Post-Soviet Hauntology

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Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memoryof the Soviet Terror

Alexander Etkind

In Russia, where many millions were unlawfully murdered during the Soviet period, the

cultural practices of memory are inadequate to these losses. While Europeans are talking

about the mnemonic age, a memory fest, and the obsession with the past around the

globe, Russians complain about the historical amnesia in their country.1 Sporadically,

some Russians outsource their memorial concerns abroad. Sometimes they strive to protect

Russian monuments in Tallinn, Vienna, and elsewhere. Sometimes they attempt to silence

the public sorrows of Russias neighbors in respect to a past that they happen to share with

Russians. Sometimes it feels that the former Iron Curtain has become the frontline of theMemory War. But in contrast to the amnesia thesis, sociological polls show that Russians

remember the Soviet terror fairly well, though they vastly differ in their interpretations of

this terror. In contrast to the abuse of memory for nationalist purposes, the most important

developments of Russian memory are structured not by nation or ethnicity, but by solidarity

between different communities and generations. While the state is led by former KGB

officers who avoid giving public apologies, building monuments, or opening archives, the

struggling civil society and the intrepid reading public are possessed by the unquiet ghosts

of the Soviet era. Haunted by the unburied past, post-Soviet culture has produced perverse

memorial practices that are worthy of detailed study. While the American historian Stephen

Kotkin perceives a Shakespearian quality in the post-Soviet transformation, it is no surprisethat the participating observers of this process employ equally dramatic metaphors, partially

invented and partially imported, in their attempts to understand what has happened to their

civilization.2 In a land where millions remain unburied, the dead return as the undead. They

do so in novels, films, and other forms of culture which reflect, shape, and possess peoples

memory. Inspired by Jacques Derridas hauntology, I have developed a theory of cultural

memory consisting of monuments (hardware), texts (software), and specters (ghostware).

The Black Energy of the Remnant

Close to the Belomor Canal in the northwestern corner of Russia, a large mass grave wasuncovered in July, 1997 by independent researchers from St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk.

The site, called Sandarmokh after the closest village, is a pine forest which is distinguished

by small, regular depressions in the earth. About 9,000 people were shot on this spot in 1937

and 1938. The victims were men and women of sixty ethnicities and nine religions, with an

unusually high proportion from the political and academic elites. More than a thousand of

the murdered were delivered here from many hundreds of miles away, from the Solovetskii

camp, for unknown reasons. People were brought there alive, forced to dig their own graves,

and were shot on the spot. The executioners knew that it is easier to transport living people

than corpses.

The site was discovered in 1997 by Veniamin Iofe and Irina Flige, leaders of the Memorial

Society at St. Petersburg, and by a local enthusiast named Iurii Dmitriev from Petrozavodsk.

None of these three researchers were trained as a historian, though Iofe was a political

Constellations Volume 16, No 1, 2009.C The Author. Journal compilation CBlackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford

OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


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184 Constellations Volume 16, Number 1, 2009

which were committed decades before. Using his own words, the local newspaper described

Dmitrievs ordeal:

After many months, which Dmitriev spent in the archive reading the files of those who wereexiled or shot, he lost his appetite, could not sleep. . .There is a black energy; it leaks intoeveryone who touches the yellowish pages of interrogations, denunciations, and shooting

protocols. But Dmitriev continued his work on the Book of Names. He ran out of money.His friends died. His nerves betrayed him. His relationships were destroyed. He lapsed intomonths of heavy drinking.7

I like to compare monuments to crystals that settle in a solution of memory, provided that

this solution is strong, stable, and not too hot. Contemporary Russian memory barely ap-

proaches these minimal conditions of crystallization. An important condition in the process,

analogous to the temperature of the solution, is the social consensus. High social consensus

encourages the proliferation of monuments but, since there is not much to debate if everyone

agrees, it discourages public debates; we see such a situation in contemporary Germany.

In contrast, low consensus suppresses public memory, but can intensify manifestations ofmemory among the remembering minority. The enthusiastic efforts of solitary individuals,

veritable heroes of memory like Dmitriev, are vital in this situation.

But many sites of the Soviet Terror still have no monuments. To give a well-known

example, about 30,000 people lie in unmarked graves in Toksovo near St. Petersburg. A part

of this area is favored by wealthy Russians for its natural beauty and proximity to the city.

Another part is a shooting range which is still being used by naval artillery to test weapons.

As a Moscow newspaper wrote in 2002, They are being shot until now.8

Russia vs. Germany

When Nikita Khrushchev initiated his de-Stalinization campaign in 1956, he chose the con-

cept of unjustified repressions as the idiom for mass murders, arrests, and deportations.

Always mentioned in the plural, this is a striking concept: a formula for senseless acts of vio-

lence which do not specify agency and therefore, elude responsibility. In contrast to the Nazi

terror, in the Soviet Union no specific group (ethnic, territorial, professional, etc.) suffered

significantly more than other groups, with one exception: A particularly heavy toll among

Stalins victims was, of course, extracted from the state and party apparatus.9 Following this

line, a bizarre argument was produced by the defense attorneys who represented the Com-

munist Party at the Moscow trial of 1992. Since communists suffered from repressions morethan others, this argument goes, their organization cannot be blamed for these repressions,

even though it organized them. Conflating subject and object, Soviet repressions differed

from Nazi German exterminations, in which the victims and perpetrators were distanced by

crystal-clear constructions. Unjustified repressions means, exactly, self-imposed, mean-

ingless social catastrophe. If the Holocaust was the construction and extermination of the

Other, the Great Terror was similar to a suicide.

Comparing the state of the German memory of Nazism to the Russian memory of Com-

munism, a Russianist feels despair. The processes and institutions of terror in Nazi Germany

and Communist Russia featured multiple parallels and contacts; but the cultural memories

of Russian and German terror developed in such different ways that they seem to defy com-

parison. Holocaust memorials, museums, films, and novels have been studied by numerous

researchers. The memory of World War II has recently become a subject of Russo-German

C 2009 The Author. Journal compilation C 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Hauntology: Alexander Etkind 185

comparative studies.10 In contrast, the scholarship on the Russian memory of Soviet terror

is negligible.

Both the Russian and German catastrophes have rich and controversial historiographies.

Both national traditions are familiar with attempts at particularizing their respective catas-

trophes and insisting upon the methodological principle of incomparability. In the 1980s, in

the atmosphere of Detente, the question of the (in)comparability of the Nazi crimes launched

a fierce discussion which is remembered as Historikerstreit. The philosopher Ernst Nolte

emphasized the historical fact that the practices of state terror, such as concentration camps,

were developed in the Soviet Union earlier than in Germany and that German socialists knew

of these Soviet practices well before the Nazis came to power, thus suggesting the direct

influence of the Soviets upon the Nazis. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas found in these

arguments an unacceptable historicization of the Holocaust which, he argued, relieves the

burden of historical guilt.11 In 1998, Francois Furet still characterized comparisons between

Fascism and Communism as a taboo subject.12 In Russia, this was not the case. A former

member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the USSR, Aleksandr Iakovlev charac-

terized the Soviet regime in terms which alluded to the German parallel: It was full-scalefascism of the Russian type. Our tragedy is that we have not repented. 13 Iakovlev chaired

The Presidential Committee on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Persecutions; as

he knew well, rehabilitation was far from repentance.14 The GULAG survivor and founder

of the Memorial Society, Veniamin Jofe wrote that the current chaos of speculations

about the Soviet past works like a smoke-screen which masks the problem of evaluating

the Soviet period of Russian history in terms as clear as those used for evaluating Nazi

Germany.15 He obviously wanted the Russia of the 1990s to produce as clear a vision of

its violent past as Germany managed to do.

