Between History and the Past:
(Post-)Soviet Art of Re-Writing

Soviet and post-Soviet history may be conceptualized as a process of ceaseless cultural erasing and re-writing. Both the continuity and the dissimilarity among the stages of Soviet history stem, not so much from a simple reexamination of "cultural heritage," but from its endless erasing and re-writing. Whether it is the erasing or the re-writing that constitutes the dominant approach at given moment determines the strategy for constructing the past and, consequently, imagining the future, including the production (and over-production) of social expectations, the creation of what is commonly called "the historical perspective," the whole teleology of social development, and the like.

In the revolutionary culture, for example, the mechanism of re-writing was practically absent. The culture of this period was almost exclusively absorbed by the tasks of erasing the past and creating (emphatically not re-creating) a new world. By contrast, under Stalin the mechanism of re-writing predominated. What was being re-written was primarily the revolution while pre-revolutionary culture functioned as a sort of a warehouse of "tradition" which one could use selectively in order to neutralize particular aspects of revolutionary utopianism. And yet, despite this difference, both during the revolutionary period and under Stalin, the party-state was involved in similar, essentially, utopian projects. More specifically, the culture of the avant garde, so typical of the revolutionary period and so much oriented toward the "masses," came into conflict with the cultural demands of these same masses and, ultimately, remained "unclaimed" by them, rejected by its primary addressee. The Stalinist aesthetic program involved not only the rejection, or the "overcoming" of the avant garde and modernism in general, but an attempt to "leap out" of history by re-writing a pre-modernist aesthetic as if modernism had not existed at all.

These two models of cultural construction (revolutionary and Stalinist) combined a comprehensive set of strategies for dealing with the past. And yet, in the post-Stalin period, these strategies progressively lost their effectiveness. As much as the party-state tried, it failed to find a successful combination of re-writing and erasure to hold Soviet culture together: neither the so-called "Thaw" culture, nor Brezhnev's "stagnation" cultural policy, nor the grand compromise of "perestroika" could manage the cultural crisis. Each of these three attempts to carry out modernization and at the same time to recoup the past have retained both the object of re-writing and re-writing as the dominant strategy for dealing with the past.

A radically new situation has emerged in post-Soviet culture. The cultural trauma of Stalinism has been resolved, history once again began anew. The strategy for dealing with the past has taken the form of a particular kind of nostalgia which is free from the old reflexive actions. By contrast with the "revolutionary situation" of 1917, the collapse of the Soviet system, disintegration of the USSR and the "world socialist system" have rendered the strategies of erasure and re-writing practically useless. In literature and the arts, re-writing of Soviet history is no longer at the top of the agenda (as it was only a few years ago); the strategy of erasing is even less attractive. Post-Soviet nostalgia generates a quasi-postmodernism of sorts, accompanied by a shift in the patterns of cultural construction that are no longer exclusively oriented to Russian (or Soviet) history but replicate those of the West.

What we have here is yet another attempt at modernization of culture. If the first such attempt (the revolutionary period) turned out to be most original and productive, the second (Stalinist, socialist realist) culture, less productive but nevertheless quite original; the third (post-Soviet) is both less productive and less original. Notwithstanding the presence of brilliant individual authors and artists in today's Russia, what is lacking are original ideas and styles. Apparently, the emergence of new cultural patters in post-Soviet Russia must be preceded by the emergence of new strategies for dealing with the past.