10
From German memorials to Russian memoirs, one can trace a continuum of the cultural genres of mourning, but the contrasts are remarkably sharp. Though terror in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia both resulted in many millions of victims, their memories are different. The popular memory of the Holocaust boomed in the last years of the twentieth century on an industrial scale, but the popular memory of the Soviet terror has been cyclically returning to the insights and taboos that were first established in the times of the Gulag Archipelago. This double standard operates in various contexts, not only in post-Soviet Russia. The idea of a Holocaust denier lecturing at a Western university is now unimaginable, but that same university might well manifest tolerance toward a gulag denier. A writer or professor who claimed that fighting the Nazis in World War II was unnecessary or harmful would be ostracized, but it is far from unusual to hear similar doubts expressed in respect to fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
The debate over the relationship between German Nazism and Soviet Communism has been a long and fierce one. Hannah Arendt’s Cold War–era concept of totalitarianism, positing a metaphorical “common denominator” shared by the two regimes, was largely rejected by Western academics in the 1960s-1980s, was embraced enthusiastically in Russia in the 1990s, and has been largely resurrected in the Western scholarship of the new century. However, many Western thinkers, from Freud to Habermas, have emphatically rejected the notion that these two regimes should be viewed as symmetrical.1 Their methods may have been similar but their purposes were fundamentally different, they say; the Soviet project was at least congruent with the Enlightenment tradition and based on admirable ideals. Historians have often challenged this philosophical argument. From Ernst Nolte, who launched the German “Historians’ Dispute” in 1986, to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010), historians demonstrate the comparable scale and mutual dependency of the lethal policies pursued by the Soviet and Nazi regimes. In this chapter, I look at the response that one of the most important Western philosophers, Jacques Derrida, gave to this problem, and then proceed to the Russian cultural scene that looks different, I believe, after reading Derrida.
Derrida’s Silence
The rise of poststructuralism has been explained by the legacy of the Holocaust and postcolonial struggles, which were all pertinent for the Jewish, Algerian-born Derrida.2 However, in his late works, which often sound like memoirs, Derrida defines his deconstruction in its relation to Marxism, as at once its radicalization and a product of disenchantment. Insisting that he learned “early” about the “totalitarian terror in all the Eastern countries,” he derives the genealogy of his central ideas from these early impressions, which he describes clearly and powerfully:
From the Moscow trials [1936–1938] to the repression in Hungary [1956] . . . such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed— and one can understand nothing of this period of deconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes this historical entanglement into account.3
It seems unlikely that Derrida’s disillusionment could have occurred earlier than Khrushchev’s revelatory speech of 1956, which caused the first anti-Stalinist debates within the French Communist Party.4 Then, he writes, talk about the “end of history” and the “ends of man” was his “daily bread.” In the 1990s, these terms circulated because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but Derrida remembers them from the late 1950s, when they connoted the end of Stalinism, the collapse of the gulag, and the first revelations of the “cult of personality.” In the 1990s, Derrida viewed the debates that accompanied the end of the Soviet Union through these old lenses, and they seemed a revival of the debates that accompanied the end of Stalinism. In that crucial moment in the 1950s, Derrida had “indissociably” connected the readings of the philosophical “classics of the end” (he gives a long list of names, from Hegel to Heidegger) with the news about “the totalitarian terror in all the Eastern countries . . . the Stalinism in the past and neo-Stalinism in the process.” It was precisely from this combined knowledge that he derived his “apocalyptic tone in philosophy,” a catchphrase that he coined retrospectively, in 1980.
In 1981, Derrida was arrested in socialist Prague and spent two days in jail. Horrified by the experience, he saw no end to the Soviet domination of eastern and central Europe: “this barbarism could last for centuries.”5 He used the same popular label for the Soviet gulag, which he said was “at least equal to the Nazi barbarity.”6 However, Derrida remained faithful to the “specters of Marx”; crucially, he has described this faithfulness as a kind of grieving and haunting. In this respect, Derrida felt an affinity with his bereaved colleagues in post-Soviet Russia, an emotional identification that he translated into intellectual terms, noting in 1993 that he had been told by colleagues in Moscow—he does not mention their names but he anachronistically calls them “Soviet”—that the best translation for “perestroika” was not “reconstruction” but “deconstruction.”7 In Specters of Marx, he presents this mourning for the spirit of Communism as global and interminable, so that it amounts to what he calls a “geopolitical melancholy.”
“We are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and like all inheritors, we are in mourning.”8 How can we understand this chain of metaphors? If it is true that we are heirs of Marxism, what are we mourning for? As Derrida repeatedly showed, metaphors are pregnant with meaning, whether they work or not. Derrida’s statement may refer to victims of Marxism, who are not mentioned here though “we are in mourning,” or, alternatively, it might mean that he is mourning the loss of his belief in Marxism, which is also not mentioned here, because “we are heirs.” Derrida’s statement could also combine both meanings, which corresponds to the condition of double mourning that I described in chapters 1 and 7. This uneasy alternative finds illumination in Derrida’s reminiscences about the leading Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser. A tragic figure whose mature life started with imprisonment in a German POW camp and led to psychotic delusion and murder, Althusser was a longtime member of the French Communist Party. In his angry response to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communists, Althusser attacked Khrushchev for using a non-Marxist concept, “the cult of personality,” and reproached Stalin, of all things, for an “excessive economism.”9 It was precisely in 1980—the year to which Derrida dates his own “apocalyptic” turn—that Althusser strangled his wife and was found mentally unfit to stand trial. Althusser would never recover his sanity, and Derrida has described his experience as he tried to care for his friend.10
The historian and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco gives a striking interpretation of Althusser’s ailment as “the melancholy of revolution.”11 She believes it to be similar to “a subjective collapse, a plunge into madness” that many went through, she states, after the French Revolution and its Terror. Conversing with Derrida about their mutual friend, Althusser, Roudinesco presents melancholy as an “invariant” of postrevolutionary situations. Following this logic, Roudinesco explains that “when an entire generation of communists were faced with the disaster of real socialism,” they were “forced to mourn” their ideal, or “succumb to melancholy.”12
Explicating the spirit of postrevolutionary melancholia, Derrida substitutes “ontology,” a central term of traditional philosophy, with “hauntology,” a science of specters and an art of talking to them. He believes that hauntology is the proper approach to Marxism, a ghost that was exorcized after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, but continues its stalking and warning; he also emphasizes the ghostly metaphors of some crucial texts by Marx, most importantly the Communist Manifesto (1848) with its opening line, “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.”13 An inheritor, Derrida speaks more often about specters of Marx than about the ghosts of those who died for or because of Marxism; however, his hauntology embraces all these multinatural spirits. In Colin Davis’s formula, “hauntology is part of an endeavor to keep raising the stakes of literary study, to make it a place where we can interrogate our relation to the dead, examine the elusive identities of the living, and explore the boundaries between the thought and the unthought.”14 This ambitious endeavor also entails new ways of exploring the relations between the past, the present, and the future.
