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
Torn : the story of a Lithuanian migrant
This doctorate consists of two parts: a novel Torn and the exegesis: Writing the migrant story: nostalgia, identity and belonging. The novel and theoretical exegesis are intended to complement each other in capturing the 20th century Lithuanian historical and political circumstances that led to Lithuanian emigration to Australia. 
In my novel and exegesis, my intention has been to explore how the experiences of Lithuanian refugees and migrants differ, especially in relation to nostalgia, identity and belonging, depending on the time and circumstances of their arrival in Australia. Lithuanians came to Australia from the same place geographically, but from a different place in terms of history and politics.
Tsarist Russia, Lubok style: Nikita mikhalkov's barber of siberia (1999) and Post-Soviet National Identity
Nikita Mikhalkov’s film Barber of Siberia (Sibirskii tsiriul’nik), his first feature since winning the Academy Award for Burnt By the Sun, debuted in February 1999 with a great deal of fanfare. The film set box office attendance records in the former Soviet Union, its release prompted a media blitz, and it initiated a discussion over the role of cinema in post-communist Russia like no other film had done. By and large, critics hated the film while audiences mostly loved it. Shortly after it premiered, one critic described it as a ‘Mercedes 600 pretending to be a lubok’. This criticism provided an interesting lens through which to view the film and its relevance to postSoviet life: it referred to the Russian popular print similar to a poster that had its heyday in the nineteenth century and the review replicated criticisms of the lubok in tsarist times. The comment about the film masquerading as Russian popular culture was a particularly interesting one. The tsarist wartime lubok (plural lubki) helped to foster a sense of nationhood throughout the nineteenth century and in many respects the film attempted to do the same for the late twentieth century. This essay will use the criticism of Mikhalkov’s film to explore how Barber of Siberia can be interpreted as a lubok (but not entirely in the same way that the author above had in mind). In its themes, dynamism, nationalism, nostalgia, and through its reception, Mikhalkov’s film represents one of the defining events of post-Soviet Russian life and in the role of culture to search for a usable past. Above all, Mikhalkov’s lubok-style portrait of tsarist Russia captures many of the contradictions and components of post-Soviet Russian national identity.