post-soviet hauntology: cultural memory of the soviet terror

Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memoryof the Soviet Terror

Alexander Etkind

In Russia, where many millions were unlawfully murdered during the Soviet period, thecultural practices of memory are inadequate to these losses. While Europeans are talkingabout the “mnemonic age,” a “memory fest,” and the obsession with the past “around theglobe,” Russians complain about the historical “amnesia” in their country.1 Sporadically,some Russians outsource their memorial concerns abroad. Sometimes they strive to protectRussian monuments in Tallinn, Vienna, and elsewhere. Sometimes they attempt to silencethe public sorrows of Russia’s neighbors in respect to a past that they happen to share withRussians. 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 Russiansremember the Soviet terror fairly well, though they vastly differ in their interpretations ofthis terror. In contrast to the abuse of memory for nationalist purposes, the most importantdevelopments of Russian memory are structured not by nation or ethnicity, but by solidaritybetween different communities and generations. While the state is led by former KGBofficers who avoid giving public apologies, building monuments, or opening archives, thestruggling civil society and the intrepid reading public are possessed by the unquiet ghostsof the Soviet era. Haunted by the unburied past, post-Soviet culture has produced perversememorial practices that are worthy of detailed study. While the American historian StephenKotkin perceives a “Shakespearian quality” in the post-Soviet transformation, it is no surprisethat the participating observers of this process employ equally dramatic metaphors, partiallyinvented and partially imported, in their attempts to understand what has happened to theircivilization.2 In a land where millions remain unburied, the dead return as the undead. Theydo so in novels, films, and other forms of culture which reflect, shape, and possess people’smemory. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology,” I have developed a theory of culturalmemory 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 distinguishedby small, regular depressions in the earth. About 9,000 people were shot on this spot in 1937and 1938. The victims were men and women of sixty ethnicities and nine religions, with anunusually high proportion from the political and academic elites. More than a thousand ofthe murdered were delivered here from many hundreds of miles away, from the Solovetskiicamp, 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 peoplethan corpses.

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

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prisoner – good training in itself. The discovery was based on the testimony of CaptainMatveev who was sent by the NKVD to Karelia in 1937, shot thousands in Sandormokh,and was arrested and interrogated in 1939. Having survived in the archive, the evidence heprovided helped lead to the discovery of the remains of his victims. Ironically, Matveev alsosurvived; he died as an old man in 1981.

The excavations at the site recovered bones and skulls, many marked by a bullet hole.Decomposing under a thin layer of soil, the corpses of the people whom Matveev executedon each of his daily missions form a recognizable depression in the ground. There is amemorial complex in Sandarmokh, which consists of wooden sharply-roofed stakes whichmark every mass grave. Dozens of these markers are scattered around the pine forest. Thememorial also includes a figurative sculpture by Grigorii Saltup, a prolific artist and writerfrom Petrozavodsk. After taking part in the excavations, Saltup applied to the ministry ofculture of Karelia with a project for a monument. The government promised money but nevergave it; Saltup believes that the ministry wanted a kickback. Having a three-meter modelin his workshop, Saltup mortgaged his apartment, reduced the project, and completed it ina local factory.3 The monument shows an angel with spread wings and tied hands, waitingto be shot. On the top of a stone obelisk, an inscription declares, “People, do not kill eachother.”

I interviewed Iurii Dmitriev, a slight man with a sailor’s mustache and unusual energy.He is obsessed with the duty of memory which he feels as his personal responsibility.His father served in the Soviet military; his own family’s connection to the Soviet terrorseems to be irrelevant.4 Among his discoveries is the largest known burial ground in thearea of the Belomorkanal, the notorious construction site of the Gulag which connectedthe Baltic and White seas. Dmitriev knew that in 1933, the hectic race to beat the springfloods killed about ten thousand prisoners who dug the ten kilometer-long rocky, frozenterrain of the 165th canal, which connects the Northern and the Southern parts of theBelomorkanal. For many months, Dmitriev explored the nearby woods and marshes withno success. Wandering in the woods with a local hunter, Dmitriev found a deep hole madeby a raccoon that had dug up remnants from under a layer of stones. Nearby, Dmitrievidentified about a hundred depressions in the moss floor. In this marshy land, the victims haddug deep holes, in which they were shot and covered with stones so that predators wouldnot reveal them (which eventually happened anyway). There is no monument there.5 In1997, Dmitriev found another mass grave in Krasny Bor, 20 kilometers from Petrozavodsk.After marking about 40 “shooting holes,” he started the excavations. After months of workwith a shovel and a computer, Dmitriev identified the names of 1193 victims and twoexecutioners. Having failed to convince the local authorities to allocate money for a memorial,Dmitriev erected a self-made one. Two rocks stand vertically like strange teeth gazing at theskies.