Comparing and contrasting the Russian and German situations of memory, several major

factors should be taken into account. First, the socialist regime in Russia lasted much longerthan the Nazi regime in Germany. Repairing the damage probably also requires more time,

but Russia is less distant from the collapse of its Soviet state than Germany is from the

collapse of its Nazi state. Second, the Soviet victims were significantly more diverse than the

Nazi victims; their descendants are dispersed and in some cases (e.g. Russian and Ukrainian

political elites), have competing interests. Third, Germanys post-war transformation was

forced upon it by military defeat and occupation, while Russias post-Soviet transformation

was a political choice. Fourth, the memory of the Nazi period has developed in different ways

in Germanys Western and Eastern parts; it may happen that the situation in East Germany is

more similar to the Russian case than the better-known situation in the West. Finally, among

the victims of both regimes and their descendants, the subjective experience of victimization

and mourning was significantly different. In Soviet camps, most of the political prisoners

shared the principles of their perpetrators but believed that in their personal cases, they were

mistakenly identified. In Nazi camps, on the other hand, the typical victim did not question his

identification (e.g., as a Jew), but objected to the general reasons for his persecution. These

are two deeply different sentiments, which had different consequences: a strong and coherent

anti-Fascist and Zionist movement in one case and a chaotic mix of loyalty, escapism, and

resistance to the Soviet state in the other.

With few exceptions, Jewish victims of the Nazi regime perished in a way which excluded

hope in their families and communities. In contrast, many prisoners of the Gulag returnedfrom it; of those many who did not return, relatives and friends often knew nothing for years

and decades. The condition of mourning in a situation of uncertainty is unusual and under-

theorized. As Jacques Derrida put it, Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning,



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than confusion or doubt; one has to know what is buried where and it is necessary. . .that, in

what remains of him, he remains there. Let him stay there and move no more!16 Interpreting

ways of life which were relatively orderly, Sigmund Freud famously distinguished between

mourning and melancholia, basing this distinction on the subjects ability to acknowledge the

reality of the loss. In Freuds logic, if the loss is not recognized, it is repressed; when repressed,

it turns into new and strange forms; henceforth, it threatens to return as the uncanny. The

failure to recognize death as death produces the uncanny. When the dead are not properly

buried and mourned, they turn into the undead. Unlike some researchers on memory,17

I believe that Freuds metaphors retain their heuristic value. However, different historical

contexts shift the borders between such categories as certainty and doubt; mourning and

hope; health and pathology; and, as Derrida insisted so vigorously and ghosts demonstrate so

often, life and death. Scholars have not yet explored what happens to mourning/melancholia

in a condition of uncertain loss.

In a situation in which the beloved person disappears for reasons which nobody under-

stands; in which she may be alive and might possibly, miraculously return; in which no

information about the loss is available or trustworthy Freuds clinical distinction shouldbe modified.18 In this situation, uncertainty was external and realistic rather than internal

and pathological. In an indefinitely large part of the Soviet experience, death could not be

recognized as death, and survival could not be relied upon as life. The state, the source

of repressions, was also the only source of information. Millions were convicted for long

terms with no right of correspondence; no information was received from them for years

or decades. As we know now, some of these victims were murdered immediately after their

sentencing and some of them died later in the camps. Relatives were usually not informed

in either case. People returned from the camps earlier or later than their sentences were

supposed to expire. The sentence had little or no predictive value. The Gulag did not pro-

vide reality checks for either hope or mourning. What it did provide was fertile ground forghost-making:

One night the general was found in a cold sweat, screaming, Forgive me, DmitriiIvanovich! His wife shook him awake and asked him, whom he was talking to; hedid not respond. After a few weeks, the general started talking to the invisible DmitriiIvanovich while awake. After they took him to the insane asylum, his wife learnedthat Dmitrii Ivanovich was a man the general had shot with his own revolver in1937.19

The trained historian Liudmila Alexeyeva, who later would become a leading Sovietdissident and post-Soviet human rights watcher, heard this story in 1953 and retold it in

1990. She remembers the first prisoners who returned to Moscow as the undead: these

people had been forgotten, written off, and now they were out there, on the streets, like the

walking dead. Clinically, a disturbance of reality-testing distinguishes psychotic conditions,

such as paranoia, from more benign ones, such as melancholy. But the ghostly panic that

was launched by the return of the repressed from the Gulag in 1953 was not an individual

disease or an epidemic. It was a post-catastrophic condition that should be understood as a

communitarian event, for which the integral, long-lasting effects have been clearly different

from the sum of individual ailments and recoveries. One can compare this condition to

melancholy or paranoia, but its subject was not an individual but a community, not the

screaming general talking to Dmitrii Ivanovich but Soviet society, which has continued

talking to its victims even after its own death.



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Marking the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 and the end of the Soviet regime from

19861991, we must judge the current state of Russian memory against German memory,

as it was documented in the 1960s. At that time, complaints about collective amnesia

and silencing the catastrophe were probably as typical in Germany as they are now in

Russia. However, Germans had already experienced the Nuremberg trials (19451946) and

the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (19631965). In Russia, an attempt to try the Communist

Party failed in 1992. Germans began in the sixties to open memorials and museums on the

sites of camps. Russians started opening memorials in the nineties. Comparing the Russian

and German memory of terror is like comparing two individuals, an adolescent and an old

man. One needs to imagine the old man in his younger years in order to understand their

actual difference.

The first study of German memory, The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margaret

Mitscherlich, documents the situation in 1967. Read now, this book suggests a strong,

almost ghostly resemblance to the Russia of 2008. In their clinical case studies and in

an astute cultural critique of German society of the 1960s, the Mitscherlichs identified

a syndrome which consisted of the unconscious fixation on the past, collective egodepletion, blockage of social imagination, and material satisfaction. Germany needed a

political working-through of the past and failed to produce it. Historians, public intellectuals,

and politicians failed to master the past in which millions were murdered. After the

enormity of the catastrophe that lay behind them. . .the country seems to have exhausted its

capacity to produce politically effective ideas; as a result, political life froze into mere

administrative routine. Atypically for psychologists, the Mitscherlichs blamed the political

system rather than specific individuals. Hard work and its success soon covered up the open

wounds left by the past. . .Economic restoration was accompanied by the growth of a new

self-esteem. Every word here is true for the Russia of the 21st century, with the difference that

economic success in Russia has not been secured by hard work but inadvertently awarded by achance of history and nature. Since the German society of the 1960s, like the Russian society

of the 2000s, was at least materially, on the whole better off than ever before. . .it [felt] no

incentive to expose its interpretation of the recent past to the inconvenient questioning of

others. It also had no reason to overcome the affective isolation of the Germans from the

rest of the world, which started under the Nazi regime; this self-isolation has only just begun

to change, wrote these German psychologists in 1967. The working hypothesis of this old

book is still relevant, though in a context that its authors would find hard to imagine: Our

hypothesis views the political and social sterility of present-day Germany as being brought

about by a denial of the past.20

Talking about Russia of 2008, I would only replace sterility with apathy and denialwith misrepresentation. Politically and culturally, the aftermath of president Yeltsins rule

has proven to be very different from the aftermath of Chancellor Adenauers. However, this

anachronistic comparison gives modest hope for the future. A number of studies demonstrate

that the transformation of German memory reflected and led the broader development of

culture and society.21 If German memory dramatically changed after the time analyzed

by the Mitscherlichs, Russian memory could also undergo such a transformation in the

future.

