Legal but Criminal: The Failure of the "Russian Nuremberg" and the Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Memory
In post-Soviet studies there has been a consistent tendency to look at the contemporary political and cultural situation in Russia in terms of the failure of democratic revolution as well as the rise of authoritarianism. On account of this tendency, nostalgia for the Soviet past has become one of the most popular topics in current research. Thus, for example, many shows and films and a lot of popular music thrive on the nostalgic veneration of the Soviet era.1 The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, despite its common association with an older generation of retired workers, is increasingly becoming popular among young people.2 According to a nationwide poll of the country’s most celebrated Russians conducted by the state television channel, Rossiia 1, in 2008, Stalin was voted Russia’s third most popular historical figure. Furthermore, in October 2009, a Russian court held a hearing in a libel case brought by Stalin’s grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili over a newspaper story published in Novaya gazeta that said Stalin had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens. The libel case was dismissed, of course, yet the very fact of its occurrence is highly symptomatic of the overall grotesqueness of the current state of the collective memory of the Soviet legacy. There are, however, certain positive signs, such as President Medvedev’s appointment of Mikhail Fedotov in October 2010 as a presidential adviser and the chairman of the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation.3 Fedotov in turn proposed the de-Stalinization of the public conscience as the most urgent issue to work on in the council. Russia’s nostalgic clinging to the “Soviet Golden Age,” associated primarily with its imperial politics commanding international respect and the state’s protection of each and every citizen, is commonly explained by
“We're nostalgic but we're not crazy”: Retrofitting the Past in Russia
In the scholarship on cultural changes in postsocialist countries it has become a cliché to single out nostalgia as an increasingly prominent symbolic practice through which the legacy of the previous period makes itself visible. Scholars from the Balkans are talking about Yugonostalgia and its fascination with “the successes of the golden Yugoslav national teams and clubs, personalities and elements of political life.”1 In a similar fashion, cultural critics of the (former) German Democratic Republic draw attention to the phenomenon of Ostalgia centered on Ostprodukte, the items of daily consumption from the socialist time, that are available again in the eastern part of Germany.2 Often perceived as a reaction to the recent
From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's Theory of Art
This paper argues for a reevaluation of Aby Warburg by attending to the theoretical concerns underpinning his study of the Renaissance. It argues that Warburg's oeuvre has an overarching perspective, namely, an engagement with the emergence of specifically “modern” culture based on rationalization and the “disenchantment” of nature. This suggests parallels with Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies, and others. Consequently, Warburg appears as more than a gatherer of philological, historical, and art historical information. Instead, his work takes its place among the widespread and influential philosophical, anthropological, and cultural-theoretical analyses of modernity dominating early twentieth-century German intellectual life.