Warped mourning: stories of the undead in the land of the unburied Open Access

Current cultures of collective memory are rather different from those of the first half of the twentieth century when they primarily reflected national memories; representations of those pasts served to unite nations and consolidate national identities. In national memories, difficult pasts used to be suppressed. It is only since the end of the 1990s that difficult pasts have become part of national memory repertoires. Stories of perpetrators and victims became universal tropes, coinciding with the development of a human rights regime and the cosmopolitanization of memories. Though the scope of these changes is considerable, they certainly do not occur everywhere. Some countries are still reluctant to address tragedies in their history. It does not mean that these events are completely forgotten; rather, it presents a complex situation where difficult pasts ‘haunt’ societies. Alexander Etkind's book is dedicated to such an ‘undead’ and ‘unburied’ past of Soviet terror that comes back in different forms.

Surprisingly, the gulag system, a phenomenon almost comparable with the Holocaust in its scope, not only remains understudied in Russia but also barely registers on the commemorative scale. Conversely, memories of Soviet terror in Eastern European countries have become a potent political issue and a popular theme in memory studies since the end of the Cold War. Some Eastern European countries are pushing for the recognition of atrocities committed by Communist regimes as criminal, similar to the way the Nazis were treated. The condemnation of Communist, especially Stalinist, atrocities seems to unify people in these societies. The situation in Russia is rather different. Etkind describes it as a magical historicism – ‘bizarre but instructive imagery that has evolved out of postcatastrophic post-Soviet culture’ (p. 233). This unresolved and rather painful past becomes, in Etkind's terms, ‘ghostly’ and ‘haunting’.

The project ‘Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine’, led by Alexander Etkind and based at Cambridge University, was one of the first steps in understanding such a complex topic. Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, grew out of this larger project. Although the author frames his work in terms of cultural studies that he aims ‘to reformulate as a historical discipline’ (p. 18) it is not just a history of Soviet and post-Soviet culture under the influence of memory of the gulag. It is also a reflection of the ways these memories are shaping contemporary Russian society.

The key concept for Etkind is ‘mimetic mourning’, ‘a recurrent response to loss that entails a symbolic reenactment of that loss’ (p. 1). Etkind deploys the concept of mourning in a limited way, as he is interested primarily in the production of mourning narratives, and less in the issues of reception. As such, responses to the representations of difficult pasts and the attendant possibility of emerging solidarities are beyond the scope of his study. As mourning narratives are the main objects of Etkind's book, he investigates memoirs, fiction and non-fiction writings, and movies in search of mnemonic footprints of the gulag experience, trying to trace the gulag as a determinant of Soviet and post-Soviet cultural and intellectual life.

The first two chapters discuss the theoretical framework of the study. In the third chapter, the author moves to the trope of misrecognition of those who returned from the gulag. To illustrate this trope, he shares a personal example. We learn that his grandfather was arrested, but then released after several months. When the grandfather came back, even Etkind's father couldn't recognize him.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to those Soviet historians who were arrested but still managed to work after surviving the camps. Etkind does not conduct a broad survey, but instead focuses on several well-known figures, such as Dmitry Likhachev and Mikhail Bakhtin. He concludes that there were two major themes that interested survivors, both relating to their experiences in the gulag. On the one hand was a macrohistory of power, a history from above – ‘grand-scale parables of the collectivization and the gulag’ (p. 81). On the other hand, it was the microhistory of violence, misery, and humour that seemed to explain the everyday life of a gulag prisoner.

In the fifth chapter, Etkind continues his investigation into how survivors interpreted their gulag experiences by looking at artists. He focuses on Boris Sveshnikov, a surrealist who, in his paintings, incorporated historically accurate and fantastic elements to depict the gulag experience. From non-fiction and art, the author moves to literature and cinema. In chapter 6, while telling the story of Andrei Siniavsky, the author of the Thaw period and a second-generation gulag prisoner, Etkind discusses the ghostly nature of the gulag system and of Russia as a whole. He cites a description given by Siniavsky about Russian literature of the Thaw: ‘The voices of the dead speaking through the lips of the half-dead’ (p. 133). It corresponds with the idea of constant mourning for both the victims of the regime and lost revolutionary ideals that the author elaborates in chapters 7 and 8 of analyzing movies, primarily, Grigory Kozintsev's King Lear and Hamlet shot in a tragic key, and the Hamlet story reframed in an ironic key, Beware of the Car by Kozitsev's student, Eldar Riazanov.

While texts and movies in Etkind's terms represent soft memory, there is also a hard memory – monuments. Memorials are possible only if there is a consensus in understanding the common past, which Eastern Europe and Russia in particular do not have. Accordingly, as Etkind elaborates in chapter 9, Russia has very few gulag memorials, the reason being that the state is not interested in the commemoration of gulag victims. All existing initiatives in this sphere are driven by grassroots movements and the efforts of private people. For instance, the Memorial society, the most prominent NGO working on commemorating the gulag, established the Virtual Gulag, a web-based memorial. In this respect, Russian memory runs counter to the broader trend of what Jeffrey Olick has referred to as a ‘politics of regret’, namely the acknowledgement and engagement with difficult pasts.

Despite these limitations, Etkind is quite optimistic that Russia will eventually confront and come to terms with its toxic past. However, in the post-Soviet culture of the 1990s–2000s, there has been a rise of mystical narratives which prevail in movies (chapter 10) and in literature (chapter 11), and are focused on ghosts, vampires, and magic. Etkind sees this mysticism as a metaphor for the unresolved past of Soviet atrocities that writers and filmmakers use.

Etkind finished his book in 2011. At the time, a political crisis was unfolding in Russia. Thousands of people rallied in Moscow and St Petersburg against the alleged rigging of parliamentary elections. ‘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’ (p. 248). Today, three years later we know that Russia has receded even further into the Soviet past.

In this respect, Etkind is correct to describe Russia as a country of the unburied dead that come back as the undead. He focuses mostly on the unburied victims of the Soviet regime, and though he talks a bit about controversies and conflicts of memories, for the most part, a coherent narrative of a common mourning is presented. These are the voices of three generations of intelligentsia that we hear in this book; survivors and ‘goners’¹ of the early period of the gulag, those of a later period, and then of a post-Soviet intelligentsia working with memory accounts of the gulag.

But it is not just victims of the regime who are unburied; it is also the regime itself. Every year people gather at the Solovetsky stone to read aloud names of the repressed. Every year people bring flowers to Stalin's grave. If Russia is indeed in mourning, it is also fighting to establish who deserves to be mourned. Memory of the Soviet Union in Russia is an ongoing contestation, and Etkind's book is an important contribution to understanding the politics of memory in Russia.