slavonica, Vol. 17 No.

2, November, 2011, 156–66

Nostalgic Modernization: the Soviet

Past as ‘Historical Horizon’
Ilya Kalinin
St Petersburg State University

My main thesis can be formulated as follows: accounts of the traumatic

presence of the Soviet past in present-day Russia — descriptions that rely on
analytical frameworks based in claims concerning the masses’ post-Soviet
nostalgia and the restoration efforts of the political powers-that-be, which
supports and guides this nostalgia — are becoming less and less adequate
to grasp the current situation. We are no longer dealing with nostalgia and
the desire for a return of the lost object, but with a politics whose objective
is the positive recoding of nostalgia for the Soviet past into a new form of
Russian patriotism for which ‘the Soviet’ lacks any historical specificity, but
is rather seen as part of a broadly conceived and comically heterogeneous
cultural legacy. The consideration of this inner and intense connection
between the Soviet past, nostalgia and the project of modernization of
Russia includes revealing of main cultural tendencies (in reinterpretation
and restoration of historical past) as well as discourse analysis of president
Medvedev’s speeches dedicated to the modernization project.

keywords Soviet past, trauma, memory, nostalgia, modernization

The Soviet Past as Cultural Legacy

The paradoxical presence of the Soviet past in the culture and common consciousness
of present-day Russia cannot be reduced merely to traumatic effects having to do with
the ongoing ‘reliving’ of this past, nor with the tension between various modes of
perception and description of that past. Nor can it be reduced to the more profound
cognitive dissonance between nostalgic identification with former Soviet grandeur
and the painful sense not only of loss itself, but also of the impossibility of returning
to what is now gone forever. Nor can it be reduced to a sense of resentment in relation
both to external and internal enemies, who might otherwise be blamed for this loss.
The nostalgic attitudes inherent in the post-Soviet collective consciousness have
been the subject of many sociological polls and studies (above all, those carried out
by Yuri Levada, Lev Gudkov, Boris Dubin, Alexey Levinson and other members of
the Levada Center).1 The official discourse of the contemporary elite, which aims to

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2011 DOI 10.1179/136174211X13122749974366

 SOVIET PAST AS HISTORICAL HORIZON 157

legitimize and redeploy various forms and symbols of the Soviet past and to rewrite
the most dramatic pages of Soviet history in an apologetic mode, has many times been
criticized in liberal academic circles and by the political opposition. According to this
analytical scheme, Putin’s authoritarianism emerged as a result of a ‘restructuring of
the Soviet system’, from which the current regime has adopted the mechanisms of
state management and economic control, suppressing social and institutional differ-
entiation.2 Additionally, the Soviet past has often been described as the main source
of the symbolic legitimization of today’s regime. The following are the key terms
that have been applied in order to conceptualize this situation: conservation
[konservatsiia], restoration [restavratsiia], re-animation [reanimatsiia], re-actualization
[reaktualizasitia]. Generally speaking, these terms refer to various forms of a return
of the Soviet past. In this understanding of ‘restructuring’, the emphasis lies on repro-
duction rather than transformation: the Soviet past’s lingering presence in the post-
socialist era is understood not so much as an eclectic accumulation of institutional
symbols and social practices, but rather as a systematically reproducible mechanism.
Ironically, such a critical logic produces an effect contrary to its intentions: it posits
as a whole something that is in fact fragmentary; it endows that which is purely
political–technological and instrumental with an inherent logic.
My main thesis can be formulated as follows: accounts of the traumatic presence
of the Soviet past in present-day Russia — descriptions that rely on analytical
frameworks based in claims concerning the masses’ post-Soviet nostalgia and the
restoration efforts of the political powers-that-be, which supports and guides this
nostalgia — are becoming less and less adequate to grasp the current situation.3 We
are no longer dealing with nostalgia and the desire for a return of the lost object, but
with a politics whose objective is the positive recoding of nostalgia for the Soviet past
into a new form of Russian patriotism, for which ‘the Soviet’ lacks any historical
specificity, but is rather seen as part of a broadly conceived and comically heterogeneous
cultural legacy.
Let us consider, for example, the Monument to Victory at Poklonnaia gora in
Victory Park in Moscow, which represents a stele in the form of the bayonet of a
Russian rifle, whose length (1418 decimetres) corresponds to the number of days of
the Great Patriotic War. Perched atop the stele are the Greek goddess Nike with
baroque amours, a group that ‘symbolizes the victory of the Soviet people’. At its base
one sees the figure of St George, vanquishing a snake and symbolizing ‘the victory of
good over evil’.4 This is a typical attempt to create a grand style from a random
mixture of fragments referencing different eras, different historical, cultural, and
political contexts. Ironically, whenever ideological justification is replaced by techno-
logical projection, the eclecticism of this grand style reveals its own inadequacy
and internal parody. The paradox, however, lies in the actual desirability of such a
frankly autoparodic and almost self-deconstructing effect for official discourse and
contemporary mass culture, which is symbiotic with that discourse.5
In the past, we have witnessed a fairly consistent state-run project supported by
loyal representatives of the cultural elite. This project strives to neutralize the Soviet
past as a specific object of either positive or negative identification. It is meant to
transcend old historical debates, which threatened to split Russian society. Everything
Soviet loses its historical specificity as an ideological or social project or as a political
158 ILYA KALININ

