of the 1996 brochure (except for the keyword “hell”) survived in the 1997 brochure, subsequent brochures largely replaced the heavy rhetoric of that initial programmatic statement with announcements about current developments related to the museum and related projects.31 However, the traces of that original initiation and redemption narrative are persistent enough still to mark a trajectory for the visitor. This master narrative is the first thread that I will follow critically in my essay, paying close attention to the ways it intersects with the museum’s documentary and aesthetic ambitions. The 1996 brochure thus invited the visitor to become the protagonist of



cristina vatulescu

Figure 31. Prisoners’ clothes, Sighet Memorial Museum. Photograph by the author.

a story of initiation into “the hell” of Communism that was modeled on the museum’s totalizing version of the prisoner’s experience. Following the scenario designed by the museum curator, the visitor’s walk is meant to produce a moving picture of the former prison. This moving picture of the museum, with a scenario carefully designed by the curator, is supposed to move the visitor toward identification with the victims’ experience of Communism as a hell of repression. In a former prison, the memorial museum offers model sets for this experience. Many memorials invite such identifications directly, by issuing visitor identity cards in the name of a victim (the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) or by inviting the visitor or museum guides to take on the role and sometimes the garb of either a prisoner or a guard.32 Following such identification scenarios, the Sighet visitor, having read the brochure that invited her to undergo “the hell” of Communism, could easily interpret one of the first rooms, featuring prison garb, as a costume room (figure 31).33 But a closer look at the exhibit itself uncovers more ambiguity and self- reflexivity than the brochure would have led us to expect. The arrangement of these clothes imperatively forbid they be touched, let alone worn like costumes; the empty uniforms belie the notion that anyone can fill in the absence that the disappearance of the prisoners has created. The absence of the prisoners is carefully staged. The walls have been painted

prisons into museums



Figure 32. Prisoners’ shoes, Sighet Memorial Museum. Photograph by the author.

over, the clothes washed and carefully arranged in a mise- en- scène of absence. The way the curators of the museum have staged this room suggests self- reflexivity: by hanging the clothes as if to dry, they draw the visitor’s attention to the previous cleaning of these clothes, and thus the curatorial techniques of processing the material. Below the clothes, in the exhibit “Prisoners’ Shoes,” the initiatory narrative and the mise- en- scène of absence again call us in opposite directions (figure 32, WA 6). The question is how these shoes move us. Is this an invitation to step right into the prisoners’ shoes and identify with the prisoners, or are these shoes supposed to move us toward an acceptance of the impossibility of filling in the empty spaces? This exhibit recalls other prisoner shoes, most famously the thousands of pairs of shoes found at the Majdanek Nazi camp. First immortalized in the Soviet film made upon the camp’s liberation, some of these already iconic Majdanek shoes were later transported to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where they form one of the most memorable exhibits.34 The first exhibit of the shoes in the Soviet film, like the famous shot of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog as the camera pans over hundreds and hundreds of prisoner shoes, and like the Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit, all draw their power from the juxtaposition of the mass of shoes with the undeniable particularities and materiality of each particular shoe.



