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Post-Communist NostalgiaAlexander Vari aa Marywood UniversityPublished online: 22 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Alexander Vari (2012): Post-Communist Nostalgia, Nationalities Papers: TheJournal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 40:6, 969-972

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and 1996 elections, probably because they were influenced by the ROC’s structural expan-

sion. All other parties, with the exception of the Rodina block, either never included

references to Orthodoxy in their rhetoric or, in case they did, never aimed to establish

an active partnership with the church. Federal-level official ideology, on the other hand,

does not adopt a purposefully Orthodox orientation (with the exception of the above-

mentioned 1997 law).

The second part of the chapter seeks to assess whether there is such thing as a Russian

‘Orthodox Society’. Here Papkova makes a highly original and valuable contribution by

pointing at the dynamics of generational change with the survey she conducted in nine

Moscow universities (secular and Orthodox ones). Her findings indicate that the political

views of the student population are consistent with the Patriarchate’s formal political

ideology. She questions, thus, the findings of previous large-scale Western surveys that

found a minimal influence of the ROC on political decision making, which she argues

is due to their focus on the general population instead of the post-Soviet generation.

Furthermore, she shows that Orthodox universities reinforce existing conservative

tendencies among their actively Orthodox students, or even create such tendencies. Never-

theless, the Patriarchate’s influence is minimal and ambiguous, since the majority of the

students at Orthodox universities seem to follow the orientations of the more conservative

or even the fundamentalist faction within the ROC (p. 188). At this point, a more detailed

discussion on the survey’s results in the only reformist Orthodox university (St. Filaret’s)

would have been of interest to the reader in order to further prove Papkova’s claim,

because it would have shown whether and how the students of the liberal Orthodox

university tend to follow a more liberal political ideology by contrast to the students of

the other three Orthodox universities.

To conclude, Papkova’s book offers some very interesting and valuable insights into

the complex structure of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as its ambivalent position

in post-Soviet Russia. Her study is well-written and relies on rich bibliographical

sources, especially Russian ones, and on the survey data which she compiled. Papkova

demonstrates a unique way to capture her reader’s interest when addressing each topic,

by interspersing her narrative with anecdotes and observations from her fieldwork in

Russia that give her text emotional power. It is an excellent volume for scholars interested

in church–state relations and popular religion in today’s Russia, as well as for any general

reader that has an interest in contemporary Russian politics.

Sofia Tipaldou

Autonomous University of Barcelona

Email: Sofia.Tipaldou@uab.cat

# 2012, Sofia Tipaldou

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.726084

Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, New York and

Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, viii + 299 pp. + illustrations, US$90.00 (hardcover),

ISBN 978-1845456719, US$34.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-85745-643-4

Be it in the form of films in which the pre-1989 past is brought back to life on the screen or

everyday objects from the socialist period that are popular again, a nostalgic concern with

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matters of everyday life under socialism was by the late 1990s a phenomenon that became

noticeable in every country formerly belonging to the Eastern Bloc. Taking their cue from

it, the book chapters in Post-Communist Nostalgia, which originated in papers presented at

an eponymous conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April

2006, dissect and analyze the way memories and material artifacts of the communist past

came to play a symbolic role during the period of transition to capitalism and democracy in

Central and Eastern Europe during the past two decades.

One of the book’s major findings is that nostalgia for the pre-1989 past is manifested

rather in the private realm than the public one. At the same time, and unlike many political

commentators who saw it as a simple desire to return to the past, all the contributors to the

volume emphasize that post-communist nostalgia is a much more complex matter that

reflects as much on the present as it does on the past. The diversity of perspectives that

the authors offer in their attempts to conceptualize its meaning in Bulgaria, Romania,

Hungary, Germany and the new republics born on the ruin of former Yugoslavia (the

countries covered in the book), turns the examination of nostalgia in the post-communist

context into an extremely rich topic. Although Svetlana Boym’s concepts of reflective and

restorative nostalgia (with the first’s ability to comment on the present, and the second’s

propensity to reinvent and mythify the past) feature prominently in almost every chapter,

the application of these concepts to different national contexts both challenge and take

Boym’s analysis as developed in her seminal work, The Future of Nostalgia (2001), a

lot further. This is obvious in both parts of the book titled “Rupture and Economies of

Nostalgia” and, respectively, “Nostalgic Worlds in Word, Sound and Screen.”