and economic alternative to capitalism. It ceases to be a whole, referring to a

specific historical context, and is instead transformed into an organic part of the
historical past of Russian statehood and national tradition. It is in these de- and
re-semanticized forms that the Soviet past ceases to reflect an actual ideological choice
leading to any political demarcation and, instead, becomes the foundation for a new
social consensus, eliding any kind of difference and overcoming any gulfs of meaning.
After this ideological and political–technological ‘working through’ we are dealing
with the soviet-free Soviet (just as we are now used to sugar-free coke or caffeine-free
coffee).
The key premise here is not nostalgia itself, but the positive ‘channelling’ of its
energy, a translation of the politically loaded language of Soviet symbols into the
politically neutral language of a common cultural and historical legacy, the absorp-
tion of the Soviet past within the general past of Russian statehood, and, even more
broadly — within Russian culture as such.
In short, we are witnessing not the ‘return of the Soviet’, but a policy of the nor-
malization of Soviet history. Its principles are simple and accessible to all: national
culture is more important than political history, while the ethos of serving one’s
motherland is above any ideological ‘controversies’. In the framework of such a
narrative, there is no clear-cut difference between Stolypin and Stalin (efficient
managers), Nikolai II and Solzhenitsyn (national martyrs), Alexander Nevsky and
Georgy Zhukov (victors over the Germans) or, finally, Yury Dolgoruky and Yury
Luzhkov (founders of Moscow). Such equivalencies are in fact the foundation for
such a construction of history, in which paradigmatic correspondence makes possible
a transcendence of syntagmatic gaps. Such a view of history projects a living chain,
which on a personal or event-based level can hold together a caravan that has stretched
for a thousand years.
The politics of monuments and memorials, naturally, reflects an agenda dictated
by the present. Some monumental examples of this neutralizing decontextualization
can easily be found in contemporary memorials built with a barely concealed
presentist agenda. We have referred above to the autoparodic eclecticism realized by
Tsereteli at Poklonnaia gora. No less eloquent an example of the overcoming of
historical tension, achieved thanks to the serial reproduction of its symbols, is
encountered in the work of the sculptor and patriot Vyacheslav Klykov, who has
constructed numerous monuments to Nikolai II and Pushkin, Marshall Zhukov and
Ilya Muromets, Nikolay Rubtsov and Konstantin Batiushkov, Protopop Avvakum
and Serafim Sarovsky, Cyril and Methodius and the God of trade Mercury, Vladimir
the Saint (in Sevastopol, Ukraine) and Peter the Great (on Karl Marx Square in
Lipetsk). He also created the monument to Alexander Nevsky and the temple and
belfry in memory of the Battle of Kursk.6 This list is a telling example of the current
quest for unity in diversity that now comprises the basis of the Russian national idea
and of the Russian national version of political culture.
Renouncing its responsibility before the past, this discourse attempts to neutralize
history as a political space and turn it into a museum of historical legacy objects,
arranged according to the political agenda of the day. This museumification and
massification of culture amounts to a fragmentation of the historical past that
removes it from its context and makes any external critical perspective impossible.
 SOVIET PAST AS HISTORICAL HORIZON 159