cristina vatulescu

The very notion of a pair seems worn out, and with it that of the individual. The Sighet exhibit drastically limits the number of shoes exhibited, thus renouncing the pathos of sheer numbers, so central to the previous iconic representation of prisoner shoes. Instead, the installation draws its pathos from its self- defeating attempt to put the pairs back together. The shoes all look alike, inasmuch as each shoe could at first glance go with any other shoe. Except that upon closer inspection no two shoes quite make a convincing pair. The curators seem to exhibit above all a doomed desire to restore individuality, similar to the attempt to bring together a fragmented body buried in a common grave. Once such reconstruction is made, it can be taken as a last homage always bordering on the impossible. Or it can be taken, by the visitor eager to be initiated into “the hell” of Communism by identifying with its victims, a visitor who generally needs two matched shoes, as a conveniently prepared aid to transportation through the museum. One size fits all. This passage between the traumatic anonymity and uniformity of the prisoners to the uniformity of the visitors hangs by a thread, here the shoestring that could tie two shoes together into a pair, or the work of the curator. Déotte convincingly shows the complicity between the emergence of the modern museum and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.35 He argues that both the museum and the declaration construct their subject as abstract and uniform by erasing all particularities. At Sighet, the memorial continues the tradition of the modern museum’s construction of its subject inasmuch as the type of exhibits that the museum presents hardly ever return the visitor’s gaze critically upon herself. In a country where much of the repressive system was supported by a large number of informers, the museum hardly broaches the issue. It addresses all visitors in one voice. It sets out to educate, inform, and finally model the visitor without showing much awareness for the inherent differences in the visitors’ profiles. Inasmuch as the museum attempts to provide a symbolic substitute for the trial of Communism, it tends to treat the guilt for these crimes as a separate entity that can be isolated in the exhibits, at a safe distance from the consciousness of the visitors. This is a crafty move for a memorial to those few who uncompromisingly resisted Communist repression: the memorial is always in danger of irrevocably estranging the many who, even if generally opposed to Communism, also compromised and collaborated with the regime. This attempt to isolate the general guilt inside the confines of a memorial museum, while erasing the uncomfortable differences among visitors, deserves criticism for attempting reconciliation without enough self- scrutiny. At the same time, it could be that a more reflexive and divisive attitude would have buried the project before it even got off the ground. As Irina Paperno concluded based on her own work in Russia as well as on Katherine Verdery’s work in other post- Communist countries:

prisons into museums



“A legal explanation might be easier to come by, and achieving ‘Nuremberg’ (or ‘Hague’) justice might be easier than erecting a memorial in a local community.”36 This assessment certainly holds for Romania, a country divided down to the individual, many of whom had not one but two types of files with the Securitate—a personal file and an informer file—being informed on and informing even at the same time. It also holds for Sighet in particular, a provincial town where the former prison director and a former prisoner share the everyday space of the same apartment building.37 Museums are often said to kill the objects exhibited there, severing their life links to the rest of reality and putting them into frames.38 In situations of abrupt political change, where the past refuses to be contained in the logic of a before and after and afflicts the present with its lingering presence, museums can be useful. They can be used as a civilized and symbolic way of finishing off and burying the uncomfortable past (albeit sometimes burying it alive). However, “fundamentally dialectical, the museum serves both as burial chamber of the past . . . and as a site of possible resurrections.”39 Chances are that the past, so hastily disposed of, may well come back to haunt the present. But for the time being, the Sighet Memorial and Romanian society at large hardly appear ready to face their past more critically. By carefully ignoring the complicated links between its visitors and the past, the museum protects the visitors from its attack on the tainted past. Given the actual paucity of uncompromised subjects, the museum chooses to recreate its visitors as forward- looking and Communism- abhorring. Another display shows the contents of a package received by the family of a political prisoner as the only news of his death (WA 7). Here, again, the arrangement of the clothes in the middle of an empty cell can be seen as an act of mourning. Instead of the careless cramming of the package by a prison official, we see a careful arrangement that spells out the meaning of these clothes for the family, as well as their desire to make up for the lack of a proper burial. This exhibit seems to appeal to the museum’s power to provide a burial and act as “family sepulchers” for the objects buried there, while erasing the criticism inherent in Theodor Adorno’s formulation: “Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like family sepulchers of works of art.”40 While for Adorno the decontextualization inherent in the placing of an art object in a museum severs its links to life, killing it or at least making its death official, this Sighet exhibit decontextualizes death itself. It decontextualizes the prison death that has already happened in criminally unknown circumstances by replacing the careless discarding of an individual’s remains with the acts of touching, handling, and rearranging part of these remains. So rearranged, the clothes preserve the dead man’s living traces, from the skin cells rubbed against the



