Mourning is work and like any work has its pace, stages, and instruments. There are latent periods when intellectuals, the conscience of the nation, talk about the inability to mourn. There are also periods of hectic activity when it seems that no other concern is more relevant; then, intellectuals talk about mourning fatigue. The longest are the periods of slow, blurred, but persistent remorse, when reminiscences of the past shape warnings about the future and compete with concerns about the present. Melancholic as they are, these periods are unavoidable. In a post-catastrophic nation, which suffers not only from the loss of people but also from the destruction of cultural symbols, social networks, and spiritual or ideological beliefs, the work of mourning re-creates and replenishes a wellspring of solidarity and coherence. Then, work of mourning becomes “action,” as Hannah Arendt calls the free, essentially political manifestations of human plurality. Because of human vulnerability and violence, and also because of human solidarity and love, mourning is an essential part of Arendt’s vita activa.1 This book has presented many examples of acts and deeds of mourning, which are also actions of ethical choice, political resistance, and aesthetic self-expression.
I have looked at the Russian memory of the Soviet terror as an enormous cultural formation that encompasses different media and genres, incompatible versions of history, and various rituals of mourning. In the late-Soviet period, the work of mourning did see its moments of explosive release, but for the most part, it was blocked. Post-Soviet Russia, by contrast, has turned its tortured process of mastering the past into an important part of the political present. At the start of the twenty-first century, political opponents in Russia differed most dramatically not in their understanding of social issues or international relations, but in their interpretations of history. The present felt oversaturated with the past, and this solution refused to produce any sediment. With my concept of magical historicism, I have tried to embrace the particularity of this post-catastrophic moment.
Uncomfortably for the historian, postcatastrophic memory often entails allegories rather than facts and imaginative fiction rather than archival documentation. As we have seen, in the post-Soviet condition, narrative genres of high culture such as the novel and film play the central role in the double-edged processes of mourning and warning. Like posttraumatic consciousness, the postcatastrophic culture cyclically returns to the overwhelming events of the past. It returns there both willingly and unwillingly, sometimes even unconsciously, without reflection or acknowledgment. These reenactments are cyclical, but they are not, of course, eternal. Like all memory, intergenerational memory has its limits. But we do not know when the process of mourning will be over.
Putin’s authoritarian regime has now controlled this country for over half of the post-Soviet period, and its oily grip has choked the newborn century in Russia. If the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 was a revolution, a claim that has been passionately defended by some experts but is largely distrusted by the post-Soviet public, much of the subsequent two decades has been its “Thermidor,” a dark and oppressive period of political restoration and cultural despair. A concept that was widely used by historians to denote the French Revolution’s self-annihilation, this idea was used in the 1930s by Leon Trotsky, who interpreted Stalinism as a postrevolutionary Thermidor. In such periods, a victorious revolution suffocates in its own violence, and the unlimited, revolutionary power slides from the idealists to the oppressors. Trotsky defined the “Soviet Thermidor” as “a triumph of the bureaucracy over the masses,” a definition that applies all too well to the post-Soviet condition. According to these revelations of the leading Russian revolutionary, “Nobody who has wealth to distribute ever omits himself.” At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Trotsky’s contemporary Carl Schmitt formulated the same truth as the fundamental law of political theory: “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state,” he wrote.2
Redistributing the wealth, bureaucrats become oligarchs and oligarchs, bureaucrats. “The deposed and abused bureaucracy, from being a servant of society, has again become its lord,” Trotsky lamented. With all his understandable bitterness (writing his Revolution Betrayed in exile, he anticipated his death at the hands of Stalin’s assassins), Trotsky did not assert that the situation he observed in the 1930s was a resurrection of the ancien régime of czarist Russia; he saw the logic of Stalinism as belonging to the present and not to the past. For Trotsky, the “Soviet Thermidor” was a question “not of specters of the past, not of the remnants of what no longer exists . . . but of new, mighty, and continually reborn tendencies to personal accumulation.”3
Abiding with these speculations that originate from Hobbes rather than from Marx, Russian politics shows little regret for the millions who perished in the Soviet terror. However, post-Soviet culture has produced unusual, maybe even perverted, forms of memory. As we have seen, two processes come together on this stage of postcatastrophic mourning: the defamiliarization of the past and the return of the repressed. Excavating the past buried in the present, the scholar of postcatastrophic culture watches memory turning into imagination. In Russia, many authors and readers seem to share a desire for a poetic reenactment of the catastrophic past. My point is that this is melancholy rather than nostalgia. Famously contrasted by Sigmund Freud against “healthy mourning,” the logic of melancholy embraces the confusion between the present and the past, the obsessive reenactment of the loss, and the interruption of the relationship to the present. “The inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely,” Freud writes.4 The dialectic of reenactment and defamiliarization produces a rich but puzzling imagery, which absorbs the melancholic, post-Soviet subjectivity.
