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www.ssoar.infoAppropriating History: The Soviet Past inBelarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Popular CultureSchwartz, Matthias (Ed.); Weller, Nina (Ed.)Veröffentlichungsversion / Published VersionSammelwerk / collectionZur Verfügung gestellt in Kooperation mit / provided in cooperation with:transcript VerlagEmpfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:Schwartz, M., & Weller, N. (Eds.). (2024). Appropriating History: The Soviet Past in Belarusian, Russian and UkrainianPopular Culture (Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenskulturen / History in Popular Cultures, 21). Bielefeld:transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839460771Nutzungsbedingungen:Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY-SA Lizenz (Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen) zur Verfügung gestellt.Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden Sie hier:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.deTerms of use:This document is made available under a CC BY-SA Licence(Attribution-ShareAlike). For more Information see:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0Diese Version ist zitierbar unter / This version is citable under:https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-96947-5Matthias Schwartz, NinaWeller (eds.)Appropriating HistoryHistory in Popular Cultures Volume 21EditorialThe seriesHistorische Lebenswelten in populärenWissenskulturen |History in Popu-lar Cultures provides analyses of popular representations of history from specific andinterdisciplinary perspectives (history, literature and media studies, social anthropol-ogy, and sociology). The studies focus on the contents, media, genres, as well as func-tions of contemporary and past historical cultures.In der Reihe Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenskulturen | History inPopular Cultures erscheinen Studien, die populäre Geschichtsdarstellungen inter-disziplinär oder aus der Perspektive einzelner Fachrichtungen (insbesondere derGeschichts-, Literatur-und Medienwissenschaft sowie der Ethnologie und Soziologie)untersuchen. Im Blickpunkt stehen Inhalte, Medien, Genres und Funktionen heutigerebenso wie vergangener Geschichtskulturen.The series is edited by Sylvia Paletschek and Barbara Korte (executives) as well as JudithSchlehe,Wolfgang Hochbruck, Sven Kommer and Hans-Joachim Gehrke.Matthias Schwartz is head of the project “Adjustment and Radicalisation. Dynamicsin Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe” and co-head of the program areaWorld Literature at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin,Germany.His research interests include the cultural history of Russian and Soviet spaceflight, adventure literature, science-fiction and science popularisation, Eastern Euro-pean youth cultures, memory cultures, and contemporary literatures in a globalisedworld.NinaWeller is a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Adjustment and Radicalisation”at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research. 2018-2022 she was the headof the BMBF project “Designing the Past” at the European University Viadrina in Frank-furt (Oder),Germany.Her research focuses on contemporary literature,popular culture,memory studies and representations of history inEasternEuropean cultures (Belarusia,Russian, Ukrainian).Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller (eds.)Appropriating HistoryThe Soviet Past in Belarusian, Russianand Ukrainian Popular CultureOur thanks go to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) andLeibniz Collaborative Excellence funding programme of the Leibniz Association forfunding this publication. An electronic version of this book is freely available in OpenAccess thanks to the support of the Leibniz Open Access Monograph Publishing Fundof the Leibniz Association.Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche NationalbibliothekThe Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibli-ografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at https://dnb.dnb.de/This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (BY-SA) whichmeans that the text may be remixed, build upon and be distributed, provided credit is given tothe author and that copies or adaptations of the work are released under the same or similarlicense.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures,photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission maybe required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solelywith the party re-using the material.First published in 2024 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld© Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller (eds.)Cover layout: Maria Arndt, BielefeldCover illustration: Illustration from the Ukrainian comic Buiviter, 1995, KonstantinSulimaCopy-editing: Katharina KelblerProofread: Charlotte Bull andMargarita SchäferPrinted by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH,Wetzlarhttps://doi.org/10.14361/9783839460771Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-6077-7PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-6077-1ISSN of series: 2366-1267eISSN of series: 2702-9441Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.ContentsIntroductionPopular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation StatesMatthias Schwartz and Nina Weller ............................................................. 11I. Places of Longing:Yesterday’s Tales, Melodramatic Lives and Astonishing WorldsChapter 1:More than NostalgiaLate Socialism in Contemporary Russian Television SeriesMark Lipovetsky............................................................................... 29Chapter 2:Drawn HistoryUkrainian Graphic Fiction about National HistorySvitlana Pidoprygora .......................................................................... 45Chapter 3:Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic PastThe Historical Novels of Guzel YakhinaEva Binder .................................................................................... 69Chapter 4:The Zone as a Place of Repentance and RetreatChernobyl in Belarusian Films of the 1990s and 2000sOlga Romanova ............................................................................... 89II. Combat Zones:War Heroes, Resistance Fighters and Joyful PartisansChapter 5:Alternative Versions of the Past and the FutureSoviet and Post-Soviet Pop LiteratureMaria Galina and Ilya Kukulin ................................................................... 111Chapter 6:Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate HistoriesThe Soviet Past in Role-Playing GamesDaniil Leiderman ............................................................................. 133Chapter 7:Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, CyberpartisanOn the Popularity of Partisanhood in Belarusian CultureNina Weller ...................................................................................155Chapter 8:Mummified SubversionReconstructions of Soviet Rock Underground in Contemporary Russian CinemaRoman Dubasevych ........................................................................... 187III. Sites of Trauma:Horror Fantasies, Weird Sceneries and Realms of TerrorChapter 9:Dealing with Cultural TraumasPopular Representations of the Past in Contemporary Belarusian ProseLidia Martinovich............................................................................. 207Chapter 10:Nostalgia for TraumaRussian Prize Literature and the Soviet PastValery Vyugin ................................................................................ 225Chapter 11:The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.Domesticating Nuclear Disaster in a Video GameOleksandr Zabirko .............................................................................241Chapter 12:Come and See, Once AgainA Russian Television Series on the Seventh Symphony in Defeated LeningradMatthias Schwartz ........................................................................... 265EpiloguePublic History, Popular Culture, and the Belarusian Experience in a ComparativePerspectiveA ConversationAliaksei Bratachkin in conversation with the editors ......................................... 293AppendixAcknowledgments ........................................................................... 311Authors ......................................................................................313IntroductionPopular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation StatesMatthias Schwartz and Nina Weller1. The Post-Soviet ConditionSoviet history has been the subject of controversial debates in the spheres of history pol-itics and commemorative culture from the moment the world’s first socialist state fi-nally collapsed. When on 8 December 1991 the heads of state of the Belarusian, RussianandUkrainianSoviet Socialist Republics Stanislav Shushkevich,Boris Yeltsin andLeonidKravchuk left the Soviet Unionwith the Belovezh Agreement and founded the Common-wealth of Independent States, this was the decisive move towards its end. A few weekslaterMikhail Gorbachev formally stepped down and dissolved the USSR.With this turn-ing point, a radical revision of history began.Already in the final years of perestroika andglasnost, the previously taboo and bloody aspects of the ‘red dictatorship’ had been in-tensively examined and discussed. Now, an uncompromising renunciation of the failedstate socialism and an unsparing reckoning with the crimes of communism were pro-claimed. Boris Groys once described this turning away from the Soviet Union as a “post-communist condition”, which resembled a “return from the future to the present” of thenation state.The utopian project of communism became once again an evil “spectre” forwhich nobodywanted to be blamed and that was imagined as an interruption of the nat-ural cause of things, demonically supressing and destructing one’s own nation and itsallegedly essential development (Groys 2005: 35–49).At the same time, the three countries, which actually had never existed as nationstates for any length of time, set out in the early 1990s to search for an independentnational history, for a ‘national idea’. Particularly anti-communist narratives from theColdWar era circulating among the Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian diasporas in theWest, who then longed for a ‘liberation’ and ‘rebirth’ of their ‘supressed’ nations, becamevery popular among the new elites of the young post-Soviet countries. However, due tothe close historical interconnections of the three newly founded states, this almost in-evitably led to conflicts: To whom did themedieval feudal principality of Kyivan Rus’ be-long – Russia or Ukraine? Who had a claim to Crimea? Was the Tsarist Empire a colo-nial state of great-Russian dominance or a common heritage? Could Ukraine exclusivelyrely on the Habsburgian Galician period as a cultural heyday, or should it be understoodas a multireligious, multicultural post-national state? (Hagen 1995) And which events,12 Appropriating History: Introductionmyths andfigures could Belarus integrate into its self-image from the long history of theLithuanian-Polish Commonwealth and later Tsarist rule, to which its territory belongedfor centuries?Yet, besides these debates among the political and cultural elites of how to constructtheir respective invented tradition, therewas also a vivid interest among ordinary peoplein how to cope with the disruptions and upheavals of history, whose object and subjectthey themselves had become in the preceding years and decades. And they found pos-sible answers in the then flourishing commercial mass culture, which developed partic-ular appeal in Eastern Europe during the 1990s as a previously unknown phenomenon.Accordingly, in itswidely consumed formats like evening talk shows,documentaries, fea-ture films, nonfiction or fiction books and journals, it was not the search for a ‘nationalidea’ or pre-Soviet history that dominated, but all possible aspects of the Soviet pastwerethe major topic. And the images and narratives distributed in these popular media veryoften sufficiently departed from what the respective official state history claimed in itsnew schoolbooks or at national curricula.However, this history boom in popular media formats underwent significant trans-formations in recent decades.Not only the political circumstances changed, but also theincreasing digitalisation and globalisation of all spheres of life transformed the formsand formats of popular culture sufficiently.The internet,mobile phones and socialmediaenabled people even in themost remote provinces to easily create their own ‘glocal’ imag-inary links to transregional events, histories and communities beyond centralised powerstructures. Thus, in the beginning of the new millennium, various imaginary “scapes”(Appadurai 1990) and affective affiliations arose, some of which ran counter to the state’scontested attempts to establish a national history,while others reinforced it.This was bynomeans a phenomenon particular to Eastern Europe (cf. Korte/Paletschek 2007; Groot2015), but within the context of the complete breakdown of the formerly canonised dog-maticMarxist conceptualisation of history, such tendencies developed their own specificdynamics of appropriating the formerly commonpast.Amass ofmainstreamfilms,nov-els, comics, television series, computer games, and music videos appeared, which gen-erate, revise, perpetuate, dismantle certain notions of the past, and thus contribute totheir affectively charged visualisation and virtualisation. And exactly these dynamics of‘appropriation’ in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian popular culture are the subject ofthe essays collected in this volume.Their authors explore this changing tension betweenstatehistorypolicy,popularhistoricalmyths andglobalised entertainment culture indif-ferent media formats and art forms, particularly in the first two decades of the 21st cen-tury.2. Popular Histories of the 1990s: Concealed Truths and Alternative ClaimsWhen the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, this was not just a departure towards newnation states. It was also the so-called transformation period, when a chaotic privati-sation of state property, Manchester capitalism, corruption and lawlessness prevailed,with all its enormous social and economic upheavals. Instead of prosperity and freedomfor all, capitalism brought increasing economic inequality and the collapse of the socialMatthias Schwartz and Nina Weller: Popular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation States 13security systems (Ther 2014). Accordingly, the new political leaders – who mostly aroseout of the old socialist nomenklatura – elected for the first time in free elections, quicklylost support. This disappointment about the promised better world of democracy andmarket economy also affected the common picture of history.The partly disastrous per-sonal situation quickly led many people to long for the allegedly grey, but materially andin terms of everyday life reasonably secure stability of late socialism. ‘Nostalgia’ for theold days arose (Boym 2001).It was at this specific moment of failing social ‘transformation’ and economic andofficial history politics had already been discredited under the communists for a longtime, when in the name of Marxist historical dialectics only one ideologically reliableversion was accepted, the newly established national ‘mythologies’ (Barthes 2006 [1957])were soon disregarded as similar state propaganda. Furthermore, civil society activism,which focussed on a critical reconstruction of the past, had little to offer in the wayof practical solutions for daily life. Against this background a new commercial popularculture quickly emerged that promised to provide all the answers that could not be foundelsewhere. So-called New Chronologies, Eurasian genealogies and manifold conspiracymyths about secret powers behind the scenes attracted the broader public (Schwartz2009; Suslov 2017).Private television channels, tabloids, para-scientific periodicals or voluminous fan-tasy sagas were the media that fascinated the audience in the first post-Soviet decade.Among themwere the “true story”of Stalin’s crimes, “uncensored truths” from theKrem-lin, “secret documents” from theKGBarchives, “unbelievable stories” from theGulag,butalso sex and crime, love in concentration camps and scandals in the cosmos as well asSatanism and astrology, light and dark forces, puppet masters and masterminds.Whatreally happened in the October Revolution? Who was to blame for the coup d’état in 1917:Russians, Germans, or the Jews? Was Lenin actually a spy? Did Stalin want to starve allUkrainians to death?Was the Soviet Union the real aggressor in theWorldWar II?Whatwas the Space Race actually about? Howmany lovers did Gagarin have, why did he haveto die? What are the real reasons for the Chernobyl accident? Would the Soviet Unionhave survived if Andropov had not been murdered? (Schwartz 2009) There has been nohistorical event, no famous personality, for which there have not been scandalous andvoyeuristic revelations.What these stories of the 1990s had in common was their scepticism towards offi-cial narratives. They looked for the plausible explanation behind the contradictory andthe inconsistencies behind the seemingly self-evident: where the guilty party was estab-lished beyond doubt, they discovered unknown accomplices; where the perpetrator hadlong since been convicted, they found new evidence to the contrary; what was writtenin the Soviet or post-Soviet textbook had to be re-examined. Yet this popular culturalhistory writing was by nomeans always emancipative and rebellious; it was often deeplyreactionary andxenophobic, followinganti-Semitic conspiracymyths andnationalist re-sentments. However, they achieved their popularity less due to such sometimes radicalpolitical views but rather because of their distance, inherited from the late Soviet era, toany kind of official, generally accepted historical truths. And although this makes thememinently political, they have received little attention frompolitical science, nor have lit-political crises, that all kinds of alternative histories became extremely popular. Because14 Appropriating History: Introductionerary and cultural studies takenmuch notice of the dynamics and pitfalls of these appro-priations of history.3. History Politics: Nationalising and Disintegrating a Common PastWith the turn of the 21st century, the political and technical conditions of history poli-tics changed. Vladimir Putin won his first presidential election in 2000 in the RussianFederation, Aleksandr Lukashenko [Aliaksandr Lukashenka] in Belarus in 2001 startedhis second term as president, while Ukraine in 2004 underwent its first major politicalupheaval and mass pro-democracy protests with the Orange Revolution.The persistent‘nationalisation’ of history policy, but also newmedia developments and the gradual es-tablishment of authoritarian rule in Belarus and Russia have shifted the context for pop-ular cultural activities massively. In the Russian Federation, the consolidation of Putin’spower was accompanied by a change in official history politics (Kalinin 2011). Now a re-habilitation of theRedArmy, the secret services and strong leadership found its symbolicexpression in the renewed glorification of the victory in the ‘Great PatrioticWar’, but alsoin the praise of supposedly great Russian statesmen and strong personalities as gloriousforerunners of the president’s own rule. Although it was not taboo to portray the darkersides of history in themedia, such as the terror of the Cheka in the civil war or the crimesof the Stalin era, with increasing frequency at least since the 2010s they have been nar-rated as avoidable, if not excusable, excesses of a statehood in crisis (Scharlaj 2017;Weiss-Wendt/Adler 2021).This emergingnewofficial narrative suggested that precisely inorderto prevent such turmoil in the future, a strong hand was needed. At the same time, theRussian Federation was represented as a global political superpower following on fromthe Soviet Union, whose geopolitical interests outside its own country and especially inthe ‘near abroad’ and vis-à-vis Ukraine have to be recognised (Saunders 2016; Szostek2018; Borenstein 2019). State actors frequently saw Ukraine and Belarus as an integralpart of the Russian multinational andmulticultural empire since the 18th century.Conversely, in Ukraine following the successful Orange Revolution in 2004 and espe-cially after the so-called Euromaidan in 2013/2014, and in reaction to the annexation ofCrimea byRussia and thewar in theDonbass, a national historiography increasingly dis-tanced itself from the overpowering neighbour (Kasianov 2022).TheUkrainian Institutefor National Memory, founded in 2006, monitored the allegedly correct understandingof history and promoted, for example, the international recognition of the famine in theearly 1930s caused by forced collectivisation as a genocide of the Ukrainian people, theso-called ‘Holodomor’. Everything Soviet and Russian became designated negatively asalien influences of the centuries-old coloniser, occupier and aggressor from theEast.Theso-called decommunization laws banned nearly all Soviet names, symbols, legacies fromthe public space as a totalitarian criminal heritage. In contrast, the Western periods ofrule from the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom to the Habsburg-Hungary monarchy tendedto be reinterpreted as positive, if not as periods of prosperity. Especially since Presi-dent Viktor Yushchenko in 2010 officially declared Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine”,for many he turned into an icon of the anti-Russian struggle for independence and lib-eration, whereby his collaboration with the Nazis and the anti-Semitic or anti-PolishMatthias Schwartz and Nina Weller: Popular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation States 15ical marginalia (Dubasevych/Schwartz 2020; Yekelchyk 2022).While this extreme politicisation and polarisation of common Ukrainian-Russianhistory reached its tragic climax in Vladimir Putin’s two speeches in February 2022shortly before Russia’s massive military attack on Ukraine, in which he attempted tojustify this step with long historical digressions, the politics of history in Belarus isprimarily based on domestic politics. National history became a contested subject inthe conflict between President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has reigned in an increas-ingly repressive and brutal way, and the opposition, which nowadays has been largelycrushed, imprisoned or driven into exile. In order to justify its authority, the regimedraws strongly, also symbolically, on Soviet historical narratives, but also uses nationalmyths to distinguish itself from Russian influence (Goujon 2010; Rudling 2017). At thesame time, the opposition tries to legitimise its actions partly by referring to the sameeveryday myths, but also seeks non-Soviet points of reference in history (Bekus 2017,2018; Lewis 2017). A symbol for these different attitudes to history is the flag. Whilethe official red-green state flag is clearly based on that of the Belarusian Soviet Repub-lic, during its anti-government protests the opposition usually uses white-red-whitebanners originating from the Lithuanian Noble Republic. Soviet history has thus beenmoved back to the centre of power politics of the three newly formed independent statesand is ‘nationalised’ in different and antagonistic ways.pogroms committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army UPA were relativised as histor-These large-scale attempts at ‘nationalising’ history took place very much on a sym-bolic and ritual level, whereas the everyday experiences of people in late socialism arehardly representedhere (Rutten et al. 2013).Yet, theywent alongwith a change in theme-dia formats to distribute und popularise these narratives: Print products play only an in-creasinglymarginal role, and television has also largely lost itsmonopoly on audio-visualopinion-forming, at least among the younger generations. In contrast, various digitalformats and genres are becoming more important. Digital search platforms, news por-tals, socialmedia,messenger services or chat rooms,but also computer games, televisionshows and series are shifting the popular historical and alternative-historical discoursesinto virtualworlds, thusmoving them from the local subcultures of fanzines and special-ist circles into themainstream ofmultiply linked communication spaces and discussionforums.This goes alongwith a gradual blurring of the boundaries between scientific andpseudo-scientific, journalistic andpopulist communication.Ordinaryusers have thepo-tential to create their own niche on theWorldWideWeb, regardless of the language bar-riers that are becoming increasingly irrelevant thanks toAI translationprogrammes.Butusually, the overall monitoring, commercialisation and surveillance of the digital spherealso channel userswithin their blurbs and target groups,which attracts state institutionsthat try to regulate this allegedly borderless information flow by IP addresses, nationallaws and ethical norms.16 Appropriating History: Introduction4. Popular Culture and History: Recoding, Normalising, Adjustinga Contested PastIn this field of tension between political nationalisation and media regulation, popularcultural appropriations of history are currently taking shape.They give history alterna-tive affective and imaginary form and content, meaning and significance by transform-ing current fascinations and fears, desires and problems of the present into a historicalguise. If one tries to grasp this phenomenon more accurately in theoretical terms, it isin particular the term ‘popular culture’ that has ambivalent connotations. Since moderntimes, popular culture has primarily been a term with negative connotations, function-ing above all as a contrast to bourgeois high culture and classical art. The ‘uncultured’peasants, soldiers and proletarians, in this view, were considered primitive, backward,barbaric, savage and tasteless.With the emergence of industrial mass production, an additional difference hasbeenmade between a commercial and often state-controlled “culture industry” (Adorno/Horkheimer 2002 [1944]) on the one hand, which is shaped by the term ‘mass culture’.and on the other hand, the much older notion of ‘popular culture’ of the lived andpractised cultures of the common people, which goes back to fairy tales and folklore.While ‘mass culture’ stands for manipulation, propaganda, brainwashing, dumbingdown and delusion ‘from above’ as modern ‘opium of the people’, ‘popular culture’ incontrast is associated with a rebellious, seditious, subversive, carnivalesque componentof resistance ‘from below’ against the authorities. It is precisely the approach of theBirmingham School of Social Studies that has questioned such a schematic dichotomybetween manipulation by the “state block” and resistance by the working classes andinsteadmade strong the ambivalent and contradictory nature of urban, proletarian andyouth subcultures (Hall 1981; Storey 1996).Thus, further social andcultural researchshowed that insteadof a simplified juxtapo-sition of above and below, manipulation and emancipation, reactionary and rebellious,a more dynamic andmultidimensional understanding of popular culture is needed. Ur-ban youth cultures ‘from below’ could also be reactionary, like the skinhead or hooli-gan scenes, just as, conversely, commercial Hollywood blockbuster movies ‘from above’could certainly spread emancipatory and even rebellious narratives. In addition, in aglobalised andmedia-networked world, there can be very different local appropriationsof cultural and consumer products that turn the possibly intended function of artworksinto its opposite in practice. For instance, during late Soviet times, entertaining TV se-ries, soaps or melodramatic film comedies from India or Latin America with no politi-cal ambitions shown on state television developed an enormous cultural impact on thepolitical imaginary. A completely different dynamic was taken on by the rebellious styleand habitus of African-American hip-hop music that spread from New York across theglobe at the end of the 20th century, which found many nationalist and even xenopho-bic adaptations in Eastern Europe without any emancipatory attitude (Oravcová 2016;Schwartz 2019). This means that popular culture today often constitutes its popularitynot somuch through their production sites (commercial vs. independent, state vs. dissi-dent) but rather through thedifferent formsof appropriation in specific cultural-politicalcontexts.Matthias Schwartz and Nina Weller: Popular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation States 17However, the post-Soviet experience of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine also shows thatthis partly idiosyncratic appropriation and recoding by no means always has to happenwith a clear political agenda, but that it is rather a kind of adjustment to given social andcultural conditions. Initially scandalous or tabooed topics and figures under differentcircumstances can lead to the normalisation of conventionalised narratives or images(Rosenfeld 2014), whereas apparently harmless youth cultures can suddenly become ex-tremely political.This is especially true in times of war, when divergences in general areless tolerated and cultures tend to homogenise and erase ambivalences (Ugrešić 1998). InUkraine, for example, this applies to the way in which the dark realm of Mordor and themalevolentOrcs fromJ.R.R.Tolkien’s fantasynovelLordof theRingshavebecomecolloqui-ally synonymous with Russia and its soldiers (Szczerek 2013; Yekelchyk 2022: 237–238).Conversely, in Russia, the so-called “popadantsy literature” about fantastic time travelstoWorldWar II, advertised by large commercial publishers, but read before the war onlyby a modest number of male lovers of military fantasy (Zabirko 2018; Galina 2021) pre-pared the ground for the imaginary commitment of many volunteers at the front, whosee the attack on Ukraine as a decisive battle for the salvation of Russian civilisation.But it would be premature to conclude from these examples that certain popular-cultural formats do have a somewhat predictable or even controllable effect on specificappropriations of history. Rather, the two examples show that popular culture developsits imaginary and affective power situationally. The fantasy boom in the decades beforeprepared the ground for an extremely heterogeneous and widespread reservoir of im-ages andnarratives open for subversive aswell as for conformist notions (Schwartz 2016).Only through theRussian-Ukrainianwar, the fantastic histories of Light andDark forcesfighting against each other gained a definite political meaning. Similarly, in Russianpopular culture, alternative histories aboutWorldWar II enabled diverse subcultures toarticulate and constitute their personal “patriotism of despair” (Oushakine 2009: 2013)which only throughRussia’smilitary aggression gained its uncanny topicality (Noorden-bos 2018; Makhortykh 2020).In thisway, popular appropriations of the past operate through various state and un-official, commercial and independentmedia channels, constantly recoding,normalisingand adjusting official narratives, alternate and fantastic histories and imaginary belong-ing (Brouwer 2016).They affect everyday routines, local subcultures and imaginary com-munities and gain political topicality within specific political and social conditions. Itwas probably not quite by chance that the role of a fictional history teacher becomingpresident in a popular commercial TV series calledTheServant of the People (Sluga naroda),directed by Oleksii Kyriushchenko, paved the way for Volodymyr Zelensky to actually beelected as the real President of Ukraine in 2019 with an overwhelmingmajority.5. Appropriating History: Entertainment and EstrangementIt is precisely these ambivalent and occasionally powerful aspects of popular culture thatthis book aims to address in focussing on its ways of dealing with the Soviet past. Theeditors have deliberately chosen the verbal noun appropriating in relation to history asthe title. After all, the term ‘cultural appropriation’ in social and cultural studies signals a18 Appropriating History: Introductionthoroughly problematic procedure in which, especially in (post)colonial power relations,a ‘major’ groupor an institutional collective ‘appropriates’ and claims for itself styles, cul-tures, art forms of ‘minor’, often defeated societies, often against their will and withouttheir consent.The term thus describes a cultural relationship of exploitation, where the‘appropriated’ is powerless or at least inferior against thewill of the expropriator (Young/Brunk 2012).In our case, however, it is not a question of culture, but of history, and not that ofappropriating something from another, foreign, ‘exotic’ culture, but of one’s own his-tory,which is, however, a divided and contested one: the common Soviet past of Belarus,Russia and Ukraine.This ‘appropriation’ process is on an affective and imaginary level athoroughly violent and intrusive one, constantly splitting the past into what is one’s ownandwhat is alien,what belongs andwhat is rejected,what is approved andwhat is foughtagainst. In this context, the term appropriating does not refer so much to a hierarchical,exploitive power relationship betweendifferent groups or societies (as in ‘cultural appro-priation’), but rather focuses on the competition of political and cultural actors for a con-tested ‘heritage’. At the same time, in using the term in a more general understanding,we alsowant to emphasise the banal but significant fact that ‘history’ is not simply given,but is always made, questioning thus any form of naturalisation and essentialisation of‘national history’.In this respect, the chosen approach focussing on appropriation of history also dif-fers froma conceptualisation of dealingwith the recent history of the 20th century that iswidespread inmemory studies.Memory studies often conceptualise ‘collectivememory’or ‘cultural memory’ as something that has existed within a specific community (a na-tion) for centuries,maintained by certain institutions, rituals, symbolic places that allowthe inhabitants to reassure themselves as a collective and eventually to process traumaticevents. In such a concept, Soviet history is often understood as an interruption of ‘na-tional’ memory culture, forbidding and tabooing certain collective traits and traditions.Accordingly, Soviet history itself with its violent revolution, civil war and Stalinist ter-ror is occasionally viewed as a process of permanent traumatisation and simultaneouslytabooing everything divergent from its own ideology. “Warped mourning” (Etkind 2013)andunprocessed (national) traumata (Lugaric et al. 2017;Drosihn et al. 2020) are the con-sequence of this allegedly failed, false policy of memory (Schwartz et al. 2021). Throughthe gerund, “Appropriating History” emphasises that the alleged collective memory ofsuch a ‘nationalised’ understanding of history is always an active, intentional process ofconstruction that does not simply happen, but must be deliberately implemented andproduced in order to be successful.And it is precisely this active, productive appropriation of the Soviet past thatcharacterises popular culture and essentially distinguishes it from alternative con-ceptualisations of collective cultural memory and state history policy: Popular culturenever wants to permanently anchor a ‘cultural memory’ of certain historical events inthe collective or enforce a specific ‘national’ understanding of history against otherversions and views among the population, but constantly seeks alternatives, deviations,estrangements. Videogames are not about reenacting history, but about making well-known episodes and images enthralling and thrilling. Popular TV series are not aboutconveying official points of view, but about confronting individual fates with the un-Matthias Schwartz and Nina Weller: Popular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation States 19known sides behind the façade. And bestselling literature does not aim to enlighten, butto shock and shake, to touch and comfort (Lovell/Menzel 2005; Borenstein 2011).In doing so, popular culture reconstructs and varies the discontents and longingspresent in society, casts them in entertaining and exciting narratives and images andthus makes history accessible and transferable to daily life experiences (Shumylovych2019).Thus, there is also a large number of state-sponsored, expensive, lavishly producedand widely promoted blockbuster films that fully correspond to the national-state viewof Soviet history in Belarus, Ukraine or Russia, that never became popular culture. Likethe widely promoted Canadian-Ukrainian melodramatic historical drama Bitter Harvest(Hirki zhiva, 2017, directed by George Mendeluk) about the ‘Holodomor’ or the Russianbiopic about the heroic life of the first cosmonaut Gagarin. First in Space (Gagarin. Per-vyi v kosmose, 2013, directedy by Pavel Parkhomenko), which both were a flop with view-ers at the box office as well as on TV screens. In contrast, sometimes entertaining lowbudget movies that ridicule melodramatic and heroic narratives became a huge audi-ence success, like historical comedies mocking Napoleon’s Russian campaign RzhevskyVersus Napoleon (Rzhevskii protiv Napoleona, 2012, directed by Marius Vaisberg), carniva-lesque Cossack musicals Like the Cossacks (Kak kazaki..., 2009, directed by Igor Ivanov)or slapstick films about Hitler Hitler Goes Kaput! (Gitler kaput!, 2008, directed by MariusVaisberg) or the film parody of the partisan myth Party-Zan (2016, directed by by AndreiKureichik).In summary, popular culture is formed in a dynamic process between producers andconsumers, state andpopulation,above andbelow,which constantly recodes,normalisesand adapts historical narratives and images to the respective condition.These appropri-ations gain their attractiveness through the deviation from the norm: they make bor-ing school knowledge or ideology exciting and entertaining by shedding new light onit, estranging it. Estrangement and entertainment succeed whenever they capture cer-tain moods, discomfort, a zeitgeist, and turn them into catchy stories or plots, memes oricons.The specific characteristic of appropriating history in the post-Soviet countries ofBelarus, Russia and Ukraine is that in 1991 there was no firmly consolidated official his-toriography or historical knowledge here.Thus, in all the three countries history becamea subject of large-scale nationalisation and ideologisation on the part of the state. At thesame time, since the 1990s there has been a mass of very heterogeneous, partly specu-lative and counterfactual interpretations on offer. Popular culture is a key player in thisdevelopmentbecause it generatesdispositives thatmaybecomepolitically effectiveby re-inforcing and radicalising emerging socio-political developments or, conversely, by un-derminingand recodingwidespreadnotionsofhistory.However, there isnoautomatismor determinism here according to which certain popular cultural tendencies inevitablylead to war or certain subversive practices necessarily result in revolt. Rather, the ap-propriations of history through popular culture are indicators and gauges of moods andresentments, they channel fears and desires, give them form and shape, but also offerimaginary escape routes and attractive alternatives to reality.20 Appropriating History: Introduction6. Outline of the Volume: Places of Longing, Combat Zones, Sites of TraumaThe present volume deals with works and phenomena of popular culture from the pe-riod before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Initial ideas forits conceptualisation were discussed at the workshop “History Goes Pop?” On the Popular-ization of the Past in Eastern EuropeanCultures organised by the two editors at the EuropeanUniversity Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) in December 2019. Accordingly, most of the essayscollected here were written long before the war and partly impacted by the Belarusianprotests in2020and2021,althoughmanywere revisedand, in somecases, supplementedafterwards.The aim of the volume is not to cover all areas of popular culture in all threecountries equally, which would not be possible. Many formats of popular culture – likefestivals, sport events, subcultures or religious movements – are not represented at all,others – like socialmedia or popularmusic –are present in the individual contributions,but are not the subject of separate essays.The focus is on a literary, film andmedia stud-ies analysis of audio-visual and textual formats, mainly fiction, comics, film, series andcomputer games.The first part of the volume is dedicated to Places of Longing, events and periods ofhistory with positive or negative connotations that are receiving new attention in popu-lar culture.The emotional relationship to these places can hardly been described as nos-talgic; popular culture engages rather with the conflict-laden aspects of the past in animmersive and empathic way, thus reinterpreting it for the present. While in the Rus-sian Federation the reconstructive tendencies clearly predominate,fitting the Soviet intotheir ownmultinational and imperial self-image, theexamples fromBelarusandUkrainedemonstrate a more ambivalent imaginary relation to the socialist past, which often isimagined as contradictory to national identity.What all these reconstructive andwishfulrelations have in common is that they do not represent the past as something gone anddistant, something irretrievably lost, but deal with Soviet history as something havingcontinuous impact on the current reality. Mark Lipovetsky analyses the Russian televi-sion series The Thaw (Ottepel’, 2013), Black Marketeers (Fartsa, 2015), Our Happy Tomorrow(Nashe schastlivoe zavtra, 2016) and Optimists (Optimisty, 2017) to show how the rebels andoutlaws of everyday Soviet life are presented here as heroes for the present. The seriesthus recode the fears and desires of contemporary viewers in a kind of retro-utopia withthe aim of “symbolically protecting the viewer from the dangerous future and offer anescape from the present” (chapter 1). EvaBinder focusses on Guzel Yakhina’s bestsellingnovels Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza, 2015), A Volga Tale (Deti moi, 2018)and Train to Samarkand (Ėshelon na Samarkand, 2021) to demonstrate how dramatic his-torical events such as the civil war, famines and theGulag are brought to a contemporaryreadership in an exciting and entertaining way. Binder argues that this mainstream lit-erature, which is committed to humanist values, follows a global popular realism in itsstyle, but in contemporary Russia also has critical and enlightening impulses (chapter 3).Olga Romanova, on the other hand, demonstrates through four Belarusian filmsabout the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, The Wolves in the Zone (Volki v zone,1990),The Atomic Zone Ranger (Reindzher iz atomnoi zony, 1999), I Remember/Father’s House(Ia pomniu/Otchii dom, 2005) and Exclusion Zone (Zapretnaia zona, 2020), how a critical andsubversive impulse of repentance in the course of time gave way to a resigned retreatMatthias Schwartz and Nina Weller: Popular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation States 21into the personal, a development that directly resonates with the political sphere inthe country (chapter 4). In contrast, Svitlana Pidoprygora analyses dozens of Ukrainiancomics and graphic novels from the last decade and concludes that in most of theseworks the Soviet past is largely made invisible and simply overwritten dominantly byfantastic alternative histories. Here, all kinds of superheroes, cyborgs, mythic warriorsdefend their nation against external enemies, which often resemble stereotypes aboutthe Soviet Union and Russia. However, in particular graphic novels in the context of theRussian-Ukrainian war in Donbass since 2014 increasingly also emphasise the tragicand dramatic consequences of such violent conflicts for the own presence (chapter 2).These texts, films and series thus offer very different representations of Soviet Placesof Longing, in which mythical fighters, cheerful rebels and melodramatic lone fightersprovide often nationalised images and narratives for their own audience. Appropriatedhistory here rarely displaces differentiated and educating aspects of the past, rather itadjusts it to present needs and demands.The second part, Combat Zones, is not so much concerned with the structures oflonging expressed in the appropriation of the past, but rather with the different types ofprotagonists and their function in the respective historical episodes. Maria Galina andIlya Kukulin analyse Russian alternative histories of the Soviet Union, focusing on sol-diers and fighters who are primarily concerned with avoiding the collapse of a mightystatehood. While in the 1990s the main subject of interest was to remove taboos fromcertain topics,more recent counterfactual works increasingly deal with an imagined re-venge and a deep resentment against external enemies (chapter 5).Daniil Leiderman alsoanalyses alternative histories, albeit in computer games such as 74 (1980s, 2017),Red Land(Krasnaia zemlia, 2011),AtomRPG (2018), andDisco Elysium (2019).These games, equippedwith typical paraphernalia and landscapes of Soviet provenance, give players the oppor-tunity “for examining and coming to terms with the complexities and contradictions ofhistorical experience.” This allows gamers to playfully reconsider and revise their ownunderstanding andmemories of the Soviet past (chapter 6).NinaWeller looks at a special combatant figure fromWorld War II, namely the par-tisan, who enjoyed enormous popularity in post-Soviet Belarus, both in official circlesand among the artistic and political opposition. His tactics and strategies of subversionwere appropriated and reinterpreted for the post-Soviet present in a wide range of me-dia formats and genres, from large historical films to small forms of street protest (chap-ter 7).RomanDubasevych discusses two recent Russian films about the stiliagi subcultureof the 1950s and the Leningrad rock underground of the 1980s to exemplify that artisticand political reconstructions of Soviet heroic figures do not always aim at an active in-tervention into current conditions, but can also have the reverse effect of mummifyingand depoliticising individual protest. Although the two sensational music filmsHipsters(Stiliagi, 2008) and Summer (Leto, 2018), clearly focus on rebellious young people as like-able characters they are not staged as antagonists of a repressive dictatorship, but ratherthe plot and the visual aesthetics bring about an identification with hegemonic power(chapter 8). Thus, all four contributions demonstrate that the Combat Zones of historyfor popular culture functionmainly as playing grounds for their protagonists to test vari-ous ways of action and behaviour that range from resentful imaginary revenge to playful22 Appropriating History: Introductionand performative forms of negotiation and protest to an entertaining silencing of thehistoric conflict.The last part of the book Sites of Trauma demonstrates that violent traumatic eventsin history have become an extremely successful and favoured topic in popular culture,which can be appropriated and narrated in very different ways. Lidia Martinovich dis-cusses how “cultural trauma” has become an important medium for narrating nationalhistory in Belarus in recent times, analysing popular novels of the last decades.The “suf-fering Belarusian” has become a central figure to confront readers with different optionsfor action and survival strategies in a historical guise, sometimes in a ridiculous, some-times in a frightening way (chapter 9). Valery Vyugin, on the other hand, shows that thetreatment of extreme violence is a thoroughly ambivalent phenomenon inRussian prize-winning literature nowadays. He argues that the depiction of traumatic events in Soviethistory is increasingly losing its critical and enlightening function and is becomingmoreand more akin to non-political “recycling” for the purposes of entertainment, resultingin an increasing gamification of the past (chapter 10).OleksandrZabirkoobservesadifferentphenomenon for thegameseriesS.T.A.L.K.E.R,in which the apocalyptic zone of Chernobyl is depicted as an eerie and terrifying worldpopulated by monsters and mutants from which there is no escape. This enormouslypopular model of reality has taken on a frightening topicality with Russia’s attack onUkraine (chapter 11). In the last chapter, Matthias Schwartz examines the multi-award-winning television seriesThe Seventh Symphony (Sed’maia simfoniia, 2021) about the per-formance of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s SymphonyNo. 7 in August 1942 during the LeningradBlockade to analyse how popular formats use traumatic historical experiences forthe present as a multi-layered imaginary offer to come to terms with the ever moreauthoritarian and militarised regime in Russia (chapter 12). So, when in the 1990s thecritical encounterwith the tabooed and silenced traumatic aspects of Soviet historywerehighlighted primarily to uncover and demonstrate the failures and crimes of the Sovietsystem, nowadays Sites of Traumamainly provide imaginary patterns and models forthe present on how to act under situations of pressure, misery and danger. The volumeconcludes with a conversation with the historian and public history expert AliakseiBratachkin. In focussing on Belarus from a comparative perspective, he discusses howthe use of popular cultural elements in public history has played a crucial role in post-Soviet nation-building since 1991. Historical themes in particular were promoted asdidactic and educational tools by the state, but have also been used by opposition groupsin competing national narratives, especially since 2020.‘Appropriating history’ does not necessarily imply either critically reappraising andadequately remembering the past or, conversely, ideologically trivialising and relativis-ing it; in popular culture, it means above all presenting dramatic episodes, dazzling fig-ures and stereotypical images, which appeal in an entertaining way to the needs and de-sires, challenges and conflicts of the respective public. Especially in the nascent post-So-viet nation states, these entertaining representations oftendomore thangovernment in-stitutions, political parties or public educational organisations to shape ideas about hownational belonging is articulated. Ideas about history and historical belonging some-times have a strong effect in situations of political upheaval by fuelling rebellion and in-Matthias Schwartz and Nina Weller: Popular Culture and History in Post-Soviet Nation States 23creasing bellicosity, aswell as by exposing nationalmyths or suggesting a retreat into theprivate sphere.List of Games74. Nastol’naia igra po sovetskoi istorii, produced by Baryshnikova, Natalia/Vorontsov, Ro-man/Lomakin, Nikita/Starostin, Vasilii, Memorial, Tabletop RPG, 2017.AtomRPG, produced by Atom Team, PC/Mac/Linux, 2018.Disco Elysium, produced by ZA/UM (Kurvitz, Robert/Rostov, Aleksander), PC/Mac, 2019.RedLand (KrasnaiaZemlia), produced by ShtabDukhonina (Borkovskii,Egor/Trofimenko,Konstantin/Shalupaev,Mikhail/Ian’kov, Ivan), Tabletop RPG, 2010–2011.S. T. A. L. K. E. R. Shadow of Chernobyl’ (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Ten’ Chernobylia), produced by GSCGameWorld, PC/MAC, 2007.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Chyste Nebo), produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2008.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Poklyk Pryp’iati) produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2009.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Cursed Zone (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Prokliata Zona) produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2013.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Oblivion Lost, produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2015.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Sertse Chernobylia), produced by GSCGameWorld, PC/MAC, 2024.FilmographyBitter Harvest (Hirki zhiva), dir. George Mendeluk, Canada/ UK 2017.BlackMarketeers (Fartsa), dir. Egor Baranov, Russia 2013.Exclusion Zone (Zapretnaia zona), dir. Mitrii Semenov-Aleinikov, Belarus 2020.Gagarin. First in Space (Gagarin. Pervyi v kosmose), dir. Pavel Parkhomenko, Russia 2013.Hipsters (Stiliagi), dir. Valerii Todorovskii, Russia 2008.Hitler Goes Kaput! (Gitler kaput!), dir. Marius Vaisberg 2008.I Remember/Father’s House (Ia pomniu/Otchii dom), dir. Sergei Sychev, Belarus 2005.Like the Cossacks… (Kak kazaki…), dir. Igor’ Ivanov, Ukraine 2009.Optimists (Optimisty), dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii, Russia 2017–2021.Summer (Leto), dir. Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia/France 2018.Party-Zan, dir. Andrei Kureichik, Belarus 2016.Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon (Rzhevskii protiv Napoleona), dir. Marius Vaisberg, Russisa/Ukraine 2012.TheAtomic Zone Ranger (Reindzher iz atomnoi zony), dir. Viacheslav Nikiforov, Belarus, Rus-sia 1999.TheServant of the People (Sluga naroda), dir. Oleksii Kyriushchenko, Ukraine 2015–2019.TheSeventh Symphony (Sed’’maia simfoniia), dir. Aleksandr Kott, Russia 2021.TheThaw (Ottepel’), dir. Valerii Todorovskii, Russia 2013.24 Appropriating History: IntroductionTheWolves in the Zone (Volki v zone), dir. Viktor Deriugin, USSR 1990.Our happy tomorrow (Nashe schastlivoe zavtra), dir. Igor Kopylov, Russia 2016.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W./Horkheimer Max (2002): “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment asMass Deception.” In: ibid. 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IntroductionMore than 20 years have passed since Svetlana Boym published her famous, now classicbookTheFuture ofNostalgia (2002), inwhich she, on the one hand,defined nostalgia as thenecessary shadow ofmodernity, and on the other hand, suggested a distinction betweenrestorative and reflexive nostalgia.1 While the former embodies the longing for a lostsymbolic order, simultaneously (re)producing its idealised mythology, the latter “dwellson the ambivalence of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from thecontradictions of modernity” (Boym 2002: xviii) – as exemplified by the works of JosephBrodsky [Iosif Brodskii] and Ilya Kabakov [Il’ia Kabakov].However, I would like to argue that since the second decade of the 21st century, themeaning of the representation of the late socialist past has drastically changed and nolonger fits the concept of nostalgia, be it restorative or reflexive. One may find a tellingexample of this new quality of nostalgia in recent Russian TV series depicting the Soviet1960s-80s. I will focus on several of them:TheThaw (Ottepel’, 2013, directed and producedby Valerii Todorovskii), Black Marketeers (Fartsa, 2015, dir. Egor Baranov), Our Happy To-morrow (Nashe schastlivoe zavtra, 2016, dir. Igor Kopylov), and Optimists (Optimisty, 2017,dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii). There are certainly many more miniseries on the Thaw and1 This article is a shortened version of the article “Bolshe, chem nostalgiia. Pozdnii Sotsializm v Tele-serialakh 2010-kh godov” [More thanNostalgia. Late Socialism in TV series of the 2010s”]. In:NovoeLiteraturnoe Obozrenie,168/3 2021, 127–147, in co-authorship with Tatiana Mikhailova.30 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingStagnation that appeared in the 2010s, such as Trouble in Store (Delo gastronoma no.1, lit-eraryTheCase of Supermarket No. 1, 2011, dir. Sergei Ashkenazi), Furtseva (2011, dir. SergeiPopov),The Dark Side of the Moon (Obratnaia storona luny, 2012, dir. Aleksandr Kott), TheRed Queen (Krasnaia Koroleva, 2015, dir. Alёna Rainer),Margarita Nazarova (2016, dir. Kon-stantin Maksimov), Liudmila Gurchenko (2016, dir. Sergei Aldonin), A Mysterious Passion(Tainstvennaia strast’, 2016, dir. Vlad Furman),Hotel “Rossiya” (Gostinitsa Rossiia, 2017, dir.Sergei Sentsov), and Little Birch Tree (Berёzka, 2018 dir. Aleksandr Baranov) andmany oth-ers.All these series hardly fit a concept of nostalgia due to their focus on illicit, yet sys-temic aspects of the late Soviet lifestyle – black market trading, corruption, illegal busi-ness, bohemian freedom, or a semi-legal industry of glamour. Typically, the protagonistconfronts Soviet authorities, while the latter are represented by various officers of the‘organs’ and party apparatchiks. These TV series highlight and elevate those who werepersecuted and humiliated in the 1960s-70s – the so called stiliagi (hipsters, dandies),fartsovshchiki (slang forblackmarketeers), tsekhoviki (colloquial termforblackmarketpro-ducers) – as true heroes of their time and forerunners of the future (i.e., of the post-So-viet present). However, none of these films selects dissidents as their heroes – politicalopposition to communist ideology is not what they highlight, but rather capitalism andglamour within ‘highly-developed socialism’ (razvitoi sotsializm).22. An Aesthetic UtopiaValerii Todorovskii’s The Thaw was indeed a trend-setter, although Todorovskii did nothide the fact thathewasdirectly inspiredbyMatthewWeiner’sAmerican television seriesMadMen (2007–2015).TheThaw gained incredible popularity due to its tasteful and at thesame timedazzling stylisation of the fashions,music, dances and even faces of the 1960s.Inspired by Todorovskii’s suggestion, many critics initially interpreted The Thaw as thepost-Soviet version ofMadMen, only to discover more differences than similarities withthe AMC cult series.First and foremost, Todorovskii only slightly imitates MatthewWeiner’s retromaniawith his attention tominute details of the time. Todorovskii warnedwhen the series hadjust been released: “I didn’t try telling how it was in reality. There is documentary cin-ema and other directors seeking to reconstruct the epoch.And I have created amyth. Forexample, I decided that all women should be beautiful [in my film]” (Efimov 2013).While creating his ‘myth’, the Russian director does not avoid stereotypes, rather hefills them with live energy and genuine charm. He openly constructs his series on thebasis of a doubling between a film that the characters are producing, and their relationswith one another that replicate the affairs of the personages in thefilm,butmore brutally2 Onemay point to Petr Buslov’s Vysotsky. Thank You for Being Alive (Vysotsky. Spasibo, chto zhivoi, 2011)and Vlad Furman’s A Mysterious Passion (Tainstvennaia strast’, 2016), but the representation of po-ets who personified the Thaw and Stagnation is so ridiculous in these films exactly because theyare stripped of any depth and the protagonists are completely reduced to one-dimensional – flataccording to Fredric Jameson – icons of glamour.Mark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 31and with a greater psychological depth. Following the example of the cult film of the So-viet 60s, Federico Fellini’s 8 12(1963), Todorovskii blurs the border between filmic reality,artificially created in front of our eyes, and the personal dramas of the film characters.By doing so, he unnoticeably evacuates the characters’ political and social troubles intothe realm of fiction, thus removing the last obstacles for the representation of theThawas the triumph of style and elegance – in other words, as an aesthetic utopia.The Thaw appeared in the atmosphere after the protests against the rigged Dumaelections and the ‘creative class’s’ attempt to formulate its political will in the winter of2011–2012 were suppressed, and Todorovskii’s series offered an answer to the despairfollowing the failed revolution. The critic Ksenia Larina (2013) argues that Todorovskiidepicts the world of Soviet filmmakers as the epitome of a parallel reality of freedomthat cannot avoid compromises with the system but, nevertheless, heroically preservesits independence. Andrei Arkhangel’skii (2013), on the contrary, sees in this film a justi-fication of conformism – “a non-ambiguous suggestion to revisit the contract betweentoday’s authorities and power and to reorganise it by using theThaw as a model.” In myview, neither of these critical assessments is accurate: indeed, Todorovskii seeks the ori-gins of today’s creative class, but he locates the intelligentsia’s uniting platformnot in itsshared ideas, but in its shared lifestyle – chaotic, self-destructive, at times hysterical, attimes sentimental, but always aesthetically attractive. Ilya Kalinin’s analysis of the protestmovement of 2011–2012 clearly demonstrates thatTheThawwith emphasis on the stylis-tic appeal of the intelligentsia’s lifeworld, indeed manifested the protest’s actual “ideol-ogy”, or rather, its substitute: “Thepolitical in this protestmovement operated as just oneother form of the stylistic, and the political protest served as the sign of the stylistic splitbetween ‘the cultured us’ and ‘cultureless them’.” (Kalinin 2017) In Kalinin’s opinion, thisemphasis on style betrayed the elitist character of the protest,which,because of this,wasdoomed to failure.InTheThaw, one may also detect the formation of the performative discourse for asociocultural self-identification of the ‘creative class’ that emerged after 2012 and whichMikhail Iampol’skii has defined in his eponymous book of 2018 as a “park of culture” (parkkul’tury): “the hipster lifestyle becomes the battlefield, while pogroms and arrests are ir-relevant to it. […] Violence not only coexists with the new lifestyle of today’s Moscow; itconstitutes its hidden but necessary component.” (2018: 15, 29)This formula perfectly fitsTheThaw,where the bohemian freedomof the filmmakers’ circle is defenceless before theaggressive pressure and drunken invasions of the police investigator; where the film ad-ministrator never forgets his recent time in the prison camps of theGulag,where genderrepression is normalised, andwhere almost everyone is eager to turn away from the pro-tagonist, a cameraman Khrustalev (Evgenii Tsyganov), when he is publicly shamed as acoward.32 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingFigure 1.1: Film still from Evgenii Tsyganov as Khustalev in the TV seriesTheThaw (2013)This penetration of violencewithin the television series into the lifestyle underminesthe entire liberational project that this style is supposed to embody. Khrustalev and hisfriend, director Egor Miachin (Aleksandr Iatsenko) dream about the war film – judgingby fragmentary references to the script, they have in mind something similar to AlekseiGerman’s Trial on the Road (Proverka na dorogakh, 1971) with its stern monochromic styleof 1960s ‘severe realism’. However, the film that Khrustalev and Miachin are actuallyshooting within the twelve episodes of the series, whose hack dramaturgy creates coun-terpoints to the characters’ stories and whose climactic optimistic song constitutes avery important part of the miniseries finale, belongs to a completely different genre,namely Soviet musical comedy. Its semi-parodic titleTheGirl and the Brigadier (Devushkai brigadier) refers to Ivan Pyriev’s infamous musicals of the 1930s and 40s, while itsmusical style more resonates with Eldar Riazanov’s The Carnival Night (Karnaval’naianoch’, 1956). If the dialogues and situations sound like amockery,TheThaw stylised songs(composer – Konstantin Meladze) stick in the viewer’s mind, shaping the series’ long-lasting aftertaste.Notably, both references to Pyriev’s musical comedy films andTheCarnival Night re-late to the period preceding the time allegedly depicted in The Thaw. Since the dramaabout the partisan unit remains an abstract dream, and the hack comedy materialisesin front of the viewers’ eyes, it is the latter rather than the former that arises as theman-ifestation ofThaw cinema and art in general.This substitution is quite telling: while nar-rating his characters’ artistic compromises for the sake of their future – yet unrealised –project, Todorovskii makes the Thaw, with its sexual freedom, irony and style, indistin-guishable from late Stalinist aesthetics with its ‘conflictlessness’. Notably, inTheThaw,much like in The Carnival Night, there is only one evil character – a police investigatorTsanin (Vasilii Mishchenko) – surrounded by various positive and invariably appealingpersonages.Mark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 33Figure 1.2: Film still from a scene from the fictitious comedyTheGirl and Brigadier inTheThaw (2013)Indeed, inTheThaw, we are dealing with what Fredric Jameson in his Postmodernism,or, theCultural Logic of LateCapitalismcalled “utopianismafter the endof utopia” (1991: 160).According to Jameson, new utopian discourses that appear after the disappointment inleftist utopias of revolutionary change, display “the development of a whole range ofproperly spatial utopias in which the transformation of social relations and political in-stitutions is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the humanbody”(ibid: 160).The crisis of leftist utopias in theWest of the 1970s-80s is comparable with thedisappointment associated with Perestroika and its liberational ideology that begins inthe 1990s and reaches its peak in the 2010s.Hence,myhypothesis is that theTV series un-der discussion transform nostalgia into somethingmore profound – a new utopian dis-course,which, at the same time, is radically different fromour traditional idea of utopia,as any example of ‘utopianism after the end of utopia’ would be.The eight-episode television series Black Marketeers by the young film director EgorBaranov – later known for the mystical thriller Gogol. The Beginning (Gogol’. Nachalo,2017) – is an illuminating case of such utopian spatialisation according to Jameson.Thestory is set in Moscow beginning with the protagonist’s return from Siberia, where hespent a year at the construction of the Bratsk Power Station, which thanks to EvgeniiEvtushenko’s poem The Bratsk Station (Bratskaia GES, 1965) is a symbol of the Thaw it-self. Even in the most dangerous moments, when an escape from Moscow would savethem from trouble, the film’s characters never leave the city – this idea literally nevercrosses their (and the filmmakers’) minds. Moscow here emerges as the space of thematerialised utopia filled with recognisable symbols of greatness and success (from thelegendary opera and pop singer MuslimMagomaev to cosmonaut Iurii Gagarin) as wellas with invariably beautiful and fashionable men and women. In the lavish Moscowsetting, Black Marketeers portrays the life of black marketeers, producers of recordings‘on bones’ (i.e., on X-ray film), and illegal hard currency traders, experienced by fouryoung friends, as a series of exciting adventures. These adventures, according to theseries’ logic, initially stem from the idealistic cult of friendship, butmore generally fromthe youthful desire to enjoy a fulfilled life. Accordingly, Andrei, the central character and34 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingthe group’s leader (played by Aleksandr Petrov), formulates the essence of theThawwithRobert Rozhdestvenskii’s poetic line: “zhit’ vzakhleb” [to live fully, in full breath].An interpretation of the protagonists’ criminal business as a chain of exhilaratingadventures is emphasised by repeated parallels between the four central characters andAlexandre Dumas’ThreeMusketeers, as well as by Andrei’s affinity with D’Artagnan, an ex-tremely popular figure in the late Soviet Union thanks to Georgii Iungval’d-Khil’kevich’stelevision seriesD’ArtagnanandThreeMusketeers (D’Artan’ian i trimushketёra) from 1978.No-tably, the system of characters reminiscent of Dumas’ Three Musketeers and of the So-viet TV adaption is characteristic of several contemporary TV series under discussion.It serves both as a sign of the characters’ free spirit and their problematic relations withthe system of power – both being subversive towards it and inseparable from it.The protagonist of Black Marketeers is also an aspiring writer whose first story hasbeen already published in the most popular literary journal of the Thaw period, Iunost’(Youth).Thismotif allows the filmmakers to engage the world of literary glamour, repre-sented not only by a fictional femme fatale Valeria Lanskaia (Ekaterina Volkova) but alsonon-fictional,althoughhighly stylisedprototypes like theknownauthorsVasilii Aksenov,Gennadii Shpalikov, and Mikhail Svetlov. However, the meaning of the ‘literary’ motif ismore substantial.When engaged in his life of adventures, Andrei either cannot write orwrites poorly – obviously, his creativity is transferred elsewhere, or in other words, hislife adventures substitute his writings. The writing, according to Jameson, also standsfor spatialisation of the temporal and, like inTheThaw, suggests the evacuation of socialproblems from the realm of history to the realm of timeless fiction.The impression that Black Marketeers is a timeless adventure rather than a historicalnarrative also suggests spatialisation insteadof temporalisation.Theeffect of flatness in-creaseswith the growing significance of Pont, a larger-than-life villain,played byEvgeniiStychkin. In the film’s finale, also in full accordance with the expectations inscribed intothe adventure genre,Andrei ismiraculously exoneratedduring the trial,whichotherwisewould lead to his long-term imprisonment and maybe even execution (as suggested bythe story of a historical figure, famous black-market businessman Ian Rokotov,whowasexecuted in 1961 and briefly appears in Black Marketeers, played by the star ofTheThaw,Evgenii Tsyganov). As a deus exmachina aKGBofficer appears (played by Timofei Tribunt-sev): throughout the series he protected Pont as his informer and collaborator, but in thefinal episode, right before the verdict, he deliversmaterials to the court, pointing to Pontas themurderer and absolvingAndrei.The evil character of theKGBofficer thus becomesa saviourfigure.This accumulationof improbabilities brings the impressionof an adven-ture flatness to its maximum, only to be broken in the series’ finale.Andrei is exonerated due to his agreement to be a KGB informant and basically tobecome a new Pont. The viewers learn about this during the final scene, when Andrei’sfriends overwhelmed by joy meet him at the steps of the courthouse. Only Andrei’smother understands that his miraculous escape from imprisonment suggests a dra-matic self-betrayal, and to his admission of guilt: “I’ve done so many horrible things”,she responds bitterly: “And you’ll do evenmore in the future.”33 All translations from Russian quotes are mine if not noted otherwise.Mark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 35Figure 1.3: Film still fromBlack Marketeers (2015)Only here the adventure narrative ends, and a different temporality takes an upperhand, but this is where the film ends too.3. Remembrance of Idealism PastIn general, almost all the protagonists of these new Russian television series appear tobe people who possess true creativity and seekways to realise it.The viewer understandsthat only the rigidity of the Soviet system turns their creativity into a crime; under thepost-Soviet condition it would be a secure foundation for their social success. However,the main utopian effect of these TV series seems to be associated with the decoupling ofcapitalism and cynicism,manifesting a tangiblemirage of non-cynical profiteering and,by default, politics, conveniently situated in the late Soviet past.Notably, all these series, with a varying degree of success, try to revive themoralisticnarrative of the 1960s,according towhichanethical compromise is theworst crimeaper-son can commit, and that the path of compromises inevitably leads to self-destruction.This narrative clearly represents an antithesis to cynical contempt towardsmoral values.In post-Soviet television it first reappeared in The Thaw, where Khrustalev loses every-thing, first and foremost the prospect ofmaking his dreamfilm, because during the warhe had accepted his father’s offer (or rather a plea) to save him frommilitary service. Inthe climactic scene ofOurHappy Tomorrow, the series about underground Soviet capital-ists – the so-called tsekhoviki – in 1989, in themidst of Perestroika, the tsekhovik Lugovoi,who by now has lost all his wealth but won his beloved woman, with pathos suggests tohis nemesis Kozyrev, a professional criminal, to ask himself: “At what moment did youbetray yourself?”This narrative of moral betrayal in many ways resonates in the finale ofBlackMarketeers.36 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingIn Soviet films of the 1960s-70s, the function ofmoralists and guardians of idealism,was embodied by the officers of the organs – most frequently the Ministry of InternalAffairs or the KGB. InTheThaw, one such character appears, the aforementioned Tsanin,who investigates the death of the screenwriter Kostia Parshin and eventually rises as anepitome of entrenched Stalinism, systemic hatred towards the intelligentsia and its cul-ture, and, generally speaking, becomes a personification of Soviet cynicism of power.A similar character appears in Black Marketeers, and he openly represents the KGB.Timofei Tribuntsev plays Captain Ivanov as a disgusting character, and the film repre-sents his villainy with almost a comical excess. Not only does he cover up for Pont, whopays him a significant fee for ‘protection’ – thus foreshadowing business practices ofpost-Soviet law enforcement officials, the so called ‘siloviki’ – but his henchmen alsotorture suspects imitating the Stalinist period. The KGB villainy is counterweighted inBlack Marketeers by the moral authority and support provided by an honest policeman,who happens to be the father of the protagonist’s love interest, German MikhailovichVostrikov,playedbyAleksei Serebriakov.Notably, inLittleBirchTree,a2018TVseries aboutthe famedSoviet folk-dance ensemble, Serebriakov plays aKGBofficer,who becomes theguardian angel for the ensemble and especially its director, while all villainy is delegatedto a small clerk from theMinistry of Culture. FromTheThaw, to Little Birch Tree, from 2013to 2018, the power figure has accomplished a full transformation from a super-cynic to aguardian angel.Such a ‘splitting’ of the figure representing the Soviet regime and its violence, into agrotesque villain and magic helper, is quite typical for all the series under discussion. Itreflects filmmakers’ ambivalence towards the Soviet system, or more generally, towardsthe Soviet past. On the one hand, the Soviet system serves as the obstacle to the protag-onists’ self-realisation. On the other, it stimulates their ingenuity and challenges theirtalents. The system harasses and represses them, while at the same time producing thedemand for underground capitalist business and adding the significant cultural capital ofrebellion and martyrdom to the transgressors, from stiliagi and modernist filmmakersto black marketeers. In short, this ambivalence reveals a co-dependence of the utopiannon-cynical capitalism, as depicted in these films, and the repressive Soviet system, aco-dependence that deserves a closer look.4. “A Deep State” of Late SocialismOn 11 February, 2019Vladislav Surkov, at the time still Putin’s closest aid,published an ar-ticle titled “Putin’s Lasting State”. Amongmany suspicious claims about the greatness ofPutin’s state and its ‘export potential’, Surkov argues that this political order ismore hon-est than its Western counterparts. Why? Because Western states apparently are secretlyadministered by the ‘deep state’ – an alliance of powerful agents and organisations, legaland illegal alike, that operates beyonddemocratic institutions andblatantly uses violenceand corruption, alluding to a staple ofmultiple conspiracy theories. On the contrary, theRussian stateMark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 37If unpacked, Surkov’s statement reveals an Orwellian paradox at its core: the Russianstate is honest because it is openly deceptive and corrupt. Surprisingly Surkov’s revela-tions did not causemuch stir (if any) in the Russianmedia, apparently this logic has beenadopted by contemporary Russian culture long before Surkov articulated it. More pre-cisely, it has been cultivated by variousmeans, including popular culture. It would not bean exaggeration to say that Surkov’s self-righteous legitimisationof violence and corrup-tiondirectly stems fromthediscourse shapedby theTVseries Idiscusshere.Thecontem-porary social, political and economic order is represented in them as the direct heir notto the formal Soviet system, as Western analysts frequently believe, but to the informal‘deep state’ that was hidden underneath late socialism’s surface and absorbed its bright-est andmost dynamic elements.By themeans of this imaginedgenealogy, contemporaryRussian social order is placed beyond any legal or moral judgment, as the ‘third’, hybridand utopian, path, situated between capitalism and communism.Another TV series, Optimists (2017–2021) based on the idea by Mikhail Shprits andMikhail Idov, directed by the famous Aleksei Popogrebskii, author of the acclaimed filmsKoktebel’ (2003), and How I Ended this Summer (Kak ia provel ėtim letom, 2010), highlightsa connection between the imaginary Soviet deep state and contemporary Russia’s poli-tics. Notably, this TV series depicting Soviet diplomats in the early 1960s, received directapproval from the ‘profile ministry’ – in this case from the head of the Russian ForeignOffice,Sergei Lavrov (cf. [Anon.] 2017).This is especially curious since at the same time asLavrov’s approval,Parlamentskaiagazetapublishedanangry letter fromoneof theRussian‘senators’ Andrei Sobolev (2017), who felt offended by the fact that “in the difficult inter-national situation of the 1960s Soviet diplomats are drinking vodka, sleeping around andendlessly smoking foreign cigarettes.”The series begins with the American exhibition in Sokolniki in 1959, which obviatesthe cultural gap between Soviet and American understandings of international politics.The Optimists are the staff members of the newly created Information-Analytical Groupand their group’s creator is an American communist of Latvian descent Ruta Blaumane(Severija Janušauskaitė, a future star of Tim Tykwer’s BabylonBerlin).Their new boss Vik-tor Biriukov also features, a seasoned party apparatchik, with military experience notonly fromWWIIbut also fromBudapest in 1956,hewasoneof those officerswho crushedtheHungarian uprising (played by Vladimir Vdovichenkov, a former star of the TV seriesBrigada about 1990s gangster capitalism).is not split up into deep and external; it is built as a whole, with all of its parts andits manifestations facing out. The most brutal constructions of its authoritarian frameare displayed as part of the façade, undisguised by any architectural embellishments.The bureaucratic apparatus, evenwhen it tries to do something clandestinely, does nottry too hard to cover its tracks, as if assuming that “everyone understands everythinganyway.” (Surkov 2019)38 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingFigure 1.4: Film still fromRuta and Biriukov inOptimists (2017–2021)Both Blaumane and Biriukov are transgressive, yet in a different way. As Popogreb-skii explains, Biriukov from the very beginning is depicted as a seasoned Stalinist, whileBlaumane is cheating on her husband, a heroic pilot, and without any hesitation writesa slanderous denunciation implicating Biriukov after their first rough encounter. Youngcharacters are also far frombeing Soviet poster boys, in certainways, they are borderlineSoviet outcasts – a Jew, a son of reemigrants who perished in the Gulag, a secret Amer-ican agent. Paradoxically, their marginality in relation to Soviet standards makes themmost fitting for the role of transgressive reformers.The first half of the series unfolds as a narrative about the ‘westernisation’ or, rather‘Americanisation’ of Soviet diplomatic style – ‘optimists’ educate themselves and teachothers how to utilise the media for political purposes and how to manipulate Westernpublic opinion.These funny or not so funny episodes include storylines about the Amer-ican pilot Powers, canine cosmonauts Belka and Strelka, or the media representation ofSoviet fishermen lost in the ocean and found by Americans (an obvious reworking of the1960 story about the Soviet Sergeant Ashkat Ziganshin and his crew). Apparently, Sovietdiplomacy learns from the Western media how to do politics in the society of specta-cle.Proudly andwith panache, the series’ protagonists demonstrate that thewithholdingand distortion of information is the most effective political tool and that it can producea tremendous effect on the ‘world’s destiny’.This part of the film looks like clumsy advo-cacy for the ‘spectacular’ methods employed by Russian diplomats in the post-Crimeanepoch and the heavy hand of the political commission from Lavrov’s ministry is easilydetectable here. However, despite a faithful reproduction of Cold War rhetoric, this se-ries reveals the Soviet (and Russian) establishment’s unrequited love for the West, hid-den under the disguise of confrontation.The style and cut of Soviet diplomats’ clothing,as well as their secret and not so secret sexual affairs with Westerners help to visualisethis paradox.Evenmore paradoxical is that while trying to act as realWesterners, the Soviet diplo-mats, in fact, act as imaginary devious capitalists lampooned by Soviet (and nowadaysRussian) propaganda. At the same time, the series’ authors present the adoption of dirtyMark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 39media tricks by the protagonists as proof of the true modernisation of Soviet interna-tional politics, which is confirmed by the verdict that comes from a highly placed Partyfunctionary, a hiddenStalinist,whowants to disband the Information-Analytical Group:“Your department was created to convince our enemies that we are like them.”In the second part of the series, however, diplomats almost entirely forget about for-eign affairs and find themselves fully absorbed by domestic politics. The theme of be-trayal and self-betrayal begins to dominate the series’ plot manifested by almost all cen-tral characters. In the beginning of the series, Blaumane writes a political denunciationof Biriukov, while having an affair with the KGB overseer of the ministry; and in thetwelfth episode she has sex with Biriukov when her husband, half-paralyzed after theunsuccessful trial of a new fighter plane, falls and dies at home. Biriukov’s secret love,a German journalist Gabi Getze (Karolina Grushka), is shot dead during a sting opera-tion that he arranged, and the young son of his adversary dies after a car collision, or-ganised on Biriukov’s request. Andri Muratov (Egor Koreshkov) learns that his wife hasdenounced him to the KGB out of jealousy. A naïve and idealistic Arkadii Golub’ (RinatMukhametov) is forced to take a bribe for his assistance in getting a foreign passportfor a fictional Soviet genetics, Stanislav Pimenov, who will defect during a conference inPrinceton.Whenarrested,Golubadmits underpressure that hedid this onBiriukov’s or-ders (which is a lie).Even LeniaKorneev (played byArtemBystrov, knownby Iurii Bykov’sfilmTheFool (Durak, 2014)),who seems to be a perfect example of the true Soviet diplomat– he is a street-smart former sailor, with roughmanners – appears to be a victim of CIAentrapment: he agreed to collaborate with the US while in Cuba, and now the Moscow-based CIA officer reestablishes his connection with the former sailor who is beginninghis career in the Soviet foreign ministry.Figure 1.5: Film still from three Soviet diplomats, three transgressors inOptimists (2017–2021)Considering the importanceof the themeof faithfulness to oneself andone’s ideals asthe antithesis to today’s cynicism in all the TV series under discussion, such a treatmentof this motif in Optimists looks like an aberration. However, it is not. Rather, it reveals40 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingthe true meaning of the alleged idealism of the past heroes in all these films. Optimistsmost openly, albeit in a caricature-like way, shows how the late Soviet ‘deep state’ func-tions by depicting a fictitious attempt of the anti-Khrushchev coup d’état in 1960. Untilthis moment, Biriukov devotedly serves the coup leader as his faithful lieutenant. How-ever, when he learns that members in his group will be persecuted as traitors after thecoup’s success, Biriukov (with Blaumane’s help) betrays his formermentor and protectorby turning the same methods of media disinformation that they used on the interna-tional scene against the domestic conspirators.Thanks to thismega-treason, all the film’s protagonists, despite their own acts of be-trayal, flourish in the film’s finale and in the second season of the series released in 2021.Ruta Blaumane becomes the deputy minister of foreign affairs; Biriukov receives a postin theCentralCommittee; ArkadiiGolub’ is appointedas theheadof the Information-An-alytical Group instead of Biriukov; and Korneev ends up the chair of the KGB supervisorfor the entire Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Notably, Muratov who did not betray anyonebut was betrayed himself, is ‘rewarded’ in the least spectacular way – he is appointed tothe Congo embassywhere he departs togetherwith his treacherouswife. In otherwords,after the defeat of old party apparatchiks, now they, young and transgressive, constitutethe new deep state. Ignoring historical detail, the filmmakersmake it clear that thisdeepstate has assumed power after 2014.From this perspective, the plot of Optimists – as well as other TV series of this kind– looks to be a rite of passage that the heroes need to undergo in order to join the new,post-Soviet, deep state. Alleged idealism helps the film’s authors to justify the viewers’moral solidarity with these characters and their subsequent transformations. But it isthe protagonists’ ability to betray and to forget about their betrayals – i.e., to become coldand shameless cynics – that constitutes the critical condition for their ‘admission’ to thenew order. In this respect,Optimists obviates the genealogy or contemporary power thatis detectable in all of these series. Genealogy of power, according to Foucault (Rabinow1998: 374), is based not on linearity but on ruptures and breakdowns – apparently, themoment of the betrayal of the former idealism imaginary constitutes the point of originfor the contemporary cultural, political and symbolic regime of power.5. Retrotopia UnpackedWhat is the new quality of nostalgia as manifested by these and similar TV series of the2010s?Onemaydefine itwithZygmuntBauman’s term ‘retrotopia’whichhederives fromSvetlana Boym’s conceptualisation of nostalgia. He also cites Walter Benjamin’s famousdescription of Paul Klee’s the Angelus Novus (1920) as the Angel of History whose face isturned towards the past, in which he sees nothing but “a single catastrophe which keepspiling wreckage” and who is smashed by the storm blowing from Paradise: “The stormirresistibly propels him into the future towhichhis back is turned,while thepile of debris[from the past] before him grows skyward” (Benjamin 1968: 249). In Bauman’s words,nowadays this Angel of History is changing direction, he is caughtMark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 41in the midst of a U-turn, his face turning from the past to the future, his wings beingpushed backwards by the storm blowing this time from the imagined, anticipated andfeared in advance Hell of the future towards the Paradisе of the past […] The road tofuture looks uncannily as a trail of corruption anddegeneration. Perhaps the road back,to the past, won’t miss the chance of turning into a trail of cleansing from the damagescommitted by futures, whenever they turned into a present? (Bauman 2017: 2, 6)In otherwords, in the retrotopiandiscourse thepast has replaced the future.This conceptresonates with the series under discussion. Both Mikhail Iampol’skii (2014) and AndreiArkhangelskii (2013) suggest that these TV series attempt to cure the axiological disori-entationexperiencedbypost-Soviet people.Thedominant ideological discourse simulta-neously glorifies the Soviet period as the paradise lost and justifies neoliberal capitalismas the most effective economic order. On the contrary, the viewer of TV series about theThawand Stagnation finds the source of comfort in the realisation that the dreams of theminiseries’ characters about foreign clothing andmusic, travel abroad andfilming eroticsceneswithout the control of the Party has already been successfully accomplished in thepresent.Thus,what is indeed, albeit indirectly, glorified in retrotopias, is not the past butthe present. Retrоtopias, according to Bauman, offer “a firm ground thought to provideand hopefully guarantee an acceptable modicum of stability and therefore a satisfactorydegree of self-assurance” (Bauman 2017: 8).It would also be logical to explain the sense of post-Soviet confusion and identitysplits with the contradictory or lost societal telos, which is also the reason for the absenceof any captivating images of the future in contemporary Russian culture, both in socialand literary discourses. Bauman’s conceptualisation of retrotopia treats it as the modi-fication of a traditional utopia. It was Northrop Frye, who famously compared the genreof utopia with the social contract offering the ‘imaginative telos’ to society:There are two social conceptions which can be expressed only in terms of myth. Oneis the social contract, which presents an account of the origins of society. The other isthe utopia which presents the imaginative telos or end at which social life aims. […]The social contract, though a genuine myth which, in John Stuart Mill’s phrase, passesa fiction off as a fact, is usually regarded as an integral part of social theory. The utopia,on the other hand, although its origin is such the same, belongs primarily to fiction.The reason is that the emphasis in the contract myth falls on the present facts of so-ciety which it is supposed to explain. And even to the extent that the contract myth isprojected into the past, and so themyth preserves the gesture ofmaking assertion thatcan be definitely verified or refuted. (Frye 1965: 323)Not everything in this definition fits contemporary Russian retrotopias. First of all, theydonot depict the utopian space and time of the past as rational, let alone faultless.On thecontrary, they frequently emphasise negative aspects of the past, especially if these fea-tures seemnot to be relevant for the present.Nevertheless,whether the heroes and hero-ines of the past fail or triumph in these miniseries, their performances create a utopianperspective on the past, not on the level of conscious goals but on the level of affect.Thisaffect stems from the purely aesthetic aspects in the representation of the recent past,enhanced by the beauty of actors, elegance of settings and exoticism of clothing. These42 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingfilms, unlike classical utopias, do not situate a societal telos in the past, nor do they seekto provide “yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems”, to use Bauman’s expression, be-cause as we know, affect is pre-cognitive, yet, it creates an illusion of knowing and un-derstanding and thus is deceptive.4However, and this is the most vital aspect of retrotopias – they blur the distinction be-tween the social contract and utopia, or rather, present the affective utopia as a new socialcontract. Much like the latter, retrotopias project their myth into the past thus creatingan illusion of historical evidence. But most importantly, retrotopian emphasis also “fallson the present facts of society which it is supposed to explain”. Probably not only explain–butmostly justify, although this can be said about the social contract aswell.This is notaneo-traditionalist,but aneo-conservative social contract that paradoxically reaches outto select transgressive and rebellious elements5 of late Soviet history in order to validatetoday’s status quo.By thismeans it simultaneously justifies the state repression andpar-dons citizens’ legal nihilism, advocates obedience and absolves rebellion.The emergence of retrotopias as a new social contract can be explained from variousperspectives: either by the disappointment in ‘traditional’ utopias of a radiant future –whether communist or capitalist alike – or the instability of all social contracts, to whichthe ruling regime seemed to subscribe. Nevertheless, they provide a comforting effect.These retrotopias symbolically protect the viewer from the dangerous future and offer anescape from the present. In deep resonancewith Adorno’s andHorkheimer’s descriptionof the culture industry: “It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad realitybut from the last thought of resisting that reality” (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 116).Filmography8 12, dir. Federico Fellini, Italy/France 1963.Amysterious passion (Tainstvennaia strast’), dir. Vlad Furman, Russia 2016.Babylon Berlin, dir. Tim Tykwer, Germany 2017–2023.Little Birch Tree (Berёzka), dir. Aleksandr Baranov, Russia 2018.D’ArtagnanandThreeMusketeers (D’Artan’ian i trimushketёra), dir.Georgii Iungval’d-Khil’ke-vich, USSR 1978.BlackMarketeers (Fartsa), dir. Egor Baranov, Russia 2013.Furtseva, dir. Sergei Popov, Russia 2011.Gogol.The Beginning (Gogol’. Nachalo) dir. Egor Baranov Russia 2017.Hotel “Rossiya” (Gostinitsa Rossiia), dir. Sergei Sentsov, Russia 2017.How I Ended this Summer (Kak ia provel ėtim letom), dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii, Russia 2010.Koktebel’, dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii, Russia 2003.Liudmila Gurchenko, dir. Sergei Aldonin, Russia 2016.4 Cf. Massumi 2002 on affective knowledge.5 As noted by Ilya Kukulin, “performances of transgression in Russia’s public sphere could be seenas elements of a shared system of public expression, almost unconnected to any specific politicalideology and/or social stratum. These performances constitute the horizon of expectations for theconformist majority” (Kukulin 2018: 229).Mark Lipovetsky: More than Nostalgia 43MadMen, dir. MatthewWeiner, USA 2007–2015.Margarita Nazarova, dir. Konstantin Maksimov, Russia 2016.Optimists (Optimisty), dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii, Russia 2017–2021.TheCarnival Night (Karnaval’naia noch’), dir. Eldar Riazanov, USSR 1956.TheDark Side of theMoon (Obratnaia storona luny), dir. Aleksandr Kott, Russia 2012.The Fool (Durak), dir. Iurii Bykov, Russia 2014.TheRedQueen (Krasnaia Koroleva), dir. Alёna Rainer, Russia/Ukraine 2015.TheThaw (Ottepel’), dir. Valerii Todorovskii, Russia 2013.Trial on the Road (Proverka na dorogakh), dir. Aleksei German, USSR 1971.Trouble in Store (Delo gastronoma no.1, literary The Case of Supermarket no. 1), dir. SergeiAshkenazi, Russia 2011.OurHappy Tomorrow (Nashe schastlivoe zavtra), dir. Igor Kopylov, Russia 2016.List of IllustrationsFigure 1.1: Film still from the TV seriesTheThaw (Ottepel’), dir.Valerii Todorovskii,Russia2013.Figure 1.2: Film still from the comedyThe Girl and Brigadier – film within the seriesTheThaw (Ottepel’), dir. Valerii Todorovskii, Russia 2013.Figure 1.3: Film still from film BlackMarketeers (Fartsa), dir. Egor Baranov, Russia 2013.Figure 1.4: Film still from the TV Series Optimists (Optimisty), dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii,Russia 2017–2021.Figure 1.5: Film still from the TV Series Optimists (Optimisty), dir. Aleksei Popogrebskii,Russia 2017–2021.References[Anon.] (2017): “Lavrov nadeetsia, chto serial ‘Optimisty’ pomozhet molodezhi vybirat’professiiu diplomata.” In: TASS, 25 April 2017 (https://tass.ru/obschestvo/4209864)[21 December 2022].Arkhangel’skii,Andrei (2013): “Khrustalev,mashinku!” In:Kommersant,9December2013(https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2358217) [21 December 2022].Benjamin, Walter (1968): Illuminations. Edited and with an introd. by Hannah Arendt,translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Harcourt, Brace &World.Boym, Svetlana (2002): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books.Bauman, Zygmunt (2017): Retrotopia, Cambridge: Polity.Efimov Sergei (2013): “Valerii Todorovskii: ‘Ia reshil, chto v ‘Ottepeli’ vse zhenshchinybudut krasivymi’.” In: Komsmol’skaia Pravda, 2 December 2013 (https://www.kp.ru/daily/26166.5/3053484/) [21 December 2022].Frye, Northrop (1965): “Varieties of Literary Utopia.” In: Dedalus 94/2 (Spring), pp.323–347.Horkheimer, Max/Adorno, Theodor W. (2002): “The culture industry: Enlightenment asmassdeception.” In:GunzelinSchmidNoerr (ed.):Dialectic ofEnlightenment: Philo-44 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingsophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, pp. 94–136.Iampol’skii, Mikhail (2014): “Dvoiniki i zaemnoe ia.” In: Seans, 28 March 2014 (https://seance.ru/articles/dvojniki-i-zaemnoe-ya/) [21 December 2022].Iampol’skii, Mikhail (2018): Park kul’tury: Kul’tura i nasilie v Moskve segodnia, Moscow:Novoe izdatel’stvo.Jameson, Fredric (1991): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,Durham: Duke University Press.Kalinin, Ilya (2017): “O tom, kak nekul’turnoe gosudarstvo obygralo kul’turnuiu oppoz-itsiiu na ee zhe pole, ili pochemu, dve Rossii men’she, chem ‘edinaia Rossiia’.” In:Neprikosnovennyi zapas 6 (http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2017/6/o-tom-kak-nekulturnoe- gosudarstvo-obygralo-kulturnuyu-oppoziciy.html) [21 December 2022].Kukulin, Ilya (2018): “Cultural Shifts in Russia since 2010: Messianic Cynicism andParadigms of Artistic Resistance.” In: Russian Literature 96/98, pp. 221–254.Larina, Kseniia (2013): “Chelovek idet za solntsem.” In:The New Times 41/308 (https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/75506/) [21 December 2022].Massumi, Brian (2002): From Parables for the Virtual, Durham: Duke University Press.Rabinow,Paul (ed.) (1988):TheEssentialWorks ofMichel Foucault, 2, Aesthetics:Methodand Epistemology, edited by James Faubion, translated by Robert Herley et al., NewYork: New Press.Sobolev, Аndrei (2017): “Serial ‘Optimisty’ – paskvil’ na otechestvennyi dipkorpus.” In:Parlamentskaia gazeta, 28 April 2017 (https://www.pnp.ru/culture/serial-optimisty-paskvil-na-otechestvennyy-dipkorpus.html) [21 December 2022].Surkov Vladislav (2019): “Dolgoe gosudarstvo Putina. O tom, chto zdes’ voobshche pro-iskhodit.” In: Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1 February, 2019 (http://www.ng.ru/ideas/2019-02-11/5_7503_surkov.html) [21 December 2022].Chapter 2:Drawn HistoryUkrainian Graphic Fiction about National HistorySvitlana Pidoprygora1. IntroductionFor centuries, the history of Ukraine has been the subject of interest for not only writersbut also numerous artists,whohave drawnupon varied styles, genres, and approaches tointerest their readers and acquaint them with the past, draw parallels with the present,andpoint towards the future.1Naturally, the ideological conceptionsof suchworks corre-sponded to the artists’worldview and the cultural-historical circumstances of their workand, in some instances, they played a key role for constructing an imagined national idea– as was the case with novels by Raisa Ivanchenko, Roman Ivanychuk, Ivan Bilyk, andothers.When Soviet-era history books falsified the past, a sense of that history could bedrawn from historical fiction. But it was only the boom inmass literature, which startedin the early 1990s, that introduced historical images and themes that had otherwise beensilenced toabroaderpublic. Inparticular,Ukrainiancrimenovels,melodramas,women’sliterature, and thrillers prevailed and formed the basis for further popular engagementwith the topic in comic books and graphic novels or graphic fiction.Thus, in the politicalcircumstances of present-day Ukraine, comic books became a popular platform for thediscussion of contested issues and formed a bridge between historical memory and thepresent through the close intertwining of words and pictures, i.e., visual images.This trend corresponds to a general tendency in 20th century popular culture, wherevisual representations became increasinglymore important than textual narratives. In away, the visual became the calling-card of contemporary mass culture, as Fredric Jame-son writes, whereas1 This article uses materials frommymonograph Ukraïnska eksperymentalna proza XX– pochatku XXIstolit: ‘nemozhlyva literatura’ (Ukrainian Experimental Prose of the 20th and early 21st Centuries: An “Im-possible” Literature, 2018), particularly the sub-chapter “The Experimental Nature of Visual Litera-ture and Graphic Fiction” (221–253).46 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingthe image, now liberated from complex temporalities of a plot you need to read anddecipher, to reconstruct at every point, [began] to call for a different kind of visual at-tention […] projecting something like a visual hermeneutic which the eye scans for everdeeper layers of meaning. (Jameson 1998: 127)Late 20th century scholarship reacted to this tendency with the new research field of vi-sual studies, which analyses visual artistic works (such as comics, graphic novels, videogames, commercial ads, etc.) in relation to its implied ideology, social myths, and eco-nomics, focussing on the production and politics of signification within a given culturalcontext. This is especially true for graphic fiction, including comics and graphic novels,which often use visual metaphors to increase the images’ variegated associativity, mak-ing themunderstandable within the context of the cultural, political or sociological situ-ation of their own society. In this essay I will analyse some of these visual constructionsof national history in Ukrainian comics and graphic novels as a specific form of nationalappropriation of the past.2. The Comic Book. Cossacks in Ukrainian Comic BooksThe comic book as drawn history has a long history – scholars trace it back to cavepaintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Maya codices, medieval miniatures, illustrations ofthe Bible, and late 18th- early 19th century English political caricatures. The develop-ment of comics was enabled by a powerful explosion of mass culture on account of newtechnology that allowed the mechanical reproduction of images.For a long time, professional academic analysis of comic books was hindered by theprejudiced opinion of it as a ‘low’ genre. However, starting from the mid-20th century,the comic book attracted increasing academic attention. We can find the beginnings ofintellectual consideration of comic books in theworks of such renowned semioticians asRoland Barthes and Umberto Eco. Eco views the comic book in the context of mytholog-ical narrative (“The Myth of Superman”). He posits that superhero comics – like ancientvisual narratives – aremeant to present the protagonist as a paragon ofmoral virtue andnational pride (1979: 107–124). However, this does not preclude the fact that comic bookscomprise highlymotivated signs, images and symbols, which generatemeanings in var-ious ways, creating a code for the reader to interpret.International scholars conceptualise the comic as a 20th century cultural phe-nomenon that, despite its seemingly primitive nature, deserves serious attention as anindicator of social sentiments and tastes, a powerful tool of influence with profoundcommunicative potential. Comics express the “word – symbol – image interaction”(Booker 2011: 958). They are not mere illustrations of the narrative, not just picturesaccompanied by text, but a cohesive unit of word and image, a meaning-making inter-connection. “Thanks to the interaction of verbal and nonverbal components,” Liubov’Stoliarova notes, “the comic encompasses within itself a high volume of easily decipher-able information” (2010: 384).In the concluding decades of the 20th century, and the early 21st century, comicsstudies became especially popular in Western academic settings (McCloud 1993; EisnerSvitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 472008). A number of studies touched upon the question of the comic’s evolution, its ex-pression of national traditions, and view the comic in the context of visual rhetoric,mul-timodality, mediality and complex artistry.In recent years, graphic novels especially have become increasingly popular in manycountries, gaining recognition also with literary awards and artistic rankings. Also inpost-Soviet space,with the lifting of state regulation and censorship, comics and graphicnovels are gradually appealing to ever larger numbers of readers. Since 2010, Ukrainianliterature has incorporated increasing amounts of various graphic literary works. A re-cent bookmarket overviewofUkrainian comics lists severalworks that can competewithinternational products and are anchored in a national Weltanschauung and have a dis-tinctly Ukrainian flavour, as one critique put it (Koval 2017).2This ‘Ukrainian flavour’ is most clearly manifest in the themes of images in graphicfiction that highlight certain key events (periods) in the national history such as the Cos-sack age, the early 20th century ‘national liberation struggle’, the Soviet era or the war inEasternUkraine since 2014 to the present.3 It is notable that not somany comics are ded-icated to the treatment of the Soviet era (where national elements are not as prominent).Currently growing in popularity is a series of comics by Оleksandr Koreshkov entitledAmong the sheep (Sered ovets’, 2018).Thework’s fictional space-time is full of signsmarkingSoviet realities of the 1950s through the 1970s: slogans like “Forwards to aBright Future!”,“TheParty and thePeopleAreOne!”, “Glory toToil!”,workers’ greyuniforms,workpasses,vigilantes, ‘boy scouts’ (pioneers) with red kerchiefs. In a playful, colourful, animation-like form,with animal characters like dogs, pigs or sheep, the comic offers a social satireof the Soviet reality, which, however, could be associated not only with the Soviet order,butwith any formof violence against the individual.Theanthropomorphismof thework,and the serious problems it touches on, is reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s style in hisgraphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1980). In the first book of Koreshkov’s series, thecanine protagonist (we are not told his name) is dismissed from factory work for beingoutraged with the director (a ram) who let himwait at his office door for a long time.Heis intercepted and beaten up by vigilantes, asking why he is not at work; he witnesses acar crashwhen a drunken official (a hog) runs over a child at a station.The driver and theinjured child are taken away by an ambulance, while a bystander is blamed in the news.These events force the protagonist to break with the usual scenario of being a silent wit-ness to lies and they force him to overcome his own fear (Koreshkov 2018). In the comic,we trace an allusion to George Orwell’s dystopia Animal Farm (1945), which uses animalprotagonists as well as an allegory to expose the ‘Sovietmyth’ of socialist life. Subsequentissues of Koreshkov’s comic (four to date) discuss the protagonist’s further resistance to2 Themarket overviewwas done by Chytomo, an internet resource that publishes the latest informa-tion about the Ukrainian book market, events and projects, as well as analyses the developmentof Ukrainian book publishing https://chytomo.com/ [30 September 2023].3 This article was written in November 2021, before the start of the full-scale war of the Russian Fed-eration against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Therefore, it does not discuss comics that appearedafter the large-scale invasion and continue to emerge throughout the war. These comics now rep-resent a significant layer of Ukrainian comic culture as of May 2024.48 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingthe system, his transformation from victim to a fighter and defender of others, a transi-tion to active resistance.Ukrainian contemporary authors of visual stories draw particular inspiration fromthe Zaporizhian Cossacks from the early modern period, interpreting this period anewin the context of contemporary mass culture. In particular, mythical Cossacks of strongcharacter became the embodiment of the national superhero. Thus, it makes sense toview the comic as a mythological narrative that playfully offers positive role models tosociety, accumulates patriotism, awakens national pride for days of yore, thus strivingto inspire heroic acts also in the present day. In doing so, these comics do not artificiallyconstruct a newUkrainian narrative about the Cossack past, but rather revise and adaptthese pre-existing narratives for the present, from post-independence (1991) to wartime(2014 onwards) Ukraine.Comics dedicated to the fictional, legendary adventures of the Cossacks began to ap-pear in Ukraine already in the 1990s, mostly in children’s magazines.Thus, the newspa-per Robitnycha hazeta (Worker’s Gazette) published the Buiviter comic in 1995, written anddrawn by Kostiantyn Sulyma.In this story everything is aimed at fostering patriotism and praising the protag-onists’ courage, when the Cossacks in their conflict with basurmany (infidels),4 yasyr(booty)5 or magical monsters at last gain the obligatory victory for good. Accordingly,whereas an infidel gets his magical powers from amonster in exchange for his soul, theCossack restores his power thanks to his native soil, and the holy cross. The structureof the comic is complicated by its narrative framing: the story of Buiviter’s feat is toldby a grandfather to his grandchildren, and in the end, it turns out that the grandfatherhimself is Buiviter’s son.The young listeners understand their part in a struggle that isnot complete – in the end, evil returns and the boys pick up Buiviter’s magic sword.Thestriking drawings, the non-traditional placement of the frames (one drawing per page),the shading and colours (negative characters are depicted in dark colours, and as doingtheir dark deeds at nights, whereas Buiviter and the Cossacks are depicted in daylightand in bright colours), the negative caricature-like depiction of the infidel antagonistsand the more realistic depiction of the Ukrainian Cossack protagonists, shapes the per-ception of an antithetical world, divided into good and evil, with Ukrainians standingunquestionably on the side of good. The comic also underscores important words witha larger font such as “Run for your life” and “Time”. The rage of Khiz-Gireia and hisyearning for revenge is emphasised by writing his remarks in white letters on a blackbackground in the bubbles. This makes reading harder, thus deepening the prejudiceagainst this character.The authors of the article “The history of Ukrainian comics” pointout that “Buiviter became a Ukrainian superhero of a Ukrainian epic. The story becameextremely popular, because there was no cult of a liberator hero in the country prior to4 Basurmany is an archaic word once used to denote ‘infidels’, people of non-Christian faith; it wasoften associated with Tataro-Mongols, who raided Slavic lands, and who were eventually opposedby Cossacks. Later the term came to mean foreign enemies, or enemies of foreign faiths.5 Yasyr is a term used (in the mid-15th to mid-18th centuries) to denote people taken prisoner byTurks and Tatars during fighting or raids on Slavic lands. Prisoners from the yasyr were intendedto be sold at special markets for the trade of captives.Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 49that. The clear image of the Ukrainian Cossack was turned into a superhero” ([Anon.]2020). It was the first time in the Ukrainian cultural discourse that the Cossacks areviewed through the prism of superhero qualities. However, Buiviter can be seen as aprotagonist adapting superhero qualities while not quite fully inhabiting it yet, becausehe lacks certain features that would allow us to classify him as such.Figure 2.1: Scene from comic Buiviter (1995)An attempt to publish a caricature comic, where the protagonists act, talk andare depicted in the manner of an animated film, was made by the Kozaky publishinghouse in 1992 in the comic Marco Pyrih the Cossack. How Pyrih Became Pyrih (Marko Pyrih,zaporozhets’. Iak Pyrih stav Pyrohom, 1992), written by Vadym Karpenko and drawn byOleksandr Haiduchenko.The events of the plot are presented through the prism of bur-lesque humour. The heroes Marko Pyrih, Kharko Zhytymozhna, Koshovyi, Krutyviter,deacon Omel’ko, bard (kobzar) Zahrai inhabit an optimistic space, where even adversityis faced with levity and humour. The drawings of this comic are in a conventional style,the narrative is uncomplicated, however the characters seem to talk too much.The text50 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingin the speech bubbles disturbs the images, because at times every character in the framehas something to say on a givenmatter.The comic looks like a series of sketches from theKrokodil6 and Perets’ (Pepper)7magazines. No heroic image of Cossacks is presented here,rather they are shown to drink, play and engage in sport during peacetime, sometimesdefending their everyday interests like inventive men who will always find a way.Figure 2.2: Scene from comicMaksymOsa (2011)A different approach to the topic was chosen by Ihor Baran’ko,who in 2011 publishedhis comic strip novelMaksym Osa. Baran’ko is a renowned Ukrainian author of interna-tional acclaimed comics, living abroad andworkingwithmultiple publishers in different6 Krokodil was a “mass satirical journal founded in Moscow in 1922 as a supplement to theWorker’sGazette. From 1933 onwards it was published in the Pravda printing press. The pages of the pub-lication gave the reader humorous and satirical words by I. Il’f and E. Petrov, M. Zoshchenko, V.Maiakovskii […] and others, accompanied with sketches by artists D. Moor, V. Deni, the Kukryniksiigroup, etc” (Kovaliv 2007a: 533).7 Perets’ was a “popular bimonthly humor and satire journal, founded in Kharkiv in 1922 and basedin Kyiv after 1941. Its pages […] often contained caricatures” (Kovaliv 2007b: 203).Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 51languages. The Ukrainian publication of the first volume of Maksym Osa was awardedthe Ukraine-Europe 2011 diploma.The work had previously appeared in French, Polish,and Russian.The story describes the adventures of the eponymous Cossack protagonist.The historical surroundings, modernised by adding a ‘whodunit’ component makes thecomic novel a lively read. Besides his skill as an artist, Baran’ko builds a tense detectivenarrative, full of intrigue.Thequick and observantMaksymOsa cracks a hidden treasuremystery, finds a murderer and saves innocent lives. Essentially, Maksym Osa presents afavourable image of a Ukrainian with exclusively positive characteristics.Furthermore, the full-colour adventure comicDaohopak, consisting of three volumesAntalya Tour (Antaliis’ka hastrol’, 2012),Noble Love (Shliakhetna liubov, 2014) andTheSecret oftheCossackDruid (Taiemnitsakozats’kohomol’fara, 2016), byMaksymPrasolov (script),Olek-siiChebykin (art),OlehKolov (text) dealswithCossack themes.Thefirst volumewasgiventhe Jury Special Award for Best Illustrated Children’s Book at the Book Arsenal festival.The authors of the ‘blockbuster comic novel’ succeeded in presenting the Cossack contextin popular and modern forms. The work modernises national mythology and heritage,particularly the myths and legends of Cossacks with strong character and with special,seemingly mystical abilities. In the comic, three Cossack friends from the “knightly or-der of sorcerers andmartial artsmasters of the ZaporizhianHost” experience numerousmind-boggling adventures, endure hard battles and duels, astound enemies with theirdeftness, bravery, and invention. The work mixes the Ukrainian world with Eastern ex-oticism of places like Türkiye or Japan. The love story, a relationship between one maleprotagonist and a ninja woman, provides a clue to the book’s title, a portmanteau of aUkrainian martial art and an East Asian philosophy. The cast of characters is imbuedwith additional colour by adding talking and highly intelligent animals, such as the gan-der Husiar II and the tattooed hog Okist (meaning gammon). Animals are also involvedin the Cossacks’ various adventures. Overall, Daohopak is an amalgamation of variousgenres: adventure, fantasy,mystical, and historical fiction.3. What is a Ukrainian Superhero Like?Thewar inEasternUkraineboostedexperiments in the superherogenre since2014.Muchlike in theUnitedStates, inwhich thepatrioticCaptainAmerica showsup in thedramaticperiod ofWorldWar II in order to oppose the Hitlerite coalition of powers, in Ukrainiancomics, the threat of the conquest of the country by another state brings forth the imageof a positive superhero, capable of opposing the military onslaught.The colouring comic book series Ukrainian Superheroes (Ukrains’ki superheroi) with thevolumes To Save the Lark (Vriatuvaty zhaivoronka, 2015) and Invisible Island (Nevydymyi os-triv, 2015) by Lesia Voroniuk uses the genre to educational ends in order to foster patrio-tism andUkrainian national pride among children. Because, in addition to being a posi-tive figure, the superheromust necessarily possess a set of qualities –have superpowers,wear a suit setting them apart from the public, and have a secret identity, i.e. lead a dou-ble life, hiding one’s superhero essence (Duncan et al. 2015: 221–245). But, in contrast totheirAmericanmodels,Ukrainian superheroes oftendonothide a secret identity or their52 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingsupernatural abilities. Their identity is exclusively a heroic one, which is why they haveno names other than the names that mark them as heroes.Voroniuk’s superheroes are faced with a task that is both difficult and ordinary forsupermen – to save the Ukrainian world from perdition and to fend off the triumph ofthe forces of evil.The opposition between the positive and negative images transparentlyinsinuateUkrainian realities, inparticular theAnti-terroristOperation,which tookplacein theDonbas region from2014 on,and the conflict between thenational (Ukrainian) andthe imperialist (Russian) worlds.Figure 2.3: Scene from comic To Save the Lark (2015)Thenamesof the superheroes and their supernatural abilities betray thenational cul-tural code, both historically, and in the present. Much like in the Fantastic Four of MarvelComics, Voroniuk’s superheroes are also four: Kobzar (Bard, leader of the superheroeswho lost his sight as a Cossack on the island of Khortytsia, and has the ability to readminds and communicate telepathically), Vira (a student who believes in the all-conquer-ing power of good), Kiborh (Cyborg, an unbreakable warrior with a human heart fromLuhans’k), and Krip (Dill, a herbalist from the Carpathians, who uses herbs to heal or toSvitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 53make truth or memory potions). The heroes’ outfits partially stress their national iden-tity, underscore their abilities, their moral values andmode of being.They do not, however, change over the course of the story, because life is not dividedinto ‘heroic’ and ordinary.Thus, the Kobzar wears a Cossack kaftan and jeans, his instru-ment, the kobza, which he plays when he is free to do so, is a necessary element of hisimage.The protagonists’ blindness is also a homage to the traditional image of the blindkobzari, itinerant bards who wandered through Ukrainian lands in the 18th century andkept the memory of the past alive through songs. Krip wears an embroidered shirt andbaggy Cossack-like trousers. He holds a dill plant in his hands. In addition to its healingsignificance, it gains a new connotation in the context of current events in Ukraine: TheRussian word for dill, ukrop, has been used by Russian proxies to denote Ukrainian sol-diers.Alongwith“ukr”, thisderogatoryname isgivenapositive associationhere,with thedill plant that has anumberofhealingproperties,and is an ingredient inmanyUkrainiandishes. Kiborh’s name and superhero origin story (once human, now a cyborg with a hu-man heart and brain) has to do with events in the Donetsk airport in 2014–2015, wherethe Ukrainianmilitary put up a defence so unexpectedly vicious that they were called cy-borgs for their ‘superhuman’ strength and resilience. Kiborh, the cyborg, is essentiallya robot made out of a super strong alloy, but his human nature is revealed through hisheart,which is visible through clearmaterial on the left side of his chest.Only the femalecharacter is depicted as wearing different outfits in the two volumes of the comic, whichmay identify her as a helper to the (male) superheroes.The distinguishing feature in heroutfit is its green colour (green dress, green blouse), which symbolises hope, wisdom,calm, and optimism.The threemale protagonists have obvious supernatural powers – telepathy (Kobzar),healing (Krip), extreme physical strength (Kiborh). Their resistance to evil is an activeone, they are always doing – running, fighting, playing a musical instrument (Kobzar),uncovering the enemy’s plans. The female protagonist, by contrast, is static. Addition-ally, Vira’s superpower is not that extraordinary, it is simply the belief in the triumph ofgood (her name, Vira, means “Faith” in Ukrainian), which all heroes ought to have. Viraaccompanies the superheroes, her assistance takes the form of moral support – whenKiborh recalls the death of his wife after having found a “Faithful Heart” pendant he hadgiven to her, Vira consoles him, saying “You did all you could” (Voroniuk 2015a: 10). Like-wise, in To Save the Lark, it is Vira who figures out the code on the cage and lets the birdfree. In Invisible Island the superhero men save Vira twice – Vira, again, not particularlystrong, but serving here as an embodiment of all those for whose sake the superheroesfight evil, all those whose faith gives them strength.Whereas the Ukrainian world is primarily represented by human characters, the en-emy world is so repulsive and monstrous that it is represented by monsters, rather thanpeople.The names and images of enemymonsters carry also a present-day political sub-text.Dvorly [tweagles], the double-headedman-eating eagles, are an allusion to the dou-ble-headed eagle in the coat of arms of the Russian Empire and the Russian Federation;Vyrodky [bastards] are people who turned into monsters when they sold their soul andconscience for money. Vyrodky are traitors manipulated by Dvorly, who give them or-ders to destroy Ukraine. Visually, Vyrodky are reminiscent of Colorado potato beetles.They are also referred to by another name, Kolorady, which is a moniker for pro-Russian54 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingseparatists and adherents of the ‘Russian World’ due to the similarity of the stripes ofthe St. George Ribbon to the yellow-and-black stripes of the beetle. In Invisible Island thesuperheroes fight a sea monster, Imperukha (a queen who was turned into a river mon-ster for her heinous deeds), which also underscores the imperial ambitions of Ukraine’senemies.The Ukrainian world is likewise represented through the images of a lark, cranes,Cossacks and a kobza, an embroidered shirt.8 The superheroes make fairly quick workof the objectives facing them – they save the lark so that the sun may always rise aboveUkraine; they save the Ukrainian soul embodied in a traditional vyshyvanka9: “The vyshy-vanka is the soul of the Ukrainian people” – says the Cossack Keeper of the Soul, – “aslong as we wear vyshyvanky we will be united and unbeatable” (Voroniuk 2015b: 10).Thesimple plot, clear drawings, the interactive, co-creative possibilities provided by the op-tion of colouring the comic, clearly convey the main idea to the child reader – whateverhappens, Good always defeats Evil, and Ukrainians will overcome any obstacles.In a very similar way, the image of a Ukrainian superhero is modelled in the comicThe Patriot (Patriot, 2016), which was written and drawn by Vadym Nazarov, stylisticallyresembling DC Action Comics. Notably, the comic is intended for a young adult audi-ence, employing 17+ and 15+ age restrictions, as it features detailed depictions of graphicfight scenes, the cruelty of which is conveyed through torn-off limbs, bashed headsand ‘creepy’ elements. The comic complies with the three key elements of superherocharacters: mission, power, and personality (Coogan 2006). Thus, an ordinary soldier –Sergeant Vidirvenko – gains supernatural abilities when he puts on the Patriot armour.The armour imbues him with extreme strength and speed to overcome evil. In armour,the sergeant also becomes impervious to bullets and able to jump off a helicopter with-out any harm to himself. But, like Superman, he is threatened by explosions, includinggrenade explosions: “Oh,damn…I don’t like being blownupongrenades…Bullets, lasers,swords – I don’t care… but not grenades…” (Nazarov 2017: 26). He performs a pro-socialmission, fearlessly helping others as a warrior of light opposing the powers of darkness,which strives to conquer Ukraine, and then the entire world.8 Linguistically, the comics draw upon Ukrainian folk expressions, sayings and spells (“[…] seekingout herbs, picking good health for the entire year”, “come ye cranes, ye brothers, come and helpgood people”, cf. Voroniuk 2015b: 3), which creates a positive national element, appeals to andenvelops the reader with historical memory.9 A vyshyvanka is a traditional element of clothing, a men’s or women’s shirt with ornamental em-broidery. In fiction, it often serves the symbolic role of marking and keeping Ukrainian identity.Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 55Figure 2.4: Scene from comic Patriot. Renegade (2016)Whereas American superhero identity usually comprises “the codename and the cos-tume, with the secret identity being a customary counterpart to the codename” (Coogan2006: 32), inNazarov’s comic, the Patriot denotes the role he plays in the struggle againstevil. The Patriot is, first and foremost, a Ukrainian, who loves Ukraine, has the mentalfortitude and the belief in victory, which enables him to wear his armour. The Patriot’sarmour possesses national markers, which becomemore pronounced with each new is-sue of the comic. Thus, on the cover of the first issue, Patriot. Attack of the Clones (Patriot.Ataka kloniv, 2014), the suit is adorned with an abstract flag. In the second and third is-sues,Patriot. Renegade (Patriot. Renehat, 2016, 2018), the Patriot’s armour exhibits a tridenton his helmet, shoulders and chest, as well as the national flag – the armour is yellowand blue. Additionally, his weapon – the “Stinging Trident” sniper rifle – is reminiscentof a trident in shape, while the light billhook resembles the Old Kyivan kolovorot/kolovrat(spinningwheel),which hints at the Patriot’s connectionwith ancientUkrainian powers.However, in contrast to Voroniuk’sUkrainianSuperheroes,Nazarov’s Patriot has a pri-vate identity. In daily life he has the name Sergeant Vidirvenko,whichmeans “the Break-56 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingneck” and suggests the character’s risk-friendly nature, his ability to make independentdecisions according to the situation, and sometimes to ignore orders from his superi-ors, which always leads to positive outcomes. Whereas out-of-suit superheroes oftenfeign some sort ofweakness,Vidirvenko has no suchweaknesses.The sergeant’s physicalpower without his suit (which he must remove in enemy territory because light energyis blocked there, and the suit does not work) is demonstrated when he is depicted shirt-less, with clearly defined musculature, and tattoos of a trident and the Kobzar (the 19thcentury Romantic poet Taras Shevchenko) on his chest. His image is crowned by his os-eledets, the Cossack hair lock. In addition to his willpower and sense of duty, the sergeantis humble – he does not seek reward for his labours and has a sense of humour.The three issues of the Patriot comic published so far put the struggle between Goodand Evil into a more fantastical plane than the one we see in Ukrainian Superheroes, anda more large-scale one.The struggle of “Ukrainians against their enemies” becomes thestruggle of “earthlings versus aliens”.With every new issue, however, events of the comicare increasingly projected onto present-day Ukraine, including the war in the Donbas;and the conditional plane, where events unfold, betrays Ukrainian realities. The authorstresses the comic’s historical basis and the deliberate parallels with actual events andpeople with a note on the book’s front endpaper: “Similarities to real persons and eventsin the comic are not always accidental.” (Nazarov 2018)In the first issue, Patriot. Attack of the Clones “the story’s inception […] both in termsof the style of drawing, and the narrativemanner, is reminiscent of a giant cartoon fromthe Perets’ magazine” (Pityk 2019). By alluding directly to a potential real danger, it dealswith the question if Ukraine is prepared to resist outside aggression and what is to bedone when the threat becomes a reality.Will a hero turn up, one able to resist an invinci-ble enemy?The comic uses humour and sarcasm to attempt to answer these questions. Ittells the story of how Sergeant Vidirvenko has to try and infiltrate the enemy space sta-tion, “Phobos”,which is hanging above Kyiv, and acquires armour andweapons.He evenhas to fight the clones of historical figures, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, as well as robotsand aliens. It seems like the author deliberately saturated his comic with diverse antag-onists to underline the multifaceted nature of the evil the protagonist is facing, as wellas his extraordinary persistence and strength. Only after having overcome all obstacles,the sergeant becomes “the Patriot”– a defender of Ukraine and the entireworld from thepowers of darkness and evil. In general, as researchers of Ukrainian comics Anatolii andKateryna Pityk note, “‘Patriot. Attack of the Clones’ is a sweet, benevolent, and at timesnaive mockery of the cliches of Communist inheritance and Russian propaganda, a funblack-and-white action comic.” (2019)The second (2016) and third (2018) issues of the Patriot comic comprise a separatestory, “Renegade”, and exhibit metamorphoses both formally, and content-wise. Unlikethe first issue, these comics are full-colour, not black-and-white. The quality of draw-ing and artistic work with colour shows the author’s prowess.The third issue opens withinformation about its characters, which again allows parallels to be drawnwith contem-porary reality. In particular, members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and militants ofthe Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR in its Ukrainian acronym), whereas the comic itselfmentions “ukry” (derogatory term for Ukrainians/Ukrainian military used by separatistmilitants since 2014), “muscovites”, the “ceasefire”, the “ghostly peace and the exhaustingSvitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 57invisiblewar”,which situates the narrative clearly in the present.Among the dramatis per-sonae are the Patriot, a.k.a. Sergeant Vidirvenko; Leutnant Kvitka, a servicewoman in theUkrainianArmedForces, and the Patriot’s partner; Agent Franko, anundercover agent inthe Ukrainian Armed Forces intelligence and others,who are set against the Bis (demon)– a werewolf and commander of DNR militants or a cap-wearing DNR militant who isa commander of a territorial checkpoint at a temporary frontline.The supervillain – therobotised demon-lord Pu, is not included in the list of characters, because, although heis the initiator of the aliens’ attack, and a puppet master of the work’s antagonists, heonly appears on the final page with a promise to destroy the Patriot, which can be seenas hinting at further conflict, and the fact that the comic is incomplete.Figure 2.5: Scene from comic Patriot. Renegade (2018)58 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingThe narrative of the Patriot comic clearly separates Ukrainian and enemy forces.Ukrainian forces are represented by people, who embody light, whereas the alien ene-mies feed on dark energy, turn people into renegades, and aremonsters in terms of theirphysical form. Their misshapen nature is hyperbolised by the fact that they eat humanflesh.Thus, Bis says “[…] leave a fewwarm ones for me […] it’s been a while since I’ve hadany fresh meat!” (Nazarov 2016: 130). A renegade in the likeness of a little girl draws inchildren in order to eat them, and having seized a child, yells: “Won’t! Mine! Won’t! Mytoy! Must devour!” (Ibid. 2018: 33).In general, both visually and verbally, the enemies in the comic are demonised anddehumanised. This shapes an unattractive image of the enemy in the mass conscious-ness.The antagonists are modelled in such a way as to provoke a negative attitude in thereader, to stress the enemy’s physical andmoral decrepitude, bizarre nature and opposi-tion to the Ukrainian world. DNRmilitants are caricatures, their clothesmark the socialgroups making up their detachments – people with a criminal past (dressed in vatniks[cotton wool padded jackets], cigarettes between their teeth), the military (fatigues withno IDmarkings), Russian kazaks (kubankahats).They have no names, only nicknames like“worm”,“rat-eater”and theaforementioned“demon”.Theenemies’ language isfilledwithcursewords,criminal argot, surzhyk.TheRussian language isprovided inUkrainian tran-scriptions, thus further stressing its ‘otherness’. Incorrect speech patterns also stress theethnic origins of those who fight for the enemy – such as Buryats or Chechens. HittingthePatriot fromagrenade launcher,a littlemanwith apaunch says, in brokenUkrainian:“Take that, Ukropa. Batu[-khan] reward, Batu hero for Ukropa! Kobzon wife, kids shakehand for Ukropa! […] You shaitan […] flying Ukropa!!!” (Ibid. 2016: 11).The renegade’s de-humanisation is stressed not only through a physical transformation into amonster, butalso through the impoverishment of his speech: he speaks in simple sentences consistingof a single verb or noun (“toy”, “girlfriend”, “devour”).The events of Patriot. Renegade unfold in several locations: “Eastern Ukraine. Mus-covite-occupied territory”, “Department ofMilitary Intelligence and Strategic Planning,Irpin, Ukraine”, “somewhere in Kyiv, off the loud streets”, “Not far from the frontline”,“Armed Forces of UkraineMilitary Base seized by pro-Moscow forces, Donetsk”, “Some-where in the nondescript ravines of the Donbas,”, “Kremlin. Muscovy”. Although thecolour scheme of the entire comic is bright, there is still a light vs. dark contrast in thedepiction of peaceful Kyiv, and the places where the enemy prevails. Eastern Ukraine isdrawn in dark hues, with greens and browns, as a desolate, unpeopled territory – withbare trees, a human skull in the forefront, and a destroyed building in the background,where previously, a truck driver explains, “All this was villages! Neat houses in a row,and gardens blooming” (ibid. 2016: 1). The visual image of the separatist base is alsodominated by darker shades, and the malevolent atmosphere of the events unfolding isunderlined bymaking the bubbles red and pointy, rather than round. Red and shades ofred accompany the appearance of the renegade in the image of a girl (red sky, red eyes)and his transformation into a red beast that shoots red snot at the Patriot. The Patriot,a warrior of the powers of light, is shaded in blue, yellow and orange hues. He performshis mission – rescuing rays of lights from occupied territory.Among the comic’s female characters, Lieutenant Kvitka (Flower) stands out. She isstereotypically sexually attractive, and lenient about the sergeant’s jokes about her re-Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 59lationships with her subordinates. At a checkpoint, the Patriot notes: “You are a harshmistress to your suitors, Lieutenant. It’s a rare occurrence to see such a fine lady stand-ing guard!”, to which Kvitka replies: “Better bite your tongue, Sergeant, before I appointyou a costume for the canteen […]” (ibid: 6). Leutnant Kvitka appears in an episodewherechildren are being saved as a helicopter pilot, which causes a boy’s admiration (“When Igrow up, I’m going to be a pilot, like you!” (ibid. 2018: 40)). She assists the Patriot. How-ever, it seems that the creation of an image of a Ukrainian female superhero is still in thefuture.The Patriot comic is clearly oriented towards the contemporary political situation inUkraineand fosters anoptimistic agenda in the reader.Thesuperhero lacks a secret iden-tity (it is common knowledge that Sergeant Vidirvenko is the Patriot), which hints at theidea that Ukraine does not require a secret hero, but rather an obvious one, so that everyperson might believe themselves capable of an extraordinary feat, and that “the super-heroes’ true heroism is not in any supernatural ability, but in beingunshakable in the faceof overwhelming hardship” (Duncan et al. 2015: 252). At the same time, the comic dividesthe world into light and darkness, with the protagonists standing on the side of light,while their enemies represent darkness.This division and character of the struggle im-plies that the enemy is demonised. As a consequence, shaping a dehumanised version ofthe enemy also implies that one cannot negotiate with him; the only way to be safe fromsuch an enemy is by destroying him.A mixture of contemporary and Cossack narratives is also found in the comic Vic-tory. Savur-Mohyla (Zvytiaha. Savur-Mohyla, 2015) by Denys Fadieiev.The comic deals withthe fight for Savur-Mohyla in the summer of 2014, superimposing it on the Cossack age.According to legend, at this place the ottoman Sirko executed people who, after beingliberated from Turkish captivity, decided to go back to the Turks rather than return totheir homeland. In the comic Sirko judges: “Anyone who has rejected his home country,his native land, has no right to live! For there are no two Gods, no two suns […] no twomothers” (Fadieiev 2015: 17). This exclamation is addressed also to present-day Ukraini-ans, while his art of combat is understood to inspire heroic acts and reawaken inbornnational pride. In the comic, in particular a Cossack sword found during a battle dur-ingUkraine’s Anti-terroristOperation, becomes amagical artifact that awakens nationalmemory and turns ordinary persons of no particular moral courage into brave warriorswith Cossack blood running through their veins. Notably, this present-day part of thenarrative is told in Russian, whereas the Sirko story is told in Ukrainian.Denys Fadieiev was also part of a script writing group for two issues of the full-colour comic Volia: The WILL (2017, 2018).10 Rather than Cossack-era themes, this work10 An entire collective of authors worked on Volia: The WILL. The scriptwriting group of thefirst volume comprised Denys Fadieiev, Oleksandr Fylypovych, and V’iacheslav Buhaiov; RomanOnyshchenko joined them to write dialogue; the group of artists included Oleksii Bondarenko,Maksym Bohdanovsk’yi, and Oleksandr Opara. The second volume was written by Denys Fadieiev,Oleksandr Fylypovych, Ol’ha Vozniuk, V’iacheslav Buhaiov; Anastasiia Fadieieva and Oleksandr Fy-lypovych joined in the writing of dialogues; the visual narrative was created by Ievhenii Tonchylov.Notably, the comics give separate credits to the artists of the historical pages (Victoriia Pono-marenko for the first volume, Maksym Bohdanovs’kyi – for the second) and historical consultants(Vladyslav Kutsenko, first volume; Ol’ha Vozniuk, second volume). The comic’s language is diverse60 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingaddresses Ukraine’s ‘national liberation struggle’ of 1917–1920, and projects alternativeoutcomes for those events. In the comic, the authors bring together a “historical basis,alternate history and superhero elements” (Il’in, 2018) and interrogate what would havehappened, had events developed according to a different scenario. Additionally, thecomic has no shortage of uncanny facets, portraying extensive steam-punk elements(steam machine technology, Industrial Revolution-era weaponry, the protagonists’clothes) and including various artistic styles, ranging from realism to caricature.Figure 2.6: Scene from comic Volia: TheWILL (2017)The comic’s characters include notable figures fromUkraine’s history (Hetman PavloSkoropads’kyi; leader of an anarchist movement Nestor Makhno; Head of the Cen-tral Rada Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi; first President of the National Academy of SciencesVolodymyr Vernads’kyi, inventor Ihor Sikors’kyi, Vladimir Lenin) who together withseveral otherminor characters serve as recognisable historical figures that act accordingto widespread stereotypes and dominate the comic’s narrative. Thus, the malevolentand aimed at showing the characters primarily through a national lens. In addition to Ukrainian,the characters also speak Russian, Polish, and English.Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 61nature of Bolshevik power is underscored by the images of Madame Blavatsky, who isbrought back to life bymagic,while Leon Trotsky resolutely implements the ideals of theOctober Revolution, by tearing out the hearts of dissenters and raising ‘the Red dead’ tofight.These fantastic elements of the comic clash with the drawn parts of factual history –they are grayscale, realist-style sketches.The first volume places such history pages afterevery episode, the story of the second volume concludes with five history pages.They aremeant to introduce little-known historical events, phenomena, inventions, and thus tofamiliarise the reader with the historical background.The first part of Volia: THE WILL has a well thought out ‘national’ conception. Thestory begins on the front endpaper, which depicts an archangel striking a monster witha trident.The accompanying text serves as a starting point for the narrative:The youngUkrainian state arose from the ruins of an empire, as did its new and treach-erous enemies. At the same time, a great war continues in Europe, the like of which theworld had not yet seen, with spy intrigue, new mystical cults, and dangerous militarytechnology. The freedom struggle continues, and the new history of the world beginsin these pages. (Buhaiov/Fadieiev 2017)Each episode of the comic is preceded by a segment of text introducing the reader intothe action or foregrounding a key idea. Thus, the first episode opens with a text aboutWorldWar I and the formation of the Ukrainian state under the leadership of Pavlo Sko-ropads’kyi. The second episode, “Ghost of the Past” (“Pryvyd mynuloho”), opens with aUkrainian Sich Riflemen11 song “Oh Ukraine! Beloved mother”. The song’s lyrics are amodified text of the ForUkraine (ZaUkrainu) poembyMykolaVoronyi, one of the foundersof theUkrainianCentral Rada.Overall, the second episode,whichwas drawnbyMaksymBohdanovs’kyi, is executed in a Realist style, withmany detailedmass scenes.Thewordsof the song “ForUkraine, for her freedom/For honour andglory, / For the people”becomethe ideological lodestone of the narrative, which is based on the story of the Crimea Op-eration of 1918, when Ukrainian troops, headed by Colonel Petro Bolbochan, institutedUkrainian authority on thepeninsula, and created aUkrainiannavy. In the third episode,“A New Enemy”, Oleksandr Oles’ poem Chains can never bind Ukraine (Vilnu Ukraïnu neskuiut kaidany, 1917) stresses the optimism and invincibility of Ukraine’s defenders. Thesecond volume has no such introductory element.The opposition between national and enemy forces is constructed according to theconventions of the superhero genre, with a clear separation between good and evil,heroes, and villains, and with demonisation and dehumanisation of the enemy. On theside of theUkrainian revolution are powerfulweapons, the latest inventions, peoplewithsupernatural abilities – all of this is meant to help in the struggle against the Bolsheviks(Soviet Russia), who have mystical connections to evil spirits, can raise the dead aszombies to fight, subjugate thewill of the living, and possess fantastical technology.Thisevil is fought by the Ukrainian ‘cyborgs’ Sich Riflemen, Maksym Kryvonis, Agnieszka11 The Sich Riflemen are one of the detachments of the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic,formed in 1917 and notable for its organisation and effectiveness in combat.62 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingthe medium, the brilliant Professor Vernadskyi, who is developing a super weapon, andUkraine’s President Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, whose weapon is his book “The History ofUkraine-Rus”.In hismeditations on theVolia comic, Vadym Il’in criticises the voluntarism of its su-perheroes, as “rather than to solve the problems that led to war, we are given a ‘simple’solution – the removal of those problems through exclusively military means, througha superhuman technological effort” (2018). This bears the risk of forming “in the youngreader a stereotypical,black-and-white ideaof the events thatdonot actuallyfit into sim-ple schemes” (ibid.). However, as a work of fiction the comic in no way aims at a truthfulrepresentation of real events, but on the contrary at strengthening the idea that victoryover the external aggressor is possible, an idea particularly relevant in the political con-text of today’s Ukraine.4. Dira (Hole). A Graphic Novel by Serhii ZakharovIn the broadfield of comics, cartoons, drawnpicture stories and visual taleswith its gen-eral orientation towards comicality, simplification and entertainment, it is only since the1970s a distinct subgenre of the so-called graphic novel emerged, whose authors stroveto separate themselves from the earlier genre development,modelling artistic reality in adifferent set of coordinates from that of the comic. JanBeatens andHugoFrey in their in-troduction to the Graphic Novel (2015) stress that the graphic novel is notmerely a genre,but amedium that is part of other cultural fields and practices (graphic literature, visualnarrative). They define the graphic novel and comics in general on four levels: 1. form;2. content; 3. publication format; 4. aspects of production and distribution (cf. Baetens/Frey 2015). For instance, the distinctness of the form of the graphic novel is in the factthat its authors do not follow the established rules of comics, but rather create their ownrecognisable style, which does not necessarily mean an improvement to the traditionalcomic style.Authors of graphic novels prefer non-standard layout techniques,disruptingthe usual net structure of the comic, or else return to a clear layout, so as not to distractfromwhat they deem themost essential in their work. According to Baetens and Frey, interms of narrative form, graphic novels often feature a narrator, where comics lack thevisible involvement of one. On a content level, graphic novels deal with adult, or seriousand complex themes that are largely uninteresting to a teenage audience. Authors stressrealism or autobiography (like in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman, or Persepolisby Marjane Satrapi), turn to historicity and actuality (In the Shadow of No Towers by ArtSpiegelman, Last Day in Vietnam byWill Eisner, etc.), mixing fictional and non-fictional,documentary narrative (ibid.).One attempt to create a genuine Ukrainian graphic novel isTheHole (Dira, 2016) au-thored by the artist Serhii Zakharov, who had witnessed the events in Donetsk that hadled to the proclamation of the unrecognised DNR in 2014. In response, Zakharov or-ganised an art collective, entitledMurzylka, and created caricatures, street art, and graf-fiti portraying the infamous representatives of the new authorities.This artistic protestgained a worldwide response when the photographs were posted on the internet. TheDNR authorities subsequently arrested Zakharov, imprisoned him and staged a shoot-Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 63ing. But Zakharov managed to escape Donetsk and to move to Kyiv, where he processedhis traumatic experience in graphics, which became the start of a graphic novel, andstarted to collaborate with the writer and journalist Serhii Mazurkevych, with whom healso started to work on the graphic novelTheHole.The Hole was presented in Kyiv in 2016 and accompanied by the opening of an exhi-bition at the National Museum for the History of Ukraine, entitledThe Hole. 14 August…An Experience of Nonviolent Cultural Resistance, where works by Zakharov were presented.The book immediately got a broad reception on the internet, underlining the fact thatgraphic novels disprove the idea that drawings can only entertain and amuse, but canopen a much broader circle of subjects: “problems in the family, intolerance, the strug-gle for rights; genocide, as well as war” (Kalytenko 2017). Zakharov’s works contains allcentral elements of the graphic novel, like a historical basis, autobiographical elements,the scale of the problems touched upon, the large book format (A4), and the orientationtowards an adult reader.The topicality of the content in particular brings thework closerto non-fictional literature.Figure 2.7: Scene from graphic novelTheHole (2016)Particularly impressive is the layout of Zakharov’s images, which, as indicated, heonly later inserted into a plot in collaboration with Mazurkevich, supplementing themwith new ones in order to make a story suitable for the form of a graphic novel. For thisreason, the drawings, their situation on the page, their ‘framing’ are of utmost impor-tance, they create an emotional visual arc, and reveal a person’s feelings in a critical sit-uation. In this respect the book cover, in shades of red and black, is impressive.64 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingOn an elevation in an urban landscape, a hole is drawn, into which the city is beingpulled (high rise buildings, a stadium, train stations), but this process is incomplete.Thehole symbolises a transition into a different space, which is likely unfriendly and has nofuture, which leads to emptiness, which is the unrecognised Donetsk People’s Republic(DNR). At the top of the page, Dira is written in big black letters, drawn haphazardly –some spots are not filled with colour, the lines are clumsy as if pointing to the author’snegative connotation of the word and what it stands for.Theplot is also typical for thegraphicnovel genre.Fromthe veryfirst pages the readerfinds herself thrown into an uncanny world of violence, fear and lawlessness – a spreadshows the barrel of a pistol,which conveys the impressions of someone facedwithmortaldanger. In the face of death, details become blurred,which is shown through a darkenedbackdrop in hatched lines.The large-scale image has no frame, it occupies the entirety ofthe available page space, including themargins.This technique of placing a single imageon a two-page spread becomes the book’s signature, literally signalling the huge scale ofthe disastrous events that took place in Donetsk in 2014.The blown-up close-ups (open-mouthedperson indespair; someonewith a gun; a protester, the artist himself; a scene ofsomebody being beaten up; the face of the victim of the beating) deepen and strengthenthe sense of danger that rules in the city.Another specificity of graphic novels is the framing of how many images are placedon one page, thus accelerating or slowing down the action, stressing at the same timeits significance and tension. Scott McCloud distinguishes six types of frames: frommo-ment to moment; from action to action; from object to object; from place to place; fromdetail to detail;withno visible connection.Whereas action framespredominate inAmer-ican comics,making thenarrative dynamic andkeeping the reader in suspense, Japanesecomics caremore about condition,which iswhy they also havemany “detail to detail” and“no visible connection” frames (McCloud 1993: 74–78). In the graphic novelTheHole it isnot just the adventure that is of significance, but also the narrator’s emotional state, soframes from action to action here alternate with frames that stress detail, and frameswith no visible connection. These latter ones show how unbelievable and unreal every-thing happening to the narrator is, talk of his desire to break out of the closed space ofunfreedom. Frames often include meaning breaks, which the reader is forced to fill forherself, thus supplementing eventswith own reflections and feelings, joining the processofmaking sense.Also, the shapeof the framematters,whether they are rectangular, star-shaped, heart-shaped, or something else. InThe Hole, all the drawings are rectangular,however their frames are not differentiated, with them being situated on a black/whitebackdrop, or on full spreads without a frame, which further emphasises the bleak anddepressive atmosphere.Indeed, the author’s use of black-and-white drawing is not accidental. The mono-chrome palette illustrates the absence of joy and hope, serves as a marker of cruelty,fear, moral degradation, and spiritual downfall. Gray people against the recognisablebackdrop of the Lenin monument, with sticks in their hands, hands balled into fists,blackmouths open, are reminiscent of a terrifying dark power.The author only capturesnegative emotions, depicting them schematically through an expressionist-influencedtechnique of hatching. The reader is faced with “strained hatch lines” and “black-and-Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 65white” silhouettes (Kalytenko 2017), a line technique which is reminiscent of delirium, ofa nightmare, the narrator’s refusal to believe that all of this is truly happening.It is in particular the city of Donetsk where the destruction of peacetime life andits replacement with a state of war is happening: a pregnant woman in her kitchen, agrenade on the floor, blown up to an unrealistic size, children playing while a womantalks to an armed man; a person on their knees being beaten by sticks and brass knuck-les; a foot on a person’s face; drunken people – all of these are apocalyptic scenes thatillustrate the arrival of an evil which awakens previously controlled aggression in peo-ple. At the centre of this kaleidoscope is a torn white space with a human silhouette inthemiddle – likely watching and realising the horror brought upon the beloved cityThiscontrasts with the only full-colour object, a Ukrainian flag on the book’s last page,whichserves as a symbol of return from the ‘uncanny valley’ to the space of freedom and full-fledged life.Figure 2.8: Scene from graphic novelTheHole (2016)The narrative (both verbal and non-verbal) of Zakharov’sThe Hole is in the first per-son, in retrospect. Taking temporal distance from the traumatic events, the protagonistassumes the point of view of an outside observer and analyses the events from a remoteperspective, strengthening the impression of the reliability of reported facts with its fo-cus on abuses and human rights violations.Another characteristic of the graphic novel in contrast to comics with its playfulspeech bubbles is that text is rather placed separately from the frame or atop the frame.This separation does not actually separate the whole but carries additional meaning. InThe Hole the clarity of Mazurkevych’s text with regard to place, time of action and thenovel’s protagonists is supplemented by Zakharov’s expressive drawings. For instance,writing some phrases in uppercase, such as “It became clear on 12th of May, when the66 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingself-governance ‘referendum’ was held in the DNR” or “Is that you? Yes, it’s me” under-scores key plot twists. Moreover, the constant change between white letters at blackbackground and vice versa makes reading harder and forces the reader to concentrateon emotionally challenging events.Thus, by dealing with recent Ukrainian history, Zakharov’s The Hole broadened thefield of Ukrainian graphic literature both in terms of form and content. In the graphicnovel, the narrative takes a serious register, and operates on more complicated levelsthanwe have seen in comics.Thework expresses the author’s own traumatic experience,which he processes and addresses to an adult audience, an audience with its values andworldview already in place.Thenovel foregrounds the tragic, rather than the heroic.This,in turn, requires the use of specific artistic techniques,more attuned to tragedy, like theuse of zoomed-in close-ups, grayscale, an expressionist drawing style, the lack of speechbubbles and a detachedmanner of first-person narration.5. ConclusionThe modern Ukrainian comic is distinguished by original authorial techniques, athought-out verbal component, as well as its relevance to the current needs of society.The comics make national history, in particular the Cossack past in its historical andmythological guise, but also the national liberation struggle of 1917, the Soviet era,the contemporary war in Eastern Ukraine relevant. They experiment with superhero,adventure, andmystery genres, as well as turning to alternative history and steampunk.A number of comics (Ukrainian Superheroes, Patriot, Volia:TheWILL) model the image of aUkrainian superhero, capable of opposing evil forces, which often carrymarkers of Rus-sian expansionism.Through a number of visual metaphors and associations, the comicsdraw parallels to recent Ukrainian history – namely, Ukraine’s conflict with the RussianFederation. Essentially, with its hyperbolised rejection of the enemy, the superherocomic serves as an answer to Russian propaganda in the current media communicationfield. More generally, contemporary Ukrainian comics and graphic novels construct allprevious history as a ‘national liberation struggle’ opposing foreign, Russian oppressors.Thedepiction of history through theprismof the struggle betweenGoodandEvil, theseparation of characters into clearly positive and negative, ignores the complexity andcontroversial nature of historical events and figures and contributes to forming a one-dimensional picture of theworld inmass consciousness, anddichotomising, simplifyingcomplex relationships.However, this formof national appropriation of history in comicsis called to perform a higher-priority task – to create an optimistic and vibrant space forthe victory of the national idea.Whereas comics are distinguished by fantastical, fairy-tale elements and imaginaryscenarios, or the modelling of a playful, entertaining representation of history,TheHolesupplements and deepens the earnestness of its subject – namely the war in EasternUkraine, ongoing since 2014, and the proclamation of the unrecognised Donetsk Peo-ple’s Republic – via an autobiographical and ‘documentary’ narrative, as well as expres-sive drawings and an unusual page layout, thus addressing an adult audience.Svitlana Pidoprygora: Drawn History 67But regardless of all the differences between the more simplistic superhero comicsand the serious deeper genre of the graphic novel, they both have in common that theyare concerned indepictingnational historywith the present-daypolitical situation in thecountry and are intended to form an optimistic agenda among the reader,while bolster-ing the faith in victory in mass consciousness.List of IllustrationsFigure 2.1: Scene from comic Buiviter (1995).Figure 2.2: Scene from comicMaksymOsa (2011).Figure 2.3: Scene from comic To Save the Lark (Vriatuvaty zhaivoronka) (2015).Figure 2.4: Scene from comic Patriot. Renegade (Patriot. Renehat) (2016).Figure 2.5: Scene from comic Patriot. Renegade (Patriot. Renehat (2018).Figure 2.6: Scene from comic Volia:TheWILL (2017).Figure 2.7: Scene from graphic novelTheHole (Dira), (2016).Figure 2.8: Scene from graphic novelTheHole (Dira), (2016).References[Anon.] (2020): “Istoria ukraïns’kykh komiksiv.” In: UN (https://uncomics.com/ukranian-comics/) [16 January 2023].Baran’ko, Ihor (2011): MaksymOsa [2008], Odessa: Ievgenios.Baetens, Jan/Frey, Hugo (2015): The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.Booker, Keith M. et al. (eds.) (2011): The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory inthree Volumes, Hoboken: Blackwell.Buhaiov, V’iacheslav/Fadieiev,Denys et al. (2017): Volia:TheWILL,Knyha 1,Mikolaïv: As-gardian Comics.Buhaiov, V’iacheslav/Fadieiev, Denys et al. (2018): Volia: TheWILL, Knyha 2, Kharkiv.Coogan,Peter (2006):TheSuperhero.TheSecretOrigin of aGenre,Austin:Monkey-BrainBooks.Duncan, Randy/Smith, Mattew J./Levutz, Paul (2015): The Power of Comics: History,Form, and Culture [2009], London: Bloomsbury Academic.Eisner Will (2008): Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Leg-endary Cartoonist, New York: W.W.Norton.Fadieiev, Denys (2015): Zvytiaha. Savur-mohyla,Mikolaïv: Asgardian Comics.Il’in, Vadym (2018): “Komiks ‘Volia: the WILL’: nova mifologiia Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï1917–1921 rokiv”. In: Spil’ne, 14 December 2018 (https://commons.com.ua/uk/komiks-volya-will/) [16 January 2023].Jameson, Fredric (1998): Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern, London:Verso.Kalytenko,Теtiana (2017): “Veseli kartynkypronevesele: 4 komiksypro viinu”. In: Bokmal,8 May 2017 (https://bokmal.com.ua/books/war-comics/) [15.01.2020].68 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingKarpenko, Vadym/Haiduchenko,Oleksandr (1992): Marko Pyrih, zaporozhets’. IAk Pyrihstav Pyrihom: knykha-komiks, Kyiv: Kozaky.Koreshkov, Oleksandr (2018): Sered ovets’: komiks, Kyiv: Vovkulaka.Koval’, Nata (2017): “Made in Ukraine: komiksy velyki i malen’ki.” In: Chtyvo, 25 August,2017 (http://www.chytomo.com/issued/made-in-ukraine-komiksi-veliki-j-malenki) [16 January 2023].McCloud, Scott (1993): Understanding Comics: Invisible Art,NewYork:WilliamMorrow.Nazarov, Vadym (2014): Patriot. Ataka kloniv: Knykha 1. Navaleo.Nazarov, Vadym (2016): Patriot. Renehat. Knykha 2. Samvydav.Nazarov, Vadym (2018): Patriot. Renehat. Knykha 3. Samvydav.Kovaliv, Iurii (2007a): Literaturoznavcha entsyklopediia: u dvoh tomah. Vol.1. Kyiv:Akademiia.Kovaliv, Iurii (2007b): Literaturoznavcha entsyklopediia: u dvoh tomah. Vol.2. Kyiv:Akademiia.Pidopryhora, Svitlana (2018): Ukrainska eksperymentalna proza XX – pochatku XXIstolit: “nemozhlyva” literatura,Mikolaïv.Pityk,Anatolii/Pityk,Kateryna (2019): “Kvantovyi strybokKapitanaUkraïna: koly chekatyna zoloty doby ukraïns’kykh komiksiv”. In: Chtyvo, 18 March 2019 (https://chytomo.com/kvantovyj-strybok-kapitana-ukrainy-koly-chekaty-na-zolotu-dobu-ukrainskykh-komiksiv/) [16 January 2023].Prasolov, Maksym/Chebykin, Oleksii/Kolov, Oleh (2012): Daohopak. Knyha I: Antaliis’kahastrol’. Kyiv: Nebesky.Prasolov, Maksym/Chebykin, Oleksii/Kolov, Oleh (2014): Daohopak. Knyha II: Shli-akhetna liubov. Kyiv: Nebesky.Prasolov, Maksym/Chebykin, Oleksii /Kolov, Oleh (2016): Daohopak. Knyha III: Taiem-nitsa kozats’kohomol’fara, Kyiv: Nebesky.Stoliarova, Liubov’ (2010): “Analiz strukturnykh ėlementov komiksa”. In: IzvestiaTul’skogo gosudarstvenogo universiteta. Gumanitarnye nauki 1, pp. 384–389.Sulyma, Kostiantyn (1995): Buiviter: komiks, Kyiv: Robitnycha hazeta.Umberto,Eco (1979):TheRole of theReader.Explorations in the Semiotics of text,Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.Voroniuk, Lesia (2015а): Ukraïns’ki supergeroï. Vriatuvaty zhaivoronka. Vypusk 1, Cher-nivtsi: Bukrek.Voroniuk, Lesia (2015b): Ukraïns’ki supergeroï. Nevydymyi ostriv. Vypusk 2, Chernivtsi:Bukrek.Zakharov, Serhii/Mazurkevych, Serhii (2016): Dira, Kyiv: Luta sprava.Chapter 3:Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic PastThe Historical Novels of Guzel YakhinaEva BinderHonest novels about Soviet times are neededtoday in order to squeeze out the Soviet,even if only a drop at a time, and to finallyleave it behind.Guzel Yakhina (Iakhina 2021a)1. Guzel Yakhina: Success and ControversyWithin the space of a few years, the novelist Guzel Yakhina [Guzel’ Iakhina] has achievedcritical acclaim and great popularity among Russian readers. Following the tradition ofthe historical novel, Yakhina brings crucial and traumatic moments from the first twodecadesofSovietpowerback to thepublic’s attention.At the same time,Yakhinahasbeendrawn into heated public debates onmultiple occasions,which further raised her visibil-ity. It turned out that criticismhas been launched fromopposing sides:Whereas conser-vative circles ranging from patriots to communists condemn her novels as a denigrationof national history, liberal intellectual elites criticise her for romanticising and idealis-ing themost traumaticmoments of the Soviet past.Themain question that inspired thisarticle and therefore will be discussed in the following is what has made Yakhina one ofthemost widely read and publicly debated authors in Russia within just a few years.Thisquestion will be approached by focussing on the strategies Yakhina pursues in order totransformtraumaticmoments of theSoviet past into a contemporary reading experiencethat is as informative as it is entertaining.In her historical novels, Yakhina draws on key elements of popular literature, such asprotagonists who evoke empathy, conflicts that create tension, or the incorporation ofpopular genres by making use of melodramatic plotlines and adventure stories. At thesame time however, Yakhina offers her readership more than mere divertissement. Be-sides being entertaining, historical novels have always opened up the possibility of pre-70 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingsenting historical events from a critical distance and enabled reflection on the past fromthe perspective of the present. By fictionalising time and space, Yakhina recalls and re-frames past realities and feeds them into present public debates. As will be shown, inher approach to history Yakhina attempts to balance opposing and conflicting ideologi-cal positions.Sheparticularly addresses the egalitariandimensionof Soviet ideology anddraws the readers’ attention to questions of ethnic and cultural identity. This recognis-able configuration on the level of content correlates with an equally recognisable form orstyle, which has been referred to as the ‘cinematic quality’ and which will be discussedhereafter in the context of realistic narration in mainstream literature and cinema.Since personal identity and self-representation are significant factors of the medi-ated image of an author, some biographical information about Yakhina shall be providedprior to discussing her literary texts. Born in 1977 in the Tatar capital of Kazan’ with aTatar family background, Yakhina received her education from primary school to uni-versity in Russian (she holds a degree in foreign languages – in German and English).In 1999, she moved to Moscow, where she undertook a training course in screenwritingat the private Moscow Film School. As Yakhina has stated in numerous interviews (cf.Surikov 2021), she found the form for the story she had already had in mind by writingthe screenplay for a full-length feature film. Out of the screenplay Yakhina finally devel-oped her debut novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza, 2015),1 which waspublished by AST, one of the leading and largest publishers on the Russian book mar-ket, in 2015.The novel immediately received the major Russian literary prizes – the Ias-naia Poliana Literary Award and the Big Book Award. From this moment on, the book’scirculation figures rose from an initial 3000 copies to more than 600.000 to date. How-ever, this impressive publicitywasnot gainedby the literary text alone.Five years after itspublication the story about a young Tatar peasant womanwho fell victim to the so-called‘dekulakisation’ of the 1930s was adapted as a TV miniseries for the Russian TV chan-nel Rossiia 1. When the series premiered in April 2020, it garnered record-high viewingnumbers and caused controversy across the political-ideological spectrum.The suddenmedia outrage came from different sides. Representatives of the Tatar community com-plained about the lack of a positive ethno-cultural Tatar identity and took particular of-fence at a brief sex scene in amosque.The criticism from this side was particularly harshregarding the two women involved – the author Guzel Yakhina and the actress ChulpanKhamatova, who were denigrated as traitors to Tatar culture. The Russian side raisedno less vehement accusations of insult and slander. National patriots felt that the por-trayal of history in the series offended their national pride,while communist sympathis-ers condemned thefilmas anti-Soviet.Above all, the suddenmedia outrage causedby theminiseries2 demonstrated that Soviet history remains a contentious issue and a highlycontested terrain in today’s Russia.1 Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes was translated into English by Lisa C. Hayden and published as Zuleikha in2019, Children of Mine (Deti moi) was translated by Polly Gannon and published as A Volga Tale in2023. All other translations from Russian are mine, if not stated otherwise.2 For a close examination of the controversial debates cf. Anisimova 2020.Eva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 71Figure 3.1: Film poster for the TV series Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes(2020)Besides Yakhina’s highly successful literary debut, the two novels that followed alsomanaged to achieve a remarkable record on the book market. Her second novel A VolgaTale (Deti moi), which was published in 2018 also by AST, has a circulation figure of260.000 copies.Her latest novel Train to Samarkand (Ėshelon naSamarkand) hit themarketin March 2021 with an initial circulation of 75.000 copies (cf. Surikov 2021), and therebyexceeds the first edition of Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus (Lavr, 2012) or Zakhar Prilepin’sThe Monastery (Obitel’, 2014) fivefold, just to cite two of her well-known and criticallyacclaimedmale colleagues.Apart from the remarkable popularity of Yakhina’s historical novels on the Russianbook market, the author has attracted considerable attention from outside the country.According to Yakhina, by 2021 Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes has been translated into about 40languages, her second novel A Volga Tale into about 14 languages, out of which half hadbeen published by 2021 (cf. Surikov 2021). Due to its topic – the fate of the Volga Ger-mans from pre-revolutionary time toWorldWar II, her second novel received particular72 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingattention in Germany where in 2020 Yakhina and her translator Helmut Ettinger wereawarded the prize for most promising work by the German Culture Forum for Centraland Eastern Europe.2. Diversity Beyond Postcolonial DiscourseIn the three novels Yakhina has published so far, the author draws attention to the firsttwo decades of Soviet power and the radical political and social changes the country andits population were subjected to. The dramatic and traumatic moments at the core ofthe narration are the ‘dekulakisation’ (raskulachivanie) of the 1930s (Zuleikha Opens HerEyes), the tragic failure of the so-called Volga German Autonomous Republic (A VolgaTale), which existed from 1923 until 1941, and the famine in the Volga region after thecivil war (Train to Samarkand). Apart from the historical time, the three novels share thegeographic region in which the stories are set or which serves as a starting point for thejourney within the plot. Yakhina’s choice of the Volga region – in Russian Povolzh’e – canbe regarded as a successful branding strategy. First, it fosters the public image and iden-tity of the author who, by writing about the region she has been familiar with since herchildhood, is seen to express her “love for the homeland” “(Pakhomov/Sadikov 2021). Sec-ond, Yakhina puts forward a geographic region that in public discourse tends to receiveless attention than the imperial centres on the one hand, and the remote, culturally dif-ferent peripheries of the country, such as Siberia or the Caucasus, on the other. Third,by highlighting the multi-ethnic population of the Volga region, Yakhina recalls the So-viet formula of the multi-national family and, at the same time, brings ethnic diversityin the present Russian Federation to the public’s attention. As research on Russianmassmedia has shown, ethnic diversity appears to be, for various and complex reasons, not amajor issue inpublic discourse (cf.Anisimova 2020: 110), although ethnicminorities con-stitutemore than 20 per cent of the population of the Russian Federation (Protsyk/Harzl2013: 2).Departing fromethnic diversity at the core of the narrative,Yakhina opens a per-spective on cultural and social diversity in general by representing voices that in Russianpublic discourse are less audible than others. This can truly be said of women (ZuleikhaOpens Her Eyes), children (Train to Samarkand) and of people whose voices were silencedand suppressed in the Soviet past, as is particularly the case with the German minority(AVolga Tale) after the Volga German Autonomous Republic was abolished in 1941.The geographic and symbolic space of Yakhina’s novels is determined by the Middleand Lower Volga – a region that is home to Volga Tatars as well as other numerous eth-nic minorities and small languages. Accordingly, the city of Kazan’ as one of the region’scultural and urban centres forms the point of departure for two of Yakhina’s novels. As amember of the ‘kulak’ class, the pejorative Stalinist term for landowners, the heroine ofher first novel is forced to leave her Tartar village Iulbash, and, together with the otherdeportees, is deported from Kazan’ to the Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk and from there tothe banks of the river Angara. In a similar way, the plot ofTrainToSamarkand is framed byKazan’ as the point of departure and a destination that is thousands of kilometers awayfrom the central Russian Volga region. In Yakhina’s third novel, 500 starving orphans aretaken to the Central Asian city of Samarkand – “to the sun and bread” (Iakhina 2021c:Eva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 7338), as it says in the novel.The journey is conducted under the surveillance of the youngRed Army soldier Deev and the severe female commissar Belaia.The individual stages ofthis declared ‘travel novel’ (roman-puteshestvie) thusprovide the structure for thenarrationwith regard to place and (historical) time.The voyage along the railroad is outlined in thechapters’ titles, as for example “Sviazhsk – Urmary” (chapter 2) or “Sergach – Arzamas– Buzuluk” (chapter 3). But although the geographic locations are real, the route itselfis as fictional as appears to be the time – the year 1923.This obvious deviation from his-torical facts in Train To Samarkand – commonly the years 1921 and 1922 are regarded asthe period of famine –made Yakhina, a year after the public outrage over the TV series,once again the target ofmedia-fueled criticism.When the novel was presented in spring2021, Grigorii Tsidenkov, a local historian from Samara, launched a harsh attack againstthe author, accusing her – besides historical inaccuracy and a lack of historical investi-gation – of plagiarising his own texts that he had published previously on his LiveJournalblog (cf. Samigullina et al. 2021).3By fictionalising historical places and events, Yakhina ascribes symbolic significanceto space and time.This becomesmost obvious in thefictitiousGermanvillage ofGnaden-thal, where her second novel AVolga Tale is set.With its figurative name that can be ren-dered as “Valley of Mercy” in English, the village of Gnadenthal serves as a model of thehistorical German settlements on the Volga River (cf. Silant’eva 2020). In contrast to theother two novels, AVolga Tale is focused on a single place and a single male character: ontheGerman schoolteacher Jacob Ivanovich Bach,who,due to the turmoil of the post-rev-olutionary years, falls silent but still manages to raise Antje, the baby left to him by hislove Klara. The symbolic space in A Volga Tale is based on the dichotomy of the Germancolony on the right bank of the Volga River and the solitary homestead on the left bankwhere Bach lives. Here, the Volga functions as a border between a realistic and magicworld (cf. Nabiullina 2019) or between a world of rapid historical changes (the village ofGnadenthal) and a world where time stands still (the solitary homestead).The river itselfis presented through embellished descriptions that facilitate visualisation in the readingprocess, as the following quote illustrates: “[T]he Volga was so broad in these parts that,from the right bank, even the impressively large Gnadenthal houses looked like a smat-tering of colorful buttons, in the midst of which the belfry stuck out like a pin.” (Yakhina2023: 60)Yakhina evokes the historical territory of the Soviet Union by combining fictitiousplaces and travel routeswith factual topography.Besides servingas a reference to thehis-torical world, the accumulation of toponyms in the text stimulates the process of imag-ining space.Thereby, the toponyms themselvesmay take on a clearlymarkedpoetic func-tion by being displayed visually aswords andphonetically asword sounds.The visual andacoustic effect these signifiers create is due to both their familiarity on the one hand andtheir non-Russian, foreign exoticism on the other. In her essayThe Garden on the Border(Sad na granitse, 2016), Yakhina reflects upon the mere sound of non-Russian toponymstogether with her subjective perception of space as a child:3 For Grigorii Tsidenkov’s attack on Yakhina including the untenable accusation of plagiarism see inparticular: Shikhman 2021, 12:05-15:11.74 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingIt is 800 kilometres from Kazan’ to the Ural Mountains, just like to Moscow. When Iwas a child, I had this strange feeling: Siberia always seemed within reach, but thecapital seemed infinitely far away. Siberia – that sounds familiar, similar to the Tur-kic languages: Ienisei, Baikal, Surgut, Kurgan; […] the same wind-battered taiga as notsmelling of printing ink as in school textbooks and the black-and-white pictures ontelevision. Siberia is tangible and familiar, whereas Moscow is abstract and foreign.(Iakhina 2016)4Besides the sound quality emanating from the place and river names from different lan-guages the perception of space is intensified by sensory impressions and references tomedia representations. InAVolgaTale, one of thenarrative digressions that featureStalindescribes how the great leader perceives his country from the air during his flight overthe riverscapes of theCaucasus,Central Asia andSiberia,which provides the readerwitha fictitious bird’s eye view on the huge landmass of the Soviet Union.The scene is remi-niscent of visual representations of space from the time in which the novel is set. Pointsof reference appear to be the numerousmaps in political posters, as for example the 1951poster In theName of Communizm (Vo imia kommunizma), or the avant-garde cinema of the1920s in general andDzigaVertov’s traveloguedocumentaryASixthPart of theWorld (Shes-taia chast’ mira, 1926) in particular.By making use of ostensive comparisons of the rivers with golden threads, whitemaines andblue ribbons,Yakhinamerges the sentimental, subjectiveperceptionof spaceby a character, in this case by Stalin, with the objective perspective of cinematic and car-tographic technologies. In addition, the accumulation of non-Russian toponyms inten-sifies the process of imagining the vast Soviet Empire:AndHe understood: under himwas not one river, but dozens, hundreds of Soviet rivers,merging their waters together, and advancing forth. The Kura and Aragva, the InguriandKhobi shone like finde golden threads in the current. TheKatun andKaravshan andthe Irtysh shook their white manes. The Enisei and Lena entwined their blue ribbons,and the Argun and Kolyma entwined their black ones. The varicolored streams ran atdifferent paces – some rapidly, somemore slowly. Somehardly crawled. [...] Breathless,He looked down at this incredible dance of the waters, at this symphony of hundredsof Soviet rivers. And, for the first time in many years, He felt the thrill of ecstasy in hischest, asHe had felt long ago in his youth, listening to the poetry of Rustaveli and Eris-tavi. (Yakhina 2023: 280–281)4 Yakhina’s essaywas published several times. It first appeared in print in the journal Snob,April-May2016. In 2021, the text was republished in its Russian original together with a translation into Ger-man in the edited volume Kulturen verbinden – Connecting Cultures – Sblizhaia kul’tury (Fuchsbaueret al. 2021).far from Kazan’, in Mari Ėl – the “Land of the Mari”. And Moscow? Only the KremlinEva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 75Figure 3.2: Viktor I. Govorkov: In the Name of Communizm (1951)Besides imagining the space of the Soviet Union, Yakhina recalls the Soviet model ofthe ‘friendship of peoples’ andmulti-national family in a positive egalitarian notion.Theutopian conflict-free coexistence of different ethnic groups becomesmost evident in thenewly formed community of deportees in Yakhina’s first novel. When the small groupof those who survived the six-month-long deportation journey arrives at the desolatebanks of the Angara River, we share, through internal focalisation, the perspective of theOGPU officer and camp commander Ivan Ignatov on the people who are now left to hissole surveillance and responsibility:As he peers into their faces, Ignatov recalls the names of everyoneworking in the camp.He finds them on the list, circles them with the charcoal, and counts again. There aretwenty-nine people, including the Leningraders, Russians, Tatars, a couple of Chuvash,three Mordvins, a Mari woman, a Ukrainian man, a Georgian woman, and a Germanmanwhosemind is gone and has the fanciful and sonorous name Volf Karlovich Leibe.In short, an entire international organisation. (Yakhina 2019: 234)Despite the ironic tone throughwhich Ignatov’s view of the group is rendered andwhichis particularly expressed in the phrase “polnyi internatsional”5, the labour camp is pre-sented here as an ideal type of Soviet microcosm of people with different ethnic back-grounds and from different social strata, ranging from the Leningrad intelligentsia (theso-called ‘former people’) to craftsmen, farmers and criminals.5 In the English translation the irony expressed in the phrase “polnyi internatsional” which is ren-dered as “an entire international organisation” unfortunately gets lost, whereas it is well perse-vered in the German translation of “eine echte Internationale” (Jachina 2017: 266).76 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingFigure 3.3: Film still from group of ethnically different people in the TV series Zuleikha OpensHer Eyes (2020)Much later in the novel, which covers a time span of 16 years from 1930 to the post-war period, this idea of the multi-ethnic community recurs, this time with reference tothe deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944. Here again, the multi-ethnic communityis viewed from the derogatory perspective of the OGPU (which by this time had alreadybeen renamed toNKVD).Thereby, the narrative technique of internal focalisation allowsfor ironic distance and functions as a marker for Yakhina’s critical position towards therepresented historical events:6 The English translation of this passage is in fact erroneous. Therefore, a version that corresponds tothe wording of the original shall additionally be provided here: “TheMuslim southerners were de-ported from the southern territories as a precaution, not waiting until the territory was occupiedby the invaders and the minoritiesand ethnic groups would take the chance to defect to the en-emy – as they say, to avoid this. Well, the Greeks are the Greeks. But even if Eskimos and Papuans,Ignatov could not get used to it.” (Cf. Iakhina 2015: 457)In the spring of 1942, Kuznets makes a sudden appearance out of nowhere, as always.He’s brought with him a barge packed with emaciated people who have dark-oliveskin and distinct profiles: Crimean Greeks and Tatars. ‘Ivan Sergeevich,’ he says, ‘theseoutsiders are to be taken into your charge. And provide security measures. After all,they’re a socially dangerous element in large numbers and of excellent high quality.’He laughs. Non-natives were being deported from southern territories in case the re-gion should be overrun with occupiers and minority nations, giving such people theopportunity to desert to the enemy. Thismeasure was, as they said, a precaution.Well,Greeks are Greeks. Even if they’re Eskimos with papooses, they’re no strangers to Igna-tov. Out of curiosity, he once counted up all the nationalities residing in Semruk andcame to nineteen. This means there are two more now. (Yakhina 2019: 438)6Eva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 77In Yakhina’s first novel, ethnic and social diversity is not only a central element for de-scribing the scenery, but also determines the three main characters upon which the plotand narrative perspective rest. There is, first, the naïve perspective of the Tatar womanZuleikha, whose sole narrow point of view defines the first chapter so that the readersperceive thedegradingpatriarchalworld she inhabits.Thehegemonic position ismarkedas male and Russian and is represented by the OGPU officer Ignatov, the murderer ofZuleikha’s husband and her later lover. However, in the course of the plot Ignatov, whoescapes the party purges only by being transferred to Siberia, becomes a victim of theStalinist system himself and is thus transformed into a positive character with whomreaders can sympathise.Third, there is the figure of Volf Karlovich Leibewho, as “a third-generation professor at Kazan University” (Yakhina 2019: 102), is reminiscent of the cru-cial role German scientists played in Tsarist Russia.Whereas the plot as a whole rests upon the multi-ethnic triangle of Tatar, RussianandGerman,only the female character undergoes a fundamental personal development,which echoes the Soviet model of education, modernisation and cultural assimilation.This development is not only brought to the fore by realistic descriptions of the charac-ter’s psychology, but is most concisely and densely rendered in the book’s title, which isalso the sentence with which the novel begins. Zuleikha opening her eyes describes boththe literal everyday action of waking up and the personal growth of the female protag-onist, who leaves patriarchal subjection and religious superstition behind and achievesinner freedom at the end.When Zuleikha opens her eyes for the first time, it is “as darkas a cellar” around her (Iakhina 2015: 9), and the reader is, as it were, trapped with her inan archaic peasant world. Until the end, this sentence recurs four times, and each timethe world around Zuleikha or rather Zuleikha’s perception of it appears brighter. Finally,she is surroundedby glaring sunlight: “Zuleikha opens her eyes.The sun is beating down,blinding her and cutting her head to pieces.The vague outline of trees all around her arequivering in a sparkling dance of sunbeams.” (Yakhina 2019: 479)Stepping out of the darkness into the sun and light is one of the most frequently in-voked images of communist enlightenment. With regard to the supposedly backwardnationalities of the Soviet East, this notion is rendered most vividly by the image of theMuslim woman casting off her veil. In this sense, Zuleikha opening her eyes functionsas an icon, which in its form is reminiscent of the expressive close-ups of the Soviet filmavant-garde7 and in itsmeaning appears as a perfectmetaphor for the liberation, eman-cipation andmodernisation of thewomanof the Soviet East. Froma contemporary post-colonial perspective, however,Zuleikha’s personal development verymuch resembles thecolonial and imperial cultural logic, according towhich universal subjectivity can only beachieved by discarding the traditional ethnic and religious identity.This logic was an in-tegral part of the Soviet empire, although the Soviet nationalities policy was at the sametime aimed at decolonisation and the formation of national identity among the non-7 The close-up of Zuleikha’s eyes, which is also rendered on the book cover of the English translation,most closely echoes Dziga Vertov’s film Three Songs about Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934/35), in whichthe pioneer of documentary cinema presented an impressive montage sequence of pairs of eyesand women’s faces.78 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingRussian minorities.8 As Anisimova has shown, Yakhina’s approach to ethnic identity ismost obviously rendered in the storyline of Zuleikha’s son Iusuf, who grows up in thecosmopolitan atmosphere of the camp:[…] Iusuf’s education fulfills the Soviet ideal of the transformation of an ethnic sub-ject into a cosmopolitan Soviet intellectual, even if this personal growth emphasizesthe humanist rather than the ideological influence of Soviet culture. Yet, to achievethis universal subjectivity, Iusuf has to reject his Muslim and Tatar identity. (Anisimova2020: 118)Whereas in Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes the particular constellation of the Tatar and Russiannationality sparked considerable criticism from the Tatar community, Yakhina’s compa-rable approach to identity in her second novel passed unnoticed. In A Volga Tale, the au-thor follows the same principle of positioning the universal model above the national(is-tic) mode of particularity and even goes a step further by promoting a hybrid model ofcultural identity. The analogous character in A Volga Tale is Antje who was conceived inan act of rape and therefore is not themain protagonist’s biological daughter.9 Since theschoolteacherBach fell silent,he cannotpassonhis language–German–to thenextgen-eration. Instead of being endowed with the cultivated German language of her non-bio-logical father, Antje learns to speak from Vasia, a vagrant boy who turns up at the home-stead one day. Vasia is a typical representative of the so-called besprizorniki, the orphansand waifs produced by war and famine. The language Vasia, also called Vaska, speaksis “foreign”, “unknown” to Bach (Yakhina 2023: 399) – not only because it is Russian, ofHowever, Vaska’s words and phrases so diverged from the few hundred words of stan-dard Russian Bach knew that they probably belonged to some unfamiliar language.Shamat’, kipishnut’, shnyrit’, styrit’, xapnut’, shibanut’, kanat’, volynit’ – clearly all words forpinching, or stealing, carousing, guzzling food and drink, etc. – but what kind of wordswere these? (Yakhina 2023: 398)Astill closer look shows that the languageAntje learns fromVasia isnotonly substandard,but also a mix of numerous languages, just as Vasia himself is ethnically unidentifiable,of an unknown origin – whether from “a Kirghiz or Kalmyk yurt, or a Bashkir or Tatar8 The numerous contradictions inherent in the Soviet approach to nationality are well described bythe term “Affirmative Action Empire” which was introduced by the Canadian historian Terry Mar-tin (2001). Martin sums up the tension between national identity on the one hand and the anti-national Soviet approach on the other as follows: “The Bolsheviks attempted to fuse the national-ists’ demand for national territory, culture, language, and elites with the socialists’ demand for aneconomically and politically unitary state. In this sense, we might call the Bolsheviks internation-alist nationalists or, better yet, Affirmative Action nationalists” (15).9 This shift from biological to social parenthood can already be observed in Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza,when Ignatov forges Iusuf’s birth certificate and makes Iusuf his official son in order to give himthe possibility to leave the camp.Bach knows only a “few hundred words”, but also because it does not correspond to thestandard language:peasant hut” (Yakhina 2023: 350).Vasia’s language is expressive, emotional, inventive andEva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 79thus diametrically opposed to the cultivated language Iusuf learns from the Leningradintelligentsia:And it didn’t matter whether Vaska was glad, angry, or afraid. The curses were alwaysmagnificent, of the highest order. He usually swore in Russian, but he was perfectly ca-pable of swearing in Kirghiz, Tatar, and Bashkir. He knew abusive oaths in Mordovian,as well as Udmurt, Mari and Kalmyk. The epithets and the languages stuck to him likeburrs to socks. Often, Vaska’s lips scrambled all the idioms and dialects he knew, andthe result was such an intricate mesh of curses that they astonished not only his inter-locuters, but Vaska himself. (Yakhina 2023: 348)To draw a first conclusion,we can say that Yakhina’s notion of identity onwhich her nov-els rest echoes contemporary, liberal attitudes and thus does not conform to the systemof conservative cultural and social valueswhich has emerged since Vladimir Putin’s thirdterm as president and which, according to Katharina Bluhm, aims at “an authoritarianconsolidation of national unity on the basis of social conservatism with repressive fea-tures” (2021: 13). Central elements of this conservative ideology are the invocation of thenation’s “thousand-year history”, as it says in Article 67 after the constitutional amend-ment of 2020, and the preservation of traditional family values and gender roles. At thesame time, Yakhina’s notion of ethnic identity does not correspond to postcolonial con-ceptions of identity but rather recalls the progressive and egalitarian tendencies withinSoviet ideology and politics. In thisway, Yakhina tries to find a balance between differentideological positions and strives for compromise, which is not only true for her under-standing of ethnic identity, but also for her general attitude to Soviet history.The lattergoes hand in handwith a clearlymarked emotional distance to the Soviet past that in herliterary texts is conveyed by irony and by switching the narrative perspective. In a com-mentary for the online platformRBKStil’, Yakhina emphasises the need to face the Sovietpast and to actively deal with it in order to finally gain sovereignty over it:Enough of watching – enough of being observers of our own country’s history and ourown lives. The Soviet is not an object, it is a subject: it lives in us and governs us, nomatter how much we want to deny it. In our relationship with the Soviet past, we arethe objects. As long as we are not aware of this. (Iakhina 2021a)Yakhina clearly distances herself from any form of Soviet nostalgia and sees a possibilitytogain critical distanceby recognisingwhatwasachieved throughSovietmodernisation.She views the secular andurban society of the present day as a direct result of Soviet edu-cation and enlightenment, of the struggle against religion aswell as of the “then imposedscientific view of the world”. At the same time, Yakhina clearly calls for the crimes andthe perpetrators to be named:1010 According to the historian and journalist Sergei Medvedev (2016), the sore point of dealing withthe Soviet past is that violence has remained anonymous until the present day or, in other words,that with a few exceptions the Soviet perpetrators have never been named.80 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingWe – as society as a whole and not just a small part of it – can already afford to callmonstrous things monstrous (e.g. the mass famine of the 1920s). Crime a crime (e.g.the Great Terror or the deportation of peoples). A criminal a criminal (e.g. Joseph Stalinor Genrikh Iagoda). (Iakhina 2021a)It is undoubtedly to Yakhina’s credit that some of the crimes committed by the Sovietregime are named and fed into public debate. In doing so, she is successful by the merefact that thousands of people read her books and millions of viewers have watched theTV series based on her novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (cf. Revizor.ru, “Skandal rabotaet”).The public outrage the series sparked in 2020 can be explained – as paradoxical as it maysound – precisely by Yakhina’s attempt to seek balance and compromise.11 An answerto this paradox is provided by Alexander Etkind and his notion of the “multi-historical”condition in contemporary Russia. According to Etkind, historical memory in Russia isde-centred, deprived of social and political consensus: “Historical memory in Russia isa living, de-centered combination of symbols and judgments which are experienced si-multaneously, all at once […] deprived of consensual anchors or reference-points” (2009:190). In contrast to the persistent official complaints that young people had no or littleknowledge of history, Etkind argues that “it is not the historical knowledge which is atissue but its interpretation” (ibid.: 193). In the past ten years since Etkind published hisarticle onpost-Soviet ‘hauntology’,whichwas followedby the bookWarpedMourning: Sto-ries of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013), official as well as the people’s interest inhistory has not decreased but rather increased.The interest of particularly young peoplein Soviet history is indicated, for instance, by the high viewing rates of Iurii Dud’s doc-umentary Kolyma – Birthplace of Our Fear (Kolyma – rodina nashego strakha, 2019) that hasgathered more than 29 million views on YouTube. Although definitely more modest innumbers and reach, Yakhina’s novels are both an expression of and a driving force forpublic interest in the country’s recent history.3. Camera-stylo Reversed: The “Cinematic Quality” of Yakhina’s NovelsWhat the French film critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc claimed for cinema back in1948 – the camera-stylo as a new auteur based, non-commercial direction in filmmaking– reappears in Yakhina’s approach to literature in a laterally reversed way.Themuch-ac-claimed“cinematic quality”as the attribute of Yakhina’swriting style (cf.Anisimova2020:111) is literally placed at the beginning of her success as a writer. Her first novel was pub-lished with a preface written by Liudmila Ulitskaia, the grande dame of contemporaryRussian literature. In her preface, Ulitskaia recalls the Soviet “pleiade of bicultural writ-ers” from the Caucasian Fazil’ Iskander to the Kyrgyz Chinghiz Aitmatov and regards the“young TatarwomanGuzel Yakhina” as someone capable of continuing this lineage.Ulit-skaia highlights Yakhina’s “somewhat cinematic narrative style” (Iakhina 2015: 5–6) as a11 Due to the political and cultural situation in Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,Yakhina's attempt to seek balance and compromise is doomed to failure and further publicationsin Russia are called into question.Eva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 81stylistic feature. Since then, literary scholars and critics (c.f. Abasheva/Abashev 2016) aswell as the author herself have tried to comprehend the ‘cinematic quality’ and its impli-cations.When Yakhina’s third novel Train To Samarkand hit the market in March 2021, somecritics noted a change in her writing style and praised the use of language that appearedsimpler and clearer in comparison to herfirst twonovels: “But the language has changed.It is simple, clear and lucid.The reader does not have to fear the viscosity of metaphorsandcomparisonsof thepreviousbook” (Bashmakova2021).12 In thenumerous interviewsthat accompanied the release of the novel, the author stressed that she felt the need tomitigate the “horrifying material” (Surikov 2021), to “lighten up the heavy narrative” andto “balance the grievous subject” by using artistic techniques that provide a serious coun-terweight (Pakhomov/Sadikov 2021). Yakhina herself associates these techniques withcinema, and invoked, first of all, the importance of genre: the genre of adventure (film),a series ofminor adventures along the way, an integrated love affair, the children’s worldand children’s playful, creative use of language with rhymes and nicknames (cf. ibid.).Besides genre, Yakhina refers to questions of narrative structure and gives priority toshort and action driven scenes, to dialogues based on conflict or to the mimetic over thediegetic (cf. Kostiukovich 2021). Correspondingly, the sources Yakhina consulted are, be-sides dairies,memoires or letters, not the literary works of the avant-garde of the 1920s,but rather the works of artists and cinematographers, whichmeans that hermain refer-ence points are visual rather than textual:And of course, there is another view, which I would call the view of the artist who livedin that era. Important to me is: the artist – not the writer. I try to avoid reading literarytexts with regard to what I’m writing about, simply because their influence might betoo strong. I’m particularly talking about related arts such as cinema. While workingon “Train to Samarkand”, I watched newsreels. This is not really an artist’s perspective.But still, we can certainly call documentarians of that time, like Dziga Vertov, artists.(Surikov 2021)With regard to textual structures and formal techniques, a better understanding of themuch-acclaimed ‘cinematic quality’ of Yakhina’swriting style can be achieved by taking acloser look at the way the author constructs narrative scenes. Yakhina works with visualeffects by dynamically switching between distant and close views on what is happening.The technique of altering the perspective fromdistant views to close-ups works togetherwith vivid descriptions of movement within the scene. Two scenes shall be singled outhere in order to illustrate Yakhina’s transmedial use of camera angles, cameramovementandmontage with which cinematic effects are achieved within the literary text.The firstexample is a hunting scene in Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes. The first winter in the taiga hascome to an end and the deportees together with their commander Ignatov are starving.Ignatov goes hunting with the last remaining cartridge and can barely keep himself onhis feet. In the following scene, we first follow the audio-visual perception of the hunterand, together with him, capture several details of a squirrel before it scurries up a tree.12 The comment by Elena Kostiukovich for BFM.RU (2021) goes in the same direction.82 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingThen we see his movements from an objective point of view and return to his subjectiveperspective, which now is a worm’s-eye view of the sky and the treetops spinning fasterand faster:There’s a sudden rustling beside him. A squirrel is on a branch right next to Ignatov’sface: it’s thin, dirty gray, with scanty white fluff, yellow cheeks, and long scampish tas-sels for ears. Meat! A shining brown eye darts and – zoom! – it’s up the tree trunk. Ig-natov’s shaking hand reaches upward with the revolver but it’s instantly way too heavyto hold. A shabby tail like a miniature broom flashes mockingly up above, teasing asit blends in with brush-like branches, layers of bark, and needly sunbeams, before dis-appearing. The sky suddenly starts spinning faster and faster, and then everything’sspinning, the treetops, the clouds […]. (Yakhina 2019: 303–304)Ignatov’s gaze up into the spinning sky, which points to the danger that he may lose hisconsciousness at any moment, recurs several times while he moves, or rather crawls, upthe cliff. At the top of the cliff, he is about to put an end to his life, but suddenly he looksup, the sky stops spinning and he sees “the long brown spot of a barge” in a perfect cine-matic extreme long shot: “He looks up. In the distance, dark against the bright blue An-gara water, is the long brown spot of a barge and a bold black dot alongside it. It’s thelaunch.” (Yakhina 2019: 305)Figure 3.4: Film still fromDziga Vertov’s reference to the Soviet avant-garde inthe opening frame of his filmThree Songs about Lenin (1934/35)The recurring view up into the spinning treetops well deserves closer examinationbecause it has a distinct reference point in photography and cinema. The image crys-tallises the Soviet avant-garde from the moment it was celebrated as a new art form toits obliteration in the 1930s and rediscovery in the 1950s. The genealogy of the gaze upEva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 83into the branches of (pine) trees can be traced back to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photog-raphy “Pine Trees” (“Sosny”, 1927). In the film Three Songs about Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine,1934/35) it takes the form of an implicit aesthetic and political statement, by whichDzigaVertov reaffirmed his avant-gardist approach.Figure 3.5: Reference to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography Pine Trees in thefilmTheCranes Are Flying (1957)Finally, it recurs in the most prominent film of the Thaw – in The Cranes Are Flying(Letiat zhuravli, 1957) – as an explicit visual citation (cf. Stiegler 2009). Yakhina’s referenceto the spinning treetops as a sign of near death is formally and thematically most closelylinked to the scene inThe Cranes Are Flying, in which the positive hero Boris looks up atthe treetops while he falls to the ground, having been hit by a bullet. In thismoment, theimage of the treetops literally starts to spin and other images of themelodramatic hero’sprojections of a happier future are superimposed onto it. In Yakhina’s hunting scene, thegaze up into the treetops functions on several levels: it contributes to the cinematic style,enhances themelodramatic mode of the narrative, and – together with other referencesto the history of cinema such as the recurrent close-ups of Zuleikha’s eyes – indicates thetransmedial character of intertextuality in Yakhina’s writing.The second scene that will be discussed in order to illustrate Yakhina’s use of cin-ematic techniques demonstrates how action and movement are conveyed by means ofparallelmontage.The scene fromTrain to Samarkand is placed at the end of the first chap-ter,when the trainwith the 500orphansfinally leaves the station ofKazan’.The comman-der of the trainDeev is standing on the open steps of the carriage and looking back at thecrowd of women, when, through the thick white steam of the engine, his gaze suddenlyfalls on a running figure that tries to catch up with the moving train:84 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingThe wagon shivers underfoot. The rails clatter. The station building, the trees, thetrains – everything floats slowly and drifts backwards. Thick clouds of steam fly overthe ground, covering the crowd remaining on the platformmore andmore tightly fromDeev. Suddenly a figure emerges out of the white wadding, someone running afterthe locomotive, headlong, as fast as possible. A woman! Her long skirt is fluttering asshe runs, stretching up above her knees and exposing her skinny legs in huge shoes.Her braid, half grey, is flying in the wind. And in the woman’s arms – a baby in scarlet.The train is picking up speed, faster by the second. And the woman is running – fasterand faster. She stretches out her arms with the baby. [...] Her eyes gazing wildly. Hermouth open. She is reaching out the baby to him – with her bony, straight arms: takethe child! (Iakhina 2021c: 77–78)In comparison to the canonical gaze up into the trees, the scene of the departing trainand a figure catching up with it does not recall a specific film or image, but rather ap-pears to reference cinema as a whole and its ability to produce visual clichés. Although itcan be argued that other contemporary authors make use of cinematic clichés as well,13the ‘cinematic quality’ ascribed to Yakhina’s novels can be justified by the accumulationof formal devices that refer to cinema or, viewed from the perspective of reception, thatcontemporary readers are familiar with from cinema. Thereby, the cinema in questionis not avant-garde or auteur cinema with its complex textual structures and formal ex-periments, but rather the technically well-made mainstream cinema based on realisticnarration.4. ConclusionIf we approach the question put forward at the beginning from the angle of Yakhina’scinematic style, then one answer to the question of Yakhina’s popularity in present dayRussia is the particular way the author narrates her stories. Yakhina’s realistic narrationcan be illuminated by the notion of “popular realism” put forward by the German literaryscholar Moritz Baßler (cf. 2011; 2021). According to Baßler, popular realism in contem-porary literature implies a writing technique through which the reader is presented adiegetic world that practically anchors itself in space and that the readers perceive with-out being confrontedwith a complex literary form: “One reads. And understands.” (“Manliest. Und versteht.”), as it says in a teaser for the German novelist Bernhard Schlink (cf.ibid: 91). The characteristic features of popular realism include a language that is easyto comprehend – in contrast to the difficult, impeded language of literature in ViktorShklovskii’s concept. Furthermore, popular realism provides comprehensible plots, con-flicts that create suspense and characters the readers empathise with (an effect that isachieved by, among others, the narrative perspective of internal focalisation (cf. ibid: 147;2011: 101).However, popular realismprovides both, a reading experience that is touchingand profound at the same time (ibid: 137). For this tendency, Umberto Eco back in 1964referred toDwightMacDonald’s stratification of high art,mass andmiddlebrow culture.13 As Abasheva and Abashev (2016) have argued, also the novels of Aleksei Ivanov, another well-known and popular contemporary Russian author, show a certain cinematic quality.Eva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 85Eco characterisedMacDonald’s “Midcult” as the interaction of form and content in orderto sell the effects of art and “satisf[y] its consumer by convincing him that he has just ex-perienced culture” (1989: 192). A characteristic feature of today’s midcult or mainstreamliterature is, according to Baßler, the integration of “difficult” or “heavy” signs (“schwereZeichen”) in the text (cf. 2021: 145). For German culture such signs are provided by “theNazi and Stasi period” (ibid. 2011: 100),with theOscar-winning filmTheLife ofOthers (DasLeben der Anderen, 2006) as one prominent example. At the same time, Florian Henckelvon Donnersmarck’s highly successful feature film of 2006 demonstrates how popularrealism as the dominant method of telling stories affects cinema and literature alike.Viewed from this perspective, Yakhina’s historical novels and the way they are re-ceived by literary critics in Russia clearly show that the general attitude towards main-stream literature has changed under the conditions of the globalisedmarket economy ofthe last decades. Significantly, Galina Iuzefovich (2021) may criticise Train to Samarkandas “highly comfortable for the reader”, rewarding the reader with “universal love”, “com-passion” and “the unity of all good people”, but at the same timemay stress the novel’s ne-cessity and relevance. Above all, Yakhina’s novels themselves as well as the author’s self-representation in the media bear witness to the fact that today’s mainstream literaturedeclares itself openly as popular and entertaining, on the one hand, and as profound andhonest, on the other. At the same time, Yakhina’s novels need to be assessed against thebackdrop of a society, which is deprived of a consensual interpretation of Soviet history.In this context, Yakhina’s Chekhovian aim to “squeeze out the Soviet, even if only a dropat a time” (Iakhina 2021a) appears as reasonable as it is courageous.FilmographyTheCranes Are Flying (Letiat zhuravli), dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR 1957.TheLife ofOthers (DasLebenderAnderenThree Songs about Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine), dir. Dziga Vertov, USSR 1934/35.Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza), dir. Egor Anashkin, Russia 2020.List of IllustrationsFigure 3.1: Film poster for the TV series ZuleikhaOpensHer Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza),dir. Egor Anashkin, Russia 2020, https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/1186153/posters/ [30 September 2023].Figure 3.2: Viktor I. Govorkov: “Vo imja kommunizma” (“In the Name of Communizm”).1951. Printed by courtesy of KlausWaschik.Figure 3.3: Film still from the TV series Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza),dir. Egor Anashkin, Russia 2020, (2019), https://www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/ros/131459/foto/ [30 September 2023].Figure 3.4: Film still from Three Songs about Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine), dir. Dziga Vertov,USSR 1934/35.),dir.FlorianHenckel vonDonnersmarck,Germany2006.86 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingFigure 3.5: Film stillThe Cranes Are Flying (Letiat zhuravli), dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR1957.ReferencesAbasheva, Marina/Abashev, Vladimir (2016): “Kniga kak simptom. Kak sdelan romanGuzeli Iakhinoi ‘Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza’.” In: Novyi mir 5 (http://www.nm1925.ru/Archive/Journal6_2016_5/Content/Publication6_6342/Default.aspx) [30 September2023].Anisimova, Irina (2020): “From Celebrated Novel to Media Outrage: The Public DebateSurrounding the Miniseries Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes.” In: Slavica Bergensia 13, pp.107–127.Bashmakova, Mariia (2021): “Ėshelon na Samarkand” kak ispytanie. Kakim okazalsianovyi roman avtora ‘Zuleikhi…’.” In: Fontanka.ru, 9 March 2021 (https://www.fontanka.ru/2021/03/09/69801017/) [30 September 2023].Baßler,Moritz (2011): “Populärer Realismus.” In: Roger Lüdeke (ed.), Kommunikation imPopulären. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein ganzheitliches Phänomen, Biele-feld: transcript, pp. 91–103.Baßler, Moritz (2021): “Der neue Midcult. VomWandel populärer Leseschaften als Her-ausforderung der Kritik.” In: POP. Kultur und Kritik 18, pp. 132–149 (https://doi.org/10.14361/pop-2021-100122) [30 September 2023].Bluhm,Katharina (2021): “Sozialer Konservatismus und autoritäre Staatsvision in Russ-land.” In: RGOW (Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost undWest) 10, pp. 13–15.Eco, Umberto (1989): “The Structure of Bad Taste.” In: ibid.:The OpenWork, Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, pp. 180–216.Etkind, Alexander (2009): “Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Ter-ror.” In: Constellations 1/16, pp. 182–200.Etkind, Alexander (2013): Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of theUnburied, Stanford: Stanford University Press.Fuchsbauer, Jürgen/Stadler, Wolfgang/Zink, Andrea (eds.) (2021): Kulturen verbinden –Connecting Cultures – Sblizhaia kul’tury. Festband anlässlich des 50-jährigen Be-stehens der Slawistik an der Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck: innsbruck universitypress.Iakhina, Guzel’ (2015): Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza,Moskva: Izdatel’stvo AST.Iakhina, Guzel’ (2016): “Sad na granitse.” In: Snob.ru, 2 May 2016 (https://snob.ru/entry/80811/) [30 September 2023].Iakhina, Guzel’ (2018): Deti moi,Moskva: Izdatel’stvo AST.Iakhina, Guzel’ (2021a): “Mozhem sebe pozvolit’. Kolonka Guzel’ Iakhinoi o sovetskomvchera I segodnia.” In: RBK Stil’, 12 March 2021 (https://style.rbc.ru/impressions/604a3d789a7947c5b4cfd743) [30 September 2023].Iakhina, Guzel’ (2021c): Ėshelon na Samarkand,Moskva: Izdatel’stvo AST.Iuzefovich, Galina (2021): “Ėshelon na Samarkand’: Guzel’ Iakhinu obvinili v plagiate, noproblema romana ne v ėtom. Tragediiu v Povolzh’e avtor prevratila v komfortnuiuskazku.” In: Meduza.io, 13 March 2021 (https://meduza.io/feature/2021/03/13/esheloEva Binder: Narrating Russia’s Multi-Ethnic Past 87n-na-samarkand-guzel-yahinu-obvinili-v-plagiate-no-problema-romana-ne-v-etom) [30 September 2023].Jachina, Gusel (2017): Suleika öffnet die Augen. Translated from Russian by Helmut Et-tinger, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.Kostiukovich, Elena (2021): “Porazhaet sovershenstvom”. Vyshel novyi roman Guzel’ Iak-hinoi “Eshelon na Samarkand.” In: BFM.RU, 9 March 2021 (https://www.bfm.ru/news/466802) [30 September 2023].Martin, Terry (2001):The Affirmative Action Empire.Nations andNationalism in the So-viet Union, 1923–1939, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.Medvedev, Sergei (2016): “Ėffekt Karagodina. Pochemu vlast’ boitsia tomskogo filosofa?”In: Republic, 29 November 2016 (https://republic.ru/posts/76777) [30 September2023].Nabiullina, A. N. (2019): “Prostranstvenno-vremennye obrazy i motivy v romanakh G.Iakhinoi ‘Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza’ i ‘Deti moi’.” In: Aktual’nye voprosy sovremennoifilologii i zhurnalistiki 3/34, pp. 32–36.Pakhomov, Vladimir/Sadikov, Aleksandr (2021): “Guzel’ Iakhina govorit o romane‘Ėshelon na Samarkand’ i otvechaet ego kritikam (i, konechno, rasskazyvaet o svoikhotnosheniakh s iazykom).” In: Rozental’ i Gil’denstern, 15 March 2021 (https://tehnikarechi.studio/episodes/2021/03/15/guzel-yahina-govorit-o-romane-eshelon-na-samarkand-i-otvechaet-ego-kritikam-i-konechno-rasskazyvaet-o-svoih-otnosheniyah-s-yazykom) [30 September 2023].Protsyk, Oleh/Harzl, Benedikt (2013): “Introduction.” In: Oleh Protsyk/Benedikt Harzl(eds.),Managing Ethnic Diversity in Russia, New York/London: Routledge, pp. 1–12.“Skandal rabotaet: Serial ‘Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza’ stal samym reitingovym teleproėk-tom s proshlogo goda.” In: revizor.ru, 30 April 2020 (https://www.rewizor.ru/cinema/news/skandal-rabotaet-serial-zuleyha-otkryvaet-glaza-stal-samym-reytingovym-teleproektom-s-proshlogo-goda/) [30 September 2023].Samigullina, Ėl’vira/Nigmatullin, Ajrat/Avakian, Diana (2021): “‘Mne nuzhno vremia,chtoby vsë obdumat’’: kraeved iz Samary obvinil Guzel’ Iakhinu v plagiate.” In: BiznesOnline, 11 March 2021 (https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/501964) [30 Septem-ber 2023].Silant’eva, Ol’ga (2020): “Tsentr malen’koi vselennoi.” In: Moskovskaia Nemetskaiagazeta, 25 May 2020 (https://ru.mdz-moskau.eu/centr-malenkoj-vselennoj/) [30September 2023].Stiegler, Bernd (2009): “When a Photograph of Trees Is Almost like a Crime.” In: Étudesphotographiques [En ligne], 23May 2009 (http://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3422) [30 September 2023].Surikov,Viacheslav (2021): “Guzel’ Iakhina: ‘To,chtoproiskhodit seichas,–ėtoprodolzhe-nie sovietskogo perioda’.” In: Expert, 5 April 2021 (https://expert.ru/expert/2021/15/guzel-yakhina-to-chto-proiskhodit-seychas-eto-prodolzheniye-sovetskogo-perioda/) [30 September 2023].Shikhman, Irina (2021): “‘A pogovorit’?’: “Guzel’ Iakhina. Ėshelon na Samarkand. Plagiat,fal’sifikatsia istorii, golod v Povolzh’e.” In: YouTube, 25 June 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGV9WAOVA0c) [30 September 2023].88 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingYakhina, Guzel (2019): Zuleikha, translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, London:Oneworld Publications.Yakhina, Guzel (2023): A Volga Tale, translated fromRussian by Polly Gannon,New York:Europa Editions.Chapter 4:The Zone as a Place of Repentance and RetreatChernobyl in Belarusian Films of the 1990s and 2000sOlga Romanova1. IntroductionThe military invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces on 24 February 2022 began with thetakeover of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The news of the outbreak of war in theformerSovietUnion triggeredaculture shock,part ofwhichwas the instant renewed fearof a new nuclear disaster and radioactive contamination that was reflected in themedia– both among the populations of Belarus and Ukraine, which were most affected by the1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion, and in Europe.News outlets and social media advisedpeople to stockpile iodine pills and take a large dose if the level of background radiationrose to protect the thyroid gland, and rumours and fears were shared that the pills haddisappeared from pharmacies. The panicked reaction that quickly spread through theinternet suggests that both the memory and fear of a repeat of the Chernobyl disaster,despite the mothballing of the exploded reactor and complete shutdown of the nuclearplant, have become part of global contemporary culture in the 21st century.Andpart of this global culture is the constantproductionoffilmsand television series(as well as computer games) on the topic. Documentaries as well as feature films aboutthe events at Chernobyl, the consequences of the nuclear explosion and the search for itscauses have been released in various countries over the years. Among the feature films todate, there is a large number of both problematic and dramatic auteur films and genrefilmswhere the Chernobyl zone becomes the backdrop for a horror, thriller or adventureaction plot.In comparison, Belarusian feature films on the Chernobyl topic constitute only asmall proportion of this group of films – from 1990 to 2020, only six feature films werereleased by independent studios andBelarusfilm.At first glance, this seems paradoxical,as for the small republic the radioactive contamination of parts of its territories becamea national disaster and trauma. Belarusians are still facing the consequences of the ex-plosion, for example, Belarus has a very high percentage of thyroid diseases. Moreover,the most famous book about Chernobyl was written by Nobel laureate and Belarusian90 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingwriter Svetlana Alexievich [Svitlana Aleksievich] and Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of theFuture (Chernobyl’skaia molitva. Khronika budushchego, 1997) has been the source of plotsfor many films produced outside Belarus, like the famous HBO series Chernobyl (2019).But Belarusian feature film directors have never turned to this book themselves.In order to understand this seemingly paradoxical situation, in the following sectionIwill analyseBelarusianfilms fromthe 1990s-2000s aboutChernobyl taking into accountthe closely intertwined cinematographic and political contexts. I will then offer an anal-ysis of four genre films from different periods – the crime dramaTheWolves in the Zone(Volki v zone, 1990), the action filmTheAtomic Zone Ranger (Reindzher iz atomnoi zony, 1999),themelodrama I Remember/Father’sHouse (Ia pomniu/Otchii dom, 2005) and the thriller Ex-clusion Zone (Zapretnaia zona, 2020). In doing so, I want to trace the different meaningsapplied to the event that took place on the night of 26 April 1986, what political processesthesemeaningsmanifest, and how they are influenced by the genre format of the respec-tive films.2. Production Conditions and PoliciesIn 1986, in the wake of perestroika, a landmark event took place in Soviet cinema – theFifth USSR Congress of Cinematographers in Moscow. It was held in a both revolution-ary and romantic atmosphere under the slogan “to put an end to serfdom in cinema.” Atthis convention a new leadership of the Union of Cinematographers was elected (ĖlemKlimov became the head), the abolition of censorship was declared, and the Union’s re-public cinema organisations proclaimed independence from the central USSR Goskino.Anewfilmproductionmodelwas establishedby theCouncil ofMinisters’Regulation “OntheRestructuring of Creative,Organisational, andEconomicActivities in the Soviet FilmIndustry” in 1989, which in fact initiated a process of radical changes.One of the results was the emergence of independent film studios, at least withinthe Belarusian film industry. A number of well-known Belarusian directors, mostly ofthe middle generation (like Viacheslav Nikiforov [Viacheslaŭ Nikifaraŭ], Valerii Rybarev[Valer Rybaraŭ] or Mikhail Ptashuk) left Belarusfilm, which until then had been the solefilm studio, and established private film studios. By 1991, there were already eleven suchstudios, which is why “the period 1990–1992 is described bymany as a boom of indepen-dent film production in Belarus” (Khatkovskaia 2010:108).However, another result of the reforms was a crisis in the film industry, which wasno longer financed from the Soviet budget: production declined, distribution problemswere experienced, and the competition against Western films was lost, with these filmsoften being imported by ‘pirates’, filling cinemas and video rental outlets, and beingfreely sold on videotape. After the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, the situationbecame evenmore critical. Independent studios had tomaster themarket economy andsecure funding for their films. They mainly depended on bank loans and subsequentlywere held financially responsible.This determined a lot of the specifics of the studio executives and their approach towhat they did and how they did it. They had to calculate everything from the begin-Olga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 91ning, stick to deadlines and budgets, combine the relative cheapness of the films’ pro-duction whenever possible with their quality and appeal to the audience, and engageinmarketing and self-promotion. They abandoned expensive projects, made low-bud-get films and experimented a lot. (Khatkovskaia 2010: 112–113)At the same time,Belarusfilmremained theonlyproductionbase inBelarus.However, itsmanagement did not consider it necessary to support ‘independents’ and charged veryhigh rental prices. In addition, private filmprojectswere heavily taxed and therewere notax breaks for Belarusian directors. In the light of high inflation, these conditions werevery difficult. Yet in the early 1990s, it was the independent film studios that began toshape the face of Belarusian cinema.These hard economic conditions explain why the films produced by the independentstudiosweremostly popular genreproductions (likedramas,melodramas,comedies,de-tectives, actionfilms) –directors had to ensure financial returns.However, experimentalauteur films were also often private production projects. Thus, the first Belarusian fea-ture film that was set in the Chernobyl region, the crime drama The Wolves in the Zonedirected by Viktor Deriugin, was produced as an independent project. It was released in1990 as a coproduction of two private film studios, the Belarusian Impul’s,Minsk and theRussian Benefis, Leningrad. At the same time, the film can be interpreted as an autho-rial experiment, based on the search for a cinematic language to describe the Chernobyldisaster as a social and cultural trauma.In total, several documentaries and only three feature films were made in the 1990sabout life after Chernobyl, although the topic itself was still very present among the Be-larusian public. Only one of the movies was produced by Belarusfilm: in 1993 it releasedthe film Black Stork (Chernyi aist), the production of which was entrusted to the iconicSoviet Belarusian director Viktor Turov [Viktar Tyraŭ]. The film is characterised by itsnon-genre format, slow narration, symbolism and use of metaphor.The two other filmsare directed by Viacheslav Nikiforov,My soul, Maria (Dusha moia, Mariia, 1993) – a dramaproduced by the private studio Kadr, which had been led by Nikiforov since 1987. Niki-forov returned to the subject of Chernobyl once againwith the action filmTheAtomic ZoneRanger. Released in 1999, it was a joint project of several Russian studios and was shot atBelarusfilm. Compared toTheWolves in the Zone, here the matrix of a Hollywood actionfilm is adapted more explicitly and consistently, which gained the film a greater popu-larity.But already by the mid-1990s, most of the Belarusian independent studios had dis-appeared from the cultural field.The reasons for their self-liquidation are the lack of conditions conducive to their ac-tivities: an unformed legislative and legal framework, an unorganised banking system,credit and insurance systems, the absence of tax benefits and a policy of priorities fornational cinema, and the absence of a coherent programme for the development ofthe national film industry itself. (Khatkovskaia 2010: 121)In 1997,Belarusfilmwas officially given ‘national’ status, and it returned to shootingfilmswith state-fundedmoney, just as in Soviet times.92 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingIn the absence of opportunities for the further existence of independent studios in thecountry, the situation slowly starts to return [...] to a situation of administrative regula-tion of cinema and state funding, to a limited and easily regulated number of subjectsof cinematographic activity. (Khatkovskaia 2010: 121)Thus, it is no wonder that the period from 1986 to the mid-1990s was the most fruitfulfor Belarusian cinema in terms of social self-reflection. A number of films dealt with‘blank spots’ of Belarusian history or sought to make sense of the late and post-Sovietpresent.They revealed thememory of traumatic experiences of various historical eventsof the 20th century seen from a national perspective like the Belarusian anti-Bolshevikresistance of the 1920s, the life of Belarusian Jews and the pogroms against them, theforced collectivisation or the post-war Stalinist repressions. All four feature films aboutthe Chernobyl disaster made during this period are embedded in this context.However, by the early 2000s, the work of cinematography engaged with the topicof national, historical and cultural traumas was artificially stopped. In this decade onlya few Belarusian feature and documentary films that touched upon the subject of theChernobyl catastrophe were produced. In 2006, Belarusfilm released the ‘anniversary’film-melodrama I Remember/Father’s House, directed by Sergei Sychev, which reflects onthe state policy ofmemory and constructs amyth about the stablemodern Belarus of theLukashenko era.Themain idea of this film is “You shouldn’t look into the past all the time[…],” as one of its positive characters explains.In 2020, following the success of the HBO series Chernobyl, Belarusfilm released theaction film Exclusion Zone, directed by Mitrii Semenov-Aleinikov, where the Chernobylterritory becomes a springboard for a survival game ofwarring teenage heroes on a huntfor a bag full of money. The Russian TV series Chernobyl (produced by the Russian TVchannel NTV, released in 2021) was also filmed in Belarus. Its plot is revealing, especiallyin light of the fact that a year later Russia would launch a ‘special operation’ in Ukrainewith thepassive support ofmostRussianTVviewers:HereKGBofficers learn that foreignagents are interested in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. An experienced CIA agent,suspected of espionage, is located in the town of Pripiat’ and to find him, a Soviet lieu-tenant colonel of military counterintelligence arrives in the town. Soviet history servesas a blueprint for the present.3. The Wolves in the Zone (1990): Mission ImpossibleAlthoughTheWolves in theZonehas been and still is advertised as a crime thriller, the crim-inal plot here seems less important than the author’s statementwith its surrealist climaxand religious outcome of the storyline. Instead of a thriller, an existential drama of de-humanisation unfolds on the screen.The protagonist of the film is a former police cap-tain called Rodion,who returns to the Chernobyl zone on a special mission.Hewas bornthere, was a liquidator in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, damaged his healthand was forced to leave on his own and take his blinded mother with him.These detailsare revealed in a dialogue in the first scene with the local policeman Stas, as well as thefact that a gang of looters (‘wolves’) has appeared in the zone – led by their mutual ac-Olga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 93quaintance Semёn. Unlike the captain, who gained nothing from working for the stateas a policeman, Semёn lives richly and clearly bribes the local authorities so that he cansell goods taken from abandoned houses.This constellation is central for the whole plotcontrasting the courageous Rodion with the neurotic Stas, who leads a cynical gang sell-ing items contaminated with radiation all over the Soviet Union.1This criminal plot in the following scenes, however, gives way to direct social and po-litical denunciation. In the first scene,where Rodion and the viewer are immersed in thelife of the zone, he witnesses a policeman stopping a peasant ‘self-settler’ (samosel)2, whois driving a cart from his territory. Under the hay he is hiding radioactive cherries whichhe is taking to the market to sell. When the policeman proposes that the bearded mantaste cherries, he spits them out in fright. Rodion also observes the liquidators buryingfood and machinery contaminated by radiation in a quarry, covering them with earth.“Battalion of death”, says the liquidators’ exhausted foreman, “working without gloves,naked […].” A close-up shows the face of a twelve-year-old boy sitting behind the wheelof an excavator without any protective equipment.Subsequently, we see some foreigners loading a car into a van, clearly taking it awayto be sold.The next scene reveals that it is a joint business between Semёn and the Sovietdistrict leadership. After the deal, a representative of the nomenklatura goes out intothe square “to the people,” only after putting on boots with lead soles. “Quiet, comrades!Many authoritative scientists, authoritative commissions have come here.They’ve cometo the conclusion: it’s still possible to live!”Shouts canbeheard fromthe crowd,separatedby the police: “And why are the children sick?!” A little boy asks, “Uncle, when are we allgoing to die?”Figure 4.1: Film stills from the filmTheWolves in the Zone (1990). Radioactive products in theburial ground; Speech by district authorities to local residents1 As the credits state, this filmwas actually even shot in an abandoned area of the Chernobyl nuclearpower plant, and occasional documentaries are used and simulated to convey the atmosphere ofthe half-empty and radiation-contaminated area.2 ‘Self-settlers’ were locals who had voluntarily returned from evacuation to their homes in the ra-diation-contaminated area and were living in abandoned villages.94 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingThe three scenes are constructed using parallel editing, even though the story is toldas taking place consecutively. This means that the director sees a connection betweenthem,aswell as akey tounderstanding thepost-Chernobyl Soviet reality,whichhepaintsas disintegrated and dehumanised.Such a conclusion is also supported by a subsequent scene at the local market in atown near the border with the zone, where everything from food to white goods is sold.One resident walks around with a dosimeter, which shows high doses everywhere. “Putthat gun away! Get out of here, you hooligan! Alcoholic!” a peasant yells at him who isbringing his radioactive cherries to themarket.The curious citizen is grabbed and takenaway by the ‘market watcher’ mafia, who works for Semёn. Rodion stands up for himand is brutally beaten in an abandoned hangar. Semёn,who fears the former captainwillexpose his business,warns: “If you get into trouble, you’ll be buried yourself […].”Rodion,beaten half to death, soon recovers – and this is perhaps the only sign that the viewer isfacing a true hero of the criminal genre; in other scenes, the former captain ismore oftena silent witness rather than an active participant.Obviously, these images of brutal mafia, corrupt police, cynical representatives ofstate power,who are opposed by a lone hero, are adapted fromHollywood actionmovies,which were well known to Soviet viewers and video parlour-goers from popular films inthe late USSR with Sylvester Stallone (Rambo. First Blood, 1982), Steven Seagal (Above theLaw, 1988), or Chuck Norris (Code of Silence, 1985). However, the emergence of these char-acters is also due to the social developments of theperestroikaperiod.Thecriminalworldas part of the ‘decaying’ Soviet reality had appeared in films since 1986, such as Plumbum,orTheDangerous Game (Pliumbum, ili Opasnaia igra, 1986), directed by Valerii Abdrashitov,Assa (1987), directed by Sergei Solov’ёv,The Needle (Igla, 1988), directed by Rashid Nug-manov [RachidNougmanov] orMyName isHarlequin (Menia zovutArlekino, 1988), directedby Valerii Rybarev. Late Soviet daily life is represented here as false, implacably class-ori-ented, divided into rich and poor, province and the Moscow centre. Especially the com-mon Soviet man is shown as drinking heavily, often a conformist and a latent Stalinist.Also, inTheWolves in the Zone, the ordinary Soviet facing the collapse of his country is por-trayed as a looter or a cynical salesman of contaminated food, thinking only about hisown well-being.The parallel motif of all these perestroika films is the violence that per-vades Soviet society, as well as the cynicism of state power.Very characteristic for this trend are two Belarusian films of this period – OurArmoured Train (Nash bronepoezd, 1988, Belarusfilm) and Political Bureau Co-op or A LongFarewell (Kooperativ Politbiuro, ili Budet dolgim proshchanie, 1992, Independent Studio),directed by Mikhail Ptashuk and written by Evgenii Grigor’ev.The latter was shot usingprivate funds as an independent project already in 1990, but was released only two yearslater after the collapse of the USSR, when it finally received a distribution certificatefrom the Belarusian Ministry of Culture. Political Bureau Co-op begins as a satire oflate-Soviet society: in the story, a resourceful entrepreneur creates a cooperative andhires doppelgängers of the civil war hero Chapaev as well as of Stalin, Khrushchev andBrezhnev.The theatre troupe travels to Belarusian towns where it draws full houses.Thespectators of the play laugh at Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and then suddenly franticallyapplaud Stalin’s appearance on the provincial stage. Satire is gradually replaced bytragedy.The turning point comes in the scene where two representatives of the provin-Olga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 95cial government order a Stalin impersonator into their mansion.He tries to play his role‘to order’, but the situation changes: the owners begin to humiliate andmock the elderlyactor and then they forbid the troupe from continuing their performances.This turning point of the plot reveals the critical message of the film: encounteringthe Soviet authorities leads to inevitable humiliation, to discovering oneself as a subor-dinate, being at the bottom of the power hierarchy. However, the film protagonists alsoencounter the new ‘masters of life’, who turn out to be even more dangerous and fright-ening than the old ones. They are young racketeers who show up at the village hut andblackmail the outcast troupe into paying them protection money. On discovering thatthey have nomoney, they shoot all the actors, brutally torturing each one, before settingfire to a hut with the bodies of those killed. The gruesome finale of the burning villagehouse, in which almost all the main characters die, reveals, according to the director, asymbolic meaning that characterises the whole country.Thus, this film very vividly deals with the internal conflicts of late Soviet society andits fear of a post-Soviet future.The past is represented here by the figures of the leaders,the present by the ‘Stalinist people’ and the corrupted power, and the future by the youngracketeers, the killers, who represent the dangerous nature of wild capitalism.Figure 4.2: Film stills from the film Political Bureau Co-op or A Long Farewell. Aleksei Pe-trenko as Stalin’s doppelgänger actorTheWolves in the Zone contains a very similar negative message that connects it to thethemeof life after theChernobyl disaster.Whereas in typicalHollywoodcrime thrillers oraction films of the same period the protagonist is supposed to restore order and punishevil in a world that is falling apart, this exact mission proves impossible in late Sovietand early post-Soviet films. Just as the protagonist is defeated, the genre logic is alsosuspended here.4. Symptoms of Cultural TraumaIn place of the typical climax of crime genre movies with a shoot-out between the heroand the antagonists, the central part in The Wolves in the Zone is a long and fraught se-96 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingquence atnight in adeserted town thathasbeen clearedof residents.RodionandStasde-cide that it is impossible todealwith thegang through legalmeans, so theykidnapSemёnfrom his cottage and take him to a place where no authority exists.We see documentaryfootage filmed at night of an abandoned town (most likely Pripiat’ within the Chernobylarea, where all the inhabitants have been evacuated). This is followed by a scene in anabandoned flat after the evacuation, where the militia friends bring Semёn as well asStas’s girlfriend, a nurse, whom they suspect of reselling looted items. In themeantime,Rodion goes off to look for his house. Spotting amarauder there trying to steal the familyicon, he shoots him. It is at the house that Stas finally finds him. Rodion orders him totake the corpse out of his house and yells at his partner to leave as well. Then he looksat the photo album thrown on the floor. A close-up shows a photograph of Rodion as achild standing under a portrait of Stalinwith a toy gun in his hands –a typical Soviet boysocialised with violence from early on.Themain emotional state of all those involved in the final part of the film can be de-scribed as fear, hysteria andmadness. Also, all the characters who find themselves in thezone have nothingmore to lose and nothing to hide; in the plot they are extremely open.In fact, the viewer hears a series of public monologues, which are constructed as a socialdenunciation and an exposé of the essence of the Soviet man. For example, Semёn anda nurse are drinking vodka found in the flat. She complains about her very low salaryand her longing for a child and justifies her collaboration with the looters entirely dueto the circumstances of life: “Life is divided into before and after,” says the woman. “Wedon’t knowwhat we eat, what we drink,what we breathe,what will happen to us.We arehostages.How can we keep ourselves safe? And there is no point.” Semёn’s monologue isan ode to wild capitalism, denouncing the lack of initiative and the slavish obedience ofthe Soviet people. Rodion suddenly turns out to be a patriot for whomhis homeland, theSoviet Union, is important. Stas’s monologue is constructed as the self-disclosure of anordinary Soviet man, as he shouts, “We are mutants, slaves, sheep!”Then another man – a former intellectual, a former nuclear power plant worker –breaks into the flat.He claims to be the owner of the flat and suspects the guests of beinglooters, and they suspect him of the same. Rodion and Stas shoot both him and Semёn,and are ready to shoot each other. It is dawn. Finally, Rodion imagines that the door ofthe room is slowly opening and a huge cactus, oversized due to the radiation, is reachingfor him.Thus, the viewer is immersed in a process of dehumanisation, where all the charac-ters lose any sense of direction, easily kill each other and sink into madness. The zoneis painted as a place where there is not only no power restraining people, but also nomorality, and this is, according to the movie, the essence of what the Chernobyl disas-ter and the Soviet regime have done to people. This understanding is also supported byother individual fragments of thefilmand the glimpses of Rodion’s flashbacks, such as inthe picture showing him with a Stalin portrait. In this sense, he also represents the lastpost-war generation, being born still under Stalin’s regime and in the present turningout to be criminal, deceitful and cynical. This is also true for the representatives of thedistrict authorities, who began their ascent through the Komsomol and the Party. Oneof these nomenklatura representatives outright lies in a speech to the local populationdemonstrating no respect to ordinary Soviet people or to human life in general. In one ofOlga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 97the flashbacks, Rodion recalls the evacuation of the population from the contaminatedterritories and thereby refers to the German occupation as one of the most terrible andtragic events in the memory of the Belarusians. The present authorities seem to be nobetter.Figure 4.3: Film stills from the filmTheWolves in the Zone. Rodion and his memories of theevacuationAlthough these motifs are exaggerated and taken as a direct denunciation of pere-stroika-era cinema in general and the author’s film concept, some of them are also heardin the testimonies recorded by Svetlana Alexievich for her documentary-fiction bookChernobyl Prayer. In the accounts of survivors – former liquidators or their relatives –parallels with the horrors and losses of war are often mentioned. For example, in thechapter “Land of the Dead” there is a story about the ‘self-settlers’, an elderly coupleof peasants who went into the forest with their cow when the soldiers evacuated thevillage. “Like under the punishers,” they explain. Other characters in the book also recallreturning to their homes along familiar ‘partisan paths’.There are also witness accounts of looting and of locals removing both radioactiveitems and crops to sell in the markets. A former policeman recalls:They broughtmeat for disposal in the burial sites. The hips weremissing from the beefcarcases. The fillet. I filed a report. We had a tip-off that a house in an abandoned vil-lage was being dismantled. They were numbering and placing the logs on to a tractorwith a trailer. We headed straight out to the address given. The raiders were arrested.Theywere hoping to remove the building and sell it as a dacha. They’d already receivedadvance payment from the future owners. I filed a report. (Alexievich 2016: 88)A recurring motif in Chernobyl Prayer is that the authorities explained nothing to the lo-cal population or the liquidators, gave no medical advice, acted in a domineering man-ner, hiding both the truth and their confusion, while the newspapers carried the tradi-tional Soviet heroic narrative. In the part “The Soldier’s Choir,” the surviving liquidatorsoldiers recall the disenfranchised and hysterical atmosphere (“One guy, I think he wasfrom Leningrad, was protesting: ‘I don’t want to die.’ They threatened him with a courtmartial.” (Alexievich 2016: 76) and how they were sent to the area with only shovels (“Did98 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingall the work by spade.” (Alexievich 2016: 76)). At the same time, instances of heroism arealso recalled when liquidators consciously sacrificed their lives.Today we can view thesemonologues as evidence of the cultural trauma experiencedby late Soviet society. As the central figure of “Monologue on amoonscape” reflected:I began wondering why so little has been written about Chernobyl. Our writers keeponwriting about thewar, about Stalin’s camps, but they’re silent onChernobyl.There arealmost no books on it. Do you think that’s just a coincidence? It’s an episode still outsideour culture. Too traumatic for our culture. And our only answer is silence.We just closeour eyes, like little children, and think we can hide (Alexievich 2016: 98).The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka (2001a; 2001b) suggests that any changes orevents that shock society should be considered social trauma. In contrast to the medicalorpsychological understandingof the term, it refers to a “destructive impact on the socialbody.” If trauma affects the cultural order, it can be called “cultural trauma,” a symptomof which is the “disruption of normality:” a crisis of collective identity and a “disruptionof the world ofmeanings,”where both values and trust in authority are permanently un-dermined.If disorder occurs, symbols take onmeanings different from the ordinary signifiers.Values lose value,unrealistic goals aredemanded,normsprescribeunsuitable behaviour,gestures and words signify something other than their former meanings. Beliefs are re-jected, faith is undermined, trust disappears, charisma collapses and idols crumble (Sz-tompka 2001a: 11).In the final scene ofTheWolves in the Zone, Rodion races away in a military car, whichhehas stolen to get away from the site of the crime,having been shot by a distraught Stas.He then finds himself in the dugout of a strange man who all this time has been silentlyobserving everything that has been going on in the zone and in the flat. In the corner ofthe dugout there is a candle and an icon:– “Who are you?” Rodion asks him half-dead.– “A Human. The zone,” he replies.And the viewer sees the man sowing the desolate land. It is commented on by a voice-over: “If a baby is taken away from itsmother’s breast, it will be sick. So it is with themanfromwhomGod has been taken away.”This final moral can be seen in different contexts. On the one hand, it refers to thecentral ideaofGeorgiandirectorTengizAbuladze’sfilmRepentance (Pokaianie/Monanieba),which was filmed in 1984 but was not shown to a wide audience until after the FifthCongress of Cinematographers in 1987. In its symbolic form it spoke about the victimsof Stalinist repressions and the fact that they should not be forgotten either by the newgenerations of the Soviet authorities or by the people.The protagonist Ketevan, after thefuneral of Varlam Aravidze (a symbolic figure who refers to both Stalin and Beria), digsuphis corpse several times and throws it at the house of hiswealthy heirs, son andgrand-son, and then tells the story of how Varlam destroyed their family by arresting his fatherand mother on a deliberately false accusation. The final scene of Repentance features adialogue that has become famous and iconic primarily in the eyes of the late Soviet intel-ligentsia. An elderly woman asks Ketevan if this road will lead her to the temple: “–ThisOlga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 99street of Varlam, itwill not lead to the temple.–Thenwhat’s the use of it?What’s the roadfor if it doesn’t lead to the temple?” asks the old woman and walks off into the distance.After the release of this film, the idea of repentance for the whole of Soviet society be-came, in a way, the project of the Soviet intelligentsia and was often called for in publicstatements. Behind this idea, presented in religious tones,was the hope for the ‘spiritualrenewal’ of Soviet society and its morals.At the same time, the final scene ofTheWolves in the Zone captures the collapse of faithin Soviet science and the ‘peaceful atom’, which was its main symbol in the 1970s (theChernobyl nuclear power plant was completed and started operating in 1977). Similarmotifs are recorded in Alexievich’sChernobyl Prayer: one of the characters retells the pop-ular version that the Chernobyl disaster was prophesied in the Book of Revelation:‘And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon thethird part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star iscalledWormwood: and the third part of thewaters becamewormwood; andmanymendied of the waters, because they were made bitter’. (Alexievich 2016: 74)Chernobyl inUkrainian is translatedas“wildplant,wormwood,” this iswhy theapocalyp-tic “wormwood star” has become a stable metaphor of the catastrophe in the journalismof the perestroika period and 1990s as well as in popular opinion. “You want to take herfor science, but I loathe your science! Loathe it! First, your science took him away fromme, now it’s back formore. I won’t give her to you!” (Alexievich 2016: 21) says another fig-ure in the book whose monologue is a very painful story about how her husband died inagony (she recalls the doctors saying that he is now “a highly contaminated radioactiveobject” (Alexievich 2016: 16) and that she should take care of herself and her child, not tostay in hospital with him dying).As Sztompka writes, any attempts to interpret a shock event that becomes symp-tomatic of cultural trauma do not arise in a vacuum: “There is always an available set ofmeanings encoded in the culture of a particular community (society). Individuals do notinventmeanings, but select them from the surrounding culture, applying them to poten-tially traumatic events […]” (2001a: 8).Healsonotes that these interpretations oftenman-ifest pre-existing cultural conflicts which, inmy view, could include social stratification,the ritualisation of ideology, and grassroots condemnation of continued militarisation(like the 1979 invasion of Soviet troops into Afghanistan). These conflicts permeated thewhole of the previous Brezhnev period (the period of Stagnation) and surely formed theincreasingly indifferent, ironic or negative attitude towards Soviet power.In summary, the crime movieTheWolves in the Zone and several other films from theperestroika period likePolitical BureauCo-opdeal with this cultural trauma, attempting tocapture it on screen. In comparison,The Atomic Zone Ranger, another genre filmmade asan independent project but nearly ten years later, reflects very different cultural patternsand socio-political symptoms.100 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longing5. The Atomic Zone Ranger (1999). A Fantasy of a ‘Strong Arm’By the mid-1990s, the crime-adventure thriller, set against the backdrop of post-Sovieteveryday life, was becoming a popular genre both in post-Soviet literature and in cin-ema, including Belarusfilm. The Atomic Zone Ranger was released in this context. Alek-sei Kravchenko, a Russian actor who played the famous role of teenager Flora in ĖlemKlimov’s war drama about the German occupation, Come and See (Idi i smotri, 1985), wasinvited toplay themaincharacter.Yet itwasonly after the releaseofTheAtomicZoneRangerthat he changed his image and became the ‘Russian Chuck Norris’.Figure 4.4: Film still of Aleksei Kravchenko inComeand See (left)Figure 4.5: Film still of AlekseiKravchenko inThe Atomic ZoneRanger (right)In the film, Kravchenko plays a captain nicknamed Badger, who served on a nuclearsubmarine and later returns to Belarus to replace his father as a forester. He has to pre-vent timber frombeing exported from theChernobyl zone for sale, and also runs into thelocal mafia, which is involved in drug trafficking and uses abandoned houses as a drugdepot.Themain difference between theTheWolves in the Zone and a typical action film is thatthe latter usually promotes an incorruptible and strong hero who confronts the criminalworld. This is commonly accompanied by a melodramatic love story, erotic episodes, aclimax in the form of a shoot-out with the mafia and a happy ending. Accordingly, thegrafting of the Hollywood genre canon onto post-Soviet soil requires a well-crafted andrecognizable everyday background and a sympathetic protagonist that the public canidentify with – fighting against antiheroes in a painful and unstable world.The Wolvesin the Zone adapt many of these motifs, showing ‘self-settlers’ and looters in the zone ortraderswho sell radioactive goods on themarket throughout the SovietUnion.Followingthe release of a series of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian films about Chernobyl andthe publication of Alexievich’sChernobylPrayer, thesemotifs became commonpatterns ofdescription of the social consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. “We got a nuclear mis-sile from ourselves. Now we’ll be dealing with it for 300 years,” the protagonist RangerOlga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 101and his only associate in the fight against organised crime argue in one of their privateconversations over a beer.In addition to themotifs of lawlessness in the zone, realistic details of ordinary peo-ple’s bleak,dreary everyday lives are shown, typical for 1990s perestroikafilms.Theactionfilmalsoportrays life in theprovinces bordering theChernobyl zone aspoor anddepress-ing. But there is no social and political criticism here anymore – the main trouble is notan indifferent or cynical state, but the mafia, the so-called ‘New Russians’ or ‘New Be-larusians’. Unlike the state, the mafia can be defeated – destroyed or imprisoned, andthe evil will be punished. In this way, the genre formula of the crime thriller neutralisesboth social tension and fear of the future.The Atomic Zone Ranger, like other genre filmsof the period, adopts these motifs reproducing the post-Soviet audiences’ fatigue fromthe shocking anddemanding auteur cinema of the earlier perestroika period.AsRussianfilm scholar Ian Levchenko aptly put it, “the Soviet cinemaof the late 1980s […] is ahead ofits viewer, it wants toomuch fromhim.Theneed for a serious conversation in this vieweris more likely to arise out of inertia, on the wave of interest in the media. Unsupportedby existential need, this interest fades quickly” (Levchenko 2007: 701).This viewer fatigue regarding social and political criticism and self-criticism, as wellas cultural products dealing with cultural trauma and fear is characteristic for the 1990s.Instead of thought-provoking pictures, genre cinema offered a schematic struggle of thestrong hero against themafia,whichmay be comparedwith the political call for a ‘stronghand’ of the authorities. In 1999, for example, Vladimir Putin declared publicly on cen-tral television with regard to Chechen fighters and justifying the Russian bombing ofGroznyi: “We’ll rub [mochit’] them out in the outhouse”.The expression ‘rub them out inthe outhouse’ instantly became an idiom, and permanently formed the image of the newRussian president as a strong leader. At the same time, in the second half of the 1990s,in independent Belarus, Lukashenko [Lukashenka] won wide popular support and wasgiven the respectful family nickname of “Batska”.6. The 2000s: “You don’t have to look back all the time...”As one of the epigraphs to her Chernobyl Prayer, Alexievich chooses fragments from thearticle of the handbook Chernobyl: A look back over the decades, published in 1996, ten yearsafter the disaster:On 26 April 1986, at 1:23 hours 58 seconds, a series of blasts brought down Reactor No.4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, near the Belarusian border. The accident atChernobyl was the gravest technological catastrophe of the twentieth century.For the small country of Belarus (population ten million), it was a national disaster,despite the country not having one nuclear power station of its own. Belarus is still anagrarian land, with a predominantly rural population. During the Second World War,the Germans wiped out 619 villages on its territory along with their inhabitants. In theaftermath of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and towns: seventy remain buried102 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingforever beneath the earth.During thewar, one in four Belarusianswas killed; today, onein five lives in the contaminated zone. (Alexievich 2016: 1)Twenty years later, Belarusfilm released the melodrama I Remember/Father’s House. Themainmessage is encapsulated in the description of one of the positive characters, a doc-tor-professor whomonitors the health of the artist Anatolii, who as a child lived on con-taminated territoryand losthisparents andbrother: “Youshouldn’t lookbackall the time,to the past. I understand, the people you loved are there, Chernobyl is there. But don’tburn yourself to the ground! You’re not a memorial candle.” These words resound fromthe very first minutes of the film, which brings us to the key phenomenon of Belarusianstate cinema of the 2000s: ideology is not camouflaged here, rather it is brought to thesurface. It is articulated by the positive characters, supported by the plot, visuals and thefinal message – and none of it needs to be deciphered.The professor’s daughter Inna is Anatolii’s former lover, who leaves him when shefinds out she is pregnant and he is afraid to have a baby. In the end she leaves her job ascurator of an art gallery and follows Anatolii to his homeland – to wait for the arrival ofthe baby in an abandoned village on the territory of the zone. The self-settled peasantshave been living there for a long time. Sturdy, ruddy oldmen build a chapel in the zone toappease God, as oneman says, “Chernobyl is a punishment for us for turning away fromGod,” stating, “The soul is beyond control of radiation” and claiming that “nature itselfhas purified itself.” Accordingly, Anatolii feels healthy and happy here, breathes the cleanair of his native village and is reborn to a new life. It turns out that his illness was purelya product of nervous self-destruction.Within this frame, theplot of thefilm is drivenby ahardly camouflaged conflict.Ana-tolii discovers that cynical workers laid the floor of the house of the old Makarovs withradioactive planks taken out of storage from the zone. “That’s a sin,” says Anatolii’s aunt.Thenarrator answers her: “Punishment. Let ComradeMakarov nowwalk onhis floor andglow!” However, Anatolii sets out to find the house to warn the owner, but discovers thata young girl, Katia, who recently bought it, lives there. She tells him that the house hasbeen sold because of the sudden death ofMakarov,who used to live therewith his grand-parents. A further plot aspect develops as they attempt to find the cynical constructionworker and punish him. At the end, a young businessman in love with Katia finds himthrough his connections and turns him in to the police.The Belarusians portrayed in this film are mostly kind, naive and well-to-do people.They represent social stereotypes that have nothing to do with Belarusian reality. Thus,self-settled peasants are shown here as the most important national social group, ‘stal-wart in spirit’ and religious,who have returned to the zone after evacuation and are con-vinced there is no longer any radiation. When Anatolii also decides to stay in his nativevillage and tohelp paint the chapel, one of the oldmen says: “You shouldpaint icons of us,so that our grandchildren will come here and pray”. According to programmatic state-ments in the film, all problems are caused by ‘spiritualmutation’. A bundle of dollars thatpasses from one character to another in order to help each other until it reaches Katiasymbolises the solidarity that still exists among ordinary people.In contrast to the early Christian idea of repentance, which appears in the finale ofthe 1990 film dramaTheWolves in the Zone, here the religious morality refers to the Or-Olga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 103thodox Church. It is also combined with traditional patriarchal relations in a romanticlight: women treat men with love and sacrifice, Anatolii’s bride Inna is ready to carry achild in the zone, and Katia keeps her chastity until her wedding – only towards the endshe finally agrees tomarry the businessman and tells him: “You will both feed and clotheme.” References to orthodoxy, patriarchy and popular ‘spirituality’ are fragments of theeclectic ideology of the Lukashenko era. Its essence can be defined as the ideal of a pre-political stage of society, where the life of citizens is an adjustment to its urgent prob-lems. As the film I Remember/Father’s House suggests, the state is as if invisible here, asinstead of by force, ideological constructs are presented here as ‘coming from the peoplethemselves’’ and thus guaranteeing an imagined ‘Belarusian stability’.Repressive mechanisms are shown here only in relation to ‘outsiders’ who allegedlyact against the interests of the ‘common people’ and their well-being.This notion of Be-larusian authoritarianism allows the state to demand unconditional acceptance of anyof its decisions. This became particularly obvious in 2008, when Lukashenko made thefinal decision to build a nuclear power plant on the territory of Belarus.Themain objec-tion fromopponents to its constructionwas the fear of a repeat of theChernobyl disaster.But other arguments like the ecological damage caused by transportation and process-ing of uranium and the problem of nuclear waste storage were also raised. “No atom ispeaceful!”, was one of the of the often-repeated slogans used by activists at the annualCharnobylski Shliakh protest action first held on 26 April 1989. Later in independentBelarus these marches and rallies in memory of Chernobyl became a form of politicalresistance and the one in 2008 was the biggest ever in the country, protesting againstLukashenko’s policies, accompanied by clashes with police and arrests.This mass resis-tance against the construction of the nuclear power plant showed vividly that the author-itarian claimof an overall consent among ‘commonpeople’was false and that the distrustof citizens towards the authorities is enormous, especially because the Belarusian statenever discusses its decisions with the public, does not engage in dialogue and respondsto any protests with repressive methods.The Belarusian revolution that erupted in August 2020, following the rigging of thepresidential election results, the arrest of candidates, and the beatings and torture ofprotesters, finally exposed the mechanisms of violence that have always underpinnedLukashenko’s rule. I Remember/Father’s House is significant in this context and points tothemodel of relations between the state and the imagined people that the authorities arestill trying to follow today, while no longer hiding their repressive nature and constantlypointing to internal and external ‘outsiders’ who threaten ‘stability’ and the ‘Belarusianmodel’. It is worth noting that the inauguration of the first unit of the Astravets nuclearpower plant, the construction of which began in 2008, took place on 7 November 2020with the participation of Lukashenko,by then already an illegitimate president. Interest-ingly, the event was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolu-tion, formally demonstrating the continuity of the Belarusian authoritieswith the Sovietauthorities.104 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longing7. A Thriller Set against the Backdrop of PerestroikaExclusion Zone is the last Belarusian feature film shot to date that takes place in the Cher-nobyl zone. It was shot at Belarusfilm, co-financed by the film studio with independentproducers and released in Russia and Belarus in theatres and on streaming platforms.The aim of the project was to make an entertaining genre film that would be profitable,which has been a problem and a challenge for the national film studio formany years, asmany of its films are still made for educational purposes, are not popular among Belaru-sians and do not pay off at the box office.The result is a thriller with elements of slasher, horror film and survival drama. Ittakes place in 1989, three years after the Chernobyl accident and two years before the col-lapse of the USSR. The main characters – former classmates, two girls and four boys –set out on a hike along the Pripiat’ River, and overnight their raft floats into the Cher-nobyl zone (the film was not shot there). The wild, desolate forest, swamps and aban-doned houses become a disturbing backdrop for the unfolding plot conflict, in whichonly one heroine can survive and return home. A bag full of stolen money falls into thehands of the characters,whenoneof the classmates,Lësha,accidentally kills amanwalk-ing in thewood.Theprospect of getting rich instantly changes the characters.They are alldistinguished by several traits with an attempt at social typification. Lёsha is back fromthewar in Afghanistan – to explain his easy-going attitude towardsmurder and corpses,the authors add another old criminal case and poorly controlled jealousy towards one ofthe heroines. If his first victim is accidental, the shooting of a former classmate Grisha isdone on purpose. Grisha is a conventional rock music lover, who does not want to sharethemoney nor conceal the accidentalmurder.Thefilmalsomentions that one of the girlswas working ‘on a panel’, i.e.,worked as a prostitute,which explains her passion for easymoney.And the fun-loving guyMoniawants themoney on his own to buy a flat, a car andto get married.Among these protagonists there is also a boy and a girl who take their share of themoney with a noble purpose: Artur is the son of an academic and needs the money fora heart operation abroad for his younger brother, whereas Lida, a student who wantsto help him, gives him her share. Then an unknown person comes into play, who turnsout to be the partner of the accidently killed man and who avenges him by killing twomore of the classmates. In the final scene, Lida has to shoot the finally enraged ‘Afghan’Lёsha to prevent him from killing her friend Artur. In this way, the film obviously followsa formulaic model and keeps the viewer curious as to who will kill the next victim andsatisfy the viewers’ expectations. It is also likely that associations with computer shootergames like S. T. A. L. K. E. R. Shadow of Chernobyl’ (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Ten’ Chernobylia, 2007)are intended, as the action is also placed in the ‘zone’.However, the real historical context of the late Soviet Union, although shown in astereotyped way, as well as symbolic motifs are also characteristic for Exclusion Zone. Forinstance, the bag ofmoney alludes to I Remember/Father’sHouse,where a bundle of dollarsalso played a role, but back then the positive characters managed their problems with-out it. In contrast, closer to the finale, the survivors Artur and Lida learn that the moneyis radioactive, with the dosimeter from it going off the scale. “This is death. It must bedestroyed,” says Artur. But he has no time to destroy it, as he is killed in an absurd wayOlga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 105on his way out of the forest, caught in a bear trap. Lida leaves the zone in a motorboat,along with the deadly radioactive money. The epilogue shows her spreading the moneyamong Soviet citizens, and then someone handing Artur’smother a box of dollars for thetreatment of her second son abroad.Another typical characteristic of themovie is a certain nostalgia for Soviet values undrelicts, which is also obvious in the motif of illicit and contagious money, which causeslust for profit and leads only to death, evoking the myth of the special morality of So-viet men. In another episode, the three heroes wander around the abandoned houses ofPripiat’, where Monia throws stones and smashes windows, as he has “always dreamedof doing that.”Then the glance of the protagonists stops at a red bannerwith the inscrip-tion: “Everything must be beautiful in a man: both his face and his soul, his clothes andhis thoughts”. In reality, such a slogan never existed, because Soviet banners bore shortmobilisation formulas like “Peace for the World”, “Peace. Labor. May” or “Decisions ofthe XXV congress of the CPSU Central Committee into life!”. However, this quote aboutthe beauty of a man from Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya (Diadia Vania, 1898) was notunknown in Soviet culture and, for instance, a frequent topic of school essays.Figure 4.6: Filmstill from the filmExclusion Zone. A banner that is impossible in realityInstead of seeing this set-piece as a historical mistake by the filmmakers, it is rathera symptom of how Soviet ideals are represented here, ideals, which the protagonists areapparently deprived of, having lost theirmoral compass during the perestroika period.Amore realistic banner would have been inappropriate and incomprehensible to the post-Soviet public. Whereas Alexievich’s generation distinguished itself in opposition to So-viet morality, as she portrayed it in her book Secondhand Time (Vremia sekond khėnd, 2013),under the onslaught of capitalist cynicism, paradoxically the next, already post-Sovietgeneration is open for a certain nostalgia for the Soviet ‘golden age’, as it is summariedinapopular internet joke: ‘the younger theblogger, thebetter the lifehehadunderStalin’.Another characteristic of contemporary Belarusian films is the popular post-Sovietmyth of the ‘bandit 1990s’. Although the action in Exclusion Zone takes place before thecollapse of the USSR, the motif of easy, bloody and bandit money is also omnipresenthere. This myth is also actively used today in Russian and Belarusian propaganda. For106 Appropriating History: I. Places of Longingexample, after the 2020 revolution, Lukashenko has repeatedly frightened Belarusiansin speeches that ‘cynical businessmen’ (aka ‘bourgeoisie’) who disagree with his policieswant everyone to return to the 1990s, a time when they got rich and the main popula-tion starved and suffered. According to the official authoritarian narrative, Lukashenkopersonally prevented the country from being ‘plundered’ by destroying the bandits andkeeping the collective farms and state factories.Thus, an analysis of this thriller throughthe prism of the political context and popular post-Soviet myths reveals a rather conser-vative and nostalgic morality, that is rather implicitly visible on the level of the ‘politicalunconscious’ than purposefully on the level of the entertaining plot.In summary, one can conclude, that in order to fully understand the specific adapta-tionof formulaic popular genre cinemawithinpost-Soviet culture,a detailed elaborationof the real context and psychology of the characters is inevitable, paying special attentionto the way nodal symbols are implemented into the film plot. Thereby, the four Belaru-sian genre films about the Chernobyl disaster from different historical periods analysedin this essay, show a clear development from more critical attitudes towards the Sovietlegacy to a rather distorting view on the recent past. Especially today, against the back-ground of the renaissance of authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies in Russia and Be-larus, it is most relevant to analyse late Soviet and post-Soviet movies through the prismof cultural trauma, taking into consideration ideology and political context.When discussing the forms of social adaptation to cultural trauma,Sztompka, refer-ring to Robert K. Merton’s research, distinguishes between constructive active and pas-sive adaptations.The former forms include innovation (cultural production) and rebellion(an attempt to radically change culture).The passive forms are ritualism, cultivating “un-established traditions” as a way of hiding from trauma, and retreatism, ignoring traumaand attempting to act as if it does not exist (2001b: 9). Regarding Belarusian cinema, thesituation of the 1990s can generally be characterised as an attempt at innovative culturalproduction and rebellion,while thepath chosenby the state and,accordingly,byBelarus-film in the 2000s rather resembles passive forms of retreatism. The critical message offilms from the perestroika period and the early 1990s consisted in exposing totalitariantendencies in power and in Soviet people. In spite of its journalistic, partly denunciatoryform, the films of this period also expose the fear of impending capitalism and diagnosea value deadlock, trying to seriously copewith the near anddistant past.Belarusianfilmsof the following periods, with the exception of some independent productions,make anartificial break with this tendency, and instead present a both tendentiously ideologi-cal picture of reality, like in I Remember/Father’s House, and politically unconscious genreplots as in Exclusion Zone.List of GamesS.T.A. L.K.E.R.ShadowofChernobyl’ (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.Ten’Chernobylia), produced byGSCGameWorld, PC/MAC, 2007.Olga Romanova: The Zone as a Place of Repentance and Retreat 107FilmographyAbove the Law, dir. Andrew Davis, USA 1988.Assa, dir. Sergei Solov’ёv, USSR 1987.Black Stork (Chernyi aist), dir. Viktor Turov, Russia 1993.Chernobyl, dir. Johan Renck, USA, UK 2019.Code of Silence, dir. Andrew Davis, USA 1985.Come and See (Idi i smotri), dir. Ėlem Klimov, USSR 1985.Exclusion Zone (Zapretnaia zona), dir. Mitrii Semenov-Aleinikov, Belarus 2020.I Remember/Father’s House (Ia pomniu/Otchii dom), dir. Sergei Sychev, Belarus 2005.MyName is Harlequin (Menia zovut Arlekino), dir. Valerii Rybarev, USSR 1988.MySoul, Mariia (Dushamoia,Mariia), dir. Viacheslav Nikiforov, Belarus 1993.Our Armoured Train (Nash bronepoezd), dir. Mikhail Ptashhuk, USSR 1988.Plumbum, or The Dangerous Game (Pliumbum, ili Opasnaia igra), dir. Valerii Abdrashitov,USSR 1986.Political Bureau Co-op or A Long Farewell (Kooperativ Politbiuro, ili Budet dolgim proshchanie),dir. Mikhail Ptashuk, Belarus 1992.Rambo. First Blood, dir. Ted Kotcheff, USA 1982.Repentance (Pokaianie/Monanieba), dir. Tengiz Abuladze, Georgia 1984.TheAtomic Zone Ranger (Reindzher iz atomnoi zony), dir. Viacheslav Nikiforov, Belarus, Rus-sia 1999.TheNeedle (Igla), dir. Rashid Nugmanov [Rachid Nougmanov], USSR 1988.TheWolves in the Zone (Volki v zone), dir. Viktor Deriugin, USSR 1990.List of IllustrationsFigure 4.1: Film still from thefilmTheWolves in theZone (Volki v zone), dir.ViktorDeriugin,USSR 1990.Figure 4.2: Film still from the film Political BureauCo-op or A Long Farewell (Kooperativ Polit-biuro, ili Budet dolgim proshchanie), dir.Mikhail Ptashuk, Belarus 1992.Figure 4.3: Film still from thefilmTheWolves in theZone (Volki v zone), dir.ViktorDeriugin,USSR 1990.Figure 4.4: Film still from thefilmComeandSee (Idi i smotri),dir.ĖlemKlimov,USSR 1985.Figure 4.5: Film still from the filmThe Atomic Zone Ranger (Reindzher iz atomnoi zony), dir.Viacheslav Nikiforov, Belarus, Russia 1999.Figure 4.6: Film still from the filmExclusionZone ( Zapretnaia zona), dir.Mitrii Semenov-Aleinikov, Belarus 2020.ReferencesAlexievich, Svetlana (2016): Chernobyl Prayer [1997]. Translated by Anna Gunin and ArchTait, London: Penguin Books.108 Appropriating History: I. Places of LongingKhatkovskaia, Inessa (2010): “Iz nedolgoi istorii belorusskogo nezavicimogo kino(1989–1997).” In: Perekrestki 3/4, pp. 98–133.Levchenko, Ian (2007): “God zakrytogo pereloma.” In: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 83/1,pp. 699–710.Sztompka,Piotr (2001a): “Sotsial’noe izmenenie kak travma.” In: Sotsiologicheskoe issle-dovanie 1, pp. 6–16.Sztompka, Piotr (2001b): “Kul’turnaia travma v postkommunisticheskom obshchestve.”In: Sotsiologicheskoe issledovaniia 2, pp. 3–12.II. Combat Zones:War Heroes, Resistance Fightersand Joyful PartisansChapter 5:Alternative Versions of the Past and the FutureSoviet and Post-Soviet Pop LiteratureMaria Galina and Ilya Kukulin1. IntroductionAlternate history is a special kind of contemporary fiction and, more broadly, narrativeart.1 It involves depicting historical events in the ‘what-if ’ mode: how the modern worldwould have changed if one or more key events had played out differently than in real-ity. Broadly speaking, alternate history, overturning the famous thesis “history knowsno subjunctive mood”, is concerned with “a comparative analysis of precisely differentpossible alternatives” (Bestuzhev-Lada 1997: 112–122).Usually, alternate history works are associated with science fiction and thus withmass culture, although intellectuals also drawupon this approach: in particular, StephenFry (MakingHistory, 1997) and Philip Roth (ThePlot against America, 2004), describe in theirnovels how countries, which in ‘our’ reality participated in the anti-Hitler coalition, be-gin instead to undergo political radicalisation in the 1930s-40s, taking on anovert resem-blance to fascist regimes. Itwould thereforebemoreaccurate to say that alternatehistoryis a method of narrative construction, encompassing different types of literature, frommass to experimental. Alternate history echoes in terms of method the work of contem-porary historians in the relatively newgenre of ‘thought experiments’ or counterfactuals,Furthermore, it is difficult to draw a precise line between ordinary historical novelsand alternate history narratives, because any work of fiction with a historical theme isalways based on fiction. As the American writer, literary scholar and sociologist KarenHellekson puts it: a “mere” historical novelist may create a fictionalised maid to a real-life QueenMary of Scots, but a “normal” narrative about the Queen assumes that her life1 This essay partly draws onmaterial in a chapter of a collective monograph: Galina, Maria/Kukulin,Ilya (2021): 155–186. Thanks to Vera Dubina and Andrei Zavadskii for permission to use materialsfrom the chapter.which have a similar meaning but are written much more analytically and addressed toan audience of professionals in the humanities.112 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zoneswill end at the stake.However, if the novel, for example, reports thatMary defeated Eliz-abeth Tudor and became ruler of England and Scotland, then we are encountering analternate history story (2001: 33). Hellekson suggests that alternate history is based pri-marily on nexuses of key events. In particular, many of the mass-cultural alternate his-tories in English-language literature rely on twowell-known andmythologised nexuses:what would have happened if Germany hadwonWorldWar II andwhat would have hap-pened if Southerners had won the US Civil War in the North (Thiess 2015: 8–9).Such literaryworksdemonstrate, in aparticularly poignantway, the creationof a “us-able past”.The creator of this term, the American critic and literary historian VanWyckBrookswrote in 1918 that the contemporary author should give the past amoralmeaningthat edifies people of the present. Alternate histories contribute to giving suchmeaning(and in this, writers can differ markedly from historians who create counterfactuals) onat least three levels.Firstly, they most often portray fulfilled anti-utopias or – less frequently – utopias(Butter 2009), making our reality appear either as the best possible option or a result ofan unfortunate accident in comparison with which the imperfections of ‘our’ world lookespecially frightening and, most importantly, changeable: had things been a bit differ-ent, ‘we’ could have lived a much better life! A ‘past-turned-utopia’, as we shall see later,could be the ideal imaginary space for escape from the discomfort ofmodernity. In casesof anti-utopias, reality is portrayed as relatively acceptable compared to the terrible dis-asters that could have occurred if events had gone differently.Second, alternate history authors often establish implicit correspondences betweenevents that actually took place and their ‘alternate’ versions. For example, Pei-Chen Liaodraws attention to the ‘realist’ aspects of Philip Roth’s novel mentioned above: his de-scriptionof thepersecutionof the Jews inhisfictionalisedUnitedStates in the early 1940sclearly draws onRoth’s experience of childhood suffering fromgrassroots anti-Semitismin America as described in his memoirs (2020: 11).Third, alternate history sharply emphasises the impact of personal action and/orchance on large-scale social and political shifts. One of its earliest examples, LyonSprague de Camp’s novel Lest Darkness Fall (1939)2, tells the story of American archaeolo-gist Martin Padway being transported by lightning from fascist Italy in 1938 to Rome in535 AD, under the rule of the Ostrogoths. Padway helps the Ostrogoths to defend theirkingdom against the Byzantines and the Lombards, thus preventing the onset of theDark Ages.Obviously, at the time the novel was written, it was read as an allegory callingfor personal opposition to fascism.Accordingly, the American literary scholar Catherine Gallagher writes that alternatehistory has political significance: “the alternate-history impulse in the Cold War Periodand after” was based on “the desire to see the logic of justice triumph over the dynamicsof historical determination” (2010: 17). And since contemporary Russia is currently ex-2 Hereinafter, except where otherwise stated, the year of the first publication of the work is indi-cated.Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 113periencing a veritable boom in alternate history fiction (in the broad sense)3, to whichboth authors with mass appeal and ‘sophisticated’ writers are contributing, it seemedworthwhile to investigate the socio-historical reasons for such an upsurge more closely.In doing so, we pursue the following initial hypotheses: Alternate history in contempo-rary Russia is, on the one hand, a special form of reflection on historical traumas, whichis akin to the corresponding literature in the West, and, on the other hand, a form ofphantasmatic, imagined historical revenge for all events which the authors consider as‘defeats’ andmanifestations of ‘injustice’ in relation to Russia.43 See in particular theAlternateHistory (Al’ternativnaia istoriia) website https://alternathistory.ru/ [30September 2023], which has been described as “the largest Runet blog”. Runet is a common des-ignation of the Russian sector of the internet.4 On revanchist motifs in fantasy literature and alternate history in the 1990s and 2000s, cf. Viten-berg 2004; Arbitman 2009.5 Our dating is guided by this work.2. Background to Post-Soviet Alternate HistoryThe thought experiment “what would have happened if” has been posed by many, fromTitus Livy (59 BC – 17 AD), who speculated what outcome the war with Alexander theGreat could have had for the Roman state, claiming that Rome had every chance of win-ning this war, to Aleksandr Pushkin in his note on the poemCountNulin (GrafNulin, 1827)(Leibov 2023):5Rereading Lucretia, Shakespeare’s rather weak poem, I thought: what if Lucretia hadthought to slap Tarquinius in the face? Perhaps this would have cooled his enterpriseand he would have been forced to retreat with shame? Lucretia would not have beenslapped […] and the world and the history of the world would not have been the same.(Kibalnik 1995: 64)However, the French writer Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy-Château (1803–1858) was the firstto publish a book of alternate history in 1836, his History of the World Monarchy: Napoleonand the Conquest of the World (Histoire de la monarchie universelle. Napoleon et la conquette dumonde, 1812–1832) – an account of how Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly beat Russia, thenconquered all the other countries and created a world state where the arts flourished.In the first half of the 20th century, alternate history was developed and contem-plated by both scholars andfictionwriters, including Sovietwriters: for example, in 1928,TheReckless Novel (Bestseremonnyi Roman), co-written by Veniamin Girshgorn, Iosif Kellerand Boris Lipatov, was published. Its hero called Roman (in Russian, it is both a malename given to the character and alsomeans “a novel”) goes back in time to helpNapoleonwin the Battle of Waterloo.In the 1920s, alternate history narratives in both Soviet and émigré Russian litera-ture were perceived as a ‘possible’ extension of real history, where the course of eventscould be reversed by chance, as had been shown by the events of the two Russian revo-lutions of 1917 and of the Civil War. In 1922, the utopian novel Behind the Thistle (Za cher-114 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonestopolokhom) was published in Germany by Pёtr Krasnov, the recent leader of the self-pro-claimed Cossack Don state who had just fled Russia. In his novel, he described a worldwhere the Red Army perished under its own bombs and instead of Soviet Russia a patri-archal yet technocratic state emerged, “without foreigners,without speculators,withoutbanks and without the dictates of Western Europe” (Krasnov 1922), but with televisionand airships to ferry whoever is needed to anywhere in the world. This narrative couldbe considered the first example of ‘imagined historical revenge’ in the history of Russianliterature,which, as we shall see later, brings it close to post-Sovietmass-cult novels. Forexample, the commonplace accusation by conservative émigrés that there are too manyJews among the Bolsheviks takes on an inverted form in the novel:“Do you have any Jews?” asked Diatlov.“How not. They live among us. Where can they go? Only they don’t rule over us any-more.” (Ibid.)If we talk about the USSR again, the publication of any works in the genre of alternatehistory since the 1930s became impossible for a long time. The Soviet authorities posi-tioned science fiction as utilitarian literature, designed to call up young people to workon scholarly and technical innovations. Fiction had to serve propagandistic (educationaland enlightening) goals and mainly portrayed the achievements of visionary inventorsand the socialist economy. Of particular note are the fictional works depicting the vic-tories of the Soviet Union ‘with little blood’ in the global wars of the foreseeable future,also a kind of alternate history, designed, however, to demonstrate not somuch the ran-domness of historical choice, as the regularities of the Marxist-Leninist conception ofthe course of history.Under these conditions, any somewhat daring intellectual experiments in sciencefiction were considered dangerous. However, during World War II, when the USSR be-came an ally of the United Kingdom and the United States, some works of English-lan-guage science fiction were published in Russian.Therefore, despite the postwar censor-ship bans, Soviet readers and writers had some idea of what sci-fi literature could be.After Stalin’s death in 1953, ideological prejudice against the ‘dangerous genre’ some-what abated,but the artistic level ofworks of sci-fi remained very lowdue to the utter de-struction of the genre. Attempts to change this tendency started in the late 1950s,mainlyby IvanEfremov and the brothers Arkadii andBoris Strugatskii. It is indicative, however,that it was precisely alternate history that continued to be perceived by the censors as anideologically dubious – and therefore undesirable – field of literature. The Strugatskiibrothers and Efremov preferred to transfer their dystopianmodels to imaginary planets– like inHard to Be God (Trudno byt’ bogom, 1963) andThe Inhabited Island (Obitaemyj ostrov,also known as Prisoners of Power, 1969) by the Strugatskiis, or inTheBull’s Hour (Chas byka,1968) by Efremov – or to unnamed capitalist countries – like in the Strugatskiis’The Fi-nal Circle of Paradise (Khishchnye veshchi veka, also known as PredatoryThings of the Century,1965).Characteristic in this sense is the Russian translation of Arnold J. Toynbee’s essay IfAlexander theGreathad livedon from1969,published inabridged formin the journalZnanie-Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 115Sila (Knowledge is Power) in 1979 (No. 12).6 In this essay, the British historian returns to thethought experiment once set up byTitus Livy andpresents a reality parallel to our own, inwhich Alexander the Great fulfilled all his plans of conquest, conquering the Qin Empire(the forerunner of China) and creating an everlasting state: Toynbee’s narrator reportsthat he lives in the time of Alexander XXXVI.This journal publication resounded with readers and, perhaps, also provoked the in-dignation of the ideological curators so that the editorial board had to hastily organisea round table dedicated to the topic “History – inevitable and accidental” in the next is-sue, gathering together “real historians” (Podol’nyi et al. 1980).The general verdict of thisdebate, as one of the participants, ProfessorG.A.Fedorov-Davydov, summarised it, con-cluded that “accidents speed up or slow down the course of history, but do not change itsdirection” (ibid.: 39), criticising Toynbee as an apologist of the decisive role of the indi-vidual in history. This critique was an ideological stigma in the USSR, because the cru-cial role of the masses in history was one of the key tenets of historical materialism (theofficial ideology of the time), where the individual could not be the creator of history(Marks/Ėngel’s 1966: 175–176).7 This dogma was ineluctable, even though this emphasison themasses came into obvious contradiction with the cult of Lenin and, at the time, ofLeonid Brezhnev.86 Wewould like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the publisher was a candidate (Ph.D.)of physical andmathematical sciences, rather than a historian belonging to the Soviet professionalcorporation.7 First published in 1895 in Der Sozialistische Akademiker.8 Since in Soviet times, the composition of journal issues was approved by the editorial and censor-ship authorities manymonths before the issue was printed, the publication bore all the hallmarksof an emergency response launched from above.However, apparently by this time the most open-minded Soviet intellectuals werealready seriously interested in the possibilities of depicting alternate historical events.Four years before Toynbee’s translationwas published, a book by the famous popular his-torian Nathan Eidelman,TheApostle Sergei: A Tale of SergeiMuravyov-Apostol (Apostol Sergei:Povest’ o SergeeMurav’ёve-Apostole, 1975), had been released with a chapter entitled “Imag-inary 1826”, which described the success of the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 in TsaristRussia.The chapter ended with a paragraph of two phrases: “It wasn’t. Could have been”(ibid.: 264).The persistent prejudice of Soviet censorship against alternative versions of historywas later triggered by the tamizdat (foreign) publication of Vasilii Aksenov’s novelThe Is-land of Crimea (Ostrov Krym) in 1981 by Ardis Publishing, a publisher based in Ann Arbor(Michigan). In the novel, due to a number of favourable circumstances like the absenceof the Perekop Isthmus and the decisive action of Aksenov’s fictional Lieutenant Bailey-Land, during the Civil War the retreatingWhite Army had defended Crimea against theBolsheviks.Thus, it became a developed capitalist democracy and the object of envy, lustand hatred of the impoverished ‘mainland’ USSR. In doing so, Aksenov adopted some ofthe characteristic Cold War divisions to his alternate history novel, like those betweenNorth and South Korea, the FRG and GDR, or mainland China and Taiwan, which ismost similar to the fictitious ‘capitalist’ Crimea. By analogy with the ‘other China’ that116 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zoneswasbooming inTaiwan,Aksenov cameupwith an ‘alternativeRussia’.Apart from the ob-vious ‘anti-Soviet’ message (the author portrayed the USSR as a country of total scarcityand the suppression of individual freedom), here the role of the individual is highlightedas the turning point in theCrimean campaign, thus obviously challenging the official So-viet notions of history (Aksenov 1983 [1981]). It sharply contrasts, for instance,with SeverGansovskii’s thought experimentThe Demon of History (Demon istorii, 1968). In this storythe protagonist, with the help of some mystical force, visits pre-World War I Austria-Hungary, eliminates the dictator who unleashed World War II, and in so doing bringsHitler to power.The message of this story is unambivalent: the course of history cannotbe changed, one personality can be easily replaced by another.9In this context, it is understandable that not only the outrageous Island of Crimeacould not be published in the USSR until 1990 (in Iunost/Youth’ 1–5), but also the clas-sic examples of alternate history like Philip K. Dick’sMan in theHigh Castle (1962). In thisnovel, a successful assassination attempts on Roosevelt changes history and leads to theAxis countries being victorious inWorldWar II, an alternative that was categorically un-acceptable to Soviet ideology, centred as it was on the irrevocability of the victory of theUSSR.10Therefore, Dick’s novel was only published in Russian translation in 1992 – thatis, after the collapse of the USSR.However, Ray Bradbury’s famous story ASound ofThunder (1961), in which history wasradically changed by a minor intervention in the past, was promptly translated at theend of theThaw, in 1963.This was possible since Bradbury did not deal with the events ofSoviet or Russian history or with events that were somehow sensitive for Soviet propa-ganda.3. Trauma and Resentment as a Driving Force of the Post-Soviet RussianHistorical NovelAlthough the domestic prehistory of post-Soviet alternate history, as we have seen, wassparse, in the post-Soviet space we are gradually beginning to observe its blossoming,unrestricted by censorship and –at first glance – ideological frameworks.This surge hasseveral reasons.The boom in the ‘mass production’ of alternate history novels in the former SovietUnion (but especially in Russia) in the 1990s was, of course, partly a ‘response’ to an un-spoken ban on the genre in the USSR, but there were other reasons too. As early as 2002,Boris Vitenberg referred to alternate history in Russian as “a special genre, representedby dozens of names; the number ofworks of this kind is already in the hundreds.”Amongthe reasons for this demand for the genre, the critic mentions “a natural feeling of dis-satisfaction anddisappointment caused by the brutal, sometimes simplymonstrous andshocking realities of Russian history of the past century,which have become apparent to9 Interestingly, a similar thought can be deduced from Stephen Fry’s novelMaking History (1996).10 The USSR differed from other socialist countries in this radical extent of censorship: in Poland,for example, thanks to the efforts of Stanisław Lem, a translation of The Man in the High Castle waspublished.Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 11711 Boris Strugatskii was one of the two Strugatskii brothers – the novels they co-wrote were arguablythe most popular and well-known works of Soviet fiction. Arkadii Strugatskii died in 1991, BorisStrugatskii, who had since written two novels alone and a memoir about their common literarycareer, died in 2012.themass reader.”Thewritings of contemporary Russian “alternative authors,” Vitenbergwrites, “are successful because they give rise to the pleasant and relaxing illusion thatthese sad events of the past could have been prevented in some way (ibid.: 315–327).”The first text in the post-Soviet space that was broadly discussed and reviewed wasa short novel by the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) writer Viacheslav Rybakov The GravityPlane Tsesarevich (Gravilёt Tsesarevich, 1993), which won several genre awards (includinga personal award from the famous fantasy writer Boris Strugatskii, the Bronze Snail).11An anonymous synopsis of the novel, written in 2009 on a fanzine website summarisesthe novel’s mainmessage best and its depiction of a flourishingmonarchical Russia in athriving world:[…] A world without World Wars I and II, which took the lives of millions of people.A world without a Bolshevik coup in the early twentieth century. A world without com-munism. On this Earth, the Russian Empire is leading all countries towards a brightfuture through modern technology and true ideas of humanism. (Ruddy 2009)This repetition of “without” in the description of the Russia of the future recalls the pre-viously mentioned émigré novel by Petr Krasnov from 1922: “Russia without foreigners,without speculators, without banks, without the dictates of Western Europe.” It depictsa world of high technology without great power rivalry, an arms race and everything weconsider frightening but almost inevitable concomitants of modernity and progress.Rybakov’smain protagonist, the State Security Colonel Prince Aleksandr Trubetskoi,investigates the crash of an aircraft, a “gravilёt” (i.e., with an anti-gravitation engine),which killed a crown prince of the Russian Empire. Trubetskoi discovers that the culpritof the gravilёt accident was a communist named Kislenko,who staged an act of sabotageand acted in an apparent state of lunacy. Soon, several other distraught communists arecaught by Trubetskoi’s agents.However, in theworld Rybakov describes, communists donot follow terrorist methods – communism is portrayed not as an ideology but a reli-gion, peaceful and utopian, and the “patriarch of communism” is given physical featuresthat resembleMikhail Gorbachev.Therefore, the actions of Kislenko and other terroristsare clearly not motivated by communist ideology. Looking for the reasons for their lu-nacy, Trubetskoi arrives at the villa of a certain Albrecht Haushoffer – despite spellingthe surname differently, apparently this character’s name should refer to the son of thefounder of geopolitics, Karl Haushofer. The real Albrecht Haushofer took part in the 20August 1944 plot, the failed assassination attempt against Hitler, and was killed by theNazis inMoabit Prison in April 1945 (in Rybakov’s novel, Haushoffer’s doppelganger waskilled there in 1944). In the basement of an elderly aristocrat, Trubetskoi finds a strangeconstruction:118 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zones12 First published in Oktiabr’ 2014: 1–2.13 Arabov (who died in 2023) was better known not as a novelist, but as a frequent scriptwriter forthe famous film director Aleksander Sokurov.Almost the entire space of the room was occupied by a cast-iron monster standing inthemiddle – an incongruously and awkwardly huge one, [...] stitchedwith vertical linesof rivets, surrounded by a dishevelled tangle of thick and thin, straight and crookedpipes.It lookedmore like an enormous steamengine thananything else. It reeked amile awayof the wonders of Jules-Verne-like science. (Rybakov 1997 [1993]: 185)It soon turns out that hidden inside this apparatus is a reduced, almost microscopiccopy of the Earth, inhabited bymicroscopic human beings.Thesemicro-humans are theguinea pigs in a gruesome experiment launched in the 19th century by Russian revolu-tionary-maximalist Pёtr Stupak and German scientist Otto Raschke.They created their“parallel world” in order to influence its inhabitants with chemicals andmake themwill-ing to give up any human attachments and go to their deaths for the sake of an idea.The beings created in this way inside the “cast-iron monster” unleashed the real historyof the 20th century, with Lenin, Hitler and the concentration camps. As a result of thecontinued functioning of this “steam engine,” negative psychic energy began to be trans-ferred to the harmoniousworld of “gravilёts,” causing randomvictims to become existen-tially identified with the most militant inhabitants of “micro-Earth” and to be preparedto carry out unmotivated violent acts. In the novel’s finale, Trubetskoi is about to addressthe UN Security Council with the question of what to do with this horrible device thatis inhabited, however, by reasonable andmorally responsible beings: technically it couldsimply be destroyed, but such a solution seems unacceptable to him.The novel’s message can be defined as both psychotherapeutic and escapist. Itsmainidea can be retold as follows: we live inside a global error,while reality is in fact incompa-rablymore beautiful, albeit unattainable.With such an attitude to history, the authors ofalternate history return time and again (a characteristic symptom of ‘acting out’ histor-ical trauma) to the possibility of building a utopian Russia. They use a variety of eventsfrom the early 20th century as ‘bifurcation points.’It is indicative that almost all the changes introducedby the authors of contemporaryRussian alternative history prose lead to a radical restructuring of the entire historicalpicture of the 20th century.Thus, in Iuri Arabov’s novelCollisionwith aButterfly (Stolknove-nie s babochkoi, 2014)12 Emperor Nicholas II did not abdicate in March 1917 and remainedalive.13 In the subsequent events of 1917–1918, history takes a completely different path:first the emperor arranges a secret meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II in Finland and per-suades him to agree to an armistice, and then forms an alliance with the Bolsheviks, as aresult of which Lenin becomes head of government. Consequently, at the Ipatiev houseit is not the royal family that is shot, but members of the anti-Lenin conspiracy, includ-ing Sverdlov and Stalin. Trotsky leaves to make a revolution in the United States, whileLenin, thoughwounded at theMichelson factory, recovers surprisingly quickly and,withMaria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 119the support of the emperor, hopes “to restore the capitalist market in the country, con-necting it with the Soviets” (Arabov 2014: 307) – as betting on the proletariat did not payoff.At the same time, the Tsar’s daughters grow up well. “Tatiana, who is enrolled on asewing course, has an affair with a schoolteacher who teaches the history of the FrenchRevolution” (ibid.: 309), while his other daughters also have a career. Olga works in thegovernment office, Anastasia married a diplomat and went to England, only the beauti-ful Maria cannot find a path for herself and smokes “Herzegovina Flor” (ibid.: 310; in theUSSR the cigarettes “Herzegovina Flor” were known as Stalin’s favourite tobacco prod-ucts). Moreover, the kolkhozes were never established and Lenin, transformed from afervent revolutionary into a potential corruptor, “started taking bribes, and that has beenthe best news of recent months” (ibid.: 323). That is to say, all is not well, of course, butthe alternative reality is still better than it could have been:The revolutionary impulse, like a volcano, went all to universal education and theGOELRO plan. The latter lit the ‘Ilyich bulb’ in the backwoods villages, while universaleducation taught the lazy but savvy people to read and write. Free medicine, runentirely by the state, put an end to malaria and typhus. Education in schools taughtreading Tolstoy, Chekhov and Marx. What would emerge from this symbiosis, theTsar did not know, and was a little worried about the future – was the pot boiling tooquickly? The black dishes of loudspeakers hung in the village houses broadcastingnews, folk and classical music. From the heights of telegraph poles, too, the radioshrieked. One peasant wrote to him in a letter: ‘Put up the speaker. I want to speakinto it myself’. (Ibid.: 324)14At one moment, while the bed-keeper was preparing his bed for the night, Tsar Nikolaiglanced through an economic report from the Office of the Council of People’s Commis-sars, stating that 1926 industry had reached its pre-war level, i.e., had increased morethan fivefold compared with 1921.Nevertheless,Nikolai suddenly has anunpleasant dream that he signs a renunciationand he envisions everything that followed also in ‘real history.’This ‘return to reality’ is acharacteristic narrative move of alternate history. In Russian literature, it is often usedas in Gravilёt Tsesarevitch or in the finale of the novelThe Seventh Part of Darkness (Sed’maiachast’ t’my, 1997)15 by Vasilii Shchepetnev, which will be discussed below.Aswe can see fromArabov’s novel, the themeof ‘Russiawithoutwars and revolutions’is addressednot somuchbymass literature as bywhatmight be called ‘highbrow’fiction,perhaps because these ‘peaceful’ fictions do not offer any special adventures or actionscenes, andmass literature is not too interested in ‘adventures of the spirit’.14 A twisted quote fromAndrei Platonov’s novel Kotlovan [The Foundation Pit], 1930: “Safronov listenedwith a sense of triumph, regretting only that he could not talk back into the speaker, to makeknown his readiness for all activity, for clipping horses, and his general happiness.” (Platonov 1975[1930], 56) This quote further emphasises that the ‘alternative Russia’ under monarchist rule hasall the good that came – or seemed to come – in Soviet Russia thanks to the revolution.15 First published in Ural’skii sledopyt 1998 8–19.120 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesAt the same time asThe Collision with a Butterfly, the storyThe Architect and the Monk(Arkhitektor i monakh, 2013)16 by the famous writer and journalist Denis Dragunskii waspublished. Here, in 1913 in Vienna’s Café Versailles the young men Adolf Hitler and IosifStalin meet, talk, go to meetings in socialist circles along with Trotsky, they take turnsin the bath, feel something like attraction for each other but it is not for certain, andthey argue about a child’s teardrop (in fact, Stalin did spend a short time in Vienna in1913, where he met Trotsky). Trotsky is killed at Lenin’s instigation with a meat cleaver,Lenin is drowned in a pond in revenge, Stalin is also hunted, but he escapes and findsrefuge inGod as a result of the shock. In 1922, terrorists attempt to assassinate not Leninbut the head of the country, Miliukov, who is shielded by Vladimir Nabokov Senior (aswas the case in reality – but in Berlin, not Moscow), however, unlike in ‘our’ world, hesurvives and becomes Miliukov’s successor. In 1937, Hitler is imprisoned for anti-stateagitation, in 1938he is released,meetsEvaBraunand invents the “Viennese country style”(Dragunskii 2013: 271). Overall, Dragunskii’s 20th century also looks cruel, but still lessmonstrous than in ‘our’ reality:And Metropolitan Joseph recalled his strange life in his dying hours. […] The under-ground, emigration, the monastery. What a terrible century, what enormous revolu-tions and wars! […] Why did they kill the Tsar and his family? Why were so many peo-ple put in jail and killed by Thälmann [the leader of the German communists ErnstThälmann who in Dragusnkii’s world came to power in Germany – M.G., I.K.]? And theRussian-Germanwar! Only soldiers killed eightmillion people, and civilians – it is scaryto imagine. And the fate of the Jews? Three million forcibly assimilated, one and a halfmillion resettled, and another one hundred and fifty-six thousand eight hundred andsix killed in the massacre of the forty-fourth year [...] Horrible, bloody, shameless, cyn-ical and evil century. (Ibid.: 348–349)Compared to the real losses of the 20th century, the losses of the alternative are more‘modest’, but to the protagonist (the author’s bitter irony) they rightly seemmonstrous –there is nothing to compare them to.InAleksandrSobolev’snovelGryphonsGuarding theLyre (Grifonyokhraniaiut liru,2020),which is more artistically complex and refined than Arabov and Dragunskii’s novels, theaction “takes place in Russia of the 1950s, but specifically in a Russia, where the Whiteswon, the Bolsheviks were expelled to Latvia and are stirring something up from there,where there was neither terror nor World War II and metro stations nestled among theunreconstructedMoscow squares” (Birger 2021). In general, it can be said that the alter-native history of ‘Russia without revolutions’ in the post-Soviet space turns from a liter-ature of challenge and foresight into a requiem for the unfulfilled golden 20th century, intothe literature of nostalgia.There are incomparably fewer sceptical alternative versions, like Vasilii Shchepet-nev’s story The Seventh Part of Darkness, 1997) about the non-murder of Stolypin in 1911,which leads to the preservation of the monarchy in Russia until at least 1933. But theresult is not very comforting, as a newspaper review of the story summarised it:16 First published in Znamia 2013 1.Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 121There was no First World War, the country did not become Bolshevik. Emperor Alexeiwas not very confident but ruling, the biologist Vabilov [an allusion to the great Sovietbotanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov who died of hunger in a Stalinist prison. –M.G.,I.K.] is awarded the Nobel Prize for a universal vaccine, the husband of Nadezhda Kon-stantinovna [Krupskaia; allusion to Lenin. – M.G, I.K.] is floundering in the Comintern’sRadio Liberty in Berlin under Lev Trotsky, Kaiser Wilhelm, who emigrated to Russia,is feeding at the Russian Tsar’s court, and in America, the genius Einstein is workingwith his assistant Semen Blium to create a ‘machine for travel through all dimensions’,a zero-transportation machine [...]. Nevertheless, the alternative world is going downthe drain. Russia, on the brink of a coup, is at warwith Kuomintang China and the Com-intern entrenched in Germany at the same time. The Russian General Staff, in alliancewith Japan, plans to launch military operations against the United States, for whichRussian scientists have already developed an ‘atomic’ (nuclear) bomb. There are plansfor a global use of lethal bacteriological weapons created by the same Vabilov. All themain characters of the story are about to die [...]