cristina vatulescu

threadbare soft white of his undershirt, down to the way he impressed his weight unto the world. The uneven wear on his shoes is still molded by the peculiarities of his gait. As such, this exhibit takes advantage of what Nora described as the lieu de mémoire’s defining hybrid status, “bound intimately with life and death,” intent “to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial,” to offer what has again and again been found wanting in postconflict societies—the chance to offer proper mourning and a proper burial to the victims.41 By turning the museum into a substitute burial site the curators employ their art to perform the kind of mourning that LaCapra commends for having the social and political potential of working through the traumas of the past while opening toward the present. While we have so far dedicated most of our attention to particular exhibits in the museum, I would like to focus now on the transformation that the architecture of the prison itself—its walls, windows, stairways, and doors—has undergone during the creation of the museum.42 In a recollection of his viewing of Second World War footage after the war, Jean- Luc Godard dwells on the documentary effect of black- and- white film versus color film.43 He comments that the black- and- white Soviet films prompted him to take for granted their supposedly unposed authenticity, while the color American films seemed a Hollywood concoction. The Soviet films, he comments, were, like the American ones, carefully staged. Indeed, the one cell where a careful restoration was attempted, the punishment cell Neagra, exhibits special paint complete with cracks and was endowed with a smoky smell. In contrast, all the other cells of the museum display a desire for radical transformation rather than renovation. The transformation of the prison into a memorial museum tries to subvert the former prison and its attempt to annihilate the prisoners together with their memory. As the first image of Romania’s map had already suggested, the museum is intent on removing the barbed wire from its initial oppressive function and bending it so as to produce a particular writing of history. The techniques used in this bending and the effects it produces on the visitors ask for reflection. If upon my first visit the scratched dirty walls seemed an unlikely screen for the projections of my stories about the prison, the newly painted walls often invite a process of abstraction. Thus, the peculiar painting of the cell window invited a photographic framing (WA 10) that, to me, divorced it from its referent and opened it to a whole array of interpretations. The picture is taken from inside a cell, looking out of the window toward the corridor where the guard was patrolling, and it faces the window of the opposite cell. This was a particularly dangerous position to be in for a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement, since looking out the window was strictly forbidden.44 Taking this photograph from this spot, I was

prisons into museums



responding to the peculiar transformation of the window into an abstract image achieved through the complicity of the museum curator and myself. In the process, the black contoured itself against the white like a pupil of an eye. As a projection and as a mirroring pupil tend to do, this image sent back my own reflection and erased the thought of the prisoners’ attempt to communicate. As I was thinking of the temptations of this aestheticization I met the gaze of another visitor walking by the window. In contrast to my first walk through the empty prison, the presence of this visitor was very likely linked with the black- and- white window, and the general transformation of the former prison into an elaborate museum. After this transformation, the museum has attracted significantly more visitors, and it has received extended press coverage.45

The Afterlives of a Modernist Table: On the Politics of Memorial Art Our visit ends in the only new architectural structure in the museum: the Space of Recollection and Prayer. Designed by architect Radu Mihăilescu, the structure is positioned in the interior yard of the museum, formerly a desolate piece of arid land where the prisoners were taken for walks. Now the yard is covered with grass, and its center is slightly elevated in a circular mound. Descending a few concrete steps, one enters the space of recollection. Once inside this striking structure that looks like a stylized cell or tomb, the visitor’s gaze is directed toward the cross- shaped incision in the middle of the roof (WA 11). For the gaze of those engulfed in the initiatory scenario, this cross- shaped incision opens the way toward greener pastures and the heavens. But this incision was also designed to let drops of rain fall onto the central table and thus provide a screen of water that produces stunning reflections, shifting the emphasis from direct light to the moving beauty of reflected light (WA 12–13). The appearance of the central table immediately recalled in my mind the most famous table in Romanian memorial art, Constantin Brâncuși’s Table of Silence. The 1996 museum brochure confirmed this association, mentioning Brâncuși’s Table as the inspirational model for the Space of Recollection table.46 The association proves worthy of attention. In 1938, Brâncuși, by then an established artist in France, returned to his native Romania and built not one table, but at least three.47 The first table is little known, as it was designed for the private garden of an acquaintance.48 Its middle is decorated with a cross- like incision, just like the one reflected on the middle of the Sighet table. The most famous table that Brâncuși built came to be known as The Table of Silence. Brâncuși initially built two versions of this table; dissatisfied with both, he finally took the upper drums from each table and superimposed them. He then threw the rejected lower