The past years have been marked by restoration of a number of symbolic Soviet
monuments: The Worker and the Peasant Woman by Mukhina; the monument to
Lenin in Petersburg, which was blown up several years ago and then restored; the
interior of the Kurskaya Metro station, which has been adorned with words from the
Stalinist anthem of the USSR. However, there is no reason to fear that the current
leadership or the contemporary Russian society will become ‘Sovietized’.7 On
the contrary, such a political course testifies to the political leadership’s ambition
painlessly to digest the experience of the recent past, to make it as safe and powerless
as ‘the ancient past’ that one can see on a visit to the architectural preserves of Kizhi
or Suzdal΄. As far as ‘restoration’ is concerned, there is no difference here between
the ‘authentic restoration’ of Stalin’s Metro station and the reconstruction of the
Temple of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
This new model of including the Soviet past in the Russian present, however, does
legitimize the former, albeit no longer as a preferable political or ideological resource
(as is often claimed), but as a ‘cultural and historical legacy’ that constitutes the com-
mon, inalienable ‘cultural baggage of Russia today’. The task of this new official
discourse is not to establish a historical bond with the Soviet past, but rather to turn
Soviet history into the Soviet past once and for all; or in other words — to re-describe
a dramatic and fractured historical space by means of the patriotic language of com-
mon legacy. The painful process of ‘reliving’ Soviet history is replaced by the ‘reliving’
of a single, multi-sided history of the Motherland in general. That said, we are also
dealing with a discourse that positions itself within the larger discourse of moderniza-
tion. Its ironic and paradoxical character consists in the fact that its positive energy
is bound to stem from the yet ‘unutilized’ energy of trauma — an energy that is
released through a conversion of the stigmatized and lost past into a generally
accepted cultural legacy that can be legally inscribed into the country’s present.
Correspondingly, the past appears here not as an object of identification, but as a
source of transformation. It is not a figure of return but a mirror-like multiplying
construction — the kind of movement that turns the past into a special historical
horizon or resource that guarantees accomplishments yet to arise. This particular
situation can be described as a form of nostalgia that turns into a source of moderni-
zation, or, alternatively, as modernization that is motivated by nostalgia. Patriotism,
in its turn, becomes a mechanism that enables such mutual transmutations.
The patriotic idea was for the first time explicitly used as a national banner in the
recent past in 2003, during Putin’s initial term as a president. At that time, after
visiting the archaeological excavations in Staraia Ladoga (which, incidentally, was at
that time proclaimed to have been the first capital of Kievan Rus΄) the president
clearly formulated his basis for a new national idea: ‘Patriotism must become Russia’s
unifying ideology’. This ideological project has been inherited by president Medvedev,
who in his Address to the Federal Assembly in November 2008, stated:
Patriotism. Even given our critical perspective on Russian history and our far-from-ideal
present. Under any circumstances, at all times — faith in Russia and deep affection for
our native land, for our great culture. Such are our values; such are the foundations
of our society, our moral points of reference. To put it more simply, these are obvious,
commonly understood matters — the common understanding of which is precisely what
makes us a unified nation, that is — Russia. Our values also shape our conception of the
future.8
160 ILYA KALININ

In this way, Medvedev affirms patriotism as a feeling that allows resolution of the
conflict between a ‘critical perspective on the past and on our far-from-ideal present’
and ‘faith in Russia and deep affection for our native land, for our great culture’.
That is, the ‘critical perspective’ is not in principle cancelled, but is suspended (in the
Hegelian sense of Aufhebung); it is suspended through the loftier and more synthetic
notion of ‘faith’ (in this case, patriotism functions as an antithesis to a more critical
perspective). A ‘history that is far from ideal’ is compensated for by a ‘great culture’.
And all these ‘obvious, commonly understood matters’ shape a certain conception of
the future; that is, they possess some performative and even imperative power.
Here we are faced with the same intellectual move we described earlier. Culture is
understood as a space that abolishes the distinctions created by history’s motion: if
history represents a series of discrete advances and retreats realized via constant
political conflict and social struggle, culture represents an accumulation of objects,
whose canonization runs the risk of turning diversity into unity, dramatic past into a
great legacy, critical thought into belief, and politics — into a declamatory attach-
ment to the Fatherland. If in itself this ‘belief in Russia’ is completely comprehensible,
if not always shared by all, then the depoliticizing, demobilizing, and demoralizing
implications that derive from it are not always obvious either to the speaker or to the
listener. If the values that form our understanding of the future consist of assertions
of attachment to some common heritage, from which all historical tension has been
removed, then we must investigate the source of this performative power, which
underlies the latest mobilizing call for modernization. Why indeed does a people with
such a great and singular historical legacy require new feats and a new exertion of
forces, especially given that over the last dozen years we have been taught that any
exertion of forces amounts to an expression of radicalism?