Throughout his book Derrida presents Hamlet, and specifically the scenes between the prince and the ghost, as the key to the fate and memory of Communism. The tripartite construction of Specters of Marx starts with Hamlet as the paradigm of mourning and haunting; moves on to Marx, who envisioned Communism as a specter; and ends with a picture of the late twentieth century that Derrida sees as haunted, like Hamlet, by the betrayed and revengeful spirit of Marxism, still in full armor. Persistent references to Hamlet are to Derrida’s hauntology what references to Oedipus are to Freud’s psychoanalysis. By replacing the tragedy of misrecognition and murder of the father with the tragedy of mourning and revenge for the father, Derrida shifts his central concern from the revolutionary, patricidal Oedipus to the postrevolutionary, melancholic Hamlet. Eloquent as it is, this analogy between the stories of Marx and Hamlet does not always work very well: in contrast to Shakespeare, Marx scornfully eschewed ghosts. According to Derrida, Marx “does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else.”15 It is precisely here that Derrida gains the upper hand over his precursor, and reproaches Marx for his “terrified hostility” toward ghosts and his “fear of spectrality,” which betray a dependence on these hauntological beasts.16
Using Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism but rejecting the idea of “symmetry” between the two totalitarian regimes, the founder of deconstruction demonstrates his eagerness to combine these contradictory ideas, sometimes in a single sentence.17 “I constantly refused to posit a symmetry between Nazi totalitarianism and Soviet totalitarianism,” he says in a phrase that provocatively rejects and embraces the same idea.18 Indeed, Nazism and Stalinism are “inseparable adversaries” for Derrida.19 In one of the most obscure and inspired parts of Specters of Marx, Derrida combines magic, history, and politics in an original master plot. The specter of Communism, he writes, terrified both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks out of their wits, and this fear is key to explaining the outbreaks of terror in both cases. In these speculations, specter turns into spirit, haunting into hunting, and enemies into mirrors, but their “symmetry” is still emphatically denied. Derrida was careful to defend himself against charges of “revisionism,” whether in the sense of defending Nazism or denouncing Marxism. “There is nothing ‘revisionist,’” he wrote, “about interpreting the genesis of totalitarianisms as reciprocal reactions to the fear of the ghost [of] communism.” “Revisionism” is a slippery term, but Derrida’s point here is that both the Nazi and the Soviet totalitarianisms were equally hostile to the specter and spirit of Communism. The Nazi socialists responded to this noble ghost from the outside and the Soviet socialists from the inside, but their responses were similar. Derrida would never run out of strong words while explicating the internal fear of Communism among the Communists as well as among their enemies, “the terror that [Communism] inspired in its adversaries but . . . felt sufficiently within itself to precipitate the monstrous realization, the magical effectuation, the animistic incorporation of an emancipatory eschatology.”20 This is, in the final account, Derrida’s explanation for the Soviet Union’s collapse and his method of rescuing Marx from under the rubble.
Derrida presented Specters of Marx as the book that broke the long years of his self-imposed silence—silence about Althusser, Marxism, and Communism. “For a long time,” he said in what I see as a crucial statement, “I was virtually reduced to silence, a silence that was also assumed, almost chosen, but also somewhat painful with regard to what was happening right in front of me.”21 I believe that with this figure—silence about Communism—Derrida is alluding, consciously and with a healthy dose of self-irony, to a historical model that was all too well known to him: Heidegger’s silence about the Holocaust.
Derrida’s chosen teacher in philosophy, Heidegger is a dubious model. Having built his university career on collaboration with the Nazis, Heidegger kept a conspicuous silence about their crimes even after the war. In 1988, when Derrida was contemplating Specters of Marx, he gave a talk about Heidegger’s silence. Since the early 1960s, Derrida said, he had been struggling to understand how Heidegger’s “difficult work could fit together with what we knew of his political engagement,” and he proposed to distinguish between two aspects of this engagement. While Derrida saw in Heidegger’s prewar career with the Nazis a complicated problem that “could be understood, explained, and excused,” he deemed Heidegger’s silence after the war to be “wounding” and “inexcusable.” Heidegger’s silence, Derrida said, “leaves us a commandment to think what he did not think” and moreover, to “approach what we condemn and to know what it is that we condemn.”22
Heidegger did not break his silence about Nazism; Derrida did break his silence about Communism. His self-ironical idea of his own long-term silence about Communism affirmed the symbolic equivalence between Nazism and Communism, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Derrida, on the other. Having refused to posit “symmetrical” relations between Nazism and Communism, Derrida produced a striking figure of these relations.