cristina vatulescu

drums into the river.49 The Table of Silence became the first element of the celebrated memorial to First World War heroes that traverses in a straight line the whole city of Târgu Jiu, in Romania. The Table of Silence is followed by The Gate of the Kiss, and then the Endless Column. Brâncuși designed the column as the last element in his complex, which he meant to contain just one table; however, now the walk continues up to another table that resembles The Table of Silence. It was created by the superimposition of the two rejected drums that Brâncuși had thrown in the river, and which the locals fished out and added to the complex without Brâncuși’s permission.50 The interpretation of the complex remains controversial, but most accounts read the Avenue of the Heroes, as the axis is sometimes called, as leaving from The Table of Silence feast of those parting for war to a moment of passage and leave-taking under The Gate of the Kiss. The Endless Column is taken to express gratitude for the soldiers’ sacrifice. In contrast to The Table of Silence, the table salvaged by the locals lacks accompanying chairs and came to be interpreted as standing for the absence of the dead heroes after the war. This accidental afterlife of the table came then to signify the afterlife of the soldiers as heroes. In a lecture titled “Post- Modernism in Eastern Europe,” the Romanian writer Magda Cârneci described the peculiar brand of postmodernism developed in Romania by her generation of artists.51 She claimed that largely isolated from the overall conditions that defined the arrival of postmodernism in the West, Romanian postmodernism developed as the continuation of a trend in modernism epitomized by Brâncuși’s work. This was a modernism of abstraction, a search for essences beyond the multiplicity of details. The postmodern aesthetic inspired by his work was not a seamless continuation of Brâncuși’s aesthetic, but in many cases the wayward continuation of forgotten, abandoned, or lost modernist elements. Part of the reason that continuation was not seamless is the sustained censorship of the modernist tradition epitomized by Brâncuși. Indeed, Brâncuși’s work was one of the symbolic sites of the dogged attempt to annihilate this aesthetic. The Endless Column itself, arguably Brâncuși’s most famous work in Romania, “has stood seven degrees off true vertical ever since the early 1950s, when a Stalinist mayor of Târgu Jiu decided the work was a piece of Western formalist junk and tried to pull it down for smelting into industrial machinery. He had guy ropes attached, and for three days horses tried to pull the column over.”52 In the end, “The Column proved immovable, though it was left with a slight lean.”53 While listening to Cârneci’s talk, the salvaged table that fortuitously concludes The Avenue of Heroes immediately came to my mind, as one of those dislodged, violated modernist elements recovered not only by the thrifty locals but also by a whole generation of contempo-