. Blium tries to reverse the course ofevents by sending 5.2 grams of lead from 1933 to 1911. Stolypin will be assassinated.World history will become what we know from the textbooks. (Larionov 2003)It is only logical that in addition to ‘revisiting the results of the revolution’, the authorsof alternate history in Russia also address another previously taboo subject: the victoryof the Axis countries inWorldWar II (let us call this subgenre alternative Reich studies).However, we do not always end up with the seemingly expected anti-utopia. Tellingly,even such a seemingly radical version ultimately leads in many narratives to a kind of‘humanisation’ of theThird Reich.It is common to trace the beginnings of alternative Reich studies in Russia to AndreiLazarchuk’s novelThe Other Sky (Inoe nebo, 1993), subsequently revised into the novel AllThoseWhoCanHoldArms (Vse, sposobnye derzhat’ oruzhie, 1997).Thebifurcation point here isthe successful German campaign of 1941 and Hitler’s death in a plane crash in 1942. As aresult, Göring takes over power, whose policy towards the conquered territories is muchmore lenient. By 1991, the world, according to Lazarchuk, is divided between the US andBritain, which is under their protectorate, Japan, which has annexed mainland China,independent Siberia and the Reich, which, as a state formation, is held until 1991 andfalls apart as a result of a putsch (an obvious reference to the August Coup in the USSR).Already in Lazarchuk’s works, it is depicted how the decrepit Reich gradually loses itsaggressiveness.A few years later, Sergei Abramov’s even more radical novelThe Silent Angel Flew Over(Tikhii angel proletel, 1994) appears. Here the USSR surrendered in 1942, but after Hitler’sdeath from a heart attack in 1952, the country regains full independence:Over the last twenty years, perhaps, Moscow has grown rapidly upwards; glass build-ings, fragile to the eye, forty or more storeys high, impudently encircled the Boule-vard Ring, with their golden mirror windows they looked over Chistoprudnyi Boule-vard, Rozhdesvenskii Boulevard, Pokrovskii, Strastnoi, Tverskoi and other boulevards,but they did not enter the Ring with fear, the invasion had not yet taken place, themu-nicipality firmly took the architectural virginity of the old center and did not sell anyland there. [...] But a good deal of municipal money has been put to good use in the122 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesIn other words, the National Socialist regime becomes first and foremost the guarantorof Russia’s ‘organic’ development.Thenostalgicmessage here is undeniable andmaywellcompare with the alternate history versions that erase the revolution of 1917.As a last example of this strand of literature, one could name the novel The Sinolo-gist (Kitaist, 2016) by Russian Booker Prize winner Elena Chizhova.The same geopoliticaloutcome is modelled here with a protagonist, sent in 1983 from the Trans-Ural USSR tothe territory invaded by the Reich, now called Russia, who is surprised to notice similar-ities, at least in the state rhetoric and symbolic language of both countries. In the finale,however, this hero stages a coup d’état, uniting the USSR andNazi Russia into a non-con-tradictory totalitarian state.In almost all the works mentioned, the victorious Third Reich is gradually trans-formed into a less bloodthirsty state. Probably, as observers point out, the belief that anyrepressive regime tends to soften in historical perspective, especially if it is surroundedbymore liberal regimeswithwhich it is forced to interact, is atwork.Boris Vitenberg, forinstance, directly links the humanisation of Hitler’s regime in Lazarchuk’sTheOther Skyto the limited de-Stalinisation that took place in the USSR in the second half of the 1950sand the 1960s. But then he adds an important reservation: “It is indicative, however, thatPhilip K. Dick [...], unlike the later Russian ‘alternative’, considered – most likely formoral reasons – a serious liberalisation of the Nazi regime, even decades later, almostimpossible.” (Vitenberg 2004).However, Russian alternate history prose does not limit itself to the revision of theresults of the 20th century, but the whole history of the Russian state is revisited in allkindsofutopia (or perhapsof retrotopia, touseZygmuntBauman’sneologism).Rybakov,for instance, in co-authorship with the orientalist Igor Alimov under the pseudonym ofHolm van Zaichik (in Russian, “zaichik” means “a little hare”, and the whole pennameimitates the name of the Dutch sinologist and writer Robert van Gulick, the author ofdetective novels about Chinese Judge Di) have presented the reader perhaps the mostambitious project of the 2000s in the alternate history genre, the seven-volume cycleSymphony of Eurasia (Evraziiskaia simfoniia) or There are no Bad People (Plokhikh liudei net,published by Azbuka, 2000–2005). Here the fork that directed the history of Russia inanother – incomparably more favourable –way is based on the assumption that the sonof the Golden Horde’s Batu Khan, Sartaq Khan (died 1256), the sworn brother of dukeAleksandr Nevskii (1221–1263), was not poisoned by his own uncle Berke, but survived toold age, and as a result the Golden Horde (Zolotaia Orda) and Russia (Rus’) united into asingle state Ordus’ (van Zaichik 2000–2005).17 A little later, China and vast territories inthe Near and Middle East joined Ordus’. As a result, a great power with three capitals17 However,modern historians ofMedieval Eastern Slavs consider the ‘twinning’ of AleksandrNevskiiand Sartaq a fiction put forward by Lev Gumilёv, the author of disputable works on historicalthemes.restoration of, for example, ancient walls, or on durable asphalt coverings of Moscowstreets or on bright electric garlands decorating the eternal Moscow poplars on thesame boulevards. So that, then, it was beautiful for all and convenient to live and re-joice... (Abramov 2015)Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 123appeared – Khanbalyk (Peking) in the east, Karakorum in the centre, and AleksandriaNevskaia (St. Petersburg) in the north-west. It is a technically and socially super devel-oped country,which considers the people of theWest to be ‘barbarians’ but, in spite of itsmulti-ethnicity and tolerance, still bears signs of an archaic society. For example, publiccorporal punishment and polygamy are practiced here, although, according to the au-thors, the latter is humanised too.Each novel in the cycle has a detective story, but as a whole the cycle is franklypresented as a postmodernist literary play, starting from the author’s pseudonym tothe ironic cultural references, such as the reference to a popular pop song “Unbreakableunion of cultural uluses is united forever by Alexander and Sartaq”; these lines are aslightly modified opening of the Soviet Union’s anthem (text by Sergei Mikhalkov andĖl’-Registan). However, in spite of all these playful allusions, the cycle – quite in accor-dance with the title – can be considered a manifesto of new Eurasianism18: it describesa superpower based on the union of the peoples of Russia and Asia and at the same time– very importantly – directed against Western Europe and the ideas of liberalism anddemocracy associatedwith it. Regional rulers inOrdus’ are not elected, but appointed bythe capital’s authorities, so residents of the relevant region can only ask the country’s topleadership for one or another official to be placed above them – and they are all togethercalled, respectively, not the electorate, but the “demanderate” – from the French verbdemander, to ask. The state has a special kind of censorship which checks all foreigninventions for their usefulness to the state of Ordus’.Boris Vitenberg (2004) in his article gives numerous examples of van Zaichik’s anti-Western orientation: for example, the Balts deemed “practically barbarians”, for they“drink strong alcoholic beverages in the middle of the day”, and in general are “thievingpeople”. As a consequence of the “barbarianism” of the Europeans, “the Atlantic world isincreasingly becoming […] a technological appendage of Ordus’”, which, of course, is along-standing dream of Russian nationalist technocrats.The second novel in van Zaichik’s cycle,TheCase of the IndependentDervishes (Delo neza-lezhnykh dervishei, 2004), combines satire of both supporters of Ukrainian independenceand supporters of Chechen independence, for all the disparate nature of these move-ments and their consequences. The city where the action takes place is called Aslaniv:here the root of the Ukrainian name of Lviv, which in Slavic means “lion”, is replaced bythe Turkic translation of the same word – “a(r)slan”. The Russian and Western humanrights activists acting in Chechnya are portrayed in the novel in the comically grotesqueimage of a Western guest, Valeriia Kova-Levi (a portmanteau made up of the names ofRussian journalist and political speaker Valeriia Novodvorskaia, human rights activistSergeiKovalёv andFrenchphilosopher and social activistBernard-Henri Lévy),whodoesnot understand anything about Ordus’ realities. All the opponents of empire in the novelappear to be criminal and dangerous and acting only for the benefit of their own selfish-ness.The release of the novels in the Ordus’ cycle was accompanied by a hectic publicitycampaign and numerous reviews and public reactions. Irina Rodnianskaia (2002) pub-lished a review of the novel entitled “Trappers of Advanced People” (“Lovtsy prodvinutykh18 On Eurasianism cf. Bassin, Glebov, Laruelle 2015.124 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zoneschelovekov”). She characterises what is happening in Rybakov’s and Alimov’s novel cycleas “a connection of phobias: anti-Americanism,Ukrainophobia, fear of radical Islam; [...] anti-Catholicism, eradication of words of foreign origin”, and comments: “not only Latinisms, Gal-licisms and Anglicisms are eliminated [in the language of Ordus’], but also everythingthat links the Russian lexicon with Hellas – the common European cultural cradle […].”The “phobias”mentioned by Rodnianskaia became dominant, “mainstream” in Russia inthe second half of the 2000s and especially after 2014, when Ukrainophobia became partof Russian state policy and rapprochement with China becamemuchmore pronounced.In this sense, Holm van Zaichik’s novels, whether inspired by political elites or writtensimply based on a spontaneous sense of conjuncture, anticipated earlier thanmany oth-ers some important political trends that emerged in the early 2000s. In contrast to Soviettimes, a literary work of alternate history thus coincides with the state-backed politicalattitudes instead of contradicting them. But there is also another dimension that prob-ably also contributed to the success of the novel, as Boris Vitenberg noted:The reason for the success of van Zaichik’s alternative history [...] lies on the surface.It is, of course, the ‘psychotrauma’ of the collapse of the USSR. [...] This thoroughness,unhurriedness, paternal concern for citizens is well remembered from Soviet times.And many of its real characteristics as well. (Vitenberg 2004)4. Our Women and Men Back in the PastA very peculiar version of post-Soviet alternate history prose is the so-called popadantsyliterature – a highly widespread phenomenon in Russian mass culture. The wordpopadantsy is derived from the verb popadat’ (to find oneself somewhere), meaningsomeone accidently ending up elsewhere in time or space. By and large, there are severalthousand novels on the theme of “our man in the past” in the post-Soviet space (Galina2017). The concept of popadantsy is based on the fact that the protagonist in flesh, orby possessing the body of a historical character, gets to a key moment of history andchanges the course of events, moving it in a more favourable direction for Russia’sprosperity. Statistical calculations made by one of us (Maria Galina) show that the mostfrequently used periods in which the action of such novels takes place are the rule ofIvan the Terrible, the Time of Troubles, the Crimean and Japanese wars and – to a lesserextent – the October Revolution and the CivilWar.We can assume that these periods areso attractive because they are perceived as the most traumatic for Russia’s national self-perception – not per se, but thanks to the popular narratives created around them, andpartly due to the underlying contradictions in these narratives: the October Revolutionis supposedly benign because it created a Soviet state, but dangerous because it meantthe destruction of the Russian empire.However, two trends have been prevalent here in the last decades. One of them is therestoration of the USSR through the incarnation of the protagonist as a contemporaryof the 1960s and 1970s. Here we should mention the novel by Sergei Arsen’ev A Student,a Komsomol Girl, an Athlete (Studentka, komsomolka, sportsmenka, 2012), with the revealingsubtitle “Moscow, 1983. Bifurcation” and an equally revealing publisher’s synopsis:Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 125Hehas livedhis life inRussia,whichhas fallen apart.Hehas no family or loved ones left.His son died fighting NATO peacekeepers in the streets of Moscow. His granddaughterwas killed by thugswhowent rogue. His present is poverty and death in the street froma heart attack. But as it turns out, he also has a future. And in that future he is giventhe opportunity to test whether one man can turn the machine of history around. Notjust turn it, but do it without any superweapons or super-knowledge, by the power ofhis mind and a young girl’s body. (Arsen’ev 2012)Here, as we can see, the vector of resentment is directed not only at the “collapse of theempire”, but also at imagined aggression by “NATOscumbags” (ibid.).Mikhail Koroliuk’strilogy on Quintus Licinius (Kvint Litsinii, 2014, 2016, 2018) with the subtitle “To Save theUSSR”orDmitrii Lazarev’snovel cycle It’sNotTooLate (Eshchenepozdno,2012–2015) aswellas dozens of other novels and series follow the same direction (Viazovskii 2021). Almostall of them aim to save the USSR in one way or another, often by eliminating politicalreformers (Khrushchev, Gorbachev etc.).However, themost popular of all historical periodswithin the popadantsy literature iswithout doubt World War II, of which there are over a thousand texts. These narrativescanbegrouped into themes,with its time-travellingprotagonists beingable tobedividedinto the categories of the intelligence officer, the tankdriver, the counterintelligencemanand so on. A separate topic are time-travellers visiting Hitler, like the radical nationalistnovel duologybyGermanRomanovComradeFührer.TheTriumphof theBlitzkrieg (TovarishchFiurer. Triumf blitskriga, 2012) andComrade Führer.HangChurchill (Tovarishch Fiurer. Povesit’Cherchillia, 2013), published with the following editorial synopsis:A new fantasy thriller […], breaking all limits of ‘Political Correctness’! Our man at thehead of the Third Reich! A Russian hitman in the body of Adolf Hitler!Will he be able todefeat England, carrying out Operation ‘Sea Lion’ – the invasion of the British Isles?Willhe dare to lead amilitary coup to remove theNazi Party frompower anddestroy the SS?Will ‘Comrade Führer’ be able to prevent a clash with Stalin by preventing Germany’ssuicidal war against the USSR? (Ibid.)This is certainly an extreme example of rewriting the Soviet past, although it is not theonly one. On the whole, however, the impression is that the majority of works in thispool are aimed at shortening the duration of thewar and reorienting (in themost radicalcases) the vector of resentment, but not at “abolishing” this historical cataclysm, despiteits traumatic nature (Galina 2021). Because, according to sociologists,WorldWar II andits victory – at least in mass consciousness – is the only undisputed “assemblage point”of the nation, a sacred and irrevocable event (Gudkov 2004: 20–58). Today this affectiverelationship to the past enters a new stage, as for the current Russian authorities the cultof victory inWorldWar II has become a de facto civil religion, protected by a number oflegislative acts. Alternate history can only adapt to this trend.1919 One of the most active advocates of such a civil religion is Sergei Cherniakhovskii, professor of po-litical science at Moscow State University and one of the ideologists of the Communist Party of theRussian Federation, who was already calling for it as far back as the mid-2000s. Of his numerouspublications on the subject, see, for example: Cherniakhovskii 2005.126 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zones5. ConclusionAfter the collapse of the USSR and the abolition of censorship, most novels in the alter-nate history genre manifested the idea of a ‘lost paradise’ or missed opportunities re-quiring ‘correction’. Since the 1990s, a huge body of trash literature has been publishedin Russia dealing with the intervention of ‘our men’ (or women) in the past. Attempts to‘correct’ the past, in particular to prevent the collapse of the USSR and, consequently, tochange the present,have anopenly neurotic and revanchist character.As a result, there isa nostalgic trend in both popular literature andmore complex forms of fiction; however,popular literature adds a powerful vector of resentment and imagined revenge againstRussia’s ‘enemies’.This transformation of the alternate history genre into a ‘weapon of imaginary re-venge’ and, ultimately, into a tool for anti-Western and anti-liberal propaganda has in-stitutional backing, especially from big publishing houses aimed at the wider readingpublic. Unlike the USSR, where almost every version of alternate history contradictedthe officially accepted interpretation of Marxist ideology, in contemporary Russia thereis little confusion about the idea that history is infinitely malleable and changeable.Thevector of resentment that can be traced in the vast body of popular literature in the 2010sand2020s is very close to thenarratives of thepro-statemedia.However, reviewsof thesenovels on reader forums are markedly polarised, including in their assessments of theauthors’ political stance. Among the reviews there are quite favourable ones, alongsidemarkedly critical ones, which is perhaps indicative of the fragmentation of the readingcommunity.In sum, we can say that post-Soviet Russophone alternate history narratives servedifferent functions, from experimenting with previously taboo topics to replaying trau-matic moments of national history and imagining moments of ‘historical revenge’.Recent trends put forward ‘the logic of justice’ and the nostalgic vector, dreaming of arestoration of the USSR and ‘how it should have been in reality’, including the infamouspopodantsy literature aboutWorldWar II.PostscriptThischapterwaswrittenprior toRussia’s full-scale invasionofUkraine.This invasionwasaccompanied by a major rebuilding of the Russian political regime, making it not onlymore aggressive toward other countries, but also more repressive toward many minori-ties within Russia – such as LGBTQ+ and transgender people, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.The public support that the regime enjoyed in Russia during the first years of the full-scale invasion was largely based on the fact that state propaganda capitalised on – andcontinues to capitalise on – the emotions of post-Soviet ressentiment. Post-Soviet al-ternate history – as is now clear – was important because it expressed the emotions ofthe ressentiment in its purest form, except in rare instances of criticizing or analyzingthem – in the novels of Elena Chizhova, Vladimir Sorokin, and Roman Arbitman – and,partially, Aleksandr Sobolev.Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 127Theterm“ressentiment”as a sensible characteristic of theRussia’s post-Soviet societywas coined by the sociologists of Yuri Levada’s circle. Following the annexation of Crimeaand invasion in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, it determined the whole framework of theiranalysis of contemporary Russian society (Dubin 2014). In 2014, Lev Gudkov suggestedthat the ressentiment he describedwas the result of the development and delayed “after-effect” of psychological processes that spread in Russian society in the early 1990s: “Thecollapse of the Soviet order caused extensive anomic processes and a prolonged state ofmass disorientation, frustration and erosionof collective identity” (Gudkov 2022: 53–54).While writing on the first stage of invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Gudkov states: “Thetraumatic consequences of the loss […] havemanifested themselves a generation later inthe current explosionof patriotism,whichmakes sociologists think about the ‘long-term’of social change” (ibid.: 127).The transformation that Gudkov is talking about is worth considering from themethodological perspective of the history of emotions. One of the leading researchersin this field, William Reddy, introduces the concept of emotive, which is a description ofemotion that simultaneously constructs emotion as a specifically cultural reaction inthe consciousness of both the author of a statement (or a text) and his or her addressees(Reddy 2004: 96–111). Research in psychology and sociology shows that complex emo-tions are much more culturally constructed and much more the result of the subject’spersonal choices thanwas assumed previously (Scott 2015). Reddy reveals how a society’sdistinctive emotional regime is constructed, that is, a set of recognised, socially acceptedemotional reactions tied to particular situations and communities and “guided” byemotives. The most important role in the production of emotives, as Reddy shows, isplayed by literature. Pop-cultural Russophone novels in the field of alternative history –not all, but many – can be understood today as reservoirs of ressentiment emotives.The sociological significance of sci-fi for understanding ressentiment in post-SovietRussia can be indirectly confirmed by the fact that back in 2014, some very popular au-thors of Russian sci-fi – for example, Sergei Lukyanenko or Vadim Panov – openly sup-ported the war against Ukraine. Moreover, the popular and critically acclaimed sciencefiction writer Fyodor Berezin might be considered one of the scriptwriters of the earlystage of this war – in his dilogy of novelsWar 2010: Ukrainian Front (Voina 2010.UkrainskiiFront, 2009) andWar 2011: Against NATO (Voina 2011. Protiv NATO, 2010).These novels de-pict the takeover of Ukraine byWеstern countries and the struggle of Russian partisansbehind the frontline betweenNATOandRussia. In 2014,Berezin became one of the lead-ers of the separatistmovement inDonetsk (easternUkraine), and for severalmonthswasdeputy to Igor Strelkov (Girkin) – the ‘defense minister’ of the self-proclaimed DonetskPeople’s Republic. In 2022, Igor Girkin was found guilty by a court in the Netherlands fordestruction of the Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777 crash: he ordered the plane to be shotdown with a missile, believing it to be a Ukrainian military aircraft.Berezin’s role as a “scriptwriter ofwar”wasfirst described bywriter and criticDmitryBykov (2014), and soon later by journalists Kathy Young (2014) and Pёtr Silaev (2014). In2016,TheNewYorker published an interviewwith Berezin in which he referred to himself128 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesas a “Russian Tom Clancy,” (Hitt 2016)20 but articulated an obvious state of traumaticressentiment:One might see here an internal tension characteristic for the post-Soviet Russia’s massculture in general (L’vovskii 2011). Berezin regrets the collapse of the Soviet Union, butat the same time he tries to follow the style of American thriller novels, more precisely,the “technothrillers” of Tom Clancy, whose translations could not be published in theUSSR because the writer publicly expressed his dislike for the Soviet leadership (Arbit-man 1996).June 2024ReferencesAbramov, Sergei (2015): “Tikhii angel proletel.” [1994] In: Ibid.: Trebuetsia chudo (Fan-tasticheskaia dinastiia Abramovykh, 7), Moskva: Sam sebe izd. https://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/A/ABRAMOV_Aleksandr,_ABRAMOV_Sergey/Fantasticheskaya_dinastiya_Abramovyh._T.07.(2015).[rtf-ocr].zip [30 September 2023].Aksenov, Vasilii (1983): The Island of Crimea [1981], New York: RandomHouse.Arabov, Iurii (2014): Stolknovenie c babochkoi,Moskva: AST.Arbitman, Roman (1996): “Iz chego sdelano kreslo prezidenta SSHA.” In: Novyi mir5, (https://magazines.gorky.media/novyi_mi/1996/5/iz-chego-sdelano-kreslo-prezidenta-ssha.html) [1 June 2024].Arbitman,Roman (2009): “Kroshka syn,papa Sėm i rzhavye grabli.Rossiiskaia fantastikakak Neulovimyi Mstitel’.” In: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 1, pp. 223–228.Arsen’ev, Sergei (2012): Studentka, komsomolka, sportsmenka,Moskva: Ėksmo, (http://samlib.ru/a/arsenxew_s_w/cbuffersvet22doc.shtml) [30 September 2023].Bassin, Mark/Sergey Glebov/Marlene Laruelle (eds.) (2015): Between Europe and Asia:The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, Pittsburgh: Universityof Pittsburgh Press.Clancy did not take part in the actions of terrorist groups, but only described their activities – andwithout much enthusiasm, to put it mildly.By studying the evolution of post-Soviet novels in the realm of alternate history, onecan reconstruct it as a transformation of ressentiment into the mode of imaginary re-venge against the collective West. This visionary revenge was accompanied and fueledby Russia’s real wars in Chechnya (1994–1996 and 1999–2009), Georgia (2008), Ukraine(since 2014) and Syria (since 2015).20 In our opinion, Berezin’s self-comparison with the American writer is wrong, at least because Tom[The Soviet Union] was a special civilization, and now I mourn for it. Russia today is acapitalist country like the United States—not like the Soviet Union, which representeda new type of civilization inwhich you can livewithout undermining or exploiting otherpeople. One day I hope it will be reborn. Maybe in some other country. (Ibid.)Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 129Birger, Liza (2021): “10 knig, s kotorykh stoit nachat’.” In: Pravila zhizni, 7 Jan-uary, 2021 (https://www.pravilamag.ru/letters/233963-10-knig-s-kotoryh-stoit-nachat-2021-god/) [30 September 2023].Bestuzhev-Lada, Igor (1997): “Retroal’ternativistika v filisofii istorii.” In: Voprosy filosofii8, pp. 112–122.Brooks, Van Wick (1918): “On Creating a Usable Past.” In: The Dial, 11 April 1918, pp.337–341.Butter Michael (2009): The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002, NewYork: Palgrave MacMillan.Bykov, Dmitrii (2014): “Voina pisatelei. Ukrainskie sobytiia byli predskasany i osushch-estvleny avtorami boevoi fantastiki.” In: Novaia Gazeta 74, 9 July, 2014.Cherniakhovskii, Sergei (2005): “Velikaia voina i grazhdanskaia religiia Rossii.” In:Agentstvo politicheskikh novostei – Nizhnii Novgorod, 22 June 2005 (https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=1447) [30 September 2023].Dragunskii, Denis (2013): Arkhitektor i monakh,Moskva: AST.Dubin, Boris (2014): “Nartsissizm kak begstvo ot svobody.” In: Vedomosti, 27 Au-gust, 2014 (https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2014/08/27/narcissizm-kakbegstvo-ot-svobody) [1 June 2024].Engels, Friedrich (1895): “Ein zweiter Brief von Friedrich Engels.” In: Der SozialistischeAkademiker 20, pp. 373–374.Galina,Maria (2017): “Vernut’sia i peremenit’. Al’ternativnaia istoriia Rossii, kak otrazhe-nie travmaticheskikh tochek massovogo soznaniia postsovetskogo cheloveka.” In:Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 146, pp. 258–271.GalinaMaria (2020) “Ressentiment andPost-traumatic Syndrome inRussianPost-SovietSpeculative Fiction: Two Trends.” In:Mikhail Suslov/Per-Arne Bodin (eds.),The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia. Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia, London/New York: I.B. Taurus, pp. 39–60.Galina, Maria (2021): “Post-Imperial Resentments: Alternative Histories of World WarII in Popular Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction.” In: Matthias Schwartz/Nina Weller/HeikeWinkel (eds.): AfterMemory.WorldWar II inContemporaryEasternEuropeanLiteratures, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 171–195.Galina, Marina/Kukulin, Ilya (2021): “Al’ternativnaia istoriia. Romany o ‘popadantsakh’.”In: Vera Dubina/Andrei Zavadskii (eds.): Vse v proshlom: teoriia i praktika publich-nykh istorii, Moskva: Novoe izdatel’stvo, pp. 155–186.Gallagher, Catherine (2010): “Telling It like It Wasn’t.” In: Pacific Coast Philology 45, pp.12–25.Gudkov, Lev (2004): “Negativnaia identichnost’.” Stat’i 1997–2002 godov,Moskva: Novoeliteraturnoe obozrenie, “VSTIOM-A”.Gudkov, Lev (2022): “Resentimentnyi nationalizm.” In: Lev Gudkov: Vozvratnyi totalita-rizm. V dvukh tomakh. Vol. 1, Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obosrenie, pp. 47–156.Hellekson Karen (2001): The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Kent/Ohio/London:The Kent State University Press.Hitt, Jack (2016): “The Russian Tom Clancy is on the Front Lines for Real.” In: The NewYorker, 7 January, 2016 (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-russian-tom-clancy-is-on-the-front-lines-for-real) [1 June 2024].130 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesKrasnov, Petr (1922): Za chertopolokhom. Fantasticheskii roman, Berlin: Izdatel’’stvoOl’gi D’iakoboi i Ko, (http://az.lib.ru/k/krasnow_p_n/text_0100.shtml)) [30 Septem-ber 2023].Larionov, Vladimir (2003): “Moglo byt’ i khuzhe.” In: Knizhnoe obozrenie 27, 27 January.Leibov,Roman (2023): PoemaPushkina“GrafNulin”.Opytkommentirovannogochteniia.The University of Tartu Press.Liao, Pei-Chen (2020): Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction:Transnational andMultidirectional Memory, Switzerland: Springer Nature.L’vovskii, Stanislav (2011): “A Crick in the Neck.” In: Russian Social Science Review 52/6,pp. 91–98.Marks, Karl/Ėngel’s Friedrich (1966): Sochineniia. Vol. 39, Moskva: Izdale’stvo politich-eskoi literatury.Platonov, Andrey (1975): The Foundation Pit [1930]. Tanslated by Mirra Ginsburg, NewYork: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.Podol’nyi,Roman et al. (1980): “Istoriia: neizbezhnoe i sluchainoe.” In: Znanie – sila 1/631,pp. 38–40.Reddy, William M. (2004): The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History ofEmotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rodnianskaia, Irina (2002): “Lovtsy prodvinutykh chelovekov. O ‘Evraziiskoi simfonii’Khol’ma Van Zaichika.” In: Russkii Zhurnal, 18 July 2002 (http://old.russ.ru/krug/20020717_rodn.html) [30 September 2023].Ruddy (2009): “Comment on” Viachslav Rybakov’s ‘Gravilёt ‘Tsesarevitch’.” In: fantlab.ru[n.d.] (https://fantlab.ru/work7303) [30 September 2023].Rybakov,Viacheslav (1997): “Gravilёt ‘Tsesarevitch’.” [1993] In: Sochineniia v 2-kh tomakh.Vol. 1, Moskva: Terra, pp. 7–205.Scott,Harris (2015): An Invitation to the Sociology of Emotions, London/NewYork: Rout-ledge.Silaev, Pёtr (2014): “Kak fantasty predskasali voinu na Ukraine.” In: Afisha Daily, 5September, 2014 (https://daily.afisha.ru/archive/vozduh/books/kak-fantasty-predskazali-boi-za-vostok-ukrainy/) [1 June 2024].Shchepetnev, Vasilii (2002): “Sed’maia chast’ t’my.” [1997] In: Temnye zerkala, Moskva:AST, pp. 5–210.Thiess, Derek J. (2015): Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader, Lanham:Lexington Books.Toynbee, Arnold J. (1969): “If Alexander the Great had Lived On.” In: Toynbee, ArnoldJ. (ed): Some Problems in Greek History 4, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.418–487.Toynbee, Arnold (1979): “Esli by Aleksandr ne umer togda.” In: Znanie – sila 12, pp. 39–42.Van Zaichik, Kholm [Rybakov, Viachslav/Alimov, Igor’] (2000–2005): Evraziiskaia sim-foniia, St. Petersburg: Azbuka.Viazovskii, A. Garik (2021): “Polnaia ėntsiklopediia popadantsev v proshloe, 26-ia redak-tsiia.” In: Zhurnal “Samizdat”: Litobzor, (http://samlib.ru/o/odinokij_gawriil/popadanec26.shtml) [30 September 2023].Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin: Alternative Versions of the Past and the Future 131Vitenberg, Boris (2002): “Ob istoricheskom optimizme, istoricheskom pessimizme igosudarstvennom podkhode istorii (Po povodu novykh knig A.L. Ianova i Iu.N.Afanas’eva).” In: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 54/2, pp. 315–327 (https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2002/2/ob-istoricheskom-optimizme-istoricheskom-pessimizme-i-gosudarstvennom-podhode-k-istorii-po-povodu-novyh-knig-a-l-yanova-i-yu-n-afanaseva.html) [30 September 2023].Vitenberg, Boris (2004): “Igry korrektirovshchikov (Zametki na poliakh ‘al’ternativnykhistorii’).” In: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 66/2, pp. 281–293.Young, Kathy (2014): “The Sci-FiWriters’War.” In: Slate, 11 July, 2014 (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/science-fiction-writers-predicted-ukraine-conflict-now-theyre-fighting-it.html) [1 June 2024].Chapter 6:Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate HistoriesThe Soviet Past in Role-Playing GamesDaniil Leiderman1. IntroductionThis article explores the representation of the Soviet past and experience in contempo-rary role-playinggamesboth inRussia andabroad.Scholars likeAdamChapmanhavear-gued the need to take games seriously as historical epistemologies,with a significant im-pact onhowplayers enjoying suchgamesperceivehistory (cf.Chapman2016).Myclaim isthat the epistemologies of role-playing games represent the Soviet historical experiencequite differently from conventional academic and popular historiography by demand-ing that players take responsibility for the course and outcome of history as representedwithin the game. By making history playful, decoupling it from a commitment to thecontinuities and inevitabilities of history, such games paradoxically accentuate the roleof personal agency.Games appropriate history as a space for playwith the experiences and identities anyhistorical moment prescribes as possible, yet without necessarily demanding any com-mitment to accuracy: for instance,amedieval game settingmight let youplay as a knight,but what thismeans will be accurate in some respects (wearing armour and riding a warhorse) and inaccurate in others (fighting dragons). Both the commitment to and the ne-glect of historical facts structure the fantasy – so you can have your horse and the dragontoo. When games apply this paradoxical fantasy structure to the representation of spe-cific and recent history, rather than vaguely defined distant history – for instance, set-ting the game in World War II instead of the ‘medieval era’ – the result is still both theverisimilitude of historicity and a departure from it (e.g., you fight againstHitler and hisinner circle, but also defeat them with your own hands, and Hitler is a giant robot).Thesame dynamic of intermittent commitment to historicity applies however, so the appealto history fuels the very fantasy calling for major changes to historical continuity. Themore compelling a game’s representation of a historical moment, the more interestingit becomes to intervene in it, to change what you know to have happened, and if to fail,then to fail meaningfully. History and historical continuity become territorialised in the134 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesgame as interactive and explorable ludic objects, comparable to the kinds of traversableboards or maps that historically territorialise everything from adulthood to economicsin various board games (Life, Monopoly, etc.).This territorialisation of history does not have to be particularly accurate or truthful.It can be very rudimentary: for instance, a first-person multiplayer shooter represent-ing World War I trench warfare, would use historical elements (e.g., World War I-erauniforms and weapons) and offer a specific historical experience (harrowing trench-to-trench combat, bayonets etc.), but no context or historicity otherwise (the player’s avataris adisposablebodywithno identity,past or future,when theavatardies, theplayerkeepsplaying with another avatar). At the same time, there are also more sophisticated exam-ples, which engage with history deeply, using ludic identity and the personal memoryof ludic phantasmagoria as though they were primary experiences. Players live anotherlife and its history as though it was their own, however simulacral, and make choicesmeaningful to themselves, but also inseparable from the representation of history fram-ing them within the game. Such representations attempt to territorialise the confusingterrain of history, to take ownership of it in a way that both explores what actually hap-pened, and intervenes in it, potentially creating an alternate history, but in either caseoffering a fantasy of sovereignty within history.2. Playing with Alternate HistoriesIn her book, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction(2018), literary scholar and historianCatherine Gallagher argues for alter-histories as animportant form of moral argument, citing the example of when in[…] prosecutions of war crimes against humanity […] prosecutors often respond by in-stancing people in similar situations who refused to cooperate with the criminal ac-tions. They thus construct norms for alternatives in which the victimsmight have goneunmolested if the perpetrators held themselves to higher levels of accountability. Andthey often further claim that convicting the perpetrators will set a precedent for theadoption of new norms by the agents of the state, who will no longer consider them-selves immune to prosecutions. (8)Gallagher concludes that “the counter-factual mode’s ambition [is] to shape historyrather than merely record, analyze, or understand it” (ibid.). Thus, games employingcounter-factual modes are directly invested in a historical exegesis or an ideologicalreckoning and are anything but frivolous in tackling the subject of historical memoryand trauma. As historical representations, they can easily be faulted for being entirelyfocused on entertainment, with no interest in engaging with actual historical events asanything beyond a colourful backdrop. However, if Gallagher’s argument is taken seri-ously, they should also be considered as shaping history and taking responsibility for itin a way that is not strictly about entertainment, or is about entertainment in a peculiarway – allowing for unusual fantasy realisation that is not simply oriented towards gra-tuitous violence, but towards viscerally imagining a historical moment, or even shapingDaniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 135thatmomentwith your own hands. After all, a game that only offers violence as a fantasydoes not need to go to the trouble of creating historical verisimilitude – there are plentyof such games set in zombie apocalypses, alien landscapes, abstract terrains and othersettings that are not overdetermined with historicity. Instead, what becomes apparentis that there is a reciprocity in historical games: they produce historicity because theplayer demands it, needs it to realise a fantasy of historical agency.This argument resonates strongly with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s thesis aboutgames as a whole, laid out in his book Games: Agency as Art (2020),where he writes:The designer creates, not only the world which players will act, but the skeleton of theplayers’ practical agency within that world. The designer designates players’ abilitiesand goals in the game. The designer’s control over the nature of the players’ agency ispart of the game. The game designer sculpts the game’s activity. The game designercrafts for players a very particular form of struggle, and does so by crafting both a tem-against. In other words, the medium of the game designer is agency […] games are theart of agency. (17)For C.Thi Nguyen, games’ use of agency, however truncated, is the medium’s definitiveformal feature, but in the case of games attempting to territorialise history, Gallagher’smodel of thealter-historical becomesparticularly important. If both scholars’ argumentsare valid, then suchgamesnot only engage agency,butmoralise itwith rhetorical appealstowards shaping history. If for Nguyen games are a medium of agency, historical gamesturn the full weight of that agency to the problem of what can be learned from historyand what pleasures can be wrung from engaging with a distant historical moment.3. Agency and Role-Playing GamesRole-playing games (hereafter RPGs) are a type of game that grew out of Gary Gygaxand Dave Arneson’s tactical fantasy dungeon-crawler Dungeons and Dragons (hereafterD&D) (1974), but today embrace a much vaster and more diverse set of possible games,play-styles and genres.There are both table-topRPGs and computerRPGs,but computerRPGsgrew from the table-top legacy andoften emulate or aspire to emulate table-top ex-periences, as table-top RPGs allow for far greater improvisation and freedomon the partof theplayer.Every table-topRPGworks through collaborative storytelling constrictedbya set of rules, which are either interpreted collectively, or in the case of computer RPGs,programmed into the game, with the game designers scripting the story and whateverchoices it will permit. In a typical table-top game, one player takes charge as the ‘GameMaster’ (hereafter GM) and describes aworld and its inhabitants, troubles and obstacles,using the rules to arbitrate interactions within it for the other players.The other playersuse the rules to create characters (hereafter PCs for ‘PlayerCharacters’) in thatworld, andplay as those characters, making decisions and changes in the world represented by theGM.porary practical agency for us to inhabit and a practical environment for us to struggle136 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesAll players roll polyhedral dice to generate random numbers, establishing the failureor success of their actions on the basis of the dice rolls and rules. In computer RPGs, thecomputer handles this aspect of the game. In both cases, the aim is to make the story-telling unpredictable, creating the drama and the pleasure of the game.While everyoneinvolvedhas some fantasyofhowthenarrativeought todevelop, thedice create thepossi-bility of surprise (e.g., theplayersmight fail to achieve their goals completely,and insteadof a cinematic victory, suffer a crushing defeat). This makes the narrative interesting tothe players, since they themselves cannot conclusively say how the game will end, andthus the risks they take within the game feel authentic andmeaningful. Similarly,moraland ethical choices feel significant because they are not controlled by chance and allowfor the expression and exploration of identity.InD&D,players took the part of adventurers exploring a fantasyworld full of treasureand dangerous monsters. D&D identities were limited by the genre of fantasy, but nev-ertheless became complex explorations of moral agency, with players able to play bothtraditional heroes and villains, or otherwise ‘evil’ characters, and pursue expressly evilgoals within the game – e.g., raising armies of monsters to destroy society. This incor-porationofmoral and ethical dilemmas is consistentwith other role-playinggames,evenas they represent totally different contexts, genres, or identities: from science fiction tocontemporary life.Gallagherhistoricises theoriginsof thealter-history to theworkofGottfriedLeibniz,arguing that for this Enlightenment philosopher, the creation of alternate histories wasan important way of imagining and rationalising the subjectivity of God:[…] [Leibniz] posited a new mode of being for all of those unrealized possibilities bylocating them in ‘possible worlds.’ The invention of these realms was a way of recon-ciling the fact of evil in this world with God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and unfailingbeneficence, as well as with the freedom of both divine and humanwill […] The Theod-icy thus inspired later writers to combine counterfactual history with religious apolo-getics, explicating historical events, especially the most apparently incomprehensibleand horrific, as preferable to other possibilities; and it also gave the enterprise its com-Alter-history inGallagher’s readingof Leibniz tries to capture theperspective ofGod,an-ticipating or imagining an omniscience so as to understand and even justify it, gaininga clarity about real history. In games, however, this is further complicated by the playernot only imagining this omniscience, but embodying it, through the ability to rememberdifferent outcomes in the same game, saving and reloading and other practices commonto digital games. In table-top games, you subordinate yourself to chance as a player, butstill exercise a divine perspective – for instance, if a character drinks wine from a goblet,they donot know if they have beenpoisonedor not,but the player playing themdoeswithcertainty, as the GM told them, and indeed they are likely responsible for making a noteof it and keeping track of the poisoning in the game (or cheating and ‘forgetting’ about ituntil reminded by the GM).The divine gaze sought by alter-history, and the personal, in-dividual gaze empowered with sovereignty by RPGs, here hybridise into a vantage pointthat combines the traits of both, despite their apparent irreconcilability.parative emphasis […]. (2018: 18–19)Daniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 137You are omniscient, capable of quantifying and leveraging every aspect of your iden-tity into shaping history as a sovereign agent, but you are also limited and prejudiced,lockedwithin the historical contingencies and political inevitabilities spelled out on yourcharacter sheet. In ahistorical RPG,you are both the playerwhoknowshowhistory reallywent, and the PC, caught up in a whirlwind of historical events and desperate to changethem to their will. This treatment of history entangles it in several contradictory modesof representation, interactively collapsing politics, ideology, history, and private subjec-tivity together. What is the goal of such a venture? Is it to clarify or obfuscate? To forcehistory to make sense, or force the player to make sense of it?4. The Objects of StudyI am going to explore four RPGs all of which represent Soviet histories and alter-histo-ries, offering post-Soviet landscapes as a comparable terrain to the haunted dungeons ofD&D. These games are all by East European designers, and all equally full of dangeroustrials and weighty moral decisions, tailored to the ideological and historical trauma ofthe Soviet experience: 74 (1980s, 2017), Red Land (Krasnaia zemlia, 2011), Atom RPG (2018),andDisco Elysium (2019).74 is a board game, initially created by anonymous Soviet nonconformists in the1980s, and then donated to Memorial, which published 74 as both a board game andpolitical work of art. It asks players to play through the whole of Soviet history, keepinga kind of familial record of the historical traumas experienced by the player’s avatars.RedLand is a historical RPGset in the revolutionary periodof 1917–1924,where amag-ical anomaly gave everyone’s political ideology magical weight, pitting Red revolution-ary mad science against the angel-summoning of the White army, while demonically-possessed revolutionaries realise themetaphor in Fёdor Dostoevskii’sThePossessed (Besy,1872) literally.The warring ideologies are accentuated with magic, allowing for an exag-gerated examination of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary values.Atom RPG is a post-apocalyptic role-playing computer game, an explicit ode to theclassic American series of post-apocalyptic role-playing computer games focused on1950s America and the Western landscape (Fallout (1997) and Fallout 2 (1998)), but aboutthe USSR and the Soviet landscape. Like Fallout, Atom is loaded with historical referencesto the post-Soviet 1990s, effectively imagining the post-Soviet world as an apocalypseand demanding that the player make meaningful choices for the future of this world.Finally, Disco Elysium is a critically acclaimed and philosophically complex mysterycomputer RPG created by an Estonian anarchist collective (ZA/UM),which imagines thepost-Sovietworld through thefigure of an amnesiac policeman coming to termswith thecomplexities of ideology and identity in the wake of the collapse of communism underneoliberal forces.I have chosen these four because they represent a vast spectrum of role-playingexperiences andmedia, but all focus on Soviet and post-Soviet history as a central objectof play and inquiry, and all directly hold players responsible for this history, whetheras passive witnesses (who nevertheless have a responsibility to witness), or as active138 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesshapers, whose intervention not only explores history, but changes it, or responds to itwith sovereignty and urgency regarding the contemporary moment.The RPG as a genre promises a range of agency within the phantasmagoric worldshaped by play, or perhaps even sovereignty over it – an allure key to the entertainmentthat they offer, as well as to the power fantasy. Facedwith a nemesis, the PCmight defeatthem in combat, trick them with a clever ploy, join them in building their evil empire,perish while trying, or leave altogether. All options consistent with the emergent narra-tive are within the player’s range of agency, limited only by their ability to narrate thedecision, and carry it out using the power that the gamemechanics offer their character– frommartial skill tomagic spells. RPG computer games have historically attempted tomaintain this legacy: for instance, the aforementioned Fallout series is particularly no-table for havingmultiple possible means of resolving challenges within the game (mem-orably, in Fallout: NewVegas (2010) persuading a reaving army that their economicmodelis unsustainable).This leads to a ready contradiction inRPGs focusedonor set in real history: a player ina fantasy game who just defeated a tyrannical dragon-king and liberated their kingdomis still within an internally consistent phantasmagoria – there are always more dragonsto slay. But what if the game is historical, set in 1938, and the player characters just over-threw Stalin? How does the narrative of the game proceed from there, without exitingor rupturing the very historical context that originally defined the game’s setting?Thereis an intrinsic friction as sovereign choice grates against the specific and stable circum-stances of history necessary for organising a historical narrative or setting.The private experiences of the PCs do not always collide with history in this fash-ion. Indeed, if we imagine the game described above playing out, before overthrowingStalin, the players necessarily first inhabited the Stalinist setting for a meaningful pe-riod of time, both in the game and out of it, in their solitary day-dreams, and collectively,meeting for a fewhours everyweek,establishing theirworld, their PCs’ relationships andvalues, overcoming challenges and likely only overthrowing Stalin at the conclusion of aprolonged narrative arc.There would likely be tense coded conversations, close brusheswith the KGB, perhaps a terrifying interrogation or the brutal death of either a playeror someone close to the players. Players tend to consciously bring in familiar literaryand cinematic tropes, while the randomness introduced by the dice makes the narrativeemergent (does your character live or die, trick the interrogator, or break?) The experi-ences shaped by such play are alternate histories, but these alter-histories are peculiarfor having been experienced personally, with players inhabiting or surviving a phantas-magoria of Stalinism in the 1930s, that they themselves imagined; likely both inaccurate,loaded with images from other fictional media, and still paradoxically earnest in the at-tempt to capture the historical moment, or bring it to life in the collective imaginationof the players.The unpredictability of the emergent narrative neverthelessmakes the ex-perience feel less like literature or theatre, and more like life, defying scriptedness withturns of fortune or misfortune driven by the dice. Consequently, rather than feeling asthough they have read a history, players feel as though they have lived one.Daniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 1395. Witnessing History: Memorial’s 74 and the Suspension of SovereigntyThefirst RPG Iwould like to discuss is not entirely anRPG. It is a board gamewith a trackand does not allow for too many meaningful choices – for the most part, players roll thedice andmove the appropriate amount experiencinghistorical andpersonal events.This,as I will show, is an important component of its rhetoric, supplemented by a device fromrole-playing games, where at the conclusion of the game, players are asked to narratetheir PC’s personal history under the USSR. All RPGs are structured around a certainfreedom of choice, while 74 (1980s, author unknown), is consciously choiceless, offeringno opportunity to take agency, other than through this finalising narration that turns thegame into a kind of family history. At the same time, unlike the racetrack board gameswhose formal structure it adopts, 74’s track does not represent capturable territory, butrather a full span of history: 74’s space can only be passed through, never won.The currently available version of 74was released and re-designed in 2017 and madeavailable fordownloadorpurchasebyMemorial, thehuman rights organisationdeclareda ‘foreign agent’ in Russia in 2016, and which was ordered to liquidate by the SupremeCourt of the Russian Federation for alleged violation of the “Foreign Agent” Law on 28December 2021.The title 74 reflects the number of years that the Soviet Union lasted – the donatedoriginal was untitled. According to Memorial, 74 was made anonymously as a samizdatart project at some point in the 1980s (“74. Nastol’naia igra po sovetskoi istorii”). It is notclear how many copies of the original game were created, likely very few.The copy usedas a basis for the 2017 release was gifted to Memorial in 2009 by Susanna Pechuro, whoreceived it from Liubov’ Kabo (ibid.). Memorial’s 74 juxtaposes private existential expe-rience and angst by framing it against the whole span of the Soviet experiment from 1917to 1991, mapped onto a board game track. The overall structure of the game is a tradi-tional racetrack, a genre of games commonly played by children who enjoy rolling diceuntil the game ends, but generally disliked by adults who want to make choices in theirgames.Here the game spatially begins in 1917 and ends in 1991, but everyone reaches 1991in due time, making racing an unimportant part of the game, with the focus instead onthe historical and personal experiences accumulated along the way.In 74, players follow two courses – the personal and historical, with separate circu-lar tracks marking off the chronotopes of the prison camp and the international trip,where player pieces may move due to events in the game. However, the major emphasisin 74 is on characters, as each player begins with a discrete profession – at first,Worker,Labourer or Past-Person (pre-revolutionary elite), and quickly accumulates new roles inresponse to historical events, becoming a Soldier, Expert, Chekist, Enemy of the People,or after de-Stalinisation, a Marginal.140 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesFigure 6.1: Cards from 74 (2017)Left: Chekist. Caption: Work in national security isn’t for everyone, acquaintances behave carefullywith you. In red:This character cannot go to jail. Arrest means execution by firing squad; Right:Enemy of the People. Caption: Political charges and the camps are a mark for life, and your healthis ruined. In red: A player with this character cannot expend private life cards. All private life eventsaffect the enemy of the people.These accumulations of identities are accompanied and shaped both by historicalevents and private events which appear as the PCs traverse both the historical andpersonal tracks. Private events are by-and-large tragedies or problems, while historicalevents are not necessarily tragic, except insofar as they represent historical trauma.Thus, for instance, the card “1937:The Great Terror” demands that players roll a six-sideddie, going to the camps on one to five as an Enemy of the People, or becoming a Chekiston a six. This means players fundamentally have no control over the vicissitudes theiralter-egos suffer from history. This is clearly a device, as one of the consequences ofbecoming an Enemy of the People is being subject to all, rather than only some eventson the personal track (and these tend to be terrible). In effect, the game models theexperience of the Enemy of the People by having them experience more of the gamedirectly – an intensification of the normal play experience – you are swept along by thewaves of history more powerfully than the other players, but all of you lack control overwhere history sweeps you – to a camp or into the KGB – and that is the point.This type of representation transforms the basic epistemology of the game into a per-sonal narrative generator –players do not choose to join the repressive apparatus or per-ish heroically, it happens to them automatically, due to the roll of the dice, but chancehere produces the distinct feeling of authenticity. It is no longer a stranger that dies inthe camps or joins the repressive authorities – your fate is in play.The designers drive inthis implicationwith their end-game ruleswhich request that players goaround the tableDaniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 141telling their personal and typically tragic story of the Soviet experiment by reading theiridentity cards in sequence and filling in the details via improvised narration.This twistresonates with role-playing games, creating a fascinating situation where the deliveryof an ideological or rhetorical message is not couched in a pedagogical tone of knowingauthority, but offered first to chance and then to the players themselves for articulation.This recitation of the family history is a player’s only opportunity to express their agencywithin the game, allowing for the greatest freedom in either coming to terms with theirPC’s actions and experiences, or framing them in ameaningfulway.What seemed to be arepresentation of history as a torrent of chance and fate, detached from personal choiceor responsibility transforms at the end, suddenly holding players personally responsiblefor witnessing andmemorialising their alter-history.74 is not about simulating theGreat Terror – it is about simulating the life of ordinarypeople as the Great Terror passes over them, as they are threatened by the authoritarianapparatus or co-opted by it. Its epistemology is drastically different from the vantagepoint of traditional history, but it is equally different from that of the personal journal –juxtaposing the two, collapsing one into the other and, most significantly, investing theplayer with the obligation to make sense of it – to take up a fictional epistemology andmake it compellingly their own. Sovereignty of choice appears to be a wilfully missingfactor from the game play of 74, a fantasy that consciously will not be indulged. But isn’tsovereignty the utopian promise of such games and their experiments with identities?6. Exacerbating Politics with Magic: Red Land’s Experimentwith Ideological IdentityNumerous games from the post-Soviet world, however, have attempted to experimentwith allowing sovereignty, even an excess of sovereignty that derails and destabilises his-tory, oncemore relying on the devices of role-playing games, and thus the central deviceI located within 74: the juxtaposition of history represented as set in stone, or as an un-controllable current, and the opportunities for agency offered by personal or private al-ter-histories.Red Land (2010–11) by “Shtab’Dukhonina”, a Russian collective composed ofEgor Borskovskii, Konstantin Trofimenko,Mikhail Shalupaev, and Ivan Ian’kov, is a par-ticularly interesting example, because it further empowers this personal vantage pointwhile exploring a discrete temporal territory – the Revolution of 1917 and the civil warthat followed – through a role-playing game.Red Land uses Savage Worlds (2003), an RPG rule system designed to be genre-neu-tral, accommodating every conceivable narrative, from superheroes to regular people’sexperiences, as a basis.RedLand adds its own content and tilts the SavageWorld system torepresent the October Revolution and ensuing civil war. The rules thus encompass his-torically appropriate identities, professions, skills, weapons and munitions. However,Red Land also adds a supplementary magic system structured around the four playablefactions within the Red Land: the “Reds” or Communists, the “Whites” or Monarchists,the “Greens” representing the vantage point of villagers advocating a traditional way oflife, and the “Blacks” representing either anarchists or professional criminals.Players areto choose their PC’s faction, and there is no obligation to choose the same faction – so142 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesplayers could both be collaborating and opposing one another, depending on the sort ofstory they are all interested in telling. Similarly, the role of magic is entirely up to theplayers: it is possible that a given groupwill either focus onmagic or ignore it altogether.Nevertheless, themagical system complicates and accentuates the representation of thehistorical civil war. Ideologies arematerialised and literalised here: for instance, a playerwhose character is a White cavalry officer, who in a moment of crisis prays for salvationfrom the godless Reds, might find an actual angel manifesting in accordance with therules of the game.This is the case for all the ideologies involved: Red magic relies on ‘scientific’ experi-ments using historical materialism and a lot of human blood,Marxist cyborgs and vam-pire-locomotives.Whitemagic relies on summoning the ghosts of the Imperial past andterrifying Biblical angels, as well as on strict parochial social hierarchies. The magic ofthe “Greens” is all about rejecting industrialmodernity for the united forces of Pan-Slavicwitchcraft andpaganism.Blackmagic isnot representedasmagic at all, rather as incred-ible luck that allows criminals and anarchists to escape prosecution but is also fuelledby actual demonic possession – an apparently conscious literalisation of Fëdor Dosto-evskii’sThe Possessed (or Demons) on the part of the designers.The designers also addeddozens of texts: faux-newspaper clippings,manifestos, underground agitation and oth-ers, both imitating historical materials and supplying alter-historical plot hooks and de-tails hinting at the supernatural or magic.Rather than playing conventional slay-the-dragon adventures, the game focuses onthe historical events and scenarios of the Revolution and civil war. Instead of becomingknights and wizards, players become Bolsheviks agitating in revolutionary Petrograd, aband of Cossack bandits on the front, commissars rooting out counter-revolutionaries,a folk uprising in the shtetl – or any other conceivable scenario appropriate to the set-ting and exacerbated by the presence of ideologically-chargedmagic.Gameplay requiresa particular commitment to a historical verisimilitude. In games like 74, a roll of the diceis all it takes to become a Chekist or a political prisoner, in Red Land each player has toask themselves what it means to be a Chekist or a political prisoner, and then act accord-ingly, as part of the collective fiction developing in the course of play.This verisimilitudeis absolutely vital here, because otherwise you might as well be playing D&D and askingyourself what it means to be a wizard or elf – identities not intrinsically limited by 20thcentury political ideology and its onerous demands. It is the intensity of Revolutionarypolitics and the specificity of the historical moment, and the identities it allows and fos-ters, that define Red Land as a setting.Historical consistency in Red Land is a double-edged sword. It delimits agency, forinstance, by forcing players to act as a Bolshevik orWhite officer of noble birth would (orhow they imagine they would), acting out their character’s identity both to their benefitand their detriment.However, this consistency also permitsmeaningful interventions inhistory: successfully assassinating Lenin, or indeed making him immortal, or any othersuchacts arepossible,provided theplayers act consistentlywith the established rules andfiction. This is in marked contrast to 74, as the agency allotted to players is far greater,and with the addition of magic, so is their power to make an impact on the world.Whatif Lenin is attacked by the player characters and the ghosts of the monarchy that theysummoned?What will the USSR look like under the rule of Baba Yaga?Daniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 143Figure 6.2: Flavour text composed of fictional newspaper clippings about occult subjects, juxta-posed with appropriated Revolutionary-era posters and photographs. Red Land, p. 151Red Land opens up history into a kind of playbox, providing opportunities for bothactions that feel historically accurate, and that make history radically protean. Red Landattempts to territorialise history, turning it from a vast an unknowable territory of end-less complexity, into a personalmap and narrative shaped by gaming sessions andmem-ories of various ludic accomplishments (e.g.: “rememberwhenwe helped Baba Yaga saveLenin’s life at the Kremlin in 1924?”) producing a multiplicity of alter-histories. As thespace territorialised by games is necessarily composed of role-played characters inhab-iting phantasmagoric historical chronotopes, the subjectivities shaped byRed Land’s ter-ritorialisation of history almost necessarily cross-contaminate personal vantage pointsand the vantage points of governmentality, producing an odd hybrid.InRedLand, governmentality becomes aportion of your character profile–your com-mitment to theReds,Whites,Greens, or Blacks and their respective political and govern-ing ideologies is primary and definitive, describing your identity and, perhapsmore im-portantly, your magic, which translates directly to agency within the world of Red Land.Within a game of Red Land, the PCs define the world and ideology alike: if all of the PCsare, for instance, communist revolutionaries, their narrative arcwithin the gamewill be-comea synecdoche for the entirety of the communist sidewithin theRevolution andCivilWar – they will be the heroes and their stories, successful or tragic, will frame the repre-sentation of their chosen ideology.They, and only they, end up definingwhat revolution-144 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesary communism looks like for everyone involved in the game. In a groupwhere the playercharacters have mixed ideologies, this effect will only be intensified: a communist revo-lutionary,White spy, and an anarchist bandit playing togetherwill consciously treat eachother’s PCs asdirect representatives of their respective ideologies, accentuating their po-litical differences for the sake of ludic drama, or having their political arguments inflectthe decisions made during play. It is this ludic epistemology – the merger of individ-ual fantasy and a governmentality located in some alter-historical phantasmagoria thatI am denoting ‘ludic sovereignty’, to stress that I am both sceptical of how genuine thissovereignty is and compelled to call it that because of the complexity of the fantasies itevokes.7. Responsibility and History: Atom RPG and Making ChoicesAtom RPG (2018) by the Atom Team, a multinational game indie-development studiobased in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Latvia, is an excellent example of the complexityand ambition of role-playing games’ attempt to represent not only history, but genuineresponsibility and agency within history.AtomRPGwas successfully funded with a smallKickstarter campaign, but was published on nearly every platform, including iOS andthe Xbox, a fairly impressive feat for a small indie title. Atom RPG uses the RPG form toattempt an exegesis of a confusing and difficult-to-represent historicalmoment: the col-lapse of the USSR and Perestroika. Atom is unambiguously an homage to another alter-history series of games: the 1990s American RPGs Fallout and Fallout 2, both predicatedon a post-apocalyptic future as imagined in the 1950s – ray guns and talking householdrobots alongside cannibal gangs and radiation. Fallout 1 and 2 were set in Southern andNorthern California, respectively, as alternate American histories told largely throughthe landscape, whose recognisable names (Reno, San Francisco, and others) jarred withtheir post-apocalyptic terrain and mutated inhabitants. Atom RPG represents the samesort of post-apocalyptic world-building, but in Eastern Europe. The international teamof designers did not follow Fallout in depicting a specific geography, instead attemptingto capture a temporal terrain.At first glance, their approach is to scatter various geographical references, mak-ing the territory of the game both recognisable and not. For instance, one of the majorcities in the game is Krasnoznamensk, which is west of Moscow, while the starting hubis the village Otradnoe, near Sochi, but they are within walking distance in the game.The names do not reference the actual locations, instead acting as broad Soviet-style sig-nifiers: Krasnoznamensk translates as “Redbannerton”, the village – as “joyful”. Thesenames are chosen as generic markers of the socialist world. Visually, Atom RPG evokesan immediately recognisable East European terrain and Soviet architecture and namingconventions, one both totally phantasmagoric and familiar.Instead of the 1950s, this alter-Russia is supposed to be the 1980s (following a nuclearapocalypse and the detonation of multiple atom bombs), yet in its jokes and references,AtomRPG instead allegorises the first post-Soviet decade. Such contemporary referenceswere already present as small easter eggs and jokes in Fallout, but here they are exacer-bated to the level of major factors in the game’s plot. Atom RPG refers constantly to suchDaniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 145diverse sources as Vladimir Sorokin’s postmodern novella Monoklon (2010), post-Soviethip-hop, Perestroika-era cults, and the Russian literary canon, all framed as encounterswithin a post-apocalyptic landscape, and effectively representing the collapse of the So-viet Union as an explorable geography.One of the first non-player characters who can join the PC is the protagonist ofGrandfatherMazai and the Hares (DedushkaMazai i zaitsy),Nikolai Nekrasov’s 1870s narra-tive poem commonly assigned to and read by Soviet school children. In the poem,Mazaiis an oldmanwho rescues hares froma spring flood.Here,he (andhis hares), is the agingSoviet intellectual, fixated on the literary tradition and living ethically while still tryingto build communism. In another scene, the protagonist goes to see the dead Lenin, orrather Lenin’s mummy, who turns out to be faking his death (or just impersonatingLenin) for profit – Lenin lives! Immediately adjacent to Lenin is an obvious referenceto Mariia Devi Khristos (born Marina Tsvihun), leader of the prominent early 1990s cultYUSMALOS, who is depicted in AtomRPG in her recognisable pose of offering a blessingto the audience.So, what exactly is happening here?The player is exploring a post-apocalyptic Sovietwasteland, in a game set in an alternate history of the 1980s, but keeps encountering ref-erences to thepost-Sovietworldof the early 1990s, its politics, jokes,cults,and ideologies.Atom RPG is using the personal vantage point of the role-playing game as a mechanismfor exploring and understanding the contradictory and messy post-Soviet moment andtaking a sovereign position within it.In one of the most telling scenes, the player encounters a madman who calls himself“Monoklon”. In a scene directly parodying the scene in the New Testament, when Christencounters a man possessed by enough demons to call themselves “Legion”, the playeravatar can choose to exorcise theMonoklon into a herd of pigs, by calling upon the spiri-tual power of communism, in a kind of perverse rite that sacralises socialistmaterialism:“By the will of the presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Part of the So-vietUnion, leave this proletariat, ohunclean ones! Begone!” InVladimir Sorokin’s novellaMonoklon, thenarrativeproceeds as adialoguebetween severalwealthy and sophisticatedindividuals in their mansion. Towards the very end of the narrative, themansion is sud-denly invadedbyarmedpeople,who seemtohave somesort of police authority,but speakin an utterly incomprehensible tongue, that nonetheless is unmistakably the language ofbrutal and immediate violence.The reference to Sorokin’s novel evokes it as a representa-tion of epistemological collapse – of meaning disappearing under a wave of violence, ofwords no longer making sense except as supplements to violence.The player’s paradox-ical ability to exorcise the confusion through the magic of communism is meaningfulhere.This juxtaposition of the New Testament and Sorokin’s postmodernist prose investsthe jumbled setting with a clear purpose. Atom RPG represents the Soviet post-apoca-lyptic as concurrent with the post-Soviet day-to-day, as characterised by the fragmen-tation of meaning and sense, a multiplicity of narratives, voices and myths strugglingfor competition and creating a violent cacophony. However, the player’s intervention inthese narratives and their role as a territorialising agent, completing all the quests in onecity and moving on to the next, clearing a particular zone of monsters and artifacts andmoving on to the next, all theway until the conclusion of the game, allows a fantasy of or-146 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesganising and traversing the historical space represented. Atom RPG culminates with theplayer asked to choose to either empower the old forces of Soviet history, embodied by acabal of authorities from the Soviet regime soldiering on in amilitary bunker in order torestore the old world, or support the new forces of post-apocalyptic change, embodiedby a nomadic militant organisation capturing the post-apocalyptic world for the future.History here becomes condensed in a single decision enacted by the player if they suc-cessfully territorialise this strange new terrain.Atom RPG tackles history as an impossible tangle of ideologies and utopian projectsbut offers this entanglement as a territory that can be travelled, captured, understood,and ultimately mastered. Sovereignty becomes a crucial factor here: in Atom RPG, youare sovereignly deciding howhistory ought to progress from the chaos of the post-Soviet1990s, but the choice is reductive and achieved through violence. AtomRPG cannot artic-ulate or imagine a sovereignty that is not made possible by the apocalypse – the collapseof all social structures, and a wasteland ruled by violence are necessary factors here.Theend of the world removes those social institutions that Atom RPG ultimately asks you tojudge – it is only possible to defeat the forces of the old Soviet world because the atomicapocalypse has locked them in a bunker. It is similarly possible to re-empower them.Theplayers have to make the choice themselves.8. Fragmentary Selves in Post-Soviet HistoryDisco Elysium (2019) the computer role-playing game by the Estonian anarchist art collec-tive ZA/UM, is the unlikely case of a game developed as an art project, but that goes onto become internationally famous as both a cult hit and a bestseller with more than 40million dollars in sales world-wide (cf. Game-Stats 2019). For an indie project developedby an Estonian anarchist collective, Disco Elysium was remarkably successful with bothfans and critics, earning 10/10 reviews from virtually all prominent video game sites, andsweepingmultiple video gameawards in 2019.Theprimarywriter behindDiscoElysium isRobert Kurvitz, who developed the elaborate setting and the history of the world withinwhich the video game is set over the course of multiple table-top RPG campaigns con-ducted with friends in the last two decades and using an original RPG system designedby Kurvitz towards this end (cf. Apperley/Ozimek 2021).Disco Elysium is not a typical role-playing game. It attempts a more ambitious ludicepistemology, exploring ideology,history, andmemory fromanon-violent vantagepointand through doubling-down on the radical potential in the new and alternate identitiesand histories made possible by the role-playing game.There are no D&D-like monsters,or even combat mechanics in Disco Elysium: violence is possible, but it is representedas tragic, swift and devastating to every human being involved, and everyone involved(other than a hallucinogenic cryptid that is not easy tomeet) is a human being.The gameconsists of territorial and psychic exploration.The protagonist is an amnesiac, possiblynamed“Harry”,who awakens in a strange city fromwhat turns out to have been a lengthyalcohol and amphetamine stupor, devoid of any memory of their world or themselves.You are told, however, that you are a cop, and are investigating a crime – a murder, infact. The dead man still hangs in the courtyard of your motel when you awaken, it hasDaniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 147been a week since the apparent lynching. You are told you have been drinking heavily,singing, and screaming that you “don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore” for hoursduring the night, and days on end. Nothing else is known, at least, at the start.Solving themurder, and the largermystery of who you are, is the premise and plot ofthe game, but the focus is on the self – on the protagonist’s lost inner world, their brokenlife, that they are desperate to recover and understand. The protagonist is not a singu-lar entity. The character sheet within the game splits him into twenty-four distinct at-tributes, all of them individually voiced within the game as separate personalities. Eachhas demands, insists on its own importance, chatters, and offers insights. Your Ency-clopaedia bombards you with irrelevant facts and trivia, your voice of Authority insistsyou flash your badge and remind everyone you meet that you are the law around here,your Electro-Chemistry really wishes that you did more drugs, or maybe just had an-other cigarette, your Inland Empire intuits that themurder victimwas killed by commu-nism.Can any of thembe believed or trusted?Do any of them represent the authoritativevoice of the authentic self?Theplayer can expend their experience to improve these areas,strengthening some attributes and their insights, while dampening others. Wheneverthey encounter a challenge that tests an attribute, the game visibly rolls dice, and even ifimprovedwith experience, failure is always a possibility.The game changes as a result, ineach case, with success and with failure, and with each choice – as each “Harry” playedis different – an authoritarian bully for one player, a warm-hearted empath for another.The game also encourages Harry to adopt a political stance, offering unique contentdependingon ifHarry chooses communism,fascism,neoliberalismor“moralism” (apar-ody of status quo liberalismwithin the game).Themurder at the centre of the plot is alsodirectly historicised andpoliticised.The lynchedman is a representative of theneoliberalforces that destroyed the revolution.The local socialist labour union takes responsibilityfor his lynching but is not actually responsible. The real murderer is a man still fight-ing for the communist revolution, as far as he is concerned, alone and without hope.The neighbourhood has anarchists and nazis, capitalists and thieves, all invested and in-volved.The identity chosen by the player is unambiguously political and has a direct im-pact on how the city’s history continues to affect its present. In one gameHarrywill solvethemurder and become a homeless alcoholic, in another theymight become an artist, orrejoin the police force, or quit drinking, or accuse the wrong person of murder. Harry’smany potential selves reveal him to be a synecdoche of his city, and his multivalence andpotentiality signal the same multivalence and potentiality as the rightful inheritance ofthe post-Soviet world, for better or for worse.The game adjusts to all such playthroughs: whatever the protagonist chooses to dowith themselves and their future is supported by the game’s flexible narrative.The docu-mentaryfilmMakingDiscoElysium:TheImportance of Failure (2020) byOutcastDocs,makesthe case that the roll of thedice– that central ludic device drawn fromrole-playing games– is strategically and conceptually important inDiscoElysium (cf.OutcastDocs 2020).Thedocumentary argues that rather than treating dice rolls as prompts to either succeed,moving forward with the intended and planned plot where Harry solves the murder,finds his identity and returns to the police, or failure, where the game stutters, and theplayer needs to try something different to get back on track, the game leans into failure.Through failure, the game embraces all outcomes, even those that in other games would148 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesrepresent the player’s having failed to overcome a challenge or losing track of the ‘proper’plot. In Disco Elysium, your failures accumulate as meaningfully as your successes, aspoints of contact, development and potentially growth for the ludic subjectivity that isHarry, and his voices and thoughts. This ludic epistemology constructed around failedrolls of the dice, allows ZA/UM to experiment with an antiheroic protagonist, tormentedand vulnerable, someone whose personal life has failed, who is residing in a failed polit-ical state, threatened by global capitalism and a looming climate disaster, someone whowill not be fixed by any solvedmurder, and almost certainly not by returning to the policeforce. Failure is crucial to the historical representation aswell.The failure of the commu-nist revolution to create a better world is key to the game’s central problems and philo-sophical conflicts, thus the accentuation of failure as a ludic device must also be seen asa historical argument: the failure of the revolution is a ludic problem,play again and playit differently.Accordingly, rather than abilities or powers, Harry accumulates beliefs, which jointhe “Thought Cabinet”. These have a mechanical function, improving certain skills orgranting other advantages or disadvantages to represent the political, social and emo-tional conclusions that Harry draws from his experiences: everything from deciding toquit drugs, to deciding to embrace them, to obsessive, haunting nostalgia for a lost love,to direct commitment to the political ideologies of fascism, communism, capitalismand others. All these are available as potential avenues for Harry to believe, internalise,discard, or replace. No ideology or value system is represented as intrinsically superior(though fascism is clearly mocked and denigrated, while communism is treated withboth cutting irony and a palpable hint of sadness – ZA/UM had no intention of makingan apolitical game or hiding their leftist commitments).Thecharacter-building systemsandepistemologies of the role-playinggameherebe-come a poignant metaphor for postmodern identity and identity formation, for the ne-cessity of making political and personal decisions without havingmoral absolutes or es-sential origins to rely upon.Harry is contingent and patchwork, hismemories and iden-tity shift constantly as he tentatively explores the world around him, lying about what heknowsanddoesnot know,orhonestly acknowledginghis amnesia,grasping formeaningand purpose in a world where both meaning and purpose are clearly mediated by blindchance, and the decentred accumulation of experiences and failures in your charactersheet.Disco Elysium reflects on these dynamics directly within the narrative. If the playerdecides to explore one of the major buildings in the neighbourhood’s top floors, Harrydiscovers the abandoned studio of a company that once developed role-playing gamesabout identity. A bare trace of their ludic epistemology remains in a 20-sided die thatHarryfindsandpockets,a small symbol of his ownsearch for identity,and the contingentand randommeaning that will necessarily emerge from it.At the conclusion of the game, a minor plotline culminates in an easily missed butcrucial encounter, when after hearing myths of a cryptid living in the reeds aroundthe city, Harry actually encounters it; a marvellous, hallucinogenic mantid. The cryp-tid speaks to Harry, expressing profound sadness and grief at the terrifying humancondition. Harry calls the creature “insane”, to which it responds:Daniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 149“No. *You* are. Themoral of our encounter is: I am a relatively median lifeform – whileit is you who are total, extrememadness. A volatile simian nervous system, ominouslynew to the planet […] You are a violent and irrepressiblemiracle. The vacuumof cosmosand the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us allout and replace us with nothing – just by accident. […] Everything your eyes touch goesback there – behind the thought mirror. What if you blink? Are we still here? (Pleasedon’t blink). What if you misplace us all one day – or just forget?” (ZA/UM 2019)This encounter articulates themodel of the self that emerges from the ludic epistemolo-gies of role-playing games: tentative, decentred, the fragmentary portrait of humanitynot united by omnipresent heroic narratives of unity and fantasies of domination andpower. An experimental and vulnerable alternative self, shaped acutely by meaningfuland painful choices, still fiercely powerful, ruthlessly engaged, capable of rethinking, re-assessing, transforming, and awakening the world around it – as dangerous as it is fullof promise, as rudderless as it is driven.Disco Elysium evoked a powerful set of both criti-cal and fan reactions, from serious discussions about drug abuse and alcoholism,whichthe game portrays both playfully and with stark tragedy, to critiques of its political andhistorical message.In an article called “A Year Later, I Still Cannot Stop Thinking About Disco Elysium”(30 August 2021) for Kotaku.com, a popular gaming website, Renata Price stresses thatthe fragmentations of Harry and the city of Revachol are intimate allegories of trauma,as it reverberates in both history and private memory:Martinaise, the Revachol district within which Disco Elysium takes place, is sick. Thereis a body hanging from a tree, it has been there for over a week now. This is not nor-mal for Martinaise, but for most people it is acceptable. Children, trapped in a haze ofdrugs and trauma, treat it like a plaything. The district has been sick for a long time.The Antecellian Civil War destroyed Revachol’s monarchy, so the rest of the world de-stroyed the city. Following a successful communist revolution, the Coalition of Nations(the game’s U.N. equivalent) unleashed a swift and violent campaign known as Oper-ation Death Blow. Martinaise was one of its primary targets. The district was all butobliterated by artillery, and it has not recovered in the five decades since. This was thetrauma that has since seeped into the bones of the city […]. (Price 2021)150 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesFigure 6.3: Alexander Rostov,Disco Elysium, mainmenu and loading screen showing the cityfrom the vantage point of the murderer, 2020Harry is a synecdoche of the city and history of Revachol, the setting of the gamethat is as much a protagonist as Harry. Revachol’s history is presented throughout thegame: its communist revolution, both optimistic and terribly bloody, economically andmilitarily crushed by the ‘Moralist’ nations of the world,making Revachol a colony-statefor capitalist enterprise. The district explored throughout the game still bear the tracesof the bombardment, walls marked with the executions of the communards. It is also acity struggling for its identity andhistory between the push andpull of communist, capi-talist,moralist and fascist pasts.Harry’s identity struggles are thus a reflection of globalissues – the personal is truly political here, and since the personal is the exact domainupon which the game focuses mechanically, its epistemology becomes an epistemologyof political history after the collapse of communism. Just as thePCs inRedLand inevitablycame to stand for their chosen revolutionary or counter-revolutionary ideology, so doeseach player’s Harry-experience become a representation of the post-Soviet condition,and the trauma both of the communist experiment and its collapse.Revachol’s symbol is the statue at the centre of the game’s urban centre.The statue isof the ex-monarch of Revachol, who was overthrown in the communist revolution. Thestatue was blown up by the communards, but during the counter-revolution, a Dadaistart group re-assembled the monarch’s statue without restoring it, preserving the kingin an on-going state of explosion.The patchwork king stands still, torn chunks of stoneon metal wires, a symbol of eternal and unceasing revolution without resolution. Thisindeterminacy, in which players intervene through Harry’s soul-searching and crime-solving, not only mirrors Harry’s fractured subjectivity, but also invests it with distinctmeaning, monumentalising the post-socialist moment when the king is neither over-thrown, nor reigning, but is frozen in perpetual explosion and fragmentation, unable toeither remain a statue or to become nothing.The indeterminacy turns this post-utopianor post-dystopian state into its owndistinct era, as fractured and still as unitary asHarryhimself, or as the player playing Harry.Daniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 151Muchof the game’s political conflict is centred around themurder thatHarry investi-gates.Themurdered man is a mercenary working for a moralist corporation, ostensiblykilled by the local socialist union, who are striking against the corporation. The actualmurderer, however, is an old communard, who never stopped fighting the long-since-lost war against capitalism and imperialism, dementedly continuing the lost cause fromanearby lighthousewith a sniper rifle.Hemurders themercenarywhile he is in bedwitha local woman, seeing their consensual affair as a symbolic violation of Revachol’s polit-ical history. However, the socialist union takes the blame, claiming to have lynched themercenary as a rapist, due to a complex triangle of desire between the socialists’ leadenforcer, the murdered mercenary, and the woman in whose arms he died. Failing tosolve the crime adequately leads the corporation to send a fully armedmercenary squadagainst the socialists and their union,with tragic consequences for the entire neighbour-hoodand city.Here thepersonal andpolitical are inseparable,not on the level of ideology,but on the level of sex, life and death, as personal conflictmirrors or exacerbates politicalhistory, bringing back old traumas and staging huge issues as personal interactions.Price writes of the communard assassin:You find an old man with a gun. He is broken by the world and full of bullets, almostlike you, Harry. He lived the revolution, loved it actually. Married himself to it. And itwas murdered. So he sits on this shitty little island, alone. He eats rations and watchesthe city through the scope of his rifle. He hates it. Every bit of it. He is a warning of whatyou might become. (Ibid.)The old man is Harry if Harry hadn’t lost his memory, hadn’t surrendered to oblivion al-lowing for the clean, if broken slate upon which the game’s narrative relies.The amnesiais structurally equivalent to beginning a new game here, with Harry wiped clean oncemore, but the player is not granted the same privilege as Harry, as they are repeatedlyforced tomake sovereign decisions within the game, remembering all outcomes, even asthey reload or change their mind.Disco Elysium affects the player through the constellation of two familiar epistemo-logical vectors: that of the character sheet,which attempts tomap personal identity, andthat of the representation of the city itself, which is composed both of the explorable, in-teractive area in the game, and several aesthetic images of it within the loading screensand start screens of the game.Aleksander Rostov, the primary artist behindDiscoElysium’s visuals, chose an expres-sionistic, even fauvist aesthetic of sweeping strokes, dissonant and unblended coloursand physiognomic grotesqueries. The epistemologies of the character sheet and the vi-sual dimension oncemore constellate the personal and political right from the start.Thestarting screen is a digital painting of a vista of Revachol, including all of the areas vis-ited by the player during the game save one: the lighthouse where the communard andassassin is still fighting for communism one sniper shot at a time.The assassin’s location is identical to our vantage point in this image – we see Reva-chol as he would from his lighthouse – indeed, if we focus our eyes just to the left of theequine statue of the detonated king at the centre of the image,wewill see a solitary sliverof light – the window of the hotel where themurderedmanwas shot. Our aesthetic gaze152 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesupon the landscape can readily become themurderous scopeof thepolitical assassin,andonce more the personal and the landscape become equally relevant epistemologies of ahistorical moment. Both the total fragmentation of a unitary self and the total fragmen-tation of ideological clarity become equivalent terrains that Disco Elysium embraces asfragmentary, as broken, and yet as ludically redeemable,mappable, reconcilable throughthe act of play, which renders all such complexity legible and redemptive as either char-acter sheet, or map or both: “All of it in service of producing narratives strong enough tocopewith trauma after trauma, and realising that, despite all the broken things inside ofyou, you can still touch and be touched by other people.” (Ibid.) Memory is thus a crucial axis andmotif within the game–Harry loses his and comesto termswith the fact that hemay well have lost it for a reason.Theworld is losingmem-ory too, quite literally, as theworld ofDisco Elysium is suffering from a slow apocalypse atthe hands of a devouring fog called “ThePale”,which is strongly implied to be themateri-alisation of the weight of human history, a destructive and corrosive process of erasure.Memory is also a crucial formal device.The structure of the game is such that the playeris often tantalised by a particularly ludicrous choice,with havingHarrymisbehave or actoutrageously. Often after reading Harry’s outburst, or otherwise unacceptable act, theplayer feels a bit troubled, reloads and tries a different approach. It is possible to domanyreprehensible things in Disco Elysium, from internalising fascism, to striking a child, toattempting suicide tomake a point in an argument. All these potentialities are sustainedby thememory of the player,whomakes bad choices, and thenmust decide to either stickwith them,maintaining the narrative course, or reload, trying for a different Harry anda different sovereignty. This is fundamental to the game, and central to its philosophi-cal argument – just as Harry must decide who he is, deprived of memory, so do you, theplayer who possesses the means to turn back time and try a different approach, mustdecide what your game is, and why you are playing it.9. ConclusionThe representations of history in these games demand that the player not only makemeaningful ideological choices but take responsibility for how these choices affect theworld. In the process, contingent, and phantasmagoric ludic histories become allegoriesfor examining and coming to terms with the complexities and contradictions of histori-cal experience. Whether by allowing choices, or restricting them, turning history into amap, a district, or an individual, gamesmake arguments about the histories they repre-sent. Such ludic epistemologies do not produce authentic historicity. The alternate his-tories these games generate are necessarily allegorical and symbolic rather than factual.Nevertheless, through conduct and play their allegories become existentially meaning-ful, convincing the player that they experienced something authentic within the fiction,compelled and tested as theywere by their own sovereign choices and theweight of theirownmemories.Daniil Leiderman: Ludic Epistemologies and Alternate Histories 153List of Games74. Nastol’naia igra po sovetskoi istorii, produced by Baryshnikova, Natalia/Vorontsov, Ro-man/Lomakin, Nikita/Starostin, Vasilii, Memorial, Tabletop RPG, 2017.AtomRPG, produced by Atom Team, PC/Mac/Linux, 2018.Disco Elysium, produced by ZA/UM (Kurvitz, Robert/Rostov, Aleksander), PC/Mac, 2019.Dungeons andDragon, produced by Gygax, Gary/Arneson,Dave, TSR, Inc., Tabletop RPG,1974.Fallout series, produced by Cain, Tom, Interplay Entertainment, PC/Mac, 1997–2004.RedLand (KrasnaiaZemlia), produced by ShtabDukhonina (Borkovskii, Egor/Trofimenko,Konstantin/Shalupaev,Mikhail/Ian’kov, Ivan), Tabletop RPG, 2010–2011.SavageWorlds, produced by Hensley, Shane Lacy, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Table-top RPG, 2003.List of IllustrationsFigure 6.1: Cards from 74 (2017). Left: Chekist. Right: Enemy of the People.Figure 6.2: Text composed of fictional newspaper, Red Land (2010–2011), p. 151.Figure 6.3: Mainmenu loading screen from theGameDiscoElysium, designed byAlexan-der Rostov, 2020.ReferencesApperley, Thomas/Ozimek, Anna (eds.) (2021): “Disco Elysium: Special Issue on BalticScreen Media Review.” In: Baltic Screen Media Review 9/1, (https://sciendo.com/issue/BSMR/9/1) [30 September 2023].Chapman, Adam (2016): Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Pastand Offer Access to Historical Practice, London: Routledge.Gallagher, Catherine (2018): Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination inHistory and Fiction, Chicago/London:The University of Chicago Press.Game-Stats (2019): “Disco Elysium –The Final Cut – Stats on Steam.” In: Statson Steam(https://games-stats.com/steam/game/disco-elysium/) [30 September 2023].“74. Nastol’naia igra po sovetskoi istorii.” In: memorial.com (https://www.memo.ru/ru-ru/projects/boardgame) [30 September 2023].Nguyen, C.Thi (2020): Games: Agency as Art,New York: Oxford University Press.Outcast Docs (2020): “MakingDisco Elysium:The Importance of Failure.” In: YouTube, 11November 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3NY7PnPhwY) [30 Septem-ber 2023].Price, Renata (2021): “A Year Later, I Still Cannot StopThinking About Disco Elysium.” In:Kotaku 30 August 2021 (https://kotaku.com/a-year-later-i-still-cant-stop-thinking-about-disco-el-1847585413) [30 September 2023].Sorokin, Vladimir (2011). Monoklon,Moskva: AdMarginem.Chapter 7:Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan,CyberpartisanOn the Popularity of Partisanhood in Belarusian CultureNina Weller1. The Partisan MythIn August 2020, an amateur video circulated on Belarusian social media that hadbeen recorded from the window of a private flat in Minsk during protests against theLukashenko [Lukashenka] regime.The video shows a group of OMON riot police clad inblack balaclavas,1 who form a chain across a wide street, attempting to block protestersfrom passing. They do not get very far with this effort, however, because numerousseemingly random passers-by unexpectedly encircle them from all sides and push themaway, rendering them incapable of action. With music playing in the style of a silentfilm, the sped-up film reel conveys amusement about the fact that this ‘partisan tactic’was able to foil the state authorities at least temporarily.2As a pattern of resistance action, partisanhood always refers to the unequal relation-ship between mighty power structures and their weaker opponents, between the dom-inance of ‘regular’ forms of combat and the undermining of it through ‘irregular’ com-bat strategies. As irregular fighters, partisans defend the territory defined as their ownwhich lies within a space occupied by the other. Since the publication of Carl Schmitt’sbook Theory of the Partisan, the partisan struggle has been defined primarily by decen-tralisedaction,mobility, surprising shifts betweenattackandretreat,andpolitical (neverpurely personal) motivations for their engagement (Schmitt 1963).1 OMON (Otriad mobilniy osobogo nasnatchenia), also known in Belarusian as AMAP (Atrad militsyiasobaha pryznachennia) is a special unit of the militia.2 Cf. video on BelsatTV channel on Х-Twitter: https://twitter.com/Belsat_TV/status/1300366799985356810 [30 September 2023].156 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesFigure 7.1: Screenshot from Belsat-TV on X-Twitter: “Belarusian women against men from riotpolice”Partisan tactics as strategies of resistance against an opponent occupying one’s ownterritory are characteristic of Belarus in the 20th and 21st centuries. Partisan fightingon the territory of present-day Belarus dates to the 19th century. But it was not until theSoviet-Belarusian partisan struggle against the German occupation in the ‘Great Patri-oticWar’ (WorldWar II) –which became culturally entrenched in the 1960s as a nationalmyth and to popularise and legitimise Soviet-Belarusian state politics of memory andhistory – that the partisan became a central point of reference in Belarusian discoursesof identity. Yet for decades, partisan tactics have also informed the Belarusian popula-tion’s resistance to the increasingly totalitarian Lukashenko regime, which culminatedin protests in August 2020 against fraudulent elections, with protesters demonstratingfor democratic change and against repressive violence. Since the beginning of the large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022, partisan tactics have for the first timesinceWorldWar II again become relevant in a concrete state ofwar, in the sense that self-proclaimed partisan groups are together resisting Russia’s great power ambitions.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 157The partisan is, in line with Roland Barthes’Mythologies, a figure through which, inBelarusian culture, history is transformed into everyday mythologies and a simulationof the past is completed which can always be reproduced and transformed anew for thepresent day. In Barthes’ understanding, the success of themythology lies in the fact thatits message is never directly questioned, but rather is taken for granted, and its uncon-scious collective meaning is constantly reinforced by new material, through which themyth fundamentally reproduces itself continually (Barthes 2006 [1957]).3This also holdstrue for the partisanmyth. I will discuss this below by tracing how themyth of the heroicpartisan and of Belarus as a ‘partisan republic’ has been, and continues to be, shapedand generated by media and repeatedly transformed in popular culture in ever-shiftingforms of appropriation, recoding and counter-mythologising.2. “Partisan Republic”: The Partisan as National MythIn Belarus to this day, the central pillars of official war remembrance are the victory ofthe SovietUnion overNaziGermany and theBelarusian civilian population’s tragic expe-rience of violence and annihilation duringWorld War II.4 After the war, the embeddingof these experiences andmemories in the collective work of commemoration created of-ficial places of remembrance and of personal and familial grief, but also always served tostylise thewar as a struggle in defence of the Soviet homeland.5 It iswell known that dur-ingWorldWar II,Sovietpartisansalso fought against theNazi occupiers in theUkrainianand Baltic Soviet republics, in Crimea, in the Caucasus and in Russia.However, it is onlyin Belarus that the overarching Soviet cult of the Great Patriotic War came to focus sostrongly on the partisan struggle as a patriotic justification for an autonomous nationalidentity.6 Thus emerged the mythology of the partisan republic, which continued to becultivated after 1991 as a raison d’ȇtre (Lewis 2017: 377) and a “calling card” (Sitnikova 2008:413) of the country.This myth essentially rests on three ideological conditions: first, the idea that resis-tance against the occupiers was sustained by the unity of all the Belarusian people; sec-ond, the idea of the selfless heroism of the partisan fighters; and third, the idea that allBelarusians made an unparalleled sacrifice for the Soviet fatherland7, and that this sac-3 On the connection between myth, history and the political in popular discourse, cf. also Pfister(2015).4 DuringWorld War II, one in four to one in three Belarusians lost their lives; the number of victimswas estimated at 2.2 million, of which 1.4 million belonged to the civilian population. Some 290towns and9200 villagesweredestroyed in the course of theGermanoccupation andexterminationpolicy (cf. Sahm, 2010: 43; Goujon 2010: 6–12; Marples 2012, 2014).5 Cf. for more detail: Rudling 2008; Goujon 2010; Marples 2012 and above all Lewis 2017, whowrote the first seminal article on the significance of the partisan myth in Belarusian culture in the1990s-2000s.6 This development is at best comparable to the Yugoslavian partisan cult, which also reaches fromsocialist culture far into contemporary popular culture (cf. Jakiša 2015).7 “Vsenarodnost’”; “Samootverzhennyi geroizm”; “Bespretsedentnaia zhertvennost’” (cf. Sitnikova2008: 413, 424).158 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesrifice made a crucial contribution to victory.8 However, the notion of regional partisanidentity existed long beforeWorldWar II. It can be traced back to the concept of Bolshe-vik nationalities policy which was essentially developed by Lenin during World War I inresponse to the nationalism of the workers, a concept which demanded along with theproletarian revolution a national liberation of the nationalities that had been repressedin the ‘prison of nations’ of the Tsarist empire; this included the Belarusians.TheWhiteRuthenian Democratic Republic proclaimed under German occupation in 1918 was fa-mously short-lived; however, by early January 1919, after the collapse of the German Em-pire, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was tobecome a foundingmember of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. Inthe first years of the Soviet Union, the young republic enjoyed a relatively large degree ofautonomy, which was intended, in the spirit of Bolshevik “affirmative action policy”, tofoster the national liberation of the people on the path to socialism through comprehen-sive language and cultural education (Martin 2001). In the context of this nationalitiespolicy9, the figure of the Belarusian partisan, who from 1918 to 1921 had fought along-side the Bolsheviks in the civil war and especially in the Polish-SovietWar10, proved to bean ideal projection surface for developing the notion of the Belarusian people as fightersfor a bright socialist future. In 1929, for example, the partisanmotif was one of six guid-ing themes of the Third All-Belarusian Art Exhibition. Many of the paintings exhibitedthere were devoted to the theme of the partisan as a specifically Belarusian topos, in-cluding famed paintings by Gavriil Vier [Gaŭvril’ Vier, GabrielWier] (1927),Mikhail Ėndė(1928) and Valiantsin Volkaŭ (1928), all of which were entitled Partizany.11 The art histo-rian Siarhei Kharėŭski notes that these works display an established canon of iconogra-phy, showing “men in farmer’s attire with an ammunition belt slung across their shoul-der, weapon in hand, carrying an axe in their belt” against the backdrop of a stereotypi-cal landscape, most often a forest in winter (Kharėŭski 1999, as cited in Sitnikova: 2008:398). While cinema and literature of the interwar period focused more on the Polish-Soviet War or the resistance against the Polish occupation, in visual art the opponentor occupier against whom the partisan struggle was directed remained vague in mostrepresentations in the 1920s (Sitnikova 2008: 400).12 Kharėŭski therefore refers to exem-plary representations of a “Belarusianpartisanhood that defends itself against outsiders”(ibid.). This non-specific representation of the Belarusian partisan, however, soon took8 The fact that the partisan movements on Belarusian territory were anything but uniform and thatthere were also Belarusian national partisan groups fighting against the Soviets was and is largelyexcluded from the official discourse (cf. Chiari 2001; Musial 2007, 2009).9 A phase of language and cultural Belarusification was followed by a change in the party line in theearly 1930s and a campaign to combat ‘local nationalism’, as a result of which the Belarusian intel-ligentsia were subjected to a repressive policy of persecution (deportations and mass shootings).10 On earlier partisan battles on Belarusian territory, cf. Akudovich 2013:58-69; cf. Artsimovich 2016[2021].11 Cf. Kharėŭski 1999; Arcimovich 2016 [2021].12 According to Dar’ia Sitnikova, this was also due to the fact that it was unclear which country couldbe considered one's own andwhowas to be defined as a “foreigner” and “outsider” (whether Poles,Germans, White Guards or even Soviet Russia itself) and thus as an “opponent”, which is why theBelarusians tended to play the “role of a spectator without a voice” (Sitnikova 2008: 401).Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 159on a significantly more political cast in films, and the figure of the village activist, filledwithBolshevik ideals,whofights for a new classless society against imperial GermanandPolish oppression, began to appear with increasing frequency.13 This also represented ashift in the image of partisans themselves: “in place of the ‘insurgent masses of the peo-ple’, a ‘heroic (Belarusian) people’ was needed. A new war was needed, so that the fablecould finally become amyth” (Sitnikova 2008: 412).This new war arrived with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941:during the period of war and occupation, the Soviet press imbued the figure of the parti-san with heroic andmythological traits. Ekaterina Keding uses representations of parti-sanwarfare in thenewspaperPravda fromJuly 1944 to showhow itwasnowpresentedas a“particular expression of popular ingenuity, of agility, of slyness, of unstoppable courageand plotting” (Keding 2013: 82).14 The German invasion was understood as an “attack onthe historical right of the Belarusian people to their own statehood” and the partisanwaras an expression of the “remarkable qualities of the Belarusian people, their bravery andtheir heroism” (Lindner 2005, as cited in Artsimovich 2016 [2021], cf. Richter 2014).After the endof thewar, references to the partisan struggle served, asKeding empha-sises, “above all a function in the post-war society of integration, legitimization andmo-bilization”: “The partisan was supposed to unify a people divided between resistance andcollaboration and to mobilise the Belarusian people for the work of building the SovietUnion and for socialist ideals” (Keding 2013: 82, 85). At the same time, national rhetoricnow receded,while the overarching popularmyth of the Soviet Union as a whole came tothe fore: theBelarusianpartisanswere presented as part of the collective struggle againstfascismof all peoples of theSovietUnion,who in turnwouldnothavebeenable tooperateso successfullywithout the support andsolidarity of the simplepeople in the countryside,who had given them shelter, food and support.The1960s sawthephaseof constituting thepartisanmyth,whichnowreferredalmostexclusively toWorldWar II,while earlier imageryandstories fromthecivilwar faded intothe background: in the Brezhnev era, according to Nina Tumarkin, the Great PatrioticWar became a “sacrosanct cluster of heroic exploits that had once and for all proven thesuperiority of communism over capitalism” (Tumarkin 1994: 5). For the Belarusian SovietSocialist Republic, this meant large-scale glorification of the partisan struggle, includ-ing in public spaces. Piotr Macherov [Mashėraŭ], who became the first secretary of theBelarusian Communist Party in 1965 and who himself had fought as a partisan inWorldWar II, played a crucial role in this project.Therewas already aBelarusianMuseumof the13 For example, the films Tale of the Woods (Lesnaia byl’ 1926, directed by Iuri Tarich), an adaption ofthe novel Svinopas by Mikhas Charot; The Pines Are Noisy (Sosny shumiat, 1929, directed by LeonidMolchanov), an adaption of the novel Dva (1925) by Anatol Volnyi; the play Partisany by KondratKrapiva (1937); the film 11 July (11 Iulia, 1938, directed by Iuri Tarich) cf. Sitnikova 2008: 400) as wellas the novel Dryhva (The Quagmire, 1934) by Iakub Kolas in which a Soviet partisan (Ded Talash)from the era of the Polish-Russian war in 1941 rejoins the partisans and is supposed to testify tothe fact that the entire Belarusian people joined the partisan struggle (cf. Gorbunov et al. 1961:454, quoted by Lewis 2017: 378).14 The medal “To the Partisan of the Patriotic War”, introduced in 1943, also indicates the importantrole the partisan struggle played in Soviet propaganda already during the war (cf. for more detailKeding 2013: 82).160 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesGreat Patriotic War and a victory monument dedicated to Soviet soldiers and partisanshad been erected on Victory Square inMinsk in 1954.Now, however, numerous streets inMinsk and throughout the countrywere renamedafterwar heroes and additionalmonu-ments to partisans and victory were built in almost every city (Lastoŭski et al. 2010: 266).This era also saw the creation of major national memorials with an almost sacred char-acter, such as the Khatyn Memorial complex (Memorialnyi kompleks Khatyn,1969), theMound of Glory (Kurhan Slavy, 1969) and Brest Hero Fortress (Brestskaia krepost’[Brest-skaia krepost’],1971).Additionally, in 1978Minskbecame the last of a series of Soviet citiesto be bestowed the title ‘Hero City’.Even after the end of the Soviet Union, this tradition of official war memorials andheroes’memorials was carried on: along with the creation of numerous newwarmemo-rials, an outdoor-adventure memorial theme park was opened outside Minsk, on whatwas dubbed the ‘Stalin Line’15, in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the war’s end.The newtheme park included a Stalin memorial and tourist attractions featuring military tech-nology.16This new ‘Stalin Line’ shows that critical engagementwith Stalinism is officiallyunwelcomeunder Lukashenko.Additionally, this positive framingof Stalin broke a tabooin post-Soviet commemoration practices, given that in 2005, creating newStalinmemo-rials, let alone placing them in a context of entertainment and leisure, would (unlike to-day) most likely have caused a scandal even within Russia (even the renaming of Vol-gograd as Stalingrad since 2013 has taken place only temporarily on the occasion of warremembrance days). In 2014, Lukashenko had a newmuseum of the Great PatrioticWarbuilt, which was intended to symbolically represent an independent Belarus’s own per-spective on war remembrance by taking up the Soviet narratives but adapting andmod-ifying them to fit the national discourse.The Soviet representation of the heroic partisanstruggle thus continues to this day to inform official state initiatives for the formation ofnational memory in Belarus, as attested to by the traditional cult of heroism that is evi-dent on days of remembrance and in history books,museumpresentations of partisans,andmultimedia projects commemoratingWorldWar II.1715 The “Stalin Line” is the name of the Red Army’s western defence line, which ran from Karelia to theBlack Sea and along the former USSR’s border with Poland. In contrast to Western Europe, wheresimilar fortifications were demolished, much of the line remained or was largely ignored after thecollapse of the USSR in 1991. Remains of the fortifications of the Stalin Line can be found today inBelarus, Russia, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.16 Official site of the Stalin Line Park: https://stalin-line.by [30 September 2023].17 E.g. shifting the National Day of Remembrance from 27 July (Independence Day) to 3 July (the dayof the end of the German occupation in 1944); the newly built Museum of the History of the GreatPatrioticWar, built in 2014; the representation of partisan images in public spaces tomark “VictoryDay”; themultimedia project “Belarus Remembers” (“Belarus pomnit”), produced tomark the 75thanniversary of the end of the war: http://storyofvictory.sb.by/ [30 September 2023], etc.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 1613. “Partizanfil’m”: Partisans and their Heroism in Post-War FilmPost-war Soviet cinema played an important role in popularising the figure of the parti-san as a war hero and folk hero. Along with literary non-fiction, memoirs and novels18,(war) filmwas themedium that played an essential part in canonising themyth.The statefilm studios produced so many war films that the Belarusfilm studio, founded in 1926,was ironically dubbed the Partizanfil’m studio for its perceived high output of partisanfilms. It was alleged that one out of every two films produced there after the war wasdevoted to the war; this claim was in fact greatly exaggerated.19 Most of the 17 partisanfilms created in total were produced between the end of the Khrushchev Thaw and theearly 1970s, after which the studio’s interests shifted towardsmainstreamgenres such ascomedy,melodrama and adventure films.One of the first films produced by Belarusfilm in the post-war era was Konstantin Za-slonov (1949, directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer and Vladimir Korsh-Sablin), which de-fined the format for the aesthetic treatment of the war theme in Belarusian cinema foryears to come (Sitnikova 2008: 426; Lewis: 2017: 377).The film tells of the legendary resistance activities of the real-life figure KonstantinZaslonov, who commanded Soviet partisan units between 1941 and 1942 in the Orsharegion. He appears in the film as a flawless fighter for the Soviet cause, who takes astandboth for country-wide resistance and for theParty line.Thishighly ideological film,whichwas awarded the third-class StalinPrize in 1950, is one of fewworks to passmusterwith the censors at the peak of post-war Stalinism and the ColdWar.The film The Clock Stopped at Midnight (Chasy ostanovilis v polnoch’, 1959, directed byNikolai Figurovskii) likewise conveys the notion of the ‘nationwide partisan war’, nownarrated through the more complex expressive possibilities permitted to films in theKhrushchevThawera.Theplot centres on a real-life event: the September 1943 assassina-tion of Nazi official Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar of the GeneralbezirkWeissruthe-nien region of occupied Belarus and theGauleiter of occupiedMinsk.Thefilm stylises twopartisans who carried out the attack while disguised as maids, Ganna Chёrnaia [HannaChernia] andMarina Kazanich, as heroes of the people.The film thereby introduced twofemale protagonists to the partisan myth for the first time; however, it was not solelydue to their individual achievements, but above all through the invoking of the collective18 E.g. collections such asUnconquered Belarus:Memoirs andArticles about theNationwide PartisanMovement in Belarus during the Great Patriotic War (Nepokorennaia Belorussiia. Vospominaniiai stati o vsenarodnom partizanskom dvizhenii v Belorussii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny.1941–1945 gg., 1962), TheNationwide PartisanMovement in Belarus during theGreat PatrioticWar.June 1941–1944 (Vsenarodnoe partizanskoe dvizhenie v Belorussii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoivoiny. Iun 1941-Iul 1944), 1967–1982); Memoirs of partisan commanders such as Partisan Chronicle(Partizanskaia khronika, 1961) by Aleksandr Vaupshasov, Partisan Republic (Partizanskaia respub-lika, 1964) by Petr Kalinin or Faithful to the End and Special People (Veren do kontsa and LiudiOsobogo Sklada, 1973) by Vasili Kozlov among others.19 Daria Sitnikova has pointed out that the numbers were different in reality: among the 250 Be-larusfilm productions from 1946 to 1983, there were ultimately only 18 partisan films (includingchildren’s films), i.e. only slightly more than 7 per cent, in which the partisans were the main orkey theme (Sitnikova 2008: 425).162 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesstruggle of the people as a whole, which transcended boundaries of gender and educa-tion, that they could be presented as heroes.The film attracted 34.8 million viewers (Ku-driavtsev 1998: 419), making it a Soviet blockbuster and showing how much its subjectmatter resonated with audiences at the time.Figure 7.2: Film poster for the filmKonstantin Zaslonov (1949)The Film also played a major role in shaping the image of the partisan struggle as amatter of intergenerational identification. Other extremely popular post-war films in-cludeThe Children of the Partisan (Deti partizana, 1954) and Girl Seeks Father (Devochka ischetottsa, 1959), both directed by LevGolub,which expanded the partisanmyth to the youngerSoviet generation by focusing on children and young people.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 163Figure 7.3: Film posters for the filmsTheChildren of the Partisan (1954) andGirl Seeks Fa-ther (1959)The Children of the Partisan, the first Belarusian colour film, is set in the post-war era,with a plot centred on honourable remembrance of partisans: the children of two parti-san fighters who died in service of the fatherland are lured into a trap by a former Nazicollaborator who fears being exposed. But with the help of their grandparents, the chil-dren escape and bring the villains to justice; in the end, the rightful order is restored.Thefilm Girl Seeks Father tells the story of the young daughter of partisan commander Bat’kaPanas. The girl is taken into the care of an old forester, then is captured by the Nazi oc-cupiers, who want to use her to force the partisan leader to capitulate. A heroic sabotageoperation by the shrewdpartisans thwarts theNazis’ plan.Both films illustrate the inter-generational power of the partisan myth. The films’ use of the myth brought enormoussuccess, especially for Girl Seeks Father, which became one of the most popular children’sfilms in the Soviet Union with some 35 million viewers (Kudriavtsev 1998: 418, 420) andwasalsowell-received internationally (Beliaev2023).20Thissuccesswas surelydue inpartto thefilm’s linkingof thepartisan themewith adventuremotifs (searching for the father,freeing the girl from theNazis’ clutches) andwas also related to the fact that in the Soviet20 Cf. the list of the most successful Soviet films between 1940 and 1989, compiled and annotatedby cinema critic Sergei Kudriavtsev on the basis of statistics. According to this list, Girl Seeks Fa-ther is, along with the filmWhat Is It, the Sea? (Kakoe ono, more, 1964: Ėduard Bocharov), one of thetwo all-timemost-viewed children’s films in the Soviet Union (Kudriavzev 1997: 410–442). The filmcritic Vadim Beliaev lists the film as one of the top 10 Belarusian box-office hits and, referring todata fromGoskino, rates it as a highly successful film internationally, with releases in 75 countries.Unfortunately, Beliaev’s further information on Goskino, among others, is currently not available(Beliaev 2023).164 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesUnion, entire school classes and Young Pioneer groups collectively attended showings offilms thatwere considered especially important ideologically and educationally.Throughthis, thefilmbecamewidely knownandmadeanessential contribution to theproductionof the myth.214. “The Cinematic Partisan”: The Psychological Turn in War Films(1960s-1980s)The partisan film peaked near the end of the Khrushchev Thaw period, amidst the en-trenchment of the Sovietwarmyth in history andpolitics underBrezhnev andMasherov.In this era of “Kinopartisanstvo” (Sitnikova 2008: 426), the partisan myth developed aparticular allure, as its cultural function was twofold: it was not only a projection sur-face for heroic Soviet-nationalist warmemory, but also served as a site of individual andpsychological grappling with traumatic experiences of the war and the occupation.22On one hand, this period saw the making of a number of “showpiece films” (paradnyi),which were marked by an epic “fusion of Stalinist placard heroism and mass tragedy”(Sitnikova 2008: 430).23They include works such as Father (Bat’ka, 1971, directed by BorisStepanov), Flame (Plamia, 1974) andTheBlack Birch (Chernaia berёza, 1977, both directed byVital’ Chatsverykoŭ [Vitalii Chetverikov]), as well as the first made-for-TV works, suchas the miniseries Time Has Chosen Us (Vremia vybralo nas, 1976–1979, directed by MikhailPtashuk).They typify the reproduction enmasse of an entrenched partisanmyth in theseyears.24 Aseconddirectionevident in this period is thepsychological partisanfilm,whichmore starkly centres the individual experience of war in its plot. Like the so-called ‘lieu-tenant prose’ of this era, theseworks explored personal dimensions andmorally ambigu-ous victim-and-perpetrator stories that went beyond simplistic friend-or-foe constella-tions. One of the pioneering ‘psychological’ partisan films is Viktor Turov’sThrough the21 Another indication that the film was produced with some effort is the fact that, according to Beli-aev, around 900 children tried out for the role of little Lenochka. The role was played by the laterwell-knownactress AnnaKamenkova,whohad caught the eye of a crewmember in the playgroundwith her open-minded and dominant qualities (Beliaev 2013).22 Regarding the psychological aspect, Sitnikova justifiably mentions in literature the widely dis-tributed works of Vasyl Bykaŭ and Ales’ Adamovich, and in art the famous paintings Partizanskaiamadonna (1967) byMikhail Savitskii (followed in 1978Minskaia partizanskaiamadonna) and Belarus’-mat’ partizanskaia (1967) by the artist Mai Dantsig.23 Cf. on the topic of public history and popular Soviet cinema as myth-maker Tumarkin 1994 andYoungblood 2001.24 During this period the canon was expanded by historically and politically sacralised heroic places:numerous films from the 1970s contributed to the popularisation of the image of Brest as a placeof heroic resistance against the German invaders in the first days of the Great Patriotic War, whichonly loosely corresponded to historical reality, such as the multi-part The Ruins Are Shooting (RuinyStreliaiut, 1970–72, dir.: Vital’ Chatsverykoŭ [Vitalii Chetverikov]) or the films I Am a Fortress, I StoodmyGround (Ia –Krepost’, Vedu Boi, 1972, dir: Izrail Pikman) and Brest Fortress (Brestskaia Krepost’, 1975,dir: Pikman). The partisan of the cinema and TV epics of the timehad, as Sitnikova aptly diagnoses,been transformed into a “simulacrum”, into a “monumental, decorative façade that no longer con-ceals a powerful imperial ideology of a totalitarian kind” (Sitnkokova 2008: 431).Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 165Cemetery (Cherez kladbishche, 1964), whichwas the first such film not to place a party func-tionary at the centre of its plot as the leader of the people’s resistance and to eschewexag-gerated heroism and optimism. Instead, it showed internally contradictory characters,who acted out of doubt rather than conviction.25 Suchfilmswere able to connect the pre-sentation of the Belarusian people’s resistance struggle and their suffering in war withexistential questionswithoutbeingaccusedof “anti-heroism”byparty loyalist critics (Sit-nikova 2008: 428). In the 1960s, this formed the foundation of a humanist hero ethos, towhich later generations also felt connected.Two additional films by Viktor Turov played a key role in the development: his screenadaptations ofAles’Adamovich’s duology of novelsPartisans (Partisany), comprisedofWarUnder the Roofs (Voina pod kryshami, 1960) and Sons Go into Battle (Synov’ia ukhodiat v boi,1963), which appeared in 1967 and 1969.The films tell of the fate of a mother and her twosons, who join the partisans during the war. Both the novels and their film adaptationsare still anchored in a heroicmode of storytelling in that their plots follow the traditionalnarrative of the sacrificial struggle for survival and resistance which is borne by the par-tisans and the general population together. But they also use family and neighbourhoodentanglements to show the irreconcilable moral dilemmas and human depths of war.26The popularity of the films and of Adamovich’s books27 was amplified by the casting ofhigh-profile actress Nina Urgant in the role of the mother and by the fact that the filmfeaturedmusic byVladimir Vysotskii, arguably themost popular Soviet singer of the era.Vysotskii remained a cult figure even after his death; he was well loved for his blissfulsongs about the Great Patriotic War and for his critical, ironic lyrics about everyday lifein the Soviet Union. His song titled Sons Go into Battle (Synovia ukhodiat v boi)28 played amajor part in the popularity of the second film.However, the psychologically nuanced characters, especially in the first film, whichwas released in 1967, met with harsh criticism from the authorities and the State Com-mittee for Cinematography. Turov and Adamovich (who had written the screenplay forboth films) were accused, among other things, of lack of heroic pathos, preference fortraitorous characters rather than strong ones, and failure to designate clear villains.2925 In this film, “the individual stands above the social, thewar and the occupation situation serve onlyas a backdrop to raise existential questions” (Sitnikova 2008: 427).26 Adamovich’s own mother served as a model for the psychologically illuminated fate of Anna Ko-rzun, who actively supports the partisans despite the great risk and ultimately saves her sons fromthe Germans by joining the partisans together with them. The book and film represented a newlook at the underestimated role of women in war and were to be a major inspiration for SvetlanaAleksievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War (U voiny ne zhenskoe litso, 1985). Aleksievich’s famoustitle goes back to Adamovich’s introductory motto toWar Under the Roofs: “War has no female face.But no memory of this war was stronger, more harrowing, more terrible and more beautiful thanthat of the faces of our mothers” (Adamovich: Voina pod kryshami. Minsk 1960, 5).27 Their popularity is not so much reflected in large audience or sales figures (they do not appear onthe lists of Kudriavtsev et al.), but rather in terms of their canonisation in the field of psychologicalpartisan films, to which frequent reference is made to this day.28 A video of the song with film images is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ounQy6JWQ00 [30 September 2023].29 For the argumentation of the criticism against Turov and Adamovich, see in detail: Historiya ki-namastatstva Belarusi. 1960–1985 (2002: 100–103), quoted in Sitnikova 2008: 429 as well as Shal-166 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesFor the 1969 second film, then, Turov and Adamovich had to make compromises in thedirection of a more heroic depiction of the partisan struggle30, which did not hinder thepopularity of the two films or the long-term expansion of the partisan myth to includepsychological dimensions.Ultimately, however, this psychology-focused approach persistently chipped away atthe partisanmyth. Twofilms that became classics of Soviet-Belarusian filmhistory showthis particularly clearly in that they address violence, fear and doubt, and show the sur-mounting of these without any resolution, also connecting these themes with religiousmotifs.Thefirst of these isTheAscent (Vozchozhdenie, 1976) directedbyLarisa Shepit’ko andbased on the story Sotnikaŭby Vasyl Bykaŭ,which tells of complicated confrontations be-tween partisans, villagers and collaborators. Its protagonist does not follow the code ofloyalty, but rather – entangled in moral doubt and hope for rescue – betrays both hiscomrades and his ideals. Despite the authorities’ misgivings about the film, it debutedon 2 April 1977, and although there were few copies of it, was seen bymore than tenmil-lion viewers within the Soviet Union (Vasil’eva/Braginskii 2012: 313). It was the first-everSoviet film to be awarded a Golden Bear at the Berlinale.The second such film, Ėlem Klimov’s Come and See (Idi i smotri, 1985), likely the best-known of all Belarusian-Soviet anti-war films, focusses radically on physical and psycho-logical experienceof thehorrors ofwar.Thefilmwasmade in 1977butwas censoredby theSoviet authorities before it was completed andwas blocked from release for years, due toaccusationsof,amongother things,“simplification”,“abstracthumanism”andaperspec-tive “not related to class” (as cited in Stiglegger 2020: 170). Ales’ Adamovich had writtenthe film’s screenplay, and elements of his short story Khatyn Story (Khatynskaia povest’),which was published in 1972, were incorporated into it. Klimov rendered the story withdisturbing images and intense sound collages. From the perspective of a teenage boy, thefilm recounts the partisan struggle and the horrific massacres of Belarusian civilians byGerman troops, transposing the presentation of the war onto a reality where everything– people, animals and nature alike – is touched by utter destruction and moral despair.Here, thepartisan isno longer aheroicfigure,but ratherbothvictimandperpetrator,andabove all a human beingwho is bound up in the inescapable atrocities of war. After yearsof censorship, thefilmfinally reached cinemas in 1985 as a co-production ofMosfil’mandBelarusfilm; it found an audience of almost 30 million people in the Soviet Union alone.It remains the most internationally well-known Soviet-Belarusian war film to this dayand was re-released in a restored Blu-Ray version in 2020. In the film, little remains ofthe heroic dimension of the partisan myth, but its radical depiction of the abject abyssof war from the perspective of a child partisan carries on the figure of the partisan withmerciless realism.nuivski 1971, quoted in Sitnikova: 2008: 430 and in: Vse belorusskie filmy. Catalogue spravochnik.Vol. 1: Igrovoe Kino. 1926–1970 (1996: 222).30 Cf. for more detail, among others Karpilava et al. 2002: 103.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 167At the end of the Soviet Union, the heroism and psychology that had ultimately been twosides of the same mythological construction began to break apart. In the context of Be-larus becoming an independent country, the partisanmyth now took on its own dynam-ics: in the 1990s, film production at Belarusfilm, the country’s only major film studio,largely collapsed,which was due in part to economic factors and the reorientation of thefilm industry and in part to the shift in the orientation of public discourses of historyand memory. Other themes now came to the fore, such as the Grand Duchy of Lithua-nia as the foundational period for a new version of national history.31 At the same time,the first publications by independent historians appeared, which sought to revise thepartisanmyth and also challenged the conventional narrative of the civilian population’sunconditional support for the partisans (cf. Lindner 1999, 2001; Artsimovich 2021). Theelection of Lukashenko as president in 1994 brought an abrupt end to this shift in per-spective in the public discourse of history.32 While the state and those representationswhich conformed to the official politics of history took on the Soviet construct of nation-ality in modified form, others began to revise the partisan myth in various ways or evento reinvent it entirely.This trendbecame increasingly evident beginning in the 2000s andfollows two strands in film.The first strand recycles the partisan myth in a certain sense, along the lines of thealternative concepts to notions of ‘nostalgia’ or ‘trauma’ which Valery Vyugin proposesin this volume, according to which historical narratives are “reused and resold” as “aresource” and are shaped into new forms to fit current needs (cf. Vyugin, chapter 10in this volume). Numerous publicly financed Belarusfilm war film productions of the2000s carried on the traditional Soviet image of the Belarusian folk hero in a new pa-triotic guise and with updated film technology (Khatkovaskaia 2013: 435). Two examplesof this are films that both represent the staging of official national politics of memoryunder Lukashenko as “memory events par excellence” (Etkind 2010: 4, as cited in Lewis2012: 379): first, the war drama Deep Flow (Glubokoe techenie, 2005, directed by MargaritaKasymova and Ivan Pavlov), the first Belarusian film in Dolby Surround, which uses theexample of a young commanding officer to tell of responsibly overcome difficulties ofthe partisan struggle early in the occupation period.Not coincidentally, the film is basedon motifs from a 1949 novel of the same name by Ivan Shamiakin, which was celebratedby Soviet critics at the time as the first real partisan novel and was awarded the StalinPrize.33 The second example is the monumental blockbuster The Brest Fortress (BrestkaiaKrepost’, also known as Fortress of War, 2010, directed by Aleksandr Kott), which was cre-ated in co-production with several major Russian studios.The film rehashes topoi of theSoviet war canon: the “heroic defence of Brest Fortress” and the tenacious Belarusian31 Cf. Hansen 2008: 187–196; Krawatzek/Weller 2022: 27–40; Weller 2022: 59–74.32 On the politics of history under Lukashenko, cf. Lindner 1999: 423–477; Goujon 2010; Rudling 2017:77.33 Inessa Khatkovskaia classifies the film as the first and only “true national” (partisan) film(Khatkovskaia 2008: 437).5. Partisans in Films of the 2000s:Nationalisation, De-Glorification, Deconstruction168 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesresistance against the German Wehrmacht in June 1941. Despite the Soviet side’s swiftdefeat at Brest Fortress, party ideologues constructed a heroic narrative soon after thewar (Ganzer 2021) which connected the Red Army’s defence of the Fortress with partisanresistance. It was not until the KhrushchevThaw period, however, that this narrative be-camewidely known through the books Brest Fortress (Brestskaia krepost’, 1957) andHeroes ofBrest Fortress (Geroi Brestskoi kreposti, 1961),whichwerewritten by the famouswar reporterand Lenin Prize winner Sergei Smirnov based on witness accounts and interviews, andwhich made the fortress a symbolic site of memory, particularly in Belarus (Lewis 2011:379).Thesignificance that thepost-SovietBelarusian state attached to the recyclingof theSoviet partisanmyth is also evident in the tremendousfinancial expenditure and organi-sational effort thatwas invested in the production anddistribution of the twofilms.Bothfilms were Belarusian-Russian co-productions and were produced under Lukashenko’spatronage. According to Khatkovskaia,Deep Flow broke all records for state funding andwas introduced by the President himself at its premiere at the October cinema inMinsk.As forBrest Fortress, its production costs totalled some eightmillion dollars, and the film’spremiere was promoted as one of the most important events of the 2000s wave of warfilms.The premiere was laden with symbolism: timed to coincide with the 69th anniver-sary of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, it was held on-site at the Brest Fortressmemorial,as part of a grandiose memorial ceremony.A seconddirection in recentBelarusianfilm,on theotherhand,continues an individ-ualised and psychological mode of narrating the war; these films de-glorify the partisanmyth and in some cases deconstruct it.While the characters in the previouslymentionedblockbusters display psychological nuance and internal conflicts, distinguishing themsharply from the epic works of the Soviet era, this ultimately serves solely to attest to theheroic pathos of the collective struggle. By contrast, newer adaptations of literary worksby Vasyl Bykaŭ and Ales’ Adamovich tie in with the late Soviet film adaptations of theseauthors’ work, which address the bleak and brutal aspects of the partisan struggle fromthe perspective of the individual.These include Franz + Polina (2006, directed by MikhailSegal), a film based on Adamovich’s novelTheDeaf (Nemoi, 1993), along with several filmsand a graphic novel based on Bykaŭ’s storyOurs (Svaiaki,1966), as well as the award-win-ningfilm In the Fog (V tumane, 2012) by Sergei Loznitsa, based on a story of the samenameby Bykaŭ (1989). In the latter work, the Belarusian-Ukrainian director Loznitsa treats thepartisan struggle as a mere backdrop for the unspectacular but existential conflicts ofindividuals in times of war: each of the film’s three characters tries to follow their ownmoral compass, but none of them remain morally unscathed.MysteriumOccupation (Okkupatsiia.Misterii [AkupatsyiaMistėryi], 2004) directed by An-drėi Kudzinenka, set a highly provocative new direction. Its radical aim of dismantlingthe heroic partisan myth opened a new chapter in Belarusian cinema (Khatkovskaia2008: 469). Even the fact that it was not produced by Belarusfilm, but rather by theindependent Navigator Studio, was a minor sensation.34 The film not only rejects the34 Other critical films about national historical themes and the Soviet past crimes –such as IgorKuznetsov’s TV-documentaries Katyn’. After 70 Years (Katyn. Praz 70 gadoŭ, 2010) – about the massmurder of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals by the NKVD in April 1940) and The StalinLine on a Child’s Palm (Liniia Stalina na dzitsiachai daloni, 2015) – dedicated to the youngest membersNina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 169heroic meta-narrative, but also radically dismantles the categories of moral value setforth in the Soviet-Russian canon.35 In micro-histories, it shows how daily life in anoccupied country is shaped by desires, irrational choices, instincts, violence and sadism,with nobody distinguishing themselves through any heroic acts.The Belarusian cultureministry therefore banned the film on the grounds that it was unpatriotic and destruc-tive, denying it a distribution licence for years,36 which only attractedmore interest in itin Belarusian online spaces and at international film festivals.37Figure 7.4: Film still from the filmMysteriumOccupation (2004)ButMysteriumOccupationnotonlydismantles (neo-) Soviet partisanheroism; throughthe paratextual framing of the plot, it also accentuates a negative state of “Belarusian-ness” as the actual national catastrophe: such “Belarusianness” is the end, the non-exis-tence of Belarusian culture, or, as Simon Lewis aptly puts it, “the postcolonial mourningof the Stalinist terror) or Vasil Hryn’s documentary oral history film The Third Truth (Tret’ia Pravda,2010) – inwhich people from the Polesian region talk about their life during Polish and Soviet rule)could have been shown only in an informal setting in these years (Sahm 2010: 53).35 For more details on the film, see inter alia Gusakovskaia 2008; Bekus 2010: 229–233; Lewis 2011.36 The state press accused the film and its director of, among other things, “slandering the partisanmovement”, TV-Kanal Kul’tura, 24. 06.2004 [22 November 2022, link not accessible]. The Ministryof Culture justified its decision by arguing that: “The treatment of the partisan movement in thefilm contradicts the truth, can hurt the feelings of war veterans and can have a negative impacton the education of the younger generation and young people” (Khatkovskaia 2008: 439). The filmwas first shown in Minsk in 2010.37 The film was first screened as a short film at Filmfest Rotterdam and was able to be extended to a90-minute feature-length film thanks to an award from the Dutch Film Fund. The longer versionof the film was shown at numerous international film festivals.170 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesfor a past that cannot return and a present that is in ruins” (Lewis 2011: 377). A text super-imposed on the beginning of the film states:500 years ago, they did not know they were Belarusians, but their country was thelargest in Europe. When they realized this, they no longer had a state of their own,and others considered them to be either incomplete Russians or defective Poles. Butthere still were some Belarusians. They got lumped together with the Soviet people.And then the war and occupation started. After this there were very few Belarusiansleft. Now theBelarusians have their own state. But there are nomore Belarusians. (Mys-terium Occupation)38Here,directorKudinenko is addressing anothermyth,onewhich tracesBelarusian iden-tity to the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Polish-Lithuanian aristocratic cul-ture as an anti-programme to the Soviet concept of nationalities. Inherent to thismodel,which was put forth by exponents of ‘Belarusian rebirth’, is the projection of nationalhistory backward onto the period of the Grand Duchy and onto the Belarusian Repub-lic which existed for a few months in 1918 under German occupation. According to thismodel, Belarusian identity has always been formed in contrast to the dominant popula-tion group or in resistance to the occupying power.But what is truly provocative about Kudinenko’s interpretation is that he turns theparadox of this Belarusian identity into its essence: it is at the moment when the popu-lation are repressed and destroyed that they first gain an awareness of themselves as Be-larusians. In this ‘decolonial’ reading, then, the existence of the Belarusian Soviet Social-ist Republic is also a period of non-existence, as it had no autonomy under Soviet power.Correspondingly, the re-founding of Belarus as a nation can only take place through aradical deconstruction of all that is Soviet and thereby also of the Soviet partisan myth.In the end, all that can remain of the myth is its mere form, ‘partisanhood’ as a form ofresistance and a therapeutic model for grappling with the absence of Belarusianness.39In his 2007 bookTheCode of Absence (Kod adsutnaci, 2007), the philosopher Valiantsin Aku-dovich took up this notion,which Kudinenko had generated through direct engagementwith the Soviet partisan myth, expanding it into a comprehensive concept of identity.38 See the introduction to the film on Youtube, minute 0:00-0:52: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s3_HqpVtSs [30 September 2023]. I quote the translation by Simon Lewis (Lewis 2012: 377).39 “For Belarus, the occupation is themain themeof its existencebecause our country has always beenunder occupation … . We wanted to speak about a traditional theme for Belarusian cinema, but atthe same time to do it in our own way. All Belarusians are partisans and the subject of partisansand war is a sacred theme for Belarus.” Kudienko in interview at the Moscow International Filmfestival in June 2004 (Kudinenko 2004).Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 1716. “I’m not there”: ‘Partisan Identity’ and the Anti-PartisanSince the early 2000s, thefigureof thepartisanhasbeen increasinglypresent in indepen-dent Belarusian culture as a concept of identity that creates a sense of commonality andisdirectedagainst state appropriationof theSovietmyth. In thisfigure, themain topoi ofthe partisan have shifted: in particular, the topos of collective ‘resistance’ against theGer-man occupation inWorldWar II has been gradually expanded to encompass any kind of‘occupation’ past or present (Oushakine 2013). Two conceptualisations of partisanhoodhave especially gained tremendous popularity with the consolidation of Lukashenko’sauthoritarian presidential system and of the resistance against his regime’s repressiverestrictions: firstly, Akudovich’s notion of a specific “partisan mentality” as a concept ofnational identity, as set forth in hismuch-cited bookCode of Absence (Kod adsutnaci, 2007).And secondly, the concept of the “partisan artist”, which the artist Artur Klinaŭ outlinesin his cultural project pARTisanandwhich is focusedmore on subversive artistic practice.What the two concepts have in common, and what has made them so influential in con-temporary popular culture, is that they pointedly make reference to the Soviet partisanmyth and understand it as the true deviation from the Belarusian national tradition, or,more precisely, as an artificial, imperial construct, something ‘foreign’ thatwas forced onthe Belarusian people through Soviet-Russian colonisation. At the same time, however,they appropriate thefigure of the partisan,which is at the heart of thismyth,butwhich isnow used on behalf of the idea of a national rebirth and an ‘authentic’ Belarusianness inopposition to the Soviet ‘occupier’.This figure is imagined not as a heroic warrior, but asa fighterwithout aweapon in hand,who defends the homelandwith tactics of resistanceand perseverance. According to Akudovich, this figure is an almost sacred embodimentof the Belarusian people and is a formof anticolonial self-description. Partisan life in theunderground and the background is reinterpreted to possess a special quality of ‘activeabsence’:For the Belarusians, the word ‘partisan’ has long possessed a sacred meaning, whicheven the Soviet myth of the partisan movement could not take away from it. The Be-larusian is a ‘partisan’ by nature – in his private life and as part of history. … a partisanis someone who always hides. Hide-and-seek is probably the only national sport of theBelarusian people. A partisan always says: I’m not there. A partisan shows himself onlyin the interest of sabotage; afterwards, he hides again beneath his mask of ‘I’m notthere’. (Akudovich 2013: 68)40Akudovich’s alternative conception, then, adopts the form of the Soviet myth but recon-structs its contentmetonymically.He removes thepartisan’s twodefininghabits–hidingand sabotage – from their Soviet war context entirely; beyond this, he also postulates theoriginal setting of the Soviet post-war myth –World War II era – as the real distortion40 The original edition in Belarusian was published in 2007 under the title Kod adsutnatsi. Asnovy be-laruskai mental’nastsi by the Minsk publishing house Lohvinaŭ. The translations into English arebased on the German edition.172 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesof history. He argues that the Soviet partisan struggle was forced on the Belarusian peo-ple as a foreign and ultimately self-destructivemovement, and that the ‘partisan’ form ofpresence – acting in the background and adapting oneself – is ultimately far older (Aku-dovich 2013: 62, 170). This twofold revision enables him to transfer the qualities of thepartisanas anontological foundation forBelarusian identity backwardsonto the entiretyof its history and culture, which he claims shapes civilian everyday life to this day. Aku-dovich declares partisanhood to be the conditio belarus, a timeless and “sacred” habit thatis to be found in all life situations and periods of history of the Belarusian people. Andeven where it completely invisible, he argues, it remains present, as the partisan men-tality as a fundamental national habit is characterised by its disguising of itself. How-ever, with this central part of his argument, Akudovich in turn takes up typically pan-Soviet habits of disguise, which – as Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown – spread throughoutthe country beginning in the 1920s and especially during the terror of the Stalin era (Fitz-patrick 2005).Klinaŭ’s conception of partisanhood is very similar to Akudovich’s in its form butrefers less to a national identity imagined to be timeless and more to a specific artisticstrategy. For him, the Belarusian ‘underground man’ is someone who has, by retreatingto a territory which he will defend and by defending his own culture from external in-fluences, strategically adapted to his own country being ruled by authorities perceivedas foreign (Klinaŭ 2014: 31). “For more than two hundred years, partisanhood has beenan indispensable strategy of self-preservation, the only available survival technique forBelarusian culture” (Klinaŭ 2014: 26).For Klinaŭ too, the Soviet partisan myth plays a key role: he defines it as the “GreatPartisan” and sets it in opposition to the figure of the “anti-partisan”. The latter fightsnot for heroic victories, but rather in the counter-world of the underground, against anauthoritarian state regime and for his own survival and that of Belarusian culture.But the partisan is not just the heroic typewith aweapon in hand, thefighter for the na-tional cause. He is also a diagnosis: a pathological state of consciousness, with deep-rooted fears in response to historical trauma… From a psychological perspective, theBelarusian partisan is an underground man. His mission is not to triumph, but to sur-vive. (Klinaŭ 2014: 28)But for Klinaŭ, survival also means deconstructing the system of the Great Partisan inorder to preserve the cultural code of Belarusian culture. In this, Klinaŭ’s conception dif-fers fundamentally from Akudovich’s in that, while he too regards the Soviet myth as anaberration, he does not discard it entirely as a colonial construct foreign to Belarusianidentity; rather, he recognises it as a national product of its own.Hewrites, for example,that the “development of the mythology of the Great Partisan” was “the most distinctiveBelarusian cultural achievement of the Soviet era” (Klinaŭ 2014: 8). For him, the antago-nismbetweenwhat is one’s ownandwhat is foreign is not an ontological state of nationalidentities, but rather amatter of succession: theGreat Partisanfigure that emerged fromthe ‘colonial’ Soviet context is supplanted by the anti-partisan or ‘artist-partisan’, whomust subversively emancipate himself from the authoritarian and heroic legacy of hispredecessor, becoming the true partisan (Klinaŭ 2014: 14–26).Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 1737. pARTisan: TheArtist-Partisan as a Rebel against State IdeologyIn the early 2000s, Artur Klinaŭ programmatically expanded his concept of the artist-partisan. For Klinaŭ,what was at stakewas no less than the reconquest of the Belarusiancultural space and with it a comprehensive concept of partisan art that fought by sub-versivemeans to gain artistic autonomy. In works such as his installation PartisanMobileShop (Mobil’nyimagazin partizana,2003),Klinaŭ shows that for him thiswas from the out-set also a matter of differentiation from the official state partisan myth. In the installa-tion, he displayed the retro-Soviet ideology of the Belarusian state as a cheap nostalgiaarticle, like an exotic attraction.But the cornerstone of Klinaŭ’s project was the pARTisan art and culture magazine,whichwas founded in 2002 and sought to gather the independent arts scene together forthe first time under the partisan label. In the first issue of pARTisan, Klinaŭ articulatedthe qualities ascribed to this rebellious partisan in a sort of ‘partisan manifesto’:The appropriation of spaces that the system is not able to penetrate constitutes thestrength of the partisan. These spaces, the zones of the irrational, are inaccessible tothe system, because the system a priori moves within the framework of rational dis-course. At the same time, the partisan is superbly able to find his way in the labyrinthof the system. Because he knows the system’s vulnerabilities, he can puncture it withpinpricks, then disappear into his safe haven on the other side of the mirror… (Klinaŭ2014: 24)For Klinaŭ and the pARTisan project, then, much more was at stake than creating exclu-sive spaces for autonomousart or, like theheroesof thefilmTheMatrix (1999),ofwhich thequote above is strongly reminiscent, solely retreating into subversive actions.Rather, theproject represents the presence of independent creative artists in the spirit of an ‘alterna-tive partisanhood’ as an “intellectual front”, as also articulated by the philosopher MaksZhbankoŭ: “It is very simple: partisans only appear in those places where an occupationhas occurred. And in a country that has long been under cultural occupation, partisansof the intellectual front consequently appear” (Zhbankoŭ 2014, as cited in Strocaŭ 2014:75).One important point of reference for the pARTisan project was the programmaticmultimedia photography project Light Guerrilla Movement (Lёhki partyzanski rukh [Tikhoepartizanskoe dvizhenie]), through which the artist Ihar Tsishyn [Igor’ Tishin] had made aname for himself in 1997. A series of black-and-white photographs shows aman in parti-san attire with amachine gun in his hand inside a typical hut like those seen in countlesspartisanfilms.One photographprovocatively shows theweapon in a dysfunctional state.Themandoesnot hold theweaponat the ready todefendhimself or to attack.On the con-trary, he lies passively on a table and holds the weapon lackadaisically in his hand, like auseless object that has grown obsolete. Around him, time appears to stand still and thetable to be the last safe refuge. In other images from the series, he starts moving, firstinside the hut, then outside it, but nothing happens. In place of the hero of the Sovietand post-Soviet partisanmyth,who is perpetually ready to fight, this scene ismarked bya sense of excessive helplessness. Tsishyn’s project was greeted by many as a manifesto174 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesand his partisan as a metaphor for Belarusian artists, who found themselves at a pointof absolute emptiness at the turn of the century: in the late 1990s, alternative cultural lifehad largely ground to a halt due to increasing repression under the Lukashenko regime.The partisan became a symbol of the artist whose world had shrunk to the dimensions ofa ‘dissident’ kitchen table. In this period, Tsishyn andmany other dissenting artists emi-grated abroad, as they saw no future prospects for themselves in Belarus (cf. Arcimovich2016 [2021]); Shparaga 2013: 7–10). Klinaŭ’s pARTisan project represented an attempt tocounter this trend by offering an alternative within the country.Figure 7.5: Cultural magazine pARTisan, 2010/22During the 2010s, there were multiple phases in which state repression receded toa certain extent and small pockets of an alternative cultural life appeared to take holdwithin the few free spaces that the state authorities permitted. In a few scattered cases,the alternative and official cultural spheres even inched a bit closer to one another, forexample, when rock bands that had previously been banned from performing were nowable to perform even on state television (cf. Petz 2013: 2–7) or when critical artists re-Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 175ceived public funding.41 The clear boundaries between the state ‘occupier’ and the re-sistance ‘partisan’, which had been fundamental to Klinaŭ’s and Tsishyn’s models of thepartisan, now appeared to be obsolete. Even Akudovich called for a change in strategy:“The war of those days is over. Because the war we chose ended long ago without us, wejust didn’t notice the end…That is why pARTisan needs a radical shift in strategy so thatit can remain partisan” (Akudovich 2014: 154). This shift in strategy did indeed come topass, albeit in a very different way than expected, when in 2020 the regime respondedto declining support among the population by holding fraudulent presidential elections,which led tomassive protests,which in turn again updated the Soviet partisanmyth andappropriated it in a form that strongly modified some aspects of it.8. Partisanhood Reloaded: Between Resistance, Protest and WarTo understand the boom in partisanhood during the protests of 2020–2021, one musttake into account that the Soviet partisan myth had been reappropriated in many waysnot only in the alternative intellectual and art scene, but also in commercial popular cul-ture, on major websites and on social media. For example, in the film Party-Zan (2016)by Andrėi Kurėichik, young actors provocatively parody the myth in a storyline in whichsome young people seize on the obsessive production of war films in Belarus and shoottheir own partisan film as a moneymaking scheme.42 As early as 1997, the rock bandN.R.M. (Nezalezhnaia Rėspublika Mroia/Independent Republic of Dreams), one of the mostpopular groups in the alternative scene, released the song Partyzanskaia on their albumMade inN.R.M. Beginning in the style of war partisan songs, then shifting to a hard rocksound, the song features Belarusian-language lyrics that express the speaker’s aversionto the present-day occupiers, an unmistakeable reference to the Lukashenko regime.43In 1999, the poet and singer Andrėi Khadanovich wrote the humorous poem Pesnia Be-lorusskikhPartizan (Song of the BelarusianPartisans)44,which uses absurd rhymes, a Belaru-sian-Russian hybrid language, and the rhyming of ‘partisans’ with ‘Tarzans’ to under-mine the heroic pathos of the myth.45 The theme was also taken up in performance art,too, such as in “I am not…”, a 2008 performance action by the artist Mikhail Gulin, in41 Such as Klinaŭ himself, who in 2011 participated in the Belarusian pavilion at the 54th Venice Bien-nale, whichwas funded by theMinistry of Culture, and triggered critical discussions aboutwhetherindependent art should be allowed to cooperate with a regime that extensively fights the idea ofautonomous art (reference Petz 2013: 6, interview Klinaŭ).42 Simon Lewis aptly speaks of “near-total carnivalization of the partisan trope, satiricallymixingHol-lywood-style comic debauchery with a mocking treatment of the country’s traditional obsessionwith World War II” (Lewis 2017: 391).43 See the refrain: “We are partisans, forest brothers. We are partisans, on familiar terms with war.We are partisans, we love our country. We’ll cleanse our country from foreign bands.” Translationby Lewis 2017: 387; Original song and full text on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSvwNjYsXgE [30 September 2023].44 The poem was first published in the online edition of the magazine ARCHE (2/3, 1999), one of themost important independent platforms: https://arche.by [23 March 2023].45 Cf. “O, Tarzans, forest Tarzans!, Long live the monkey King Kong! Off to camp went the Partisans,Off to faraway Hong Kong!” (Khadanovich 1999, translation by Lewis 2017: 387).176 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zoneswhich he walked throughMinsk and other cities with a sign on his chest proclaiming hisnon-identification with certain stereotypical attributes: “I’m not an amerikos” (“Ia – neamerikos”), “I’mnot gay” (“Ia –ne gei”), “I’mnot a terrorist” (“Ia –ne terrorist”).He beganthe series with a sign written in German, which read “Ich bin kein Partisan” (“I’m not aPartisan”), evoking the German occupiers’ punishment of Soviet partisans duringWorldWar II.46 Gulin’s work thereby inverts the historical formof public denunciation,makingit into a personal reclaiming of public space (cf. Šparaha 2014).Belarusian Partisan (Belorusski Partisan) 47, an independent media platform critical ofthe government which was founded in deliberate contrast to the state-sponsored plat-form Partisans of Belarus (Partizany Belarusi)48, likewise made subversive use of the parti-sanmyth, publishing information about events in the country that was omitted from theofficial news.49All these widely divergent reappropriations of the partisan myth in popular culture,art and politics had the effect that during the dramatic events of summer and autumn2020, the myth also played an important role in the protests against fraudulent elec-tions, within a dynamic of recoding and reappropriation. For example, in a symbolicallycharged act on 16 August, in front of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War on VictorySquare, a crowd of people wrapped the Minsk Hero City Obelisk and the Motherlandstatue (Радзіма-маці) in the white-red-white flag of the protests. Such impactful “actsof re-signification” (Bekus 2021) also appeared when subsequent demonstrations – fol-46 Cf. Mikhail Gulin: “Ich bin kein Partisan”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olG7o1ZaE6w[30 September 2023].47 Launched by Pavel Sharamet and a group of independent journalists in 2005, this platform wasdedicated to uncensored information about events in Belarus, which is why it was repeatedly ac-cused of “defiling the fatherland” and subjected to accompanying restrictions before it was de-clared “extremist” in November 2021 and closed down, including all channels on social networks.48 This is a state database and educational project supported by the state-affiliated publishing houseBelarus Segodnia and theNationalArchives of Belarus. In addition to the archiving and search functionfor historical data and individual fates, the platform is intended not only to keep alive the “memoryof the Belarusian partisan struggle against Nazism”, but also to cultivate the “patriotic educationof the youth” and to explore an “expansion of the patriotic level of the population”, which meansthat it is still clearly marked by the Soviet narrative. Cf. the homepage: https://partizany.by [30September 2023]. Cf. the description of the project on the homepage: “The Partisans of Belarusproject has been set up to perpetuate the memory of the Belarusian partisans who fought againstthe Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, to educate young people patriotically, to raise the civiland patriotic level of the population, and to intensify the search operations”: https://partizany.by/about/ [30 September 2023].49 The restrictions were justified by typical schemes of complaints from the population: state mediapublished two letters of complaint from veterans’ associations accusing “Belorusskii Partisan” ofinsulting all citizens of Belarus and the honour of veterans through their activity. Cf. “Griasnaia stri-apnia na saite ‘Belorusskii partisan’, oskorbliaet vsech zhitelei Belarussi.” In: News.21.By, 30 March2010: https://news.21.by/society/2010/03/30/524231.html [30 September 2023)] and “Ne oskorbli-ate veteranov.” In: Belarus Segodnia, 26 February 2010: https://www.sb.by/articles/ne-oskorblyayte-veteranov.htm [30 September 2023]. Between 2010 and 2021, despite a change of server, the sitewas blocked several times, prosecuted, and declared extremist in November 2021, and thus dis-continued all activities.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 177lowing a ban on demonstrations at Victory Square –weremoved to Partisan Avenue andrenamed a “PartisanMarch” (“Partizanskii marsh”).50However, tactics such as those used in the street action described at the beginningof this paper and used in coordinating protest actions via the Telegram channel Nextaplayed an even more prominent role in the protest and resistance movement. Referringto the protest movements of the 2010s, the sociologist Almira Usmanava [Ousmanova]defined such tactics as follows:The art of coming from ten different directions to gather at a specific spot, striking asplanned, then scattering as quickly and inconspicuously as possible, only to pounceagain in another spot. (Usmanava 2014: 109)This partisan tactic is a “response to the ‘situation’ created by the regime, in which allprotest is regarded as illegitimate violence” (Usmanava 2014: 109).This tactic – for whichanewword, the verb partisanits (rus. partisanit’), has been established–was also deployedin other forms of public protest and flash mob actions. These included inconspicuousdistribution of flyers; flash mob choirs performing protest songs in public places suchas metro stations and shopping centres51 (some of which were songs from the interna-tional tradition of partisan songs)52; unannounced concerts by well-known bands; talksby creative artists in the rear courtyards of buildings; and the placing of banned protestsymbols in locationswhere theywere difficult to remove, aswell as the documentation oflaborious (andoften failed) attemptsby staff of the state authorities to remove these sym-bols.53The last example in particular shows that these actions were not solely amatter ofsymbolically attacking the system’s vulnerable points, but also of demonstrating the dys-functionality of a supposedly omnipotent apparatus of power, and ideally dismantling itfromwithin.5450 Cf. Khartyia ’97: “Partisan March Held in Belarus”, 10 October 2024: https://charter97.org/en/news/2020/10/18/397402/ [30 September 2023].51 Cf. people singing the songs The Almighty God (Mahutny Bozha) and The Chase (Pahonya) at the Ku-palovskaia metro station on the evening of 27 August, Zerkalo, Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN-ZgjvX_Vc [30 September 2023].52 An overview on the role of songs in the Belarusian protest movement in 2020 is given by the on-line magazineMeduza: “Belorusskiy protest v musyke: pleylist Meduzy”, 16 August 2020 (https://meduza.io/slides/belorusskiy-protest-v-muzyke-pleylist-meduzy) [30 September 2023] and by An-drei Khadanovich in: “Smuggling Freedom: Belarusian Protest Songs”, 31 December 2020 on on-line magazine Cultura.pl: https://culture.pl/en/article/smuggling-freedom-belarusian-protest-songs, in which he refers to the song The Partisan (originally: La Complainte du Partisan) by AnnaMarly& Leonard Cohen. The project “Street of Freedom” (“Ulitsa Mira”) and the singer Svetlana Ben per-formed the song in a natural open space, floating on a raft across a lake, Cf. Nenoev Kovcheg,Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32re2VAWMVw&t=21s [30 September 2023].53 Such as colouring a frozen lake in the colours of the opposition or tying three pairs of underpantscoloured red-white-red to a line high above a road, etc. Cf. pictures in journalNastoiashchee vremia,11 January 2021: https://www.currenttime.tv/a/belarus-2020-dno/31038555.html [30 September2023].54 A key role in coordinating the protest actions and informing people about the events was playedby the Telegram channel Nexta, with over onemillion people registered on the channel. Cf. NEXTAlive: https://t.me/nexta_live [30 September 2023].178 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesOne striking particularity of the Belarusian protest actions was their recourse tomethods taken from alternative Internet artworks with ‘partisan tactics’: popular Inter-net art projects from the 2010s such as the websites Lemons (Limony) and Belarusian Toad(Belarusskaia zhaba) and Free (Svoboden), which are collections of ironic photomontageswith Belarusian themes or caricatures of Lukashenko.55 Most of these sites have sincebeen shut down, but they were carried on in new formats during the 2020 protests, suchas on the Twitter account and Telegram channel Sad Kolenka (Grustnyi Kolen’ka), where acharacter named after Lukashenko’s oldest son comments sarcastically on current polit-ical events in away that is critical of the regime.56 After August 2020, the “war of internetmemes” (Dawidowicz/Kharytonau 2021) grew into a veritable storm of digital protestart, which made it possible to expose the ruling ideology’s crude mixture of pathosand absurdity and, as an earlier overarching description by Usmanava put it, “throughparasitical participation in public discourse” to “split things from within, devalue thefamiliar words and images and thus make the ubiquitous official culture look not onlyabsurd but also completely out of place” (Usmanava 2014: 108).The dimensions of these appropriations of tactics and symbols of the partisan strug-gle once again shifted radically with the preparation and launch of the large-scale Rus-sian attack on Ukraine in February 2022. For example, the anonymous regime-criticalhacker group calling themselvesCyberpartisans, who hadmade a name for themselves in2020 with coups such as hacking the databases of the Interior Ministry and other state-run websites57, now joined forces with the self-proclaimed partisan groupsTheStorks areFlying (Busly liatsiats’) and Resistance (Supraziu), in order to fight in solidarity with the be-siegedUkraine against the imperialist adversary, Russia, and its ally, the Belarusian gov-ernment.5855 All three sites are deactivated for political reasons and currently not accessible.56 Before the channel was declared “extremist” in August 2023, it had almost 350.000 followers onX-Twitter (https://twitter.com/sadmikalai) and over 20.000 followers on Telegram (@sadmikalai).The online portal Kyky, which has been labelled “extremist” by the government since December2022, regularly publishes a column under the hashtag Grustnyi_Kolenka: https://kyky.org/search_tag?tag=Грустный_Коленька [30 September 2023].57 One of their best-known coups, apart from uncovering numerous intercepted telephone calls, wasthe hijacking of the Interior Ministry’s computer systems, where they gained access to the wantedlists andunceremoniously placed thenames of the InteriorMinister and Lukashenkohimself at thetop of the list as “most wanted”. Cf.: Kyky, 3 October 2020: https://kyky.org/hero/eto-lish-vershina-aysberga-kiber-partizany-rasskazali-kak-budut-sryvat-maski-s-silovikov [30 September 2023].58 Members of The Storks are Flying groupwere sentenced from to 8.5 to 15 years in prison by aMinskcourt in December 2022 on charges of participating in terrorist activities, according to, among oth-ers, the human rights organisation Viasna, September 28, 2022: https://spring96.org/ru/news/109227 [30 September 2023]. Via Telegram they mobilise Belarusians to join a volunteer battalionfighting on the side of the Ukrainians in the war.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 179Figure 7.6: Screenshot TelegramChanelCyberpartisansThe alliance between the Cyberpartisans and the group known as Railway Partisansdrew a great deal of attention: beginning in January 2022, they jointly carried out nu-merous acts of sabotage against the Belarusian railway network to prevent the transportof Russian military equipment to Ukraine via Belarus (Perova 2022).59 The continuity oftheir actions with the Soviet myth is evident – inWorldWar II, partisans similarly sabo-taged the railway lines of the German occupiers on the occupied territory. InMarch 2022the opposition political and journalist Franak Viačorka posted on Twitter: “Belarus is aland of partisans.Our heroes stop Russian trains, damage Russian equipment, hand outleaflets to prevent Belarus troops from entering Ukraine.”60 In this way, symbolic art ac-tions and philosophical treatises have swiftly given way to the return of real acts of sab-otage, and in place of tactics of unarmed retreat and hidden survival, masked (cyber-)attacks and armed forms of solidarity are once again appearing.59 These acts of sabotage were coordinated and supported by anonymous comrades-in-arms via theTelegram group Belarusian Haiun (Belarusskii Haiun, @Hajun_BY), which monitors military move-ments on Belarusian territory.60 Cf. PolskieRadio.pl, 21 March 2022: https://www.polskieradio.pl/400/7764/Artykul/2924291,Belarussische-Saboteure-helfen-den-Ukrainern [30 September 2023].180 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zones9. ConclusionStrictly speaking, in contemporary Belarusian culture there have been two interrelatedphases of the popularisation of partisanhood,which are superimposed over one anotherin their contradictory nature. In line with Roland Barthes’ notion of mythologies, theseare different phases of the ‘naturalisation’ of symbolic constructions of identity, whichdifferent actors repeatedly adapt to fit specific cultural and political constellations. Thefirst crucial phase of constituting the partisan myth took place during the post-war era,when the characteristics of the figure of the partisan which had existed since the 1920swere attached to the struggle against the German occupiers during World War II andshaped into recurring attributes, images and narratives.Thus emerged the topos of Be-larus as a ‘partisan republic’whichwas presented as havingmade a decisive contributionto theRedArmy’s victory overNaziGermany through its heroic resistance.Thismythwasspread in all mediums and in many popular films beginning in the 1960s, and – after abrief phase of upheaval in the 1980s and 1990s – continued to be constitutive of Belaru-sian state power in the post-Soviet era.61 In the second phase, which began at the turnof the twenty-first century, oppositional and dissident conceptualisations of ‘partisan-hood’ have been directed against the dominance of that which is heroic, Soviet and offi-cial and of the state. In the second phase, ‘partisanhood’ has served as themetaphor forthe Belarusian ‘mentality’ and ‘identity’ and as the core of a fundamentally revisedmyth.On the one hand, this is a concept of not showing oneself, of making oneself invisible inthe face of the insurmountable superior power of the adversary ‘occupying’ one’s home-land, a stance which was also projected backwards all the way to the early modern era asa timeless quality of all Belarusian identity. However, an update of the myth which wasmore tailored to the specific situation of Lukashenko’s Belarus also emerged at the sametime: the figure of the partisan as an actor engaged in subversive artistic practises andartistic protest entered into the self-conception of independent creative artists. Parti-sanhood was now understood as the art of living (and survival) and as the only way outof a struggle – which had not been freely chosen – against the adversary (the state, ide-ology, official art). In light of the already extensive apparatus of repression in Belarusand the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine with the participation of the Belarusianstate, this understanding has begun to shift both within Belarus and abroad in the pastyear and half: now self-proclaimed partisans place their own activities within a broadercontext as acts of solidarity with the decolonial resistance of Ukraine against the imperi-alism of Russia. It is thus apparent that the formal core of the myth initially installed bythe Soviet state in the 1960s, a core which refers to resistance against external occupyingpowers,hasdevelopedenormousvitality andpopularity in recentdecades andhas largelyeliminated its ‘Soviet’ content, if not outright identifiedSovietness itself as the real ‘occu-pation’. In these reappropriations of partisanhood, however, the quality which Barthesidentifies as so dangerous inmythologies remains evident: rather than differentiating orhistoricising, the mythology constructs Belarusian identity in a way that repeatedly op-erates through clear distinctions betweenwhat is one’s own andwhat is foreign,between61 For more detail on the role of the partisan battle in Belarusian memory politics, cf. Rudling 2008;Hansen 2008: 187–196; Sahm 2010; Marples 2012, 2014.Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 181the national and the imperial, and between the colonised and the occupier. At the sametime,however, the post-Soviet appropriations of the partisanmyth in the alternative anddissident art scene and in oppositional protest culture show that these binarymythic di-chotomies are tremendously flexible, and that, as a familiar repertoire of symbols andnarratives, they can be subversively adapted and varied to fit a specific political situationand cultural environment.Translated by Jane YagerFilmographyBrest Fortress (Brestskaia Krepost’), dir. Izrail Pikman, USSR 1975.Come and See (Idi i smotri), dir. Ėlem Klimov, USSR 1985.Deep Flow (Glubokoe techenie), dir. Margarita Kasymova/Ivan Pavlov, Belarus 2005.Father (Bat’ka), dir. Boris Stepanov, USSR 1971.Flame (Plamia), dir. Vital’ Chatsverykoŭ [Vitalii Chetverikov], USSR 1974.Franz + Polina, dir. Mikhail Segal, Russia 2006.Girl Seeks Father (Devochka ischet ottsa), dir. Lev Golub, USSR 1959.I Am a Fortress, I StoodmyGround (Ia – Krepost’, Vedu Boi), dir. Izrail Pikman, USSR 1972.In the Fog (V tumane), dir. Sergei Loznitsa, Belarus/Germany/Latvia/Netherlands/Russia/USA 2012.Konstantin Zaslonov, dir. Aleksandr Faintsimmer/Vladimir Korsh-Sablin, USSR 1949.Mysterium Occupation (Okkupatsiia. Misterii [Akupatsyia Mistėryi]), dir. Andrei KudinenkoBelarus 2004.Party-Zan, dir. Andrei Kureichik, Belarus 2016.Sons Go into Battle (Synov’ia ukhodiat v boi), dir. Viktor Turov, USSR 1969.TheAscent (Vozchozhdenie), dir. Larissa Shepit’ko, USSR 1976.TheBlack Birch (Chernaia berёza), dir. Vital’ Chatsverykoŭ [Vitalii Chetverikov], USSR 1977.The Brest Fortress [also known as Fortress of War], (Brestkaia krepost’) dir. Aleksandr Kott,Russia/Belarus 2010.TheChildren of the Partisan (Deti partizana), dir. Nikolai Figurovskii/Lev Golub, USSR 1954.The Clock Stopped at Midnight (Chasy ostanovilis v polnoch’), dir. Nikolai Figurovskii, USSR1959.TheMatrix, dir. Lana/Lilly Wachowski, USA 1999.The Ruins Are Shooting (Ruiny Streliaiut’), dir. Vital’ Chatsverykoŭ [Vitalii Chetverikov],USSR 1970–72.Through the Cemetery (Cherez kladbishche), dir. Viktor Turov, USSR 1964.TimeHas Chosen Us (Vremia vybralo nas), dir. Michail Ptashuk, USSR 1976–1979.WarUnder the Roofs (Voina pod kryshami), dir. Viktor Turov, USSR 1967.What Is It, the Sea? (Kakoe ono, more), dir. Ėduard Bocharov, USSR 1964.182 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesList of IllustrationsFigure 7.1: Screenshot from Belsat-TV on X-Twitter: “Belarusian women against menfrom riot police”.Figure 7.2: Film poster for the film Konstantin Zaslonov (1949).Figure 7.3: Film posters for the filmsTheChildren of the Partisan (1954) andGirl Seeks Father(1959).Figure 7.4: Film still from the filmMysteriumOccupation (2004).Figure 7.5: Cover from Cultural magazine pARTisan, 2010/22.Figure 7.6: Screenshot Telegram Chanel Cyberpartisans.ReferencesAkudovich, Valiantsin (2007): Kоd аdsutnaci, Minsk: Lohvinau.Akudowitsch, Valentin (2013): Der Abwesenheitscode: Versuch,Weißrussland zu verste-hen (translated by VolkerWeichsel), Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.Artsimovich, Tatsiana (2021): “Igor Tishin: Multimediinyi proekt ‘Tikhoe partizan-skoe dvizhenie’ 1997.” In: Mart. Sovremennoe belarusskoe iskustvo 16, 10 August2021 (https://www.mart.by/2021/08/10/igor-tishin-multimedijnyj-proekt-tixoe-partizanskoe-dvizhenie-1997/) [30 September 2023].62Barthes, Roland (2006): Mythologies [1957] (translated by Anette Lavers), New York, NY:Hill andWang.Bekus, Nelly (2010): Struggle over Identity: The Official and the Alternative “Belarusian-ness”, Budapest/New York: Central European University Press.Bekus, Nelly (2021): “Historical Memory and Symbolism in the Belarusian Protests.” In:Cultures of History Forum, 16 February 2021 (https://www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de/politics/historical-memory-and-symbolism-in-the-belarusian-protests) [30September 2023].Beliaev, Vadim (2023): “Top-10 samykh kassovykh belorusskikh filmov.” In: Komso-mol’skaia Pravda, 20 March 2023 (https://www.belarus.kp.ru/daily/27478/4734707/)[30 September 2023].Chiari, Bernhard (2001): “Die Kriegsgesellschaft. Weißrussland im Zweiten Weltkrieg(1939–1944).” In: Rainer Lindner/Dietrich Beyrau (eds.): Handbuch der GeschichteWeißrußlands, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 408–425.Dawidowicz, Maria/Kharytonau, Serge (2022): “The War of Internet Memes in BelarusMemes and identity in Belarus.” In: Vishegrad Insight, 7 October 2022 (https://visegradinsight.eu/internet-memes-belarus-opposition-lukashenka/) [30 September2023].Goujon, Alexandra (2010): “Memorial Narratives ofWWII Partisans and Genocide in Be-larus.” In: East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 24 1, pp. 6–25.62 First published in Belarusian in 2016 in Kalektar.org: http://zbor.kalektar.org/16/ [12 December2021].Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 183Gusakovskaia, Nadezhda (2008): “‘Okkupatsia. Misteriia’, ili Belorusy ne sushch-estvuiut.” In: Al’mira Usmanova (ed.): Belorusskii format: Nevidimaia real’nost’, Vil-nius: European Humanities University Press, pp. 488–496.Hansen, Imke (2008): “DiepolitischePlanungderErinnerungGeschichtskonstruktionenin Belarus zwischen Konflikt und Konsens.” In: Sapper, Manfred et al. (eds): Osteu-ropa 6/2008,Geschichtspolitik undGegenerinnerung: Krieg,Gewalt und Trauma imOsten Europas, Berlin: BerlinerWiss.-Verl., pp. 187–196.Jakiša,Miranda (ed.) (2015): Partisans in Yugoslavia: Literature, Film and Visual Culture,Bielefeld: transcript.Karpilava, Antonina A./Krasinski, A.V./Ratnikau, G.V. (eds): (2002): Historyia kina-mastatsva Belarusi. Vol. 2. 1960–1985,Minsk: Bel. 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(eds.): “Pamiats’ pra Druhuiususvetnuiu vainu u haradskim landshaftse uskhodniai Europy.” In: ARCHE 3/2010,pp.251–300 (http://palityka.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Lastouski-Kazakievich.pdf) [30 September 2023].Lewis, Simon (2011): “‘Official Nationality’ and the dissidence of memory in Belarus: Acomparative analysis of two films.” In: Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5/3, pp.371–387.Lewis, Simon (2017): “The ‘Partisan Republic’: Colonial Myths and Memory Wars inBelarus.”. In: Julie Fedor/Markku Kangaspur/Jussi Lassila/Tatiana Zhurzhenko/Alexander Etkind (eds.):War andMemory inRussia,Ukraine andBelarus,NewYork,NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 371–396.63 First published: “Partyzani antypartyzan.” In: pARTisan 1/2002, pp. 16–24.Lindner, Rainer (1999): “Besieged Past: National and Court Historians in Lukashenka’sBelarus.” In: Nationalities Papers 27/1999, pp.631-648.184 Appropriating History: II. 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Johnson (eds.): Rites of Place: PublicCommemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe, Evanston: Northwestern UniversityPress, pp. 285–314.Petz, Ingo (2013): “Paranoia und Pragmatismus Die belarussische Alternativkultur nach2010.” In: Belarus-Analysen 12, pp. 2–7.Perova, Anya (2022): “The Guerrilla War on Belarus’s Railways.” In: Meduza, 5 July2022 (https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/05/the-guerrilla-war-on-belarus-s-railways) [30 September 2023].Pfister,Eugen (2015): “Das Politische imPopulärenDiskurs.” In: ibid. (ed.): PolitischeMy-then im Digitalen Spiel, 21 October 2015 (https://spielkult.hypotheses.org/349) [30September 2023].Richter, Timm C. (2014): “Belarusian Partisans and German Reprisals.” In: Snyder, Tim-othy/Brandon, Ray (eds.): Stalin and Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.207–232.Rudling, Per Anders (2017): “‘Unhappy Is the Person Who Has No Motherland’: NationalIdeology and History Writing in Lukashenka’s Belarus.” In: Julie Fedor et al. 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(2014): “Our glorious past”: Lukashenka’s Belarus and the Great Patri-Nina Weller: Partisan, Anti-Partisan, pARTisan, Party-Zan, Cyberpartisan 185Sitnikova, Daria (2008): “Partizan: prikliucheniia odnogo kontsepta v strane bol’she-vikov.” In:Usmanova,Al’mira (ed.): Belorusskii format:Nevidimaia real’nost,Vilnius:EuropeanHumanities University Press, pp. 397–433 (https://ru.ehu.lt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Belformat-s.pdf) [30 September 2023).Stiglegger, Marcus (2020): “Komm und sieh/ldi smotiri (1988). R: Ėlem Klimov.” In:Matthias Schwartz/Barbara Wurm (eds): Klassiker des russischen und sowjetischenFilms 2,Marburg: Schüren, pp. 169–178.Strocaŭ, Dźmitry [Strotsev, Dmitri] (2014): “Jod.” In: Taciana Arcimovič et al. (eds.): Par-tisanen: Kultur_Macht_Belarus, Berlin: edition.fotoTAPETA, pp. 63–77.Tumarkin, Nina (1994): The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of WorldWar II in Russia, New York: Basic Books.Usmanava, Almira (2014): “Anarchist, Partisan, Künstler: Von der Notwendigkeit, Situa-tionen zu schaffen.” In: TacianaArcimovič et al. (eds.): Partisanen:Kultur_Macht_Be-larus, Berlin: edition.fotoTAPETA, pp. 102–111.Vasil’eva, Ekaterina/Braginskij, Nikita (2012): Noev kovcheg russkogo kino: Ot “StenkiRazina” do “Stiliag”, St. Peterburg: Globus-Press.Weller, Nina/Krawatzek, Félix (2022): “A Former Soviet Republic? 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Certainly.But mostly because our culture dreams, behind this defunct power that it tries to an-nex, of an order that would have had nothing to do with it, and it dreams of it becauseit exterminated it by exhuming it as its own past.(Jean Baudrillard 1993: 10)1. IntroductionIn contemporary Russian film the Soviet era is mostly appropriated in a nostalgic way.While conservative –often neo-imperial or nationalist – representations prevail, this es-say focusses on twomusical films,Hipsters (Stiliagi, 2008) byValerii Todorovskii and Sum-mer (Leto, 2018) by Kirill Serebrennikov, which, on the contrary, explicitly celebrate mo-mentsof anti-authoritarian subversionandchange.Bothfilmsexpressa strongnostalgiafor the non-conformist subcultures and countercultural movements – the post-Stalinisthipsters, the so-called stiliagi of the 1950s, and the late-Soviet punks, the so-called ‘non-formal’ youth of the 1980s. However, despite all sympathy one can have towards the de-pictions of the open, liberal, underground and youth cultures in these two films, the twoclearly nostalgic reconstructions of Thaw and perestroika rebels reveal significant con-tradictions ormore precisely: a remarkable tension can be detected between the longingformoments of political emancipation and their simultaneous renunciation andmitiga-tion.Working on my material, however, I realised that the paradoxical self-induced neu-tralisation of subversive, counterculturalmessages had a significant political dimension:the films in question construct a surprising opposition between a rebellious, creative188 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zones(and materially mostly unconcerned) minority on the one hand, and an indifferent, de-generate seraia massa (grey mass) of ordinary (Soviet) citizens on the other. Remarkably,this sort of elitist dichotomy undermines the democratic appeal of both the rock-n-rollof the 1950–60s (Hipsters) or the songs of the legendary rock bandsKino and Zooparkwiththeir front men Viktor Tsoi and Maik Naumenko (Summer). Moreover, the striking divi-sion into the proud rebels and servile conformists not only resonates with a deep-rootedRussian fatalism – the long tradition of cultural inferiority complex and political res-ignation. My main thesis is that such antisocial modelling of countercultural groups,confirms traditional Russian topoi about the impossibility of change due to the ‘nationalcharacter’ and apathetic masses, and thus plays into the hands of the current regime,because it disables solidarisation across rapidly growing social divides and, as a result,impedes the consolidation of a future opposition.A prominent example for such an alienation between the high and low classes of Rus-sian society, despite the overall critical tendency, is provided by Kirill Serebrennikov’sdystopian drama Yuri’s Day (Iur’ev den’, 2008) which brings its female protagonist, a cos-mopolitan Russian opera star Liuba, to her provincial birth town where she experiencesa nightmarish survival tour amid her lower class compatriots. Though expressing validconcerns about the growing distance between the glitzy metropolitan Russian centresand its dilapidated hinterland, Yuri’s Day is also marked by palpable estrangement anddisdain towards the pauperised and ‘degenerated’ strata of society.Such a radical social othering significantly contrasts with the film’s late-Soviet tem-plates, for instance, Karen Shakhnazarov’s remarkable phantasmagorical comedy Zero-grad (Gorod Zero, 1988), where alienation and empathy function not exclusively but rathercomplementarily, reinforcing the absurd poetics of the plot and the helplessness of theprotagonist. The film’s crescendo with its celebration of the rock-n-roll pioneer of thedystopian ‘City of Zero’, a former police officer, provides an important intertext to bothpost-Sovietmusicals: here, in the late-Soviet context, the reception of rock-n-roll articu-lates an ambivalent aura surrounding the popularWesternmusic inRussian culture–anirresistible impulse to enjoy and rebel as well as the anxiety in this way to succumb to he-donism, amnesia and hegemonic power. In the post-Soviet situation, this ambivalencehas turned into open contradiction, and the shock of Serebrennikov’s 2008 protagonistLiuba and her barely hidden contempt for the decaying inhabitants of the eponymousprovincial town in Yuri’s Day can only be redeemed through her highly unrealistic andpatriarchal transformation from an international opera star to a virtuous nurse, healingthe putrid wounds of incarcerated criminals, suffering from venal diseases and tubercu-losis.Although the topos of an unbridgeable gap between liberal-democratic, pro-Westernelites in the form of the paradigmatic former ‘audience of the Ėcho Moskvy’ or the TVchannel Dozhd’ on the one hand, and those indoctrinated by state television – the infa-mous zomboiashchik (zombie-box) –on the other,hadbeen extant longbefore theRussianattack onUkraine, the alienation between the oppositional elites andmasses has reachedits peak after February 2022 when, in the face of the state-initiated aggression and war-crimes, the expected mass protests arose only in some large cities and in diaspora.Thus, instead of speculating about the abysses of the ‘Russian soul’ or a momentumfor resistance, a stronger focus on the social alienation and contempt encoded in theseRoman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 189two films, could contribute to a better understanding of the present defeat of liberal-democratic forces and the ‘shocking’ silence of theRussianmajority aswell as the absenceof active large-scale resistance. For sure, the inactivity of broad strata of the populationcertainly has complex reasons. Yet, the contempt of the post-Soviet (neo)liberal elite forthe ‘degenerate’masses undoubtedly played its part in driving them into the hands of anauthoritarian and conservative ruler like Vladimir Putin, who could always profile him-self as the advocate and protector of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘little Russians,’ accepting themwithout any socio-cultural conditioning.Current Western research on reconstructions of the past in post-Soviet cinema of-ten deals with the imperialist or nationalist mythologies. It usually discusses how dra-matic historical events in Central and Eastern Europe are instrumentalised for politi-cal legitimisation and the formation of national or ‘imperial’ collectives, but also for therepression of the unwelcome past events and voices. In particular, historical traumasfromWorldWar II like the battle of Stalingrad, the defence of the Brest fortress (TheBrestFortress, also known as Fortress of War, Brestkaia krepost’, 2010, Aleksandr Kott) or the Vol-hynian massacre (Volhynia, also known as Hatred,Wołyń, 2016, Wojciech Smarzowski),but also the state-initiated famine of 1932–33 Holodomor (Mr Jones,Obywatel Jones, 2019,Agnieszka Holland) or the Holocaust (Ida, 2013, Paweł Pawlikowski) have been broadlyappropriated in the contemporary Russian, Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian collectiveimagination.In contrast, attempts to reconstruct subversive episodes which seem to openly ques-tion the hegemonic consensus have received much less consideration. But how to re-flect critically on artworks which use cultural-historical turning points and phenomenato challenge the authoritarian narratives and mythmaking? Since both films discussedin this essay depict youth counter- or subcultures of the Soviet era, they stand, at firstglance, for an ideological and aesthetic alternative to such highly mythologised Russianrenderingsofhistory suchas thehistorical dramasAdmiral (2008,AndreiKravchuk),Stal-ingrad (2013, Fëdor Bondarchuk), Panfilov’s 28 (Dvadtsat’ vosem’ Panfilovtsev, also known asBattle for Moscow andThunder of War, 2016, Kim Druzhynin/Andrei Shal’opa), but also tocontemporary Ukrainian historical dramas Firecrosser (Toi, shcho proishov kriz’ vohon’, 2011,Mykhailo Illienko),TheGuide (Povodyr,2013,Oles’ Sanin), 1918TheBattle of Kruty (Kruty 1918,2019,Oleksii Shapariev),BlackRaven (Chornyi voron, 2019, Taras Tkachenko) or Tatar filmslikeHaytarma (Qaytarma, 2013, Akhtem Seitablaiev).In the following I will discuss how the films Hipsters and Summer try to reanimatethe traditions of nonconformism and the underground. In doing so, I will analyse towhat extent these reconstructions of protest subcultures ultimately fail and even leadto their surprising neutralisation, to a trivialisation or even subtle affirmation of re-pression. Thus, I will argue that the films seem, more unwittingly than not, to inscribethemselves into the hegemonic order complicit with the current regime and its ideolog-ical bonds, for instance, through the idealisation of the USSR and commodification ofits underground cultures. In referring to Fredric Jameson’s critique of conservative as-pects of postmodern nostalgia and Jean Baudrillard’s observations on the postmodernmedia, I will also discuss the respective aesthetic characteristics of this tendency –Hip-ster’s carnivalisation and ‘Americanisation’ of the post-Stalinist era as well as Summer’smonochrome ‘documentary’ style and “hipsterization” of the Soviet 80s. Particular at-190 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonestention will be paid to the hyperrealism in the depiction of both historical periods whichresults in a paradoxical relativisation of their subversive cultural semantics. Finally, inthe first approach these ambiguous phenomena will be tentatively described with thenotion of ‘mummification’ – a metaphor which surely requires further elaboration.12. Valerii Todorovskii’s Hipsters and the Challenge of the PhilistinesThefilmHipsters byValerii Todorovskii, the sonof the renownedSoviet-JewishfilmmakerPëtr Todorovskii, became one of the most successful productions in the history of post-Soviet Russian cinema. It was due both to its theme – the rediscovery of the noncon-formist youth culture of the Soviet era – and to the structural factors – the box officesuccess ofHipsters– that, together with the popularity of such films as Brother I/II (Brat I/II, 1997/2000, Aleksei Balabanov), Brigada (2000, Aleksei Sidorov), as well as the interna-tional success ofTheBarber of Siberia (Sibirskii Tsiriul’nik, 1998, Nikita Mikhalkov) orNightWatch (Nochnoi dozor, 2004, Timur Bekmambetov) – was seen as a long-awaited recov-ery of the Russian film after the collapse of the state-subsidised Soviet film industry.Thenew self-confidence of Russian filmmakers also developed in a complex relationship asapprentice and rival to the West, especially given the global domination of Hollywoodcinema.The claim ofHipsterswas precisely no less than to realise a local historical themeinoneof themost traditional and conventionalisedWesternfilmgenres, themusicfilm.2As the title suggests, themovie tells the story of the Soviet hipsters stilagi (the “styled”or “style-conscious”) – a youth culture of the late 1950s that, despite the Cold War, tookits cue from the rock-n-roll and jazzmusic seeping through the Iron Curtain.The actiontakes place in 1955, just on the eve of theThaw, a brief period of liberalisation introducedby Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, notably by his criticism of the so-called ‘cult ofpersonality’ at the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956.The film’s protagonist, stu-dent Mėls Biriukov, is an average Soviet citizen who initially succumbs entirely to theregime’s ideological indoctrination. As a volunteer teammember monitoring public or-der andmorality (druzhinnik), he actively participates at its lowest level of social control.In the course of a raid on an unofficial rock-n-roll dance party inMoscow’s Gor’kii Park,he pursues and falls in love with his victim, a youngwoman Polina (Pol’za, eng. “utility”),who, along with her friends,mostly children of the Soviet upper class – diplomats, partyand industrial nomenclature – indulges in the frowned-uponWestern lifestyle.After several attempts, which demand much energy, creativity and, not least, pur-chasing power, Mėls finally becomes a member of the adored clique. The admissionmeans not only an erotic but also a social initiation for him.The timid and naive young1 Speaking about the reference to the practice of ‘mummification’ also hints at a conspicuous ten-sion between its deep roots in Russian Orthodox and Soviet traditions on the one hand, and thecontemporary stage of capitalist media development on the other, a question that due to spacerestrictions cannot be explored further here. On the impact of the Orthodox tradition on the post-revolutionary cult of Lenin and hismummification see the talk by J. Arch Getty “DeadMan Talking:Lenin’s Body and Russian Politics” (Getty 2016).2 A detailed and systematic analysis of Todorovskii’s effort to revive the genre and its Russian remar-keting is offered by Rimgaila Salys (2016: 114–135).Roman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 191man gradually develops into a self-confident consumer and adherent of an alternative,Western lifestyle, learning even to deal with the underground economy that suppliesstiliagi with the coveted Western items. Mėls’ new status is also underpinned by self-taught saxophone lessons, an instrument that the authorities deemed bourgeois andideologically reprehensible,3 and which the protagonist acquires at great risk on thebarakholka, the Moscow black market.However, his conversion from an obedient homo sovieticus to a defiant stiliaga is onlyone aspect of the film’s story. Its climax is the protagonist’s second and final initiation –the confrontation with the secondary or semi-fictional character of the stiliagi lifestyle.When Mėls’ mentor Frėd, now a career diplomat, returns from a tour of duty in the US,bothmen escape from the confines of a claustrophobic family apartment onto the streetsofMoscow to talk openly about Frėd’s experiences in the country of their dreams, in par-ticular about his impression of American hipsters.Mėls former rolemodel visibly strug-gles to share his insight with his mentee – the stiliagi culture they idolised does not existthere. America, Frėd confesses, is much more conformist than they ever imagined. Ac-cordingly, their entire hipster lifestyle was based on fiction, and is a simulacrum.Mėls shock is intensified by Frėd’s disillusionment and transformation from a flam-boyant stiliaga and representative of the transgressiveMoscow jeunessedorée to a cynicaland conformist Soviet functionary in fine American garments. Frėd’s revelations triggeralmost a violent backlash from Mėls, who, horrified about the shattering of his ideals,sends his former mentor packing and strides off in the opposite direction. Here, in thepublic space of a Moscow boulevard, the film completes a time jump that catapults Mėlsinto the present. Suddenly, the protagonist, who has paid such a high price to preservehis ideals, is no longer a loner –asMėls steps into the emptymiddle of the boulevard, thecolourful crowd of various youth subcultures grows around him. The song accompany-ing this triumphant march of diversity calls for the rest of society to treat the noisy anddisruptive youths mildly and with understanding. Amid this carnival of youth non-con-formism, Mėls’ lover Pol’za also finds him, and they together stride towards a free andbright future.Perhaps the most surprising thing about the reception of Hipsters was the enthusi-astic reactions from critics in and outside the government camp.The notorious regime’sTV presenter and Kremlin chief propagandist Vladimir Solov’ëv, noted at the time:I was stunned. There hasn’t been a film like this in Russia for a long, long time, both interms of genre and the quality of the script, the direction, the superb acting, and thecamerawork... The film is so ideologically crucial that I would ask everyone to see it. It’sabout individual freedom, the right to be different, to be unlike others. I don't think the“Nashi” movement would like it very much. (Solov’ëv 2008)43 The complex dynamics of Soviet jazz and negotiations accompanying its status in Soviet society ishighlighted by Gleb Tsipursky (2016: 332–361).4 Cf. also the responses on the movie website Beliy.ru (Otzyvy): https://www.beliy.ru/work/stilyagifilm/index-48.htm [09 April 2023].192 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesOne of his antagonists from the opposition, the renownedmusic critic Artemii Troitskiieven praised the film as “absolutely anti-state” and “freedom-loving”: “‘Stiliagi’ is actuallya very valuable appropriate and beautiful excuse to talk about other things, namely, onceagain, about freedom” (Vorob’eva 2009).The enthusiastic consensus of both political antagonists Solov’ëv and Troitskii is sig-nificant in so far as it indicates the default agreement among post-Soviet Russian elites.The point of their paradoxical convergence is an elitist pathos of individuality opposed tothe conformist ‘graymass’ of the ordinary people.However, as the film shows, the nostal-gic celebration and even carnivalisation of the still highly repressive Soviet power of thefirst post-Stalin years ultimately results in a trivialisation and surprising normalisationof the Soviet reality and its modern equivalent – the Putin regime of the early 2000s.Without doubt, Todorovskii successfully communicates the central message of thedepicted globalised subcultures – of rock-n-roll and jazz.The individuation process, thepathos of liberation of sexuality and creativity from traditional and collective constraintsthat characterised the original Americanmodel resonate remarkablywell with the Sovietcontext (Bielefeldt 2017: 25–30). Despite all the systemic differences, the McCarthy andEisenhower eras, with their Cold War paranoia and mass cultural pressures, bore somesimilarities to the Soviet regime, which sought openly to determine its citizens’ leisureactivities and consumption: yet while in the Soviet Union this control was exercised bystate dictatorship, the laws of themarket also had their norming effects.Though the filmtakes great effort to accurately depict the historical atmosphere, it reduces erotic, socialand even political protest and transgression to the triumph of popular music.Thus,Hipsters at first sight expresses a strong criticism of Stalinism, the ideologicaland social repression of the Soviet regime. Obviously, it can and should be interpretedallegorically and, in a counter-presentist way as a growing uneasewith authoritarian de-velopment under Vladimir Putin’s secondpresidency.Yet, despite its general ormanifestliberal tenor, the film’s message contains significant contradictions,making the currentregime and its historical correlate sometimes appear as almost harmless, even support-ive towards its citizens, in away representing its victims as its potentialwinners and true‘shareholders’.Notwithstanding the criticismof uniformity,Hipsters strongly essentialises and sim-plifies the origins and dynamics of Soviet society. Todorovskii’s music film establishesa seductive dichotomy: here the flamboyant individuals from the stiliagi camp, there agrey, jaded seraia massa (gray mass) of Soviet philistines, whom the young hipsters referto with the pejorative slang term zhloby (“greedy persons”). Although the mainstream’shatred for stiliagi is shown as almost instinctual, ‘zoological’ in nature, its sociologicalor ideological causes are hardly elucidated. As a result, all the rage of the faceless pro-les is directed against the exterior forms of the protest – clothes, hairstyles, and music.The whole complexity of the Soviet experience, its tensions and paradoxes, adaptationsand resistances as well as epoch-specific shifts are reduced to a conflict of lifestyles andconsumer cultures, between style and stylessness. This is the more surprising as it wasprecisely during Khrushchev’s Thaw that fundamental cultural and political issues be-came much more expressible and important than questions solely of looks and habits.The de-Stalinisation manifested itself, inter alia, in the emergence and growing popu-Roman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 193larity of the so-called ‘poetic clubs’ or the development of the author song, popularisedby suchbards asBulatOkudzhava, IuriiVizbor,VladimirVysotskii, IuliiKimandothers.5The ideological and social struggles of the time are alsowell documented in the iconicmovies like Aleksandr Zarkhi’s coming-of-age drama My Younger Brother (Moi mladshiibrat, 1962) which clearly departs from the heroic scripts of the Stalin era. Travelling forvacation fromtheirnativeMoscowto the ‘westernised’Estonia, its protagonists routinelygo the pubs, listen to jazzmusic,work on the blackmarket or evendiscuss the contempo-rary ‘bourgeois’ philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre.The other paradigmatic social moviedrama of the time, Il’ich’s Gate (Zastava Il’icha, 1965) by Marlen Khutsiev, includes even adocumentary episode with the legendary poetic readings at Moscow Politechnical Insti-tute which hosted such important voices of the generation as Ievgenii Ievtushenko,BellaAkhmadullina or Robert Rozhdestvenskii. In contrast to Todorovskii’s post-Soviet film,in Khutsiev’s movie precisely ordinary young people like the working-class protagonistSergei attend such readings, thereby clearly distancing themselves from the social nar-cissism and consumer-oriented lifestyle of the Soviet nomenclature children.6 But in-stead of presenting in a similar way a nuanced picture of the contradictions within thealleged Soviet ‘uniformity’, the various forms of state control and strategies of resistancein which its ‘silent majority’ engaged, Todorovskii’s Hipsters, except for the scene withBob’s Jewish parents and Gulag returnees, trivialises Soviet daily life into a harmless catand mouse-game of flamboyant teenagers with clumsy authorities and their dumb andliterally unstylish personnel.As a result, the lack of sensitivity towards the historical and intellectual climate ofthe late 1950s is compensated within the film with an ardent attention to the materialenvironment. The obsession with period fashions, hairstyles, old radios and cars virtu-ally absorbs the viewer, turning the totalitarian Soviet Union into a mirror image of thegoldenAmerican 1950s, thePerestroikaperiodor even theMoscownight life of the 2000s.This impression is particularly reinforced by the numerous musical soundtracks, all byfamous rock bands of the 1980s likeMashina vremeni,Chai F or Kino, whichmake the stillhighly repressive post-Stalin years feel even like the much more liberal Gorbachev era,transforming the risky actions of its protagonists into an exciting adventure game. Atthis point, paradoxically, the film’s anti-authoritarian pathos tips over into an affirma-tive stance; the vibrant stiliagi subculture is representedas anarchipelagoof freedomandintrinsic part of the regime itself. Accordingly, it creates the impression that this epochof authenticity, a real sense of community,destination andoutstanding technical-indus-trial achievements actuallywasnot so bad,but a timeof great andpristine feelings, joyfulimprovisation,modesty and finally a meaningful way of life.Thus, behind the untroubled dance life of the Soviet hipsters of the 1950s, one caneasily recognise the attitudes of the early ‘golden’ 2000s which, in the Russian case, for5 On the intellectual and artistic climate of the time, especially on the role of poetry in the anti-authoritarian resistance, see the memoirs of the author, translator, and literary scholar VladimirBritanishskii [n.d.]: http://www.ruthenia.ru/60s/kritika/britanish_stud.htm [11 April 2023].6 According to Vladimir Semerchuk, Il’ich’s Gate enjoyed the status of a manifesto for the “sixtiers,”especially due to its problematisation of a deep crisis of Stalinist identitymodel and its collectivistorientation (Cit. Kun 2012: 223).194 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zoneslarge sections of the population were indeed characterised by increasing prosperity, liv-ing standards, and consolidation of state authority. The newly acquired self-confidence(and narcissistic self-referentiality within the film) arose out of the belief in irreversibleeconomic advancement,but also out of the feeling ofRussia’s comeback as a great geopo-litical power that, despite its authoritarian drift, still allows considerable freedom andleeway for art and business. Locating the film within this cultural-political frame, how-ever,doesnot explainwhy thenon-conformistKulturträger in thefilmseeas theirprimaryopponent not so much the authoritarian regime, but the heavily homogenised main-stream society. Moreover, the ordinary Russians, increasingly excluded from participa-tion in political and economic life, appear as phantasmatic, zombie-like, grey and obedi-ent homines sovietici, incessantly stalking and harassing the colourful hipsterian dandies.Such a limited, reductive portrait of the Soviet hipsters not only itself cuts awaytheir characteristic oscillation between popular and countercultural, nonconformismand conformity, but leads to their depoliticisation and excessive aestheticisation. Theimportant anti-racist as well as social message, accompanying the US-rock-n-roll wavedue to its blues origins and numerous Afro-American performers, such as Little Richardand Chuck Berry, also gets lost in Todorovskii’s transposition into the Russian context.Though its hybrid roots were hinted at by the female heroine’s love affair with an exoticAfro-American visitor of the VI. World Youth and Student Festival in Moscow 1957, onecan barely take seriously the smooth acceptance of the extramarital child byMėls and hisfamily. Supported by his father, a revered and open-hearted veteran, such an inclusivityrather coalesces with the regime’s upcoming instrumentalisation of the Great PatrioticWar, represented by such historical dramas like the In August of 1944 (V avguste 44, 2004,Mikhail Ptashuk) or Burnt by the Sun 2 (Utomlënnye solntsem 2, 2010) by the prominent‘court-filmmaker’ Nikita Mikhalkov. At the same time, the film’s unwillingness to con-front the racial issue more seriously contrasts with the persistent xenophobia towardsmigrantworkers from the formerCaucasian orCentral Asian republicswhich is depictedso vividly in Balabanov’s iconic Brother dilogy. In addition, the final scene, in which Frėddelivers to Mėls the shattering news of the invented nature of their rock-n-roll lifestyle,can also be interpreted as a warning to Russian culture against trusting Western ideastoo much.Moreover, one of the film’s pictorial leitmotifs – old x-ray films used for the piratecopies of rock-n-roll vinyl records–canevenbe interpreted ina self-revealingway.Light-hearted dancing to the sounds from the clinical x-ray pictures in a metaphorical sensediscloses the symptomatology of the film itself: its frivolous treatment of a dramatic his-torical periodappearsnowalmost like literal dancingon thebonesof the (dead)witnessesand victims of the regime, an impression, intensified, amongst others, by the choice ofthe music film genre for representing the early post-Stalin era. Though the recycling ofthe medical celluloid is historically accurate, the presence of the bones and skeletonsamidst rock-n-roll-carnival cannot but evoke subtle associations with decadence, deathand decay. While the unhomely black-and-white colour scheme of the x-rays also res-onates with the film’s schematic characterisation and Manichean dichotomies, bereftRoman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 195of the ‘flesh’ – human complexity and depth7 – one is even tempted to see them as ametaphor for a surprisingmortification of thefilm’s genuine impulse to revive the spiritsof non-conformism and resistance.3. Reanimating the Protest Traditions during Vladimir Putin’s Fourth TermNeither Naumenko, nor Tsoi, nor Serebrennikov are fighting the system. They simplylive and create as if it does not exist, and the music of T. Rex easily drowns out thethunderous anthem of the USSR. It is precisely this position that makes them alienand hostile to any power, Brezhnev’s or Putin’s. (Dolin 2018)8While the reception of Hipsters undoubtedly benefited from the cinematic legacy ofthe Todorovskii dynasty, especially the extraordinary success of Petr Todorovskii’s per-estroika dilogy Intergirl (Interdevochka, 1986) which broke ground with such explosiveissues as illegal valuta, prostitution and emigration, the reception of another famousRussian musical film Summer (Leto, 2017) is hardly conceivable without the context ofthe late Putin-regime, particularly the persecution of its producer, the Moscow theatredirector Kirill Serebrennikov. The art director of the renowned Moscow Gogol’ Centrtheatre since 2012, he gained his reputation with bold stage experiments collaborating,however, also in opera productions in famous state-sponsored institutions like theBolshoi (Moscow) andMariinskii (St. Petersburg) theatres. Apart from that, the versatileartist made successful films such as Yuri’s Day, which earned him awards at the presti-gious Locarno,Warsaw and Cannes Film Festivals. Yet, despite Serebrennikov’s genuineliberal stance, his Gogol’ Tsentr also staged authors loyal to the regime such as ZakharPrilepin, who due to his key role in Kremlin propaganda warfare and the separatistfight for Donbas, was even appointed in 2018 a deputy art director of another renownedvenue, the Maxim Gorkii theatre.97 Remarkably, theHipster’s ambivalent semantic structure is reproduced by some critical comments.Stating on the one hand that the film avoids the dangers of idealisation, Yana Meerzon surpris-ingly realises at the same time that it can be instrumentalised by the Kremlin power elite: “Inother words, Todorovsky’s film Stilyagi not only celebrates the Soviet musical underground as atool of liberation and an expression of nonviolent resistance but also establishes present-day Rus-sian youth as a target for new ideological narratives. It provides the Russian post-communist ideol-ogists […] with a propaganda tool directed at glorifying the experience of the powerless” (Meerzon2011: 479–510).8 As Anton Dolin, one of the