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
Stalinist Crimes and the Ethics of Memory
Scholarship on the collective memory of Stalinism in contemporary Russia has been remarkably fruitful since taking off in the early 2000s. Memory studies theory, in all its diversity, has been applied to the Russian context to generate both broad assessments of cultural-political dynamics and analyses of discrete texts and artifacts. Moreover, memory of Stalinism in post-Soviet Russia has served as a fertile ground for extending and developing new concepts and theories. Western scholarship has generated an impressive array of studies directly engaged with the problem. Nanci Adler and Nina Ferretti provided early interventions pointing to the specificities of the post-Soviet memory-scape, in which memory of the Stalin era played a crucial role. These were followed up in the late 2000s by detailed analyses of official memory policy toward Stalin by Michael Kramer, Thomas Sherlock, and others. Alongside these, Dina Khapaeva and Alexander Etkind worked in a sustained fashion on a parallel, culture-centered critique of post-Soviet memory of Stalinism (for the latter, this culminated in the publication of his magisterial Warped Mourning in 2013, the only monograph devoted entirely to this problem).1 Russian scholarship, while voluminous, has focused largely on the memory of the Great Patriotic War rather than on the memory of Stalinism proper. Notable exceptions have been the work of Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov with opinion polls, and Nikolai Koposov’s detailed studies of state memory policy. For the most part, however, scholarly discussion has lagged in comparison to a much livelier debate in the Russian press (spearheaded by journalists and pundits associated with various groups, from the Memorial nongovernmental organization [NGO] to the Communist Party). Nonetheless, in both Western and Russian scholarship, a wide range of historians, sociologists, literary critics, and others traditionally unconcerned with the “memory studies”
Capturing Crime in the Antipodes: Colonist Cultural Representation of Indigeneity
This chapter adopts a Southern criminological lens, which allows the authors to explore how colonialism has been constructed and depicted in museums within both regional and urban Australia. By studying spatial and historical silences in Australian museums, this chapter offers a consistent frame to chronologically chart Anglo-Australian depictions of Indigeneity, imperialism and violence wielded by the state. As this chapter will argue, museums can often reflect Westernized (white) conceptualizations about Indigeneity and the state violence involved in colonization, which actively re-enforces popular views and influences sociopolitical visions of identity, the state and justice.