The ghostly visions of Russian writers, filmmakers, critics, and even politicians extend the work of mourning into those spaces that defeat more rational ways of understanding the past. In a land where millions remain unburied, the dead return as the undead. They do so in novels, films, and other forms of culture that reflect, shape, and possess people’s memory. We have seen that the atrocities of German Nazism and Soviet Communism have left profoundly different memories in their respective countries. Due to unique combinations of political circumstances, these two cultures elaborated different forms of dealing with the past. German memory crystallized its “hardware” in the form of monuments and museums, with a consequent cultural debate over the need to revive and reinspire this memory, to rescue it from complete petrification. The hardening of memory is a cultural process with specific functions, conditions, and thresholds. It promises that the events themselves will not return, that the demons of the past have been exorcised, that the present exists and prevails. In a democratic society, it requires a relative degree of consensus in the public sphere. Such consensus follows after, and because, the intensity of the “soft” debates has reached a certain threshold.
In Russia, consensus about the past has not developed, and memory without memorials is vulnerable to a cyclical, recurrent process of refutations and denials. Feelings of guilt can be assuaged and soothed by new voices, and even the most influential texts can be challenged by new texts. Ghosts, vampires, monsters, and other species of the undead hover in the public space, available for observation by and conversation with any pedestrian consumer. They refuse to leave the living until the unlawfully killed have been remembered by culture high and low, official and popular, nationalist and cosmopolitan. Only with these multiple, infinitely numerous acts of recognizing and remembering will the new Russian culture regain its coherence and vitality.
It so happens that I am completing my book at a moment when Russia has entered another political crisis. The presidential term of Dmitry Medvedev (2008–2012) was wasted through his halfhearted attempts at changing the economic and political system in the spirit of what one observer has called “nostalgic modernization”: depressingly, the template for Medvedev’s reform project was still the Soviet Union.5 But after the parliamentary elections of December 2011, with their massive fraud for the benefit of the ruling party, a series of large-scale protests struck the country, which had been deprived of an autonomous public life for more than a decade. It is much too early to evaluate the depth of this crisis or to predict its future development, but there has been no lack of historicizing metaphors in the public responses to the events. Many commentators in the Russian press and online media are talking about an imminent “revolution” in Russia and predicting “repressions” by the authorities. One comparison that has become particularly popular in the Russian and Western press alike is between Putin and Brezhnev, the unchangeable general secretary of the ruling party and a symbol of the sclerosis of power. But the analogies run deeper. As the Herald Tribune reported with some irony, even President Medvedev used the language of memory when, in the midst of this electoral crisis, he issued a warning about Russia’s future. “It is categorically inadmissible that the political system be delegitimized,” Medvedev said. “What Russia is without government is something that everyone remembers from history books: it is 1917.”6
But there was much that is new and encouraging in the public responses to the December 2011 election fraud. Many of these responses draw parallels between current events in Russia and recent events in foreign and culturally distant countries. The Arab Spring, a series of mass protests and revolutions in northern Africa that occurred in 2011, is a particularly salient source for symbolic borrowings. I find these comparisons important not only because Putin resembles Colonel Gaddafi more than he resembles Brezhnev but also because such cross-cultural identifications have hitherto been rare in Russia’s political debates. The most popular way of explicating political and cultural events in the Russia of the twenty-first century derives these events from the preceding Soviet history, the situation that has been rendered by the sticky and now obsolete concept of the “post-Soviet.” This feeling of continuity belongs to the ongoing condition of melancholia, the inability to attain distance from the violent, catastrophic past. Believing in their uniqueness, post-Soviet Russians did not want to compare themselves with other cultures, and least of all with the “backward” countries of the East that have been perceived in conservative and orientalist ways. With its allusions to the Arab Spring and laments about Russia’s political backwardness in comparison to both the West and the East, the public sphere of 2011 has manifested a breakthrough. Future histories of the new Russia may well take as their starting point the year 2012, when, after a long and complicated pregnancy, the country finally gave birth to an open present. But the story told in these future history books may also turn out to be a sad story of regression and collapse, and such a story will no doubt overflow with historicizing allegories.
Indeed, many problems of post-Soviet Russia—its one-party system, state-supported corruption, ethnic conflicts, selective justice, unchangeable leadership, dependence on natural resources, and the miserable condition of the poor—do show strong continuities with the Soviet era. But the central issue of 2011, the forged elections, constitutes a break with the Soviet tradition, which made elections, and electoral manipulations, entirely irrelevant. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet regime, elections in Russia are still far from meeting democratic norms of transparency and fairness, but they have finally met a deeper and, in a sense, more important criterion that distinguishes an electoral (though always imperfect) democracy from tyranny: elections in Russia have become relevant. The passionate speeches at the rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the end of 2011 attacked Putin and his regime rather than Soviet traditions and institutions. Even when the enormous crowd in the center of Moscow chanted, “We Won’t Forget! We Won’t Forgive!” they referred to the crimes of Putinism and not the crimes of Stalinism. In this crisis, the Russian public sphere turned to the present, not the past. Maybe it will pull the country out of the post-Soviet era, into the open future.