The Soviet Past as a resource for modernization

The tension that lies between attitudes to the past, faith in Russia’s great culture and
striving for the future is the hidden yet highly significant basis for the new moderni-
zation project proclaimed in 2009. President Medvedev’s Obrashenie k Federal´nomu
Sobraniu (Address to the Federal Assembly) of that year, during which this project
was put on the national agenda, began with a consideration of the connections
between the past and the present, noting that the fervency of discussions of this
topic over the past ten years has been unprecedented:
What lies at the heart of my conception of the future is my deep conviction that Russia
must and can gain the status of a world power on a fundamentally new basis. The pres-
tige of our Motherland and the national welfare cannot remain forever defined by the
achievements of the past. After all, the industrial oil and gas complexes that make up the
largest part of our income, the nuclear weapons that secure our safety, the industrial and
communal infrastructure — all this was to a large extent created in the Soviet era, by
Soviet specialists, in other words — not by us. And although to this day these assets, so
to say, keep our country ‘afloat’, they are rapidly becoming outdated; they go out of date
both morally and physically. It is time for us, today’s new generations of Russian people,
to make our presence felt, to take Russia over the new stage of the civilizing process.9

This sounds radical enough. First of all, everything — from the state budget to
national security — turns out to be nothing other than rent received from the legacy
 SOVIET PAST AS HISTORICAL HORIZON 161

of the Soviet era. Second, this legacy is described exclusively as technological — as a

creation of Soviet specialists. Third, because it is not ideological but rather techno-
logical, this legacy rapidly goes out of date. Fourth, the new generation must stop
living off this ever dwindling remainder from the heroic past and instead ‘take over’.
Furthermore, a concrete name is available for this mode of ‘living off the Soviet past’
— nostalgia: ‘Instead of muddled actions dictated by nostalgia and stereotypes, we shall
launch wise international and domestic policies guided by purely pragmatic goals’.10
Pragmatism is presented here as a means to rationalize people’s traumatic attach-
ment to the past, reconfiguring the past as an object of imagined identification
and as a source of symbolic legitimization, as well as a real source of income and
‘national welfare’. It is this attachment to the past (in all of the aforementioned senses
of the word) that the new modernization of Russia has to overcome. In Medvedev’s
article Rossiia, vper´ed! (Forward, Russia!), which was published a few months
before his address to the Federal Assembly, this opposition carries an immediate
and explicit character: (‘Not nostalgia but rather Russia’s long-term, strategic
modernization must shape our foreign policy’).11
At the appropriate point, the president’s speech alluded directly to the Petrine topoi
of modernization, projecting the birth of a new nation and a radical historical break
(‘instead of a wooden Russian, we shall build a Russia of stone’): ‘In place of the
Russia of the past, we will build a real Russia — a young, modern nation aimed at
the future, which will occupy a place of respect in the world’s division of labor’.12 In
this discourse, the future is described in terms of the rejection of the preceding
historical tradition — a scenario which in the Russian context sounds particularly
familiar. However, in Peter the Great’s case, the crux of the matter related not only
to a technological breakthrough, but also to a break with the previous national
culture of the pre-modern era. In our case, the previous era, i.e. the Soviet past, is
also identified with the Soviet technology that one must reject. As far as culture
as such is concerned, in Medevedev’s words the ‘spirit of innovation has to figure
alongside the preservation of “traditions”, as well as the rich, very rich classic legacy
of our culture’.
Moreover, in the same article Medvedev polemicizes with any historiosophy that
insists on the principle of history’s repeatability and the reproduction of tradition:
One often hears that chronic social ills are not fully curable. That tradition is unchange-
able, and history repeats itself. [. . .] As for traditions — their influence is of course
considerable. But they too have to adapt themselves and change with each era. Some of
them even disappear. And not all are useful.13

Medvedev contrasts the traditionalist pathos, which often resorts to notions of na-
tional character as a universal explanation, with the openness of history and new
horizons of possibility:
Contemporary Russia is not repeating its own past. Our era is new and different.
Not only because time moves forward but also because it opens new possibilities to our
country and to each one of us. The kind of possibilities that did not exist twenty years
ago, that people did not dream of a hundred or three hundred years ago.14
In this way, the evident logic of Medvedev’s programme would seem to exclude the
descriptive term I have proposed, ‘nostalgic modernization’, as a meaningless
oxymoron.
162 ILYA KALININ