In 2002, after many years of assiduous research and begging for money, Dmitriev publisheda thousand-page volume which lists more than 13,000 biographical entries for those who weremurdered in Karelia in 1937–1938.6 In the initial stage of composing this book, Dmitrievwas supported by Ivan Chukhin, a police officer who became a deputy of the Russian Duma;in the 1990s, such people could open archival doors. A third member of this group was PerttiVuori. Chukhin’s father was an NKVD officer who was implicated in the terror; Vuori’s fatherwas murdered in 1936 during the “repressions” in Karelia. In spite of their opposing relationsto the catastrophe in the past, their work of mourning was a joint project. But working ontheir Book of Memory, Chukhin and Vuori died young men. Having survived them, Dmitrievpublicly states that his coauthors were killed by “the black energy of crimes and murders

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184 Constellations Volume 16, Number 1, 2009

which were committed decades before.” Using his own words, the local newspaper describedDmitriev’s 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 shootingprotocols. 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 thatthis 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 consensusencourages the proliferation of monuments but, since there is not much to debate if everyoneagrees, 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-knownexample, about 30,000 people lie in unmarked graves in Toksovo near St. Petersburg. A partof 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 Naziterror, in the Soviet Union no specific group (ethnic, territorial, professional, etc.) sufferedsignificantly more than other groups, with one exception: “A particularly heavy toll amongStalin’s victims was, of course, extracted from the state and party apparatus.”9 Following thisline, 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 differedfrom Nazi German exterminations, in which the victims and perpetrators were distanced bycrystal-clear constructions. “Unjustified repressions” means, exactly, self-imposed, mean-ingless social catastrophe. If the Holocaust was the construction and extermination of theOther, 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 Germanyand Communist Russia featured multiple parallels and contacts; but the cultural memoriesof 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 numerousresearchers. The memory of World War II has recently become a subject of Russo-German



comparative studies.10 In contrast, the scholarship on the Russian memory of Soviet terroris 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, inthe atmosphere of Detente, the question of the (in)comparability of the Nazi crimes launcheda fierce discussion which is remembered as Historikerstreit. The philosopher Ernst Nolteemphasized 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 knewof these Soviet practices well before the Nazis came to power, thus suggesting the directinfluence of the Soviets upon the Nazis. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas found in thesearguments an unacceptable “historicization of the Holocaust” which, he argued, relieves theburden of historical guilt.11 In 1998, Francois Furet still characterized comparisons betweenFascism and Communism as a “taboo subject.”12 In Russia, this was not the case. A formermember 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 chairedThe Presidential Committee on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Persecutions; ashe knew well, “rehabilitation” was far from repentance.14 The GULAG survivor and founderof 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 “evaluatingthe Soviet period of Russian history in terms as clear as those used for evaluating NaziGermany.”15 He obviously wanted the Russia of the 1990s to produce as “clear” a vision ofits violent past as Germany managed to do.

Comparing and contrasting the Russian and German situations of memory, several majorfactors 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 thecollapse of its Nazi state. Second, the Soviet victims were significantly more diverse than theNazi victims; their descendants are dispersed and in some cases (e.g. Russian and Ukrainianpolitical elites), have competing interests. Third, Germany’s post-war transformation wasforced upon it by military defeat and occupation, while Russia’s post-Soviet transformationwas a political choice. Fourth, the memory of the Nazi period has developed in different waysin Germany’s Western and Eastern parts; it may happen that the situation in East Germany ismore similar to the Russian case than the better-known situation in the West. Finally, amongthe victims of both regimes and their descendants, the subjective experience of victimizationand mourning was significantly different. In Soviet camps, most of the political prisonersshared the principles of their perpetrators but believed that in their personal cases, they weremistakenly identified. In Nazi camps, on the other hand, the typical victim did not question hisidentification (e.g., as a Jew), but objected to the general reasons for his persecution. Theseare two deeply different sentiments, which had different consequences: a strong and coherentanti-Fascist and Zionist movement in one case and a chaotic mix of loyalty, escapism, andresistance to the Soviet state in the other.

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



than confusion or doubt; one has to know what is buried where – and it is necessary. . .that, inwhat remains of him, he remains there. Let him stay there and move no more!”16 Interpretingways of life which were relatively orderly, Sigmund Freud famously distinguished betweenmourning and melancholia, basing this distinction on the subject’s ability to acknowledge thereality of the loss. In Freud’s 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. Thefailure to recognize death as death produces the uncanny. When the dead are not properlyburied and mourned, they turn into the undead. Unlike some researchers on memory,17

I believe that Freud’s metaphors retain their heuristic value. However, different historicalcontexts shift the borders between such categories as certainty and doubt; mourning andhope; health and pathology; and, as Derrida insisted so vigorously and ghosts demonstrate sooften, life and death. Scholars have not yet explored what happens to mourning/melancholiain 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 noinformation about the loss is available or trustworthy – Freud’s clinical distinction shouldbe modified.18 In this situation, uncertainty was external and realistic rather than internaland pathological. In an indefinitely large part of the Soviet experience, death could not berecognized as death, and survival could not be relied upon as life. The state, the sourceof repressions, was also the only source of information. Millions were convicted for longterms “with no right of correspondence”; no information was received from them for yearsor decades. As we know now, some of these victims were murdered immediately after theirsentencing and some of them died later in the camps. Relatives were usually not informedin either case. People returned from the camps earlier or later than their sentences weresupposed 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 in1990. She remembers the first prisoners who returned to Moscow as the undead: thesepeople “had been forgotten, written off, and now they were out there, on the streets, like thewalking dead.” Clinically, a disturbance of reality-testing distinguishes psychotic conditions,such as paranoia, from more benign ones, such as melancholy. But the ghostly panic thatwas launched by the return of the repressed from the Gulag in 1953 was not an individualdisease or an epidemic. It was a post-catastrophic condition that should be understood as acommunitarian event, for which the integral, long-lasting effects have been clearly differentfrom the sum of individual ailments and recoveries. One can compare this condition tomelancholy or paranoia, but its subject was not an individual but a community, not thescreaming general talking to Dmitrii Ivanovich but Soviet society, which has continuedtalking to its victims even after its own death.