Inabilities to Mourn
In the 1980s, the question of the incomparability of the Nazi crimes launched a fierce discussion in Germany, which is remembered as the “Historikerstreit,” or “Historians’ Dispute.” The dispute was sparked by a controversial statement by the philosopher Ernst Nolte, in which he emphasized the historical fact that the practices of state terror, such as concentration camps, had been developed in the Soviet Union earlier than in Germany and that German socialists knew of them well before the Nazis came to power, thus suggesting the direct influence of the Soviets upon the Nazis. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas found that these arguments entailed an unacceptable “historicization of the Holocaust,” which, he argued, served to relieve the burden of historical guilt. The ensuing controversy demonstrated the strength of the taboo governing the topic of the comparability of fascism and Communism. Even in 1998, François Furet characterized this comparison as a “taboo subject.”23
In Russia, this has not always been the case. While any comparison between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was prohibited during the Soviet period, Vasily Grossman, in his Life and Fate, produced a convincing analysis of resemblances, differences, and interactions between these two regimes. Written in the 1950s but read in Russia only in the 1990s, this monumental novel unfolded, along with Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a credible and responsible history decades before academic historians approached the subject. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a former member of the Politburo of its Communist Party, Aleksandr Yakovlev, characterized the Soviet regime in terms that alluded to the German parallel: “It was full-scale fascism of the Russian type. Our tragedy is that we have not repented.” Yakovlev chaired the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions; as he knew well, “rehabilitation” was far from being synonymous with repentance. A founder of the Memorial Society, Veniamin Iofe wrote that the “chaos of speculations” about the Soviet past works like “a smoke-screen” that masks the problem of “evaluating the Soviet period of Russian history in terms as clear as those used for evaluating Nazi Germany.”24 Iofe obviously wanted the Russia of the 1990s to produce as “clear” a vision of its violent past as Germany had managed to do.
Recent scholarship has returned to the question of mutual Nazi Soviet influences. Indeed, the institutions of state and terror in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia featured multiple interactions before and after Molotov and Ribbentrop signed their pact in 1939. At crucial moments of their histories, these two regimes selectively emulated one another, and this reciprocal mimesis continued even at the peak of the confrontation. The history of the bloodiest lands and events of the twentieth century can be presented as a chain of imitations and confrontations, a sort of mimesis that can often be found at the core of rivalry.25 In the recent historiography, the intricate timeline of these reciprocal influences—trade, emulations, deceptions, disenchantments, conflicts, and new imitations—have overshadowed the old-style “typological” speculations about resemblances and differences between the two totalitarianisms.
Several major factors should be taken into account in comparing the state of the German memory of National Socialism to the Russian memory of Soviet socialism. First, the Communist regime in Russia lasted much longer than the Nazi regime in Germany. Repairing the damage will probably require more time. In addition, Russia is less distant from the collapse of its Soviet state than Germany is from the collapse of its Nazi state. Since the Soviet regime lasted for seven decades, including at least three decades of terror, the concept of generation is less useful here than in the studies of the Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In post-Stalinist Russia, historical debates were suspended for several decades after an abortive mourning period during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Second, the Soviet victims were significantly more diverse than the Nazi victims; their descendants are more dispersed and, in some cases, have competing interests, which creates multiple memory conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Third, Germany’s postwar transformation was forced upon it by military defeat and occupation, while Russia’s post-Soviet transformation was a political choice. No occupation force ruled Russia; it has continuously ruled itself. Instead of a Marshall Plan, the international support for the post-Soviet transition was remarkably inconsistent. Finally, there are substantial differences when it comes to the subjective experiences of victimization and mourning among the victims of both regimes and their descendants.
Decades ago, the French-Russian historian Mikhail Geller pinpointed the crucial difference here in a strong statement from his introduction to the first edition of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales:
Kolyma is a twin of Hitler’s death camps. But it is also different. . . . The difference is that in Hitler’s death camps, the victims knew why they were killed. . . . Those who died in the Kolyma or other Soviet camps, died bewildered.26
If the Nazi theory of racial purity was implemented with consistency, the application of the Soviet theory of class warfare was more arbitrary. Most of those Jews and Gypsies who died in the Nazi camps agreed with their jailers that they were Jews or Gypsies (though of course they did not agree that this should be cause to kill them). In contrast, most of those kulaks, saboteurs, and enemies of the people who died in the Soviet camps disagreed with their jailers that they were kulaks, saboteurs, and enemies of the people. Some of them hated “enemies of the people” just as much as their jailers did. In the Stalinist camps, many political prisoners shared the principles of their perpetrators but clung to the belief that in their personal cases, they had been mistakenly identified. In Nazi camps, on the other hand, the typical victim did not question his or her identification (for example, as a Jew), but objected to the general reasons for his or her persecution. Equally monstrous, the Soviet and Nazi regimes manifested different structures of disagreement between those in power and those who became their victims. These two structures of disagreement gave rise to two deeply different sentiments on the part of the victims, which in turn had different consequences: a strong and coherent anti-Fascist and Zionist movement in one case, and a chaotic and often painful mix of misplaced loyalty, escapism, and resistance to the Soviet state in the other.
Comparing the Russian and German memory of terror is like comparing two individuals at divergent points in the life cycle: an adolescent and an old man. In order to grasp their actual difference, one needs to imagine the old man in his younger years. Marking the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 and the end of the Soviet regime in 1991, we must judge the current state of Russian memory against German memory as it was documented in the 1960s. Germans had already experienced the Nuremberg trials (1945–46) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965). In Russia, an attempt to try the Communist Party failed in 1992. Germans began to open memorials and museums on the sites of camps in the 1960s; Russians started opening memorials in the 1990s. But in the 1960s, complaints about “collective amnesia” and “silencing the catastrophe” were probably as typical in Germany as they were in Russia over the last two decades.