At the same time, behind this superficial logic, which dismisses any connection
between nostalgia and modernization, one can discern a different and more ambiva-
lent logic. Asserting the necessity to ‘say our own word to the world’ and cease to
live off the diminishing returns of the Soviet past (‘the remnants of Soviet industry’),
Medvedev makes the case for a historical break, which would create a social, admin-
istrative, and managerial discontinuity with respect to the past. At the same time, the
very assertion and realization of this break does not lend itself to an automatic
opposition between nostalgia and modernization. On the contrary, both the nostalgic
feeling and the modernizing drive are derived from the sharp division between past
and present. The difference lies in nostalgia’s basis in the recognition of an already
existing break and its resolution of the contrast between past and present in favour
of the former. By contrast, modernization is less about acknowledgement of a given
break than about the assertion of its necessity. The modernizer is equally dissatisfied
with the past and the present, which he perceives as a returning past. The curious
characteristic of today’s modernization project lies in its effort to keep the break
between past and present purely within the sphere of technologies and administrative
structures. At the same time, the Soviet past, which the project claims to overcome,
remains a major and immediate source of the social and psychological mobilizing
energy necessary to start the engine of modernization.15
This is not, however, the past of Soviet achievements in engineering, but rather the
past that is connected with the main event in Soviet history, which serves as the basis
for a contemporary social consensus. For, as always, the most interesting part comes
at the end. Having enumerated the technological and infrastructural spheres in need
of modernization, Medvedev suddenly — both in terms of content and rhetoric —
moves to the question of preparations for the sixty-fifth anniversary of Victory Day.
Here, the inventors of outdated technologies, the ‘Soviet specialists’, with whom
Medvedev started his speech, become ‘the saviors of our Motherland, the heroes who
stood for our freedom, went through the war and rescued our country from ruin’.16
The unexpectedness of this transition — a translation from one language into
another — can be explained by the president’s leap from one plane of discussion to
another: from outdated technologies to national values. However, the connection
between modernization and the Soviet past appears to be more complex, more
loaded with meaning and, generally, more profound than it may have seemed at
first glance. In his final statement, the Medvedev unravels the connection between
modernization and history, between memory of the past and aiming for the future.
In these closing passages, he also articulates the nature of the success that moderniza-
tion must achieve and outlines the sources of energy that are required to carry out
this project.
We all consider the [veterans] to be great people, but they are heroes not only as actual
participants in a grandiose historical drama. They are our close relatives in the most
immediate, literal sense of the word. We are of the same blood as those who won, which
means — we are all the heirs of victors; it is for this reason that I believe in the new
Russia. We must remember and respect our past; we must work in earnest for the sake
of our future . . . We have chosen our path ourselves; our fathers and grandfathers were
victors then. Now it is our turn to be victorious. Forward, Russia!17
The unity of history is thus secured through the organic unity of blood that makes
the ancestors and their progeny related, while the success of modernization, which
 SOVIET PAST AS HISTORICAL HORIZON 163

aims to overcome the Soviet past, is derived from the victories inscribed on this past.
Modernization is bound to win because its agents are ‘heirs of victors’. In other
words, if advanced technologies, which will replace the outdated technological legacy
of ‘Soviet specialists’, are the immediate means of modernization, the deeper source
of modernization appears to be the historical past itself, as well as the organic blood
relation that we have inherited from our ‘fathers and grandfathers’.
The Soviet past thus loses the character of compensatory sanctuary for that part
of society that, back in the nineties, failed to find its way in the new socio-economic
reality. And in this sense, nostalgia ceases to be a stigmatizing marker of social defeat,
harbouring the threat of a revanche in the future (a fear that was exploited by
political technologists in Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential campaign). On the contrary,
the present authorities are trying (rather successfully) to take advantage of the trau-
matic energy of loss, at the expense of those who would like to turn it into a source
of oppositional energy linked to a partial return of the Soviet project (cherishing the
dream of social protection, state redistribution of natural rent, etc.).
The nostalgic sentiment aroused by the axiological juxtaposition of the past
and the present sees the past as a lost ideal. The future is virtually absent from such
nostalgic constructs: it is regarded as either an ever greater intensification of socio-
psychological discomfort or as a return to the much idealized past. The rhetorical and
conceptual specificity of the current modernization project consists in the fact that
this project actively inscribes the image of the future upon the nostalgic demarcation
of the ‘far-from-ideal past’ (as Medvedev defines it), on one hand, and the victorious
past on the other. This conception of the future does not signify a return to the past,
but rather the use of the past as a constructed horizon of memory that calls for us to
be worthy of it.
In addition to the incorporation of the future into the memorial construction of the
past, we need to examine the very character of that incorporation. Medvedev’s activa-
tion of the romantic–conservative topos of blood, uniting fathers and sons, does not
imply that he actually believes in the idea of organic nationhood. In this case, this is
a metaphor rather than mythology. It seems that his task of translating the moderni-
zation discourse into a personal or familial language, where responsibility before the
past (which, from our point of view, functions as the engine of Medvedev’s modern-
izing rhetoric) must be recognized as each individual’s personal duty. The generation
of the victors includes not only the ‘protagonists of a grand historical drama’, but
also our own relatives. Precisely this attempt at a rhetorical shift into to the realm
of the individual endows the problem of the positive channeling of nostalgic energy
with rather real psychological meaning for the subject, rather than in the context of
abstract communities such as nation, civic society, etc.
Whereas Medvedev’s address to the Federal Assembly ended with reflections on the
significance of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Victory, the article Forward, Russia!
began with them. I do not think this was by accident or could be explained by
the coincidence of the approaching anniversary with the beginning of the new
modernizing campaign. Medvedev himself does not seem to think so either:
This anniversary is a reminder that our own time was the future of the very same heroes
who preserved our freedom. That the people, who overcame such a powerful enemy in
those days, must be able to overcome corruption and backwardness today. And to create
a modern and well-run state.18
164 ILYA KALININ