Marking the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 and the end of the Soviet regime from1986–1991, 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 inRussia. However, Germans had already experienced the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946) andthe Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963–1965). In Russia, an attempt to try the CommunistParty failed in 1992. Germans began in the sixties to open memorials and museums on thesites of camps. Russians started opening memorials in the nineties. Comparing the Russianand German memory of terror is like comparing two individuals, an adolescent and an oldman. One needs to imagine the old man in his younger years in order to understand theiractual difference.

The first study of German memory, The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and MargaretMitscherlich, 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 inan astute cultural critique of German society of the 1960s, the Mitscherlichs identifieda syndrome which consisted of the “unconscious fixation on the past,” “collective egodepletion,” “blockage of social imagination,” and material satisfaction. Germany needed “apolitical 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 theenormity of the catastrophe that lay behind them. . .the country seems to have exhausted itscapacity to produce politically effective ideas”; as a result, political life froze into “mereadministrative routine.” Atypically for psychologists, the Mitscherlichs blamed the politicalsystem rather than specific individuals. “Hard work and its success soon covered up the openwounds left by the past. . .Economic restoration was accompanied by the growth of a newself-esteem.” Every word here is true for the Russia of the 21st century, with the difference thateconomic 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 societyof the 2000s, was “at least materially, on the whole better off than ever before. . .it [felt] noincentive to expose its interpretation of the recent past to the inconvenient questioning ofothers.” It also had no reason to overcome the “affective isolation of the Germans from therest of the world, which started under the Nazi regime”; this self-isolation has only just begunto change, wrote these German psychologists in 1967. The working hypothesis of this oldbook is still relevant, though in a context that its authors would find hard to imagine: “Ourhypothesis views the political and social sterility of present-day Germany as being broughtabout by a denial of the past.”20

Talking about Russia of 2008, I would only replace “sterility” with “apathy” and “denial”with “misrepresentation.” Politically and culturally, the aftermath of president Yeltsin’s rulehas proven to be very different from the aftermath of Chancellor Adenauer’s. However, thisanachronistic comparison gives modest hope for the future. A number of studies demonstratethat the transformation of German memory reflected and led the broader development ofculture and society.21 If German memory dramatically changed after the time analyzedby the Mitscherlichs, Russian memory could also undergo such a transformation in thefuture.

The prominent Holocaust historian, Dan Diner, recently re-examined this problem. Hestated that the Nazi regime eliminated those whom Germans considered a “part of a culturallyand 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 Sovietregime defined both victims and perpetrators “as part of the same historical mnemonic



collective”; in such a situation, “the process of overcoming the evil naturally becomeswrestling with oneself.”22 Naturalizing ethnic differences (as if Germans were naturallydifferent from Jews and did not invest enormous efforts into construing this religious groupas the national Other), Diner denies the ability of non-ethnic groups to structure “mnemoniccollectives” and remember their dead in a collective way. Unavoidably, this “thesis of afundamental difference” (Diner) between ethnic and other groups underestimates those typesof solidarity which surpass national borders. But in the Cold War era, the memory of the Gulagwas preserved by international groups, which consisted of American and European historiansand politicians, and Soviet dissidents and memoirists. These people smuggled, translated,and published manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, andmany others; they produced magisterial pieces of scholarship such as Hannah Arendt’s TheOrigins of Totalitarianism (1951) or Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968). In casesof genocide, global memory has played various roles in relation to national memories, fromsupplement to catalyst to substitute.

Starting with Maurice Halbwachs’ classical argument that collective memory requiresa 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 andJewish 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 anddo 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 weresuccessfully exterminated and did not leave descendants who would mourn them. Dinercharacterizes such crimes as historically describable but mnemonically non-transmissible.With hesitation, Diner makes an exception to this rule for those Soviet groups who sufferedfrom repressions which were (if not in Bolshevik theory, then in their practice) defined byethnicity. 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 Diner’s nationalization of memory (i.e. the identification of the remembering collectivewith the nation) historically true and morally defensible?

I do not believe so. Diner’s concept of collective memory seems to be custom-madefor the Nazi Holocaust. Designed to clarify comparisons between the Holocaust and othercases of mass murder, it precludes many of these comparisons. Diner seems to operatewithin 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 toDiner, 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 topass, preserve, and exchange their feelings; culture provides them with the instruments forthese purposes. Using cultural means, some individuals and groups are able to shape thefeelings of other individuals and groups. With the help of texts, images, and other culturalinstruments, some individuals even create new groups and collectives. Besides nations andclasses, there is a third type of collective: associations, as Alexis de Tocqueville first describedthem. 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 thepolitical to the generational to the memorial, and shaped their identities in this struggle.