The prominent Holocaust historian, Dan Diner, recently re-examined this problem. He

stated that the Nazi regime eliminated those whom Germans considered a part of a culturally

and historically different collective; as a result, the crime entered the ethnicized memory

of Germans and acquired the status of a specifically German crime. In contrast, the Soviet

regime defined both victims and perpetrators as part of the same historical mnemonic



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collective; in such a situation, the process of overcoming the evil naturally becomes

wrestling with oneself.22 Naturalizing ethnic differences (as if Germans were naturally

different from Jews and did not invest enormous efforts into construing this religious group

as the national Other), Diner denies the ability of non-ethnic groups to structure mnemonic

collectives and remember their dead in a collective way. Unavoidably, this thesis of a

fundamental difference (Diner) between ethnic and other groups underestimates those types

of solidarity which surpass national borders. But in the Cold War era, the memory of the Gulag

was preserved by international groups, which consisted of American and European historians

and politicians, and Soviet dissidents and memoirists. These people smuggled, translated,

and published manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and

many others; they produced magisterial pieces of scholarship such as Hannah Arendts The

Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) or Robert Conquests The Great Terror (1968). In cases

of genocide, global memory has played various roles in relation to national memories, from

supplement to catalyst to substitute.

Starting with Maurice Halbwachs classical argument that collective memory requires

a remembering collective, Diner comes to the conclusion that nations can preserve mem-ory while some other social groups, such as classes, cannot. Therefore, German guilt and

Jewish mourning pass down through generations while the Soviet crimes vanish from mem-

ory. According to this argument, the repressions of Kulaks or Nepmen could not and

do not remain in the collective memory, either because these groups were ideological fic-

tions of the Bolsheviks with their theories of class warfare, or because these groups were

successfully exterminated and did not leave descendants who would mourn them. Diner

characterizes such crimes as historically describable but mnemonically non-transmissible.

With hesitation, Diner makes an exception to this rule for those Soviet groups who suffered

from repressions which were (if not in Bolshevik theory, then in their practice) defined by

ethnicity. Diner mentions Ukrainians but he could give many more examples, for instance,Chechens, Crimean Tatars, or, indeed, Jews after WWII. However, my central question ad-

dresses not these ethnically defined cases but a more general picture that Diner draws here:

is Diners nationalization of memory (i.e. the identification of the remembering collective

with the nation) historically true and morally defensible?

I do not believe so. Diners concept of collective memory seems to be custom-made

for the Nazi Holocaust. Designed to clarify comparisons between the Holocaust and other

cases of mass murder, it precludes many of these comparisons. Diner seems to operate

within a simplified distinction between two types of human collectives, nations and classes.

Marxist efforts to furnish classes with self-conscious identities do not seem convincing to

Diner, but the idea that nations have identities, and therefore subjectivities, he takes forgranted.

It is individuals who feel guilt or sorrow. However, these individuals have the ability to

pass, preserve, and exchange their feelings; culture provides them with the instruments for

these purposes. Using cultural means, some individuals and groups are able to shape the

feelings of other individuals and groups. With the help of texts, images, and other cultural

instruments, some individuals even create new groups and collectives. Besides nations and

classes, there is a third type of collective: associations, as Alexis de Tocqueville first described

them. Indeed, the post-Soviet transformation seems to be a process of wrestling with oneself

only to those who subscribe to a vision of the Soviet people as an undivided (classless, nation-

less, subject-less) unity. Actually, it was a struggle between myriads of collective subjects,

who constructed themselves according to a variety of principles, from the ethnic to the

political to the generational to the memorial, and shaped their identities in this struggle.



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The active role of the Memorial Society, a typically Tocquevillian association, exemplifies

the post-Soviet type of the remembering collective and testifies to the role of memory in

structuring the social space.

The concept of cultural memory is close to the concept of collective memory but is

significantly broader. Cultural memory presumes a remembering collective only in the

broadest and loosest sense; the cultural communities of those who subscribe to a certain

journal or take part in an online chat, play the role of such a collective. In some rituals,

people get together to share their mourning. Near the Solovetskii stone in Moscow, on the

29th of October, 2007, the Memorial Society commemorated 70 years since the start of the

Great Terror by reading the names of its victims. For twelve hours, volunteers read aloud

2,600,000 names of those who were shot in 19371938. Some of those who read these

names added my grandfather, my uncle. The Memorial Society intends to repeat this

performance annually; indeed, in many provincial centers such as Vologda, descendants of

the victims come annually, on The Day of the Political Prisoners on October 30 th, to the

local memorials. Emil Durkheim has sensitized us to the concept of rituals as the means

of religious and political instruction. Integrating monuments, texts, and performative acts,mourning rituals are indispensable mechanisms of cultural memory.

However, culture allows people to share their experiences without requiring physical en-

counter. Various media and genres of culture transmit and distort memory, which moves

between individuals, communities, and generations. Cultural forms structure virtual collec-

tives of their fans and connoisseurs or, in some cases, their active antagonists. However,

the turn from collective memory to cultural memory deemphasizes the remembering

collective and focuses on the materials which memory is made of. It is a turn from the soci-

ology of memory in the tradition of Maurice Halbwachs, to cultural studies of memory in the

tradition of Walter Benjamin. Multimedia collages of cultural memory integrate multiple

types of signifiers: from memoirs to memorials; from historical studies to historical novels;from family albums to museums and archives; from folk songs to films to internet.23 In her

research on the postmemory of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch emphasized the relevance

of personal artifacts, such as photographs, family albums, and letters, for the memory of

parents and grandparents experience. The crucial interaction between post-memory and

public memory, however, remains unexplored in her work.24 With time, public forms of

memory, from monuments to textbooks to novels to films, become increasingly dominant.

Most of the people who are shaping post-Soviet memory have never experienced the Gulag

themselves. The initial denial of the past transforms into the public interest in history, which

is represented in multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of events and personalities

of the past.

Multi-Historicism

Though Dunkan Bell believes that in a historical representation, one can distinguish

between social memory, mythology, and critical history,25 I doubt the practical value of

this tripartite distinction. In respect to the past, validity claims are uncertain or controversial,

as are their relations to the ethical or political concerns of the present. As Russian examples

generously teach us, what was believed to be true yesterday is not considered to be true

today. Cultural memory is a living realm which changes with history. Works of fiction which

do not claim truth (e.g. historical novels) or genres with unverifiable validity (e.g. memoirs)

are difficult to categorize according to Bells tripartite scheme. Borders between myths and

truths tend to shift and curve from one political position to another and from one generation



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to another. These movements of truth in the space of memory comprise, in their own turn, an

important part of cultural history. In democratic and other societies, various institutions of

power compete for control over cultural memory, i.e. for the patrol on the borders between

truth and myths in the representation of the past. For some political regimes, it is crucial to

insist on their definitions of truth; when they fail to do so, they collapse. Having much at

stake, various communities of memory either comply with claims of power, or ignore them,

or reinterpret them according to their interests.

