On Warped Mourning and Omissions in Post-Soviet Historiography

Ab imperio. 2014. No. 4. P. 365–85.

Cherkaev, Xenia A.

This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, for analyzing consequences of repressed histories while itself neglecting important historical facts: like the fact of Stalin's post-1956 omission from public discourse. I show that Etkind's texts rely on such factual omissions to denounce the “criminal state” from a position of non-complicity, perpetuating a popular perestroika-era historiographic narrative that today is countered by “patriotic” historiography, which unproblematically unites the Russian people and nation against foreign aggression. The two positions are counterparts, this essay argues, united by a morally unambiguous relationship to the past, and by the omission of factual details that could complicate such an unproblematic identification. 

Keywords: советская историография, soviet historiography, академическая этика, Memory Studies, academic ethics, антропология памяти, Khrushchev's thaw, Хрущевская Оттепель