The active role of the Memorial Society, a typically Tocquevillian association, exemplifiesthe post-Soviet type of the “remembering collective” and testifies to the role of memory instructuring the social space.

The concept of cultural memory is close to the concept of collective memory but issignificantly broader. Cultural memory presumes a remembering “collective” only in thebroadest and loosest sense; the cultural communities of those who subscribe to a certainjournal 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 the29th of October, 2007, the Memorial Society commemorated 70 years since the start of theGreat Terror by reading the names of its victims. For twelve hours, volunteers read aloud2,600,000 names of those who were shot in 1937–1938. Some of those who read thesenames added “my grandfather,” “my uncle.” The Memorial Society intends to repeat thisperformance annually; indeed, in many provincial centers such as Vologda, descendants ofthe victims come annually, on “The Day of the Political Prisoners” on October 30th, to thelocal memorials. Emil Durkheim has sensitized us to the concept of rituals as the meansof 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 movesbetween 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 rememberingcollective 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 thetradition of Walter Benjamin. “Multimedia collages” of cultural memory integrate multipletypes 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 herresearch on the “postmemory” of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch emphasized the relevanceof personal artifacts, such as photographs, family albums, and letters, for the memory ofparents’ and grandparents’ experience. The crucial interaction between post-memory andpublic memory, however, remains unexplored in her work.24 With time, public forms ofmemory, 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 Gulagthemselves. The initial denial of the past transforms into the public interest in history, whichis represented in multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of events and personalitiesof the past.

Multi-Historicism

Though Dunkan Bell believes that in a “historical representation,” one can distinguishbetween “social memory, mythology, and critical history,”25 I doubt the practical value ofthis 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 examplesgenerously teach us, what was believed to be true yesterday is not considered to be truetoday. Cultural memory is a living realm which changes with history. Works of fiction whichdo not claim truth (e.g. historical novels) or genres with unverifiable validity (e.g. memoirs)are difficult to categorize according to Bell’s tripartite scheme. Borders between myths andtruths tend to shift and curve from one political position to another and from one generation



to another. These movements of truth in the space of memory comprise, in their own turn, animportant part of cultural history. In democratic and other societies, various institutions ofpower compete for control over cultural memory, i.e. for the patrol on the borders betweentruth and myths in the representation of the past. For some political regimes, it is crucial toinsist on their definitions of truth; when they fail to do so, they collapse. Having much atstake, 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 in1997 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 notereproduces, the onion-shaped cupolas of the cathedral, which it previously had and whichit has now, are cut off and replaced by unusual pyramids. The local historian Jurii Brodskiibelieves that the atypical cupolas that are depicted on the note date this picture at the end ofthe 1920s.26 At that time, the semi-destroyed monastery housed the Solovetskii camp, theearliest and one of the most important in the Gulag. It would be brash to assert a conspiracytheory 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 areprosaic processes of serendipity, which are then interpreted by enthusiasts of memory. Suchinterpretation constitutes an act of memory in itself, a performative act which is no lesssignificant than other initiatives of memory, such as the renaming of a street or the writingof a memoir.

In contemporary Russia, history is omnipresent. In the press, parliamentary debates, andpolitical speeches, historical concepts like “Stalinism,” “cult of personality,” and “repres-sions” are rhetorically employed as often as modern legal or economic terms. The events ofthe mid-20th century are still perceived as a living, contentious experience which uncannilythreatens 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 WesternEurope has been a shortage of memory, in the continent’s other half the problem is reversed.Here there is too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw.”27 Historicalmemory in Russia is a living, de-centered combination of symbols and judgments which areexperienced simultaneously, all at once, responding to various political needs and culturaldesires. 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 conflictsbetween 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 callmulti-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 theTerrible and Grigorii Rasputin. There are astronomers who have written volumes on “TheNew Chronology,” which claims that in the Middle Ages, Mongols did not occupy Russiabut rather Russians occupied Europe. There are academics and officials of law-enforcementagencies who believe that the years of Stalinism were the best time for Russia. However, themajority of teachers, scholars, and politicians support the established ideas of history. Theyhave to defend them daily.

The most noticeable manifestation of this multi-historicism in popular culture borders onkitsch. A fancy St. Petersburg restaurant called “Russian Kitsch: Cafe of the TransitionalPeriod” features grand frescos executed in the manner of Socialist Realism, in which Sovietcollective farmers dance with American Indians, while Leonid Brezhnev, looking like Frank



Sinatra, gives a political speech to a stone-age tribe. This seemingly postmodern attitudein many sites of contemporary Russian culture is ubiquitous. In the very successful filmThe Peculiarities of National Hunting (1995; director Alexander Rogozhkin), a Finnishhistorian studies the rituals of Russian hunting. During his field trip to Russia, he falls intothe company of some drunken hunters. While they are drinking and shooting, the studentvisualizes gorgeous scenes of hunting with Borzoi dogs and aristocratic beauties. The wholestory is based on the interpenetration of a pathetic present and an extraordinary but irrelevantpast.