prisons into museums



rary artists. Indeed, I would argue that the new Sighet table richly reflects not only the memory of The Table of Silence but also more importantly the trajectory of the last table: a table that was dislodged and discarded, and then recast in a new role, in an uncertain afterlife. The Sighet table’s nod to Brâncuși, as well as the museum’s overall attachment to the aesthetic realm, its tendency toward minimalism and abstraction, its attachment to the intimate and the individual over the collective, and its strong religious undertones can all be read and maybe better understood against the tenets and censorious practices of socialist realism. In this context, it seems only fitting that a repressed aesthetic like Brâncuși’s modernism be revisited in the memorialization of the political resistance to repression. However, the Sighet Museum marks a key moment when a repressed aesthetic, long written between the lines or half- articulated, becomes institutionalized. The initial credo of the museum as it appears in its first brochure shows that, in the absence of the deposed official dogma that it used to undermine, this aesthetic is now in danger of itself becoming dogmatic. And yet, the visitor exits the space of recollection not through the hole in the roof, but through the same door that led her there. To leave the memorial, we have to retrace our steps all the way back through the former prison, in a movement that opens toward nonlinear trajectories and reflection. The rooms described in this essay are the ones I was compelled to step into once again on my way out. The Sighet Memorial Museum revisits some of the most arresting debates around memory, mourning, and representation that have been articulated in Western theoretical discourse around memorials. Revisiting these questions from the marginal site of an obscure Eastern European border town, somehow turned a representative site of memory, has the potential of reframing these questions and debates from a refreshing angle. Thus this essay has tried to move from an initial consideration of Sighet’s inscription within contemporary theoretical debates about memorials toward a reevaluation of these debates through a close- up analysis of the museum’s particular exhibits considered in their Eastern European, Romanian, and local context. Against the blanket critique of the dangers of representing and aestheticizing the past, Sighet’s complex weaving of memorial art with documentary history reminds us how important it is to consider who does the aestheticization, in what context, and for what purposes. Thus at Sighet, the whitewashed museum walls that have been so often criticized as a high modernist attempt at aestheticizing, erasing context, and killing the exhibited object are part of the museum’s politically conscious embrace of a modernist aesthetic that underwent repression at the time the Sighet Prison was in operation.54 Similarly, I opened the essay by considering how the



cristina vatulescu

abrupt transformation of the ruined prison into a memorial museum revisits the pivotal debate between the proponents of memorial immemorials and those of memorial museums, as between different types of mourning. While deeply sympathetic to the concerns of the memorial immemorial advocates, I believe that recent Eastern European history is an argument for the creation of memorial museums. This imperfect solution seems preferable in places where former prison sites and camps are either repurposed without much ado for present uses or left to crumble, disintegrate, and disappear unmarked. Marking these places of memory certainly raises thorny ethical, political, and aesthetic questions. But in a place where people have gotten accustomed to walking over unmarked graves and past the prisons and camps that have long fed those graves, marking and memorializing appear as necessary parts of a much needed process of mourning. Sighet’s work of mourning roots into its history but also opens up toward the present. At times, this work of mourning shies away from the site’s complex history—as when it glosses over issues of complicity, when it paints uncritical prisoner hagiographies, and when it promises facile redemption. Many of the museum’s shortcomings appear traceable to its ambition to represent not only its own traumatic history but also the traumatic history of a whole country and of Eastern Europe as a whole. This enormous burden of representation lends credit to but at times also threatens the Sighet project, as this prison’s remains are hollowed out of their particular history and made into general symbols. As such, Sighet’s status as a representative Eastern European site of memory ultimately appears as a mixed blessing and a call for the creation of other local memorial museums willing to take on some of the enormous burden of representing the region’s complicated pasts.

Notes The full gallery of illustrations for this essay can be found in a Web Appendix at https://sites.google.com/site/cristinavatulescu/. Images in this Web Appendix are marked WA 1–13. 1. See Oushakine’s essay “Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space Between Stalin and Hitler” in this volume. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, “Communist Camps and Their Aftermath,” Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 120. 3. Tomasz Kizny, Goulag (Paris: Acropole, 2003). 4. Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, 1918–1956: opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia, 3 vols. (Moscow: Novyi Mir, 1989), 2:125. 5. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26, no. 1 (1989): 12. 6. Other notable exceptions are the House of Terror in Hungary and the Perm- 36 Museum in Russia. A flashy museum, the House of Terror attracts significant num-

