December 9, 2020
Soviet Things and Post-Soviet People:
How to Remember the Communist Past
Serguei Oushakine
Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
George Bustin, Introducer, and Serguei Oushakine
Minutes of the 13th Meeting of the 79th Year
Stephen Schreiber opened the virtual meeting at 10:15 AM. One hundred forty-five members and two guests attended (Simon “Rusty” Murray, proposed for membership by John Cotton, and Boris Katz, guest of Daniel Shapiro). Larry Hans read the minutes of the preceding meeting, and George Bustin introduced the speaker. He noted that, in addition to his prodigious scholarly achievements, Professor Sergei Oushakine (his long-time friend) is the finest gourmet cook on the Princeton faculty. His current research concerns the new forms of literary and visual arts in post-Soviet states such as Belarus and Kyrgyzstan; it asks how these new states construct new identities through culture.
Professor Oushakine gave a lively talk accompanied by illustrative slides. He began with a sketch of the historical framework, beginning in 1991. That year saw the dissolution of the USSR and the emergence of new states like Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, which had never previously had political independence. In the early 1990s, he noted, the idea prevailed that you could simply erase the communist past, that there would be a relatively quick and predictable transition to western norms in law, economics, and political life. But there was growing disappointment as scholars saw that this transition throughout Eastern Europe was ambiguous and uncertain. In Yugoslavia, “Jugonostalgia” appeared; in the former DDR, “Ostalgie.” In Russia by the end of the 1990s nostalgia for the USSR was clear: Soviet sausages were being sold in Bishkek, and in Russia, Soviet cigarettes (“Prima”) were hawked as “Prima Nostalgia.”
With the accession of Putin in 2000, old Soviet symbols were resurrected. Upon the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet anthem, created in 1944, had been dropped in favor of a new one based on a patriotic song by the renowned composer Mikhail Glinka. This song, with no words, was used for about a decade. In 2000, Russia’s soccer players rebelled, saying that this anthem with no words was humiliating and asking Putin and the Parliament to do something. The Parliament soon voted to resurrect the old anthem, dropping all references to communism and adding God.
In April of 2005, Putin declared, “We should acknowledge that the collapse of the USSR was the major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Two weeks later he clarified this statement for foreign journalists: he said he had meant that the breakup of the USSR had cut family ties and divided the Russian nation. Oushakine noted that people in Russia say that those who don’t regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, but that those who want to bring it back have no brain. The question is how people can maintain a balance between these two things. Nostalgia is one possible coping mechanism. But there is a difference between restorative and escapist nostalgia. Between 2000 and 2020 there were a number of museum exhibits of past communist objects and socialist gear that were particularly popular in Germany. For instance, the interactive Nostalgia Museum in Leipzig encouraged people to touch and feel old stuff, such as phones and radios. The question is what cultural values this exhibit conveyed to young visitors with no experience of communist times. More recently, in Moscow in March 1919, a museum presented an exhibit called “The smell of Soviet childhood.” Its 15 plastic boxes contained things with familiar scents from the Soviet period, such as fresh bread, Tarkhun syrup (used to flavor carbonated water), strong perfume, a shampoo for children, and a pudding often served in Soviet schools. By pressing a lever on the side of each box, the visitor could smell the item. The idea was to teach children about the childhoods of their parents and grandparents, utilizing objects that were deliberately decontextualized. Another exhibit displayed familiar scenes of Soviet life: a schoolroom, a bathroom, a courtyard, a grocery store. Posters encouraged children, by asking their elders about these things, to experience second-hand nostalgia. As the first truly post-communist generation is taking over, first-hand knowledge of the Soviet past is disappearing, replaced by this sort of second-hand nostalgia - there is a lack of connection with the real historical past.
Oushakine turned next to a different means to the same end: recent experiments in the visual arts. When he first interviewed the award-winning Moscow photographer, Danila Tkachenko, he asked about the theory behind his striking images. Tkachenko was born in 1989 and is therefore too young to have first-hand nostalgia about the remnants of Soviet life, which he calls “trukhliashechka” - old trash. He told Oushakine that it casts a spell: you can spend days and nights in the attics of old houses. But at one point he decided to cut it off, to purge himself from nostalgia.
To produce the images of his series “Motherland,” Tkachenko traveled to one of thousands of nameless, deserted Russian villages, set it on fire, and photographed the burning village and its houses as a form of exorcism. The images of the burning village in “Motherland,” Oushakine suggests, don’t have much to offer the viewer beyond the visual effect: history is simply not there. “Motherland” is a carefully scripted pyrotechnic show. It is being continually destroyed, and there are no images of the aftermath of the fire. Nor is there interest in what made the original images possible: this is total decontextualization with a distant focus that shows he is not interested in context, a kind of exorcism.
Another project, “Restricted Areas,” shows striking artifacts of modernity in the Soviet period - an unfinished spaceport, a submarine, a former Crimean sanatorium - in silhouette, floating against white backgrounds. Sometimes snow forms a visual barrier - Tkachenko occasionally waited for weeks to get just the right amount of snow for his image. Rather than being captivated by the decay, Tkachenko seeks detachment and separation in his images. He rejects the old order by cataloging old monuments.