Currently, history seems to divide the population more than politics and economics. Thevast majority of Russians support Putin, but about half of these supporters hate Stalinand about half respect him. Most probably, it means that these people are divided intheir actual, substantive idea of Putin as well: some support Putin because they see himas different from Stalin, while others support Putin because they believe he is similarto Stalin. The content of Russians’ varying interpretations of history is highly relevantto current politics. For obvious reasons, sociological polls do not provide access to thiscontent.

The liberal-minded Russian press compares Putin to Stalin daily and speculates aboutthe coming “thaw” (the historical term which scholars use for the short period of relativeliberalization after Stalin’s death).28 The details of Stalin’s life and the names of his croniesarouse public interest, as if they are politically pertinent. “Stalinism” continues to be thecenter of gravity of Russian intellectual discourse; in a similar way, American historiansand intellectuals make their studies relevant by referring to “September 11.” Specters ofStalin are haunting a post-Soviet culture that produces dozens of alternative histories of “themiraculous Georgian,” as Lenin once called Stalin. In Vladimir Sharov’s novel Before andThen, Stalin is a son and lover of the immortal Madame de Stael. In Vladimir Sorokin’sBlue 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 Krusanov’s The Angel’s Bite, an unnamedEurasian ruler is of Russian-Chinese origin, sleeps with his sister, and murders his friendsand foes. In Dmitrii Bykov’s Justification, Stalin subjects people to unbearable suffering inorder to select those few who are fit to survive it all: those who give up under torture andconfess to invented crimes have betrayed Stalin and must perish, while those who resist tothe end are preserved, healed, and trained to be KGB operatives and Soviet leaders. Most ofthese stories deconstruct themselves. Krusanov’s hero, the dictator, in an attempt to invadethe world brings it to its end. Bykov’s protagonist, a Moscow historian and author of arevisionist theory of Stalinism, commits suicide.

The historicizing drive can go much deeper. Currently, the hit of high literature is VladimirSorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (2006); set in 2027, it depicts the future Russia as a Chinesecolony which will restore the political system of Ivan the Terrible, with its dynasty, publicexecutions, and the omnipresent oprichniki (Ivan’s death squads). On the other side of thepolitical spectrum, a big hit of the Russian media is a 70-minute long TV-show called Deathof 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 ofPutin), this documentary presents Orthodox Byzantium as the predecessor of the Russianstate, a victim of Western intrigues and Jewish capital. Anachronistically, this film appliesthe political slang which came into popular currency during Putin’s reign (successor, agentsof 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 butconfused Russia from repeating the fate of Byzantium.



Making Sense of It

The first memorial to the victims of the Gulag, a simple granite stone, was erected in1989 in the cemetery of Solovetskii island by Veniamin Iofe and a group of activists fromthe Memorial Society.29 (Years later, the same group erected similar memorial stones inMoscow and St. Petersburg.) In 1999, at the Solovetskii cemetery, Iofe said that his stonewas 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 supremevalue which demanded these sacrifices?”30 In this doubt about the idea of sacrifice, Iofeechoed Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical work on the Nazi camps which was inspiredby the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. To define the status of the victim of a “state ofexception,” Agamben developed the concept of homo sacer, “a human victim that may bekilled but not sacrificed.”31 Only that life which has value may be sacrificed. Agamben statesthat since camps were permanent zones of exception from law, life in these zones couldnot be expressed in terms which were meaningful outside of these zones. Suspended in theliminal space between social and biological deaths, the victim’s life was “bare”; it was notsubject to any legal or religious order. Essentially, it was the life of an animal, of chattel. Inthe Soviet camps, these people were called dokhodiaga (the soon-to-be-dead); in Auschwitz,they were called Muselmann (Muslim).

Agamben noticed that victims bore witness only rarely. Survivors, not victims, writememoirs. 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 decadeslater: “Only those who were about to perish in the camps, but accidentally survived can testifyabout them.”33 She had already read Varlam Shalamov, a soon-to-be-dead who survived bychance in the Gulag and translated his experience into unique testimonies of the senseless,defenseless life of the Soviet homo sacer. A less known but equally remarkable example wasgiven by Boris Sveshnikov (1927–1998), 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 experiencein many dozens of pencil sketches and (after his release) oil paintings. Rescued by a Latvianprisoner and then by an American collector, a large part of Sveshnikov’s works is kept nowin 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 the17th century (a choice of historical references which is reminiscent of another historicizingdocument of 20th-century mourning, Walter Benjamin’s 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 Proshkin’s film The Cold Summer of 1953 (1987) presents a drama of thereawakening of the soon-to-be-dead. Two exhausted exiles of the Gulag, one a captain ofmilitary intelligence, another a civil engineer in the past, fight a gang of criminal ex-prisonerswho capture a local village after their release from the camp. One exile dies in action, anotherkills 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 heroicenough 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 pollsin Russia in 2003–2005 in which about 26% of young respondents reported that they had at