most renowned oppositional film critics in Russia continues: “Summerneeds an adequate viewer who is able to remove the film from its many contexts (historical, hu-man rights, festival, etc.) and enjoy it – like a concert of old, beloved, familiar music that suddenlysounds fresh, as if it were being played for the first time” (Dolin 2018).9 The most significant controversy, however, was sparked by the rendition of the novel Okolo nulia(At Zero, 2009), published under the pen name Natan Dubovitskii. This nom de plume concealedVladislav Surkov – a shrewd Russian apparatchik who, after his successful career as a PR managerin private business, rose to the rank of Russia’s deputy primeminister. A ‘creative head’ behind thepolitical scene of Putin’s regime, Surkov is the one who allegedly invented, inter alia, the latter’sparty United Russia and led the Trilateral Contact Group for the peaceful settlement of the situa-tion in eastern Ukraine.196 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesIn view of Serebrennikov’s complex interaction with Kremlin elites, his arrest oncharges of embezzling state funds from a theatre production came as a great surpriseinside of the country – the harsh treatment of the star director stirred up tempers inso-far as Serebrennikov, like Todorovskii a decade before him, had been considered the liv-ing proof of a certain leeway within the regime – a showcase of paradoxical coexistenceof political paternalism, oil and gas based economic stability and some artistic freedomsthat characterised the regimeuntil the annexationofCrimeaand its involvement inDon-bas separatism.Thus, the filmmaker’s detainment, despite numerous protests at homeand abroad, marked a new stage of political repression.10 Serebrennikov’s persecutionwas immediately perceived as a warning signal to potential troublemakers among theRussian beaumonde, and the sign of the growing dominance in the Kremlin’s power hi-erarchy of the siloviki – officials associated with the state security apparatus – over thequasi-neoliberals.11While Hipsters reflected in a counter-presentist manner the flaring up of ten-tative hopes for liberalisation under Vladimir Putin’s co-regent Dmitrii Medvedev(2008–2012), culminating in the peaceful and partly festival-like Bolotnaia protestsagainst the fraudulent parliamentary elections to the Russian Duma in December 2011,Summer could be attributed to the second, post-carnivalesque protest phase, in whichthe desire for change, especially after the violent crackdown on the protests, was grow-ing ever more desperate but has been suppressed even more drastically. In this respect,the shift in Serebrennikov’s music film from the politically relatively benign rock-n-rollor jazz to the much more explosive punk-rock and the band Kino with its charismaticfront man Viktor Tsoi fits in well. Kino’s songs, especially its hit I Want Change! (Khochuperemen!) reached the general public with Sergei Solov’ëv’s cult film Assa (1986) and itseponymous refrain, becoming the anthem of the perestroika.Tsoi’s cutting voice and Asian appearance transformed the singer with Korean rootsinto a multi-layered symbol. Embodying a dual Russian-Soviet and Eurasian subaltern,who, after decades of social and political estrangement, started ‘singing back’ againstthe corrupt empire and demanding a say. Respectively, Tsoi’s final performance in Assaexpressed the sensibility of a whole generation, craving changes to the corrupt system,in which no mediation existed between the new, often murky elites and the rebelliousavantgarde of rock musicians.12 Generally, Serebrennikov’s Summer does not deal withthe later fame of Viktor Tsoi as a rock and film star but with the beginning of his career.10 Obviously, it was also an escalation of internal power struggle within the regime hierarchy whichsatirist Viktor Shenderovich pointedly and frequently dubbed “spider fights in a jar” (Maiers 2023).11 The insurmountable antagonisms within Soviet society that were exposed through the loomingcollapse of the SovietUnionwasmediated inAssaby the biblical Flood allusions andparallel histor-ical narrative of Emperor Paul I’s murder. Moreover, the death of the main protagonist of Assa, thefrontman Bananan, at the hands of an ambitious mafioso Krymov as well as the circumstances ofhistorical fratricide of Paul I by the future emperor Alexander I, appear, retrospectively, as a gloomyprediction of the future failure of systemic change and the subsequent marginalisation of Russiancivil society in its desperate struggle with the country’s multiple authoritarian pasts.12 See: Shada 315 (2018); Andrei Burlaka is an independent producer, eco-activist and historian of theRussian rock, still working as an editor of several St. Petersburg-based rock-n-roll websites.Roman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 197Yet Tsoi’s first steps to the all-Soviet stardom are only one aspect of the film which pro-grammatically sets out to illuminate the larger context – the socio-political climate onthe eve of perestroika. Its goal was also to draw a collective portrait of the Leningrad rockunderground of the early 1980s,which included such pioneers of the genre asMaikNau-menko (Zoopark), Boris Grebenshchikov (Akvarium), Andrei Panov aka “Svin” (Avtomatich-eskie udovletvoriteli) or the famous rock critic and promoter Artemii Troitskii.The film’s major narrative line is the artistic friendship between the already estab-lished ‘master’ Naumenko and his talented ‘apprentice’ Tsoi which unfolds against thebackdrop of Leningrad’s rock underground.This tale of a creative tandem of once againtwo great male artists is repeatedly overshadowed by a parallel romantic story – a tri-angle between Maik, his wife, Natal’ia (Natasha) and the young Viktor. In this respect,Summer could also be seen as a film about love and creativity, a cinematic coming-of-ageand artist’s novel (Entwicklungs- und Künstlerroman) in one.Surprising about Serebrennikov’s approach to this period is, however, the absenceof the major political, social and cultural currents of the time. Instead, the film plot fo-cuses on private and small places like communal or private apartments where the leg-endary kvartiniki, house concerts took place, or the gloomy backyards of St. Petersburg’sold town. The performances in the cradle of the movement – the Leningrad rock clubon Anton Rubinshtein Street with its relatively limited public – is also part of the some-what claustrophobic film chronotopos. Though a few sequences in which the televisionor radio run in the background evoke a certain Zeitgeist, they have a rather decorative,ornamental character and reveal often no specific relationship to the film narrative.The absence of the ideological atmosphere of the time within a filmwhich raised ex-pectations of a cultural and politicalmanifesto contrasts insteadwith an overabundanceof material details – from the beautiful but dilapidated fabric of St. Petersburg’s build-ings to old-school music equipment, tape recorders, furniture and Soviet interiors. LikeHipsters, Summer repeatedly creates the impression that historic artefacts and non-dis-cursivemedia aremuchmore important than the cultural-political circumstances of thetime.The fixation on iconic Soviet commodities feels almost like ametropolitan second-handstore–abiotopeofmodernhipsters rather than thehistory-laden timeof the loom-ing perestroika.This incongruity between this highly stylised ‘vintage’ world on the one hand, andthe testimonies and remembrances of witnesses on the other, provoked a heated publicdebate. As one of the film’s protagonists and forefathers of Russian rock Boris Greben-shchikov bitterly remarked on Summer:His script features hipsters, typical, today’s Moscow hipsters, who except to fuck atsomeoneelse’s expense, donothing at all. It has nothing todowithMaik, Tsoi,Natasha,or any of us. The man who wrote this script, he wasn’t even on this planet. (Roads L.2018)However, itwouldbe tooeasy to attributeGrebenshchikov’s scathing comment just to thejealousy of the witness who knows better.Other reviewers like the aforementioned criticArtemii Troitskii, who also appears as a protagonist in the film, saw the accusations ofhistorical inaccuracy as a fundamentalmisunderstanding, praising it above all as a good198 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonespiece of entertainment.13 Similarly, the renowned St. Petersburg cineaste and producerSergei Sholokhov highlighted the “amazing” quality of the camera and the “joyful affects”conveyed by the film: “Our joy in cinema has disappeared. In this film, despite the factthat it talks about some terrible years of stagnation, there is no terribleness” (TelekanalSankt-Peterburg 2018).This depoliticisation and privatisation of Summer’s story line lends the filman aura ofahistoricitywhich is reinforcedby someof its formal features, above all, by its colour tone– the nostalgic, ‘old-school’ aesthetic of black-and-white pictures. However, the inten-tion to create in thisway anaccurate and ‘authentic’ sense of the late SovietUnion, to pro-vide its specific “world view” or “structures of feeling” (RaymondWilliams) paradoxicallytips into its opposite.First, the switch to themonochromepicture itself causes somecon-fusion since by the early 1980s themajority of Soviet filmswere already released in colour.Serebrennikov’s decisionwas apparently dictated by the desire to create an aura of docu-mentary accuracy, and underground atmosphere. Yet, this technique is contradicted bythe fact that the movie is shot in modern monochrome perfection instead of the char-acteristic Soviet film and photo tonality – for instance the typical irregular, ‘amateurish’contrast structure and softness of the Soviet Svema tapes, produced at the Shostka fac-tory in the Soviet-Ukrainian Donbas.This impeccable digital black-and-white aestheticimparts to the film a surprising coldness and timeless rapture which tellingly correlateswith its ‘hipsterian’ content.14.This aesthetically and content-wise historically oblivious approach to the past is not,however, a unique post-Socialist Russian phenomenon, but a general postmodern ten-dency prominently problematised by Fredric Jameson. In the US-American cinema ofthe 70s,he observed a remarkable retrowave –a tendency for idealized reconstruction ofthe ‘golden American’ post war-era, epitomized in such films as, for instance, in the filmsAmerican Graffiti, 1973 by George Lucas, or China Town, 1974 by Roman Polanski (Jameson1991: 19).The critique relates these nostalgic representations to a fundamental change inthe regime of postmodern signification which, respectively, reflects the recent, “purer”,post-industrial stage of capitalist development (ibid: 35–36). Accordingly, the main dis-tinction between modernist and postmodernist art lies in different types of representa-tion which Jameson subsumes under the opposition between the depth and surface of13 Troitskii 2018.14 A close friend of Tsoi and co-founder of Kino, author and filmmaker Aleksei Rybin observes in rela-tion to Summer, albeit with a telling slip of the tongue: “A film is made by a director. All questionsto the director. [...] The screenwriter there is simply diabolical [adov], Idov is his last name, but inmy opinion, it’s diabolical, a simply diabolical man. This man, he should only write series called‘80s’. What I saw in the film Summer is absolutely one of these ‘80s’ series, which he did, as a mat-ter of fact. Completely unlike the real 80s, not even close” (RTIVi Novosti 2019). Rybin refers hereto popular series launched by Russian television between 2012 and 2016 which generally offeredan idealised and nostalgic picture of the late Soviet period. Interestingly, in this interviewwith Ry-bin both interlocutors agree that the number of fictional elements depends on the genre. WhileTroitskii, who briefly advised the Summer film team, still tries to justify its playful treatment of his-torical background by stressing its generic nature as a music film, Rybin is muchmore critical. Thereaction of Andrei Tropillo, the legendary producer and promoter, the “godfather of the Russianrock”, turned out to be even more devastating. Cf. Unamusic 2017.Roman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 199an object.Whereasmodernist art like Vincent van Gogh’s famous Peasant Shoes (1888) re-flects not only a specific stage in aesthetic development like the ground-breaking usageof colour, but also the social world of the French peasantry, postmodern art, like in AndyWarhol’sDiamond Shoes (1980) is characterised by pure self-referentiality, free of any his-torical relations, and hence remarkably silent. Even more, the “flattening” of Warhol’spicture, its two-dimensional quality results into a “waning of affect” (ibid: 10), “a newkind of superficiality” which Jameson diagnoses as “the supreme formal feature of allpostmodernisms” (ibid: 9). In contrast to vanGogh’sShoes,which renders to the spectatorthe severity of the peasant’s life, Warhol’s painting conveys fragmented, fetishised andthus mortified reality. Similarly, through their nostalgic character and fixation on thematerial surface, the postmodern cinematic reconstructions of the US-post-war yearsproduce idealised, fictitiousworlds; signs bereft of the complex historical reality and au-thentic historical setting – a simulacrum (ibid. 10).Despite its conservative tinge, the idea of postmodern simulacra can be productivelyapplied to the carnivalesque setting of Hipsters as well as of Summer. Todorovskii’s mu-sical film with its glaring bright colours and consumer goods (fancy clothes, cars etc.)strikingly contradict the harsh everyday conditions of the post-war Soviet Union. In thesame way, Serebrennikov’s film, despite its opposite aesthetic strategies of reductiveand monochrome perfection, ends up with an analogous loss of historicity. A loss thatis already suggested by the very title “Summer”, which, on the one hand, connects thebirth of Russian rock to the high season of vacation, enhancing its de-temporalisationand de-historisation. As a result, the evocations of the eternal, carefree lifestyle of theLeningrad’s rock bohemians differ considerably from such groundbreaking cinematictestimonies of the time andmilieu as Aleksei Uchitel’s film Rock (Rok, 1988).It is telling that the escape from history and social reality into a purified, carelessand isolated bohemian universe also correlates with the extensive presence of nature –Summer begins in a picnic atmosphere of a Baltic beachwhere the nascent rock scene cel-ebrates its parties. In addition, the beautiful shots of the pristine pine forests and BalticSea coast, now stylised as a monochromatic Soviet Woodstock, work as a counterpointto the claustrophobic spaces of the decaying collective apartments (kommunalkas), belleepoquebuildingswith theirdeep,shadybackyardsanddilapidated staircases.Theescapefrom history thus coincides with an escape from the modern city.4. Conclusion: Showbiz Logic and the Mummification of SubculturesTherewere no admirers [...] In those rock-clubdays therewere no admirers. It’s a stupidword, admirer... You know, there were like-minded people or people who shared thesame worldview... (Shevchuk/Zhang 2022)The differences between the present and the past, the consistency of certain historicalreferences are blurred in both Hipsters and Summer not only on an aesthetic and narra-tive level, but also in terms of ideology. In Serebrennikov’s case, the most problematicideological inconsistency is certainly the projection of several features of modern show-biz back into the Soviet 1980s. For example, the Leningrad rock scene,which according to200 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonescontemporary witnesses had horizontal and rather rhizomatic forms of organisation, ispresented in Summer as a hierarchical, competitive, and star-centred world, strictly di-vided between the ‘genius’ and his enchanted entourage. Respectively, the film aboundsin episodes with ecstatic female fans whose reaction is often the only way to indicateartistic quality; by the same token, Maik Naumenko, who in real life was notorious forhis shyness of publicity, modesty, and self-irony, appears as a taciturn, lofty enigmaticguruwho does not caremuch about his surroundings.The band leader,who actually washighly sceptical towards the commercialisation of rock and the lures of the emerging So-viet music industry, is presented as an impresario who encourages his younger followerTsoi by sharing with him his exquisite collection ofWestern records and supporting himas a co-producer in his first successes. Such a showbiz reinterpretation manifests itself,for example, in the rendering of Tsoi’s debut in the rock club which is dramatised as anabsolute turning point in his artistic career. Here it is not his performance that first ex-cites the reluctant audience, but only the appearance of the older ‘master’ Naumenkowhich breaks the ice bringing the predominantly female fans to a frenzy and thus set-ting the stage for a happy ending.At the same time, Serebrennikov is very inventive in the ways he stages and narratesthe relations between the ‘old master’ Naumenko and ‘to-be-master’ Tsoi; with great in-termedial sophistication he shows how certain moods, everyday situations or phrases,casually picked up on the street, may transform into songs. He, for instance, presentsfacsimiles of the original songs and blends themwith quasi-documentarymaterial suchas faked amateur recordings to highlight the explosive, bifurcatory dynamics of the songwriting. Communicating mostly without words, sometimes via chords, the creative ex-change between two rockmusicians is thus given an almost mystical aura of silence andnon-verbal agreement. Yet all these scenes with the two protagonists are presented insuch a speed of sequences, including variousmultimedia effects, that the viewer is ratheroverwhelmed, getting no time for imaginary immersion or, in Jamesonian terms, for de-veloping any deeper affect and identification. Even more: the cross-fades, quick cuts,cartoon elements or other defamiliarising devices in a waymarginalise the archival ma-terial aesthetically, covering its poetic function behind the perfectmodern orchestrationandmontage.This aesthetic choice of accelerated perfection influences also the depiction of theprotagonists, which follows a certain showbiz logic. Generally, Serebrennikov’s char-acters are rather emotionally flat and unconvincing: On the one hand, there is theLeningrad ‘John Lennon’ Naumenko, who lives in his genius bubble, neglects his familyand balances on the verge of creative exhaustion. On the other hand, the younger Tsoi,also withdrawn and solitary, but taking touching care of Naumenko’s young son andhis wife Natal’ia, a detail that Serebrennikov develops into a magesterial plot line whichtotally contradicts the biographies of his historical prototypes.15 Especially the speed15 Remarkably, it is precisely the love triangle between the two icons of Soviet rock culture thatearned Serebrennikov the most criticism. Although Nataliia Naumenko admits in her interviewsandmemoirs a short-lived, platonic affection for the young and inexperienced Tsoi, the love affairhighlighted in the film fails to convince and only distracts the attention from its central message:the testimony of intense aesthetic and ideological innovation. Cf. Kushnir 2018.Roman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 201with which Natal’ia’s love oscillates between Maik and Viktor presents an Eros who likea radar follows the creativity of the (male) rock demiurges. Moreover, the female museoperates as an irrational force that knows no constancy in feelings and attachmentsbut wanders after the (floating) symbolic capital, mirroring and reinforcing the malecreative genius. Driven by this relational logic, Natal’ia acts pretty much in line withthe ‘the winner takes it all’ principle of showbiz. Consequently, the rising leader of theLeningrad rock scene (Tsoi) wins not only the hearts of the audience but also the rival’slover (Natal’ia), turning history into a perfect Hollywood style success story.16If we look at this aesthetic strategy in a broader theoretical perspective, it almost lit-erally echoes JeanBaudrillard’s critiqueof thepostmodern stageofmediadevelopment–its “precession of simulacra” (Baudrillard 2006 [1994]: 8).According to the French thinker,instead of a positive “lively, dialectical, full dramatic relation” to reality, postmodern cin-ema is characterised by “an inverse, negative” one, aiming at amore perfect picture of theworld than the original itself and thus leading to an abolishment of the historic referent(ibid: 47). Striving towards such “an absolute correspondencewith the real” (ibid.),whichBaudrillard calls “a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal,” (Baudrillard 1993: 197)this fading of the historical referent results in a characteristic postmodern heightenedself-referentiality and the respective nostalgia for a lost reality we discover in Serebren-nikov’s Summer.The described postmodern symptomsmanifest themselves particularlyin the metareflexive commentaries added in certain critical moments of transgression,when the present threatens to replace the fictionalised past too blatantly. Then the fig-ure of a chronicler appearswho repeatedly exclaims: “All this did not exist!” (“Ėtogo vsegone bylo!”).This demonstrative negation of the film’s narrative has seemingly the rhetor-ical goal to parody the attitude of a sceptical – Soviet or contemporary – and indoctri-nated petite bourgeois who stubbornly denies the uncomfortable and subversive past orpresent reality. By contrast, for a more sophisticated audience it signals ironic distanceto this utterance, asking for a sympathetic and winking acceptance of Serebrennikov’sversion of the events, now validated by negation.However, this apparently sophisticated self-referential postmodern irony is not onlyunhistorical and superficial, but also bears an antisocial impulse, very similar to Todor-ovskii’s othering of the Soviet ‘grey masses’ in Hipsters. This tendency culminates in anepisode with the suburban regional train, the elektrichka. After a short peaceful ride inthe eponymous vehicle of Soviet culture, the young rockers start brutally mocking andthreatening ordinary Soviet citizens,who are going to their datchas or elsewhere. Insteadof mild irony and sympathy for their elderly fellow countrymen, known from such pre-texts as Venedikt Erofeev’s ground-breaking novelMoscow-Petushki (1973)17 or the alreadymentioned drama City Zero, the urge to scandalise and provoke finally prevails and be-comes an end in itself.However, this transgressive behaviour of the rebellious heroes together with theostentatious character of the meta-commentaries do not automatically elicit uncon-ditioned sympathy with the nonconformist characters: The portrayed quasi-artistic16 Thismay be the reason behind Grebenshchikov’s harsh critique of the Leto production teamwhichcompletely misunderstood his circle, namely that it was not all about money (Roads L 2018).17 Moskva-Petushki is also known asMoscow to the End of the Line orMoscow Stations.202 Appropriating History: II. Combat Zonesexcesses and provocations in the suburban train after a certain moment start to under-mine the human dignity, solidarity and the very critical common sense they appeal to.Given the disdain and aggressive behaviour towards their fellow citizens, intensified bythe exorbitant use of themultimediamontage, the ‘ordinary’ viewer rather involuntarilyfeels empathy with ‘declassed’ ‘common people,’ scared and stressed by aggressive punkperformances.Thus, the contradictory ambivalent rhetoric and aesthetic structure of both films –their simultaneous impulse to preserve and replace, to remember and to forget – leadsto a paradox self-sabotage of the intended subversion.Remarkably, the intense mythologisation and reification of the non-conformistyouth cultures as well as the idealisation of the Soviet everyday life in Summer and Hip-sters, promote rather the forgetting of its burdens and a paradox nostalgia for the verypolitical system – the Soviet regime – they set out to dismantle. With their hyperrealistclaim to surpass the historical past, to achieve a ‘higher’ verisimilitude, particularly onthe level of protagonists, material decorations or formal perfection, both films lead to astriking mortification or even ‘mummification’ of the non-conformist content. Despiteall painstaking efforts to recreate and reanimate the historical body of the Soviet rockculture, it – very much like the efforts to preserve Lenin – remains lifeless. In this way,both movies reflect something deeply symptomatic for a specific authoritarian contextof Putin’s Russia and beyond – a kind of Stockholm syndrome, an identificationwith thehegemonic power – a tragic turn against oneself.FilmographyAdmiral, dir. Andrei Kravchuk, Russia 2008.American Graffiti, dir. George Lucas, USA 1973.Assa, dir. Sergei Solov’ëv, USSR 1986.Black Raven (Chornyi voron), dir. Taras Tkachenko, UA 2019.Brigada, dir. Aleksei Sidorov, Russia 2000.Brother I (Brat I), dir. Aleksei Balabanov, Russia 1997.Brother II (Brat II), dir. Aleksei Balabanov, Russia 2000.Burnt by the Sun 2 (Utomlënnyie solntsem 2), dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia 2010.China Town, dir. Roman Polanski, USA 1974.Firecrosser (Toi, shcho proishov kriz’ vohon’), dir. Mykhailo Illienko, UA 2011.Haytarma (Qaytarma), dir. Akhtem Seitablaiev, UA 2013.Hipsters (Stiliagi), dir. Valerii Todorovskii, Russia 2008.Ida, dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland/Denmark/France/United Kingdom 2013.Il’ich’s Gate (Zastava Il’icha) dir. Marlen Khutsiev, USSR 1965.In August of 1944 (V avguste 44), dir. Mikhail Ptashuk), Belarus/Russia 2004.Intergirl (Interdevochka), dir. Petr Todorovskii, USSR/Sweden 1986.Yuri’s Day (Iur’ev den’), dir. Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia 2008.Mr Jones (Obywatel Jones), dir. AgnieszkaHolland, Poland/Ukraine/United Kingdom 2019.MyYounger Brother (Moimladshii brat), dir. Aleksandr Zarkhi, USSR 1962.NightWatch (Nochnoi dozor), dir. Timur Bekmambetov, Russia 2004.Roman Dubasevych: Mummified Subversion 203Rock (Rok), dir. Aleksei Uchitel, USSR 1988.Stalingrad, dir. Fëdor Bondarchuk, Russia 2013.Summer (Leto), dir. Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia/France 2018.TheBarber of Siberia (Sibirskii Tsiriul’nik), dir.NikitaMikhalkov,Russia/France/Italy/CzechRepublic/USA 1998.The Brest Fortress [also known as Fortress of War] (Brestkaia krepost’), dir. Aleksandr Kott,Russia/Belarus 2010.TheGuide (Povodyr), dir. Oles’ Sanin, UA 2013.Volhynia [also known asHatred] (Wołyń), dir.Wojciech Smarzowski, Poland 2016.Zerograd (Gorod Zero), dir. Karen Shakhnazarov, USSR 1988.Panfilov’s 28 [also known as Battle forMoscow andThunder ofWar] (Dvadtsat vosem’ Panfilovt-sev), dir. Kim Druzhynin/Andrei Shal’opa, Russia 2016.1918The Battle of Kruty (Kruty 1918), dir. Oleksii Shapariev, UA 2019.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean (1993): “TheEvilDemono,f Images andThePrecessionof Simulacra.” In:Docherty,Thomas (eds.): Postmodernism. A Reader. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, pp. 194–199.Baudrillard, Jean (2006): Simulacra and Simulation [1994], Ann Arbor: The University ofMichigan Press.Bielefeldt, Christian (2017): “Rock-n-Roll.” In: Hecken,Thomas/Kleiner,Marcus S. (eds.):Handbuch Popkultur, Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 25–30.Britanishskii, Vladimir (1996): “Studentskoe poėticheskoe dvizhenie v nachale ottepe-li.” In: Ruthenia.ru [n.d] (http://www.ruthenia.ru/60s/kritika/britanish_stud.htm)[11 April 2023].Dolin,Anton (2018): “‘Leto’Kirilla Serebrennikova: kollektivnyi sonominuvshei epokhe.VKannakh pokazali fil’m arestovannoho Kirilla Serebrennikova o Viktore Tsoe i MaikeNaumenko.” In: Meduza, 10May 2018 (https://meduza.io/feature/2018/05/10/leto-kirilla-serebrennikova-kollektivnyy-son-o-minuvshey-epohe) [08 April 2023].Getty,Arch J. (2016): “DeadManTalking: Lenin’sBody andRussianPolitics.” In:Universityof California Television (Youtube), 11 February 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBpm3CnGT30) [21 May 2023].Grani.Ru (2017): “Viktor Shenderovich o dele Kirilla Serebrennikova.” In: Youtube, 23 Au-gust 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h35Ik6HfdU) [11 April 2023].Jameson, Fredric (1991): Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,Durham: Duke University Press.Kun, Mishel’ (2012): “Zastava Il’icha (1968).” In: Braginskii, Nikita/Vasil’eva, Ekaterina(eds.): Noev Kovcheg russkogo kino: Ot “Sten’ki Razina” do “Stiliag”,Moscow: Globus,pp. 228–533.Kushnir, Elena/Koėn, Tania (2018): “‘Moia zhizn’ –ne sovsemmoia’: Natal’ia Naumenko ofilme ‘Leto’, svoemmuzheMaike,druzhbe sViktoromTsoeminostal’gii.” In:Meduza,19 June 2018 (https://knife.media/naumenko-interview/) [08 April 2023].204 Appropriating History: II. Combat ZonesMeerzon,Yana (2011): “Dancingon theX-rays:On theTheatre ofMemory,Counter-Mem-ory, and Postmemory in the Post-1989 East-European Context.” In: Modern Drama54/4, pp. 479–510.Maiers, Masha (2023): “Personal’no Vash. Interview with Viktor Shenderovich.” In:ĖkhoFM 07 April 2023 (https://echofm.online/programs/personalno-vash/personalno-vash-s-viktorom-shenderovichem-4) [01 May2023].Roads L (2018): “Boris Grebenshchikov vozmushchen fil’mom Kirilla Serebrennikova oViktore Tsoe.” In: YouTube, 15 February, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_inVuKLkIVc) [07 April 2023].RTIVi Novosti (2019): “Aleksei Rybin: ‘Tsoi nikogda ne igral russkii rok.’” In: YouTube,28 May 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEo03zUOlCQ&t=911s) [11 April2023].Salys, Rimgaila (2016): “Hipsters.” In: Salys, Rimgaila (ed.): The Contemporary RussianCinema Reader 2005–2016. Boston: Academic Studies Press, pp. 114–135.Shada 315 (2018): “Andrei Burlaka o fil’me ‘Leto.’” In: YouTube, 07 August 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9z06SpTFvA) [11 April 2023].Solov’ëv, Vladimir (2008), “Ideologicheskii fil’m nastol’ko vazhnyi, chto ia by vsekh procilego posmotret’” In: Beliy.ru (Otzyvy) (https://www.beliy.ru/work/stilyagifilm/-id=204-1.htm) [09 April 2023].Telekanal Sankt-Peterburg (2018): “Kak kritiki i muzykanty vospriniali fil’m Serebren-nikova ‘Leto.’” In: YouTube, 25 June 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gi_khfjMbo) [08 April 2023].Troitskii, Artemii (2018): “O fil’me ‘Leto’ i Leningradskom rok-klube (ARU TV).” In:YouTube, 24 June 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT5vxayAPN8) [08 April2023].Tsipursky, Gleb (2016): “Jazz, Power, and Soviet Youth in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953.”In:The Journal of Musicology 33/3 (Summer), pp. 332–361.Unamusic (2017): “Kirill Serebennikov. Fil’m ‘Leto.’ Viktor Tsoi.Mnenie Andreia Tropillo.”In: YouTube, 16 September 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzO8OMPbpqs&t=2s) [11 April 2023].Vorob’eva, Irina (2009): “Osoboe mnenie. Interview with Artemii Troitskii.” In: ĖchoMoskvy, 6 January 2009 (https://echo.msk.ru/programs/personalno/563726-echo/)[12 August 2020].Zhang, Petr (2022): “Iurii Shevchuk o Viktore Tsoe. Kakoi konflikt byl mezhduShevchukom i Tsoem?” In: YouTube, 29 January 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az9ZHwJ3SRI) [09 April 2023].III. Sites of Trauma:Horror Fantasies, Weird Sceneriesand Realms of TerrorChapter 9:Dealing with Cultural TraumasPopular Representations of the Pastin Contemporary Belarusian ProseLidia Martinovich1. Belarus: 26 Years of the State Regulation of EverythingWorkon this essaybegan in theperiod following themassprotests over the illegitimacyofthe 2020 elections inBelarus, continuedduring the subsequent repressions and ended atthe point when Russia’s war in Ukraine had been going on for several months. All theseevents changed the context of the ideas and works discussed, further emphasising theimportance of the trends noted in this essay: the significance of historical narratives forthe present, the public role of the Belarusian language within this process as well as thetendency of repressing and censoring certain representations of the past from opposi-tionalwriters and intellectuals. In this, theBelarusian state policy seemed to be very sim-ilar to the Russian one, except that in the Russian Federation the state more actively en-gaged,alsofinancially, in history politics.Before thewarunleashedbyRussia in February2022, these trends might have looked like a nostalgic attempt to motivate the citizens ofBelarusandRussia tobeproudof their countriesdespite the lackofdemocracy,economicand technological development, a way of trying to cover up these deficits with an eye tothe ‘great past’ and to revive the spirit of Soviet patriotism. After 24 February 2022, it be-came clear that these seemingly nostalgic representations and the pathetic celebrationsof the 1945 Victory were also preparation on a psychological level for new wars.What might have seemed like a selective approach to history during the 26 years ofLukashenko’s [Lukashenka’s] regime, privileging certain interpretations and laying em-phasis on the state ideology, today becomes the only allowed reality, claiming to be ab-solutely true. And the ways in which historical events arememorialised and representedin feature films, documentaries, and city festivals can no longer claim to have the cuteflair of kitsch, amusing in its fabulousness and addressed to a deliberately naïve viewer.Depicting historical events through entertainment has been away for the dominant (i.e.,208 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumastate) discourse to disguise the coercion and lack of alternatives to the official version ofhistory.In contrast to the Russian case, in Belarusian society the commercial component ofthis entertainment format was virtually absent; turning history into a nostalgic prod-uct was mainly a matter for state cultural actors. Movies, TV-documentaries, militaryparades and mass shows, as well as museums and memorial complexes (the most strik-ing example being the Stalin Line, a museumised complex of defensive structures notfar fromMinsk) have become themainmedia for broadcasting an ideologised version ofhistory.But the Belarusian literary community has not mirrored this development by pro-ducing a similar kind of popular historical fiction prose, portraying historical events in away that expresses the writers’ vision and interests a wide range of readers.This, at firstglance, is even more astonishing as in the literatures of neighbouring countries, suchas Russia, Ukraine and Poland, we can observe in recent decades a boom in alternativehistories, historical fantasy, radical rewritings of traditional Soviet historical narratives,and reappropriations of national narratives with very different ideological orientationsandmedia implementations. Such a widely varied and pluralistically diversified, playfulapproach to one’s own history is clearly absent from Belarusian literature and culture.This absence is partly due to the fact that Russian mass cultural products enjoyedmuch greater popularity and were better financed for many years, whereas many lo-cal, Belarusian products were poorly financed and hardly stood a chance of enjoying abroader reception.The overwhelming Russian-speaking majority of Belarusian readerspreferred popular books, films and other media products from Russia, whose mass me-dia market – at least until recently –was also more pluralistic and freer than in Belarus.But a more profound cause for this absence could be that the literature of independentBelarus (from 1991 to the present) developed in a sociopolitical context that was itselftraumatic for both society and authors.Thefirst years after the collapse of theUSSR gaverise to hope for the possibility of cultural, political and creative self-expression for all so-cial forces and actors, but this period was replaced by a revanche of state control over allspheres of life and the dying out of a wide public field.The daily life of literary production consists of restrictions on freedom of speech, themarginalisation of theBelarusian language (the state only occasionally uses it in the pub-lic sphere for decorative purposes), and an extremely narrow range ofwhat is consideredacceptable. A vivid example of a critical reaction to this cultural policy is the existenceof two unions of writers in Belarus: the pro-governmental one, which enjoys preferen-tial treatment from the state, and the independent one,which, alongwith the BelarusianPEN Centre, is essentially engaged in defending the interests of writers under constantpressure. These circumstances restricted commercially profitable projects, while trau-matic and problematic social issues gained increasing importance and critical writerswere rather focused on the moral overcoming of their own ‘invisibility’, isolation andeven marginalisation. Therefore, entertainment, as already noted, was for many yearsat the opposite pole from those critical and tragic ways of speaking, the pole chosen bymost Belarusian authors.Another factor that complicates the situation is the bilingualism of Belarusian soci-ety, inwhich only a smallminority of the country’s residents can actively use,understandLidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 209and read the Belarusian language. In the national survey “Culture of reading and literarypreferences of Belarusians” from 2014, the respondents answered the question “In whatlanguage do you prefer to read books” as follows: 93.7 per cent prefer to read in Russian, 5per cent–inBelarusian,and less than0.5per cent–inother languages (Mikheeva2014a).These figures do not reflect the share of those who know Belarusian (it is much higher),but preferences and reading habits. This situation is also connected with the informaldivision of the literary community into Russian-speaking (with a potentially large au-dience) and Belarusian-speaking (oriented towards the Belarusian-speaking minority).Until recently, there was even a discussion within the literary community whether Rus-sian-speaking authors living in Belarus should be included in Belarusian literature at all,as their works enter into a common literary market with Russia. The discussion endedwith the introduction of a rule that does not give Russian-speaking works the right tobe nominated for the country’s main literary prize – the Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award.1The Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award is given every year for the best book of prose (includ-ing non-fiction and collections of essays) written in the Belarusian language.The awardwas co-founded by the Embassy of Poland in Belarus, the Polish Institute in Minsk, theBelarusian PENCentre, and the Union of BelarusianWriters and is dedicated to the Pol-ish essayist and politician Jerzy Giedroyc (1906–2000). In general, it can also be notedthat Russian-speaking authors more often choose to work with popular literary genres.Natal’ia Batrakova’s love novels or Olga Gromyko’s humorous fantasy are good examplesof this tendency.Historical narratives became the prerogative of Belarusian-speaking authors, whoare more focused on the values of national revival and therefore choose to depict peri-ods when Belarus was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (this period is consideredthe heyday of the Belarusian lands), the Polish Rzeczpospolita, or a short period of na-tional-cultural renaissance in the early 20th century.Themost popular author of fictionand documentary historical books in Belarusian for several decades has been UladzimirArloŭ, who received the Jerzy Giedroyc Prize in 2018 for the book Dances Above The City.(Tantsy nad goradam, 2018), and the most popular historical book of recent times is his il-lustrated children’s encyclopaediaMotherland: A pictural history fromRahnedy to Kastsiushki(Aichyna: Maliaŭnichaya historyia. Ad Rahnedy da Kastsiushki, 2017).The book’s release wasa notable public event, with queues of people wanting to buy it, lining up to get an auto-graph from the author as well. In online bookshops it is still on the list of top non-fictionbooks.Themedia wrote about the book as an essential that every Belarusian should readand every Belarusian family should have at home. AlthoughMotherland: A pictural historydoes not present any new facts, it presents a sequential overview of events from the firstmention of the Belarusian lands in chronicles to the 1794 uprising of Tadeusz Kościuszko[TadevushKastsiushka],who tried to resist the encroachments of the Russian Empire onthe Rzeczpospolita and stop its partitions. In all likelihood, adults will also use the book1 The Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award is the main prize for independent writers. This award was themost visible and important among the existing non-state ones. These prizes have only been ac-tively monitored by the independent media, which have now been completely shut down in Be-larus. In contrast, state awards followed the Soviet version of award distribution, honouring pro-pagandist writers supported by ministerial offices.210 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaas a handy source of knowledge about Belarusian history, and Pavel Tatarnikaŭ’s vividillustrations are in many cases stylised reconstructions of real historical images (land-scapes, portraits, maps), making them especially valuable for readers.Not only non-fiction books, however, but also fictional works in Belarusian havebeen published in the last decademore often, targeting a broader audience.This populargenre prose (detective, historical detective, travel novel, adventure novel) followed thetradition of the great Belarusian writer of the Soviet period Uladzimir Karatkevich. Forexample, Liudmila Rubleŭskaia’s cycle of novelsThe Adventures of Prancish Vyrvich (Avan-tury Prantsisha Vyrvicha, 2012–2020) can be compared to both the novels by Karatkevichand to the quasi-historical detectives of the extremely popular Russian writer BorisAkunin.AndUladzislaŭ Akhromenka’s novelsTheTheory of Conspiracy (Tėoryia zmovy, 2011)and Muses and Pigs (Muzy i svinni, 2014) combine a historical detective component withpostmodern play and irony.Also worth mentioning are books by other well-known Belarusian authors of recentyears likeAlhierdBakharevich,ArturKlinaŭ,ViktorMartinovich, and IharBabkoŭ.Noneof them works in the genre of historical fiction, but for all of them working with historyis an important part of today’s life or even of the imagined future. For example, AlhierdBakharevich sneers at a lot of historical stereotypes about Belarus (for example, the com-mon love contemporary Belarusians have for the medieval castles in Belarus, almost allof which are now ruins, as well as for the national revival in the early 20th century) andincorporates these ironic reflections also indirectly into his novels.Another example is Ihar Babkoŭ, who created a whole pseudo-historical novel abouta figure from Belarusian culture called Adam Klakotski and His Shadows (Adam Klakotskii iahonyia tseni, 2001) who never actually existed, thus committing a kind of historicalhoax. But many readers took it seriously as a ‘discovery’ of a previously unknown his-torical character, even students and teachers of the Philosophy Faculty of the BelarusianState University (BSU) and the Belarusian Collegium, who were among its first readers.However, several intellectuals and writers admitted that Klakotski could be a real, butunknown figure.Thus Babkoŭ,who is known for researching little-known and forgottenthinkers from the Belarusian lands throughout history, demonstrated, intentionally ornot, how little Belarusians, even those interested in cultural history, actually know aboutit and could have intrigued his readers to engage more with the past.The novel itself is a collection of fragments representing the memories, reflections,dreams and diary entries of several characters living in Belarus during different histori-cal epochs.These fragments are linked through themain character,AdamKlakotski,whoat the beginning of the book is presented as a real-life enlightener and encyclopaedist,allegedly born on the territory of Belarus in 1793, the year of the second partition of theRzeczpospolita. Klakotski’s life seems to resonate with the lives and ideas of charactersfrom other eras, as if settingmajor questions, dramas, discussions and themes of reflec-tion for generations to come.The part devoted to Klakotski is stylised as a biography andis replete with many vivid details, as if putting his character in the context of the 1830s,which were rich in historical events in Europe. Importantly, AdamKlakotski is shown asa bearer of the European tradition, for whom Paris, Warsaw and Minsk are equally ac-cessible and important centres of culture.The other characters seem to echo him in theirreflections and experiences.Lidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 211Furthermore, Artur Klinaŭ’s novel Empties (Shklatara, 2013, the term in Belarusiandenotes empty bottles and jars) literally includes as a ‘novel within a novel’ the text ofa quasi-historical screenplay written by the protagonist. These historical inserts refer-ence the 19th century, when the Belarusian territories became part of the Russian Em-pire, and among the Belarusians there were many of the so called ‘narodniks’, politicallyactive people from the intelligentsia who organised the rural population in oppositionto tsarist power, the most prominent of whom was the Belarusian Ihnat Gryniavitski[Ihnatii Grinevitskii; Ignacy Hryniewiecki], who threw a bomb at Tsar Aleksandr II in1881. These events are intertwined in the ‘novel within a novel’ with folk legends and afree interpretation of the 19th century Belarusian author Ian Barshchėŭski’s workNoble-manZaval’nia, orBelarus inFantasticStories (ShliachtsitsZavalnia,aboBelarusu fantastychnychapaviadanniach, 1844).This plot clearly resonateswith events of the present,whenBelarusis still experiencing a political crisis and the intelligentsia is searching for its role in thissituation.In his other writing, ViktorMartinovich alsoworkswith historical references, for ex-ample, in his most acutely political novel Paranoia (2009). Here the fictional present iscomparedwith the era of BelarusianKastusKalinoŭski’s uprising against Russian tsaristpower, which took place in 1863, and the fictional Belarusian president is named afterGeneralMuravyov,who then suppressed this uprising and conducted the execution of itsleaders.The fantasy novelMova (2014), on the contrary, in a way transports the activitiesof Belarusian national revivalists of the late 19th – early 20th century to the near future,when Belarus has become part of the global Russian-Chinese state. Here, learning andwriting in the Belarusian language is a form of opposing the state-imposed Russian andChinese languages. Despite all their differences, both novels Sphagnum (Sfagnum, 2013)andNight (Noch, 2018) present theBelarusianpeople as a societywithout historicalmem-ory. In Sphagnum, the worldview of the characters is based on fragments of Soviet ide-ologemes about the Great PatrioticWar, folk legends and village prejudices. In the novelNight, historical memory seems to be completely destroyed, so that the characters loseall ability to think critically and unconditionally believe the false news broadcast to themon the radio by a mad crank.What all these works have in common is a critical and often ironic attitude towardhistorical narratives. Instead of creating romantic historical works designed to enchantthe reader with the atmosphere of a certain era, these authors highlight critical reflec-tion on history and its complex, debatable aspects, many of which have been culturallytraumatic for Belarusians.2. Regressive Sociality as a Traumatic Core of Belarusian LiteratureA critical and ironic approach to one’s own history is not, however, the main feature ofcontemporary Belarusian literature. In 2017, in cooperationwith the Belarusian Journal,I conducted an expert survey (Mikheeva 2017) on the 500th anniversary of book print-ing in Belarusian lands, starting with Francisk (Frantsishak) Skaryna’s (1470–1551) workin the first half of the 16th century. I asked fifty experts to name the most important Be-larusianbooks of those 500 years.Theexperts nameda total of 175 books–fromSkaryna’s212 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaBible to prose published in the 2010s.This list of 175 books helped me formulate the hy-pothesis that the contemporary code of Belarusian literature consists of a kind of trau-matic core connected not only with the problem of identity (who, what are we, Belaru-sians?), but also with the always conflicting and painful experience of the social reality inwhich Belarusians exist.To elaborate on this hypothesis, in this essay I have chosen novels from the expert listthatwerewritten in the2010sandreceivedawidepublic response,gainedawardsandbe-camebestsellers.They all inmanyways echo themost influential classics of 19th and 20thcentury Belarusian literature like Yanka Kupala’s [Ianka Kupala] tragicomedyThe Locals(Tutėishyia, 1922),Vasyl’ Bykaŭ’s short novelTheOrdeal (Sotnikaŭ, 1970),Barshchėŭski’sNo-bleman Zaval’nia (1846), mentioned above, Maksim Harėtski’s Two Souls (Dzve dushy, 1919)and several postwar novels by Uladzimir Karatkevich. In these works, the topic of an un-satisfactory, traumatic sociality, of a deficit of solidarity, a ruptured cultural landscape,discordant due to a lack of social conventions on all meaningful occasions, is added tothe issue of problematic local identities.The only situations when solidarity among peo-ple becomes evident are in ‘negative’ deficit or traumatic circumstances, a sort of ‘neg-ative solidarity’ when people rally around something that, though vitally necessary, iscurrently missing, stolen or destroyed.When analysing these literaryworks, Iwould like to use a concept introduced in 2005by the most influential Belarusian political philosopher Vladimir Fours – the concept of“regressive sociality” (Fours 2012). In Fours’s analysis of the Belarusian social field, re-gression is “a specific reaction to one’s own inconsistency in a changed situation of actionor in a situation of serious uncertainty” (ibid.: 111), a decrease in the aims and expecta-tions of citizens, apoliticality, the shifting of responsibility to a charismatic leader, theuncomplaining acceptance of social roles approved by the state, and finally the accep-tance of the status quo as the only possible and natural one. It is the state that themajor-ity of Belarusians were in before the 2020 protests and the state to which the Belarusianauthorities hope to return.This “regressive sociality” in my view can also be described as a feeling of being en-gulfed in the present (without a vision of the future and without a consensus about thepast), in the private (without access to public spaces), without solidarity and collectivity.It is condition that is enforced by a sovereign state, which opens no possibility to par-ticipate politically in the government or ministries and allows no freedom of speech ora public sphere where open discussions and independent culture could be created. Ofcourse, there is no space in such a state to cope with the historical traumas of Belaru-sian society listed above.However, it is worth remembering, as the Polish sociologist Pi-otr Sztompka states, that the concept of cultural trauma should not be understood as asingle event, but as a process that includes many components: the initial situation, theevent itself, the description of the event with the help of available cultural resources, theappearance of certain social symptoms, and a subsequent adaptation, and, in positivecases, processing and curing of cultural trauma (Sztompka 2001: 6). In other words, onecataclysm may not become a trauma, while another, on the contrary, may significantlyshake the social foundations and the usual model of the self-understanding of society.Another factor is time, as we know from studies about the temporal range of com-municativememory,which does not extend further back than a few generations. For ex-Lidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 213ample, events prior to the 20th century are mostly perceived by contemporaries as un-problematic, causing no heavy and negative emotions nor being associated with a senseof irreparable historical damage. So, the naïve, heroic film Anastasiya Slutskaya (AnastasiaSlutskaia, 2003), directed by Yuri Yelchov (Iurii Yelkhov) and produced by the film studioBelarusfilm, tells the story of a princesswho lived in the late 15th –early 16th century, andwho, after the death of her husband, ruled the principality of Slutsk on her own and re-pelled the attacks of Tatar invaders.The film is one of themost entertaining productionsof Belarusfilm and includes elements of a love narrative. Also, Liudmila Rubleŭskaia’smost popular novels take place in the 18th century, completely detached from any nega-tive emotions.But the furtherwemove toward the 20th century, the less ironic andmoreproblematic the filmic and literary representations are, depicting past events rather asuncorrected misfortunes, having fatal consequences until today.Based on the aforementioned analysis of the list of the 175 books named as the mostsignificant literaryworks,we can specify the following traumatic events in a chronologicalorder:1. WorldWar I, which has been displaced from official discourse by the memory of the“heroic” Great PatrioticWar.2. After the war, the incorporation of Western Belarus into Poland and its subsequentannexation to the BSSR (the western part of Belarusian lands went to Poland as partof thePeaceofRiga in 1918,while theeasternpartwent to theUSSR, thenat thebegin-ning ofWorldWar IIWestern Belarus was again annexed to the USSR). As a result ofthese events, society was divided and for decades existed in two different states witha radically dissimilar economic structure, political system, and state language.3. Collectivisation in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and beginning of the 1930s,which turned the owners of private farmsteads into a free labour force for collectivefarms and dekulakisation.4. Stalinist repressionsof the 1930swhen theBelarusiannational intelligentsiawaspur-posely destroyed in the so-called Night of Executed Poets in October 1937, withmorethan one hundred cultural figures and politicians being killed during one nightwith-out trial), but also during the NKVD shootings of citizens in Kurapaty from 1937 to1941.5. WorldWar II, accompanied by the extermination of the Jewish population and civil-ians, as well as the partisan movement.6. Participation of Belarusians along with other Soviet citizens in the Afghan war from1979 to 1989.7. Explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986.8. The collapse of the USSR and the socio-economic crisis that affected the last years ofthe USSR and the first years after its collapse in the 1980s and 1990s.9. Repressionofnational intelligentsia andpoliticiansunderLukashenko,peakingwithdemonstrations of disagreement with the results of elections and referendums.10. TheNiamiha tragedy inMay 1999, an accident inwhich 53 people died in a crushwhilefleeing a downpour in an underpass.214 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Trauma11. The April 2011 explosion in the Minsk metro, in which 15 people died and 400 wereinjured, as well as its investigation, the results of which were not accepted by publicopinion.During the past 26 years, in the absence of public debate and in the context of state pres-sure on independentmedia, it is precisely these catastrophic, traumatic events that haveacted as triggers for an increase of informal communicationbetweena variety of subjectsand groups, that united society situationally, forcing it to search for internal resourcesfor collectiveprocessing.What is important here is that state ideology essentially blockedany open conversation about these events, either by ignoring, glossing over, or directlydisputing the existence of a certain occurrence (for example, the shootings at Kurapatyare not officially recognised). It is precisely because of this lack of a truly universal ethi-cal reflection on the Soviet past that the cultural traumas of the 20th century are still socrucial for civil society and literature.Interestingly, the traumatic events of themore recent past are thus often unofficiallydiscussed as a kind ofmirror image of older historical traumas:Thus, the pressure onBe-larusian-speaking and opposition-minded citizens and authors was linked to the Stal-inist repression of the national intelligentsia, the activities of contemporary Belarusiansecurity forces evoked the actions of their Soviet predecessors and the Niamiha tragedyand 2011 terrorist attack in the Minsk metro were associated with the silencing and in-adequate elimination of the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.In spite of this engagement with traumatic events in the past, mainly in non-stateand unofficial media and formats, there is one state-approved trauma in the Belarusianpublic sphere,which is intensively used for the official ideologicalmetanarrative,namelythat of the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1945. In December 2021, the Belarusian par-liament even passed a bill “On the Genocide of the Belarusian People” (duringWorldWarII), which essentially aims to legally enshrine something like the Holocaust as applied tocitizens of the BSSR.The state monopolises the discourse about this period, masking everything painfuland unspoken about the war with the mythology of the feat of the Belarusian people,which has no dark chapters or controversial figures. Even the old Soviet Museum of theGreat PatrioticWar was closed, rebuilt, and reopened in a new location in 2014.The con-cept of the new museum smoothed over the suffering and horrors of the war and cel-ebrated the heroic deeds of ordinary Belarusian people as part of the Soviet Union inan even more sublime way, emphasised by innovations in the museum’s exhibition andarchitecture. The museum is filled with compositions in which human-sized figures ofpartisans or invaders play out various scenes of military life or battles. Museum visitorscan entertain themselves by taking selfies with plastic partisans ormodels of Soviet mil-itary equipment. (Mikheeva 2014b).Lidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 215Figure 9.1: Glass dome in theMinskMuseum of the History of the Great Patriotic War.© LidiaMartinovichFigure 9.2: Representation from soldats in the battle. Scene in theMinskMuseum of the His-tory of the Great Patriotic War. © LidiaMartinovich216 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Trauma3. Traumatic Experience through the Eyes of Belarusian WritersThis tension between an official glorification of theGreat PatrioticWarwhile negating allother traumatic experiences and amultilayered unofficial engagementwith the negativeexperiences of the 20th century can also be found in Belarusian literature.We can iden-tify two sense-forming centres of attention, which in general characterise the thinkingof significant Belarusian prose writers today. First, comprehending the traumas of thelate Soviet and post-Soviet transformations is still relevant. Until 2020, this relevancewas based on the policy of ‘preserving the best of the USSR’ conducted in Belarus. In2021, this relevance is fuelled by the realisation in society that not only the ‘best’ was pre-served. Such phenomena as the absolute power of the police, security and supervisoryagencies, the planned economy, the bureaucratisation and ideologisation of all spheresof society, andmilitaristic rhetoricwere all carried over from theUSSR.All themore rele-vant are the books that have beenpublished in recent years rethinking theSoviet past andthe period of post-Soviet transformation by the Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich(Sviatlana Aleksievich), for instance Secondhand Time (Vremya sekond khėnd, 2013), as wellas the laureate of the Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award Ihar Babkoŭ’s A Minute (Khvilinka.Try historyi, 2013). Second,many Belarusian prose writers think not only about the expe-rience of ‘the Soviet’ and overcoming ‘the Soviet’ as central to society, but also raise thequestionof theuniqueness of life inBelarus,which emerged froman incredible superpo-sition of various factors. Barys Piatrovich’s novelThe Square. One Lovestory (Ploshcha. His-toryia adnaho kachan’nia, 2011) for instancewas inspired by the events of the 2006 protestsand reflects on the specific pressure on dissenters. At the same time, this uniqueness iscomprehended and experienced as a cultural trauma.For example, novels by ViktorMar-tinovich Sphagnum and Night, novels by Klinaŭ A Helmet (Shalom, 2011) and Empties, theshort stories by Eva Vezhnavets from the collectionTheWay of the Minor Bastard (Shliakhdrobnai svolachy,2008) andmany other texts problematise the totality of circumstances inwhich their characters, placed in contemporary Belarus, have to exist.2These novels de-scribe various social dis-synchronisations, anomalies and lacunae, which can be foundin various spheres of social life. All these failures and gaps are seen by the authors asdirectly connected with the local specificity and historical epoch, that is Belarus duringLukashenko’s reign, which one could designate as a perspective that marks the wholestate of ‘Belarus as a trauma.’The formula ‘Belarus as a trauma’ in my view (and, I believe, for many intellectualsin our country as well) is not only a reflection on the dissatisfaction with current devel-opments or the breakdown of many social institutions, but signals also the transition ofpreviously suppressed political and cultural conflicts into an articulated form. For me,themainmeaning of this form is in the real, daily experience of fear of state violence be-hind each of the social problems listed above. By designating the current situation with2 At the same time, works appeared that rediscovered the old trauma of the marginalisation of theBelarusian language, an old, unhealed trauma from the imperial 19th century like Martinovich’sMova or Alhierd Bakharevich’s Alindarka’s Children (Dzetsi Alindarki, 2014) while Sasha Filipenko of-fered his interpretation of cultural trauma associated with the mass crush near Niamiha metrostation in the novel Ex-Son (Byvshyi syn, 2014).Lidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 217‘Belarus as a trauma’ many authors I am talking about in this text relate the memory ofthe Soviet and post-Soviet years to episodes of state violence in contemporary Belarus,trying to comprehend their present situation through the prism of history and imagesof the future, and based on this drawing conclusions and offering explanations of theapparent traumatic situation. To illustratemore precisely what Imean by this, in the fol-lowing I will examine some of the abovementioned novels in more detail.4. The Double Trauma of the Transition from Soviet to Post-Soviet SocietyMyfirst example is the novel AMinute (Khvilinka, 2013) written by Ihar Babkoŭ, one of themost iconic authors of recent years. It deals in a way with a double trauma affecting Be-larusian society. Undoubtedly the greatest trauma of the recent past was the collapse ofthe Soviet Union with all its well-known consequences: the crisis of social institutions,the economic breakdown, the sudden impoverishment of the population, the dissolutionof the army, the newborders andmilitary conflicts of former ‘brotherly peoples’, the van-ishingof amonolithic ideologicalmetanarrative,and soon. Inparallel to this,behind thispresent traumatic situation it becamemore andmore obvious, that the Soviet Union it-self was a conglomerate of social traumas, which gradually were publicly acknowledged:Stalinist repression, the Soviet devaluation of human life (the lives of its own citizensin war and in everyday life), the undermining of trust in the state after the Chernobyltragedy, and so on.It is this double Soviet and post-Soviet trauma that is depicted in Babkoŭ’s novel AMinute. Its plot begins just before perestroika and theChernobyl tragedy in the 1980s andextends to the early stageof state independenceofBelarus. In thenovel, the traumaof thepost-Soviet period takes on ametaphysical and generalised political meaning. It is com-posed of several intricately intertwined stories involving the narrator himself, the poetFranciszak, thepolitical activist Bahdan, the singerEvaDaminika,and thebartender Leoat their favourite coffee shop, Khvilinka. Through the intertwining of the lives of thesecharacters, Babkoŭ depicts the decline of the Soviet era and the social transformationsof the 1990s.The Soviet is described in the categories of boredomand indifferent detach-ment.The novel offers us large-scale generalisations, filled with the experience of dead-ness, the frozenness of social life, lasting seemingly forever. Babkoŭ’s protagonist expe-riences the feeling of isolation, disconnection, and non-inclusion in sociality as a satori.Thus, the negative social effects of alienation and atomisation of the individual are trans-formed into a productive and refreshing state ofmind associatedwith the establishmentof a salutary distance in relation to an alien and already deadened Soviet society.Observ-ing the flowof city life fromthewindowof a coffee shoponeday, thenarrator apprehendshis own separateness as a liberation fromany illusions about social life.He feelsmild dis-gust, nausea towards Soviet Belorussia.The source of these feelings is described not as asense of injustice at the social order, but as an intellectual and aesthetic protest againstthe inviolability of social automatisms. In this perspective, the main problem of the lateSoviet is the inertness, the lack of alternative to the total ideological spectacle, in whichcitizens participate simultaneously as obedient actors andmesmerised spectators.218 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaThis perception of Soviet life is also present in a rather carnivalesque way in a frag-mentwhichdepicts a scenewhen the threemain characters, Franciszak,Bahdan andEvaDaminica, become acquainted and accidentally find themselves in the “Leninist room”of the student dormitory, partying, drinking wine, listening to records, thereby risk-ing, perhaps, not only their well-being, but also their freedom.The characters throw theworks of the classics of Marxism and Brezhnev’s bookTheMinor Land out of the window,and later leave the room locked from the inside in an imaginary hot air balloon. Thus,the ‘Soviet’ in Babkoŭ’s novel is described in the categories of a dead, mechanistic spec-tacle, the traumatic consequences of which are represented latently but discernibly.Thereprisal of alien, unnecessary, dead books, embodying the code of the decrepit system,becomes a game, an act of freedomand carefreeness, the opposite in itsmodus operandito any obsolete rituals produced by the system itself.The author as narrator contrasts this ‘pain’ caused by Soviet society to him and theother characters with themicrocosm of the coffee house Khvilinka,which gives its nameto the entire novel, where the protagonist feels that it is “not so painful to live” (Babkoŭ2013: 8).At this alternative,almostundergroundplace theprotagonist canfinally be alonewith himself or meet friends. In the case of Babkoŭ, this is a gesture of demonstrativeartistic escape.Theauthor is telling us: I knowall about the traumas ofmyhomeland,butI intend to confront this collective experience withmy own individual world as a piece ofart and a project of self-salvation.However, it is no coincidence that this centre of thenewmicrocosm is a small,modestcoffee shop, overlooking themain avenue of the capital.This café represents the antithe-sis of Soviet kitchens, inwhichpeople criticised thegovernment in the 1960–70s.Becausein contrast to the private kitchen, a coffee house is a public place not hidden from the sys-tem, but it appears as if it slips out of the system’s field of vision by being in full view. Itis both part of the city and life and an island of privacy, solitude and mutual respect. Atthe same time, a cup of coffee is a symbol of pure, aesthetic pleasure of taste, unrelatedto the profane nutritional content of food or the intoxicating effects of alcohol. Coffee isa drink with a flavour of Europeanness and ties in with the tradition of intellectual con-versation in urban cafes of the fin de siècle. Its very existence symbolises a failure of theSoviet system, providing additional resources for a ‘less painful’ existence within it.Hence the descriptions of the 1990s in the novel stress the urge to transform reality,the hope of establishing a path for Belarus of its own, although not without stating theother side of the coin, also referring to theft and the redistribution of everything ‘thatis bad’, which ran parallel to the struggle for democratic freedoms. But this hope for anew less painful life of the early 1990s fails and Babkoŭ’s heroes are confronted with arelatively smooth turn into thewell-known ‘stability’ of Lukashenko’s reign.According tothenarrator, the responsibility for this turnaround liesnot onlywith the corrupt, themenin power or the hapless ‘revolutionaries’, but also with the majority of those who havechosen the path of loyal consumption, rejecting the opportunities of a radical change.The novel describes this development as a vicious circle: The main characters start withcritical contemplations and thereby detach from the ‘society with a deficit of sociality’ ofthe late Soviet Union, then actively participate in social change, before they return to theinitial position ofmere contemplators, but already with the experience of an unfulfilled,unrealised social project of a new Belarus. Both author and his heroes are puzzled by theLidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 219present: the crisis-ridden 1990s led them to the still crisis-ridden 2000s.There seems tobe no way out of the double trauma of late and post-Soviet experience.5. Empties and Sphagnum: Belarus as a TraumaAnother perspective on the traumatic entanglements of Belarusian past and present isopened up in the novels Empties by Artur Klinaŭ and Sphagnum by Viktor Martinovich,whichwere both published in 2013 and became bestsellers.3 Both novels share quite sim-ilar images of Belarus, depicting a social crisis which can be characterised in VladimirFours words as a ‘regressive sociality’. Martinovich and Klinaŭ tell us about heroes fromdifferent social strata (Klinaŭ’s heroes are Minsk intellectuals and artists, Martinovich’sare provincial gangsters),which allows us to see this regressivity fromdifferent perspec-tives.The action of the novel Empties develops around a contemporary art gallery that usedto be housed in a building that once was a drop-off point for recyclable empty glassware.Theprototypes of its characters are real people, artists, designers, philosophers, publish-ers, writers.The narrator is Artur Klinaŭ himself, an artist, writer, and screenwriter.Thenovel has two plot layers – the story of falling in love with a girl and parting with her, aswell as the story of the script written for Partizanfilm-Studio (Belarusfilm), which is apseudo-historical narrative on the narodnik Ihnat Gryniavitski, a Belarusian revolution-ary,amemberof theunderground revolutionary-terrorist organisationNarodnayaVolya(People’s Will). In 1881, he threw a bomb at the Russian Emperor Aleksandr II who diedfrom his injuries.Like Artur Klinaŭ’s previous, more phantasmagoric novel A Helmet and Empties canbe read, on a plot level, as a novel about a rejected artist. Empty glass bottles and jarshere are a metaphor for the marginalisation and desolation of Minsk’s intellectuals andartists. The gallery is not at all an optimistic public place. On the contrary, this publicspace is deeply broken, and its participants (as the novel’smetaphorical title emphasises)are almost garbage, spent material that struggles for the right to be useful again andagain.People of art in the novel are aware that they are on themargins, but retain enoughcourage and irony to continue to live their bohemian existence and work even under theconditions of neglect and humiliation by society and the state.While the hero of Klinaŭ’s previous novelAHelmet consciously chose a radical artisticposition of self-exclusion, in Empties an outlet for the protagonist becomes a painful loveaffair. His struggle for the script, in other words, his attempt to defend his authorial selfin public space, is paralleled by constant battles for his personal happiness, and in theend the hero’s downfall awaits him both in his private and public life. The pathologicalenvironment, deaf and insensitive to the intellectual and artistic processes that exist inspite of everything somewhereon itsmargins, repeatedlynullifies all of thehero’s efforts.The leitmotif of Empties is needlessness and loneliness.3 The Belarusian independent literary scene is, for reasons mentioned above, very modest. Whenwe talk about a “bestseller”, we have to consider a print run of no more than 2000–5000 copies.220 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaTraumatic collective experiences are present in Klinaŭ’s novel on several levels. Onthe one hand, the terrorist attack of April 11, 2011, is central to the plot of the novel, acertain inexplicable excess of violence, the subjects of which are not fully defined due tothe distrust of the official version of events. And so, it is not clear where this violencecame from,what its meaning or message was, and what conclusions can be drawn fromthe event. But what it exposes is a terribly rigid, clumsy, bureaucratic system in the faceof deadly and blind outbreaks of undirected, illogical violence. Tellingly, the tragic eventsat Niamiha are interpreted in Sasha Filipenko’s novel Ex-Son (Byvshii syn, 2014) in a verysimilar vein – as a burst of random, uncontrolled, ‘nobody’s’ violence. In both novels, thetragedy has become something of a transition point between Lukashenko’s early rule andthe subsequent tightening of his regime and the constant pressure on civil society,whichis what Filipenko’s novel especially is about.Another common trait of both novels is that the perpetrators of the terror act arealmost impossible to identify, whereas the huge number of victims affects society asa whole, with it being incapable of rationally comprehending what actually happened,whereby the tragedygains analmostmystical nature.This links theMinsk terror attack toearlier traumatic tragedies like the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant wherealso no culprits were identified.Thus, the novel offers a model of a ‘sinister subjectless-ness’ of traumatic events, which leads to a total mistrust towards the state authorities,who do not take responsibility and conceal the scale of the consequences not only fromthe public, but also from the forced liquidators of the disaster.In summary, the traumatic echo of Empties is triggered by a disaster, namely the ter-rorist attack on April 11, 2011, which recalls the terrorist attack on the Tsar of Ihnat Gry-niavitski in the screenplay written by the main character. This resonance between pastand present spills over into social reality of the protagonists, who are confronted withdistrust, their own futility and, in particular, personal catastrophes.  ViktorMartinovich offers a different perspective onBelarusian society and its histor-icalmemory and traumas in hiswork Sphagnum, a novel initially praised by the publisheras an entertaining read comparable to the films of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino.The novel tells the story of threemen from the Belarusian countryside,who stole a bag ofmoney from the scene of a mysterious murder and are on the run. The detective storydevelops into an exploration of small towns and villages, their everyday lives and so-cial imagination. It depicts a Belarus whose life does not intersect in any way with theuniverse we find in Klinaŭ’s Empties. At the same time, the countryside is obviously asisolated from a kind of ‘Belarusian society in a vacuum’ as, for example, Minsk’s intel-lectual community.Moreover, glocalisation in the description of the Belarusian provincereaches a new level. The ‘regressive sociality’ here consists not only in Belarus’ self-iso-lation from the world, but also in the self-isolation of separate regions (the autonomyof Palesse, small similar worlds of the Hrodna, Brest, Vitebsk, Homel’ regions, each ofwhich has its own agenda, its own political guidelines and ways of doing business, andso on) and small towns and nearby villages,where residents seek to secure themselves byaccepting imposed social contracts and social roles.The narrative strategy of Sphagnumis the creation of a kind of thread, stringing together the world of the dying and event-less modern Belarusian villages and provinces.The dramatic events of the detective plotexpose all the elements of this frozen world that acts according to rusty social automa-Lidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 221tisms.The depicted social reality of the Belarusian wilderness is a motley palimpsest ofvarious discordant layers of experience: some villagers exist in secluded archaicism, sub-ordinating their lives to the everyday magic and rhythms of forest and agricultural life;others live by the rules of local bureaucracy; someare classical philistines,whohavemadea social contract with the state apparatus – loyalty in exchange for the status of a ‘normalcitizen.’ This ‘social contract’ had often already been made during Soviet times and wasthen mechanically prolonged in the era of independent Belarus. In the novel, the Sovietdebris (in the form of remnants of a bygone civilisation, traces of urban planning andcentralised management – in the form of signs on stores, transport stops, local historymuseums, etc.) looks like one of the layers of a complex palimpsest of types of experiencewhich one needs to have in order to be ‘the true local’ in the Belarusian village. It is gov-erned by fear of authority, by a social atomisation asmodus of everyday interactions andby archaic beliefs and values.The titular swamp moss – sphagnum – in this sense is a metaphor for everythingthat replaces the social coherence of the Belarusian village: the partisans put it in theirwounds as a disinfectant, and the inhabitants also use it during the construction ofhouses to fill in the cracks between the logs. Swampmoss exists in nature in abundance,it is an inexhaustible resource for those who want to survive on the margins of ‘bigsociety’, in the land of forests and swamps. Moss in this way also becomes a symbol ofcompensation for the lack of real social connections between people.Another ‘unnecessary’ social group is depicted in the novel with the three young pro-tagonists who simply have no place to put themselves within society, being neither partof the village people nor of the philistines. Their search for a bag of money resemblessomemagical or adventurous treasure hunt linkedwith the hope that its discovery couldchange their hopeless lives at once. Just as Klinaŭ’s hero compensates his lack of public-ness with an unhappy love story, soMartinovich’s gangsters receive compensation for allthe shortcomings of regressive sociality in the formofmagical trips through themarshesof the Belarusian province, where, as they hope, an alternate mystical world could befound.In his novel Night Viktor Martinovich continued to develop this logic of thought.Here, the fragmentation of the social imaginary in which the Belarusians live is illus-trated on the plot level as the actual disintegration of the whole society. After an energyapocalypse, the world is split into multiple subjects where everyone is living accordingto his or her own values, ethical principles and concepts. In a world without electric-ity, nation-states and societies disappear, people return to living in communities, eachspontaneously invented from scratch, regressing to pre-modern forms of sociality. Thenovel describes this fragmentation of societies around the world into local groups shar-ing sometimes maximally contrarian views in detail. It presents followers of conspiracytheories who stormed the Capitol, religious traditionalists, living in communities anddenying the need for any vaccines, but also radical feminists, or adherents of veganismand zero-waste, and paramilitary communities. At the same time, it shows precisely thedisintegration of post-Soviet society – choosing not only global trends, but also recog-nisable Belarusian examples.The novel presents this development as a direct outcome ofthe post-Soviet situation: due to the inability to build real solidarity and effective socialinstitutions after the collapse of the USSR, Belarusian society is falling apart into war-222 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaring communities not bound by law and order, each with its own rules and vision of thefuture. Thus, the disappearing electricity – the central symbol of Soviet modernity – isnot only an embodiment of technical and economic regression, but also a symbol of so-cial regression, a regression of humanity and the expiration of the guarantee of law. It isan apocalyptic picture which resembles many developments happening in Belarus rightnow.6. ConclusionComparing Babkoŭ’s, Martinovich’s and Klinaŭ’s work with history in their best-sellingnovels, it is striking that all of theminawaymarka shift fromwriting that is concentrateddirectly on the traumas of the past (in the manner of Svetlana Alexievich, who gives ‘or-dinary people’ a voice, the right to speak, and laments the personal dimension of socialcatastrophes) to the paradigm of conceptualising contemporary Belarus as a pervasivelytraumatic social reality due to itsmisunderstood or forgotten history.The authors repre-sent this shift in fictional form, using the techniques of genre prose (mysticism, fantasyplots, detective stories), as well as the endless resources of postmodernist play and irony.As I have already mentioned, it is largely thanks to the authors’ desire to create fic-tion books for a broad readership that Belarusian literature in the 2010s and 2020s hasbecome themost noticeable public platform of critical thinking about the social and po-litical agenda of Belarusian society, more influential than, for example, political scienceor sociology, which experience permanent pressure.The entertaining and accessible na-ture of these novels made it possible to involve readers, regardless of their profession,education or status, in the reflection about history and collective memory.These popular novels developednew literaryways of perceiving the history of Belarusas a series of cultural traumas,shifting the focus fromthe literary recollectionof immedi-ate traumatic experiences and their consequences (as is the case with Alexievich’s prose)to a vividly entertainingnarrative of activeheroesbuilding creative,diverse relationshipswith their history and its echoes in the present.These literary works were able to look atthe image of the ‘suffering Belarusian’ with a certain distance, simultaneously with em-pathy, but also ironically.They also offered images of characters who challenge the trau-matic reality and create their own alternative worldviews and even imaginary worlds inwhich trauma becomes surmountable, less frightening, sometimes even ridiculous. In-stead of a documentary examination of past suffering heroes as passive witnesses, theseworks offer a multiplicity of views and characters who are acting, resisting, fantasising,and creative. In this way, literature potentially empowers andmightmotivate the readerto act themselves, in associating their own situation with the one of the literary protag-onists.Lidia Martinovich: Dealing with Cultural Traumas 223FilmographyAnastasiya Slutskaya (Anastasia Slutskaia), dir. Yuri Yelchov, Belarus 2003.List of IllustrationsFigure 9.1: The final halls of the Museum of Great Patriotic War express the continuityof the Belarusian authorities with the victory in the war and glorify the com-monbright future of the fraternal peoples of the formerSovietUnion.©LidiaMartinovich.Figure 9.2: The final halls of the Museum of Great Patriotic War express the continuityof the Belarusian authorities with the victory in the war and glorify the com-monbright future of the fraternal peoples of the formerSovietUnion.©LidiaMartinovich.ReferencesAlexievich, Svetlana (2013): Vremia second-hand,Moskva: Vremia.Fours, Vladimir (2021): K voprosu “belorusskoi identichnosti.” In: Fours Vladimir. Sochi-neniya 1, Vilnius: EHU, p.111.Babkoŭ, Ihar (2013): Hvilinka,Minsk: Lohvinaŭ.Filipenko, Sasha (2017): Byvshii syn,Moskva: Vremia.Klinaŭ, Artur (2013): Shklatara,Minsk: Lohvinaŭ.Martinovich, Viktor (2013): Sphagnum,Minsk: Knihazbor.Martinovich, Viktor (2017): Noch,Minsk: Knihazbor.Mikheeva, Lidia (2014a): Culture of Reading and Literary Preferences of Belarusians, Re-port, Minsk: Laboratory of Social Research NOVAK.Mikheeva, Lidia (2014b): “Voina: Niashno i ne strashno,” 19 July 2014 (http://journalby.com/news/voyna-nyashno-i-ne-strashno-209) [30 September 2023].Mikheeva, Lidia (2017): “Nashy lepshyia 50. Samyja vazhnyia knihi belarusskai litaraturypavodle ekspertau,” 1 September 2017 (http://journalby.com/news/nashy-lepshyya-50-samyya-vazhnyya-knigi-belaruskay-litaratury-pavodle-ekspertau-1026) [30September 2023].Sztompka, Piotr (2001): “Socialnoie izmenenie kak travma.” In: Sociologicheskie issle-dovanija 1, p. 6.Chapter 10:Nostalgia for TraumaRussian Prize Literature and the Soviet PastValery Vyugin1. IntroductionMuch, or perhaps evenmost, of contemporary Russian culture, including literature, canbe interpreted in terms of recycling – the ‘recycling’ of one’s own historical, and aboveall Soviet, experience.1This term is convenient as an alternative to the two concepts thatare commonly used to describe attitudes to history – “nostalgia” and “trauma”. From thepoint of view of recycling, history appears primarily as a resource that can be reutilisedand resold.Understood in this way, “cultural recycling” is an extremely basic, primal cat-egory, not an ideological one like “nostalgia” and “trauma” (V’iugin 2021). The benefit ofaddressing it lies primarily in the removal of the familiar, albeitmore complex, interpre-tative frameworks.Recently, Russianwriters have displayed a great interest in the Soviet ideological andaesthetic experience, which is especially evident in the phenomenon that can be roughlycalled ‘prize literature.’ Over the past two decades, the institution of Russian literaryprizes have proved to be an effective tool for shaping the writers’ ‘elite.’ Award nomina-tions, of course, are not always and by nomeans the only important criteria for a writer’ssignificance. However, prize literature – at least, within the domestic context – is ex-tremely influential. Although its audience is not large compared, for example, with thatof popular television shows and blockbusters, it actively participates in the circulationand production of topoi that are characteristic of popular mainstream culture. Some ofthemwill be discussed in more detail in this essay.1 This work was prepared with support from the Russian Science Foundation, Project No. 19–18-00414 (Soviet Today: Forms of Cultural Recycling in Russian Art and Aesthetics of the Everyday.1990s-2010s). I am also deeply grateful to Mark Lipovetsky for his invaluable moral support at acritical moment of my research. All translations of Russian quotes are mine, unless noted other-wise.226 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaThe institutional mechanisms of Soviet and contemporary Russian literary awardshave not yet been studied in detail (Svin’in/Oseev 2007; Akhmanaev 2016; Zubkov 2021;Gorski 2023). While this aspect is undoubtedly important, this essay does not addressquestions of the sponsoring, nominating and selecting of finalists nor the question, touse awell-known aphorism, ‘who judgeswhom?’.The focus is not onwhat James Englishcalls the “cultural economics of prizes and awards” (English 2005: 4), but on literatureas such, on the literary works themselves, which have been selected according to certaincriteria, and as a result form a specific ‘genre’ that is shaped not by the authors, but bythe prize jury.This essay examines several works of such prize literature that meet thesecriteria. In doing so, it is important to emphasise that the rather complex process of se-lecting and nominating certain literary works directly influences the career success ofauthors in the genre of prize literature.Prize literature is the specific result of thosewho,among other things, endorse and promote certain trends in contemporary literature.To interpret such trends, this essay analyses selected literary works that were in-cluded in the 2019 longlists of arguably Russia’s four most prestigious literary prizes:Bol’shaia Kniga, Natsional’nyii Bestseller, NOS and Iasnaia Poliana. This small selection ofaward-winning literature reflects not only one year’s performance but a general trendin contemporary Russian literature over the past decade. Moreover, it is worth takinginto account the specificity of 2019, which I could not imagine when I started, at the be-ginning of 2020, to read and write about the latest prize-winning novels. Indeed, thisundertaking would ultimately turn out to be a dive into a preapocalyptic culture. Backthen, I only vaguely felt what now becomesmore andmore obvious to me: the ideas andemotions of this kind of fiction from 2019 absorbed, if not foreshadowed, the upcomingcatastrophic future, and today, at least, can contribute to a better understanding of whythe social cataclysm which followed the pandemic became possible.About a third of the overall corpus of prize literature of 2019, comprising almosta hundred texts, is represented by works which can be categorised as a “retrospectivegenre”, i.e. a genre which includes historical novels and “novels of the recent past”(Fleishman 1971: 3).These are either explicitly historical narratives or narratives in whichhistory occupies a central position. The vast majority of them refer to the Soviet periodin one way or the other, and when one considers that other writings – novels and storiesabout modernity, future worlds or fantastic tales – also refer to the same time periodin many cases, the picture becomes even more impressive: at the beginning of the 21stcentury Russian literature is obviously actively recycling the Soviet past.The focus therefore will be on authors whose works deal with the Soviet past. Theessence of the trend they reflect can be characterised as an ongoing attempt to ‘har-monise’ and ‘normalise’ Soviet history, tomask all contradictions, and to find somethingpositive even in the seemingly worst stories. It is also important to note that this rhetor-ical strategy is not carried out through explicit declarations, but latently, through a kindof suggestive poetics that sometimes may not even be fully reflected by the author him-self. The literary works examined here are also united by what can be broadly describedas allegorical poetics: a very significant part of contemporary Russian literature, whichaspires to the status of ‘serious’ literature, seems to be governed by it. This technique isreminiscent of the traditions of Soviet literature, drawing on both socialist realist andmore recent aesthetics, though of course it is not a unique post-Soviet phenomenon, butValery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 227a general characteristic of the global literary mainstream.Moreover, the selected worksresemble what Boris Engel’gardt (1924) in analysing Dostoevskii’s work, called the ‘ide-ological novel’, wherein one can easily identify certain ideas behind the main charac-ters. In rhetorical terms, the characters serve as examples illustrating –metaphorically,metonymically, or otherwise – a general thesis. In other words, these novels feature inaddition to the usual story amore or less developed ‘allegorical plot’ – a gradually unfold-ing argument in defence of a certain ideology and ethical values.The reader is invited toidentify them as a specific intellectual and aesthetic exercise.This essay focuses on theseideological presuppositions inscribed into the narratives through the ‘enigmatic’ way ofan ‘allegorical plot’.No less interesting, however, are the ethical premises on which these narratives arebased, which are not necessarily included deliberately, but always at least unintention-ally (Booth 1961). If, from the point of view of allegorical hermeneutics, literature aboutthe past can be described as intellectual entertainment, from a rhetorical perspective itturns out to be a very seriousmatter, serving the formation of identity and social consol-idation. But what are the ideological and ethical presuppositionswithwhich the authorsof the selected literary works seek to consolidate their readers’ attitudes andwhich liter-ary devices do they employ to achieve this?These are the questions that will be discussedin this essay.2. Idyllic StagnationIt is to a certain extent unsurprising that the so-called period of stagnation of the1970s-1980s is mostly represented as a harmonious time. If we look at the 2019 prizeliterature, the most telling illustration of this observation is perhaps the novel by VasiliiAksёnov, Ten Visits of My Beloved (Desiat’ poseshchenii moei vozliublennoi, 2018), which wasincluded in the 2019 Iasnaia Poliana longlist.2 It is an autobiographical novel, and, if werelate the situation to the Soviet tradition, a kind of new village prose.‘Ancient’Russianhistory is presentedbyAksenov as aGoldenAge: “Our ancestors, theCossack pioneers, knew how to choose the place where to build” (Aksenov 2018: 17), butthe story set in the Soviet time is also quite idyllic in the way it portrays the period.Thisdepiction clearly contrasts with the personal melodramatic plotline, which is based on astory of unhappy adolescent love. Aksenov’s village exists almost outside of Soviet ide-ology, almost beyond politics and even agricultural production. The author of the novelis more fascinated by the leisure culture of its inhabitants than in the ‘battle for the har-vest’. Social conflicts are depicted as coming from the outside into the community’s life:“Only my Ialan is falling apart, it’s a pity […] after the announced enlargement. And whoinvented it? Some enemy. Someone, but no one from Ialan” (Aksenov 2018: 17–18). Group2 According to the author’s dating the novel was written in 2009–2010. It was first published in 2011inMoskvamagazine (No. 1/2), and the author won themagazine’s award for best publication of theyear. In 2014, a play based on the novel was staged at the Maiakovskii Moscow Academic Theatrewith the title V.O.L.K. (That’s What Love Is) (V.O.L.K (Vot Ona Liubov’ Kakaia)), directed by SvetlanaZemliakova. The first book edition was published in 2015, the second in 2018.228 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaconflicts, for example, over the honour of a village girl, are also provokednot by their ownpeople, but by outsiders. Even vehement arguments about the painful past, about Stalin,do not turn Aksenov’s characters against one another, even if one is a convinced commu-nist and the other is a believer and former kulak, a victim of the Bolsheviks’ policy. Aftereachquarrel the characters reconcilewith each other.Apart fromanunfortunate teenagecrush, life in the Soviet countryside according to Aksenov appears quite prosperous.One motif that concerns both authors of these ‘stagnation’ novels is religion. InArkhangelskii’s work, the conflict of antagonistic social groups also means a religiousopposition to the atheist state.Moreover, the topic of religion inTheVerification Bureau isso crucial that one gets the impression that all private and public life in the Soviet Unionrevolved, if not exclusively then mainly, around this question. In Ten Visits to My Beloved,by contrast, religion is not brought to the forefront. Aksenovmentions it rarely, but eachreference is symbolically weighty. His characters, who argue vehemently about Stalin,are wary of arguing about religion.Aksenov and Arkhangelskii are by no means unique in their attention to this motif.Contemporary Russian literature in general draws extensively on this previously taboosubject. But what is new is that religion in these works turns out to be a part of the har-moniously constructed past. This aspect also characterises the novels discussed below,which focus on other periods of Soviet history.The fact that in this ‘stagnation’ literature the late Soviet era is often portrayed as rel-atively prosperous is hardly surprising. But it is worth remembering that under the con-ditions of censorship during the Brezhnev era the Stalin regime was also not depictedas particularly disastrous. The situation did not change significantly until perestroika,3 The novel, according to the author, was written between 2014 and 2018. It was first published in2018 in the journal Oktiabr' (No. 3/4).But even when the author is clearly concerned with demonstrating the hidden con-flicts of the Soviet system, the portrayalmay endupbeing similar. In the novelVerificationBureau (Biuro proverki, 2018), for example, the officiousness and internal social contradic-tions are numerous.3 This ‘urban Moscow’ novel by Aleksandr Arkhangelskii was short-listed for the Bol’shaia Kniga Award in the 2017–2018 season, and a year later, in 2019, forthe Iasnaia Poliana longlist. The main tension in the novel emerges as a confrontationbetween the party-state apparatus and the intelligentsia and all the other plotlines inArkhangelskii’s piece of art are based on this. And yet, Arkhangelskii, like Aksenov,man-ages to resolve the conflict.TheVerificationBureau is essentially anovel aboutunity,–unitywhich is achieved on 27 July 1980, the day ofVladimirVysotskii’s funeral, functioning as asymbol that reconciles all the ‘actors’ of late Soviet history. In the final scene, the narrator–who is also themain character –witnesses the coffin of the deceased poet being carriedthrough the city.Someone in a large crowdhands outVysotskii’s poems,and apolicemanholds out his hand for them: “‘But you are, excuseme, the police!’The policeman blushed.