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Limbos rojizos. La nostalgia por el socialismo en Rusia y el mundo poscomunista (Красноватые Чистилища. Ностальгия по социализму в России и посткоммунистическом мире)
Postcommunism as an object of study has produced a wide literature, focused mainly on theoretical matters, with a considerable stress on "democratization" theory and analyses of political economy. In this volume, Rainer Matos suggests that postcommunism can be seen through another lens: nostalgia for the old regime, for massive subsidies, public order, international prestige, financial certitude, the welfare state and even the security apparatus of communist regimes.
The author does not only look at European countries, as is common in the incipient literature on postcommunist nostalgia; he also touches upon other cases in different latitudes (the Middle East, Asia, Africa) to discover a kind of longing expressed in varying degrees in the contemporary world, and in a manner as modern as the new liberal values claim to be. While Russia is the main interest of the book, nostalgia for socialism is revealed as a unifying thread of several political, economic, social, and cultural processes that otherwise would not have much in common.
Through an anthropological focus, primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews, Rainer Matos contributes to the study of a phenomenon which is more common than we usually think, expressed for the first time in the Spanish language and that helps to question the legitimacy of liberal political mythology by giving voice to nostalgic actors who find themselves in a limbo between past and present.