least one relative who was “repressed” during the Soviet period.35 In 2007, Dina Khapaevaand 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 Thesenumbers are impressive; Russians remember events that happened fifty or seventy yearsago surprisingly well. In any modern society, it would be unusual for every fifth or fourthindividual to know the specific details of what happened in her society and to her family inthe 1930s or 1950s. In the absence of any educational and memorial policy on the part of thestate, these results seem even more surprising. Paradoxically, scholars tend to grumble aboutthe condition of memory in contemporary Russia. Many speculate about collective nostalgiaand cultural amnesia, or notice the “cold” character of the memory of Soviet terror. 37 Inmy view, surveys reveal the complex attitudes of a people who retain a vivid memory of theSoviet terror but are divided in their interpretation of this memory.

Far from demonstrating an outright denial of the Soviet catastrophe, the vast majority ofRussians show knowledge of their history. In their attitude towards this history, Russians aresplit 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 typicalresponses 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, thepower that affirms its sovereignty by creating zones of exception, denies responsibility forthe abuses committed in these zones. But with the passing of time and with the scale of abusesrevealed, 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 Putin’s administration approved the guidelines for the new textbookof Soviet history, which interprets Stalin’s terror as “the price of the great achievements ofthe Soviet Union.” The textbook states that Stalin’s purges achieved “the utmost efficiencyof the ruling elite” and shaped “the new managerial class which was adequate to the tasksof modernization. . .This class was unconditionally loyal to those in power. Its executivediscipline was irreproachable.”39 Filippov’s textbook does not deny the mass violence ofStalin’s era but entertains the radical transformation of its meaning.

Though this textbook was severely criticized by many historians and teachers, there isno doubt that many Russians share Filippov’s drive to find a rationale for the Great Terror.According to sociological polls, approximately half of the Russian population explain theSoviet terror as an exaggerated but rational response to actual problems which confrontedthe country. Many believe that the terror was necessary for the survival of the nation, itsmodernization, victory in the war, etc. If it was necessary in the past, it can be desirable inthe present and possibly in the future.

Hardware, Software, Ghostware

Looking at almost any monument in Washington, London, or St. Petersburg, one senses howthe state celebrates its continuing connection with the past. These monuments are the bodyof the nation on display. They represent the ideal identity of the nation as a unity between thestate, the people, and their common history. In a work that has become exemplary, a groupof 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 imprintsits changing self-representations on the citizens. This is memory as pantheon: the selectiverepresentation of great personalities and events of the past.



According to the recent (August–September, 2007) exhibition in the Sakharov Museum inMoscow, there are now 1140 monuments and memorial plaques at various sites of the Gulagwithin 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 ofmultiple human faces, with a cross in place of the nose in Magadan, and the “Moloch ofTotalitarianism” in Levashovo near St. Petersburg, which represents a robotic cannibal whois devouring or raping a human figure. In contrast to the artistic experience of Holocaustmemorials, on the sites of the Gulag there are very few realistic monuments which depictan actual prisoner at a moment of suffering. Mourning senseless loss on such a catastrophicscale is an impossible task. Though this unrepresentability has been theorized less in the caseof the Gulag than in the Holocaust, the heirs of the Gulag’s victims have intuitively chosennon-sacrificial monuments to commemorate their dead. In the current practice, stones andmonsters comprise two types of monuments that express the political nature of life and deathin the camps. Bare stones convey the memory of bare life, construed from the perspective ofthe 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 intellectualand political discourse. On the other hand, public opinions, historical debates, and literaryimagery pass away with every subsequent generation or fashion if they are not embodiedin and anchored by monuments, memorials, and museums. Monuments without inscriptionsare mute, whereas texts without monuments are ephemeral. In culture, as in a computer, thereare two forms of memory, which might be likened to hardware and software. Soft memoryconsists primarily of texts (including literary, historical, and other narratives), whereas hardmemory 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 culturalmemory life.

As vehicles of cultural memory, texts and monuments differ in their relation to the publicsphere. Representations of history in a democratic society comprise an important part ofa 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 historicalpositions on the event. There are exceptions of course; American Civil War memorials, whichin 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 withits laws but instead remain outside of it.

If writing memoirs is predominantly an individual activity, constructing memorials is acollective one. Moreover, because of its large scale and public nature, it generally requires theparticipation of the state. By building monuments to its former leaders, the state affirms thecontinuity of its political tradition. By building monuments to its former enemies and victims,the state demonstrates the disruption of its historical continuity. Every such monumentaffirms the difference between the current state and the former one. For the state, the political



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 privatepersons. Without private initiative, no book and no monument in Russia would describe theterror. These initiatives are undertaken by enthusiasts of vastly different backgrounds. Amongthose whom I have interviewed were a physicist, a plumber, a former army officer, and amuseum director. On the other hand, private individuals and voluntary associations cannoterect monuments without the collaboration of the state. Access to archives is controlled by thestate (specifically the FSB, the descendant of the KGB), and this access has been diminishingthroughout the last decade. Financial resources and real estate, which are required for anymemorial, are usually owned by the state. Hard memory is controlled by the state, whilesoft memory is the domain of civil society. This is probably the reason why many Russianmonuments 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 newone, but rather suggests their quiet coexistence.