In this way, the anniversary not only activates memory but also emphasizes the
temporal construction according to which our present is the future of our past. This
is a fairly trivial formulation, out of which one struggles to extract any meaning
beyond the banal. However, according to the nostalgic logic of modernization that
I have described, it is precisely the memory of past victories that is responsible for
the renewal of the present. This is why the possibility of temporal transition from the
past into the future and back again remains an essential component of this logic and
a guarantee of the modernizing project’s success.
What is intended, of course, is a highly selective and cleansed memory of victory.
In large part, thanks to such a ‘responsible’ approach to the past and such a ‘resist-
ance to attempts to falsify it’, the workings of memory appear here as the basis for a
modernizing breakthrough into the future. Let us once again repeat the President’s
words: ‘We must remember and respect our past; and work in earnest for the sake
of our future’. This mnemopatriotic work on the past, understood as memory and
responsibility, must provide the necessary impulse for the development of Russia and
its liberation from its natural-resource dependency: ‘After all, it is not for the oil
markets to decide the fate of Russia. Our own understanding of ourselves, our his-
tory, and our future are the basis for this decision’.19 Behind the populist rhetoric of
Forward, Russia! lies a concealed call finally to establish a relationship of inheritance,
joining in an organic (but limited) manner the Soviet and post-Soviet generations. If,
apart from its technocratic rhetoric, the current project does have a particular inner
emotional drive, this drive relies on the attempt to use the negative nostalgic energy
of the split between the past and the present, directing it toward a future that, over
the head of the present,20 can resolve this tension.
Fully aware that his modernizing tendencies and his calls to end corruption will
not be supported by either the bureaucracy or the siloviki; not really counting on
the support of big business, which is more interested in government contracts for
modernization than in modernization per se; knowing the real state of civic society,
which is hardly capable of raising the banner of modernization, Medvedev seeks
support in ‘our history’, ‘our victory’, ‘our memory’. The question is: can this past,
the object of constant ideological manipulation, actually become this foundation? In
other words: can you pull yourself out of the swamp by tugging a bit harder on your
own hair?

Notes
1
Above all see the polls made by the Levada Center:
Memory of the War (http://www.levada.ru/press/
2011070502.html); To the 65th Anniversary Of
Victory in the Great Patriotic war (http://www.
levada.ru/press/2010040102.html), and fairly numer-
ous other polls concerning to the reception of the
Soviet past in contemporary Russia (http://www.
levada.ru). See also their long-term Homo Soveticus
project, which has gone through five phases of
re-actualization in 1989, 1994, 1999, 2003 and 2008;
for particular results of these polls, see Levada
‘“Chelovek Sovetskii”. Chetvertaia volna: funktsii
i dinamika obshestvennyh nastroenii’, Vestnik
obshestvennogo mneniia 4 (2004), pp. 8–18.
On matters more closely related to our present
concerns, see Boris Dubin, ‘Semantika, ritorika i
sotsial´nye funktsii proshlogo’, in his Intellektual´nye
gruppy i simvolicheskie formy. Ocherki sotsiologii
sovremennoj kul΄tury (Moscow: Novoe izdatel´stvo,
2004), pp. 74–101; Yuri Levada, ‘Istoricheskie ramki
“budushego” v obshestvennom mnenii’, in his Ishem
cheloveka. Sociologicheskie ocherki, 2000–2005.
(Moscow: Novoe izdatel´stvo, 2006), pp. 62–76;
and Levada, ‘“Chelovek nostal´gicheskii”: realii i
problem’, in Ishem cheloveka, pp. 285–300.
On post-Soviet nostalgia in contemporary Russia
see Svetlana Boym The Future of Nostalgia (New
York: Basic books, 2001); Natalia Ivanova 2002,