An arresting example of this interpretative power is the 500 ruble banknote, issued in

1997 and widely used now. On its face side, this banknote show the Solovetskii monastery,

one of the most cherished in the Orthodox Church. In the historical photograph that this note

reproduces, the onion-shaped cupolas of the cathedral, which it previously had and which

it has now, are cut off and replaced by unusual pyramids. The local historian Jurii Brodskii

believes that the atypical cupolas that are depicted on the note date this picture at the end of

the 1920s.26 At that time, the semi-destroyed monastery housed the Solovetskii camp, the

earliest and one of the most important in the Gulag. It would be brash to assert a conspiracy

theory that ascribes subversive intent to the officials of the Central Bank. Neither wouldI dare to speculate about their unconscious motivations. Perhaps what we have here are

prosaic processes of serendipity, which are then interpreted by enthusiasts of memory. Such

interpretation constitutes an act of memory in itself, a performative act which is no less

significant than other initiatives of memory, such as the renaming of a street or the writing

of a memoir.

In contemporary Russia, history is omnipresent. In the press, parliamentary debates, and

political speeches, historical concepts like Stalinism, cult of personality, and repres-

sions are rhetorically employed as often as modern legal or economic terms. The events of

the mid-20th century are still perceived as a living, contentious experience which uncannily

threatens to return again. The present is oversaturated with the past, and this solution refusesto produce any sediment. As the historian Tony Judt puts it, If the problem in Western

Europe has been a shortage of memory, in the continents other half the problem is reversed.

Here there is too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw. 27 Historical

memory in Russia is a living, de-centered combination of symbols and judgments which are

experienced simultaneously, all at once, responding to various political needs and cultural

desires. Because of the de-centered nature of this construction, deprived of consensual an-

chors or reference-points, the public does not perceive the inconsistencies or logical conflicts

between its different parts. In contrast to multiculturalism which is characteristic of (and ac-

tively promoted by) American society, Russians live in and promote a condition I would call

multi-historical.There are Russian university professors who explain Lenin or Gorbachev by the fact

that they were Freemasons. There are influential churchmen who want to canonize Ivan the

Terrible and Grigorii Rasputin. There are astronomers who have written volumes on The

New Chronology, which claims that in the Middle Ages, Mongols did not occupy Russia

but rather Russians occupied Europe. There are academics and officials of law-enforcement

agencies who believe that the years of Stalinism were the best time for Russia. However, the

majority of teachers, scholars, and politicians support the established ideas of history. They

have to defend them daily.

The most noticeable manifestation of this multi-historicism in popular culture borders on

kitsch. A fancy St. Petersburg restaurant called Russian Kitsch: Cafe of the Transitional

Period features grand frescos executed in the manner of Socialist Realism, in which Soviet

collective farmers dance with American Indians, while Leonid Brezhnev, looking like Frank



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Sinatra, gives a political speech to a stone-age tribe. This seemingly postmodern attitude

in many sites of contemporary Russian culture is ubiquitous. In the very successful film

The Peculiarities of National Hunting (1995; director Alexander Rogozhkin), a Finnish

historian studies the rituals of Russian hunting. During his field trip to Russia, he falls into

the company of some drunken hunters. While they are drinking and shooting, the student

visualizes gorgeous scenes of hunting with Borzoi dogs and aristocratic beauties. The whole

story is based on the interpenetration of a pathetic present and an extraordinary but irrelevant

past.

Currently, history seems to divide the population more than politics and economics. The

vast majority of Russians support Putin, but about half of these supporters hate Stalin

and about half respect him. Most probably, it means that these people are divided in

their actual, substantive idea of Putin as well: some support Putin because they see him

as different from Stalin, while others support Putin because they believe he is similar

to Stalin. The content of Russians varying interpretations of history is highly relevant

to current politics. For obvious reasons, sociological polls do not provide access to this

content.The liberal-minded Russian press compares Putin to Stalin daily and speculates about

the coming thaw (the historical term which scholars use for the short period of relative

liberalization after Stalins death).28 The details of Stalins life and the names of his cronies

arouse public interest, as if they are politically pertinent. Stalinism continues to be the

center of gravity of Russian intellectual discourse; in a similar way, American historians

and intellectuals make their studies relevant by referring to September 11. Specters of

Stalin are haunting a post-Soviet culture that produces dozens of alternative histories of the

miraculous Georgian, as Lenin once called Stalin. In Vladimir Sharovs novel Before and

Then, Stalin is a son and lover of the immortal Madame de Stael. In Vladimir Sorokins

Blue Fat, Stalin is a tall and handsome ruler, a friend of Hitler, a lover of Khruschev, anda possessor of the elixir of immortality. In Pavel Krusanovs The Angels Bite, an unnamed

Eurasian ruler is of Russian-Chinese origin, sleeps with his sister, and murders his friends

and foes. In Dmitrii BykovsJustification, Stalin subjects people to unbearable suffering in

order to select those few who are fit to survive it all: those who give up under torture and

confess to invented crimes have betrayed Stalin and must perish, while those who resist to

the end are preserved, healed, and trained to be KGB operatives and Soviet leaders. Most of

these stories deconstruct themselves. Krusanovs hero, the dictator, in an attempt to invade

the world brings it to its end. Bykovs protagonist, a Moscow historian and author of a

revisionist theory of Stalinism, commits suicide.

The historicizing drive can go much deeper. Currently, the hit of high literature is VladimirSorokinsDay of the Oprichnik(2006); set in 2027, it depicts the future Russia as a Chinese

colony which will restore the political system of Ivan the Terrible, with its dynasty, public

executions, and the omnipresent oprichniki (Ivans death squads). On the other side of the

political spectrum, a big hit of the Russian media is a 70-minute long TV-show called Death

of an Empire,which tells the story of the end of Byzantium. Produced in 2008 by a highly-

positioned Orthodox monk, Father Tikhon Shevkunov (ostensibly, the personal confessor of

Putin), this documentary presents Orthodox Byzantium as the predecessor of the Russian

state, a victim of Western intrigues and Jewish capital. Anachronistically, this film applies

the political slang which came into popular currency during Putins reign (successor, agents

of influence, demographic crisis, stabilization fund, internal enemy, spiritual confusion, etc.)

to the early Middle Ages; worse than that, it begs the authorities to protect the great but

confused Russia from repeating the fate of Byzantium.



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Making Sense of It

The first memorial to the victims of the Gulag, a simple granite stone, was erected in

1989 in the cemetery of Solovetskii island by Veniamin Iofe and a group of activists from

the Memorial Society.29 (Years later, the same group erected similar memorial stones in

Moscow and St. Petersburg.) In 1999, at the Solovetskii cemetery, Iofe said that his stone

was a question mark which asked about the meaning of this tragedy. We wanted to understandwhy all these millions were sacrificed, if they were indeed sacrificed? What was the supreme

value which demanded these sacrifices?30 In this doubt about the idea of sacrifice, Iofe

echoed Giorgio Agambens philosophical work on the Nazi camps which was inspired

by the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. To define the status of the victim of a state of

exception, Agamben developed the concept ofhomo sacer, a human victim that may be

killed but not sacrificed.31 Only that life which has value may be sacrificed. Agamben states

that since camps were permanent zones of exception from law, life in these zones could

not be expressed in terms which were meaningful outside of these zones. Suspended in the

liminal space between social and biological deaths, the victims life was bare; it was not

subject to any legal or religious order. Essentially, it was the life of an animal, of chattel. Inthe Soviet camps, these people were calleddokhodiaga(the soon-to-be-dead); in Auschwitz,

they were calledMuselmann(Muslim).

