On Pining for Past Slavery and Servitude

I've been at several academic conferences over the last decade in which I keep hearing lectures from researchers deep inside Russia repeatedly discovering potent pockets of nostalgia for the Stalinist era--sometimes even replete with pseudo-icons of Uncle Joe inside Orthodox churches! We might think this very strange, but for those of us who have read Erich Fromm's 1941 international best-seller, Escape from Freedom, this makes a great deal of sense. As he demonstrated there (in what his biographer Lawrence Friedman calls his most important and profound book), most of us, at least some of the time, rather prefer slavery to freedom, and rather like having strongmen of various sorts tell us what to do.

It is not a shock, therefore, to hear of such stories elsewhere across the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe. Some of them are captured in a recent book I just came across: Witold Szablowski, Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penguin, 2018), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, with the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance.

In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuściński, award-winning Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not. His on-the-ground reporting—of smuggling a car into Ukraine, hitchhiking through Kosovo as it declares independence, arguing with Stalin-adoring tour guides at the Stalin Museum, sleeping in London’s Victoria Station alongside a homeless woman from Poland, and giving taxi rides to Cubans fearing for the life of Fidel Castro—provides a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.

Georgian and South-European Nostalgia and the Politics of Memory

This fascinating article, about varying memories, many nostalgic and romanticized, of Joseph Stalin in his native Georgia, confirms what I have been hearing from scholars at conferences for several years now based on various research trips to several parts of the former Soviet Union.

Two forthcoming books, both published by Palgrave Macmillan, take us further into the fascinating field of political memory and nostalgia in that part of the world:

Catherine Raudvere, Nostalgia, Loss and Creativity in South-East Europe: Political and Cultural Representations of the Past  (PM, 2018), 238pp.

About this book we are told:

Where nostalgia was once dismissed a wistful dream of a never-never land, the academic focus has shifted to how pieces of the past are assembled as the elements in alternative political thinking as well as in artistic expression. The creative use of the past points to the complexities of the conceptualization of nostalgia, while entering areas where the humanities meet the art world and commerce. This collection of essays shows how this bond is politically and socially visible on different levels, from states to local communities, along with creative developments in art, literature and religious practice. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the book offers analyses from diverse theoretical perspectives, united by an interest in the political and cultural representations of the past in South-East Europe from a long-term perspective. By emphasising how the relationship between loss and creative inspiration are intertwined in cultural production and history writing, these essays cover themes across South-East Europe and provide an insight into how specific agents – intellectuals, politicians, artists – have represented the past and have looked towards the future.

The second is a more general and methodological study: Memory Politics, Identity and Conflict: Historical Memory as a Variable by Zheng Wang (PM, 2018).

About this book we are told:

This book focuses on the methodology of research on historical memory and contributes to theoretical discussions concerning the use of historical memory as a variable to explain political action and social movement. The chapters of the book conceptualize the relationship between historical memory and national identity formation, perceptions, and policy-making. The author particularly analyses how contested memory and the related social discourse can lead to nationalism and international conflict. Based on theories and research from multiple fields of studies, this book proposes a series of analytic frameworks for the purpose of conceptualizing the functions of historical memory. These analytic frameworks can help categorize, measure, and subsequently demonstrate the effects of historical memory. This book also discusses how to use public opinion polls, textbooks, important texts and documents, monuments and memory sites for conducting research to examine the functions of historical memory.