The first study of German memory, The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlich, documents the situation in 1967. In their cultural critique of German society of the 1960s, the Mitscherlichs identified a syndrome that consisted of an “unconscious fixation on the past” whose consequences included what they called “collective ego depletion” and the “blockage of social imagination,” and which was both enabled and masked by the conditions of material prosperity experienced by German society at the time. Germany had failed to produce the required “political working-through of the past.” Historians, public intellectuals, and politicians had failed to “master the past” in which millions had been murdered. “After the enormity of the catastrophe that lay behind them . . . the country seems to have exhausted its capacity to produce politically effective ideas”; as a result, political life had frozen into “mere administrative routine.” Atypically for psychologists, the Mitscherlichs blamed the political system rather than specific individuals. They also drew a connection to economic developments, arguing that “hard work and its success soon covered up the open wounds left by the past. . . . Economic restoration was accompanied by the growth of a new self-esteem.” In the case of post-Soviet Russia, the rise in the standard of living has not been achieved through hard work, but is rather the result of pure luck, a combination of natural resource endowment and the vicissitudes of energy prices. But in all other respects, this diagnosis of 1960s Germany holds equally true for post-Soviet Russia. Like German society of the 1960s, Russian society of the 2000s is cushioned by a newfound prosperity; it is “at least materially, on the whole better off than ever before. . . . [I]t [feels] no incentive to expose its interpretation of the recent past to the inconvenient questioning of others.” Like German society of the 1960s, Russian society today has no reason to overcome its “affective isolation . . . from the rest of the world.” The working hypothesis of these German psychologists is still relevant, though in a context that its authors would find hard to imagine: “Our hypothesis views the political and social sterility of present-day Germany as being brought about by a denial of the past.”27
The picture presented in The Inability to Mourn bears a strong, sometimes striking resemblance to the Russia of the 2010s. But this German-Russian comparison is less gloomy than it might appear; in fact, it gives a modest hope for the future, particularly if viewed in the light of Germany’s subsequent development. A number of studies demonstrate that the transformation of German memory has both reflected and led the broader development of culture, society, and politics.28 If German memory and German political life have changed so dramatically since the time analyzed by the Mitscherlichs, then this reinforces the possibilities for similar transformations in Russia in the near future.29
The Electorate in the Graves
According to some calculations, the total number of victims of internal violence in the twentieth century was larger than the number of victims of all international wars, including the two world wars.30 Politics is about distinguishing between friends and foes, but the new data on “democides” supplement Carl Schmitt’s tradition of political theory by asserting that this political differentiation took place not only in the noble domain of international relations but also—in the twentieth century, predominantly—in the dirty internal policies of the emerging nation-states, declining empires, and insecure dictatorships. Both the Nazis and the Soviets murdered many millions of those whom they doctrinally defined as their enemies with the help of various means of othering. However, it is also true that many millions were victimized before the process of their discursive excision from the political body had been completed, or even started.
A political theory of mourning might be built upon the famous dictum of Edmund Burke, who in his polemics against the ideas of the French Revolution claimed that the social contract “becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Different generations, living and dead, are partners in this contract, which links “lower with higher natures, . . . the visible and invisible world.” This idea of a “great primeval contract” was conservative, but at the same time innovative and globalizing. A nation-state in this contract, wrote Burke, is “not but a clause.”31 More common in mystical contexts than in political ones, these concerns with the past and the dead were similarly theorized by Walter Benjamin, who wrote, “There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.”32 Disappointed with both the failure of revolution in Germany and its success in Russia, Benjamin revived Burke’s ideas. The same postrevolutionary formula inspired Derrida in his Specters of Marx, though Burke does not feature in its index: no ethics or politics, writes Derrida, is just that does not recognize respect for those others who “are already dead or not yet born,” and no justice is possible without responsibility “before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” Like Burke 200 years before him, Derrida does not posit his ghostly ideas as a metaphysical speculation about the nature of politics, but addresses them to the historical situation in which he lives, in the wake of “the oppressions of imperial capitalism or any other forms of totalitarianism.”33
In the 1990s, when the Memorial Society discussed the forms of its political involvement in Russia’s tortured transformation, one of its leaders, Veniamin Iofe, used to repeat: “Our electorate is there, in the graves.”34 Rejecting the direct participation of the Memorial Society in political elections, Iofe proclaimed the unique role of the past in the post-catastrophic politics. He was a physicist by training and probably never read Burke, but he knew the relevance of the “contract with the dead.” A Soviet-era dissident and ex-prisoner, he also knew the affinity between memory and power.
Scholars tend to grumble about the condition of memory in contemporary Russia. Many speculate about collective nostalgia and cultural amnesia, or observe the “cold” character of the memory of Soviet terror.35 Yet this notion of a deficit or crisis of popular historical knowledge in Russia does not reflect the current state of affairs and needs qualification. In fact, far from demonstrating an outright denial or forgetting of the Soviet catastrophe, the vast majority of Russians are well aware of their country’s recent history. It is not historical knowledge that is at issue but its interpretation. Sociological surveys reveal a complex picture of a people who retain a vivid memory of the Soviet terror but are divided in their interpretation of this memory. This interpretation inevitably depends upon the schemas, theories, narratives, and myths that people receive from their scholars, artists, and politicians. Many Russians explain the Soviet terror as an exaggerated but rational response to actual problems that confronted the country at the time. These people believe that the terror was necessary for the survival of the nation, its modernization, industrialization, victory in World War II, and so forth. In Holocaust studies, interpretations of this kind are called “redemptive narrative”; as Lawrence Langer has shown convincingly, such redemption obstructs a sensible, “deep” connection to the catastrophic past.36 Sociological polls reflect the massive spread of the need for a redemptive understanding of the past in contemporary Russia. However, the same polls say that the overwhelming majority of Russians and other post-Soviets are well aware of the crimes, misery, and “repressions” that remain memorable parts of the Soviet period. The polls, however, do not tell us about the substance of the historical truths and myths in which the public believes. Nor do they tell us why the public believes in the truth of some myths. They do not tell us who creates myths, mixes them with truths, and defines their changing boundaries.