Agamben noticed that victims bore witness only rarely. Survivors, not victims, write

memoirs. According to Agamben, the memory of the camps is possessed only by survivors,

which is almost unavoidable but not fair.32 Addressing the Soviet rather than German camps,

Nadezhda Mandelstam resolved this paradox in the same way that Agamben did decades

later: Only those who were about to perish in the camps, but accidentally survived can testify

about them.33 She had already read Varlam Shalamov, a soon-to-be-dead who survived by

chance in the Gulag and translated his experience into unique testimonies of the senseless,

defenseless life of the Soviethomo sacer. A less known but equally remarkable example was

given by Boris Sveshnikov (19271998), a soon-to-be-dead who was saved, like Shalamov,

by a camp doctor, served the rest of his term in a camp hospital and depicted his experience

in many dozens of pencil sketches and (after his release) oil paintings. Rescued by a Latvian

prisoner and then by an American collector, a large part of Sveshnikovs works is kept now

in the Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick, NJ. Sveshnikov showed the details of life,

work, and torture in the Gulag by using historicizing styles which refer to various Spanish,

German, and Russian artists but focus on the themes of the European religious wars of the

17th century (a choice of historical references which is reminiscent of another historicizing

document of 20th

-century mourning, Walter Benjamins book on the Trauerspiel.) One of themost impressive pieces of the collection at the Zimmerli Museum shows a soon-to-be-dead,

already in the coffin but still a bit alive.

Aleksandr Proshkins film The Cold Summer of 1953 (1987) presents a drama of the

reawakening of the soon-to-be-dead. Two exhausted exiles of the Gulag, one a captain of

military intelligence, another a civil engineer in the past, fight a gang of criminal ex-prisoners

who capture a local village after their release from the camp. One exile dies in action, another

kills bandits and survives to tell the story. In this violent film, the transformation of a semi-

corpse into a hero of resistance is convincing; however, the act of creating memory is heroic

enough to be celebrated on its own terms.

Current sociological polls tell us that Russians are increasingly engaged in reinterpreta-tions of their past.34 Sarah H. Mendelson and Theodor P. Gerber sponsored a series of polls

in Russia in 20032005 in which about 26% of young respondents reported that they had at



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least one relative who was repressed during the Soviet period.35 In 2007, Dina Khapaeva

and Nikolai Koposov polled standard samples in three Russian cities. They report that 63.5%

correctly believe that tens of millions of victims suffered from repressions. 36 These

numbers are impressive; Russians remember events that happened fifty or seventy years

ago surprisingly well. In any modern society, it would be unusual for every fifth or fourth

individual to know the specific details of what happened in her society and to her family in

the 1930s or 1950s. In the absence of any educational and memorial policy on the part of the

state, these results seem even more surprising. Paradoxically, scholars tend to grumble about

the condition of memory in contemporary Russia. Many speculate about collective nostalgia

and cultural amnesia, or notice the cold character of the memory of Soviet terror. 37 In

my view, surveys reveal the complex attitudes of a people who retain a vivid memory of the

Soviet terror but are divided in their interpretation of this memory.

Far from demonstrating an outright denial of the Soviet catastrophe, the vast majority of

Russians show knowledge of their history. In their attitude towards this history, Russians are

split almost evenly. It is not the historical knowledge which is at issue but its interpretation,

which inevitably depends upon the schemes, theories, and myths that people receive fromtheir scholars, artists, and politicians. Domenic La Capra distinguished between two typical

responses to a trauma, the constructive working through and the obsessive acting out

of the trauma.38 I would add a third mode, making sense of it. In the period of terror, the

power that affirms its sovereignty by creating zones of exception, denies responsibility for

the abuses committed in these zones. But with the passing of time and with the scale of abuses

revealed, the sovereign changes his strategy. His last resource is a sacrificial interpretation,

which presents victims as sacrifices, and suicidal perpetrators as cruel but sensible strategists.

In 2007, Vladimir Putins administration approved the guidelines for the new textbook

of Soviet history, which interprets Stalins terror as the price of the great achievements of

the Soviet Union. The textbook states that Stalins purges achieved the utmost efficiencyof the ruling elite and shaped the new managerial class which was adequate to the tasks

of modernization. . .This class was unconditionally loyal to those in power. Its executive

discipline was irreproachable.39 Filippovs textbook does not deny the mass violence of

Stalins era but entertains the radical transformation of its meaning.

Though this textbook was severely criticized by many historians and teachers, there is

no doubt that many Russians share Filippovs drive to find a rationale for the Great Terror.

According to sociological polls, approximately half of the Russian population explain the

Soviet terror as an exaggerated but rational response to actual problems which confronted

the country. Many believe that the terror was necessary for the survival of the nation, its

modernization, victory in the war, etc. If it was necessary in the past, it can be desirable in

the present and possibly in the future.

Hardware, Software, Ghostware

Looking at almost any monument in Washington, London, or St. Petersburg, one senses how

the state celebrates its continuing connection with the past. These monuments are the body

of the nation on display. They represent the ideal identity of the nation as a unity between the

state, the people, and their common history. In a work that has become exemplary, a group

of French authors led by Pierre Nora produced an eight-volume study of French monuments,

Les lieux de memoire (1984). Erecting these monuments, Nora argued, the state imprints

its changing self-representations on the citizens. This is memory as pantheon: the selective

representation of great personalities and events of the past.



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According to the recent (AugustSeptember, 2007) exhibition in the Sakharov Museum in

Moscow, there are now 1140 monuments and memorial plaques at various sites of the Gulag

within the territory of the former Soviet Union: stones, crosses, obelisks, bells, bas-reliefs,

and angels. There are also strange monsters, such as a concrete Leviathan, composed of

multiple human faces, with a cross in place of the nose in Magadan, and the Moloch of

Totalitarianism in Levashovo near St. Petersburg, which represents a robotic cannibal who

is devouring or raping a human figure. In contrast to the artistic experience of Holocaust

memorials, on the sites of the Gulag there are very few realistic monuments which depict

an actual prisoner at a moment of suffering. Mourning senseless loss on such a catastrophic

scale is an impossible task. Though this unrepresentability has been theorized less in the case

of the Gulag than in the Holocaust, the heirs of the Gulags victims have intuitively chosen

non-sacrificial monuments to commemorate their dead. In the current practice, stones and

monsters comprise two types of monuments that express the political nature of life and death

in the camps. Bare stones convey the memory of bare life, construed from the perspective of

the victims. Monster monuments express the unimaginable quality of the experience of the

soon-to-be-dead.Monuments remain silent and, practically speaking, invisible unless they are discussed,

questioned, interpreted; in other words, unless they interact with the current intellectual

and political discourse. On the other hand, public opinions, historical debates, and literary

imagery pass away with every subsequent generation or fashion if they are not embodied

in and anchored by monuments, memorials, and museums. Monuments without inscriptions

are mute, whereas texts without monuments are ephemeral. In culture, as in a computer, there

are two forms of memory, which might be likened to hardware and software. Soft memory

consists primarily of texts (including literary, historical, and other narratives), whereas hard

memory consists primarily of monuments. Of course, the soft and the hard are interdependent.

Museums, cemeteries, commemorative festivities, guided tours, and history textbooks arecomplicated systems that demonstrate multilevel interactions between the hardware (sculp-

tures, obelisks, memorials, historical places) and the software (songs, films, guidebooks,

inscriptions, historical studies) of cultural memory. It is not the mere existence of the hard-

ware and the software but their interaction, transparency, and conduct that give cultural

memory life.

As vehicles of cultural memory, texts and monuments differ in their relation to the public

sphere. Representations of history in a democratic society comprise an important part of

a public sphere that shares its ideals of inclusivity, free speech, and agonistic competition.