Nostal´iashchee (Moscow: Raduga, 2002); Serguei
Oushakine, ‘“We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not
Crazy”: Retrofitting the Past in Contemporary
Russia’, Russian Review 66 (2007), pp. 451–82;
Andreas Schönle Architecture of Oblivion. Ruins
and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia
(Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), pp. 194–
231). On comparisons with the situation in other
post-socialist countries, see Maya Nadkarni and
Olga Shevchenko, ‘The Politics of Nostalgia: A
Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-socialist
Practices’, Ab imperio 2 (2004), pp. 487–519.
2
Lev Gudkov 2010, ‘Vrem´a i istoriia v soznanii ros-
siian. Chast´ II’, Vestnik obshestvennogo mneniia 2
(2010), p. 18.
3
Kevin M.F. Platt, though coming from a different
perspective, also identifies the arrival of a new phase
of the post-soviet epoch (he calls it ‘post-post-
soviet’); ‘The Post-Soviet is Over: On Reading the
Ruins’, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study
of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1 (May 2009),
pp. 1–26.
4
These interpretations are taken from an interview
with one of the officials in charge of that monument:
‘Why does the Arrow on the Victory Mountain
Shake?’ TV Center Television channel, 20 June 2010;
www.tvc.ru/AllNews.aspx?id=43e48ef0-1b8d-4a0f-
9f91-d5699efaa7ba.
5
This dialectical constellation of postmodern loss of
historical contextuality and nostalgic identification
with the lost past was the object for the critical
approach of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991) and Linda
Hutcheon’s ‘Irony, nostalgia, and the postmodern’,
in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural
Memory, ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie
Estor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 189–208. On
paradoxes of cultural consumption in post-Soviet
Russia see Serguei Oushakine, ‘The Quantity of
Style: Imaginary Consumption’ New Russia Theory,
Culture and Society 17(2000), pp. 97–120; Serguei
Oushakine, ‘In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia:
Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia’,
Europe-Asia Studies 52 (2000), pp. 991–1016.
6
For an impressive list of his monumental–patriotic
works agglutinating all cultural and political gaps
of Russian history see http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Клыков_В.
7
For an illustrative example of such a reception by
the liberal intelligentsia in Russia of the 2000s,
see Nikolai Koposov, Pamiat´ strogogo rezhima.
Istoria i politika v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literatur-
noe obozrenie, 2011), pp. 137–181. The unsteady
increase in popularity of Soviet symbols (and even
the most powerful and offensive of them — the
figure of Stalin) can be interpreted not only as a
result of positive ideological investments of Putin’s
SOVIET PAST AS HISTORICAL HORIZON 165
regime, but also as a negative social response to its
neo-liberal economical politics (the use of these
symbols can be read not as a point of historical
identification, but as a screen for a projection
inspired by the contemporary political and social
agenda); see Dubin, ‘Semantika, ritorika i sotsial´nye
funktsii proshlogo’, pp. 157–164 and Koposov,
Pamiat´ strogogo rezhima, pp. 147–62. On the criti-
cal potential of nostalgic reaction to the present
post-Soviet transformations, see Rosen Dzhagalov,
‘Konets romana: antipopulizm postsotsialisticheskoi
intelligentsii’, in Neprikosnovennyj zapas. Debaty o
politike i kulture 1 (2011), pp. 134–53.
8
‘Патриотизм. При самом трезвом, критическом
взгляде на отечественную историю и на наше
далеко не идеальное настоящее. В любых
обстоятельствах, всегда — вера в Россию, глубокая
привязанность к родному краю, к нашей великой
культуре. Таковы наши ценности, таковы устои
нашего общества, наши нравственные ориентиры.
А говоря проще, таковы очевидные, всем понятные
вещи, общее представление о которых и делает нас
единым народом, Россией . . . Наши ценности
формируют и наше представление о будущем’; cited
from http://archive.kremlin.ru/appears/2008/11/05/
1349_type63372type63374type63381type82634_208749.
shtml.
9
‘В основе моего представления о будущем глубокая
убежденность в необходимости и возможности
обретения Россией статуса мировой державы на
принципиально новой основе. Престиж Отечества
и национальное благосостояние не могут до
бесконечности определяться достижениями
прошлого, ведь производственные комплексы по
добыче нефти и газа, обеспечивающие львиную
долю бюджетных поступлений, ядерное оружие,
гарантирующее нашу безопасность, промышленная
и коммунальная инфраструктура — все это создано
большей частью еще советскими специалистами,
иными словами, это создано не нами. И хотя до сих
пор удерживает нашу страну, что называется, “на
плаву”, но стремительно устаревает, устаревает и
морально, и физически. Настало время нам, то есть
сегодняшним поколениям российского народа,
сказать свое слово, поднять Россию на новую, более
высокую ступень развития цивилизации’; cited from
www.kreml.org/other/228520626.
10
‘Вместо сумбурных действий, продиктованных
ностальгией и предрассудками, будем проводить
умную внешнюю и внутреннюю политику, подчиненную
сугубо прагматичным целям’; www.kreml.org/other/
228520626.
11
‘Не ностальгия должна определять нашу внешнюю
политику, а стратегические долгосрочные цели
модернизации России’; D. A. Medvedev, Rossiia,
vper´ed!, Gazeta.ru. 10 September 2010; www.
gazeta.ru/comments/2009/09/10_a_3258568.shtml.
166 ILYA KALININ