prisons into museums



bers of tourists without inviting much thorough introspection or reassessment of the past. For a full- blown analysis of the House of Terror in comparison to the Sighet Museum, see Gabriela Nicolescu Cristea, “On Maps, Abused Virgins and Nations: Anti- Communist Memorial Museums in Hungary and Romania,” in NaMU: Comparing National Museums, http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/030/004/ecp0830004.pdf, 2008. Like the Sighet Museum, the Perm- 36 Museum has a longer history, having been conceived in 1992 and opened in 1996. Despite its modest resources, the museum attempts a careful reconstruction of the camp. Having visited the House of Terror and an itinerant exhibit of the Perm Museum, I chose to focus on Sighet because of its unique artistic ambitions as well as because of my long- term knowledge of the site. 7. Council of Europe, Remembrance and Citizenship: From Projects to Places (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2000), 8. Nora, “Between Memory and History.” 8. The majority of funding for the project has been provided by private donors, mostly Romanians living abroad. “Prezentare generală,” http://www.memorialsighet.ro/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=362&Itemid=92&lang=ro. 9. The political prison was turned into a penal prison in 1955 as a consequence of the Geneva Convention. Ibid. 10. “Scurt istoric al închisorii Sighet,” http://www.memorialsighet.ro/index.php?option =com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=93&lang=ro. 11. All photographs were taken by the author unless otherwise noted. The photographs date from 1996–97 to emphasize the rapid changes undergone by the museum during that year and also because the museum later imposed restrictions on visitor photography. 12. Jean-Louis Déotte, Oubliez! Les ruines, l’Europe, le musée (Paris: Harmattan, 1994), 214. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. The idea of the immemorial has been interestingly developed in JeanFrançois Lyotard, “Mémorial immémorial,” in L’exposition imaginaire: The Art of Exhibiting in the Eighties, ed. Evelyn Beer and Riet de Leeuw (Gravenhage, Neth.: SDU; Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst, 1989). 15. Memorial Sighet, Carte de impresii (1998–99). 16. Ibid. 17. Eva Hoffman, “The Uses of Hell,” New York Review of Books, March 9, 2000. 18. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 23. 19. Ibid., 70. 20. Ibid., 22. 21. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 158. For Agamben’s critique of the unsayability see 31–33, 157–59. 22. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15. 23. Ibid. 24. “Sala Hărților,” Memorialul Victimelor Comunismului si al Rezistenței, Muzeul de luat acasă (Bucharest: Academia Civică, 2010). 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. The complete map of the museum, including the title of each room and a



cristina vatulescu

wealth of additional information about the project can be found at http://www .memorialsighet.ro. The museum also sells a CD- ROM, translated as Take- Away Museum, which provides animated visits inside each exhibit room as well as copies of the documents on display. Ibid. 28. Gabriela Cristea notes that “the mourning of the victims of communism in Hungary and Romania stays always under the sign of the cross.” Cristea, “On Maps,” 67. For a further study of this symbolism and a critique of its exclusions, see Simina Badica and Gabriela Cristea, “Raising the Cross: Exorcising Romania’s Communist Past in Museums, Memorials and Monuments,” in Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums After 1989, ed. Oksana Sarkisova and Peter Apor (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007). 29. Fundația Academia Civică, Memorial Sighet (1996); emphasis mine. 30. Cristea, “On Maps,” 66. 31. Fundația Academia Civică, Memorial Sighet Info, vol. 1 (1997), 3. 32. At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, visitors are issued an identity card in the name of an actual person who experienced the Nazi camps. The plans for the transformation of the Kresty prison into an interactive museum include the proposal that visitors would be allowed to choose between the roles of a warden and a prisoner. Vitalii Minchenko, “Sledstvennyi izoliator no. 1 ‘Kresty’,” http://www.petersburg - history.narod.ru/p307.htm. At the Gulag Museum in Moscow, the guide puts on an actual coat belonging to a camp guard, his own grandfather. Kevin O’Flynn, “A Little House of Horrors on Ulitsa Petrovka,” St. Petersburg Times, March 20, 2007. 33. In the meantime, this room has been moved to the second floor, at cell number 72. 34. Aleksander Ford and Irina Setkina, Majdanek (Moscow: Central Studio for Documentaries, 1944/5). 35. Déotte, Oubliez!, 51–67. 36. Irina Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror,” Representations 75 (Summer 2001): 110; Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 112. 37. This is literally true: I happened to stay in the same apartment building while in Sighet. 38. Déotte thus writes of the objects exhibited in the museum: “Reduced to the state of corpses, of ruins, [exhibits] all resemble each other.” Déotte, Oubliez!, 133. 39. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 15. 40. Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 175. 41. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 19. Mark Sanders uncovers the insistent return to the theme of mourning in Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies, a return that surges as a response to an apartheid that he defines as “a systematic prohibition on mourning and a withholding of condolence.” Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 49. 42. Figures WA 8 and WA 9 in the Web Appendix show sections of the former prison—the stairway and elevator, a cell door—that had not yet been renovated by the museum at the time I took the pictures in 1996. 43. Samira Gloor- Fadel, Berlin-Cinema (Switzerland/France: La Sept- Arte, 1999). 44. “Scurt istoric.” 45. For a compilation of the relevant literature, see Revista Presei, http://www