Fully applicable to texts about the past (professional and popular history, historical novels,

films, etc.), this vision does not work with monuments. They are monological; they usuallystand on their sites with no rivals to challenge them. Rarely do they debate and compete;

at a certain site of memory, there is no place for two monuments to expose two historical

positions on the event. There are exceptions of course; American Civil War memorials, which

in some cases feature monuments to each side of the war in close proximity, come to mind.

The Habermasian public sphere is a textual domain; public monuments do not comply with

its laws but instead remain outside of it.

If writing memoirs is predominantly an individual activity, constructing memorials is a

collective one. Moreover, because of its large scale and public nature, it generally requires the

participation of the state. By building monuments to its former leaders, the state affirms the

continuity of its political tradition. By building monuments to its former enemies and victims,

the state demonstrates the disruption of its historical continuity. Every such monument

affirms the difference between the current state and the former one. For the state, the political



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revelation of its guilt is a difficult task; the memorialization of its victims is even harder.

Almost all the projects of memorialization of the Soviet victims have been initiated by private

persons. Without private initiative, no book and no monument in Russia would describe the

terror. These initiatives are undertaken by enthusiasts of vastly different backgrounds. Among

those whom I have interviewed were a physicist, a plumber, a former army officer, and a

museum director. On the other hand, private individuals and voluntary associations cannot

erect monuments without the collaboration of the state. Access to archives is controlled by the

state (specifically the FSB, the descendant of the KGB), and this access has been diminishing

throughout the last decade. Financial resources and real estate, which are required for any

memorial, are usually owned by the state. Hard memory is controlled by the state, while

soft memory is the domain of civil society. This is probably the reason why many Russian

monuments are erected not on the former sites of murder, as is true in many German cases,

but near them. This pattern demonstrates not the replacement of the old regime by a new

one, but rather suggests their quiet coexistence.

But even such proximate location of memory is far from being the rule in Russia. Russian

memory is pervaded with soft texts, which rarely manifest in monumental forms. Memorywithout monuments is vulnerable to a cyclical, recurrent process of refutations and denials.

Feelings of guilt can be consoled with new voices, and even the most influential texts can

be challenged by new texts. Due to unique combinations of political circumstances, German

and Russian culture elaborated different forms of dealing with the past. German memory is

crystallized in hard monuments but intellectuals often lament the lack of cultural debate that

could animate them. The long construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (initiated

in 1999, completed in 2005) proved that this gigantic hardware initiative was capable of

inspiring a public debate of similar proportions. It was not the first time that the cycles of

German memory developed in this particular direction, from the hard to the soft. Russian

cycles invariably develop in the opposite direction, from the soft to the hard.However, this simple scheme, which I published a few years ago,40 no longer entirely

satisfies me. In Russian memory, I also see the proliferation of a third type or vehicle

of memory: the undead. I am referring to ghosts, spirits, vampires, dolls, and other man-

made and man-imagined simulacra that carry the memory of the dead. Three elements of

cultural memory, its software, hardware, and ghostware, are intimately connected. Usually,

ghosts live in texts; sometimes, they inhabit cemeteries and emerge from monuments. Most

often, ghosts appear before the living whose dead were not properly buried. Ghosts feature

interesting differences from texts and monuments. Texts are symbolic, while ghosts are

iconic in the semiotic sense of these terms (as signs, ghosts possess a visual resemblance to

the signified); in contrast to monuments, texts and ghosts are ephemeral; and in contrast totexts and monuments, ghosts are uncanny.

Decades ago, the Russian-American scholar Roman Jakobson examined Pushkins poems

(The Bronze Horseman, The Stone Guest, etc.) in which a statue turns into a specter to

deprive a human character of his mind or life; Jakobson stated that this sculptural myth was

a central theme of a great Russian poet.41 A contrasting idea was formulated more recently

by another Russian-American scholar, Mikhail Yampolsky, who believes that a monument

creates a mystical protective zone which stops the flow of time in its vicinity. 42 These

two ideas work well together. Precisely because monuments freeze history, their moments

of dynamism produce hauntological results. The mystical or hallucinatory resurgence of

monuments, as in Pushkins poems, is uncanny; the real and practical events that happen

to monuments, such as their removal, destruction, vandalism, or renaming, also provoke

strong responses in the observers. In 2002, unknown vandals wrote on the Solovetskii stone



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in St. Petersburg in red oil, Too few were shot. The activists of the Memorial Society

converted this situation into a media event, in which the local TV showed young men and

women climbing all over the stone and lovingly washing it with sponges. In April 2007, the

Estonian government moved the Bronze Soldier (a memorial statue honoring Soviet World

War II casualties) from the central square of Tallinn to a cemetery; this move caused street

riots and a successful cyber-attack on the governmental lines of communication. Estonians

blamed Russian political technologists for coming to Tallinn to organize these street riots

and Russian hackers for launching the cyber-attacks. In less dramatic circumstances, the

Moscow municipal government wished to move the Solovetskii stone, an important Russian

memorial to the victims of the Gulag, from one part of the Lubyanskaya square, where it

stands now, to another part; the Memorial Society organized a series of public events which,

in April 2008, convinced the government to leave the stone in peace.

The recent film 4(written by Vladimir Sorokin, directed by Ilia Khryzhanovskii, 2005)

illustrates the spectral dynamics of a post-catastrophic memory that produces the undead,

cherishes them, and, in rare acts of heroism, buries them. The central character, a Moscow

prostitute, travels deep into the countryside to attend the funeral of her sister. Her sister hadlived in a community of abandoned females who manufacture dolls made of bread. These

women use their yeasty dolls as substitutes for partners; they play, drink alcohol, and have

sex with these dolls. Creating a world of eerie simulacra, the dolls must be buried. In a

climactic moment, the only vital character, the prostitute, burns the bread corpses on the

grave of her sister in a gesture of despair and triumph.

The most popular Russian film of the decade, Night Watch and its sequel, Day Watch

(2004, 2006) demonstrate the post-Soviet infatuation with magic in a deliberately abstract, a-

historical context. Based on the trilogy by Sergei Lukianenko, a psychiatrist from Kazakhstan

who is one of the most popular post-Soviet authors, these films present an enormous tax-

onomy of immortal creatures. Vampires and other supernatural beasts live in Russia andrule it. Humans in this world are entirely deprived of self-control and political life. As in

a camp, these Muscovites are reduced to bare life, essentially the position of the vampires

cattle (vampires in this film prefer human blood but, when frustrated, drink pigs blood as

well). Actual politics are deployed by creatures of a higher order than vampires and humans.

These creatures are immortal and powerful but otherwise look like humans. Like Ameri-

cans, they are divided into two equally powerful parties, an achievement which has never

been accomplished by Muscovites. The origins of their conflict are projected in one episode

into medieval Europe, in another episode into the Asia of Genghis Khan. As in historical

debates between contemporary Russian intellectuals, the roots of the current problems are

presented as lost and found in the most distant time and spaces, but not in current or re-cent Russian politics. There is not a word in this movie about Stalin or the Soviets. The

contemporary commoners, all of whom are potential victims of vampires, are juxtaposed

against those noble warriors whose moments of glory and sources of conflicts are all in the

past. What matters is not happening here and now; it all happened in the past. The past,

which is imagined as grand and foreign, determines the actual, dismal present. While the

contemporary rulers are of alien and metaphysical origins, the vampires are local and earthly.