Oushakine then showed images made by western artists that have a radically different impact. “Soviet Ghosts” by the Australian photographer Rebecca Litchfield shows decaying Soviet building interiors that evoke nostalgia for Communist ruins. Another western artist, Christopher Harwig, photographed a series of Soviet bus stops. For both these artists the focus is very close, drawing the viewer in. Tkachenko, by contrast, radically occludes the objects he shows. He is not captivated by decay; he wants detachment and separation.
Returning to Tkachenko, Oushakine showed slides of his project, “Lost Horizons.” The artist presents black and white images side by side to evoke the utopian future that never came about. He juxtaposes Kazimir Malevich’s black suprematist square to Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist model for the monument to the Third International, and Sputnik alongside the Friendship Sanatorium in Crimea. There is a kind of optical leveling: size, color, and texture don’t matter; the objects are either emerging or vanishing in black, and there is no horizon.
Last December, Tkachenko presented his latest project, “Heroes.” He used human bones, with no identification, of victims either of the Soviet secret police or the Nazis. He painted them bright colors and arranged them randomly. After the project, the bones were cleaned and returned. In “Heroes,” Oushakine said, Tkachenko seems to be disrupting the spell of the past. There is simply no story to tell; history is reduced to ornament, flattened, producing a new reality.
In answers to the question that followed, Professor Oushakine emphasized the break with the past. Russians, he said, have appropriated the German philosopher Kant, who lived in Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg), nowadays a highly militarized enclave and also a tourist destination. Svetlana Alexseivich, the Nobel prize-winning author, is, according to Oushakine, a perfect example of post-colonial literature in post-Soviet spaces. She lives in Belarus, yet writes only in Russian. She quotes other people and that becomes her text, so she is almost not present. Her books on Chernobyl and WWII are brilliant. The Russian reaction has been bipolar: she was very popular during perestroika, but she is very critical of Putin. To the question of the role of nostalgia in creating modern Russia, he answered that people are longing for stability, not a return to the past. Another questioner asked whether Tkachenko’s images evoke a golden age. No, said Oushakine: the images are very beautiful but very cold. He agreed that there was some nostalgia for Russia’s previous domination over the former Soviet republics: Russians feel diminished. But there is also another trend: interest in the history of old empires. The old structures used in Tkachenko’s projects could not be repurposed as it was too expensive. The new generation has a very different view of the old nostalgic things. In Tallin, for example, they are trying to reappropriate the past in a non-colonizing way, not just abandon it, so they have left the Olympic structures in the middle of the city. He ended by noting that life expectancy of men has grown significantly under Putin, due largely to the dramatic drop in vodka consumption as well as sausages.
Respectfully submitted,
Priscilla Roosevelt
Professor Oushakine gave a lively talk accompanied by illustrative slides. He began with a sketch of the historical framework, beginning in 1991. That year saw the dissolution of the USSR and the emergence of new states like Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, which had never previously had political independence. In the early 1990s, he noted, the idea prevailed that you could simply erase the communist past, that there would be a relatively quick and predictable transition to western norms in law, economics, and political life. But there was growing disappointment as scholars saw that this transition throughout Eastern Europe was ambiguous and uncertain. In Yugoslavia, “Jugonostalgia” appeared; in the former DDR, “Ostalgie.” In Russia by the end of the 1990s nostalgia for the USSR was clear: Soviet sausages were being sold in Bishkek, and in Russia, Soviet cigarettes (“Prima”) were hawked as “Prima Nostalgia.”
With the accession of Putin in 2000, old Soviet symbols were resurrected. Upon the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet anthem, created in 1944, had been dropped in favor of a new one based on a patriotic song by the renowned composer Mikhail Glinka. This song, with no words, was used for about a decade. In 2000, Russia’s soccer players rebelled, saying that this anthem with no words was humiliating and asking Putin and the Parliament to do something. The Parliament soon voted to resurrect the old anthem, dropping all references to communism and adding God.
In April of 2005, Putin declared, “We should acknowledge that the collapse of the USSR was the major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Two weeks later he clarified this statement for foreign journalists: he said he had meant that the breakup of the USSR had cut family ties and divided the Russian nation. Oushakine noted that people in Russia say that those who don’t regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, but that those who want to bring it back have no brain. The question is how people can maintain a balance between these two things. Nostalgia is one possible coping mechanism. But there is a difference between restorative and escapist nostalgia. Between 2000 and 2020 there were a number of museum exhibits of past communist objects and socialist gear that were particularly popular in Germany. For instance, the interactive Nostalgia Museum in Leipzig encouraged people to touch and feel old stuff, such as phones and radios. The question is what cultural values this exhibit conveyed to young visitors with no experience of communist times. More recently, in Moscow in March 1919, a museum presented an exhibit called “The smell of Soviet childhood.” Its 15 plastic boxes contained things with familiar scents from the Soviet period, such as fresh bread, Tarkhun syrup (used to flavor carbonated water), strong perfume, a shampoo for children, and a pudding often served in Soviet schools. By pressing a lever on the side of each box, the visitor could smell the item. The idea was to teach children about the childhoods of their parents and grandparents, utilizing objects that were deliberately decontextualized. Another exhibit displayed familiar scenes of Soviet life: a schoolroom, a bathroom, a courtyard, a grocery store. Posters encouraged children, by asking their elders about these things, to experience second-hand nostalgia. As the first truly post-communist generation is taking over, first-hand knowledge of the Soviet past is disappearing, replaced by this sort of second-hand nostalgia - there is a lack of connection with the real historical past.