In a popular post-Soviet Russian film, The Peculiarities of National Hunting (1995), a Finnish student is writing a dissertation about the history of Russian hunting.37 During his field trip to Russia, he falls into the company of a group of drunken and bumbling Russian men on an amateur hunting trip. While they go about their drinking and shooting, the student visualizes gorgeous scenes of prerevolutionary aristocratic hunting with Borzoi dogs and mounted beauties. The comic effect of the film is based on the interpenetration of a pathetic present and an extraordinary but irrelevant past. Indeed, historical memory in Russia is a living, de-centered combination of symbols and judgments, which are experienced simultaneously, all at once, responding to various political needs and cultural desires. Because of the de-centered nature of this construction, deprived of consensual anchors or reference points, the public does not perceive the inconsistencies or logical conflicts between its different parts. In contrast to the multiculturalism that is actively promoted by American society, Russians live in and promote a condition I would call multihistorical.
There are university professors in Russia who explain Lenin or Gorbachev by the “fact” that they were Freemasons. There are influential churchmen who want to canonize Ivan the Terrible and Grigory Rasputin. There are authors who have written volumes on “the New Chronology,” a popular alternative history penned mainly by astronomers, who dispute the Mongol occupation of Russia and claim that, in fact, Russia occupied Europe in the Middle Ages; some go so far in their revisionist efforts as to claim Slavic origins for Jesus Christ. There are academics and officials of law-enforcement agencies who believe that the years of Stalinism were the best time for Russia. In popular culture, manifestations of this multihistoricism border on kitsch. In 2002, I visited a fancy St. Petersburg restaurant called Russian Kitsch: Cafe of the Transitional Period, which featured grand frescos executed in the manner of socialist realism. In these images, Soviet collective farmers dance with American Indians, and Leonid Brezhnev, looking strangely similar to Frank Sinatra, gives a speech to a Stone Age tribe. In a similar spirit, artist Andrei Budaev, who is popular in the Moscow of the 2010’s, depicts a fictional encounter between Putin and Brezhnev. In the scene, Brezhnev and Putin are shaking hands, to the applause of members of their respective contemporary entourages, such as Mikhail Suslov and Vladislav Surkov—a gathering that could never have taken place in real life. The anachronistic character of this painting does not obscure its critical message: the happy confluence of two corrupt and cynical cliques and the historical regress of Putin’s rule to the Brezhnev template. In another series of large-scale works, Budaev reproduces the classical canvases by Bosch, Breughel, and Rubens, with the faces of their characters substituted by those of Russian political leaders and oligarchs. In this newest version of the Russian longing for world culture, hilarious combinations of persons and situations fit the classical patterns of corruption and decadence, barbarian invasions, the end of empire, and the descent into hell.
In 2008, many millions were invested, and probably earned, on the show “The Name of Russia,” which TV-Russia declared “our most significant project of the year.” On the program, the leading filmmaker, Nikita Mikhalkov, the celebrated director of Burnt by the Sun (1994) and many other films, presided over a jury of twelve VIPs who were supposed to guide the public in electing the greatest figure in Russian history. From the Speaker of the Russian parliament to the metropolitan (and future patriarch) of the Russian Orthodox Church, all the jury members were male; all were ethnically Russian; all of them were, and looked, aged. Without any doubt, they represented the ruling group.
According to the promotional blurb, TV-Russia asked unnamed historians to produce an initial list of 500 candidates, which was then published for an online vote. The vote produced a landslide victory for Stalin. Surprised but not discouraged, TV-Russia explained this as the result of an attack by hackers. This vote was annulled, the technology was improved, and a fresh vote produced a new short list of medieval warriors, czars, nineteenth-century writers, and Bolshevik leaders, with one scientist thrown in for good measure. In the weekly sessions of the show, the twelve dignitaries discussed each of these figures, from Tolstoy to Stalin. The jury voted in-house; the public voted online or by telephone. As a result, Russia would learn who was its greatest personage, or rather personification. The segment dealing with Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century Russian prince, began with fragments of the eponymous 1938 film by Sergei Eisenstein, which was commissioned by Stalin to showcase Russia’s historical victory over the Germans. A historian expressed doubts about the film’s truth-value. The chairman, Nikita Mikhalkov, made a spirited rebuttal, arguing that the jury was interested not so much in verifying historical facts as in identifying inspiring and legendary images, which the new Russia might profitably use. But if this self-conscious mythmaking worked smoothly when it came to the ancient Alexander Nevsky, it produced new questions when applied to Stalin. Even a veteran general who praised Stalin on the show admitted that his own father had been imprisoned during the repressions, though “only” for six months. But although the jury ultimately substituted the cultish Stalin with the legendary Alexander Nevsky in the role of “the name of Russia,” their sympathies for Stalin were evident. Despite the undisputed knowledge of Stalin’s “repressions,” the viability of Stalin’s cult is remarkable. Nationalism requires sacrifices as much as socialism did: the number of victims also makes Russia great.
The show included footage from the new film by Mikhalkov, Burnt by the Sun-2, which was released later, in 2010. The central character, Commander Kotov, who is played by Mikhalkov, has survived the gulag and is now talking to Stalin, who is instructing Kotov on how to attack the enemy. Usually suave and ironic, Kotov loses his cool when he sees Stalin. The scene is full of admiration and awe, though the dialogue verges on the absurd; with no attempt at analysis, Mikhalkov affirms the irresistible impact of Stalin. Essentially, he reproduces here the same phenomenon that was dubbed the “cult of personality” fifty years earlier. In this vision, Kotov and millions of others were “burnt by the Sun,” but one can neither deny the force of the sun nor turn it off. Stalin’s “charisma” is ineffable, beyond human communication.