In the opening chapter of the first part of the volume Dominic Boyer argues that

Eastern European nostalgia is a heteroglossic discourse and an indexical practice, and is

both allochronic and symptomal in its manifestations, while it also “carries with it a poli-

tics of the future” (p. 25). Three of the remaining six chapters of the volume’s first half,

(which take Boyer’s analysis from a theoretical to a nationally more specific one) focus

on Bulgaria. According to Gerald W. Creed, who takes as material for his analysis the

life trajectories of Bulgarian peasants under late socialism and after 1989 in the village

of Zamfirovo, their nostalgia for a life that was perceived as more secure during the last

years of socialism reflects the psychological trauma that they have experienced when

faced with the expanding institutions of capitalism. Extrapolating from this, Creed

points out that in Bulgaria nostalgia is fueled by the spread of neoliberal capitalism,

which labels the responses of villagers to the extinction of their livelihood as “nostalgic,”

while turning the material remnants of the socialist past into attractive consumer goods. By

contrast to this anchoring of nostalgia in the post-communist Bulgarian present, Christofer

Scarboro argues that nostalgia was a phenomenon existing under communism as well.

He convincingly demonstrates that during the 1960s and 1970s many older members of

the Bulgarian socialist humanist brigadier movement evoked with nostalgia their own

heroic past (equated with the period between the late 1940s and early 1950s), populated

with shock workers, genuine communist ideals and a spirit of community, which was per-

ceived by them as having been lost by then. Indirectly taking issue with both arguments,

Tim Pilbrow highlights that in the case of Bulgarian teachers adjusting to the challenges of

post-communist transition, it is not nostalgia but their emphasis on professional dignity

that could best explain their relationship to the communist past and the capitalist present.

Unlike in the case of Bulgaria, nostalgia is a less contested element of analysis in the

chapters that discuss its role in the contemporary remembrance politics of the former

Yugoslavia. In her chapter, Tanja Petrovic claims that in spite of the denial by officials

of the new sovereign republics of any positive attribute to be attached to the Yugoslav

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federation, in online chat groups members of the former Yugoslav People’s Army (living

their lives today in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and

Montenegro) recall it with fondness and exchange memories of their time in it. Though

these memories have a strongly male-gendered dimension, they prove, that by contrast

to today’s dominant official position, “the perceptions of people who lived in socialism

and participated in the ‘Yugoslav project’” could “provide different accounts and make

a different hierarchy of values.” (p. 70). People’s nostalgia for their youth and their experi-

ences in the army could thus take issue with official discourses that shut off and deny that

past to them. Similarly, in a different chapter, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers identifies

remnants of Tito-nostalgia amongst the Albanians living in Kosovo, albeit – given the

new Albanian leaders’ strong emphasis on a rupture with the past and their attempt to

control public discourses – it appears only in private conversations among family

members. The fondness with which the Kosovo Albanians recall Tito is also identifiable

(with the proviso that they are also strongly shaped by their different gender and genera-

tional experiences) in the discourses of Bosnian Muslims living in the American diaspora,

as reported by Fedja Buric in a chapter in the second part of the volume, which – because

of its related topic – would have made more sense to be included among the essays in the

book’s first half. As a coda to this section, in her discussion of post-communist Romania,

Oana Popescu-Sandu shifts the terms of the nostalgia debate by arguing that criogeny –

the freezing of all members of the nation – appeared metaphorically as a solution proposed

in one of their songs at the end of the 1990s by the pop-rock group Taxi, to solve Roma-

nians’ “inability both to face the present and to turn nostalgically to the past” (p. 115).

The eight essays in the second part of the book (with the exception of Buric’s already

mentioned contribution) analyze the workings of nostalgia in music, film, and literature.