Oushakine turned next to a different means to the same end: recent experiments in the visual arts. When he first interviewed the award-winning Moscow photographer, Danila Tkachenko, he asked about the theory behind his striking images. Tkachenko was born in 1989 and is therefore too young to have first-hand nostalgia about the remnants of Soviet life, which he calls “trukhliashechka” - old trash. He told Oushakine that it casts a spell: you can spend days and nights in the attics of old houses. But at one point he decided to cut it off, to purge himself from nostalgia.
To produce the images of his series “Motherland,” Tkachenko traveled to one of thousands of nameless, deserted Russian villages, set it on fire, and photographed the burning village and its houses as a form of exorcism. The images of the burning village in “Motherland,” Oushakine suggests, don’t have much to offer the viewer beyond the visual effect: history is simply not there. “Motherland” is a carefully scripted pyrotechnic show. It is being continually destroyed, and there are no images of the aftermath of the fire. Nor is there interest in what made the original images possible: this is total decontextualization with a distant focus that shows he is not interested in context, a kind of exorcism.
Another project, “Restricted Areas,” shows striking artifacts of modernity in the Soviet period - an unfinished spaceport, a submarine, a former Crimean sanatorium - in silhouette, floating against white backgrounds. Sometimes snow forms a visual barrier - Tkachenko occasionally waited for weeks to get just the right amount of snow for his image. Rather than being captivated by the decay, Tkachenko seeks detachment and separation in his images. He rejects the old order by cataloging old monuments.
Oushakine then showed images made by western artists that have a radically different impact. “Soviet Ghosts” by the Australian photographer Rebecca Litchfield shows decaying Soviet building interiors that evoke nostalgia for Communist ruins. Another western artist, Christopher Harwig, photographed a series of Soviet bus stops. For both these artists the focus is very close, drawing the viewer in. Tkachenko, by contrast, radically occludes the objects he shows. He is not captivated by decay; he wants detachment and separation.
Returning to Tkachenko, Oushakine showed slides of his project, “Lost Horizons.” The artist presents black and white images side by side to evoke the utopian future that never came about. He juxtaposes Kazimir Malevich’s black suprematist square to Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist model for the monument to the Third International, and Sputnik alongside the Friendship Sanatorium in Crimea. There is a kind of optical leveling: size, color, and texture don’t matter; the objects are either emerging or vanishing in black, and there is no horizon.
Last December, Tkachenko presented his latest project, “Heroes.” He used human bones, with no identification, of victims either of the Soviet secret police or the Nazis. He painted them bright colors and arranged them randomly. After the project, the bones were cleaned and returned. In “Heroes,” Oushakine said, Tkachenko seems to be disrupting the spell of the past. There is simply no story to tell; history is reduced to ornament, flattened, producing a new reality.
In answers to the question that followed, Professor Oushakine emphasized the break with the past. Russians, he said, have appropriated the German philosopher Kant, who lived in Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg), nowadays a highly militarized enclave and also a tourist destination. Svetlana Alexseivich, the Nobel prize-winning author, is, according to Oushakine, a perfect example of post-colonial literature in post-Soviet spaces. She lives in Belarus, yet writes only in Russian. She quotes other people and that becomes her text, so she is almost not present. Her books on Chernobyl and WWII are brilliant. The Russian reaction has been bipolar: she was very popular during perestroika, but she is very critical of Putin. To the question of the role of nostalgia in creating modern Russia, he answered that people are longing for stability, not a return to the past. Another questioner asked whether Tkachenko’s images evoke a golden age. No, said Oushakine: the images are very beautiful but very cold. He agreed that there was some nostalgia for Russia’s previous domination over the former Soviet republics: Russians feel diminished. But there is also another trend: interest in the history of old empires. The old structures used in Tkachenko’s projects could not be repurposed as it was too expensive. The new generation has a very different view of the old nostalgic things. In Tallin, for example, they are trying to reappropriate the past in a non-colonizing way, not just abandon it, so they have left the Olympic structures in the middle of the city. He ended by noting that life expectancy of men has grown significantly under Putin, due largely to the dramatic drop in vodka consumption as well as sausages.
Respectfully submitted,
Priscilla Roosevelt