After Repentance
Reflecting the moving equilibrium between the competing forces of politics, culture, and time, accepted definitions of what is “right” and “healthy” in the memory of the Soviet past shift with every new generation. But no consensus on the crucial issues of historical memory has been reached in twenty-first-century Russia. While the state is led by former KGB officers who are no more interested in apologizing for the past than they are in fair elections in the present, the struggling civil society and the intrepid reading public are possessed by the unquiet ghosts of the Soviet era. But the circular time of postcatastrophic experience conflates uneasily with the linear time of history.38 Whatever the scale of victimization, mourning remains a personal matter, but collective rituals and cultural artifacts are critical for the process. Sharing sorrow with the community, burial rituals prevent mourning from developing into melancholy. Crystals of memory, monuments keep the uncanny where it belongs, in the grave. The anthropologist Katherine Verdery asserts that “in many human communities, to set up right relations between living human communities and their ancestors depends critically on proper burials.” Though it is never easy to learn which relations are “right,” wrong relations are universally believed to be unfair to the dead and dangerous to the living.39 In the post-Soviet economy of memory, where the losses are massive and the monuments in short supply, the dead return as the undead. The innocent victims turn into uncanny monsters. Locked in various but usually monstrous bodies and speaking in various but usually fictional tongues, post-Soviet Clorindas are bearing witness to their Tancreds about war and peace, life and fate, violence and the sacred.
Having distinguished between two forms of cultural memory, the hardware and the software, in Russian memory and mourning, I see the proliferation of a third form, which is impossible to reduce to the first two. I am referring to ghosts, spirits, vampires, dolls, and other simulacra that carry the memory of the dead.40 Usually, ghosts live in texts; sometimes they inhabit cemeteries and emerge from monuments. Most often, ghosts visit those whose dead have not been properly buried. Three elements of cultural memory—its software, hardware, and ghostware—are intimately connected. Texts are symbolic, while ghosts are iconic: as signs, ghosts possess a visual resemblance to the signified; in contrast to monuments, texts and ghosts are ephemeral; and in contrast to texts and monuments, ghosts are uncanny. These ghostly components of memory deserve a detailed analysis and close reading. One scholar of German memory confronting similar problems has devised an approach that he calls “spectral materialism”; I have used the concept of “ghostware” to indicate this new and challenging domain.41
One can feel the swift evolution of the popular style of historicizing by watching and comparing several Russian films, starting from the pre-post-Soviet Zero City (1988). In the course of the film, the narrative gradually shifts from an antibureaucratic comedy to a fable about the grasping power of the past. The protagonist is a typical Soviet man, an unambitious engineer who comes from Moscow to a provincial factory on a business trip. Screened as a drama of misrecognition, the story focuses on the investigation of a local scandal that was suppressed in the 1960s but leads to a suicide in the 1980s. Irresistibly drawn into this provincial story, the protagonist finds himself unable to escape. A key setting for this imprisonment is the local historical museum, where the engineer is presented with a past that feels more lively and consequential than his present has ever been. He ends up stuck in the museum, under the sway of a monotonous, pedantic historian who presents this Soviet Everyman with an astonishing panoply of pictures of the past in the form of group statues composed of living people. Full of tricks, conspiracies, and outright hallucinations that are all presented as apparitions of the past, the film leaves the aftertaste of a mystery that has not been resolved by its creators.
In the spirit of melancholy, Zero City combines an ecstatic fascination with the great but horrible past with a vague anxiety about the future. Conveying expert knowledge but zero sympathy for the late-Soviet present, this film still lacked the staple feature of post-Soviet cinema: hostile, mystical beasts that operate among humans and interfere with their present. In contrast to the hyperhistorical Zero City, Night Watch (2004) and its sequel, Day Watch (2006), demonstrate the post-Soviet infatuation with magic in a deliberately abstract, ahistorical context.42 Based on the bestselling trilogy by Sergei Lukianenko, a psychiatrist from Kazakhstan who has made himself into one of the most popular post-Soviet authors, these films present an enormous taxonomy of immortal creatures. Vampires and other supernatural beasts rule over Russians and live in their midst. Humans are entirely deprived of self-control, autonomy, and political life in this world. As in a camp, these Muscovites have been reduced to bare life, and essentially fulfill the role of the vampires’ cattle (the vampires in the film prefer human blood but will settle for pigs’ blood if necessary). But actual politics are deployed by creatures of a higher order than vampires and humans. These creatures are immortal and powerful though otherwise look like humans. Like Americans, they are divided into two equally powerful parties, an achievement that has never been accomplished by Muscovites. The origins of their conflict are projected back to medieval Europe in one episode, and to the Asia of Genghis Khan in another. As in historical debates between contemporary Russian intellectuals, the roots of the current problems are presented as lost and found in the most distant time and spaces, but not in current or recent Russian politics. There is not a word in this movie about Stalin or the Soviet Union. The contemporary commoners, all of whom are potential victims of vampires, are juxtaposed against noble warriors whose moments of glory and sources of conflicts are all in the past. What matters is not happening here and now; it all happened in the past. The past, which is imagined as grand and foreign, determines the actual, dismal present. While the contemporary rulers are of alien and metaphysical origins, the vampires are local and earthly. Curiously, the most important of these vampires is played by the only actor in this young, all-star cast who was famous in the Soviet era, Valery Zolotukhin. The vampires represent, as they do in Slavic folklore, the unburied dead, while the remarkable face of their leader reflects a free play of Soviet shadows.43 These films convey a static, irresolvable melancholy that risks slipping into paranoia. If vampires really ruled Russia, this is the worldview that they would disseminate among their human chattel to keep them subdued and passive. In the battle between light and dark forces, what is at stake is probably not the right to license vampires’ bloodsucking activities, as Night Watch suggests. Inverting the film’s metaphor, the only means of preventing the reproduction of vampires is to bury, acknowledge, and remember the dead.