Curiously, the most important of these vampires is played by the only actor in this young,

all-star cast who was famous in the Soviet era, Valerii Zolotukhin. The vampires represent,

as they do in Slavic folklore, the unburied dead, while the remarkable face of their leader

reflects a free play of Soviet shadows.43

These films convey a static, irresolvable melancholy which risks slipping into paranoia.

If Russia were shepherded by vampires, this is the worldview that they would disseminate



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among their human chattel. In the battle between light and dark forces, what is at stake

is probably not the right to license vampires bloodsucking activities, as the Night Watch

suggests. Inverting the films metaphor, the only means of preventing the reproduction of

vampires is to bury, acknowledge, and remember the dead. Following Sigmund Freud, Walter

Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida, some scholars in Sociology and Cultural Studies insist that

to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it and that the task of the

reader. . .

is not to exorcise these ghosts but rather to learn to think through what they have

given us to consider.44 As Freud stated in his famous essay, The Uncanny (1919), there

is nothing new or extraordinary in ghosts. In his definition, the uncanny is something

which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it. Freud

emphasized the particular way of rendering the uncanny experience that later scholars would

call metonymic. These stories feature dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off

at the wrist, and other corporeal metonymies. The experience of the uncanny depends on the

lost and found members of human bodies, which are sometimes autonomous and sometimes

incorporated into other, now monstrous, bodies. When a living or revenant part represents

the perished whole, it feels uncanny. The past is large, integrated, and self-sufficient, like theUSSR; what returns from it is dispersed, fragmented, and scary. Freuds formulas defined

the uncanny as a particular form of memory, one that is intimately connected to fear. The

higher the energy of forgetting, the stronger is the horror of remembering. The combination

of memory and fear is, precisely, the uncanny.

In Tengis Abuldzes filmRepentance(1984), which is now a Soviet classic, the daughter

of a victim digs up the corpse of the dictator. She goes on trial but does not repent: she would

do it 300 times again, she declares. It is not the corpse of the dictator that is uncanny in this

film but the living dictator, as he is remembered or imagined by his former subjects. As in

SophoclesAntigone, the perpetually moving corpse begets new tragedies; in this case, it is

the suicide of the grandson of the dictator.45 However, the ethical message of the film, theresponsibility of the corpse, and the right of revenge on the part of the living, was rarely

disputed. In the recent film The Living(2006, directed by Aleksandr Veledinskii), a Russian

soldier of the Chechen War, Kir, is rescued by his comrades who die in action. On his way

home from the war, Kir murders his officer and betrays his bride. He does not care; he is

possessed by the ghosts of his lost comrades, who come to him alive though other people

do not see them. When Kir and his ghostly companions travel to Moscow, what they (and

the viewers) actually see is the burial monument to Stalin near the Kremlin Wall. The movie

ends with Kirs visit to an abandoned cemetery where he hopes to find his friends buried like

heroes. While trying to find these graves, Kir dies; immediately, he joins the company of his

ghostly fellows. The multiple tricks that the undead play with the living in this film force theviewer to suspect that the soldier was probably dead from the very beginning; perhaps all or

a large part of what we see actually happened to his ghost.

These two films, Repentanceand The Living, mark the start and the possible end of the

post-Soviet transition. In the 1980s, it seemed that the most important goal was to punish the

dead dictator and in this way, to restore justice posthumously; twenty years later, the living

are still struggling with the authorities but their unburied dead are friends, not foes. The early

post-catastrophic culture attributed the actual problems of the present to the dead corpses

of the past. Now this culture is more eager to respond to the present. There are enemies

who are alive and deserve death, but there are also friends who are dead and need to be

buried. Both films play on the uncanny effects of communication between the living and the

dead; but while Repentancecelebrated the change of generations, the trial of memory, and

historical time,The Livingdeconstructs the meaning of death in an obsessive way that makes



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time cyclical and history irrelevant. Still hopeful for the future, Repentanceargued for a new

ethical order that would include dead corpses in its scope. Self-censoring any sign of hope,

The Livingshows the ghostly nature of post-catastrophic consciousness, which obscures the

very difference between the living and the dead. The post-Soviet trial ofthe dead turns into

the new Russian minglingwiththe dead.

For a long time, specters have been haunting this space that survived communism. While

the living and the undead are growing more accustomed to each other, they develop uneasy

friendships in which one can find a hint of hope. As Derrida urged, we must learn to live

withghosts. . .To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. . .If I am getting

ready to speak at length about ghosts. . .it is in the name of justice.46

NOTES

This essay was written while I was a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studiesat Princeton University. Elizabeth R. Moore helped immensely in formulating my ideas in plain English.

The comments of Andy Rabinbach, Eric Naiman, Svetlana Boym, Eli Zaretsky, Yuri Slezkine, MischaGabowitch, Alexei Yurchak, Sergei Oushakine, and Igal Halfin, are much appreciated.1. For a review, see Duncan Bell, Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory,Constellations

15, no. 1 (2008): 148166.2. Stephen Kotkin,Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 19702000(Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 2003), 182.3. Grigorii Saltup,Barak i sto deviatnadtsatyi (Petrozavodsk, 2004).4. In this, Iurii Dmitriev is similar to another enthusiast of memory, a leader of the Memorial

Society, Dmitrii Iurasov, who developed his interest in the repressions by reading Soviet encyclopedias;see Stephen Kotkin, Terror, Rehabilitation, and Historical Memory: An Interview with Dmitrii Iurasov,

Russian Review 51 (April 1992): 245. For another example of the excavated remains and contested memories,see Irina Paperno, Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror, Representations75 (2001): 89118.

5. Iurii Dmitruiev, Belbaltlag otkryvaet tainy,Kurer Karelii, November 12, 2003.6. Pominalnye spiski Karelii.19371938. Yurii Dmitriev, ed. (Petrozavodsk 2002); see also Yurii

DmitrievMesto rasstrela Sandarmokh (Petrozavodsk, 1999); Bor krasnyi ot prolitoi krovi. Yurii Dmitriev,ed. (Petrozavodsk 2000).

7. Tsena pamiati,Karelskaia guberniia, 26 (315), June 26, 2002.8. Pavel Gutiontov and Andrei Chernov, Ikh prodolzhaiut rasstrelivat do sikh por,Novaia gazeta

November 9, 2002.9. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, The Regimes and their Dictators: Perspectives in Comparison,

in Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in Comparison, Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, ed. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press 1997), 8.

10. Mischa Gabowitsch ed.,Pamiat o voine 60 let spustia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,2005).

11. See Ernst Nolte, Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the1980s, inThe Aspects of the Third Reich,ed. H.W. Koch (London: Macmillan, 1985); Dominick LaCapra,

Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), ch.5; JornRusen, The Logic of Historicization, History and Memory9, nos. 12 (1997): 113146.

12. Francois Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,2001), 15.

13. Alexandra Samarinas interview with Alexandrom Iakovlevym, Obschaia gazeta, October 18,2001.

14. To receive a legal exoneration, a survivor of the Gulag or his/her spouse had to prove theirinnocence against those accusations which had been formulated half a century ago. Victims could not viewtheir KGB files. The officials who took part in the terror and were repressed afterwards as spies, wreckers,etc., could not be exonerated: instead of the original accusations, they were deemed guilty of participating inthe repressions. The financial compensation that the rehabilitated victims of repressions have received

from the state has been negligible; for details, see Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: the Story of theMemorial Movement(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993).