But even such proximate location of memory is far from being the rule in Russia. Russianmemory 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 canbe challenged by new texts. Due to unique combinations of political circumstances, Germanand Russian culture elaborated different forms of dealing with the past. German memory iscrystallized in “hard” monuments but intellectuals often lament the lack of cultural debate thatcould animate them. The long construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (initiatedin 1999, completed in 2005) proved that this gigantic hardware initiative was capable ofinspiring a public debate of similar proportions. It was not the first time that the cycles ofGerman memory developed in this particular direction, from the hard to the soft. Russiancycles 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 entirelysatisfies me. In Russian memory, I also see the proliferation of a third type or vehicleof 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 ofcultural memory, its software, hardware, and ghostware, are intimately connected. Usually,ghosts live in texts; sometimes, they inhabit cemeteries and emerge from monuments. Mostoften, ghosts appear before the living whose dead were not properly buried. Ghosts featureinteresting differences from texts and monuments. Texts are symbolic, while ghosts areiconic in the semiotic sense of these terms (as signs, ghosts possess a visual resemblance tothe 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 Pushkin’s poems(“The Bronze Horseman,” “The Stone Guest,” etc.) in which a statue turns into a specter todeprive a human character of his mind or life; Jakobson stated that this “sculptural myth” wasa central theme of a great Russian poet.41 A contrasting idea was formulated more recentlyby another Russian-American scholar, Mikhail Yampolsky, who believes that a monumentcreates a “mystical protective zone” which stops the flow of time in its vicinity.42 Thesetwo ideas work well together. Precisely because monuments freeze history, their momentsof dynamism produce hauntological results. The mystical or hallucinatory resurgence ofmonuments, as in Pushkin’s poems, is uncanny; the real and practical events that happento monuments, such as their removal, destruction, vandalism, or renaming, also provokestrong responses in the observers. In 2002, unknown vandals wrote on the Solovetskii stone



in St. Petersburg in red oil, “Too few were shot.” The activists of the Memorial Societyconverted this situation into a media event, in which the local TV showed young men andwomen climbing all over the stone and lovingly washing it with sponges. In April 2007, theEstonian government moved the Bronze Soldier (a memorial statue honoring Soviet WorldWar II casualties) from the central square of Tallinn to a cemetery; this move caused streetriots and a successful cyber-attack on the governmental lines of communication. Estoniansblamed Russian “political technologists” for coming to Tallinn to organize these street riotsand Russian hackers for launching the cyber-attacks. In less dramatic circumstances, theMoscow municipal government wished to move the Solovetskii stone, an important Russianmemorial to the victims of the Gulag, from one part of the Lubyanskaya square, where itstands 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 Moscowprostitute, 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. Thesewomen use their yeasty dolls as substitutes for partners; they play, drink alcohol, and havesex with these dolls. Creating a world of eerie simulacra, the dolls must be buried. In aclimactic moment, the only vital character, the prostitute, burns the bread corpses on thegrave 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 Kazakhstanwho 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 ina 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 aswell). 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 neverbeen accomplished by Muscovites. The origins of their conflict are projected in one episodeinto medieval Europe, in another episode into the Asia of Genghis Khan. As in “historicaldebates” between contemporary Russian intellectuals, the roots of the current problems arepresented 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. Thecontemporary commoners, all of whom are potential victims of vampires, are juxtaposedagainst those noble warriors whose moments of glory and sources of conflicts are all in thepast. 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 thecontemporary 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 leaderreflects 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



among their human chattel. In the battle between light and dark forces, what is at stakeis probably not the right to license vampires’ bloodsucking activities, as the Night Watchsuggests. Inverting the film’s metaphor, the only means of preventing the reproduction ofvampires is to bury, acknowledge, and remember the dead. Following Sigmund Freud, WalterBenjamin, 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 thereader. . .is not to exorcise these ghosts but rather to learn to think through what they havegiven us to consider.”44 As Freud stated in his famous essay, The Uncanny (1919), thereis nothing new or extraordinary in ghosts. In his definition, the uncanny is “somethingwhich is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it.” Freudemphasized the particular way of rendering the uncanny experience that later scholars wouldcall “metonymic.” These stories feature “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut offat the wrist,” and other corporeal metonymies. The experience of the uncanny depends on thelost and found members of human bodies, which are sometimes autonomous and sometimesincorporated into other, now monstrous, bodies. When a living or revenant part representsthe perished whole, it feels uncanny. The past is large, integrated, and self-sufficient, like theUSSR; what returns from it is dispersed, fragmented, and scary. Freud’s formulas definedthe uncanny as a particular form of memory, one that is intimately connected to fear. Thehigher the energy of forgetting, the stronger is the horror of remembering. The combinationof memory and fear is, precisely, the uncanny.