Some other post-Soviet blockbusters produce a deeper analysis of the changing relations between the past and the present. The action of Terra Nova takes place in 2013.44 Prisons are overfilled worldwide, and the global society now exports its outcasts to Russia, where the international inmates reproduce the mores of the gulag. Left to fend for themselves on an Arctic island, the prisoners reinvent administrative corruption, ethnic hatred, and cannibalism. When the global overseers arrive at the scene they are horrified by what they find, though it remains an open question whether it was their stupidity or greed that has caused this disastrous result of social engineering. The message is that despite its part in globalization, Russia is still living by the rules of the gulag, and these rules are powerful enough to spread throughout the global community. A somewhat more parochial thriller under the challenging title Death to the Soviet Children45 chronicles a reality TV show that a Moscow television company is shooting at the site of a former pioneer camp, where Soviet children spent their summers as part of their Communist upbringing. While young, attractive, and well-dressed volunteers rehearse their show, a mysterious killer begins to murder them, one by one. The murderer turns out to be the producer of the show, who was a pioneer and spent childhood summers in this camp about thirty years earlier. Possessed by the memories of his youth, he takes revenge on it by sacrificing about a dozen young bodies in a bloody ritual whose meaning remains unexplored. The film plays out a clash of civilizations, the Soviet and the new Russian, which are deeply incompatible but are forced to exist on the same sites and puncture the same people. Reinventing a sacrificial ritual that is even older and less familiar to his victims than Soviet life, the middle-aged murderer plays out a conflict that is known to many of his peers. While killing his victims, the murderer reads and sometimes writes with their blood the long-forgotten horror doggerels (uzhastiki) that were popular in the 1980s (see chapter 5), hence bridging the epochs and presenting his post-Soviet murders as a resurgence of the Soviet terror.
One of the best Russian films, 4, illustrates the spectral dynamics of a postcatastrophic memory that produces the undead, cherishes and holds on to them, and, in rare acts of heroism, buries them.46 One of the male characters, a Moscow manager, trades in frozen meat that has been preserved since Soviet times and still feeds Russia’s capital. A huge pile of frozen meat bearing the label “1969” is the opening image of this film, which is set in the recognizable landscape of twenty-first-century Russia’s capital and provinces. The fifty-year-old meat is a metaphor for the Russian culture and economy, which despite all the dramatic changes of the past decades, continues to depend on the legacy of its long-dead Soviet predecessor. Another male character, a musician, is sent to a labor camp after he runs into trouble with the Moscow police. In the camp, he is reduced to the lowest caste of the physically and sexually abused prisoners; in the end of the film we see him convoyed, among hundreds of fellow prisoners, to a distant “hot spot,” a front of the civil war. The female protagonist, a Moscow prostitute, travels deep into the countryside to attend the funeral of her sister. This sister had lived in a community of abandoned females who manufacture dolls made of bread. These women use their yeasty dolls as substitutes for partners; they play, drink alcohol, and have sex with these dolls. Creating a world of simulacra, this melancholic substitution protects the villagers from their pathetic reality. The dolls and the meat of the past must be buried in order to let the people live in their present. In a climactic moment, the only vital character of the film, the prostitute, burns the bread dolls on the grave of her sister in a gesture of despair and triumph. With its panoramic survey of social reality; a bizarre obsession with quadruplets and mutations; a ceaseless exchange between humans, dogs, and dolls; and a persistent deconstruction of folkloric and populist themes, this film works as a veritable encyclopedia of post-Soviet culture. Its authors, Vladimir Sorokin and Ilia Khrzhanovsky, have since gone on to direct an ambitious new film, Dau, a filmic biography of the Soviet physicist Lev Landau, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939 and received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Reportedly, the setting of Dau reproduces the Moscow lifestyle of the late 1950s in an unprecedented and extreme level of detail, which includes exact replicas of Soviet-style underclothing for hundreds of actors and extras. Adherence to the rules of this simulated world is compulsory, and strictly enforced on the set. Crew members are fined for using ahistorical words, pieces of clothing, or cell phones.47
In Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance,48 which is now a Soviet classic, the daughter of a victim digs up the corpse of the dictator. She goes on trial but does not repent: she would do it 300 times over, she declares. It is not the corpse of the dictator that is uncanny in this film but the living dictator, as he is remembered or imagined by his former subjects. As in Sophocles’s Antigone, the perpetually moving corpse begets new tragedies; in Repentance, it brings about the suicide of the dictator’s grandson.49 In The Living, a Russian soldier of the Chechen War, Kir, is rescued by his comrades, who are then themselves killed in action.50 On his way home from the war, Kir murders his officer and cheats on his fiancée. He does not care; he is possessed by the ghosts of his lost comrades, who come to him alive though other people do not see them. When Kir and his ghostly companions travel to Moscow, what they (and the viewers) actually see is the burial monument to Stalin near the Kremlin Wall. The movie ends with Kir’s visit to an abandoned cemetery, where he hopes to find his friends buried like heroes. While trying to find these graves, Kir dies; immediately, he joins the company of his ghostly fellows. The multiple tricks that the undead play with the living in this film force the viewer to suspect that the soldier was probably dead from the very beginning; perhaps all or a large part of what we see actually happened to his ghost.
These two films, Repentance and The Living, mark the start and the possible end of the post-Soviet transition, which may yet turn out to have been a false start and a dead end. In the 1980s, it seemed that the most important goal was to punish the dead dictator and, in this way, to restore justice posthumously; twenty years later, the living were still struggling with the authorities, but their unburied dead were friends, not foes. There are enemies who are alive and deserve death, but there are also friends who are dead and need to be buried. Both films play on the uncanny effects of communication between the living and the dead; but while Repentance celebrates the change of generations, the trial of memory, and historical time, The Living deconstructs the meaning of death in an obsessive way that makes time cyclical and history irrelevant. Still hopeful for the future, Repentance argues for a new ethical order that would include dead corpses in its scope. Self-censoring any sign of hope, The Living shows the ghostly nature of postcatastrophic consciousness, which obscures the very difference between the living and the dead. Here, the post-Soviet trial of the dead gives way to a new Russian communion and mingling with the dead.
