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
Party, state, and citizen in the Soviet Union : a collection of documents
The command system has long pervaded nearly every area of Soviet life. This volume documents the prescriptions and proscriptions that have governed everyday life in the Soviet Union policies that are currently undergoing reexamination and revision. Among the topics covered are voting and party organ
"The Taste Remains": Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany
Ten years after German reunification, a relic from the past appeared in an industrial corner of what was once East Berlin: an original “Intershop.” Part of a chain of state retail establishments set up by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for hard currency sales, the Intershop had formerly served as a type of duty-free store for Western time travelers on their rare visits to the world of the East. In socialist days, these stores stocked scarce consumer and luxury items such as chocolate, electronics, and perfume. For all but the privileged few, these shops were a constant reminder of not only the material failings of the GDR economy, but also the incongruity of the socialist ideal with the state’s own hard currency–seeking activities. Today’s Intershop is a distorted commentary on the events of the last ten years: old GDR products are offered that, in some cases, are now almost equally as scarce as the Western goods once were. The rebirth of the Intershop can be traced to a 1999 exhibition, conceived by two western Germans, on everyday life in the socialist East. The decision to house the exhibit in an old Intershop worked in accordance with the show’s emphasis on design, as the structure was essentially a kind of transportable barracks, easily assembled or stored and easily recognizable to easterners and westerners alike.1 The exhibit sought to capture the