In Tengis Abuldze’s film Repentance (1984), which is now a Soviet classic, the daughterof a victim digs up the corpse of the dictator. She goes on trial but does not repent: she woulddo it 300 times again, she declares. It is not the corpse of the dictator that is uncanny in thisfilm but the living dictator, as he is remembered or imagined by his former subjects. As inSophocles’ Antigone, the perpetually moving corpse begets new tragedies; in this case, it isthe 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 rarelydisputed. In the recent film The Living (2006, directed by Aleksandr Veledinskii), a Russiansoldier of the Chechen War, Kir, is rescued by his comrades who die in action. On his wayhome from the war, Kir murders his officer and betrays his bride. He does not care; he ispossessed by the ghosts of his lost comrades, who come to him alive though other peopledo not see them. When Kir and his ghostly companions travel to Moscow, what they (andthe viewers) actually see is the burial monument to Stalin near the Kremlin Wall. The movieends with Kir’s visit to an abandoned cemetery where he hopes to find his friends buried likeheroes. While trying to find these graves, Kir dies; immediately, he joins the company of hisghostly 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 ora large part of what we see actually happened to his ghost.

These two films, Repentance and The Living, mark the start and the possible end of thepost-Soviet transition. In the 1980s, it seemed that the most important goal was to punish thedead dictator and in this way, to restore justice posthumously; twenty years later, the livingare still struggling with the authorities but their unburied dead are friends, not foes. The earlypost-catastrophic culture attributed the actual problems of the present to the dead corpsesof the past. Now this culture is more eager to respond to the present. There are enemieswho are alive and deserve death, but there are also friends who are dead and need to beburied. Both films play on the uncanny effects of communication between the living and thedead; but while Repentance celebrated the change of generations, the trial of memory, andhistorical time, The Living deconstructs the meaning of death in an obsessive way that makes



time cyclical and history irrelevant. Still hopeful for the future, Repentance argued for a newethical order that would include dead corpses in its scope. Self-censoring any sign of hope,The Living shows the ghostly nature of post-catastrophic consciousness, which obscures thevery difference between the living and the dead. The post-Soviet trial of the dead turns intothe new Russian mingling with the dead.

For a long time, specters have been haunting this space that survived communism. Whilethe living and the undead are growing more accustomed to each other, they develop uneasyfriendships in which one can find a hint of hope. As Derrida urged, we must “learn to livewith ghosts. . .To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. . .If I am gettingready 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,” Constellations15, no. 1 (2008): 148–166.

2. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (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,” Representations 75 (2001): 89–118.

5. Iurii Dmitruiev, Belbaltlag otkryvaet tainy, Kur’er Karelii, November 12, 2003.6. Pominal’nye spiski Karelii. 1937–1938. Yurii Dmitriev, ed. (Petrozavodsk 2002); see also Yurii

Dmitriev Mesto 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,” in The 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 Memory 9, nos. 1–2 (1997): 113–146.

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

13. Alexandra Samarina’s 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 receivedfrom 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 his Granitsy smysla (St. Petersburg:Memorial, 2002), 7.



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 Theory 41 (2002): 179–97.

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 Freud’s works on mourning, melancholia, and object-relationstend to accept the endured, interminable mourning as a non-pathological condition which Derrida called“midmourning”; see Tammy Clewell, “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,”Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, no. 1 (2004): 43–67. In these works, the impact ofFreud’s “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), 70–71. The American journalist Harrison E. Salisbury who wasa Moscow correspondent for the New York Times from 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 wife’s 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, Erinnerungsraume: Formen und Wandlungen deskulturullen Gedachnisses (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 Transmissionand 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), 191–192, 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,” Daedalus 21,

no. 4 (1992): 99; Richard S. Esbenshade, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity inPostwar East-Central Europe,” Representations 49 (1995): 72–96.

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 Studies 47, no. 8 (1995): 1343–1366.

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.



35. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Failing the Stalin Test,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 1(January/February 2006). According to Leonid Byzov, about 20.1% of Russians recall that their relatives werein the Gulag. Online vremia novostei 187, 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): 83–96; Maria Ferretti, “Rasstroistvopamiati: Rossiia i stalinizm,” available at http://www.liberal.ru/article_print.asp?Num=98; Charles S. Maier,“Heißes und kaltes Gedachtnis. Uber die politische Halbwertszeit von Nazismus und Kommunismus,”Transit 22 (Winter 2001–2002): 153–165; 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, 1945–2006. 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 Filippov’s 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 Putin’s rule, Gleb Pavlovskii, whostates that “the Soviet Union is the global treasure of social, legal, and existential models.” “Predislovie,”in Sovetskie liudi. Stseny iz istorii, Natal’a Kozlova ed. (Moskva: Evropa, 2005), 4–5.

40. See Alexander Etkind, “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia andGermany,” Grey Room 16 (2004): 36–59.

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

Late Twentieth-Century Russia, Nancy Condee ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93–112.43. 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 Bekmambetov’s 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 Benjamin’s 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 recent Katyn by 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 of Antigone.

46. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii.

Alexander Etkind is a Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History in CambridgeUniversity. His publications include Eros of the Impossible: History of Psychoanalysis inRussia (1996), Khlyst. Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (1998) and Non-fiction po-russki pravda(2007).


post-soviet hauntology: cultural memory of the soviet terror

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