A scene from a historical film, Tsar (2009), returns this post-Soviet metaphor to its medieval roots. Based on a novel by a major writer, Aleksei Ivanov, and directed by a major filmmaker, Pavel Lungin, both of whom have vast experience with historical fictions, the film presents an episode from the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Engaged in an explicit polemical relation with Eisenstein’s Soviet classic Ivan the Terrible (1944–1946), this post-Soviet film represents Ivan as a cruel tyrant, deluded millenarian, and self-destructive coward. In one scene, the czar pardons his prisoner, a prince who, during torture that is shown in bloody detail, admits to high treason. His torturer understands the czar’s granting of mercy as an order to kill the prince instead of continuing the torture. Before the execution, the perpetrator asks the prince to give his word that he will not haunt the czar after his death. Begging for death, the prince makes the promise on behalf of his ghost, and the satisfied executioner hangs him. Consciously and purposefully, the film transcends the boundaries between the mystical and the political. Exemplifying the unity of mourning and warning (see chapter 2), it merges three epochs: Ivan the Terrible’s Russia of the mid-sixteenth century; Stalin’s Russia of the mid-twentieth century; and Putin’s Russia of the present day.
The scholars of the European Enlightenment observe how its rational ordering of the world, which was still full of unpredictable suffering, led to the invention of the uncanny, “a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse.”51 By analogy I argue that Soviet culture, with its combination of bellicose rationalism and absurd violence, generated a veritable explosion of figurative and mystical ways in which people responded to their world. Official culture locked these ghostly ways in the underground of everyday life with its rumors, legends, and anecdotes, and also in low genres of art and literature that were less susceptible to censorship. Released by the glasnost of the late twentieth century, repressed figures of this Soviet underground returned to their place of origin, high culture, where they became dominant ways of representing history and even politics. Slavoj Žižek suggests that the return of the dead has become “a fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture.”52 Defeating the ideals of the Enlightenment, this process seems to be especially prominent in Russia, which has inherited and rejected the ideals of the Enlightenment in their perverted Soviet forms. Postsecular politics entails a transformation of “the state’s secularist self-understanding” in various parts of the world, and its historical mechanisms and manifestations are different everywhere.53 In the global world of the twenty-first century, mourning and warning are developing their dual alliance, but their proportions and relations within this alliance differ in different cultures. Some authors and cultures proliferate their ghosts, vampires, and zombies in response to the catastrophes of the past; others generate this imagery in anticipation of the catastrophes of the future. Either way, this ghostly perspective on world affairs—hauntological worldliness, I would say—is both realist and humanist. It is only on the hauntic level that Edmund Burke’s “great primeval contract” between the living, the dead, and the unborn can be imagined or, for that matter, observed.
Having taught the relevance of ghosts to the interpretative community of his readers, Derrida does not offer much help in understanding their nature, taxonomy, or life cycle. As some critics have mentioned, his ghosts are not the same as the sophisticated phantoms of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, which keep the secrets of the past and transmit them, in eternally encrypted form, from generation to generation. Derrida’s ghosts could reveal a secret if they wanted to, but they do not necessarily do that, and the reason behind their existence is different from this conspiratorial knowledge. “It is in the name of justice” that Derrida speaks about the ghosts, and not in the name of knowledge. But this is a special kind of justice, one that brings the living and the dead together in a single ghostly equation. As for Burke, for Derrida “present existence . . . has never been the condition . . . of justice.” Theirs is the justice of relations between the living and the dead. It needs to be established “through but also beyond right and law,”54 though not beyond human comprehension, with its rhetorical devices such as ghosts. Practically speaking, this particular “justice,” one of the most frequent concepts in Derrida’s late writings, is the debt owed to the dead (see chapter 6). As far as I know, Derrida and Siniavsky never met and never read one another, though they easily might have. Despite the fact that their experiences differ dramatically, their conclusions are similar: the living owe a debt to the dead, and this debt must be returned. Otherwise, the dead will continue to return to life in disguised forms, like Clorinda, presenting their claims and preventing the Tancreds from continuing their crusades.
But it is also true that these debts before the dead can never be returned, and this justice can never be established. I am sure that all our philosophers of mourning, from Tasso to Burke to Freud to Siniavsky to Derrida, would agree with this thesis, which gives postcatastrophic mourning its interminable, melancholic character. Having granted these images—ghosts, debts, posthumous justice—all the metaphorical relevance they deserve, one still feels puzzled by them. How can we the living redeem our debt to the dead? What kind of justice are we talking about? Can we repay the ghosts? Do we have a currency that is convertible for this task? Can this toolkit of legal and financial metaphors provide any help in carrying out the work of mourning?
Derrida links his hauntology with the idea of retributive justice. In a postcatastrophic situation, we mourners live lives and die deaths that are incomparably better than those of our precursors. This is why to live with ghosts means “to live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly.”55 This kind of justice does not require judiciary power, but it does need scholars, as Hamlet needed Horatio. As the living and the undead grow more accustomed to each other, they develop an uneasy friendship that needs to be noticed, articulated, and recognized. As Derrida urged, the ghostly dimension of our lifeworld is permanent; we must “learn to live with ghosts.” This is a departure from a folklore understanding of ghostly apparitions as consequences of improper burial rites, with the implicit promise that reburial would send the ghosts safely back to their graves. Derrida does not want this to happen as a general case, and I do not see it happening in Russia. In contrast to laying them to rest, learning to live with ghosts is an open-ended process, which generates the unpredictable and rich variety of Victims’ Balls, memory events, and cultural innovations.
These mournful experiences need to be summarized, but justice is a poor concept for doing this work. Ghosts need recognition rather than justice. There is no way to redistribute anything of value between the dead and the living; but there is a very real sense in which unjustifiable deaths can be recognized by the living. Like Clorinda in her tree, or Hamlet’s father in his armor, or Siniavsky’s marching convicts who “are on the move . . . as long as I live, as long as we all live,”56 ghosts demand recognition.