12 relying instead on the institutions of business,

‘Вместо прошлой построим настоящую Россию —
современную, устремленную в будущее молодую
нацию, которая займет достойные позиции в
мировом разделении труда’; cited from www.kreml.
org/other/228520626. Compare to Feofan Prokopo-
vich’s Slovo na pogrebenie Petra Velikogo: ‘Застал
он в тебе [in Russia — I. K.] силу слабую и сделал
по имени своему каменную, адамантову; застал
воинство в дому вредное, в поле некрепкое, от
супостат ругаемое, и ввел отечеству полезное,
врагам страшное, всюду громкое и славное’; ‘Slovo
na pogrebenie Vsepresvetleishego Derzhavneishego
Petra Velikogo, Imperatora i Samoderzhza Vseros-
siiskogo. . .’, in Sochinenia. (Moscow & Leningrad:
Nauka, 1961), p. 376.
13
‘Приходится слышать, что нельзя полностью
вылечить хронические социальные болезни. Что
традиции непоколебимы, а история имеет свойство
повторяться. [. . .] Что касается традиций — их
влияние, конечно, значительно. Но они, вписываясь
в каждую новую эпоху, все же претерпевают
изменения. Некоторые из них просто исчезают. Да
и не все они полезны’; Medvedev, Rossiia, vper´ed!
14
‘Cовременная Россия не повторяет собственное
прошлое. Наше время по-настоящему новое. И не
только потому, что оно течет вперед, как всякое
время. Но и потому, что открывает перед нашей
страной и перед каждым из нас огромные
возможности. Такие возможности, которых не было
и в помине двадцать, тридцать, тем более сто и
триста лет назад’; Medvedev, Rossiia, vper´ed!
15
Although we should not identify the current rhetoric
as being in the key of authoritarian modernisations,
of the Petrine or Stalinist sort, since Medvedev
explicitly distinguishes his project from theirs,
democracy and civil society.
16
‘Спасители нашего Отечества, герои, отстоявшие
нашу свободу, прошедшие войну, поднявшие
страну из руин’; cited from www.kreml.org/other/
228520626.
17
‘[Ветераны] это великие люди для каждого из
нас, но они являются великими не только как
действующие лица грандиозной исторической
драмы. Они для нас близкие родственники в самом
прямом, буквальном смысле этого слова. Мы одной
крови с теми, кто победил, стало быть, все мы —
наследники победителей, и поэтому я верю в новую
Россию. Нужно помнить и уважать наше прошлое.
И работать по-настоящему ради нашего будущего. . .
Мы сами выбрали свой путь, наши отцы и деды
тогда победили. Теперь должны победить мы.
Россия, вперед!’; cited from www.kreml.org/other/
228520626.
18
‘Этот юбилей напомнит нам, что наше время было
будущим для тех героев, которые завоевали нашу
свободу. И что народ, победивший жестокого и
очень сильного врага в те далекие дни, должен,
обязан сегодня победить коррупцию и отсталость.
Сделать нашу страну современной и
благоустроенной’; Medvedev, Rossiia, vper´ed!
19
‘В конце концов не сырьевые биржи должны
вершить судьбу России, а наше собственное
представление о себе, о нашей истории и о нашем
будущем’; Medvedev, Rossiia, vper´ed!
20
Note the critical reference to the previous presi-
dent’s term, which stands for what Medvedev
frequently evokes as ‘the present’: ‘. . .we have cer-
tainly not done all that is necessary in the preceding
years. And not everything we did well’; Medvedev,
Rossiia, vper´ed!

Notes on contributor
Ilya Kalinin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences
at St Petersburg State University and at the European University in St Petersburg. He
is the author of numerous articles concerned with early Soviet Culture and the socio-
logical aspects of Russian Formalism and Moscow-Tartu Semiotics. Besides that he
writes on contemporary Russian culture, politics of memory and utilization of the
former in political debates. His new book, History as the Art of Articulation: Russian
Formalists and the Russian Revolution, has been accepted for publication by the New
Literary Observer Publishing House (Moscow). He is also an editor-in-chief of the
journal Neprikosnovennyj zapas: Debates on Politics and Culture (Moscow).
Correspondence to: Assistant Professor Ilya Kalinin, Russia 190000, St Petersburg,
Galernaja st. 58–60, email: iilya_kalinin@mail.ru