Taking a look at the links between post-communist music and the memory of socialism

in Bulgaria, Donna A. Buchanan argues that instead of reconnecting with the tradition

of nationalist folksong dominant under communism, pop-folk productions today use

both ironic references to distance themselves from it, while also broadening the genre’s

borders to include Turkish, Arab and Western popular culture elements. The use of

irony in music is also central to Diana Georgescu’s chapter, in which she analyzes how

its uses in commercial ads, songs and performances in reference to Ceausescu, the coun-

try’s ill-famed former dictator, by TV ad creators as well as by Ada Milea, a Romanian-

Hungarian alternative musician and artist, “challenge mainstream memory discourses” in

post-communist Romania (p. 156). By contrast, Anna Szemere reads the content of music

produced in Hungary by underground rock bands during the 1980s (when they were nos-

talgic of an ‘elsewhere’ to be found outside the socialist system) and 1990s (when they

looked back fondly to the experiences they had a decade before) as manifestations of

two waves of nostalgia linked not to irony but rather sentimentality.

The three chapters in this section of the book that focus on manifestations of post-com-

munist nostalgia in film consider it from the perspective of movies produced during the

1990s and early 2000s in Germany and Hungary. Daphne Berdahl sees the very popular

2003 German biopic Good Bye Lenin! as representative of a wave of (N)Ostalgie in the

German cultural sphere that “did not reflect a longing to return to the GDR, but a sense

of the lost possibilities and critiques of the present.” (p. 182) In a similar spirit, and

looking broadly at the German films concerned with societal change after reunification,

Anke Pinkert discusses them as embodying a “substitute public discourse after 1989

where the effects of a historical break, if not trauma, were played out” (p. 267). Using

the plot of a string of communist and post-communist Hungarian movies as an entry

into her topic, in a fascinating chapter, Maya Nadkarni draws the broader outlines of

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post-communist memory, nostalgia and national identity in Hungary, a field fragmented

by colliding political discourses and the dichotomy between authentic/inauthentic

experiences under socialism and after. Finally, and idiosyncratically sticking out both geo-

graphically and thematically from the rest of the chapters in the volume, an essay by

Harriet Murav – with its foray in the post-Soviet space – discusses a case of individual

metamorphosis in one’s self-assumed Jewish identity as reflected in Russian-Jewish

writer Alexander Melikhov’s literary works.

Framed by an introduction by Maria Todorova and a postscript authored by Zsuzsa

Gille, the fifteen contributions included between the book’s covers make a convincing

case for the importance of nostalgia as a subject to be addressed and explained by histor-

ians, anthropologists, sociologists and literary critics. While the inter-disciplinary charac-

ter of Post-Communist Nostalgia is obvious, what is missing from it is a comparative and

transnational discussion of the topic from the perspective of other East-Central European

countries and the new countries born on the ruins of the Soviet Union. Also, recent politi-

cal developments in Russia, Hungary, Romania and a host of other countries in the region

– with their regression in the direction of a non-democratic past – more powerfully ques-

tion the apolitical character ascribed to the workings of nostalgia in post-communist

societies, as was the case at the time of the book’s publication. With this said, Todorova

and Gille’s collection constitutes an important reference work on an often elusive topic

that every student of Central and Eastern Europe would benefit from learning more about.

Alexander Vari

Marywood University

Email: vari@marywood.edu

# 2012, Alexander Vari

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.726085

Cultures of power in post-communist Russia: an analysis of elite political discourse,

by Michael Urban, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 228 pp., US$89.00

(hardcover), ISBN 978-0-521-19516-4

Michael Urban’s new book explores the intersubjectivity which shapes social reality and is

shaped by it. This study is a painstaking response to Teun van Dijk’s call for the use of

discourse analysis in political science research. Urban based his book on interviews con-

ducted in 2005–2006 with 34 members of Russia’s political class who occupied high-

ranking positions in the Gorbachev, first and second Yel’tsin, and Putin administrations,

in addition to the “democratic opposition” represented in the sample by the Yabloko

Party. To penetrate hidden dynamics of social interactions Urban actualizes respondents’

“political unconscious” asking non-political questions (for example, “What lessons could

be drawn from your experience?” or “Which personal qualities help to achieve one’s goals

in politics?”) in non-institutional contexts.

Urban draws on Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” Habermas’s discursive theory,

Lotman’s cultural semiotics, Greimas’s actantial narrative schema, and Edelman’s explora-

tions of linguistic symbolism to elaborate “an ideal type of the concept of political discourse

based syntactically on the rudiments of language’s organization of the world” (8). In this

model, “subject” is homological to discourse of competence, “object” – to discourse of

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