Category Archives: Memory

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On June 22 residents of Voronezh found their local billboards featuring an ominous, but familiar face: Comrade Stalin  “Victory will be ours!” reads a slogan in large white letters below a large picture of the vozhd.  The question, curious residents asked, was why Comrade Stalin’s visage was once again taking such a prominent public space, and more importantly, who put it there? 

According to Kommersant, the Stalin billboards are part of a campaign by the Communist Party to commemorate the 130th birthday of the generalissimo.  Sergei Rudakov, a KPRF regional deputy, told the daily that his party wanted “to remind every resident about the great person and his achievements.  The billboards, which were designed by three advertising companies, cost 8,000 rubles apiece. 

Not everyone was happy to see Stalin dotting the skyline.  Most of all, Voronezh’s city administration, which ordered that the billboards be taken down because, according ..read more

“Lenin” and “Death” these words are enemies. “Lenin” and “Life” are comrades . . . Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will live. –Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924

Vladimir Ilich Lenin turned 139 last month making him the oldest living person on Earth. However, Lenin does not live like his eulogizers had imagined.  When some mourners proclaimed that “Lenin has ceased to be an individual-Lenin belongs to the millions,” or that “Lenin has not died. Lenin lives.  There is not a corner in the world . . . where Lenin is absent,” they imagined a transhistorical Lenin, whose spirit marched through time and space.  His body may have died, but his essence continued to haunt the world.  “And when Ilich was no more, we still had Lenin,” declared the Bolshevik jurist Peter Stuchka. And this transfiguration of the spiritual Lenin from the corporal Ilich even defied the empirical sensitivity of the human eye.  “This metamorphosis went on before our eyes ..read more

It appears that some of Medvedev’s liberal posturing is producing concrete results. Or at least someone is getting the signals.  Finally, fi-nal-ly Memorial has gotten its materials back from the St. Petersburg prosecutor.  Twelve computer hard disks, or “Winchesters” as one report calls them, about 1000 business cards belonging to A. D. Margolis (the general director of St. Petersburg Rescue Fund and editor of the St. Petersburg Encyclopedia, and heаd of several Memorial projects), and seven CDs and DVDs were returned to the human rights organization on Thursday.

The return of Memorial’s property followed another ruling in its favor by the Dzerzhinsky court that deemed the December raid by the police as unlawful. The case’s lead investigator Mikhail Kalganov decided to not press the issue further. “Yes, this is our victory,” Memorial’s lawyer Ivan Pavlov told Kommersant. “And we think that in this case the Russian legal system managed itself [well]. ..read more

[podcast]http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/ta/ta_20090401-1708a.mp3[/podcast]

Thinking Allowed‘s Laurie Taylor has an interesting discussion with Mikhail Ryklin about the historical memory of Stalinism. Ryklin’s most recent work looks at Communist ideology as a “substitute” or “political” religion which “gave millions of people all over the globe an ultimate meaning.”  Indeed, Marxism, with its eschatological narrative based on the fall and rise of Man, class concepts of the Good and the Evil, and the importance of Revolution as the apocalyptic moment, stood as a secular replacement for the Christian religious narrative at the moment when liberal capitalism was in crisis.

And what is the state of Stalinism now? Ryklin argues that Stalin’s rehabilitation cannot be seperated from the Soviet victory in WWII.  Current so-called “Stalinists” are trying to explain the Terror with the Molotov thesis: Terror was necessary to rid the county of a potential Fifth Column in case of war.  As Molotov, the ever loyal and unapologetic ..read more

Here’s something that should wet the palates of scholars and induce wet dreams among the necrophiliacs of Soviet history.  Ukraine announced that it plans declassify the entire KGB archive dating 1917-1991.  The number of documents stamped “secret” and “top secret” is estimated at 800,000. The announcement comes after the law “On the declassification, promulgation, and study of archival documents connected with the Ukrainian Liberation Movement, political repression, and famine in Ukraine” was signed by Viktor Yushchenko on 23 January.

Among the documents are “Cheka instructions, execution lists, deportation maps, albums with photographs of fighters of rebel armies, reports of the KGB to the Central Committee on the development of the Ukrainian dissident movement.” Interestingly, this declassification is so sweeping that it will even go against normal archival practice in protecting living individuals. “Not a single agential file or report that possibly contains information about current politicians will stop the process of ..read more

The first thing on order is to wish everyone a happy New Year! I sincerely thank all of you for reading SRB over the last year and I hope you continue into the next.  The news about Russia certainly promises to heat up in 2009 as the economy, by all predictions, continues its nosedive, a new president takes office in the United States, and whatever other unpredictable events crop up in our favorite Slavic nation.

In the meantime, I have been silent about some of the recent news stories coming out of Russia.  I have another dissertation deadline and I’m trying to finish a chapter on masculinity in the Komsomol in earnest.

However, there have been a few news stories that have caught my eye over the last week.  First, of course, is the announcement that Aleksandr Nevskii won the Name of Russia contest. An interesting choice for sure.  Most reports have ..read more