15. V.V. Iofe, Reabilitatisiia kak istoricheskaia problema, in hisGranitsy smysla(St. Petersburg:Memorial, 2002), 7.



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16. Jacques Derrida,Specters of Marx, Peggy Kamuf trans. (New York: Verso 1994), 9.17. For a serious critique of Freudian concepts of mourning, repression, etc. in application to collective

memory, see Wulf Kansteiner, Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of CollectiveMemory Studies,History and Theory41 (2002): 17997.

18. For attempts to synthesize Freud and Benjamin by demonstrating the connection between melan-cholia and historicism, see Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge 2003); David L.Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2003); Alessia Ricciardi,The Ends of Mourning. Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Palo Alto, CA: StanfordUnivesity Press, 2003). New readings of Freuds works on mourning, melancholia, and object-relationstend to accept the endured, interminable mourning as a non-pathological condition which Derrida calledmidmourning; see Tammy Clewell, Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freuds Psychoanalysis of Loss,

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association52, no. 1 (2004): 4367. In these works, the impact ofFreuds reality testing onto the work of mourning has been taken for granted.

19. Liudmila Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation. Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 7071. The American journalist Harrison E. Salisbury who wasa Moscow correspondent for the New York Timesfrom 1949 to 1960, was surprised to see how sad theordinary Russian was; Salisbury noticed an unseen but real burden which weights his shoulders; see hisintroduction to his wifes memoirs in Charlotte Y. Salisbury,Russian Diary(New York: Walker, 1974), 7.

20. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich,The Inability to Mourn (New York: Grove Press, 1975),

7, 14, 25.21. Charles S. Maier,The Unmasterable Past. History, Holocaust, and German National Identity

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Saul Friedlander ed.,Probing the Limits of Represen-tation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); DominickLaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995);Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995);Geoffrey H. Hartman,The Longest Shadow. In the Aftermath of the Holocaust(Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 1996); Robert R. Shandley ed., Unwilling Germans? The Goldgahen Debate(Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsr aume: Formen und Wandlungen deskulturullen Ged achnisses(Munich: Beck, 1999); James Young,At Memory Edge: After-Images of the Holo-caust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Vamik D. Volkan,Gabriele Ast and William Greer, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission

and its Consequences (New York: Brunner, 2002); Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory. CulturalMediations on the Holocaust(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 2003); Daniel Levy and NatanSznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

22. Dan Diner,Beyond the Conceivable. Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust(Berkeley:University of California Press, 2000), 191192, italics mine.

23. Kansteiner, Finding Meaning in Memory.24. Marianne Hirsch,Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Post-Memory(Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1997).25. Bell, Agonistic Democracy, 150.26. Jurii Brodskii. Solovki.Dvadtsat let osobogo naznacheniia(Moskva: ROSSPEN, 2002), 3.27. Tony Judt, The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,Daedalus21,

no. 4 (1992): 99; Richard S. Esbenshade, Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in

Postwar East-Central Europe,Representations49 (1995): 7296.28. In a simple experiment, I googled two names, Putin and Stalin, in Cyrillic letters; 1,250,000Russian internet pages mention these two names. Then I googled Putin and Bush, also in Cyrillic: to mysurprise, there were half of this number, 558,000 references. If to repeat the experiment in Latin, the resultsare dramatically different: 180,000 for Putin, Stalin; 502,000 for Putin, Bush (Data from February 11, 2008).

29. For Western histories of the Memorial Society, see Adler,Victims of Soviet Terror; Anne White,The Memorial Society in the Russian Provinces, Europe-Asia Studies47, no. 8 (1995): 13431366.

30. Iofe, Itogi veka, in his:Granitsy smysla, 52.31. Giorgio Agamben,Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life(Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1995), 83.32. Giorgio Agamben,Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books,

1999).33. Nadezhda Mandelstam,Vtoraia kniga(Paris: IMCA-Press, 1972), 685.34. In Germany during 1967, Mitscherlichs offered the similar distinction between the denial of the

past, which had been made already impossible, and the obsolescence of guilt, which they described asthe actual feeling of millions; see Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn,14.



19/19


35. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, Failing the Stalin Test,Foreign Affairs85, no. 1(January/February 2006). According to Leonid Byzov, about 20.1% of Russians recall that their relativeswerein the Gulag.Online vremia novostei187, October, 12 2007, available at www.vremia.ru/print/18876.html.

36. Dina Khapaeva and Nikolai Koposov, Pozhaleite, liudi, palachei. Massovoe istoricheskoe soz-nanie v postsovetskoi Rossii, available at http://www.polit.ru/analytics/2007/11/21/stalinism.html

37. See e.g. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, Soviet Nostalgia: An Impediment toRussian Democratization, Washington Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2005): 8396; Maria Ferretti, Rasstroistvo

pamiati: Rossiia i stalinizm, available at http://www.liberal.ru/article_print.asp?Num=98; Charles S. Maier,Heies und kaltes Gedachtnis. Uber die politische Halbwertszeit von Nazismus und Kommunismus,Transit22 (Winter 20012002): 153165; for re-evaluation of this position, see Tatiana Zhurchenko, Thegeopolitics of memory, available at www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-05-10-zhurzhenko-en.html.

38. Domenic La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2001).

39. Aleksandr Filippov, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 19452006. Kniga dlia uchitelia (Moskva:Prosveshchenie, 2007), 90. This book was the subject of several conferences of teachers and heated debatesin the press. Despite the public outrage, the presidential administration supported the use of Filippovs bookin high schools. Based on these guidelines, the actual textbook for Russian high schools is being prepared; inDecember 2007, the authors declared that they would soften their formulations on Stalin and the repressions.The composition of this textbook was overseen by a leading ideologist of Putins rule, Gleb Pavlovskii, who

states that the Soviet Union is the global treasure of social, legal, and existential models. Predislovie,inSovetskie liudi. Stseny iz istorii, Natala Kozlova ed. (Moskva: Evropa, 2005), 45.

40. See Alexander Etkind, Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia andGermany,Grey Room16 (2004): 3659.

41. Roman Jakobson,Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth(The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1975).42. Mikail Yampolsky, In the Shadow of Monuments, inSoviet Hieroglyphics. Visual Culture in

Late Twentieth-Century Russia, Nancy Condee ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93112.43. These films have been the subject of several studies: Stephen M. Norris draws analogies be-

tween these films plotline and the actual events in Russian politics in In the Gloom: The Politi-cal Lives of Undead Bodies in Timur Bekmambetovs Night Watch, Kinokultura (2007), available athttp://www.kinokultura.com/2007/16-norris.shtml; a glossy Russian volume demonstrates the kulturolo-gia approach to these films and features essays by Boris Groys and Mikhail Ryklin,Dozor kak symptom.

B.Kupriianov and M.Surkov, eds. (Moskva: Falanster 2006).44. Avery F. Gordon,Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7; Gerhard Richter, Introduction in Benjamins Ghosts. Interven-tion in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, Gerhard Richter, ed. (Palo Alto: Stanford UniversityPress, 2002), 5. On ghosts of the post-socialist memory, see Istvan Rev, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory ofPost-Communism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004); Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

45. Interestingly, the recentKatynby Andrzej Waida (2007), which shows the slaughter of thousandsof Polish officers by their Russian allies in 1940, also refers to Antigone. A female character struggles tobury her brother who was murdered by Russians; to earn money for the monument, she sells her hair to aWarsaw theater which needs wigs for their production ofAntigone.

46. Derrida,Specters of Marx, xviii.

Alexander Etkind is a Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History in Cambridge

University. His publications include Eros of the Impossible: History of Psychoanalysis in

Russia (1996), Khlyst. Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (1998) andNon-fiction po-russki pravda

(2007).

Post-Soviet Hauntology

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