Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

WARPED MOURNING

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Transliteration Note.....................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................xiiiIntroduction.............................................11 Mimetic and Subversive.................................52 Mourning and Warning...................................253 The Parable of Misrecognition..........................444 Writing History after Jail.............................605 On Tortured Life and World Culture.....................836 The Debt to the Dead...................................1107 The Cosmopolitan Way...................................1348 The Tale of Two Turns..................................1599 The Hard and the Soft..................................17210 Post-Soviet Hauntology................................19611 Magical Historicism...................................220Conclusion...............................................243Notes....................................................249Index....................................................295

Chapter One

Both Russian citizens and foreign visitors know this image well: the 500-ruble banknote, which has been in use for the past two decades. It shows the Solovetsky monastery, a magnificent edifice on an arctic island, one of the most cherished sanctuaries of the Orthodox Church. But look closer and you will spot an odd detail: instead of onion-shaped cupolas, the cathedral is topped with wooden pyramids.

There was a period in the long history of this monastery when awkward planks roofed the cathedral towers. In the 1920s and 1930s, the cathedral was used as a gigantic barracks for a prison camp that was deployed on this island. Its convicts destroyed the leaking cupolas and built the pyramidal roofs, which survived until the 1980s, when the reconstruction started. The Solovetsky camp was the earliest and "exemplary" camp in the gulag system that defined twentieth-century Russia. In cultural memory, this camp functions as a metonym for all Soviet camps—a part that stands for the whole and embraces all the horror and suffering of the Soviet victims. The title of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's great book The Gulag Archipelago alludes among other things to the Solovetsky Archipelago. The memorial stones that mourn the victims of Stalinism on the central squares of Moscow and St. Petersburg were both brought from these islands.

In the twenty-first century, the monastery has fully restored its onion-shaped cupolas and other features of its ancient past. The monastery houses a historical museum that tells the story, albeit incompletely, of the murderous camp that once functioned within its walls. However, after many years of struggle between the monastery and the museum, in 2011 the Russian government decided that the museum should move from the island to the mainland. The Solovetsky story was to be streamlined. One part of its past would become the whole; another part would be excised and sent elsewhere. Simultaneously, Russia's Central Bank decided to revise the image on its note; on September 6, 2011, the bank announced the issuing of a new version of the note, which now features the onion-shaped domes of the Solovetsky monastery. Though the bank did not comment on these changes, their meaning is clear: there is no place for the memory of state terror on the state currency.

The post-Soviet series of banknotes showcase noncontroversial sites of national glory, from the Monument to the Millennium of Russia to the Bolshoi Theater. It is all but impossible to imagine that a concentration camp would be deliberately included among these images. But as I write, the 500-ruble banknote with pyramidal towers is still in circulation. This version of the note—a memorial to the Solovetsky camp, not the Solovetsky monastery—was continuously printed and reprinted from 1995 to 2011. The image survived several modifications of the note, including its redenomination in 1997, when the banknote of 500,000 rubles was exchanged for 500 rubles, with the same image of the concentration camp.

Whether millions of Russians are aware of this or not, it is the mournful images of the Soviet gulag that they carry in their wallets, touch, handle, glance at, and exchange daily. But this site of memory is as warped as it is common. Perhaps the 500-ruble banknote carries a double message, representing the Solovetsky monastery for pedestrians and the Solovetsky camp for connoisseurs. With its layers and contradictions, this double image exemplifies the typical complexity of mourning for the Soviet victims. Sometimes the proverbial Russian censorship plays a role in these mourning games, but sometimes we know that censorship is not an issue. It would be brash to suspect the officials of the Central Bank of a subversive conspiracy, nor would I dare to speculate about their unconscious motivations. Probably the most realistic, down-to-earth way to understand this amazing banknote is to see it as a ghostly apparition. Whatever the actual design- and decision-making process that shaped the note may have been, the note's cultural role is very close to that of a ghost. It is unknown who brought the banknote image into being, and how; the same is true for ghosts. The picture on the banknote reminds those who are in the know about a hidden secret of the past—a specialty of ghosts. This is probably how ghosts come to us these days, to haunt the public sphere and marketplace rather than aristocratic manors and deserted graveyards.

Though I do not know who created the 500-ruble banknote, I know who uncovered its meaning. A local scholar of the Solovetsky Archipelago, Yury Brodsky, noticed the unusual towers on the bill, identified the image as belonging to the gulag period, and published his revisionist story. As a result of this interpretative act, the meaning of a routine artifact changed from one of self-celebration to mourning.

Too Much Memory?

In contrast to the Nazi terror that featured a crystal-clear boundary between the victims and perpetrators, the Soviet terror targeted many ethnic, professional, and territorial groups. Though in some waves of terror the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Chechens, or the Jews suffered more than others, there were other waves when the terror chose Russians. Some of these operations focused on the peasants, and others targeted the intelligentsia, but some periods extracted a particularly heavy toll from the state and party apparatus. It was a rule rather than an exception that the perpetrators of one wave of terror became victims of the next. Though in every singular act of torture or murder the victim and the executioner were separated by an enormous distance, the fact was that a little later, in several months or years, the executioner would likely become a victim of the same treatment. This rotation makes it very difficult to reach any historical, philosophical, or theological—in fact, any rational-understanding of these events. Nikolai Shivarov, an investigator who forced Osip Mandelstam and several other poets and writers to acknowledge their "criminal" enmity toward the Soviet system, committed suicide as a convict of the gulag in 1940. After hundreds of thousands perished on the construction site of the Belomor Canal, the head of this construction project, Semen Firin, was sentenced and shot in 1937. After...