prisons into museums



.memorialsighet.ro/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=39&Itemid =91&lang=ro&limitstart=270. 46. Fundația Academia Civică, Memorial Sighet. 47. The following account of the Târgu Jiu complex is based on Eric Shanes, “The Avenue of Heroes,” in Constantin Brancusi (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989). 48. This little-known incised table is documented and reproduced as figure 97, ibid., 88–89. 49. Ibid., 85. 50. Ibid. 51. Magda Cârneci, “Post- Modernism in Eastern Europe,” Harvard University Humanities Center, 1999. 52. Shanes, “The Avenue of Heroes,” 93–94. 53. Ibid., 94. 54. For an eloquent critique of the decontextualizing and depoliticizing effects of the modernist museum’s white walls, see Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary,” Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (1978): 866.

C on t r ib u t or s

Julie Buckler is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (2000) and Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (2005). Her current book project is titled Cultural Properties: The Afterlife of Imperial Objects in Soviet and Post- Soviet Russia. Julia Bekman Chadaga teaches in the Russian Studies Program at Macalester College. She has recently completed a manuscript on the cultural significance of glass in modern Russia. Her current project explores the intersections of art and crime in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russia. Choi Chatterjee is the author of Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (2002) and coeditor with Beth Holmgren of Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present (2012). Patrice M. Dabrowski has taught at Harvard and Brown universities and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (2004). She is currently working on two books, a monograph titled “Discovering” the Carpathians: Episodes in Imagining and Reshaping Alpine Borderland Regions and a thousand- year history of Poland. Katia Dianina is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia and the author of When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia (2013). Michael S. Flier is the Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology at Harvard University, specializing in historical East Slavic linguistics, Ukrainian- Russian language hybridity, and the semiotics of medieval East Slavic culture. Luba Golburt is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written articles on Gavrila Derzhavin, Alexander Pushkin, and Ivan Turgenev, and is completing a book on the afterlife of the Russian eighteenth century in the culture of the nineteenth.





notes on contributors

Emily D. Johnson is an associate professor of Russian literature at the University of Oklahoma and the author of How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (2006). Marek Nekula is a professor in the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures and chair of the Department of Czech Studies at the University of Regensburg (Germany). He works on Czech, Slavic, and German literature and culture. Serguei Alex. Oushakine is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University and author of The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (2009). Karen Petrone is a professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. She is author of Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (2000) and The Great War in Russian Memory (2011). Her current research examines Soviet Afghan veterans in the late Soviet and post- Soviet eras. Rebecca Stanton teaches twentieth- century Russian literature at Barnard College, Columbia University, and has written articles on Isaac Babel, self- narrative, and the Odessa city- text. Cristina Vatulescu is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her book Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (2010) won the 2011 Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and was shortlisted for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. James von Geldern is a professor of Russian and international studies at Macalester College, author of several books on Soviet cultural history, and a human rights lawyer specializing in asylum law.