– ‘And what,’ he asked offended, ‘do you think policemen aren’t human?’” (Arkhangelskii2018: 412) Arkhangelskii combines the utopian character of the phrase “the policemanblushed” with an apocalyptic expectation of a ‘new world’ to come – some fundamen-tal social changes.Thus, contemporary Russian prose settles every conflict situation andattempts to harmonise history.Valery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 229when it wasmostly shown as a traumatic period,while today, after a different historical-political turn, there is a pluralismof different positions, towhich award-winningwritershave contributed.Many of them are by no means inclined to present the pre-1953 Soviet Union as aconflict-free environment. The repressions and their consequences are often describedin such detail that this literature may well be called ‘traumatic’.This leads to the curiousand, at first glance at least, paradoxical situation that this ‘traumatic’ literature, whichhighlights the dark sides of Soviet history, at the same time promotes the normalisationof that history, a constellation worthy further consideration.3. Peacemaking PantheismGuzel Yakhina [Guzel’ Iakhina] occupies a special place among contemporary writerswho made it into the circle of prize-winners in 2019. She is truly a bestselling author,whose works are discussed not only by experts or in literary circles. Yakhina’s novelZuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza, 2015) was turned into a television seriesin 2020 and aired on the TV channel Russia-1.The series immediately became the subjectof a heated public debate with some even calling for the series to be banned. As for theawards themselves, Yakhina is a regular on domestic shortlists. Her award-winningsecond novel A Volga Tale (Deti moi, 2018), discussed below, was written after ZuleikhaOpens Her Eyes, but is no less, and perhaps even more, revealing in its theme of Soviethistory under Stalin.The novel, as already mentioned, is written in an allegorical manner typical of manycontemporary authors, includingAksenov andArkhangelskii.Only thedegree of its sym-bolism clearly exceeds the norm. Yakhina’s eventful plot – unlike, for example, Aksenov’saccount of everyday life – is almost entirely subordinate to the allegoricalmessage. Sincethe mid-1970s, Soviet literary critics have referred to a special genre, the ‘novel-parable,’which unites such diverse authors as Vasil’ Bykaŭ, Chingiz Aitmatov, Bulat Okudzhavaand many others. Yakhina’s work, perhaps, embodies the qualities of this genre to aneven greater extent.AVolga Talemade the longlists for the 2019Natsional’nyii bestseller and Iasnaia Polianaawards and was ranked third among the winners of the 2018–2019 Bol’shaia Kniga sea-son.The novel spans two decades, from 1918 to 1938, but the story is also accompanied byreferences to both themore distant past and a brief excursion into the characters’ future.Throughout the entire novel, Yakhina’s narrative is devoid of any complacency: a lovestory unfolds against the backdrop of a brutal revolutionary reality. Meanwhile, the im-mediate prehistory is again characterised as “calm, full of penny joys and little worries,quite satisfactory. Somehow happy” (Iakhina 2018: 24).Yakhina’s protagonist, a young German teacher named Bach, leaves his communitytogether with his beloved Klara – because the community did not accept the young peo-ple’s relationship – to settle some distance away, on a farm on the other side of the Volga.The characters thus drop out of society, and even timebegins to flowdifferently for them,as their connectionwith the real calendar is gradually lost.This is one of the basic devices230 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumain the novel: the author replaces the historical, objective time in the spirit of ‘neo-mytho-logical’ poetics or magical realism with ‘legendary’, symbolic time.The fugitives are occupied only with themselves, so much so that even the continua-tion of their family seems not only unnecessary, but also undesirable.Thehero only visitshis former neighbourswhennecessary, each timewitnessing the changes taking place inthe abandoned settlement. Thus, the narrator, or, more precisely, the author4 describesthe Sovietisation of the Volga region from the perspective of a – in the sense of ViktorShklovskii – ‘defamiliarising’ observer. This is the second characteristic device used byYakhina that determines nearly everything in the novel.A turning point in the novel is a bandit attack, which Bach is unable to prevent. Hisbelovedwas raped.That is, an outside force invades the lovers’ asylum and destroys theiridyll. After that, A Volga Tale turns mostly into an account of regular violence, which, al-though primarily inflicted by the new authorities, is also caused by the acts of ordinarypeople.AVolgaTale concludeswith a phantasmagoric allegorical scene, inwhich the hero,plunging into the Volga, observes the riverbed filled with the victims not only of Sovietbut also of Russian history: at the bottom of the Volga, he sees an endless row of deadpeople and animals as well as artifacts. Moreover, all these bodies and items have notdecomposed despite the passing of time.Thus, violence, brutality, and confrontation form the basis of Yakhina’s novel, as if todispose the reader to fear and reject Soviet history, assuming, of course, that violence ismeant to deter. But around this chronicle of violence, Yakhina constructs her own ‘histo-riosophy’, in whose light terror looks somewhat different. Apart from her main charac-ter, the former teacherBach,whohas amarginal social status,Yakhinadevotes quite a lotof attention in her novel to the person who held the highest position of power in the So-vietUnion,namely Stalin.Yakhina’s Stalin possesses traits that are quite often attributedto him. He is extremely suspicious, it is impossible to contradict him and it is better toanticipate his wishes even regarding trivial things. For example, although he firmly de-cides onaparticular carp for dinner, the cookprepareshim threedifferent ones, since theleader can change his mind at any time. In addition to these generally known charactertraits, Stalin is also depicted through allegorical gestures, among which relations withanimals, especially fish and dogs, occupy a special place. Stalin feeds the carp, personi-fies them and treats them as he treats people: he encourages the most zealous one, theone that grabs the feeder by the finger, and then demands that the fish be fried.The dic-tator repeats the same experience with a pack of feral dogs, whereby he is also attackedand, on this occasion,muchmore seriously.Yakhina’s Stalin fails to tame animals, but it is obvious from the novel that he is amuchmore successful tamerwhen it comes to people –primarily those close to himwhoset the mechanisms of terror in motion. In this sense, for example, Ezhov in Yakhina’snovel becomes the first contender for the role of the zealous carp, which is about to bedelivered for frying.This extended analogy is only one of the allegorical links in the chain4 It is important for me to disavow here a well-known opposition between the terms ‘author’ and‘narrator’, stressing the fact that, ultimately, it is the author (writer) who is responsible for the ideasand values which she or he imposes upon the reader. In this respect, my approach is close to the“optional-narrator theory” (Boyd 2017; Patron 2021).Valery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 231of figurative identifications – identifications and oppositions – in which the specificityof the author’s axiology in relation to the subject of the story, that is, national history, isexpressed most clearly.At the same time in the novel, Hitler remains the only equal political rival to Stalin,against whom the Soviet dictator is literally and figuratively still learning to ‘play’.Chemodanov, a billiards genius, helps him in this business. During one of the gameswith him, Stalin finally overcomes his master in a game of billiards and simultaneously,imagining that Chemodanov is Hitler, acquires a certain feeling – ‘courage’ –which, theauthor believes, will give him an undeniable advantage over his enemy in the cominggreat war. Yakhina’s Stalin has no doubts that the war will take place, which makes hima shrewd (complimentary rhetoric) politician. Yakhina uses the war as an ethical motifby which to evaluate all of Stalin’s activities, including repression, as they occupy muchof the writer’s attention.Yakhina’s form of evaluation of Stalin’s character implies a suggestive strategy ratherthan an explicit ethical judgment. On the basis of the central text fragment in which theauthor’s position is expressed, it is impossible to say clearly whether the idea of unity be-ing used as a justification for oppression when faced with an imminent military threatshould be attributed to the character, the narrator or the author. I am specifically refer-ring to the following phrase: “Only by cleansing the organism of sores and ailments canone expect to win the inevitably approaching war” (ibid.: 461). In other words, we havea narrative which looks too much like a legitimising narrative typical of the oppressor’sdiscourse about terror, which necessarily discredits the victim of this terror, presentingthem as an enemy and depriving them of their human qualities.The fact that in this dual situation the reader is left to make an ethical choice on hisown is not so important for understanding the axiology of the narrative.Themain thing,as far as the latter is concerned, is that the ambivalence of Yakhina’s expression of theauthor’s position takes Stalin and Stalin’s repressive policies out of the category of un-conditional, absolute, evil. The ethics manifested in the novel allows for the possibilityof repression.The absolute evil is attributed to the external enemy, Hitler – a characterwho appears episodically andplays a service role.The futurewar also appears in the novelonly when the authormakes an ethical –not accusatory and therefore already apologetic– assessment of Stalin.5 This fact is most probably fictitious.If we start again with Stalin, there are clearly two figures alongside him, literally,in the text: One extremely famous, Hitler, and the other less well known, a man namedChemodanov, who teaches Stalin billiards in between matters of national importance.5From the point of view of the author, which is expressed stylistically, Hitler clearly losesout to Stalin because the latter is endowed onlywithminor negative connotations.Hitleris discredited ad hominem. For example, in contrast to the Soviet dictator, the Führer isportrayed as hysterical: “Hitler is insane, hysterical and an undoubted demagogic genius[…]” (ibid.: 458). Stalin, on the other hand, is inmost instances characterised either neu-trally or complimentarily, despite his inherent fear:Whatever hemay be,he stands aboveeverything, with Yakhina constantly repeating the word ‘leader’.232 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaThedictator’s other opponent in the novel is, of course, the Volga German Bach, whofulfils this role, however, only on the allegorical level of the plot: the characters nevermeet, and Stalin certainly knows nothing about Bach. The characters, who are situatedat opposite ends of the social ladder, are initially opposed to one another, although thisconspicuous antagonism is again not so unambiguous.In a sense,AVolgaTale is a hagiography of Bach: an account of the hermit’smovementtoward some truthof life, to sanctity.Bachbeginshis reclusive journeyby servinghis onlywoman,Klara.The climax of his feeling is whenKlara,who died just after giving birth, isplaced in the ice shed, and the hero realises that this is exactly what he has always strivedfor: to contemplate his undying beloved. He understands that this is the only thing heever really wanted. At the same time, from this moment on he must look after the childshe left to him.Bach, who at first dislikes the child of an unwanted pregnancy caused by rape, grad-ually focuses all his attention on caring for it. Soon, another child appears in the house –anorphan, towhomBach is also averse at first, but slowlyBach gets used to seeinghimatthe farm.Now the hero serves the two children.The orphanwho appears in Bach’s homeis also a phenomenon of the new world (the world which once already destroyed Bach’sidyll), so he begins to serve the children of revolution andmodernisation, and gives him-self to this cause wholeheartedly – first on the farm, then in the orphanage where thechildren are taken, and then in other, somewhat more distant places.In this manner, Yakhina connects Bach, children and revolution in a demonstrativeway. The protagonist makes his ‘contract’ with the Soviet regime immediately after theloss of his beloved: to obtain milk for his infant, he composes fairy tales, which the localactivist uses to agitate for the new regime among the main character’s former neigh-bours.6 In the last episode of the novel, Bach also sets up an orphanage in his own house,no longer for his two wards, but also for other children.Finally, having accomplished hismission– raising hiswards and building a commonhome for others – he readily accepts his fate to end his life in the camp: “I am ready,”he claims during his arrest (ibid.: 484). Thus, Bach, who rebels against his own ethniccommunity at the beginning, becomes a convinced builder of the new, Soviet world anda ‘convict’ at the same time by the end of the novel.He builds an order in which he himself has no place. Even his two children, hav-ing found themselves in a Soviet orphanage, soon stop thinking about him. In Yakhina’snovel, the children are happy, interacting with their peers, and they do not need anyoneelse. In a key scene of happiness, the adults beside them are simply absent: “By the gleamin their eyes he felt: here they are happy” (ibid.: 437); “Laughing, hurrying, bumping fore-heads and laughing again.There were no adults” (ibid.: 430).That is, the author portraysa real utopia of childhood and the orphanage.It is precisely in this role of selfless servant to the new regime that Bach is equal toStalin: one readily sacrifices others for the sake of a certain unity, the other does nothesitate to sacrifice himself. (As the iconic Soviet comic character Iurii Detochkin would6 “Tales” refers to the collection of Leonid Lerd (1935), a reference which the writer does not hide. Inparticular, the book mentions the ‘storyteller’ Hoffmann, the namesake of one of Yakhina’s char-acters.Valery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 233say: “And together we make a common cause: you in your own way and me in mine.”) Inotherwords, Yakhina, in her novel about Stalinist repressions, is implementing the samestrategy of ‘normalising’ Soviet history as the prize-winning authorswhowrite about the‘calm’ Brezhnev era, albeit in a somewhat more elaborate way.It is not difficult to see this if one again pays attention to the ‘animalistic code’ in thenovel. In Yakhina’s work, it is not only Stalin, but also Bach who interacts with wild ani-mals. In one episode,whenBach iswandering in the steppebetween the farmand the vil-lage, he runs into a pack of wolves.The wolves run across the steppe, approaching Bach,but instead of attacking him, they simply ‘streamline’ him from all sides. If we proceedfrom the gift of taming animals, Bach – a kind of Francis of Assisi or Egorii the Brave –wins in a tacit contestwith the dictator.Ultimately, the symbolismof emotions separatesthe leader and the outsider: Bach,who is afraid of losing his belovedmore than anythingelse in the world, loses his fear by the finale, while Stalin, on the contrary, experiences itconstantly, albeit concealing it from others. In this way, the idea of total violence as anethical value loses out somewhat to the idea of personal sacrifice. But in a didactic andinstructive sense this means only one thing: Yakhina teaches humility.The author offersnothing else in her novel equal to these two ethics (for example, the ethics of rebellion).The only ethical reference point remains the harmony between the executioner and thevictim.InYakhina’s novel, the truthof thisnewworld, forwhich somekilled andothers sacri-ficed themselves, is unambiguous.WhenBach’s two children of the revolution are grownup, having had so far a quite shabby and crippled life (Iakhina 2018: 485–486), they even-tually meet to spend the rest of their days together, in a sense echoing the fate of Bachand Klara. At least, this is how the cycle of the family saga closes.The final scene in A Volga Tale – the one in which the hero plunges into the Volga,can be easily read as a manifesto of pantheism – a hymn to nature, which equates andincludes everyone and everything, friends and enemies. Drowning in the Volga, observ-ing history and grasping its truth, the hero feels that he simultaneously merges with thewhole earth: “His toes were carried to the quiet backwaters of Sheksna and Mologa […]his hair – spread out on the Akhtuba, dipped end into the Caspian Sea. Bach dissolvedinto the Volga” (ibid.: 483). In other words, one kind of religious discourse, the Christianone, has just been replaced with another, ‘pagan’ one.4. The Geopolitics of ErosIn thenovelParadise onEarth (Rai zemnoi, 2018) bySukhbatAflatuni,whichwas shortlistedfor theBol’shaiaKnigaAward, the repressive past is a seemingly negative phenomenon: atleast one of its main characters – though not the main one – is entirely immersed in thework of exposing the crimes of the repressive regime. Taken as awhole, the novel depictsSoviet history, starting with the 1930s and ending in the early 2000s – in the final scene,we hear the 2004 song Black Boomer (Chernyi Bumer) by Seёga which was very popular atthat time.Themain character Pliusha grows up in the Brezhnev period.At the same timethe novel features important secondary characters. One of them belongs to the genera-tion socialised during the Stalin period, another – to the generation socialised during234 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumathe Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods.Thus, themain character is dragged into the ide-ological andethical clashbetween thesegenerations,and this generational confrontationserves as themain plot of the novel, which, just as the novels previously mentioned, alsohas an allegorical level.At the beginning, the actionunfoldswithin the frameworkof interpersonal relations,touching upon gender rather than historical and political issues.Themain character hasa close female friend. When it comes to their attitudes toward men, the two girls differfrom their peers.They do not want to getmarried and in general, their relations with the‘strong’ sex are not easy. At the same time, they are opposites in terms of character: ifPliusha is an introvert, her friend Natali is very active and sociable and not averse to thepleasures of life, except for sex.In its most extreme form, gender conflict manifests itself in Natali’s story. One day,when Natali comes home from a party, she is attacked and raped by a local guy calledGrisha. However, Natali, who is strong by nature, is not distressed for long, but learnskarate andbeatsGrishaunconscious,only just refraining fromdeprivinghimof the signsof manhood. Grisha, in turn, coming out of the hospital, begins to pursue Natali again,and one day he almost catches up with her. The conflict is finally resolved only after thedeath of themale character for reasons beyond thewoman’s control.The relationship be-tweenGrisha andNatali is, of course, a typical rape-revenge story, a plot about awoman’svengeance on her abuser. However, it also has an allegorical meaning, which only be-comes apparent towards the end of the novel, an aspect to which I will return.Pliusha, on the other hand, has a different paradigm for communicating with men.She gravitates toward artists and intellectuals, humanities scholars, and somewhat oldermen. Relationships with them do not lead to sexual intimacy, although the affectionatetouches of one of them, a teacher and academic supervisor at the institute, at least atfirst, do not disgust her. At the climax of the novel, Pliusha unexpectedly finds herselfcaught between two men – mentors, people of different generations (the generation ofStalin and Khrushchev-Brezhnev) who, having been friends and even co-authors for along time, suddenly break off all relations. Moreover, the case ends with a public slap inthe face.Thus, a political and historical conflict related to the theme of repression breaksinto the narrative: the reason for the end of the friendship is that the younger scholardiscovered that his older colleaguewas involved in the execution of the Polish populationliving in the city until the 1930s. Not yet aware of the reasons for the quarrel betweenthe two men, Pliusha gradually begins to distance herself from the compromised hero,switchingover to the sideof the indignant truth-seeker.Thismanifests itself inher losinginterest in art history and choosing anew supervisor, a historian-archivist, to investigatethe mass murder of the Poles together with him.As in Yakhina’s case, Aflatuni presents the events from the point of view of a naïve‘ordinary’ hero, who clearly does not understand what is going on, in a way that avoidsmaking ethical judgments about the actions of characters and events in real history. Histext, like Yakhina’s, lacks clear markers that clarify the point of view of the narrator, andthus of the implicit or biographical author.The reader is given the chance to make theirown choices, which of course they will make in accordance with their ethical and ideo-logical background. For instance, after a certain period of successful activity, the truth-seeking character, whom Pliusha assists, begins to have difficulties. A new chief appearsValery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 235who, unlike him, believes that: “There is no need to imagine that some were only execu-tioners and others only victims.We need to show everything in amore complex, broaderway” (Aflatuni 2019: 196). The reader is quite free to identify with either point of view,accepting or not accepting them.The fundamental ambivalence of the narrator’s position allows each interpretation.At first glance, Aflatuni perceives his truth-seeking hero positively – already by virtue ofthe fact thathe rebels againstdetected injustice and ‘meanness.’Thisgives reason to thinkthat the narrator ethically stands and, in this sense, identifies with the inquisitive histo-rian, attracting the reader to his side as well. To put this in other terms, in the eyes of theauthor, Pliusha’s new supervisor, a historian, ethically surpasses his predecessor, the arthistorian and, as we already know, traitor.This ethical hierarchy, exactly as in Yakhina’scase, is supported by using the rhetorical device ad hominem. If, in Yakhina’s novel,Hitlerlooks worse than Stalin because he is explicitly hysterical, in Aflatuni’s narrative, the arthistorian is worse not only because he is a traitor but also because he is older.Aflatouni emphasises that his heroine, the unaware Pliusha, is uncomfortable withthe signs of old age that she notices in her first mentor, the art historian: “When he firstembracedPliusha, shewas frightenedby the pungent smell of tobacco andold age” (ibid.:26). In contrast to this negative physical attraction between Pliusha and her firstmentor,her connection with her second mentor, the younger archivist and historian is purelyintellectual or ‘spiritual’.But this obvious assessment is only one side of the coin,with the allegorical plot com-plicating the picture.Aswe know,Grisha rapesNatali.However, this is not self-sufficientviolence,but violencewith a special ‘historiosophic’meaning.Aflatunimentions thatNa-tali is of Russian origin, from the Cossacks, while Grisha turns out to be a Pole: “We arePoles. – Anton slows down slightly. – Poles […]” (ibid.: 44). Moreover, Grisha catches upwith Natali not just in some wasteland, but in a field where the grave of his compatriotsexecuted in the 1930s is located. It is a sexual act on a grave – a motif not common inRussian and Polish literature but one gaining popularity today.Thismeans, the rape can be read on an allegorical level also as Polish revenge againstthe Russians for the crimes committed by them in the 1930s against the Poles. This re-venge can hardly be called successful, but it is not completely unsuccessful either. A childdoes not appear in this case, but there is a ‘sadomasochistic’ connection between thecharacters after this encounter, at the breaking off of which the heroine feels a distinctsense of loss. And after finding out about the death of her ‘offender’, Natali immediatelyproposes tomarry his older brother.Thinking of this in termsof geopolitical abstractions– the Russian offers to create a family for the Pole. Such a Russian-Polish relationshipdoes not cease to be a love-hate relationship, because in response the Pole offers the Rus-sian a bowl of soup intowhich he pours a glass of salt, and in the end, plagued by nausea,they eat the soup together and the matter ends in marriage.The unity between the Russian and the Polish nation is also realised in another form,not erotic, but thanatological. Before dying of illness, Natali demands that her friendscatters her ashes over the wastelandwhere the Poles are buried. In death and in nature,Aflatouni thus argues, all are equal. Putting it all together, the reader is faced at thismo-ment with the same concept of pantheism which we witnessed in Yakhina’s novel.236 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaThere is little to be added to this finale. Unlike Yakhina, in Aflatuni’s novel, the finalharmony,however, is achievedwithin also religious,but this time again, like inAksenov’sand Arkhangelskii’s narratives, Christian, discourse. At the very end of the novel, nearthe field where the repressed Poles are buried, it is decided that two chapels should bebuilt, one Russian and one Polish, with a garden between them as neutral territory.Thisis how Aflatuni constructs that ‘earthly paradise’, where everyone is reconciled or, moreprecisely, where the hope for universal harmony and forgiveness, which is declared inthe title of the novel, is anchored. All this is presented through the eyes of Pliusha, whoin her detachment from earthly matters appears increasingly like a nun or a saint.What is noteworthy, however, is that despite the presence in the novel of a truth-seeker investigating a crime in the past, the idea of repentance or a confession of guilt ishardly articulated in the novel, or rather, it is suppressed by the thesis of reconciliation.In terms of trauma, the point is that the novel depicts not how the victims, the Poles,are trying to get rid of the physiologically painful consequences of trauma, but how theiroppressors, the Russians, do so. It is ‘traumatic literature’, but upside down.5. ConclusionIn summary, several very different novels of so-called prize literature about Soviet his-tory have something in common in the way they reutilise the topoi of the Soviet past.Whatever different writing styles their authors adopt, whatever time period they con-centrate on, in their portrayals history invariably comes to a certain kind of harmony.The idea of ethical acceptance of the past, even when it comes to mass terror, becomescentral to them.The writers construct a system of evaluations such that, ultimately, anyexperience of the past, including mass terror, is presented as positive.This is curious, but not entirely new.The ethical normalisation of the social crisis, ifwe bear inmind the domestic tradition of the present and past centuries, is by nomeansa recent innovation. A similar situation was observed in the 1920s.Many writers, as wellas representatives of other arts, tried to talk about the revolution and civil war, not cen-soring, but rather explicating its horror. Significant writers of this trend were Isaak Ba-bel’, Boris Pil’niak, Artёm Vesёlyi, the aforementioned Andrei Platonov, Vassilii Gross-man and Vladimir Zazubrin. An ‘objective’ narrator proved to be an appropriate deviceto deal with the recent past under the conditions of the new order. If at first, in the chaosof the 1920s, such a literary strategy formanywriters proved to be awise choice, it clearlydid not appeal to Stalin: Stalin demanded a beautiful story, and instead of ‘objectivism’socialist realist camouflage and pathos.Something similar is happening nowadays: the normalisation of history, includingthe history of mass violence, its evaluation as ethically acceptable, is a proposal withwhich contemporary writers successfully enter the market of cultural products. This isthe economic side of the cultural recycling they are undertaking, but at the same time,of course, it is also an ethical and socio-political choice.The rhetoric that allows contemporary writers to effect “reconciliation with history”can be summarised as follows. First, it is based on an explicit or implicit appeal to re-ligiosity. In other words, contemporary literature is actively included in the process ofValery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 237the desecularisation of culture, which once surprised one of the first researchers of re-cycling in the post-Soviet space, Sonja Luehrmann (2005). Secondly, it is important thatdespite the dissimilarity of the narratives, in Yakhina’s, Arkhangelskii’s and Aflatuni’snovels the main character’s death turns out to be the key argument for harmonising thepast.This recurrent thanatological interest lends itself to various formsof rationalisation– for example, in terms of sociality as the priority of the origin over the individual or inthe Christian paradigm,which interprets the earthly life of man as a preparation for thegreater and supreme afterlife. But whatever the case, the topicality of death is importantto the writers, both as a rhetorical device and as a self-promoted value. Of the authorsmentioned above, only Aksenov does not focus on the idea of death in this form in hisvillage prose.Finally, in some cases (as in Yakhina’s horror novel of terror) the idea of forgivenessand harmony is reinforced by themotif of love, and by themotif of sacrifice: the authorssacrifice a concrete person for the love of an abstraction.Thus, one can conclude that thekeywords of this new ethical program of so-called prize literature are sacrifice, humility,death and religion.If we look at these novels discussed above in a larger context, we find that they are bynomeansunique in their kind.A similar ‘poetics of harmony’ can also be found inNikolaiKononov’s resolutely anti-Stalinist novelTheUprising.Documentary novel (Vosstanie. Doku-mental’nyi roman, 2016),whichwas shortlisted by theNOS. Somewhat earlier, in 2014, thefirst Bol’shaia Kniga prize was awarded to Zakhar Prilepin for his novelTheAbode (Obitel’,2014), where the apologetic rhetoric of concentration camp politics is seen with muchgreater clarity. Prilepin’s Abodewas, among other prizes, awarded the 2016 Russian Gov-ernment Cultural Award (Government Order 2017). But even without this, it is clear thatthe ‘harmonisation’ of history, which boils down to the elimination of internal conflictsin favour of universal unity, is a state-encouraged line of recycling the past in contem-porary Russia. It turns out that a notable number of Russian authors, whose names areprominently mentioned, voluntarily or involuntarily act in accordance with it. Only theneed for a thorough and evidentiary parsing of texts stops us fromgiving other examplesof the same kind.In 2004, Anne Whitehead published her book Trauma Fiction. Against the backdropof countless studies on the aesthetic narrativisation of negative experiences, this workby a representative of the first wave of trauma studies attracts attention given that itstitle contains the very term that captures the phenomenon. Whitehead drew attentionto the paradox presented byworks of fiction that address traumatic events: their authorsspell out what, according to the essence of the notion of trauma, should seem to resistlanguage and representation. According to Whitehead, the extraordinary authority oftrauma studies has only strengthened the desire of contemporary writers to bring thetraumatic to the surface. Their appropriation of the ways of conceptualising historicalevents suggested by trauma studies has resulted in a vast and significant body of fiction(Whitehead 2004: 3), to whichWhitehead devotes her research.If we consider that trauma studies are not only fed by theoretical interest, but areconceived as a kind of social therapy that helps to deal with negative collective experi-ences, the trauma fiction they provoke must serve the same purpose.The essence of theprocess to which it thus contributes is not only to make sense of and remedy the effects238 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaof trauma, but also to prevent its recurrence; or at least, the recurrence is accepted bydefault as highly undesirable.This is not at all the case with the trend in Russian fiction discussed above, aswith Russian cultural production as a whole. Drawing parallels with the USSR of the1930s-1950s, it could be considered a kind of reincarnation of the then so-called litera-ture of non-conflict. Although fiction of this type deliberately ‘visualises’ trauma, it doesnot care about overcoming it. On the contrary, if you continue in the logic of therapy, itpromotes a permanent return and adaptation to the traumatic experience, transformingit from an anomaly to the norm. From a political and rhetorical perspective, the lattermeans a more or less veiled call to maintain the status quo, to freeze both history andmodernity. Finally, since this kind of narrativisation does not deny the stressful expe-rience of the past as something ethically unacceptable, but, on the contrary, legitimisesits reproduction, the apologetic recycling of the past that it facilitates is more suitablefor description in terms of nostalgia studies rather than trauma studies. Based on itspredilection for the cultivation of social ‘wounds’ without any attempt to comprehendand address their causes, it could well be characterised as nostalgia for trauma.Obviously, the ‘harmonisation’ of history is not a unique phenomenon and is charac-teristic not only of the Russian context. Popular mass culture in general tends to trans-form conflictual subjects, including the discourses of horror, terror, pain and death, intoentertainment and pleasure. What should be highlighted however is that Russian cul-tural productionwith pretensions to intellectuality – and the prize literature in questionoften makes a claim to be ‘realist’, ‘serious’ and even ‘elitist’ – is in this respect voluntar-ily or involuntarily converging with popular culture. The only difference is that it is notaimed at the ordinary mass reader, but at a fairly well-prepared reader who expects ob-stacles and puzzles from art of various kinds and who is able to enjoymulti-layered alle-gorical, intertextual, and not just one-dimensional plots. Just as in the case of adventurenovels or computer games on a historical theme or, for example, in the case of the reen-actment movement, in this new ‘literature of non-conflict’ the entertainment functionbegins to supplant the critical function. In this sense, we are confronted with a typicalcase of the ‘gamification’ of history. On the other hand, no matter to what degree fictionis entertaining, by virtue of its ethical and rhetorical nature – let us recallWayne Booth’sRhetoric of Fiction again – it always imposes on the audience a certain “fictional world”,that is, specific moral values and norms of behaviour.FilmographyZuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza), dir. Egor Anashkin, Russia 2020.ReferencesAkhmanaev, Pavel (2016): Stalinskie premii: Istoriia uchreezhdeniia i praktikaprisvoeniia i vruchniia Stalinskikh premii, Moskva: Russkie Vitiazi.Booth,Wayne (1961): The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Valery Vyugin: Nostalgia for Trauma 239Boyd, Brian (2017): “Does Austen Need Narrators? Does Anyone?” In: New Literary His-tory 48/2, pp. 285–308.Ėngelgardt, Boris (1924): “Ideologicheskii roman Dostoevskogo.” In: Arkadii Dolinin’(ed.): F.M. Dostoevskii: Stat’i i materialy 2, Leningrad/Moskva: Mysl’, pp. 71–105.English, James (2005): The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation ofCultural Value, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Fleishman, Avrom (1971): The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf,Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.Gorski, Bradley А. (2023): “Literaturnyi kapitalizm i ekonomika prestizha (Rossiiskie lit-eraturnye premii 1990 – 2000-kh godov. Ot ‘Triumfa’ do ‘Bol’shoi knigi’).” In: Novoeliteraturnoe obozrene 1/179, pp. 202–218.Iakhina, Guzel’ (2018): Deti moi,Moskva: AST.Kononov, Nikolai (2019): Vosstanie: Dokumntal’nyi roman,Moskva: Novoe izdatel’stvo.Lerd, Leonid (1935): Skazki [nemtsev Povolzh’ia], Saratov: Saratovskoe gos. izd-vo.Luehrmann, Sonja (2005): “Recycling Cultural Construction: Desecularisation in Postso-viet Mari El.” In: Religion, State & Society 33/1, pp. 35–56.Prilepin, Zakhar (2014): Obitel’, Moskva: AST.Patron,Sylvie (ed.) (2021):Optional-NarratorTheory: Principles,Perspectives,Proposals,Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Rasporiazhnie Pravitel’stva (2017): Rasporiazhenie Pravitel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot07.02.2017g.No.209-r.Oprisuzhdenii premiiPravitel’stvaRossiiskoi Federatsii 2016goda v oblasti kul’tury: http://government.ru/docs/all/110388/ [30 September 2023].Svin’in, Vladimir/Oseev, Konstantin, (eds.) (2007): Stalinskie premii: dve storony odnoimedali: Sbornik dokumentov i khudozhestvenno-publisticheskikh, Novosibirsk:Svin’in i synov’ia.V’iugin, Valerii (2021): “‘Kul’turnyi resaikling’: k istorii poniatiia (1969–1990-e gody).” In:Novoe literaturnoe obozrene 3/169, pp. 13–32.Whitehead, Anne (2004): Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Zubkov, Kirill (2021): Stsenarii peremn: Uvarovskaia nagrada i ėvoliutsiia russkoi dra-maturgii v ėpokhu Aleksandra II, Moskva: Nove literaturnoe obozrenie.Chapter 11:The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.Domesticating Nuclear Disaster in a Video GameOleksandr Zabirko1. IntroductionComputer games allowmillions of people to play with and within the past.Although, even in the realm of pop culture, games are often considered crass enter-tainment and are generally less respected than movies or literary texts, the rapidly in-creasing sophistication of history-based game titles leads to an assumption that the cul-tural impact of the gaming industry will keep growing.Today, some bestselling games already compete with historiography itself in the waythey render facts and events to elaborate a sense of reality for almost every historicalepoch. For instance, the Assassin’s Creed series, famous for using real historical events asa backdrop to the games, has covered multiple scenarios – from Viking expansions intothe British Isles, via the Crusades and up to the American Revolution.The modes of ludic interaction with history vary considerably depending on thegame’s genre. In strategy games, players may experiment with counterfactual historywhile commanding ancient armies, running a business enterprise, or ruling a medievaldynasty, whereas a first- or third-person shooter game can offer cinematic depictions ofhistorical drama, for example, on the battlefields ofWorldWar II.Experiencing history through virtual reenactment is probably the most obvious, yetnot the only way of interacting with the past. Far less evident is the engagement withhistory in the games,which are set not in the historical past, but in the present time, andwhich rely on the player’s deeper emotional resonancewith thememories of a bygone erarather than on its detailed presentation or simulation.This emotional impact is particu-larly important for various horror games. Certainly, as digitally created works of art, allvideo games depend on player input to trigger themajority of in-game events, thus con-tributing to the player’s engagement in the unfolding of the storyline or activating newgame levels, however more than other settings for digital games, horror contexts go be-yond this ‘technical’ kind of interaction as they are primarily designed to produce strongemotional responses.242 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaThe locale of horror games, i.e., the space in which the player moves, lives, and sur-vives, is usually saturated with elements of gothic aesthetics such as decaying, ruinedscenery, ‘dark’ music, and the ubiquity of monsters. Merging the gothic entourage withthe elements of action-oriented games (e.g., shooters or adventures), the ‘survival hor-ror’ games place the player character, who is usually vulnerable and under-armed, in themiddle of this uncanny environment.Ever since the release of its originator, Resident Evil in 1996, the genre of the survivalhorror has beengradually expanding its aesthetic features, for instance,by incorporating‘ecogothic’ elements for modelling the in-game landscapes or for the representation ofecological crises. If gothic is understood as centring around some profoundly historicalmotifs like the “return of the repressed” (Clemens 1999) or revealing the “unburied past”(Etkind 2013), ecogothicmediates cultural anxieties about the human relationship to thenon-human world through uncanny apparitions of a monstrous nature (Deckard 2019:174).However, a clear boundary that separates the non-human world of nature from thehuman realm of history is often impossible to draw.Their interconnectedness is partic-ularly evident in the case of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, where the environmentaldisaster is often regarded as a pivotal point in history – a dark metonym for the fate ofthe Soviet Union (Milne 2017: 95).Chernobyl has been the subject of historical documentaries, crime thrillers, andhaunting photo installations – all focusing on both historical and ecological features ofthe nuclear catastrophe. Similarly, the gaming industry has been invoking the ghostlyarea of Chernobyl with striking regularity. This paper explores the representation ofSoviet history and culture in the main instigator of this trend, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. gameseries, which combines the elements of survival horror and ego-shooter against thebackdrop of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.2. From Cossacks to StalkersRoughly at the time when the scholarly community was arguing whether Ukraine has ahistory (while discussing the eponymous article byMark vonHagen), a small,Kyiv-basedstudio of game developers, GSC Game World, was working hard on making this veryhistory playable. The outcome of their efforts was a real-time strategy computer gametitled Cossacks: EuropeanWars.The game was released in 2001 and immediately became a massive success both inUkraine and abroad. By December 2001 Cossacks had sold over 500.000 copies globally,thus becoming one of the most popular game titles at the time (Bye 2001). The game isset in the 17th and early 18th centuries in Europe and is divided into several campaignscenarios ranging from Stepan (Sten’ka) Razin’s rebellion to the War of the AustrianSuccession.1 Drawing heavily on Microsoft’s best-selling strategy game Age of Empires,1 The game consists of four “campaigns”, which are divided into “missions” or “scenarios”. For exam-ple, at the beginning of the “Russian Campaign” the player takes on the role of a tsar general whomust supress the Cossack uprising led by Stepan Razin.Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 243the Cossacks offer four military campaigns: the English, the French, the Russian, and theUkrainian campaign. Against the backdrop of the colonial powers’ fight for supremacy,a ubiquitous motif in strategy games, the Ukrainian campaign seems out of place, butthe product’s original title coupledwith a fragment of Ilya Repin’sReply of the ZaporozhianCossacks (rus. Zaparozhtsy pishut pis’mo turetskomu sultanu; ukr. Zaporozhtsi pyshut’ lystaturets’komu sultanovi, 1880–1891) on the CD cover leaves few doubts that the Cossacks arethe real protagonists of this game.Apart from its exotic,East European flavour, the gamebecame renowned for itsmas-sive battles with a seemingly infinite number of units that playersmay control.However,the GSC’s attempts to apply the same game design andmechanics to different historicalepochs and countries were far less successful: for instance, American Conquest (2002), agame deliberately designed to appeal to the United States computer gamemarket, failedto build on the success of Cossacks.Figure 11.1: The original cover of the computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl(2008)It was only in 2008 that GSC GameWorld managed to produce another global best-seller: an ego-shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.This game has had three itera-tions since 2008 and supports an energetic fan community all around the globe. In Au-gust 2021, GSC and its partner KochMedia GmbH claimed over 15 million total sales forthe S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise (GSC GameWorld 2021b).Having changed the game’s original title from Stalker to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. due to copy-right issues2, the game still borrows many of its key elements from Andrei Tarkovskii’sfamous film Stalker (1979) based on the science-fiction novelRoadside Picnic (Piknik na obo-chine, 1972) by Arkadii and Boris Strugastkii. However, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is set in the Cher-2 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a backronym for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers,and Robbers.244 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumanobyl Exclusion Zone, in present-day Ukraine. The game’s backstory assumes that in2006 anothernuclear disaster occurs inChernobyl, turning thenatural environment intoa contaminated“Zone” full of physical anomalies,mysteriousobjects,andaggressivemu-tants. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. starts a few years later, after people have begun coming to the Zonein searchofmoney,valuable artifacts, and scientific information.Thesepeople call them-selves “stalkers” (stalkery), while their activities in the Zone and the corresponding ethosare referred to as stalkerstvo, a termwhich is by nomeans synonymous to themodern En-glish word ‘stalking’, but rather designates exploration, trailblazing, and economic ex-ploitation of the Zone.33. Welcome to WastelandStarting from the first game of the series, Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was de-signed as an open-world game: although it introduces its own plot and storyline, whichthe player has to uncover by accomplishing a certainnumber ofmissions (quests), the de-velopers place the player in a self-sustaining ecosystem in which game situations arisefrom the random interaction of different components such as weather conditions, ele-ments of the natural environment (mutants, zombies, and animals) as well as fromocca-sional fights between rival gangs and fractions, who are ‘stalking’ in the Zone.The greatdeal of randomised activity taking place in the game,nomatterwhether or not the playerchooses to interact with it, creates an illusion of a living, open universe. Unlike othershooters, which deliberately place the player in the centre of the world, S.T.A.L.K.E.R,on the contrary, constructs a self-sufficient environment, which seemingly does not re-quire the player’s presence and attention. In terms of the gameplay, this particular kindof ‘worlding’ alsomeans that the terrain continually shifts its topologies so that strategiesthat worked before no longer apply.Being primarily a first-person shooter, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.naturally centres weapons andammunition as one of its key elements, but it also incorporates features more typicalfor adventure and role-playing games, including interactions with non-player charac-ters (NPCs): the player may talk, trade or fight with the NPCs, but he also may listen totheir conversations,whichusually include jokes or stories of the everyday life in theZone.Other features, like the scary ambience and ominous background music, are typical forthe genre of survival horror as they are designed to instil a sense of fear and anxiety in theplayer. The horror aesthetics are amplified by certain gameplay properties, which makethe hero vulnerable to several problems such as radiation, hunger, and bleeding. As istypical for post-apocalyptic tales, the player always has to pay attention to the hero’s di-minishing forces. Yet unlikemost survival horrors of the early 2000s (e.g.,Doom 3, SilentHill, the Resident Evil series) which try to frighten the players by the sheer number, ag-gressiveness, or ugliness of differentmonsters,S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers a setting of strikingtranquillity – the Zone produces an atmosphere of suspense rather than that of an ac-tion-oriented shooter. To be sure, the flesh-eating, blood-suckingmonsters are all there,3 The Russian term “stalker” is probably borrowed from Rudyard Kipling’s book Stalky (1899), a col-lection of stories with a pronounced imperial subtext.Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 245but, irrespective of a player’s preferences and strategies, the far larger part of the play-ing time in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is always devoted to the exploration of the Zone’s natural andurban spaces rather than to shooting down its aggressive inhabitants.By privileging ludic experience over narrative content, the game shifts its empha-sis from characters towards the landscape, thus offering its own ecogothic version ofthe genre of survival horror. If the players of real-time or turn-based strategy gamesspend most of their time contemplating and changing the geopolitical map of the re-spective gameworlds (thus treating themapas an aestheticised object), the players of theS.T.A.L.K.E.R. series focus predominantly on the natural or urban environment, whichthey, however, can only observe and study, but hardly alter.Unsurprisingly, theprominent role of the environment in thegamedesign leads to anassumption that the real protagonist of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the Zone itself. Matthew Sakeyconcludes:If characters in narrative are primarily responsible for the evocation of emotional re-sponse, and assuming that a character can be anything, then certainly a place can takecenter stage as easily as a person. The Zone is the star of this show. (2010: 97)Thus, according to Sakey, the agency of the Zone is rooted in its capacity to evoke emo-tional responses such as the feeling of peace, threat, wonder, or loneliness. This agencyanchors the Zone firmly in the context of the so-called affective landscapes, which con-sider space and place beyond their material properties while recognising that this “be-yond” of “imaginary places, ideals, and real but intangible objects underpin and producematerial places and social spaces” (Berberich et al. 2013: 314).The interaction between thematerial and virtual,which comprise the semantic core of the term“affective landscape”,is particularly relevant in the context of video games.While people connect themselves toand detach themselves from topographical areas in complexways, video games, as a spe-cific medium, highlight our ability to interact with virtual, in-game landscapes throughcontemplation, exploration, destruction, etc. Although this experience usually remainswithin the borders of virtual simulation, the empirical dimension of this interaction sat-urates the corresponding landscapeswith powerful associations and symbolicmeaning.The Zone as an affective landscape has a glocal character. It links legacies of the in-dustrial past (e.g., industrial ruins,depopulated settlements, etc.)with geographical andnatural space, thus addressing the common experience of de-industrialisation, whichthe countries of the formerUSSR sharewithmany other regions of theGlobalNorth.Butwhile forWestern, particularly American, players the Zonemay function as an estrangedversion of the “old west” or Yukon (Sakey 2010: 101), it cannot be denied that the Zoneis also an archetypical no-go-area on the eastern side of the former Iron Curtain and assuch it is burdened with specific historical connotations, semantics, and aesthetics. An-ton Bolshakov, creative director at GSC GameWorld, explained this particular meaningof the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:Ruins of old Soviet industrial complexes, blocks of flats, military and civil facilities, ve-hicles and so on are still plentiful around ex-USSR. However, those traces of old empirecan hardly be felt as keen and striking as in the Chernobyl zone. Tome it’s living history,246 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaas life has been still there for over twenty years now, ending back in USSR times. It wasonly after visiting Chernobyl that we were able to render the atmosphere of true post-apocalyptic Soviet world which we intended to deliver. (Rossignol 2007)Interestingly enough, the choiceof theChernobylExclusionZoneas thegamesettingwasnot a spontaneous decision, but a result of a long and arduous development process.Theinitial concept of the gamewith theworking titleOblivion Lost had no references to Cher-nobylwhatsoever. Instead, the game reliedheavily on the plot of RolandEmmerich’sStar-gate movie (Iatsenko 2008). The game was supposed to take place not in contemporaryUkraine, but in the distant future, an era of interstellar voyages, with thousands of in-habited planets and intelligent races.The player and his comradeswere supposed to takethe role of intergalactic pioneers – the first to encounter new, previously unknown, andpossibly hostile worlds. However, the developers soon abandoned the initial concept asboth labour-intensive and trivial (ibid.). Between 2002 and 2007 the project had under-gone some significant changes both in terms of gameplay and storyline. In 2002–2003,GSC staff went to the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone twice, to film footage of rustingmachinery and collapsing buildings. As mentioned above, these excursions became animportant source of inspiration for the game: what came with the material was not justthe images of the decaying architecture, but also myths and narratives of the Chernobylcatastrophe.An influential British computer games journalist and critic JimRossignol,whowroteextensively on S.T.A.L.K.E.R., goes as far as to valorise the natural and cultural envi-ronment of the Zone as “a world that sits apart from the Americanised homogeneitythat exists across the spectrum of gaming” (Rossignol 2011). This statement may soundsomewhat exaggerated with regard to a game, which basically offers the same ludic ac-tivity as Half-Life 2 (an ego-shooter by American game developer Valve Inc.) and drawsheavily on the aesthetics of the post-apocalyptic America of the Fallout series (createdby Interplay Entertainment). For instance, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. painstakingly follows powerfantasies of atomic health in Fallout, where the toxic effects of radiation exposure be-come an element of gameplay that can be easily overcome by wearing “power armor”and consuming “Rad-Away”, a chemical solution that bonds with radioactive particlesand removes them from the user’s body (unsurprisingly, in the East European setting ofS.T.A.L.K.E.R., these healing qualities are attributed not to some futuristic potions, butto vodka). S.T.A.L.K.E.R. provides its own ironic comment on the (dis)continuity of thepost-apocalyptic theme in video games: inShadowofChernobyl (2008) and inCall of Pripyat(2009), the second iteration of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the playermay find the dead bodies ofMy-ron (one of themain characters in Fallout) and Gordon Freeman (the protagonist ofHalf-Life 2), who obviously did not manage to survive in the Ukrainian wasteland.Critics however point to somemore fundamental differences betweenUkrainian andAmericanpost-apocalyptic shooters: according toMukherjee (2008: 235–236) thedissim-ilarities lay in the affective experience and in the fictional setting of the games, whileRossignol (2010) highlights the authenticity of the Soviet landscape as one of the mainfactors for the worldwide success of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.With regard to the game’s Soviet am-bience, some statements made by the gamers in the comment section beneath Rossig-Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 247nol’s texts are even more telling. For instance, an Estonian gamer with the nickname“irve” concludes:So the S.T.A.L.K.E.R was a thing I (literally) waited for years and as someone from theformer Soviet bloc (Estonia): the whole architecture in Ukraine was utterly standard-ized so I got to be nostalgic about some concrete fences and small checkpoint houses,which got the “exact right” childhood window bar designs… I didn’t enjoy the plot ofthe game: I just trespassed whenever I could: the buildings had lots and lots of places Icould climb and they didn’t rewardmewith any stuff or ammo: they were their own re-wards. I could spendhours climbinghalf-built buildings, overlooking abandoned train-yards or just admiring rusty cars frommy childhood. (Rossignol 2010)Another gamer, who obviously does not have any personal ties to the Soviet era, sum-marises his (or her) playing experience as follows:The wholemythos of the Zone, Chernobyl and the ColdWar has been churning aroundinmy brain for far too long without reason, and then I realised just what an impact theactual history surrounding the zone had onme when I was playing. There’s somethingengrossing about it, something unpeaceable, and feeling as if you’re not only withinthe games [sic] mythology, but that of the real world only makes it more believableand immersive. (Ibid.)4. Observing the RuinsWhat are the main fascinations with this appropriation and playful transformation ofthe Soviet past in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Anton Bolshakov describes the 1986 accident in Cher-nobyl as “one of the black pages in the history of Ukraine”, yet in the same interview healso highlights the unique combination of factors, which led to the success of the game’sconcept: “global public awareness of the setting,mysteriousness of the place, radioactiv-ity dangers, talks about mutations – all combines into a solid concept of a horror-filledatmospheric shooter” (Rossignol 2007). The ‘atmosphere’ of Chernobyl remains utterlyhistoric, since the affective landscape of the exclusion zone seems frozen in time, on theeternal ‘black page’ of 1986.Paradoxically, in the game, the Soviet past is both omnipresent and inaccessible. Itappears, for instance, as an overtone in the soundscape of the haunted town of Pryp-iat, where the game’s sinister background music is intertwined with road noise andchildren’s laughter, but also with a fragment of a radio broadcast that informed Sovietcitizens about the death of Leonid Brezhnev. The epitome of this inaccessibility is thetime machine from the popular Soviet children’s miniseries Guest from the Future (Gost’iaiz budushchego, 1984), which, quite in line with the plot of the miniseries, can be foundbehind a secret door in the basement of one of the abandoned houses. However, thegameplay allows no interaction with the device – the time machine is, therefore, a typ-ical ‘easter egg’, a secret feature or image which is hidden in a video game. The tensionbetween the presence of Soviet history and the player’s inability to interact with it can248 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumabe traced back to the level of game characters. For example, Call of Pripyat, features twoNPCs, Captain Tarasov and Corporal (praporshchik) Volentir from the Soviet cult actionmovies In the Zone of Special Attention (V zone osobogo vnimaniia, 1978) andHit Back (Otvetnyikhod, 1981). In the game, the two characters appear asmembers of theUkrainian airborneunit that supports the protagonist in one of the decisive battles against his adversaries.Yet again, in the heat of battle, the interaction with both Soviet heroes is reduced to aA player’s limited freedom to act is an inherent feature of computer games, hencethe inaccessibility of Soviet history is not a deliberate ideological or philosophical mes-sage but results predominantly from the gameplay properties. However, combined withan affective landscape of the Zone, full of the remnants of the Soviet past, this techni-cal limitation offers a particular perspective on history: the Soviet characters, culturalartifacts, and, ultimately, the collapsing Soviet architecturemay evoke the feeling of sor-row and majesty, but the world it belongs to remains ultimately out of reach. Instead ofludic interaction with history (like in Cossacks: European Wars), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers thecontemplation and exploration of its visible remnant – a landscape full of ruins.Figure 11.2: The town of Prypiat’. Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (2009)As uncanny reminders of the passing of time, ruins inevitably trigger meditationson mortality and life’s transience, thus providing an ideal scenery for a survival horror.Yet at the same time, the omnipresence of the decaying architecture in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.makes this scenery programmatically and affectively past-oriented: a place, where anunexpected catastrophe left behind a post-human space of disaster naturally producesa haunting affect, whichmakes it impossible to see “what now is” without constantly re-flecting on “what once was” (Lee 2017: 2).couple of banal phrases.Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 249Figure 11.3: The town of Prypiat’. Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (2009)Indeed, juxtaposing the lively past with the decaying present is a commonplace inliterary and cinematographic romanticisations of all kinds of ruins – from ancient am-phitheatres to the sites of industrialisation.Apopular subject of ruins photography (‘ruinporn’) and dark tourism, the real-life Chernobyl Exclusion Zone certainly fits into thisparadigm of aesthetic romanticisation. Although with regard to Chernobyl the thinkingof “what oncewas” inevitably conflates the nuclear catastrophewith the ‘geopolitical dis-aster’ of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Zone as a haunted placeprivileges emotional turbulence over the rational reflections on history: rather than pro-viding ideological or political conclusions, it triggers themelancholicmood of childhoodmemories or, as shown above, an unspecified feeling of ‘something engrossing and un-peaceable’.Unlike photos and historical documentaries, the game turns the melancholic ex-perience of loss into a ludic experience and thus into a form of entertainment andsatisfaction. For instance, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. breathes new life into the dilapidated Sovietbuildings by making them a haven for dangerous monsters and mutants. These ruins,however, may also harbour valuable artifacts and other treasures, thus, in the game, theplayer is constantly drawn to what he fears most.This hypertrophied, affective responseto decay and material degradation is what drives the ‘ruin gaze’ in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but italso frames the perception and the historical contextualisation of the Chernobyl’ nuclearcatastrophe.For instance, Svetlana Bodrunova argues that the non-memories of gamers familiaronly with a “virtual Chernobyl” of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. obfuscate the tragic events of the nu-clear disaster and effectively substitute them with “a warmed-up interest in mutations,250 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaabandoned and dead cities, stalkerism, and romantics of the place where time stopped”(2012: 23). However, this place is not just a virtual replica of Chernobyl infested by mu-tants: apart from the real places of the disaster (e.g., the town of Prypiat’) the game’stopography features some utterly fantastical locations such as the swampy area of Zatonwith its grounded ships and dock cranes or the secret research town of Limansk, thusoffering an estranged, de-familiarised version of the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.Moreover, the ‘ruin gaze’ alsomakes the game’s aesthetics programmatically ambigu-ous in political and ideological terms.Themythology of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. cannot be reducedeither to the mere nostalgia for Soviet imperial grandeur or to the blank rejection of So-viet heritage.On the level of the landscape, this ambiguitymaybe illustratedbyoneof themost spectacular Soviet artifacts that can be encountered in the game–a giganticwall ofantennae, theDuga radar system,which is locatedwithin the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.Figure 11.4: Photograph of the DUGARadar Array near Chernobyl from 2014In the game, however, Duga features twice: in its historical role as an early-warningradar system developed for Cold War defence, but also as a sinister “brain scorcher”, apsychotropic weapon capable of destroying people’s psyche by provoking hallucinations,nightmares, and panic attacks. The two devices are not identical, the “brain scorcher”is smaller in size and does not take the form of the real array, but the resemblance oftheir metallic structures is by nomeans accidental – it points at popular conspiracy the-ories thatDugawas used formind control experiments.Thus,within the game universe,the old Soviet radar system manifests the legacy of the perished high-tech civilisationas well as the history of the ruthless, totalitarian regime. Additionally, the aggressiveside of the Soviet Union comes to light in the form of military bases and secret bunkers,weapons, and classified documents, yet in the post-apocalyptic, and, by extension, post-Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 251Soviet world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Soviet history also symbolises the state of the worldprior to the Chernobyl disaster, i.e., the ‘normal world’ without mutants and physicalanomalies.5. Mutants from the PastIn the game, elusive Soviet history becomes visible and tangible not on the level of objectsand topography, but rather on the level of characters. Conflating Tarkovksii’s Stalker andthe novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatskii brothers with the real events in Ukraine inApril 1986, the game revives the “stalkers” as a profoundly Soviet subculture.The startingpoint of the stalker trope, the Strugatskiis’RoadsidePicnic, is set in a post-visitation world in which aliens have left six zones full of mysterious artifacts that defythe laws of physics.The stalkers are tough survivalists and explorerswho venture out intothe dangerous zones in search of these extra-terrestrial objects. Tarkovskii reinventedhis Stalker as a mystical wanderer on a search for spiritual knowledge rather than forwealth or power, but he also modified the Strugatskiis’ zones by reducing them into asingular, forbidden, and enigmatic Zone, which features in the film as an area cordonedoff behind an army-patrolled border. For Tarkovskii’s Soviet audience, the Russian wordzona (as singulare tantum) gave rise to various associations, ranging from the network ofprisons and labour camps (GULag) to the walled-off West. Famously shot in the ruins ofchemical factories in Tallinn, the film created a powerful image of a contaminated ecol-ogy and decaying architecture, but the Zone as a territory of technological disaster andhuman debris was only one possible interpretation amongmany others.However, whenthe Chernobyl accident occurred, Tarkovskii’s Stalker was the first ready-to-handmodelfor interpreting it. Due to the film’s eerie foreshadowing, the evacuated 30-km exclusionzone around Chernobyl’s nuclear plant came to be called zona, while illegal scavengersand tour guides to the evacuated area began to call themselves stalkery.Obviously, despite all the differences in terms of genre specifics, the concept of theZone unites the science-fiction novel by the Strugatskii duo, Tarkovskii’s art drama, andthe ego-shooter by the GSC Game World. The Zone as a place to which some men areirrevocably drawn, despite the dangers and in search of all-powerful artifacts, resonatesthrough all three instalments.Less evident, however, are the roots of stalkers as a cultural milieu. The continuityof the stalker theme in literature and cinema suggests that the post-Soviet stalkers fol-low the role-models of their predecessors from Soviet science fiction or, speaking morebroadly, from what Mark Lipovetsky calls “the poetics of the ITR discourse” (Lipovetsky2013). As a common denominator for various strata of the scientific intelligentsia, theterm ITR (inzhenerno-tekhnicheskii rabotnik, engineer-technical employee) is both a mis-nomer and a widely used label for a cultural milieu that constituted the leading group inthe liberal movement of the late Soviet period. The ITRs were the main audience of thebard song festivals, their humour dominated the competitions of amateur student co-medians (known as KVN: klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh), but they were also the backboneof the tourist and alpinist movements, and, last but not least, of the energetic Soviet sci-fi community.252 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaThe most prominent Soviet science-fiction authors, the Strugatskii brothers, effec-tively summarised the self-identification of the ITRs in the perennial figure of the pro-gressor, an agent of a highly developed civilisation secretly planted into a repressive andbackward society. The idea of progressorism is to facilitate the development of primi-tive civilisations and to diminish casualties inflicted by historical processes or inevitablecrises. According to Lipovetsky (2016: 32–33), the progressor trope primarily offers theintelligentsia reader an identification not with a “colonized subject”, but with a “colo-nizer”, a bearer of progress to the passive and backward community of “natives”. Thus,the central characteristics of the “ITR discourse” epitomised by the figure of the progres-sor are essentialism, double confrontation of the authorities and the “masses”, and thesubsequent exceptionalist position of the intelligentsia (Lipovetsky 2013: 130). This cat-alogue may also include the inherent urge for escapism, manifested in the zeal for longexpeditions or open-air song festivals in thewoods,which promised temporary freedomfrom thepressures of Soviet ideology aswell as from the routines of everyday life.The lateSoviet intelligentsia’swanderlust combinedwith the urge for “inner freedom”also prede-termined the popularity of a stalker as a subcultural role-model.The strange neighbour-hoodof raggedbounty-hunters (stalkers) andextra-terrestrial know-alls (progressors) asidentification symbols has little to do with the “biographies” of their literary prototypes.However, while in the literary universe of the Strugatskii duo, stalkers and progressorsare detached from each other both ethically and aesthetically, the Zone serves as a linkbetween both these figures as it places the stalkers on the opposite end of the progres-sorism theme: inRoadsidePicnic theZone,a remainder of progressorshipby somehigher-level civilisation, attracts and terrifies the stalkers, while in Tarkovskii’s film the stalkertreats the Zonewith almost religious awe.Although the stalker does not exhibit the elitistsuperiority typical for the progressors, in the film he still shows an exceptionalist stanceof a prophet or a holy fool, as he leads his companions in the path of knowledge and righ-teousness.The post-Soviet stalkers from the video game appear, at first glance, as pop versionsof their highbrow predecessors mutated beyond recognition. Indeed, the heavily armedmen on steroids seem light-years away from the Romantic truth-seekers of late Sovietliterature and cinema, yet behind the protective suits and gas masks, one easily recog-nises the same archetypes of rugged survivalist andmystic seer, which fuse in the figureof the stalker in the works of Tarkovskii and the Strugatskiis. Eavesdropping on conver-sations between the NPCs in Shadow of Chernobyl or in Call of Pripyat reveals the stalkers’self-fashioning as aristocrats of the spirit, who would fill their leisure time with musicA seven-string acoustic guitar, a frequent companion of the conversations arounda campfire or in an improvised bar, anchors stalkers within the Soviet bard subcultureas represented by Vladimir Vysotskii or Aleksandr Galich. In the game, the descriptiontext for a guitar in the dialog box for equipment features a quote from the song famouslyperformed by Vysotskii “talk to me,my seven-string friend.” To be sure, the long echo ofthe “ITR poetics” comes to light only in the form of hints, brief references, or allusions– often with an ironic undertone. No bard song is actually performed here in full lengthand the ‘conversations’mentioned above are, in fact, nothingmore than short exchangesand books: “Oh, I wish I was home now, lying in a hammock with a good book in myhands.”Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 253of phrases,but sapienti sat –for those,who are at least vaguely acquaintedwith late Soviettourism subculture or with sci-fi fandom, there is no need for lengthy explanations.Figure 11.5: Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (2009) Stalkers at the campfireUnlike the stereotypical landscape of industrial andmilitary ruins from theColdWarera, which remains accessible for the Western audience, the nostalgic subcultural allu-sions to ‘stalkerism’, were designed primarily for post-Soviet gamers. Being kept on alow level, these allusions, however, establish no visible links to the heroes of Strugatskiis’novels or to the enigmatic protagonist of Tarkovskii’s film, but rather to a generalised,stereotypical figure of stalker, which served as a role model for the late Soviet intelli-gentsia. As a subcultural role model, the stalker mirrors neither the identities of its fic-tional prototypes nor the collective identity of the Soviet ITRs, instead, it exhibits a cer-tain set of values and qualities, which the educated urban dwellers (i.e., the audience ofTarkovksii and the Strugatskii duo) eagerly ascribed to a fictionalised figure of a hard-ened adventurer, thus constructing an easily identifiable ideal of a ‘real man’. By adapt-ing this ideal to the genre conventions of an ego shooter, the game resemantisises thefictional archetype of a stalker by conflating it with the universally recognisable figure ofamodern action hero, thus placing the aesthetics and the values of ‘stalkerism’ in a globalcontext.Modelling its playgroundas anew frontier to be exploredbyheroicmale adventurers,who value courage, risk, and technical innovations, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. presents these valuesas explicitly gendered. The Zone is undoubtedly a man’s world and a realm of literallytoxic masculinity. However, a glaring absence of female characters in all three iterationsof the game is rather a sign of escapism than of an explicitly sexist attitude. In the game,this escapism is presented with a sense of self-irony, which can be illustrated by the jokeabout a stalker, who always carries a picture of his mother-in-law – a reminder that forhim the contaminated Zone, full of dangerous anomalies and aggressive mutants, is, infact, a less hostile environment than the one he calls home.254 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaFurthermore, in the Ukrainian context, the Zone as a terrain of wild nature and thehub of a heroic homosocial society inevitably evokes references to Cossacks and theirmilitary stronghold, the Zaporozhian Sich. However, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R these referencesremain marginal – Cossacks appear here as a vodka brand, widely renowned among thestalker community as an effective “medicine” against radiation sickness (in the game, thelabel of the “Cossacks Vodka” is identical to that of Cossacks: EuropeanWars by GSC GameWorld).Even though the game ironically downplays the connection between Cossacks andstalkers, it would not be an overinterpretation to emphasise the transgressive, liminalqualities of both groups. Similar to the fictional Cossacks, who, in the literary texts ofthe Romantic era4, inhabit the frontier between the ‘civilisedworld’ and the ‘wild field’ oftheUkrainian steppe, the stalker, as a liminal figure, connects the ‘normal’world of post-Soviet Ukraine with the fantastical realm of the Zone. This liminal status is potentiallyburdened with political meaning since in liminality people often comply with power inunusual, often irrationalways and tend to create communal structures,which ‘interrupt’the routines of the known world. At this point an otherwise redundant plot of the seriesbecomes important.6. The Stories behind the StoryIn Shadow of Chernobyl, the first game of the series, the protagonist named Strelok(Shooter) who has lost his memory at the beginning of the story, has to explore both theZone and his own identity. Typically for all three iterations of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the gamefeatures more than one ending, but only one of them is happy: if the player manages tokill all his enemies, he gets a chance to destroy all things in the Zone that contain theZone’s mystic “consciousness” and the Zone will vanish. The alternate endings implya self-mutilation of the player: he may, for instance, wish the disappearance of theZone, which will cause his own blinding, or he may choose immortality, which will turnhim into a statue (Schmid 2013: 4). According to Ulrich Schmid (ibid.), these endingsshow the two fundamental modes of the relationship between the individual and thesurrounding world: either the protagonist shapes reality according to his wishes or hechanges himself in order to comply with external challenges. More importantly, thisscenario resonates with the self-perception of post-Soviet societies dominated by valuesof survival that imply passive or reactive behaviour to social change (ibid.).Thus, Shadowof Chernobyl echoes the gothic aesthetics of Russian popularmovies and bestselling bookseries from the early 2000s, such asNightWatch (Nochnoi dozor) by Sergei Luk’ianenko, inwhich the groups that adhere to the archaic principles of clan loyalty and the rule of forceappear far superior to the societies organised by moral and legal judgement (Khapaeva2009: 373–374; Zabirko 2020: 273–280). In the hostile environment of the Zone, neitherstate nor society can provide the feeling of security, the protagonist’s survival resultshere (quite in line with the conventions of the ego-shooter genre) exclusively from his4 E.g., Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba (1835) or Henryk Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword (Ogniem imieczem, 1884).Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 255readiness to kill. In fact, the game’s backstory assumes an erosion of the state, which isincapable of guarding the exclusion zone: as soon as anomalies start ‘throwing’ artifactswith fantastic physical properties, a black-market trade springs up, as scientists andcollectors offer massive bounties for the bizarre items. As the precious objects grow invalue, the military cordon becomes permeable – this leads to an assumption that, inthe game, the whole stalker movement ultimately results from the corruption of theUkrainian state institutions.Against the backdrop of the game’s post-apocalyptic aesthetics and the general focusonmutations and anomalies, this somewhat simplistic happy ending appears strikinglynormal, if not trivial. However, in post-Soviet countries, an image of a state, in whichthe agents of the secret service rescue those in need, the government funds scientificresearch, and the idea of the common good prevails over greed and social climbing, isanything but trivial. Furthermore, the overall ‘progressive’ tone of the plot can be inter-preted as the long echo of the ITR discourse and the corresponding social ideals (epito-mised by the progressor trope). If, following Lipovestky,we read the progressors’ historyas an allegory of themodernising efforts of ITRs from the 1960s’ generation onward, thenthe post-Soviet transformation of the fantastic freedom Zone “into an elite settlement,where modernization works for the modernizers only” (2013: 125), certainly manifeststhe defeat of this modernising zeal. The rag-tag teams of stalkers are the losers of thepost-Soviet transformation, but instead of simply feeding on each other, they swarm tothe Zone in search of answers, mysterious artifacts, and, above all, the mythical WishGranter – a nod to the secret Room from Tarkovskii’s Stalker, which is said to grant thewishes of anyone who steps inside. Yet, what they usually find in the Zone are rathermodels of social interaction, and ethical ideals, which the player, however, may share ornot, since the plot and the storyline of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not diminish or regulate theHowever, the second game of the series,Call of Pripyat, shifts the emphasis, as it cen-tres Major Aleksandr Degtiarev, an officer of the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU), whotravels to the Zone to investigate the crash of fivemilitary helicopters.Thus, unlike in thefirst iteration of the series, the protagonist of the game is not a homeless adventurer insearch of his own identity, but a government agent on a mission. Yet, in the Zone, Deg-tiarev is cut off from the resources of his powerful organisation and has to earn his livingas a simple stalker, thusmaking contactswithother inhabitants of theZone suchas crim-inals, environmentalists, traders, scientists, and simple wanderers.Degtiarev’s cover al-lows him to work for various faction members within the Zone and become involved infactions’ politics and conflicts.Hemay support or attack certain factions ormay try to re-main neutral. In the course of events, the protagonist has to rescue the pilots, defeat theevil forces of the militant renegades responsible for the crash of the helicopters, but hemay also save the life of Strelok, the hero of the first game of the series. If the player andhis companions manage to escape the Zone after the final battle, the ending slideshowappears, telling the player what has happened after the escape.Major Degtiarev is giventhe opportunity to be promoted to the rank of Colonel which he declines – however, helater becomes the head of the Security Service in the Zone. Strelok – if he survives thefinale – gives all the materials he had found in the Zone to the Ukrainian government,prompting the creation of a Scientific Institute forResearch of theChernobyl AnomalousArea, with Strelok taking up the position of chief scientific consultant.256 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumascope of possible interpretations ofwhat the Zonemight be andwhat kind of storiesmayhappen in this fantastic realm.In terms of its gameplay, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers a ‘sandbox,’ which, in video games,usually means a large, relatively free-roaming world, sometimes combined with a non-linearnarrative structure. Ina typical sandbox,narrativedoesnot limit aparticularly freeway to play the game and to interact and move around in the world.5 This is true for allthree iterations of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., where the respective plot functions only as a possiblestory (out of many others supposedly occurring in the Zone) and does not restrict theplayer’s freedom of movement and interaction.Over the years, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has developed a strong ‘modding’ scene. The gamemodifications, commonly referred to as “mods”, allow ambitious players to create theirown modifications, which alter various aspects of the original game. These changesmay range fromminor details to complete gameplay overhauls.While most of the modstackle certain aspects of the game mechanics (e.g., introducing a new weapon upgradesystem or enhanced graphics), others aim at providing new content with a more orless clear political subtext. For example, the yet unfinished mod S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – TheCursed Zone addresses the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, as it features the Zone as abattleground, where Ukrainian guerrillas fight against the Russian occupation.6Ego-shooters are not famous for their ability to deliver extensive political or philo-sophical messages; instead, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers a wide range of open conflicts, stories,and characters,which can be further developed both in video games and in othermedia.For instance, thefierce rivalry between two clans of stalkers, the anarchistic Freedomandthe paramilitaryDuty, runs like a thread throughout all three games of the serieswithoutbeing solved or extensively commented upon, thus leaving a lot of space for interpreta-tion of the reasons and possible outcomes of this conflict. The same applies to Scar, theprotagonist of Clear Sky, the third game of the series, who earns his living by escortinggroups of ecologists to theZone.Scar never vocally speaks in the game; therefore,his per-sonality andbiography are open for interpretation.Thus, the fundamental restrictions ofego-shooter as a genre allow for the basic models and the aesthetic of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. tobe transplanted into literature, cinema, and television.7. Intermediality of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.Soon after the release of Shadow of Chernobyl, the post-apocalyptic mode of the gamespread to the bookmarket.TheMoscowpublishing house EKSMO launched a serieswiththeprogrammatic titleRussianApocalypse andwith the covers clearlymodelledon the aes-thetics ofS.T.A.L.K.E.R. In 2009, theS.T.A.L.K.E.R.book serieswas launchedby the samepublisher. Today, the Russian-language novelisations of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are hard to esti-mate, as they include several dozens of novels and even a larger number of short stories,5 A prototypical example is the widely known Minecraft, where the player controls a character ina world composed of blocks, where the blocks can be combined into objects and buildings (e.g.,swords, doors, rails, beds) depending on their components.6 The mod is available online, see [Anon.] (2019/2022).Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 257blogs,andother formsof fanfiction.7Theplots of thebooks areusually set in adevastatedworld after an atomicwar or, similar to the game’s plot, after a secondnuclear accident inChernobyl. In both cases, the hero has to fight for his own survival in the contaminatedand hostile environment.Figure 11.6: Typical book titles of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series (2008–2019)Most of these books are rather plain and simplistic stories – their protagonists arestereotypical action heroes, while their plot and story are usually of minor importanceas they only provide a framework for a seemingly endless chain of shooting and fightingscenes. Although the print-runs of these books remain comparatively small, the sheerscope of such a kind of literary production shows that the bleak and haunted world ofS.T.A.L.K.E.R. generates particular excitement among the post-Soviet reading public,even if the authors of these texts seem to abandon the very idea of literature as a moresophisticated kind of entertainment compared to video games.Standingalone against thebackgroundof stalker-fiction,DmitriiGlukhovksii’s best-selling novel Metro 2033 (2002) borrows extensively from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but transplantsthe Zone into the heart of modern Moscow. In 2007, Glukhovskii was awarded the pres-tigious Encouragement Award of the European Science Fiction Society at the Eurocon(the biggest European science fiction convention) for Metro 2033. Finally, a video gameadaptionofMetro2033was released in 2010byUkrainiandevelopers 4AGames–a studio,which was founded by some formermembers of GSCGameWorld,who formed the coreteam of Shadow of Chernobyl (Wordsworth 2014). Providing a vivid example of the wan-derings of a fictional topic through different media in contemporary pop culture,Metro2033,however, presents its particular version of survivalist horror and its ownmetaphys-7 Russian-language Wikipedia lists more than 50 titles: “Spisok literaturnykh proizvedenii pomiru S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” Wikipedia, last modified 16 September 2022, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_литературных_произведений_по_миру_S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The online book store Labirintlists 178 books set in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe: “Serii/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.”. The fandom-page S.T.A.L.K.E.R.– Books counts more than 1800 book titles, including more than 1300 fan fiction texts (written byamateur writers and published online) as well as 524 novels published by the Moscow-based pub-lishing houses AST and EKSMO, see [Anon.] (2010-), [Anon.] (2016-).258 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaical vision of toxic modernity, which differs both from the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. seriesas well as from their low-quality novelisations.The latter showa clear tendency towards imperial imaginary (e.g., in theworks of Fё-dor Berezin or Aleksandr Zorich), providing a particular form of Soviet nostalgia, whichsometimes goes along with the possibility of traveling in time. On the level of narrativestructure, this implies merging two time layers: the present-day post-Soviet world andthe Soviet Union in 1986, on the eve of the Chernobyl accident. The notion of time trav-els places the literary stalkers from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. book series, published by EKSMOand AST (twomajor Russian publishing houses), firmly in the context of the books aboutpopadantsy, the revanchist time travellers, who are usually preoccupied with saving vari-ous forms of Russian statehood (e.g., the Tsarist empire or the Soviet Union) from theirhistorical collapses (Weller 2019: 167–178; Zabirko 2020: 287–294). However, the mostprominent variation of stalkers travelling in time can be found not in a work of litera-ture, but in the TV series Chernobyl: Zone of Exclusion, which was launched in 2014 by theRussian federal TV channel TNT.The series centres on a group of youngmen, who travelto the town of Prypiat’ where they accidentally find a time machine capable of bringingthem back to 1986, on the day before the Chernobyl disaster. In the course of events, theprotagonist of the series manages to change the future – in the end, he finds himself inthe alternate year 2013, where the USSR did not collapse and the nuclear accident tookplace not in Chernobyl, but at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in the United States,ultimately leading to the dissolution of the USA and a new American civil war.Obviously, this particular kind of revanchist alternate history is only loosely con-nected toS.T.A.L.K.E.R.Although the gameprovides its ownalternate historical scenarioof a second nuclear accident in Chernobyl, neither the storyline nor the gameplay offersany deliberate attempts at changing the past, in order to either prevent the collapse ofthe Soviet Union or to avoid the original Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Instead of alteringhistory, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series provides its ownmodel of coming to termswith the dis-aster that has already happened.8. The Zone Lives!Theaffective landscapeof theZone, inwhich catastrophe is “reincorporated into theordi-nary” (Palmer 2014: 16), comes close to the alternate history scenario of the Fallout seriesset in a fictionalised United States after atomic war. But while Fallout satirises the 1950s’and 1960s’ fantasies of the American “post-nuclear-war-survival” by making them avail-able for comic play, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. rejects a satirical attitude and treats the nuclear apoc-alypse with what Jim Rossignol (2011) calls “Eastern pessimism” – a strange mixture offear, brutality, and despair.Countering Rossignol’s assumption of the game’s specificallyEast European attitude, Bartłomiej Musajew (2016) argues that despite its local flavour,S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is “embedded in globalized popular culture, usually associated with theUSA”. Indeed, the conventional post-apocalyptic setting integrates S.T.A.L.K.E.R., andby extension both Soviet and Ukrainian history, into the global aesthetic framework ofsurvival horror, but the game’s roots in the progressorism of Soviet science fiction al-lows it to treat the apocalypse in a way that differs from Western “doomwriting litera-Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 259ture” (from Isaac Asimov to Roberto Vacca) and its contemporary pop versions, whichare usually pervaded by a sense of anxiety over planetary problems such as the nuclearapocalypse, overpopulation, and ecological disasters.Somewidely acclaimedWesternTVproductions fromrecent yearsdeliberately targetthe Atomic Age optimism of a nuclear-powered future. Thus, in the American science-fiction horror drama Stranger Things, a laboratory, connected to the U.S. Department ofEnergy,appears as anominous site of dangerous experiments andparanormal activities.Similarly, in the German series Dark, the cave system beneath the nuclear power planthides a “wormhole”, which enables time travel. In both series, the anomalies created byatomic energy bring the world to the verge of the apocalypse. The narrative, which un-folds as a recovery story, highlights the endeavours of the protagonists, who desperatelytry to bring the world to the status quo ante.On the contrary, the “Eastern pessimism” (Rossignol 2011), if not downright fatalism,of theS.T.A.L.K.E.R. series offers nowayback to “normality”. Instead, it gives theplayer achance to settle in anew,uncanny,and terrifyingworld.Thisworld is undoubtedly a toxicwasteland, its countryside is dominated by horrifying mutants, while in the abandonedbuildings bandits lay in wait for travellers, but after hours of playing, the Zone can beperceived, above all, as a living space, where the world is continuing in its own way.Theholistic image of the ‘domesticated’ apocalypse survived all three iterations of the gameand is likely to remain its key element in the future.8In 2021, after years of dormancy followed by scandals, lawsuits, and break-ups, GSCGameWorld finally announced the revival of the legendary series, with the release of thenew S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2:Heart ofChernobyl scheduled for April 2022.A short gameplay trailerpublished on YouTube in June 2021, presents a group of rugged stalkers, who are sittingby a campfire playing guitar. Rendered from the viewpoint of the player’s character, thescene is interrupted, as soon as the player approaches. A laconic “Howwas it?”, asked byone of the men, sets off a sequence of combat scenes overlaid with fast, dynamic music.The Zone seemed ready to produce new stories of stalkers, monsters, and physicalanomalies.It was, however, not to be.8 The question about the origins of the supposed fatalism of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is, of course, debatable.This fatalism might be traced back to the game’s national origin or to its overall retrospectivestance, but it can also be describedmore broadly as a genre convention of the survival horror, whichlacks national or cultural specificity.However, it cannot be denied thatmost post-apocalyptic videogames present the nuclear apocalypse as an event that has changed the entire world. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.,instead, implies the normalworld outside theZone and therefore presents a radioactivewastelandas an integral part of this world.In the afternoon of 24 February, 2022, the first day of the 2022 Russian invasion ofUkraine, the Russian armed forces launched an attack to capture the Chernobyl Exclu-sion Zone. By the end of the day, they had seized control of the defunct nuclear powerplant and the surrounding area. The pictures of armoured vehicles and camouflagedsoldiers in front of the plant went around the world triggering speculations about fur-ther damage to the radioactive site due to fierce fighting, the potential of leaking nu-260 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaFilmographyIn the Zone of Special Attention (V zone osobogo vnimaniia), dir. Andrei Maliukov, USSR 1977.Guest from the Future (Gost’ia iz budushchego), dir. Pavel Arseno, USSR 1984.Hit Back (Otvetnyi khod), dir. Mikhail Tumanishvili, USSR 1981.Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovskii, USSR 1979.Stargate, dir. of Roland Emmerich, USA/France 1994.List of GamesAge of Empires, produced by Xbox Game Studios, PC/MAC, 1997.American Conquest, produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2002.Assassin’s Creed, produced by Ubisoft, PC/MAC, 2007.Cossacks: EuropeanWars, produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2001.Fallout series, produced by Cain, Tom, Interplay Entertainment, PC/Mac, 1997–2004.Half-Life 2, produced by Valve, PC/MAC, 2004.Resident Evil, produced by Capcom, PC/MAC, 1996.S. T. A. L. K. E. R. Shadow of Chernobyl’ (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Ten’ Chernobylia), produced by GSCGameWorld, PC/MAC, 2007.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Chyste Nebo), produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2008.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Poklyk Pryp’iati) produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2009.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Cursed Zone (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Prokliata Zona) produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2013.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Oblivion Lost, produced by GSC GameWorld, PC/MAC, 2015.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Sertse Chernobylia), produced by GSCGameWorld, PC/MAC, 2024.9 See the official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. account on Twitter: S.T.A.L.K.E.R Official (@stalker_the game): https://twitter.com/stalker_thegame?lang=de [30 September 2023].clear waste or even a possible terrorist attack on the plant: what seemed like the plot ofa bizarre video game, suddenly appeared on newsfeeds and came dangerously close toreality.In the meantime, the official Twitter account of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl9stopped posting updates of the game’s development process and launched a fundraisingcampaign to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine.With Russianmissiles raining down onUkrainian cities, turning them into areas fullof ruins, the question,which remains to be answered, is notwhetherUkrainewill endureand domesticate yet another apocalypse on its territory, but rather, how soon the gamingindustrywill catchupwith thenewreality andwhatnewversions of survival horror itwillproduce.Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 261List of IllustrationsFigure 11.1: Theoriginal cover of the computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl,developer GSC GameWorld, Ukraine 2008.Figure 11.2: The town of Prypiat’. Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, devel-oper GSC GameWorld, Ukraine 2009.Figure 11.3: The town of Prypiat’. Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, devel-oper GSC GameWorld, Ukraine 2009.Figure 11.4: Photograph of the DUGA Radar Array near Chernobyl from 7 August 2014,copyright: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DUGA_Radar_Array_near_Chernobyl,_Ukraine_2014.jpg [01 February2023].Figure 11.5: Stalkers at the campfire. Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, de-veloper GSC GameWorld, Ukraine 2009.Figure 11.6: Typical book titles of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, various authors, publisherAST/Eksmo: Moscow 2008–2019.References[Anon.] (2010-): “Izdatel’stvo AST/Seriia S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” In: labirint.ru (https://www.labirint.ru/series/14450/) [19 October 2021].[Anon.] (2016-): “Literaturnaia ėntsiklopedia S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” In: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-knigi.fandom (https://stalker-knigi.fandom.com/ru/wiki/Заглавная_страница)[19 October 2021].[Anon.] (2019/2022): “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.TheCursed Zone: Dimkas Story.” In:moddb.com: https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-the-cursed-zone-dimkas-story-day-zero [30September].Berberich, Christine/Campbell, Neil/Hudson, Robert (2013): “Affective Landscapes: AnIntroduction.” In: Cultural Politics 9/3, pp. 313–322.Bodrunova, Svetlana (2012): “Chernobyl in the Eyes: Mythology as a Basis of IndividualMemories andSocial Imaginaries of aChernobyl Child.” In:TheAnthropology of EastEurope Review 30/1, pp. 13–24.Bye, John (2001): “The Art of Cossacks.” In: Eurogamer, 14 December (https://web.archive.org/web/20030228091306/http:/www.eurogamer.net/content/i_cossacks) [30September 2023].Clemens, Valdine (1999): The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from the “Castle ofOtranto” to “Alien,” New York: State University of New York Press.Deckard, Sharae (2019): “Ecogothic.” In: Maisha Wester/Xavier A. 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Locating Action in theComputer Game.” In: Stephan Günzel/Michael Liebe/Dieter Mersch (eds.): Confer-ence Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games, Potsdam: University Press,pp. 228–241.Musajew, Bartłomiej (2016): “Stop Calling Eastern European Videogames Pessimistic.”In: Kill Screen, 24 June 2016 (https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/stop-calling-eastern-european-videogames-pessimistic) [30 September 2023].Palmer, Christopher (2014): “Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in SomeRecent Post-Apocalypse Fictions.” In: Gerry Canavan/Kim Stanley Robinson (eds.):Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction,Middletown:Wesleyan University Press,pp. 158–178.Rossignol, Jim (2011): “On the Importance of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” In: Rock Paper Shotgun, 10December 2011 (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/on-the-importance-of-s-t-a-l-k-e-r) [30 September 2023].Rossignol, Jim (2010): “Ghosts of The Future: Borrowing Architecture from the Zoneof Alienation.” In: BLDGBLOG, 17 May 2010 (https://www.bldgblog.com/2010/05/ghosts-of-the-future-borrowing-architecture-from-the-zone-of-alienation/) [30September 2023].Rossignol, Jim (2007): “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I.N.T.E.R.V.I.E.W.” In: Rock Paper Shotgun 10 De-cember 2007 (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/stalker-interview) [30 Septem-ber 2023].Sakey, Matthew (2010): “Alone for All Seasons: Environmental Estrangement inS.T.A.L.K.E.R.” In: Drew Davidson (ed.): Well Played 2.0. Video Games, Value andMeaning, Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, pp. 92–114.Schmid, Ulrich (2013): “Post-Apocalypse, Intermediality and Social Distrust in RussianPop Culture.” In: Russian Analytical Digest 126, pp. 2–5.Oleksandr Zabirko: The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 263Weller, Nina (2019): “Gestern wird Krieg sein. Zeitreisen als neoimperiale Wunsch-maschinen der russischen Erinnerungskultur.” In: Riccardo Nicolosi/Brigitte Ober-mayr/Nina Weller (eds.): Interventionen in die Zeit. Kontrafaktische historischeNarrative und ihre erinnerungskulturelle Dimension, Paderborn: Schöningh, pp.167–198.Wordsworth, Rich (2014): “Games from the Real-World Post-Apocalypse. It Came fromUkraine – How One Team and Two Studios Changed Gaming’s Wasteland Forever.”In: IGN, 28 January 2014 (https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/28/games-from-the-real-world-post-apocalypse) [30 September 2023].Zabirko,Oleksandr (2020): “TheMagic Spell of Revanchism.Geopolitical Visions in Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction.” In: Alexander Etkind/Mikhail Minakov (eds.): Ideologyafter Union. Political Doctrines, Discourses, and Debates in Post-Soviet Societies,Stuttgart: ibidem, pp. 251–304.Chapter 12:Come and See, Once AgainA Russian Television Series on the Seventh Symphonyin Defeated LeningradMatthias Schwartz1. IntroductionCome and See (Idi i smotri) by Ėlem Klimov was a sensation in 1985 when the film was fi-nally released after years of being blocked by Soviet censors. It won the main prize atthe Moscow International Film Festival and became one of the most successful films ofthe year in 1986 in the early days of glasnost and perestroika.1 No one had ever portrayedthe horrors of the German war of extermination from 1941 to 1945 so radically, the situa-tion of the Soviet partisans so hopelessly and bitterly, the German scorched earth policyso relentlessly and clearly. Without ideological filter, without scrupulous symbolism, itshowed how deadly and merciless the German occupation of the Belarusian territoriesof the Soviet Unionwas: ‘Come and see’, the terse request referring to the four horsemenof John’s Apocalypse,was a sensation even inWest Germany,where themyth of the ‘cleanWehrmacht’ was still officially upheld, a country where Chancellor Helmut Kohl had laidwreaths at SS soldiers’ graves together with US President Ronald Reagan as late as May1985 (Stiglegger 2020: 169–178; cf. Bulgakowa/Hochmuth 1992: 127–132). But the film re-mains in the memory above all through the main actor, 14-year-old Aleksei Kravchenkoin the role of the boy Flëra, through whose eyes, or more precisely: in whose face we asviewers perceive all the horrors depicted, mirrored, seen. Children’s faces have alwaysbeen the most credible witnesses to the horrors of the adult world for cinema directors– but rarely has the expression of a youthful face been so cruelly destroyed as in Klimov’swork.Four decades later, Aleksei Kravchenko, now 52, is once again starring in a filmaboutWorldWar II, in Aleksandr Kott’s eight-part television seriesTheSeventh Symphony1 I thank NinaWeller and in particular Franziska Thun-Hohenstein for their extremely helpful com-ments on an earlier version of this essay. All translations fromRussian quotes aremine if not notedotherwise.266 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Trauma(Sed’maia simfoniia, 2021), which, on the occasion of its 80th anniversary, tells the storyof the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C major in Leningradwhile besieged by the Germans in August 1942.The broadcast of the television series hadbeen associated with high expectations not only because of its subject matter. After all,Aleksandr Kott, who on 24 February 2022 immediately positioned himself against thewar (Popogrebskii et al. 2022),2 is a successful cinema and television director who hadpreviously made demanding literary adaptations such as Mikhail Lermontov’s A Heroof Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 2006,), eight-part television series, exciting biopicssuch as Trotsky (Trotskii, 2007), eight-part television series, but also patriotic World WarII films such asThe Brest Fortress (Brestskaia krepost’, also known as Fortress of War, 2010).The cast also included many star actors (Mel’nikova 2021; Morozova 2021; [Anon.] 2021).Accordingly,when the serieswas first broadcast in the secondweek ofNovember 2021 onRussian state television’s second channel Rossiia, it achieved the highest viewing figures(Al’perina 2021).The critical response was largely positive, both at home and in Russian-speaking communities abroad ([Anon.] 2022c), with the only criticism being the some-times considerable deviations from historically verified facts, but also the underlying“anti-Soviet” attitude (Kudriashov 2021; Karev 2021; Litov 2021; Timuka 2021). Othercritics praised the fact that this was not the typical “militarism” of other series aboutWorldWar II (Maliukova 2021; Dubshan 2021). And so, in January 2022, on the eve of thefull-scale Russian war against Ukraine, the series was awarded the most important juryprize, Zolotoi orël, as the best television series of the year ([Anon.] 2022a).2. Aleksei Kravchenko Now and Then: The Poetics of Popular CultureAleksandrKott knows exactlywhohe has in front of the camerawith Aleksei Kravchenko,from the very first scene. Come and See ends with Flëra, who, enraged, shoots repeatedlyfrom his rifle at a picture of ‘Hitler the Liberator’ (Hitler Asvabadzitsel’) lying in the mud,while black and white documentary film images run backwards before the audience’seyes to atonal musical sounds, tracing the entire history of the horrors of the NationalSocialists from the end, beginningwith pictures of the extermination camps and the de-struction of the war, through repeatedly shown images of Hitler caressing children. Itis only when the reverse documentary history pauses on a photograph with Hitler as ababy on his mother’s arm that Flëra stops shooting, and his child’s face freezes in close-upwith his eyes wide open. In themoment of freezing, the choral voices of the LacrimosafromMozart’sRequiem inD-minor are heard, under whose dramatic singing Flëra rejoinsthe partisans in the Belarusian forests. The inconceivable horror brought upon human-ity by the politician from Austria cannot be undone by the music of the great composerfrom the same country, but it can give expression, at least for the moment, to the child’sspeechless anguish of the soul.The first scene of the first episode inThe Seventh Symphony begins on 20 September1941 at a jetty in Leningrad on the river Neva, where Kravchenko, playing the role of the2 Aleksandr Kott signed the appeal “No towar!” initiated by the president of the CinemaAssociationof Russia, Aleksei Popogrebskii, directly on 24 February 2022. Cf. Popogrebskii et al. 2022.Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 267NKVD lieutenant Anatolii Serëgin, is taking his wife and two children to be evacuatedby steamboat. Mozart sounds again, now from the public radio speakers, but this timeit is the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, to the sounds of which Kravchenko runs arounddancing a little with his son on his shoulders. But the cheerful major sounds instead ofthe minor of the Requiem are deceptive. As he waves on the shore, looking after the de-parting ship, there is a bombing raid by the German Luftwaffe and he has to watch hiswife and children being sunk in theNeva: again,with the same eyes wide open in horror,an expression that we know so well from Come and See. As if the horror never stops, butrather catches up with him, again and again. Even four decades later. Even almost eightdecades after the end ofWorldWar II.And yet there are huge differences between the 1985 cinema film and the 2021 televi-sion series, not only because almost twice as much time has passed since the end of thewar on the eve of a newwar and because Aleksandr Kotts’ television series wasmade in acompletely different socio-political environment. In themid-1980s, in the face of the de-bacle of the Soviet mission in Afghanistan, which was discussed more and more openlyin the Soviet press and in which a generation of conscripts had gained traumatic experi-ences of war, the anti-war film Come and See undoubtedly struck a chord with the times,in which heroic war narratives could hardly be conveyed.During Vladimir Putin’s fourthterm as President of Russia, on the other hand, the state-funded production of films,television series, novels, exhibitions and educational initiatives presenting the Great Pa-triotic War in all its heroic and patriotic facets reached new heights. The defamation ofthe Red Army and the defence of the fatherland was made a punishable offence and themass cultural preoccupationwith thewarbecamea central propagandistic lieudemémoirestaged and celebrated in all media and on all possible occasions as an obligation of sub-sequent generations for the future.But the decisive difference between the advanced cinema film of 1985 and the suc-cessful television series of 2021 lies in the different genre, since the popular format ofmass-culture television productions follows a completely different logic than the auteurcinema of the time, which worked under the conditions of state censorship and regula-tion.While here the director has to assert his work of art above all against the ideologicaland aesthetic control authorities, popular culture in today’s Russia, although dependenton state support as well, is mostly tied to audience success and therefore reacts muchmore strongly to current moods in the population or among certain target groups. Pop-ular culture signals and reinforces what is considered fashionable and relevant, and inits products makes offers to give a social unease, widespread longings and fears, socialquestions and political concerns an affective and imaginary space to be articulated andadapted to certain realities (cf. Hermann 2008; Borenstein 2011; Boele et al. 2020). Allkinds of music cultures with their scene locations, dress codes and habits of behaviour,but also mass commodity products such as popular literature or TV series function inthis way.In capitalism, such popular mass cultures are generally analysed as consumer offersthat help people come to terms with the relations of exploitation, insecurities and fearsof decline in neoliberal market economies. Since popular culture gains its attractive-ness through the participation and involvement of consumers, it can certainly becomethe catalyst and motor of protest movements and revolutions, but it can also contribute268 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumato defusing and neutralising radical resistance in the field of culture, just as conversely,it may also strengthen populist and reactionary movements (cf. Storey 1996; Hall 2009:508–518). In authoritarian or dictatorial societies like the Russian Federation, this rela-tionship between adaptation and protest is much more ambivalent. On the one hand,popular formats are an instrument of state actors to attune the population to existingsocial conditions and ideological narratives, but since popular culture–unlikemere pro-paganda – always remains dependent on the interest and participation of consumers, itconstantly produces contradictory and conflicting signals and semantics (György 1999:53–72; Bassin/Poso 2017; Stephen 2022). A concert or blockbuster movie that no one at-tends is just as worthless as audience flops or news programmes solely watched by for-eign correspondents.This mode of operation of popular television series will be analysed in the follow-ing using the example of Aleksandr Kott’sTheSeventh Symphony against the general back-ground of the enormous production of film and television series about World War IIin the contemporary Russian Federation. The aim is not so much to work out a generalcharacteristics of thismass cultural genre, but rather to show the specific pragmatic andpoetic function of this series between narratives prescribed by the state, affectively andimaginatively appealing offers of identification and the compensation of collective fearsand target group interests.3. World War II in Contemporary Russian Television SeriesIn the Russian Federation of the first two decades of the 21st century, the Stalinist eraandWorldWar II were probably themost controversial period of history towhich the in-creasingly professional commercial and state film and television industry devoted itself(cf. Beumers 2006; Norris 2012; Brouwer 2016).The sides of the war that had been tabooor little discussed in Soviet times could now be dealt with in an audiovisually sophis-ticated form using digital techniques and exciting scripts. Punishment battalions withcriminals and political prisoners from the Gulag who were burnt out at the front (theseries Penal Battalion, Shtrafbat, 2004, directed by Nikolai Dostal’), (former) NKVD offi-cers and spies spreading fear and terror (like in the series,Execution Impossible to Pardon,party politicians, collaboration with the occupiers or anti-Semitism even in their ownranks became the subject of melodramatic war adventures just as much as rousing ac-tion thrillers (cf. Norris 2021: 48–75).3 Often, novels that were banned, well-known orpopular in Soviet times served as scripts, such as Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate (Zhizn’ isud’ba, series 2011–2012, directed by Sergei Urusliak) or Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of theArbat (Deti Arbata, series 2004, directed by Andrei Ėshpai), but just as often there wereseries whose scenarios were developed specifically for the production. At the same time,3 The expression “Kaznit’ nel’zia pomilovat’” is a catchphrase in Russian, which carries oppositemeanings depending on the emphasis or comma placement: “Execution impossible, to pardon”or also “Execution, impossible to pardon”. Its written or oral origin is unclear; it is attributed tovarious tsars such as Peter the Great.Kaznit’ nel’zia pomilovat’, 2017, directed by Kim Druzhinin), incompetent and schemingMatthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 269in addition to curiosity about that which was forbidden and hidden behind the officialscenes, these series often confirmed, but sometimes also questioned and subverted cer-tain clichés and prejudices of their viewers. For example, Sergei Ursuliak’s series Liquida-tion (Likvidatsia, 2007) showed the criminal milieu in Odessa in the immediate post-warperiod, reproducing many familiar topoi about Jewish shrewdness, Ukrainian collabo-rators and the sunny life in the port city, but also openly problematising anti-Semiticprejudices (cf. Noordenbos 2021: 150–169). Series thus also function on an affective andintellectual level as imaginary offers to the viewer to become immersed in a fictional re-ality full of adventure, exoticism and unexpected challenges.In cultural-political terms, these series productions primarily followed the functionof familiarising the viewers with the harsh everyday reality of war, whereby the focus ofthe plot was often not on the battles and combat life at the front, but on what was hap-pening behind the front. Either the action took place in the enemy’s territory, where onehad to cope as a saboteur or agent, or behind one’s own lines, where one was confrontedwith treason, sabotage and espionage. This function of normalising and portraying theeveryday realities of war can be observed in exemplary fashion in the Russian-Ukrainianco-production Under Military Law (Po zakonam voennogo vremeni, 2016–2023), six seasonsso far. The series, directed by Maksim Mekheda, Evgenii Serov and Sergei Vinogradov,deals with all the fears of machinations and intrigues within the security services, ad-dresses corruption and arbitrary violence in the army as well as the illusion of a sup-posed infallibility of the party and its commissioners. Inmany episodes, however, simplenaivety, egoism, jealousy and plain opportunism within their own ranks often providedrama and suspense. Civilian life can only be adapted to the titular ‘military law’ withgreat difficulty. At the same time, the fourmain heroes, the conscientious investigator ofthemilitary prosecutor’s office IvanRokotov (playedbyEvgenii Volovenko) andhis chauf-feur Grigorii Fedorenko (Aleksandr Pankratov-Chërnyi), always up for a joke, both fromKyiv, as well as the attractive investigator of the SupremeMilitary Prosecutor’s Office ofthe Red Army, Svetlana Elagina (played by Ekaterina Klimova), and her superior Niko-lai Mirskii (Maksim Drozd), both from Moscow, survive all the dangers and difficultiesthey are confronted with on their countless missions from Kyiv in the summer of 1941to Königsberg in the autumn of 1945. The fact that this series primarily serves to con-vince viewers at home of the ‘just cause’ of the war is shown by the fact that the Germanenemy and his war crimes appear at most in passing and as background events, whilethe criminal casesmostly revolve around uncovering grievances andmisconduct in one’sown ranks. The aim is not to play down the scepticism towards the secret services andthe military by concealing and ‘varnishing reality’, as was still common in Soviet times.Rather, the credibility of thefictional reality is suggested by the fact that personal failuresand criminal violence are depicted, but then always in the end the state authorities finda resolution as a necessary and essential instrument of power. The series (the last twoseasons of which were only produced by the Russian side) also deals extensively with themistrust and disagreements between Kyiv and Moscow, which are, however, always re-solved by the protagonists in a productive Russian-Ukrainian cooperation, symbolicallyembodied in the love affair betweenElagina andRokotov.The series,whichwas launchedafter the Euromaidan in 2013/2014, the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federa-tion and the proclamation of the separatist ‘People’s Republics’ in Luhansk andDonetsk,270 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumais in this respect also a popular cultural response to how the military-political conflictwith Ukraine should be overcome from the Russian point of view.4cinema in its aesthetics and even in its “military-patriotic” textbook, as a critic noted:It is as if there is a textbook, no more elaborate than the primer on which most lo-cal war serials are diligently filmed. The plotting is admirably clear. If our guys are inthe picture, they are mostly good, although villains and traitors and not always fairNKVDsare allowed. If theGermans are in the frame, they aremostly bad, but clever andformidable opponents are tolerated, and in a sense, sometimes even almost positivecharacters. And if love occurs, it is usually with a distinct flavour of doom. (Legostaev2020)This pattern “with a distinct flavour of doom” is also followed by the series The SeventhSymphony, but it undertakes significant shifts, attempting to unite war and art, enter-tainment and high culture in its subject, which almost inevitably means a lot of kitsch.4. History and Fiction: The Leningrad Symphony Myth and NKVD TerrorThe story of the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 is one of thebest-known episodes from the 900-day German siege of Leningrad during World WarII and has been the subject of many artistic representations. After the invasion of theSoviet Union on 22 June 1941, the German Wehrmacht had advanced rapidly across theBaltic, while from the north Finland recaptured the territories lost in the Winter War of1939/1940. After the Wehrmacht had captured Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga, Leningraddecided not to conquer the city with Lenin’s symbolic name but to systematically starveits population, more than a million inhabitants died during the blockade, which lastedalmost 900 days,mainly from hunger, but also from air raids and artillery fire, as well asfrom cold and deprivation, since the people could only be supplied through makeshiftroutes via Lake Ladoga and by air.5 Shostakovich was in besieged Leningrad in Septem-ber 1941 when he was already writing a new symphony, but he did not complete it untilhe had been evacuated to Kuibyshev (Samara) at the end of the year. After its premiereby the evacuated orchestra of the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre in Kuibyshev in March 1942,premieres took place in Moscow, London and New York, among other places, beforeSymphony No. 7 could also be performed in Leningrad on August 9, 1942 by the radio4 It is certainly no coincidence that some of the Ukrainian actors who appeared in the series alsoplayed prominent roles for Volodymyr Zelensky’s production company “Kvartal 95” and its televi-sion series Servant of the People (Sluga naroda, 2015–2019), three seasons, such as Stanislav Boklanor Viktor Saraikin.5 There is an ongoing debate about whether and if so to what extent the Soviet side also willinglycontributed to the famine, but the film does not take any explicit position on this. For more recentresearch on the siege of Leningrad, cf. Kirschenbaum2006; Ganzenmüller 2007; Reid 2011; Bidlack/Lomagin 2012.Yet, at the same, this series, like many others, follows the global model of Hollywoodwas surrounded from 9 September 1941 to 27 January 1944. After the German leadershipMatthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 271orchestra that had remained in the city and the conductor Karl Eliasberg in the hallof the Philharmonic. The performance was broadcast live nationwide on the radio sothat the besieged city and the entire Soviet Union could follow it (cf. Reid 2011: 356–369;Redepenning 2011: 169–193).How should I tell this tale? [...] The Great Hall Philharmonic, that dull yellow, not par-ticularly ornate building, with it white-on-yellow rococo decorations sparse and faded,this was now the brain of our national telephone; and Shostakovich had braided thesub-waves of his immense signal so as to most beautifully and loudly carry the com-mands of the automatic central office in a rhythm as reassuringly steady as Red Armymenwith up-pointed files filing past our trapezoidal shelter for the Bronze Horseman.[...] Many wept. Leningrad was transformed into gold. (Vollmann 2005: 218–219)Aleksandr Kott avoids such pathos. Instead, he follows the narrative patterns of popu-lar television series that demand dramatic conflicts, emotional shock, unexpected twistsandmultiple opportunities for identification that captivate the viewer by combining thestrange and the familiar, the unfamiliar and the mundane, the exciting and the com-forting into an exciting story. For this, Kott changes the historical reality considerablyin some points. It is the heartbreaking story of about a dozen largely fictional orches-tra members and helpers, whom we get to know better while they practise the perfor-mance of the symphony under the terrible and deprived conditions of the Leningradblockade.At the centre of the plot, he puts the enmity between theNKVD lieutenant Ana-tolii Serëgin, played by Kravchenko, and the conductor of the radio orchestra Karl Elias-berg, played by Aleksei Gus’kov.Whereas there is no historical precedent for Serëgin, theconductor, who then was actually 35 years old, now becomes an older man, whose wifeis even arrested. While Serëgin is a typical ‘achiever’ (vydvizhenets) of the 1930s, comingfrom humble proletarian beginnings, believing in iron self-discipline,masculine tough-ness and uncompromising rigour, Eliasberg in the film is from the Baltic German andJewish bourgeois upper classes, living entirely for art and music. He is the conductor ofthe Leningrad Radio Orchestra and refuses to be evacuated in order to stay with his or-Thus, the symphony entered the canon of anti-fascist art worldwide already dur-ing World War II, dramatically giving musical expression to the inconceivable suffer-ing and resistance of the Leningrad population. Nothing was better suited as a symbolof the triumph of art and civilisation over the barbarism of German National Socialismthan classical music. The performance is also portrayed as such a collective human ef-fort in the face of the horror of the siege in the black-and-white film Leningrad SymphonyLeningradskaia simfoniia, 1957,Mosfilm) by thedramatist anddirectorZakharAgranenko,which was released in Soviet cinemas on the 15th anniversary of the performance. How-ever, this filmwas soon forgotten, still heavily influenced by the narrative schemes of thelate Stalin era, where Eliasberg is given a Russian name and oddball elderly gentlemen,motherly women and strong youngmen overcome themost difficult dangers.The heroicpathos inherent in this performance under the conditions of the blockade resonates eveninWilliamT.Vollmann’s great epic novel EuropeCentral (2005) about the fate of the conti-nent in the short 20th century, whose narrator devotes central passages to Shostakovichand the radio broadcast of the Symphony on 9 August 1942:(272 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumachestra, which had to remain in the besieged city alongside the choir and the comedytheatre on the orders of Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Communist Party and at thetime a member of the Leningrad Front war council, in order to raise the spirit of resis-tance among the population. A little later, Eliasberg receives direct orders fromZhdanovhimself to perform SymphonyNo. 7. At the same time, Serëgin, who has absolutely no in-terest in classical music, is ordered to ensure the proper performance of Shostakovich’swork and at the same time to spy on the orchestra for agents and traitors. But in practicethis ordermeans, above all, that hemust find capablemusicians in Leningrad and at thefront and forcibly recruit them for the orchestra.But this mission turns out to be difficult for Serëgin, not only because often the peo-ple he is looking for have already died of hunger, cold or at the front and are severelyphysically injured. As an NKVD officer, his person inspires fear and terror above all.Thememory of the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938,when the chekists took innocent people fromtheir homes at night, when anyone could be denounced as an enemy of the people and atraitor,when people were arbitrarily shot or banished to the Gulag, is still too dense, andthe cultural intelligentsia in particular suffered from the purges. And this fear seems tobemore than justified,as becomes clear in the veryfirst episode of the series,whenElias-berg’s wife is personally arrested by Serëgin before the conductor’s eyes. A few sceneslater, people in the air-raid shelter talk about how it is better to die under bombs than tobe taken away at night by the NKVD (episode 1,min. 42:25-43:00). Accordingly, when thelieutenant first appears, people panic and anticipate their immediate arrest and shoot-ing.When Serëgin is looking for an urgently needed violinist, his mother at first refusesto give him any information for fear that hemight be captured, andwhen he finally findsthe son in the front line, he flees in panic: the violinist would rather die at the front thanin the torture cellars of the NKVD. An oboist whom he fetches from her bombed-out flatinsults the chekists as inquisitors from the Middle Ages. And when, just before the pre-miere, the orchestra’s agitated viola player Leonid Kleiman (played by Timofei Tribunt-sev), exasperated to hysterical with despair, wants to volunteer for the front, he cursesthe whole orchestra as cowards, blurting out the following while standing right next tothe NKVD lieutenant Serëgin:“I didn’t think I would say this, but he was telling the truth from the beginning, you’reall cowards, eighty people gathered to play a little concert, and you all happily hid be-hind him.... Do you know what will happen after the concert? Maybe not right away,maybe not even this year, but people like Lieutenant will devour you, one by one, themasses will crush you and kill you like new enemies, because they are many and youare eighty...” (Episode 7, min. 33:05-34:00)The fear of the cultural intelligentsia of the terror of the NKVD,which culminates in thistirade, is historically accurate and to a certain extent prophetic here, since it could be un-derstood as a reference to the repressions of the post-war period.6Within the logic of the6 On the repression during the blockade, cf. Ganzenmüller 2011. On the postwar period, cf. Bljum2011.Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 273plot, however, it represents a complete misjudgement of the situation, since the televi-sion series has previouslymade itmore than clear, in particular through the character ofSerëgin, that the fear is not only unfounded but also unjust. The lieutenant is anythingbut a merciless inquisitor and ruthless murderer.Rather, the chekist in the series is himself a deeply traumatised person, as the view-ers know from the opening scene with the death of his wife, son and daughter, a personwho is initially completely incapable of expressing his feelings other than through angerand aggression. Accordingly, after the scene at the jetty we see him for the first time on aprofessional assignment,where he almost beats a prisoner to death in anNKVD cell andcan only be stopped at the last moment. But it is not murderousness that speaks fromhis eyes, but pure desperation and helplessness. Just as the boy Flëra in the filmCome andSeedesperately shoots at the portrait of the Führer, the adult Serëgin strikes here withoutsense and reason.Hedoes not torture due to political or othermotivations, but out of de-spair, which is psychologically immediately understandable for the audience. And witheach subsequent scene and series episode, the empathetic, compassionate camera eyemakes theNKVD lieutenantmore sympathetic and familiar, for behind the tough façadelies a soft character who has difficulty putting his feelings into words and initially triesdoggedly to suppress his own pain and grief. He helps people out of difficult situations,supports the weak, saves lives or signals understanding and compassion through his si-lence alone.Themore often hemanages to shed his body armour of an iron chekist in thecourse of the series, the more human he becomes. This ‘humanisation’ of Serëgin takesplace primarily through three characters: a little red-haired boy, a womanwho loves himand the conductor Eliasberg as his actual opponent.5. The Boy, the Beloved and the Conductor: The Humanisation of a ChekistPopular television series explain the world through the experiential horizons of theirmain protagonists, often bringing the enigmatic andmysteriousways of big politics intoconflict with private issues and personal interests,which adds drama and suspense.Thisis also the case with NKVD Lieutenant Anatolii Serëgin, who is supposed to be monitor-ing the orchestra for traitors and informers, but at the same time has to reconcile hisdeeply traumatised, yet still intact world view of an uncompromising chekist with thepartly eccentric and completely alien world of the orchestramusicians.This contrast be-tween theworld of state violence and suspicion and that of culture becomesmost obviousin the encounters with Karl Eliasberg.In this confrontation, the sympathies of the script and camera are clearly on the sideof the arts. For while the repressive policy of the NKVD is discussed as an anti-humanand false understanding of order that only causes fear, chaos and suffering, the orderof music is no less strict and rigorous, but it provides harmony, stability and security.And this other, better order is embodied from the very beginning by the conductor ofthe radio orchestra, who states in one of his very first appearances: “There is no excusefor hackwork, especially now... the more chaos around, the more order should be here”(episode 1, min. 18:55-19:10).274 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaEliasberg’s role is to uncover the narrowness and falseness of Serëgin’s world view.Already at their second encounter (after the arrest of Eliasberg’s wife), when the NKVDlieutenant is still grumbling about why he has to look for musicians for this needless or-chestra, the following dialogue develops between him and the conductor:Eliasberg expresses this abysmal dislike for the NKVD lieutenant repeatedly, with angerover his arrested wife certainly playing a role.Only gradually does Eliasberg realise that Serëgin also has human sides when, forexample,hedoesnot impose apunishment ona youngmanwhohas reported to the frontwith false papers. Conversely, thanks to the conductor, the chekist begins to understandwhy music is so important to the state and what an important role culture apparently– “Iwent to the enlistment office and they turnedmedown. They said I'mneededhere.”– “You mean waving the baton? With your name, comrade Eliasberg, there's nothingto do at the front. They'll shoot you.”– “Were you at the front?”– “No, I've been catching your countrymen here.”– “By the way, I'm half German. My father is German. My mother is Jewish.”– “And even worse.”– “You don't like the latter?”– “Well, let's put it this way: I don't trust them.”– “Karl Marx was a German Jew. You don't trust Marx?”– “Marx? I had no idea.”– “I was named after him.”– “But you don't look much like him.”– “Thank God for that.”– “Why so?”– “Because. Marx has to be the one and only.” (Episode 2, min. 18:34-20:07)Serëgin embodies the typical careerist from a simple background, characterised by hissemi-education and anti-Semitic prejudices, while Eliasberg even emphasises that hecomes from an educated communist family by referring to his first name, Karl. Accord-ingly, the two despise each other, as becomes clear in their next conversation:– “Who told you that you're a moron?”– “Well, this is why I said it? You have it written on your face that you despise me, justlike the working class.”– “I love the working class. It’s just that putting people in jail, torturing women, whip-ping children, that’s not a job.”– “I don’t torture women, at least I don't put them in a cell with murderers according tothe eighty-first article. Well, I could. But I don’t torture.” (3, 15:20-19:09)– “If you had gone to the front, there would have been no problem.”– “I'm not such a moron.”Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 275plays for people, so that he even steals a popular booklet on the Myths of Ancient Greece(Mify Drevnei Gretsii, 1941) from a destroyed library, which he also reads.7But the decisive impulse for his ‘humanisation’ in the series comes from someoneelse, namely the flutist Vera Preobrazhenskaia (played by Elizaveta Boiarskaia), whosename already symbolically indicates this, since her first name in Russian means “faith”and her last namemeans something like “The TransformingOne”: she has to convey bothqualities to him in the course of the series.8Herfirst appearance in the series iswhen shegives birth to a boy in a hallway under German bombardment, but in the very next scenewith her we see a broken woman with ruined hands at the front, from whom Serëginlearns in an ‘interrogation’ that she lost her son shortly after birth and that the illegiti-mate father was killed in the war: he orders her to come back to the orchestra anyway.However, already in the third episodewe learn in a flashback that Preobrazhenskaia’s re-lationshipwith the child’s fallen fatherwasnot a happy one: Verawas actually in lovewiththe Jewish viola player Leonid Kleiman, but despite all her familiarity with him, he pre-ferred the blonde estrada singer Lidia at the time,which is why she consoled herself withthe soldier.9WhenVera Preobrazhenskaia is ordered back to the orchestra, the guilt-rid-den Kleiman’s affection for her flares up again, but she now seeks support and closenesswith Anatoly Serëgin, who keeps his distance from her for a long time.10Serëgin only begins to visibly showemotionwhen,while searching for orchestramu-sicians in a bombed-out flat, he comes across the striking red-haired boy Kolia Vasiliev(played byMakarMozzhevilov) hiding in awardrobe, stayingwith his slain grandfather.117 In the series, the booklet is attributed to the historian Nikolai Kun (1877–1940), whose popularscience book on the ancient stories, previously revised and expanded several times, first appearedin 1940 under the titleMyths and Legends of Ancient Greece (Mify i legendy Drevnei Gretsii). In fact, thecover of the bookletMyths of Ancient Greece (1940) by Vsevolod and Lev Uspenskii, published in thesame year, is shown in the film.8 Her surname has an ambivalent connotation in Russian, since themain hero ofMikhail Bulgakov’swell-known satirical story The Heart of a Dog (Sobach’e serdtse, 1925), the surgeon Professor FilippFilippovich Preobrazhenskii, bears the same eloquent surname, who implants the dog’s heart ina human being, thus transforming him into a fanatical animalistic Bolshevik. Aleksandr Kott to acertain extent symbolically reverses this “transformation” from a human being into a bestial crea-ture, albeit not through surgery but through music.9 Leonid Kleiman alsomarried Lidia, but she leaves himduring the siege, preferring the adventurouslife of a front-line orchestra. When Lidia's lover is killed before her eyes in a bombing raid, shereturns to Leonid in despair, emaciated by hunger and losing hermind, she buys fake chocolate onthe black market in exchange for her last piece of jewellery, which she then fatally poisons herselfwith.10 Thus, the pre-war constellation between Vera and Leonid is repeated under the opposite sign:Kleiman is now alone and despises theNKVDman just as he hatesmilitarymen, but Preobrazhen-skaia courts Serëgin this time not for comfort but out of actual affection.11 Red-haired boys have been considered headstrong and rebellious at least since O. Henry’s leg-endary short story The Ramson of Red Chief (1907), so also in the Soviet O. Henry movie adapta-tion Strictly Business (Delovye liudi, 1962) by Leonid Gaidai. Tom Sawyer, modelled on his red-hairedcreator Mark Twain, is often portrayed as a redhead in films too, as in the 1981 Soviet televisionseries The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (Prikliucheniia Toma Soiera i Gekl’berri Finn,dir. Stanislav Govorukhin). The headstrong Kolia shares some of the characteristics of these rolemodels.276 Appropriating History: III. Sites of TraumaTen-year-old Kolia refuses to stay at the children’s home, so he takes him to the orchestraand Vera agrees to take him into her flat while Anatolii Serëgin gets treats for him on theblackmarket and builds him amakeshift bed. For the first time, the chekist shows a hintof joie de vivre: he smiles with the boy and makes jokes. But Kolia demands more from“Uncle Tolia” (the short form of Serëgin’s first name Anatolii), he should not only put himto bed and be near him, but take him seriously, give himhis attention.One eveningKoliaasks him if he will go to the front, repeating word for word the last words of Serëgin’sdead son. This childlike, naïve importunity bursts Serëgin’s emotional shell: with eyeswide open, a face expression we know so well since Come and See, the horrible memoryoverwhelms him, and we see fragmented flashbacks of the last moments until his son’sdeath, whereby Serëgin almost collapses, drenched in sweat. A little later he is sitting onthe edge of Vera’s bed alone with her, who tells him face to face:“You are terribly afraid. Then no, you are a brave man, you are not afraid of the enemy,of the battlefield of death, but you are terribly afraid to live. [...] you can’t live in thepast all the time... yes, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, what will happen theday after tomorrow... I only understand about now, there’s you, there’s me, we’re alive,what else?” (Episode 7, min. 22:55-24.00)With these words his resistance is broken and they spend the same night together in herbed.The series thus performs a double therapeutic function: on the one hand, Vera Preo-brazhenskaia succeeds in curing the NKVDman of his private traumas and turning himinto a living human being. On the other hand, the series also cures the traumas of Comeand See on an emblematic level: Now Kravchenko plays the symbolic father to the ten-year-old boyKolia, a fatherwho the 14-year-oldFlëraheplayed thenneverhad.Thewar inTheSeventh Symphony is also cruel and senseless, but love in solidarity and human empa-thy can at least temporarily bring fleeting happiness and relief. However, this overcom-ing of traumata doesn’t last for long. For the very next day, before Serëgin can even leavefor the front, he is surprised by a bombing raid while saving the life of Karl Eliasberg,but he is so badly wounded that he ultimately dies as a result of his injuries. After thisnext dramatic event, the conductor at last recognises the humane side of Serëgin, andso Eliasberg, standing next to the chekist’s corpse, has to confess: “I was wrong to thinkAnatoly Ivanovich Serëgin was a stranger. I was wrong. I failed to tell him that while hewas alive.This is how wars begin when we think other people are strangers” (Episode 8,min. 22:52-23:10).Thus, in the end, the series exposes a double misjudgement: the secret services havewrongly persecuted the cultural intelligentsia in the Great Terror and murdered manyof its representatives, but the artists have also beenmistaken in their disdain for the or-dinary ‘new men,’ whom they perceived as ‘strange’ transformed beasts, and thereforein a sense share at least a certain responsibility for their own persecution. So, the seriessuggests that war does not beginwith an external threat or the German attack on the So-viet Union, but at the moment when people perceive the other in their own country as a‘stranger’, an enemy of the people and a traitor.Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 2776. Imperfect People: The Leningrad Blockade as an Existential ChallengeIn the end, the ‘transformed’ chekist remains a tragic hero who only realises what life isall about just before he dies. For life, as the series shows inmany small scenes,means theacceptance of strangeness and otherness, of even deviant feelings and acting accordingto one’s own needs, which also sometimes includes transgressing rules and regulations.This is shown most clearly with the Jewish viola player Kleiman, who in his eccentricityand desperation repeatedly transgresses all boundaries of decency and tolerability with-out ever beingmalicious or unsympathetic.12 But this also applies to the behaviour of thenurse Anna,who deserts from the front for fear of being raped by her battalion comman-der, while her beloved trumpeter illegally gets her food and forged food stamps. Ratheralmost grotesquely carnivalesque, this irregularity of transgressive behaviour is demon-strated by the double life of the orchestra’s oboist and party organiser (partorg), EkaterinaPrudnikova (played by Elena Velezheva), who, even before the war, has charged the fun-loving timpanist and womaniser Valerii Korneichuk (played by Jurii Anpilogov) with acouncil tribunal for publicly imitating a sex act at a festive event.The accused, however,ridicules the charge by making sexual remarks to the party woman, which the audienceapproves with general laughter, while she is at a loss for words due to indignation. Afterhis heroic death at the front, however, it turns out that this very prudish and strict partyorganiser was the last secret lover of the heartbreaker.Even behaviour that is clearly harmful to society goes unpunished in the film.The fatoboist Semënov, for example, prefers to be fed by his no less obese mother, who worksin a canteen, through stolen food rather than take on the stress of orchestra rehearsals.But when his mother dies and he is caught stealing cabbages, he is forgiven because henowconscientiously attends rehearsals.Andeven thedenunciator ofEliasberg’swife, theyoung violinist Tusia fromBelarus, is forgiven in the end, since she acted out of unhappylove and jealousy.Thus, in its depiction of interpersonal relationships, the series is also a plea for gen-erosity and solidarity, according towhichdifferent population groups, regardless of classand nationality,must come to termswith their private wars and social conflicts. Yet, onewouldmisunderstand the series if one were to see it as unreserved advocacy of toleranceand diversity, since it is clearly demonstrated that the transgressions, going to the pointof grotesque frenzy, are motivated above all by private or war traumas. In other words,the German siege of Leningrad is only the backdrop, which has a cathartic effect on theprotagonists as anexistential challenge.Themicro-worldof theorchestra is stagedashu-manismactually lived,which represents a clear counter-world to the official propagandaimage of the 1930s with its conservative values and heroic narratives. Reports from thefront and the war only appear indirectly in conversations and news fragments, officialsocialist slogans aswell as Christian RussianOrthodox or Soviet patriotic tones are com-pletely absent. However, the series is not concerned with conveying a ‘more truthful’ or12 Especially in the character of Kleiman – but also in that of Eliasberg – the series addresses manyanti-Semitic stereotypes common in Russia by indirectly invoking them, but then unmasking themclearly as inaccurate projections and prejudices through the behaviour of the respective protago-nists.278 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaeven ‘realistic’ picture of everyday blockade life or with deconstructing common mythsaround heroic suffering and the ‘Leningrad Symphony’. Rather, it incorporates every-thing into its immersive and narrative logics, even fine arts, especially classical musicand the titular SymphonyNo. 7, but also literature through the poetry of Ol’ga Berggolts.7. The Third Zone: Classical Music and the Poetry of Ol’ga BerggoltsAleksandr Kott not only takes the performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 duringthe LeningradBlockade as gratefulmaterial for a partly tragic, partlymelodramatic plot,but also skilfully incorporates the motif of music into the symbolic-affective level of thestory, as he shows from the first scene, when the radio broadcast of Mozart’s Piano Con-certo No. 23 segues directly into the death of Serëgin’s children and wife in the hail ofbombs. But music is not only used as a soundtrack to intensify emotions, tension anddrama, as is otherwise common in popular films, it is also a direct object of reflection.Karl Eliasberg for instance, in the first scene that shows him as a conductor at an orches-tra rehearsal, a broken man after the arrest of his wife by Serëgin, in his despair quotesfrom the so-called ‘Testament’ of the 31-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven, who wrote thatit was art alone that prevented him from committing suicide.Whereupon the rehearsalof Beethoven’s SymphonyNo. 9 begins.This openingwithBeethoven’s famous letter to his brothers from1802 is already sym-bolic, as he writes it because of his incurably progressing deafness, and by the time hecompleted Symphony No. 9 in 1823 he already could not hear anything.Thus, the motif ofperforming or not-performing, hearing or not hearing music is put forward as a variedmotif in the series from the beginning. So, many musicians initially refuse to continueworking in the orchestra because of personal grief, since music seems to be pointless intimes of war, but then they realise that making music is more important than killing.13Conversely, Serëgin’s inability to grasp the beauty and expressiveness of music is a con-sistent theme inhis relationshipwithPreobrazhenskaia.She repeatedly tries to cure himof his ‘deafness’, but initially without success. It is only when she plays Beethoven’s Sym-phony No. 5, the ‘Fate Symphony’, on the gramophone at her bedside in the evening thathe slowly begins to sense whatmusicmeans, even if he cannot yet put it into words. Andit is not only Serëgin’s ‘fate’ that is softened byBeethoven’smusic: the ‘officers of theThirdReich’ blockading Leningrad, who have been listening via radio on the other side of thefront, are so thrilled by a live broadcast of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 by the radio or-chestra that they give Eliasberg a German Volksempfänger by parachute as a thank-you.And for Eliasberg himself, Beethoven’s fate is also decisive, since he not only owes hisstamina to Beethoven’s ‘Testament’, but he himself almost completely goes deaf due tothe fatal bomb attack that costs Serëgin his life.Thus, the performance of Shostakovich’sSymphony No. 7 in Leningrad is also a symbolic quotation of Beethoven’s premiere of his13 The orchestra’s blind percussionist, for example, immediately reports to the front when he hearsthat blind people are also wanted there. Thanks to his absolute hearing, he identifies all enemyaircrafts, but returns to the orchestra in the end because he considers music more important thanthe war effort.Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 279SymphonyNo. 9 in 1824, which the already completely deaf composer himself conducted.It is the samewithEliasberg; he hears very little, but still knowshis cues as a conductor atevery moment. At a dress rehearsal, he even exaggerates this contrast between makingmusic andmaking war, addressing the orchestra:“I don’t know anything about the war, yet I don’t want to know either.When I hear whatBeethoven sounds like, when it sounds exactly as he intended, I cannot believe that ahuman is capable of such harmony. But war, that's disharmony. And Beethoven is Ger-man, and I’m not ashamed of him. But war, that’s a shame. A shame!” (Episode 7, min.34:20-35:25)It is thesewords that, in a sense, sumup the quintessence of the television series,makingit a pathetic anti-war work.War between nations, but also between people fighting eachother as strangers and enemies, is amoral disgrace, “a shame”,whereasmusic can trans-form this disharmony into a higher harmonic order that does without false morals andmendacious words. And it is precisely this transformation of disharmony into harmonythat Kott also stages in the more than ten-minute-long central final scene of the series:the performance of Shostakovich’s SymphonyNo. 7 in the Leningrad Philharmonic. In thefirstmovements,we experience this acoustically and visually as an extreme disharmony:we hear the music excerpts with the damaged ears of Eliasberg, who can only distin-guish some distorted sounds from the noise in a very selective and fragmentedmanner,or with the ears of the radio listeners, as they hear the fuzzy and shrill excerpts playedthrough loudspeakers across theSovietUnion.Thecamerawork,which is otherwiseusu-ally quite conventional in the series, also visually underlines this disharmonybydaring tousebird’s-eye viewsandextremely subjective shots beforeShostakovich’smusical soundsare gradually ‘harmonised’ audio-visually and the images take on a more phantasmatic,dreamlike dimension,when the orchestramembers also see thefigures of fallen relativesand acquaintances sitting in the rows of Philharmonic visitors, before the last sounds ofthe Allegro con troppo are shown through close-ups of the exhausted, tense-looking facesof the musicians and the conductor as a final collective physical and psychological act ofstrength on the podium.But Kott does not leave it at this crowning conclusion, which tends towards heroickitsch in its audio-visual harmonisation of the orchestra collective to Shostakovich’s dra-matic, droning final chords, but allows the performance to be followed by a short, no lesspathos-filled speech by Eliasberg in the small circle ofmusicians.14This, however, is thenabruptly broken by the conductor with his last, slightly mumbled words ironically dis-tancing: “Somehow, that was a lot of pathos, let’s go home, robbers!” (Episode 8, min.41:23-41:28) Though in saying this, he indirectly underlines that musicians are not sol-diers and conductors are not political orators, but with their arts they rather underminethe state order and the war pathos, resembling more “robbers” (razboiniki), gentleman14 “And we may be forgotten, forgotten by name. But the performance of Shostakovich’s music fromthe besieged, tormented city will not be forgotten... They won't forget... our children, our grand-children, their grandchildren’s grandchildren will remember and know: music is stronger thandeath!” (Episode 8, min. 40:36-41:12)280 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumathieves, criminals of lost honour. Such an anti-pathetic stance is further emphasised bythe fact that Shostakovich’s symphony is not the last piece of music in the series, butafter a few more exchanges in which Eliasberg once again refuses to be evacuated, the‘robber chief ’ goes to the stone steps of the Neva shore, to which the hauntingly movingpiano sounds from theAdagio from Johann Sebastian Bach’sConcerto inDminor (BMV974)resound to the noise of the waves. Sad minor sounds at the end as in Come and See, butthis time not byMozart, but by Bach. Not to return to partisan war, but to draw staminafor further ‘robber’ actions. Classical music is thus not only the art that overcomesman’sdisharmony andwars, but also purifies humanhearts and leads themback to the harmo-nious state of nature, for which the stoneNeva shore with its long Petersburgmythologyhas long served as a cultural-historical trope since the founding of the city.15A similar, but different function to music is fulfilled by the poetry of the Leningradpoet Ol’ga Berggolts (1910–1975) in the series, who remained in the city throughout theblockade period andmakes a total of five appearances in the film (played byViktoriia Tol-stoganova), reading sometimes lengthy excerpts from her poems written between 1940and 1942.Her recitals are connected to the plot only by the fact that her verses are broad-cast live on the radio, just like the concerts by Eliasberg’s radio orchestra.Only in the firstscene is there a brief cool encounter with Serëgin in the broadcast studio and at the endshe also sits in the audience at the performance of Symphony No. 7. But her appearancehas strong symbolic significance for viewers educated in literary history, since Berggoltsas themost prominentpoet of theLeningradblockade embodies the tragic fate of the cul-tural intelligentsia under Stalinism like no other: she hadwritten poetry fromchildhood,was a convinced communist, worked as a journalist, war correspondent and newspapereditor since the end of the 1920s, wrote reportages and poems for adults as well as chil-dren’s books, before she was caught up in the mills of the Great Terror in Leningrad atthe beginning of 1937, when she was drawn into the fabricated accusations against for-merRAPP leaderandcritic LeopoldAverbakh (1903–1937), initially only as awitness.Afterher first husbandwas shot as a ‘Trotskyist’ in February 1938, the charges against her wereinitially dropped, but in the same year shewas again imprisoned as an ‘enemy of the peo-ple’ for 171 days, before she was released and rehabilitated in July 1939. In February 1940,despite everything, she joined the Bolshevik Party, and during the nearly 900-day block-ade, she made almost daily live radio broadcasts to encourage Leningraders to hold onand to testify to the world outside of the inhabitants’ heroic struggle for survival. Her15 However, the series does not follow the so-called ‘Petersburg text’, according towhich the foundingof Petersburg represents a civilisational taming of the wild element of water, which, in the form ofthe river, repeatedly challenges man’s fate through fog and floods. In Kott's work, in contrast, thedeadly threat comes from the sky in the form of German bombs, as the very first scenemakes clearwhen Serëgin’s family drowns after a bombing raid. In The Seventh Symphony, the river has rather areligious connotation of the purification of souls. Again and again, the protagonists go alone or inpairs to the banks of the Neva, let their feet be washed by water on the stone steps, seek comfortand relaxation by the river, which is also visually underlined by shots of the calming, unshakablerippling water that are filmed in ever-changing ways. Instead of mortal danger, in Kott’s work theriver is a consoling confidant and silent witness to human fate.Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 281second husband, the literary critic and journalist Nikolai Molchanov, died of starvationduring the siege of Leningrad in 1942.16Added to this was another tragic private fate: she had lost two daughters at a youngage because of serious illness already in the 1930s, and during the interrogations and ar-rests 1937 to 1939 she was pregnant twice, but lost both children due to torture by theNKVD, the first while still pregnant, the second as a stillborn child. After that she couldno longer bear children. By nomeans could Berggolts speak publicly about all this at thetime, but her destiny is well known to today’s educated Russian citizen, at least since thepublication of her secret diaries in the late Glasnost period. And Aleksandr Kott deliber-ately alludes to this,when Serëgin, in response to Eliasberg’s accusation, feels compelledto categorically emphasise twice that he does not torture women – the viewermay relatethis dialogue directly to the nowadays well-known poet’s own experience with chekists.Accordingly, when Serëgin loses his own two children on the quay, when Preobrozhen-skaia’s child dies shortly after birth under bombing, and they both symbolically adoptKolia, and Kravchenko intertextually recalls his role as Flëra from Come and See, then allthis points unequivocally to the subtext of Berggolts’ biography. In a sense the fictiousprotagonists thus act out her experience of suffering, whereby the German bombs fromthe sky also become detectable as an allegory for the torture cellars of the NKVD.At the same time, Berggolts is depicted in the series as an alternative role model toEliasberg for the cultural intelligentsia during times of terror and war: while the con-ductor does not want to know about the chaos and ‘disharmony’ of the world, the poetknows all the abysses of suffering and dying, but she is not allowed to tell this truth pub-licly. Outraged, she yells at the radio recording supervisor in her very first appearance inthe series: “There, in Moscow, no one knows anything about us, do you understand, noone! […]We are all going to die here, they just don’t knowabout us. So I’m going to go andsay all this live on air!” (Episode 2, min. 25:55-26:06) The latter desperately tries to stopher from doing so, which is overheard by Serëgin who happens to come in, whereuponshe indignantly shouts at him:“Standing here and spying! For how long? […] I was inMoscow. Nobody knows anythingthere. Everyone keeps talking about the Leningrad heroism, but no one knows aboutthe real situation. And it is forbidden to speak! How do you think that is?” (Episode 2,min. 26:25-27:05)Towhich the chekist only tersely replies, “Some truths youdon’t need to know.” (ibid.) Butthat is precisely the role of Berggolts and her poetry inThe Seventh Symphony: she knowsthe whole truth, she knows what immeasurable suffering and death mean, but she isforbidden to speak about it publicly. And the viewer won’t see her anymore in a privateconversation. Instead, she recites poems live on the radio. Radio is thus also a mediumof censorship, a censored venue of public speech that is only allowed to broadcast artistictruths, saying in verses, but also in music, what is not allowed to be said in plain lan-guage. Lidiia Ginzburg (1902–1990) has already indicated the “very hysterical note” with16 For biographical details, cf. Gromova 2017. I thank Franziska Thun-Hohenstein for all her valuableadvice on Berggolts.282 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumawhich Berggolts tried to encode the private and the collective in her poetry after the per-sonal “catastrophe”, andPolinaBarskovahas recently pointedout howpolysemous, fluid,ambiguousher “lyrical invocations”actuallywere, expressing the inner turmoil of her po-etic voice and speaking to different addressees inside and outside the city, to the suffer-ing and the powerful, alive and dead (cf. Ginzburg 2011: 111–113; Barskova 2017: 104–108;ibid. 2020: 65–67).17And it is precisely this ambivalence of truth and prohibition due to censorship, thistension between saying and concealing, hope and despair, concrete biographical allu-sions and general human ‘hysterical notes’ that the radio readings also convey in Kott’stelevision series. In a way, her poems are woven into the series plot likemusical counter-points, often but not always at the end of an episode. And they invite not just the olderviewers – as they were used to do in Soviet times under the conditions of censorship –to interpret her words and accordingly the series’ plot allegorically. For example, in thesecond episode, after we learn of the death of Preobrozhenskaia’s baby and Serëgin hasfound Kolia, she reads the third stanza from her poem Europe. The War in 1940. For Il’iaErenburg (Evropa. Voina 1940 goda. Il’e Erenburgu, 1940), in which the lyrical I dreams of arecreation of the world as a kingdom of children who will live there like birds in accor-dance with an undestroyed nature (episode 2,min. 28:08-29:30):Perhaps, these times are close:No howl of sirens, screech of bombs,But silence the children will hear,In their bomb-shelter sealed up tight.[…]All slaughtered… Only the childrenSaved, under the scorched earth.They do not remember those times,They do not know who they are and where.Like birds, they wait now for sunriseAnd warm themselves, splashing in the water.[…]Thus, will the childhood on the world arrive,And the wise dominion of children.(Berggolts 1988: 195)(Translation by Daniel Weissbort)1817 The only one in the series, who still sometimes says in plain language and with a ‘hysterical note’the truth about the real situation in besieged Leningrad, is Leonid Kleiman, who in a certain wayperforms as the poet's revenant, endowedwith a fool's licence in his desperation close tomadness.18 Berggolts 1996. Quoted from: https://arlindo-correia.com/040704.html [30 September 2023].Berggolts 1988: 195: “Быть может, близко сроки эти:/ не рев сирен, не посвист бомб,/ а тиши-ну услышат дети/ в бомбоубежище глухом. [...] ...Все перебиты. Только дети/ спаслись под вы-жженной землей./ Они совсем не помнят года,/ не знают – кто они и где./ Они, как птицы, ждутвосхода/ и, греясь, плещутся в воде. [...] Вот так настанет детство мира/ и царство мудрое де-тей.”Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 283Obviously, the unspoken truth of these verses is that this ‘dominion of children’ is also therealm of her own dead children, “slaughtered” by the NKVD,which here poetry, likemu-sic, raises to a certain stage of lyrical harmony. Meanwhile, we see Serëgin – alongsiderecordings of the poetry recital – walking through barricades and tank traps in Lenin-grad, lost in thought; whether he has heard the verses, and what he may think, remainsopen.Even more suggestive is the associative linking of Stalinist terror with German be-siegement in the scene when the dead Serëgin, lying on an open truck next to the sittingPreobrazhenskaia and Kolia, is driven away to the gravesite to the first three stanzas ofher poem 29 January 1942 (29 ianvaria 1942, 1942), which Berggolts dedicated to her hus-bandNikolaiMolchanov,whodiedofmalnutrition that day (episode8,min.25:20-26:05):Despair and sorrow aren’t enoughto get this cursed sentence over with![…]Why?I can’t even rock your childto sleep or swaddle him.(Berggolts 1989a: 33)(Translation by Venya Gushchin)19Serëgin here symbolically takes the place not only of her dead husband, but also ofBerggolts’ and Molchanov’s common child, whom they lost during the ‘cursed sentence’(prokliatyi srok) in NKVD prisons: the cruel constellation of her private catastrophe isrevised in the series’ fiction: here the chekist made human has to die instead of the childKolia.But the series cites not only a certain ‘Soviet aesthetic’ of coded truths, but also oneof artistic defamiliarisation.When Serëgin seeks out the denunciator Tusia at her workin a tank factory in order to forcibly recruit her for the orchestra, she only stares at himwordlessly when theymeet,whereuponBerggolts reads lines of poetry from the FebruaryDiary (Fevral’skii dnevnik, 1942) about how only hatred and the need for revenge can stillunite andwarmus. In Berggolts’ poem, these verses are clearly directed against the Ger-mans, but here they can also be related to the relationship between the two protagonists(episode 4,min. 48:56-49:40).20Just as Berggolts’ verses are thus taken out of context, the poems in this way alienatethe plot in the television series, in a sense replacing the protagonists’ possible thoughts19 Berggolts 1989a: 33: „Отчаяния мало. Скорби мало./ О, поскорей отбыть проклятый срок! […]Зачем, зачем?/ Мне даже не баюкать,/ не пеленать ребенка твоего.“ Berggolts 2022: 64–65.20 “No, we do not cry. There is not enough tears for the heart. Hate keeps us from crying. Hate is ourguarantee of life: it unites, warms and guides. That I will not forgive, that I will not spare, that Iwill avenge, that I will avenge as best I can, cries out to me the mass grave on the Okhtensky, onthe right bank.” Berggolts 1989b: 35: “Нет, мы не плачем. Слез для сердца мало./ Нам ненавистьзаплакать не дает./ Нам ненависть залогом жизни стала:/ объединяет, греет и ведет.// О том,чтоб не прощала, нещадила,/ чтоб мстила, мстила, как могу,/ ко мне взывает братская могила/на охтенском, на правом берегу.”284 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaand feelings, giving them an intertextual meaning of self-reflection through Berggolts’biographical experience, but also a more general allegorical dimension. So, the lines ofpoetry interrupt or disrupt the otherwise stringently narrated plot, imaginatively open-ing up a “third zone”, as the famous Blockade poemTheThird Zone (Tret’ia zona, 1942) byBerggolts is called, which is quoted in full length: A zone where words are disorientedand feelings confused:How do you cry, rejoice, beckon,who told you what is wrong with me?I am joyful today to the point of pain,I myself do not know why. (Episode 6, min. 50:25-50:42)21But in ‘defamiliarising’ depicted events and experiences in this way, the lines of poetry atthe same timealso elevate theplot of the series in besiegedLeningradduring the one yearfrom September 1941 to August 1942 to a more general, human level, thus ‘familiarising’it for contemporary viewers, whomay recognise as educated people in Berggolts’ poetrythe general fate of the cultural intelligentsia under Stalinism and war, but a less histor-ically savvy audience may also project their own topical feelings and thoughts onto thehardships and pains, conflicts and catastrophes suffered by the protagonists.8. ConclusionWhereas Elem Klimov’s film Come and See attempted to capture the horrors of war withcinematic devices on a formal and aesthetic level, Aleksandr Kott’sThe Seventh Symphonyworks with the conventional patterns of representation and narration of contemporarytelevision series,which are,however, constantly enrichedwith allusions and signs of dis-tinction from high culture. Moritz Baßler characterises this form of storytelling as the“international style” of “popular realism,”which presents itself as sophisticated high cul-ture, as demanding on a formal aesthetic level and offering complexly constructed plots.But as a popular form of realism, it is in fact decidedly directed against any artisticmod-ernismand renounces any“poetic function” in the senseofRoman Jakobson,any effective“defamilarisation” in the sense of the formalists that could lead to a “new seeing” of real-ity. Instead “popular realism”constantly confirms the existing symbolic order andan“ed-ucated bourgeois basic trust” (“bildungsbürgerliches Urvertrauen”) (Baßler 22: 86). Pre-cisely this narrative dynamic can also be observed inThe Seventh Symphony, which doesindeed integrate defamiliarising elements and avant-garde devices on an audio-visuallevel, among other thingswith Berggolts’ poems and Shostakovich’smusic, but these de-familiarisations only temporarily disrupt the fictional diegesis, temporarily delay it, butin no way lastingly impede its narrative logic and a straightforward reception of the se-ries’ episodes.21 Berggolts 1989c: 58: “Как ты плачешь, радуешься, манишь,/ кто тебе поведал, что со мной?/Мнесегодня радостно до боли,/ я сама не знаю – отчего.”Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 285With themelodramatic reenactment of Shostakovich’s SymphonyNo. 7 in the populartelevision series format, the filmTheSeventhSymphony thus provides a double integrationoffer in the context of Russian culture on the eve of Russia’s ‘special military operation’against Ukraine: vis-à-vis the state authorities, it stages the ‘humanisation’ of the chekistin the figure of Anatolii Serëgin by presenting the terror of the 1930s as a historical aber-ration thathadalreadybeen fundamentally revisedduringWorldWar II; and towards theSoviet socialised and post-Soviet educated and art-loving classes, this cinematic reinter-pretation of the past signals that it shares the discomfort with a glorification and sacral-isation of Great PatrioticWar that increasingly is performed in the statemedia since the2010s, presenting with Eliasberg and Berggolts alternative role models of how to behavein times of repression and censorship.When Karl Eliasberg exclaims in an indignant voice: “I don’t know anything aboutthe war, yet I don’t want to know either. […] But war, that’s a shame. A shame!” then thisexclamation can be understood in various ways. It can be understood as a clear anti-warstatement. But it can be taken also as the exact opposite of what ElemKlimov’sCome andSeedid: one does notwant to come and see the horrors and cruelties ofwar, but prefers tostay behind the front in his ‘harmonious’ world of art andmusic. Instead of a rejection ofwar out of experience and observation, this is rather a refusal of war out of demonstra-tive disinterest and ignorance.Evenmore, the quotationmarks this ‘ignorant’ attitude asmorally superior by describing war as something inferior, indecent, as ‘a shame’ (stydno).In this way, however, the television series also makes an offer to the anti-war sentimentof the cultural intelligentsia within Russia: you are welcome to consider the war a dirtyaffair and devote yourself to culturally superior matters; the ‘shameful’ dirty work willbe done for you by others. But then the cultural intelligentsia (like the fictional Eliasberg)also doesn’t have to interferewith official state decisions onwarfare andpeace.And if youabsolutely do not want to remain silent about the truth, then you have to censor yourself,as (the fictional as well as the real) Berggolts has done in her poems and radio addresses(and this series does too!), choosing an artistically coded form. At the same time, the se-ries pleads for ‘humanised’ interactions within society in all its diversity, including ordi-narymilitarymenand chekists likeAnatolii Serëgin,whomust not be treated as ‘morons’or ‘strangers’ but as equal human beings with feelings and compassion.It is precisely such characteristics, contradictory at first sight, that make popularculture products attractive: they deal with political sensitive issues and social aversions(against the NKVD, the terror of the chekists, the war), dangerous resentments (anti-Semitism, nationalism, class prejudices), uncontrolled aggressions and fears, and bringthem together in an exciting plot. As a work of ‘popular realism’ the series at the sametime addresses the specific target group of the cultural intelligentsia or people who seethemselves as such, towhom it presents slightly encoded sophisticated high art, startingwith the intertextual allusion to the film Come and See, classical music and Berggolts’ po-etry, and offers – in the shape of its protagonists – various options for integrating intothe respective society despite all obstacles and reservations. And it is this specific offer ofsocialisation that makes the television seriesTheSeventh Symphony still relevant and top-286 Appropriating History: III. Sites of Traumaical after 24 February 2022, even if the space for divergent cultural agency is increasinglylimited within the contemporary Russian Federation.22If one considersThe Seventh Symphony in the broader context of Russian popular cul-ture before 24 February 2022 it is – as some critics have claimed – not so much or, atleast, not alone an exception to the rule, but in a way also fits into the general develop-ment towards a gradual militarisation of public discourse. However, it does not call thecultural intelligentsia to the front; on the contrary, it uses the fictionalised story frombesieged Leningrad to formulate an option to participate in the social and cultural lifeof one’s own society with moral integrity and even critical consciousness, staying in thecivilian, though permanently threatened and endangered hinterland.23 In doing so, itrepresents the performance of Shostakovich’s SymphonyNo. 7 as well as Berggolts’ poetryreadings on radio as a civilisational act of high culture in contrast to the inhuman cruel-ties and horrors of an ongoing war, which the film Come and See once depicted so vividly.The series prefers rather not to speak of these horrors, not to come and see, once again.FilmographyAHero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni), dir. Aleksandr Kott, Russia 2006.Children of the Arbat (Deti Arbata), dir. Andrei Ėshpai), Russia 2004.Come and See (Idi i smotri), dir. Ėlem Klimov, USSR 1985.Execution Impossible to Pardon (Kaznit’ nel’zia pomilovat’), dir. Kim Druzhinin, Russia 2017.Leningrad Symphony (Leningradskaia simfoniia), dir. Zakhar Agranenko, USSR 1957.Life and Fate (Zhizn’ i sud’ba), dir. Sergei Urusliak, Russia 2011–2012.Liquidation (Likvidatsia), dir. Sergei Ursuliak, Russia 2007.Penal Battalion (Shtrafbat), dir. Nikolai Dostal’, 2004.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (Prikliucheniia Toma Soiera i Gekl’berriFinn), dir. Stanislav Govorukhin, USSR 1982.Servant of the People (Sluga naroda), dir. Oleksii Kyriushchenko, Ukraine 2015–2019.Strictly Business (Delovye liudi), dir. Leonid Gaidai, USSR 1962.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (Prikliucheniia Toma Soiera i Gekl’berriFinn), dir. Stanislav Govorukhin, USSR 1981.The Brest Fortress [also known as Fortress of War] (Brestskaia krepost’) dir. Aleksandr Kott,Russia/Belarus 2010.TheSeventh Symphony (Sed’maia simfoniia), dir. Aleksandr Kott, Russia 2021.Trotsky (Trotskii), dir. Aleksandr Kott, Russia 2007.22 It is certainly no coincidence that in May 2022, when the military disaster and the brutality of theRussian invasion of Ukraine (like in Bucha) were already obvious, the series was awarded the prizefor best patriotic series of the year at the St Petersburg film festival “Viva Russian cinema!” (“Vivatkino Rossii!”), cf. [Anon.] 2022b.23 Just as official Russian rhetoric has appropriated and recoded many other Soviet topoi and narra-tives in imperial and national garb, here Socialist humanism, the civilising mission of Soviet inter-nationalism and the cultural front against anti-fascism reappear in the guise of and in the nameof classical music.Matthias Schwartz: Come and See, Once Again 287ReferencesAl’perina (Susanna): “‘Sed’maia simfoniia’ stala samym prosmatrivaemym serialom naTV.” In: Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 18 November 2021 (https://rg.ru/2021/11/18/sedmaia-simfoniia-stal-samym-prosmatrivaemym-serialom-na-tv.html) [30 September 2023].[Anon.] (2021): “‘Budem smotret’ vsei sem’ei’: pochemu zriteli zhdut ‘Sed’muiu sim-foniiu’”, In: VestriRu, 8 November 2021 (https://www.vesti.ru/television/article/2636672) [30 September 2023].[Anon.] (2022a): “‘Zolotoi orel’: luchim serialom stala ‘Sed’maia simfoniia’.” In: VestiRu,January 28, 2022 (https://www.vesti.ru/television/article/2668726) [30 September2023].[Anon.] (2022b): “‘Sed’maia sinfonia’ nazvana luchim serialom na festivale ‘Vivat kinoRossii!’” In: VestiRu, 16 May 2022 (https://www.vesti.ru/television/article/2744988)[30 September 2023].[Anon.] (2022c): “Sed’maia simfoniia: mneniia i somneniia. 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(2005): Europe Central, London: Penguin Books.EpiloguePublic History, Popular Culture, and the BelarusianExperience in a Comparative PerspectiveA ConversationAliaksei Bratachkin in conversation with the editorsIn recent decades there has been aworldwide boom in the didactic and educational promotion of na-tional history, which since the 1970s became known in English as ‘public history’. State or privatelysponsored institutions, museums, schools, universities started to engage in memory culture, sites ofmemory, monuments, and also TV stations and internet platforms began to broadcast specific pro-grammes, documentaries, series or movies dedicated to historical topics. What is the role of publichistory in Belarus today? Canwe observe a similar boom?Public history in my understanding is not only what different institutions and politicalactors do with historical material, but also how history is perceived by ordinary people,who are also participants in public life. In the last thirty years, Belarus has undergone anumber of important changes, first of all, related to the way post-Soviet public life hasevolved and the way history is perceived and consumed.Firstly, in the early 1990s, the state lost its exclusive right to interpret historicalevents.Back in the mid-1980s, the communist regime’s monopoly on the interpretationof history was ensured through control over traditional media, control over the schooleducation system, museums, political censorship of historical research, etc. After thecollapse of the USSR, new modes of publicity began to form in Belarus, and the begin-ning of this new post-Soviet publicity coincided with the revision of interpretations ofSoviet history – the problem of Stalinist repressions was raised, the national narrativebegan to be constructed. History became a subject of debate for ordinary people, notjust historians.In the late 1980s andmid-1990s,we see a real boom in the dissemination of historicalmaterials of both a professional and popular nature.The ‘public history’ of the late 1980s-early 1990s in Belarus became a search for a new collective identity, for example, the firstdisputes about ‘colonialism’ applied to Belarus took place, attempts were made to dealwith the traumas of the Soviet past, a wave of renaming Soviet street names changed thesymbolic landscape, a democratisation of the very idea of history was set in motion. In294 Appropriating History: Epiloguethis atmosphere, people wanted to discover the history that ‘really was’, it was a searchfor ‘truth’.The second important change is the emergence of new media channels for the dis-seminationofhistoricalmaterials.During the collapse of theUSSR,everythingwasquitetraditional – historical fiction and academic literature were published in mass circula-tion, thereweremany publications in newspapers, debates were held on state television,etc. Inanumberof cities (not only inMinsk) something likedebate clubsappearedduringthe perestroika period.These channels of distributionwere quite easy to control centrallyeven in the early 1990s, until independent media (newspapers, radio and TV channels)began to gain more influence.More radical changes in the 2000s were associated with digitalisation, the spreadof the Internet, the emergence of new media and social networks. Large online newsportals appeared (such as Tut.by, which appeared in 2000 and was closed for politicalreasons in 2021), which also began to publish historical materials. From the mid-2000sthe Live Journal platform, then social networks like Facebook or VKontakte (until it wascensored), the development ofWikipedia, YouTube, and later Telegram channels createda new public and social infrastructure that also affected the representation of historicalknowledge and the visibility of personal views on history significantly. Since the 1990s,the commercial distribution of historical knowledge and, for example, the book marketalso developed its own logic.After the establishment of the authoritarian regime in 1994 in Belarus, some of thenew freedoms, as well as historical debates, were restricted again. However, there hasbeen no complete return to Soviet practices, although the authoritarian regime hastried and is trying to regain ‘total’ control over the interpretation of history. Describingthe situation in Belarus today, we can speak about the so-called ‘authoritarian publicsphere’, which is characterised by a peculiar hybridity. On the one hand, the author-itarian regime controls most of the media, controls the education system, researchinstitutes and universities, at the same time there are phenomena that can be referredto as counter public spheres. Independent publishing projects,magazines, conferences,educational projects, independent researchers still exist.This situation is dynamic and depends largely on political factors. For example, af-ter the Euromaidan events in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the au-thoritarian regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko [Lukashenka] pursued a more ‘liberal’ pol-icy.Thus, in 2015–2019 we see a large number of historical projects and initiatives of anactivist, grassroots type, which have a significantly expanding audience, also because itcoincides with the development of digital technologies and newmedia in Belarus.Theseinitiatives undermined, to some extent, the official narrative focused on the history ofWorld War II, the Soviet past, the selective acceptance of pre-Soviet history, and the le-gitimisation of authoritarian institutions after 1994.But after the mass protests of 2020 and the attempts to suppress them, the author-itarian regime turned its memory policy into an important instrument of political con-trol, and a series of laws were passed, by means of which – through labelling them as‘extremist’ or ‘rehabilitating Nazism’ – certain interpretations of history are persecuted.All independentmedia outlets have been shut down,and independent publishing housesAliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 295havebeenbanned.Digital platformsarealso controlled–for example,YouTubechannels,websites, or Telegram channels are declared extremist.The regime is trying more actively than before to impose specific interpretations ofhistory on society, for example, by promoting the idea of a “genocide of the Belarusianpeople”.1 This idea is promoted in school education, museum and exhibition activities,and the media. The regime’s ideologists are also trying to master such platforms asYouTube, posting propaganda materials there and encouraging the population to com-ment on them. My colleague Gundula Pohl, hinting at the fact that the regime actuallyavoids all kinds of participation, has aptly and ironically called this phenomenon “partic-ipatory propaganda” (Pohl 2023).This approach,well known from the USSR, is achieved,for instance, by filming and releasing propaganda fiction films about life in interwarBelarus like On the Other Side (Na drugom beregu, 2023) with funds from the state budget,ensuring box office income with the help of administrative resources. Newly erectedplaces of memory connected with the contradictory sides of history of WorldWar II aredestroyed in the public space for example,memorial signs or the graves of the membersof the Armia Krajowa (“Home Army”) are destroyed. This anti-Nazi Polish resistancemovement, which during German occupation operated within the borders of Poland,which in 1939 included Western Belarus, was already disparaged during Soviet times,because given its anti-Bolshevik orientation it did not collaborate with the Soviets.Nowadays, this negative attitude to the Armia Krajowa is renewed by the ruling regimefor its anti-Western and anti-Polish propaganda.Thus, within the last three years of the aggressive official memory policy everythingthat characterised ‘public history’ so far has been destroyed – all the narratives whichallowed it within the public space to see the variability of Belarus’ history from the per-spective of different actors and communities. Because, in the last 10–15 years the ap-propriations of history including the Holocaust, women’s history, local history, historyof different ethnic groups (Tatars, Roma, etc.), queer history or urban landscape studiesfrom the perspective of forgotten “places of memory” have become much more differ-entiated than before. If in the early 1990s, when the construction of a national narrativebegan, we spoke mostly about the dominant cultural group, the Belarusians, now, forexample,we speak about the Jewish culturewithin Belarus of the 20th century. A Belaru-sian-Jewish festival has started to be held, translations of Jewish writers of the interwarperiod are published, including repressed ones, such as Moishe Kulbak (1896–1937). Allthis has been made possible not only by civil society activists and historical initiatives,but also by the fact that state officials occasionally cooperated. Now all this pluralism isclearly under threat.1 In 2022 the law “On the Genocide of the Belarusian People” was adopted, which defines genocideas “systematic physical destruction” of “Soviet citizens” living in 1941–1951 in Belarus committedby “Nazi criminals and their accomplices”. This definition ignores the Stalinist repressions and thehistory of 1939–1941, and blurs the memory of the Holocaust.296 Appropriating History: EpilogueHow does this conflict over ‘public history’ in Belarus relate to popular culture? In particularamong the post-Soviet Eastern European states the Soviet past has become a widespread topic alsoin popular culture formats, beginning from tabloids and social media to popular songs, music orcomics.Would you confirm such a boomalso for the Belarusian case and do you see differences to thecultures of remembrance inneighbouring countries like theBaltic states, Poland,Ukraine orRussia?Theauthoritarian regimeestablished inBelarus in themid-1990s relied exclusively on theSoviet experience in the first years of its existence.This created a different dynamic, forexample, for the memory of the Soviet or the use of references to ‘the Soviet’ in popularculture. The lack of critical reflection on the recent past led to the fact that throughoutthe whole of society tropes of Soviet culture, elements of the former everyday life wereincorporated into the new,westernised reality and culture, forming bizarre collages.Wesee such collages in the visual language of urban space,where fast food advertising signsoverlap with Soviet mosaics and metaphorical sculpture monuments to the proletariat,in the combination ofmodern digital technologies with the language of 1930s-1970s pro-paganda in statemedia,or the attempts to combine theBologna educational systemwithold, barely reformed Soviet university education.In Belarus, there was no symbolic break with the Soviet past also on a political level,because the initial democratic reforms were replaced already in the second half of the1990s by authoritarian rule and a re-Sovietisation of politics and, subsequently, by thereestablishment and instrumentalisation of a Soviet memory and history policy on thepart of the ruling regime since the early-mid 2000s. However, I do not share the thesisthat Belarus remains ‘Soviet’, we see a more complex configuration. The state violenceof the years 2020 to 2023 in Belarus is often compared to the repressions of the Stalinistperiod, but even here I believe we should see the uniqueness of what is happening.We did not pass decommunization laws like in Ukraine in 2014–2015. There was nosuch radical distancing from the Soviet experience as in the Baltic states immediately af-ter the collapse of the USSR and directly before it, when the concept of two ‘occupations’–Soviet andNazi–appeared.Also, inneighbouringPoland theSoviet periodwas shorterand different and accordingly is remembered in a differentway. In neighbouring Russia,Soviet history was also transformed in a very specific way. Here a peculiar hybridisationof Soviet history with the history of the Russian Empire took place, although everythingthat happened after 1917 was once denoted by Soviet propagandists as the complete op-posite of the imperial history of Russia before the October Revolution.Belarus is still connected with post-communist Russia through a common space ofinformation – Russian-language Russian media (newspapers, radio, television) broad-cast the Russian agenda and there is also a transfer of Russian (post-Soviet) culture.For some time, the ‘Soviet past’ in Belarus played a similar role as in Russia – in themid-1990s, both in Russia and Belarus there was the first strong wave of nostalgia, sym-bolised by the TV musical shows Old Songs about the Main Things (Starye pesni o glavnom,1995–1998), offering a kind of remake of Soviet ‘popular’ culture in new conditions.Perhaps, we can say that this wave of nostalgia, on the one hand, stressed a certain crisisof cultural production (the newwesternised culture could not displace the former Sovietcultural codes in any way), on the other hand, it functioned as a kind of reconciliationwith the past after the political mobilisation of the perestroika era and the collapse ofAliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 297the USSR, one could even say, it enabled a certain ‘depoliticisation’ of this past and of theattitude to it.Later on, nostalgia about the Soviet, as well as critical reflection about Soviet historyfolloweddifferent dynamics inRussia andBelarus.Thiswas due to the diverging politicalcontext, market transformation of the economy, etc. In Belarus, the process of defrag-mentation of the Soviet experiencewasmuch slower, and, I think, this slow and, to someextent, more ‘natural’ gradual death of Soviet cultural forms due to generational changeand globalisation processes created certain opportunities for society and researchers.I rather tend to believe that in Belarus the Soviet ‘outlived’ and outlives itself in arather peculiar way, not by means of radical negation, but rather, as one scholar oncenoted, by gradually establishing the hegemony of the subject over the discourse itself,which no longer evokes feelings of oppression but became a subject for reconfiguration.This confident approach to the past is supported by such details as the rather low preva-lence of representations of nostalgia that reproduce ‘the Soviet’ as an everyday living con-dition.The first signs of such a new approach to nostalgia, already quite far from the desireto restore the USSR, can be observed in Belarus around the turn of the 2000s-2010s.Thismanifested itself in the opening of cafes or bars with a ‘Soviet atmosphere’. One of thefirst cafes in this style was the “Tovarishch café” (“Comrade café”) in Minsk, placed in thebasement of the 1950s building of the Palace of Culture of Veterans, which retained the‘classical’ pretensions of Stalinist architecture, which was followed by attempts to cre-ate such cafes also in some other cities. However, these were mostly designed more fortourists and did not turn into particularly successful or iconic projects.By the end of the 2010s, the ‘Soviet’ was being appropriated and digested by hipsterculture.Media, for instance, reported about the opening of a brow-bar (beauty salon foreyebrows) called Brezhnev or a barbershop with the name Chekist. The opening of thelatter caused a political scandal and raised ethical questions about the ‘consumption’ ofhistory. Similar reactions were provoked by the partial restoration and inauguration in2005 of the so-called Stalin Line, a barrier of defensive military installations built in the1930s on the western border of the USSR near Minsk. Despite the protests of a part ofsociety, the Stalin Line memorial near Minsk, exploiting narratives about the Great Pa-triotic War, turned eventually into a commercial attraction for tourists.Similar to the Soviet narrative but much earlier, the new ‘national’ narrative beganto be promoted already in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s and quickly be-came part of popular culture. Specific representations of national history even becameforms of kitsch.This was also due to the fact that the ‘national’ was already present in theculture of the late Soviet era. Rock scene, art, literature, academic environment – every-where there were people, activists promoting ‘Belarusianness’. For example, in 1990, thePahonia association was founded within the state Union of Artists, which was closed in2023 for political reasons.The project of ‘national revival’ became part of the public dis-course in the late 1980s – mid-1990s, in the course of the political struggle of that time.Of course, this was also visible in the field of popular culture. References to the nationalhistory of the pre-Soviet period were also used by state structures in attempts to cre-ate commercial cinema. For example, the 2003 film Anastasia Slutskaya tells the story ofevents that took place in the early 16th century, when the lands of the Grand Duchy of298 Appropriating History: EpilogueLithuania were attacked by Tatars, and the defence of one of the towns, Slutsk, was ledby the wife of the dead prince, Anastasia.However, different versions of collective national identity competed in the publicspace, including references to different historical narratives and theuse of theRussian orBelarusian language.The state actually discriminated against speakers of the Belarusianlanguage despite the adopted laws to preserve it, and this all the time influenced addi-tionally the dynamics and political meanings of cultural phenomena. For example, afteranother dispersal of protests in December 2010, many activists came to the conclusionthat public politics was impossible, but it was possible to shift some of the activity intothe sphere of cultural projects.This activity coincided with digitalisation and the acceleration of Belarus’ inclusionin a more global context. The processes of marketisation of the economy also played acertain role. In the period of 2013–2019, commercially successful projects in the Belaru-sian language appeared, which were no longer situated solely in the field of indepen-dent culture and activism and promoted the ‘national idea’ in new ways, for example,through the production of clothing brands referring to Belarusian history and identity.In part, one can speak of a specific ‘commodification’ of Belarusianness. But in timesof a relative ‘liberalisation’ of the regime the very same projects and activists also triedto influence the political agenda, and were the organisers of events like the 2018 cele-bration of the centenary of the formation of the non-Soviet Belarusian People’s Republic(BNR). DuringWorldWar I, when the German imperial troops occupied the territory ofBelarus, then part of the Russian Empire, in March 1918, representatives of the Belaru-sian national movement proclaimed the BNR,which existed until December 1918. In theUSSR, the history of the BNR was not recognised, and in the historical narrative underLukashenko’s regime, the BNR was also not considered a state for a long time, until thischanged around the year 2018.What does this ‘commodification’ of history, in which there are various commercial and state ap-propriations of the past, mean for the conflict between the authoritarian regime and the oppositionmovements?What role does theGreat PatrioticWar, but also the short-livedBelarusianPeople’s Re-public of 1918 or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania play in these controversies? To what extent is thisconflict over competing images of history also played out in popular culture andmass culture?The conflict you are talking about was rather characteristic for the culture of remem-brance inBelarus in themid-1990s and early 2000s.This splitwas formed and intensifiedafter Lukashenko came to power and a certain re-Sovietisation of the historical narrativein officialmemory policy took place.Over the last ten tofifteen years at least,we can see agradual convergence of twonarratives– the official narrative oriented towards the Sovietpast and thememoryof theGreatPatrioticWarwith the competingnarrative referring tothe history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (13th-16th centuries), the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth (16th-18th centuries), and the short-lived Belarusian People’s Republicin 1918.The sociologist Aliaksei Lastoŭski, who describes this merging of the two narratives,when official historians and regime ideologists even appropriated the oppositional nar-Aliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 299rative, as a process of convergence and proposes the thesis that in Belarus, finally, anunderstanding of a “long genealogy of statehood”was established. According to this newgenealogy history is no longer limited only to the Soviet period, a phenomenon which istypical for nation-building and the construction of the national narrative in Eastern Eu-rope (Lastouski 2019). This merging of narratives accelerated after Russia’s annexationof Crimea, when Lukashenko tried to balance between Russia and the European Union,which also affected the official politics of remembrance.Even now, when Lukashenko practically gave up the country’s independence in ex-change for Russia’s support during the events of 2020, this tendency of building a “longgenealogy” of the history of Belarus persists. But it can also be said that this narrativeminimises critical reflection on the relationship between Russia and Belarus during theSoviet period; it ismore a history of state power and institutions than ahistory of society,its social groups, resistance and divergent behaviour.One of the goals of this narrative isto legitimise the authoritarian institutions of power in Belarus. Perhaps, we can say thatthe split of the memory culture of the mid-1990s was transformed into a new phase inwhich the conflict has becomemore complex.To what extent this merging of the two national narratives will have an impact onpopular culture in the future is difficult to say. But in the 30 years since the early 1990s,references to the history of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Com-monwealth, and the BNRhave becomemore extensive and stable, also because these ref-erences to ‘Europeanness’ underline the non-Russian context. However, now the regimeis trying to reverse this process.But if popular culture is defined as a specific way of appropriating some cultural products, formats,topics or symbols, which gains a certain popularity among people, as we do in our book, canwe thenspeakat all about ‘popular culture’withinBelarus today,where the state aims to control all channelsof public communication and representation?Wecan still talk about ‘popular culture’ in Belarus today, if only because there is no longeran iron curtain, there is YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media. Until 2022when the sanctions started to take effect, film distribution worked without interrup-tions, Hollywood blockbusters were shown, and so on. All cultural industries were func-tioning.However, all this coexisted alongside two phenomena– the renewed old author-itarian aesthetics and also attempts to censor and ban this or that cultural product forpolitical reasons. Also important in the cultural field were the lines of division aroundthe political struggle which took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s and were mainlyconcentrated on the problem of language use and the support for a ‘Belarusianisation’of national culture. Today we can talk about another problem – the problem of forcedemigration after 2020, and the emergence of new lines of divisionwithin society – thosewho left and those who stayed.But authoritarianism in Belarus has also produced its own aesthetics, which claimsto become part of popular culture – it is not only about mass spectacles inherited fromtheUSSR associatedwith state holidays and parades, or official festivals, such as the Sla-vianski Bazaar, a music festival that has been held since 1992, in which musicians from300 Appropriating History: EpilogueBelarus, Russia, and Ukraine have participated. Often attended by Lukashenko and offi-cials from Russia, the festival is seen as a political event, not just a cultural one. In 2022,representatives of Ukraine refused to participate in the festival. But also in literature orpropagandacinemawecanof coursefind this authoritarianaesthetic,whichon the vergeof thrashor kitschpresents history in apseudo-democraticmanner for ‘ordinary people’.We can observe here a kind of cultural populism thatmirrors authoritarian political pop-ulism. Yet, authoritarian aesthetics has so far not matured to a specific style in Belarus.Authoritarianism in the period of its liberalisation also tried to appropriate popularculture inorder todemonstrate its own ‘achievements’– like in sport–outside and insideBelarus.Thus, partly due to personal interference by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the ideolo-gists of the regime participated for some time in the local selection of contestants for theEurovision Song Contest. Andwinning places at the children’s Eurovision or adult Euro-vision were regarded as almost a political success; they were even mentioned in the sec-tions of school history textbooks dedicated to culture. A similar phenomenon can also beobserved in thefilm industry.On theonehand, the state retains control overfilmproduc-tion (Belarusfilm studio) and finances some obviously ideological projects, on the otherhand, there are sporadic statements about the need to create commercially successfulproducts.In the late USSR there was an official culture committed to Socialist realism with itsinstitutions of censorship and control, and there was an underground culture, whichdeveloped according to its own logic, often staying outside the public space. Nowadaysauthoritarian control over culture, which has been reestablished in Belarus since themid-1990s, in a way resumes this late Soviet situation: there are so-called ‘black lists’ ofrepresentatives of other cultural spheres (musicians, artists,writers, etc.) who for politi-cal reasons are not allowed to perform in public in statemedia or at various event venuesand clubs. This situation worsened drastically after the mass protests of 2020, when allblacklists were updated. Some representatives of the art scene, theatre, literature, etc.were forced to emigrate.Thosewho participated in the protests but stayed in the countrywere mostly dismissed from cultural institutions, the absolute majority of which arestate-owned. Some independent cultural institutions were closed and destroyed, suchas the Ў Gallery in Minsk which had a long history or a number of creative spaces andindependent galleries in other cities of Belarus like in Brest or Hrodna.Another important aspect is the language in which this or that cultural product ismade. Until the mid-1990s a policy of ‘Belarusianisation’ dominated the cultural sphere.In 1995 this was stopped, and although it was prohibited by law, those who spoke Belaru-sian were discriminated against, for example, when educational programmes in it weresignificantly reduced. Only in the independent culture scene did Belarusian continue toprevail,andpeople started todescribe this increasingly isolateduseof theBelarusian lan-guage metaphorically as existence in a ‘ghetto’ because authoritarian aesthetics mainlyrepresented itself in Russian, also in popular culture.However, in the 2010s this whole configuration started to change slowly. We see theprofessionalisation of independent culture that I already mentioned, which uses newways of marketing and makes Belarusian more popular. Belarusian was increasinglyused for advertising to mark distinctive styles or acquire symbolic value. Some authorstried to work for the Russian-speaking market as well, but at the same time insisted onAliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 301their belonging to an independent Belarusian culture. Even Russian-language mediastarted to use Belarusian expressions. The Russian-language sector was still larger interms of consumption, but the more exciting things seemed to happen in the sectorof Belarusian language culture, a tendency that nowadays has practically been stoppedinside Belarus.Some people left Belarus after 2020 and are trying to make cultural products andbuild upnew institutions outside the countrywithin a completely different cultural envi-ronment.These works of new emigrants aremade in the Belarusian language and there,of course, the question arises of how towork in a commercially successfulway andof howto attract the target audience.Ifwe take this tension into consideration: on the one hand, the digitalisation andprofessionalisationof cultural production in the last decade, on the other, the massive emigration since 2020: Are thereany particular historical events, figures ormotifs from the Soviet past that play a special role for ap-propriating, rewriting or deconstructing history by certain state actors or independent institutions?Howwould you assess, for instance, the role of the Soviet-Belarusian partisan in the field of popularculture? Are there other figures that could compete with him?Late Soviet and post-Soviet official projects of collective identity in Belarus were builtlargely on the memory of the Great Patriotic War. Representations of this subject inpopular culture, media, education system, etc. fulfilled an important political role. Themetaphor of the “partisan republic”, images of ‘partisans’ in particular, as described byMichael E. Urban (2008) and Simon Lewis (2017), were not only a successful project tocombine ‘national content’ with an overall Soviet identity, but also represented a colonialconstruct, imposing a new identity and also acting as a defence against the trauma ofthe actual war. In the 1990s – 2010s in Belarus, one can observe a specific dynamic ofrememberingWorldWar II and its functioning in the public sphere: the ‘nationalisation’of the Soviet discourse of remembrance by the authoritarian regime led to a certaingamification of war images in popular culture and at the same time to the emergence ofvarious counter-narratives and images in social media and publishing projects.The mass protests against Lukashenko’s regime in 2020 and the beginning of Rus-sia’s war in Ukraine in 2022 reinforced the reframing ofWorldWar II by different actors.Inside Belarus, on the part of the repressive regime, the idea of a genocide of the Be-larusian people perpetrated by the Germans is instrumentalised, references to Nazismand fascism aremanipulated,memorials of the Armia Krajowa are physically destroyed,and critical analyses of World War II are criminalised. Instead, a certain militarisationof history and a synchronisation of propaganda in Belarus and Russia can be observed.Because of this dynamic, I think thewidespread image of the Soviet partisan has alsochanged in popular culture. For example, one of Artur Klinaŭ’s most famous projects, anart magazine and publishing project in Belarus was named PARTizan, but at the sametime there existed also an edition in this series called “Partizanka”which was an attemptto review the art field from a feminist perspective. And also during the 2020 protests,a hacker group called Cyber Partisans emerged that paralysed government websites. All302 Appropriating History: Epiloguethese new appropriations of the partisan figure vary widely from the Soviet discourse onthe topic.Is there a competing figure to the partisan in popular culture today? I would say thatfor quite a long time the image of Kastus Kalinoŭski, one of the leaders of the anti-Rus-sian uprising of 1863–1864 in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, has beenquite popular. A programme for students and teachers repressed in Belarus was namedafter him, the reburial of the remains of Kalinowski and other rebels in Vilnius in 2019became an important event. After the protests of 2020 and the beginning of the warin Ukraine a Kalinowski regiment was formed by Belarusians, fighting on the side ofUkraine. By the way, official Russian historians-propagandists like Aleksandr Diukovtried todeconstruct this popularBelarusian imageof him for quite a long time, focussingon his biography and personal views (Diukov 2021).Other images of the Soviet (or anti-Soviet) couldn’t compete so far. Pre-war historyfor many is the history of Stalinist repressions. The history of such absolute evil is forinstance depicted in the comic strip The Last Vampire (Poslednii vampir, 2019) by AndreiSkurko and Filipp Kokosha, which deals with the late Stalinist era in Belarus and wasprinted in the popular history magazine Nasha istoriia (Our History). Military history isalso actively exploited by the authoritarian regime,whereas post-war history is still onlybeginning to be actively discussed. One could even say that there is almost an emptyspace between 1945 and the 1986 disaster in Chernobyl with regard to the representationof post-war Soviet Belarusian history in mass culture.Recently the TV series For Half an Hour to Spring (Za polchasa do vesny, 2022), whichtells the history of the most successful musical group in Soviet Belarus,Pesniary, was re-leased. Its leader,UladzimirMuliavin, started his career in Soviet Belarus in 1963, havingmoved from the Russian part of the USSR.The Pesniary ensemble performed Belarusianfolk songs in modern arrangements and rock compositions which had huge success inthe 1970s-1980s.The series caused controversial reactions andwas suddenly subjected tounexpected political censorship because one actor took part in the 2020 protests againstLukashenko’s regime who was therefore removed from a number of scenes.In my opinion, the place Lukashenko’s image occupies in mass culture is also inter-esting.Hewas the subject of anecdotes, caricatures, satire.Within the authoritarian cul-ture, a specific cult of Lukashenko’s personality even began to form. The 2020 protestsstrongly deconstructed this authoritarian image of the ‘leader’.This aspect of a certain ‘personality cult’ around Lukashenko, even in satirical and critical popularculture, is interesting. Because it points to the fact that popular culture always works very stronglywith emotions, channelling hatred and anger, but also longings and empathy, providing symbolicform and stories for feelings. How is this ‘emotionalised’ relationship with history being dealt withofficially these days?Does this also affect the role and function of historymuseumsand (school) text-books in Belarus today? Or is there a specific aesthetics or mode of representation that differs fromglobal developments? Are there frictions and diversions within this discourse and imaginary?More than twelve years ago,TatsianaOstrovskaya’sfirst studyonschool history textbooksin Belarus was published,which analysed how they had been rewritten three times sinceAliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 303independence due to political changes (Ostrovskaya 2010).By todaywe can already speakabout a long “tradition” of textbook rewriting and instrumentalisation of history in in-dependent Belarus under the authoritarian regime. After the mass protests of 2020, anew stage of this rewriting has come. Among the authors of textbooks we find not onlyhistorians and methodologists from the National Institute of Education, but also rep-resentatives from state authorities and the General Prosecutor’s Office. This concerns,first of all, textbooks for pupils of all ages about the “genocide of the Belarusian people”,in which the contemporary protesters are accused of links with the legacy of the Nazicollaborators during World War II. We can observe here a process of ‘securitisation’ ofhistory politics – control over interpretations of the past becomes the main task of “se-curity” for the regime.The school system of historical education and museums in Belarus are financedand controlled by the state. School teachers, including history teachers, are appointedas members of election commissions, and many of them, either under duress or con-sciously, become participants of political manipulations and falsifications. Using schoolbuildings for polling stations and teachers for election commissions, is still a Soviet tra-dition. But we have to bear inmind that history textbooks used by teachers and childrenare the same throughout the whole country and are compulsory.The curriculum as wellas lists of additional, extracurricular literature on history have to be approved by theMinistry of Education. Of course, there are always exceptions and people who have thecourage to teach critical thinking, but this is not the rule and the goal of this system isoriented towards political loyalty.This systematic monitoring and controlling of all aspects of the past is not a uniqueBelarusian phenomenon, also in Russia we can observe such an “affective managementof history” (Oushakine 2013) to emotionally connect new generations to a national col-lective, but in Belarus this practice has its own peculiarities. Back in 2010, the Russian-Belarusian film The Brest Fortress (Brestskaia krepost’, also known as Fortress of War) wasreleased in mass distribution, in which naturalistic, even hyperrealistic scenes of Nazicrimes ensured an instant emotional connection to the lived experience of the pastevents in June 1941 shortly after the German invasion. The film’s distribution was quitesuccessful, but at the same time, the way of representing the historical events of theBrest Fortress defence against the Nazi aggressors followed the typical Soviet narrativethat has been established since the late 1950s. In fact, the film updated this construct ofdistorted memory, which omitted many historical circumstances, for new generations.As it seems tome, in today’s Belarus, the emotionalmodes of connecting to the past,if we are talking about the official politics of memory, are as distanced as possible fromany critical reflection. In the case of the filmThe Brest Fortress this can be somehow ex-plained by the logic of mass cinema and its particular artistic demands, such an excusehowever does not work if we speak about school history textbooks or museum exhibi-tions. In the latest editions of school textbooks, we find for instance photos of excava-tions of the remains of Nazi genocide victims, but the corresponding descriptions of thecrimes are not aimed at working ‘with sensitive topics’, but propaganda. It’s ‘affectivemechanism’ aims not at explaining the past but at legitimising the present.There is no Holocaust Museum in Belarus, but a special type of various museums,which are dedicated to different groups of victims, to themechanisms of genocidal prac-304 Appropriating History: Epiloguetices, to trauma, to the problem of political responsibility for history. Large museumprojects, such as the Museum of Modern Belarusian Statehood, which was inauguratedin 2011, or the newMuseumof theGreat PatrioticWar,which opened in 2014with the re-locationof part of the exhibition, ratherwork as obviouspolitical and ideological projectsthat use modern equipment, but they themselves are archaic in a certain sense, as theirtask is not to act as independent institutions that stimulate debates about memory andhistory, but to represent quite specific official interpretations of historical events.Museums in Belarus are not autonomous and independent in their activity. But inthe 1990s, part of the state museums’ exhibitions changed, they became more modern,topical, and until recently, museums employed people who tried to promote some newideaswhichwere even partly implemented during the period of political liberalisation in2015–2019.The last 10 years were a time when some museums began to work orientated on theprinciples of participatorymuseums, but aftermass dismissals ofmuseumworkerswhoparticipated in the 2020 protests or allowed this freedom, the situation has worsened,political control and censorship of exhibitions leave almost no opportunity to act cre-atively. Outside Belarus today we see attempts to create independent museum institu-tions. Such as, for example, the Museum of Free Belarus in Warsaw, which emerged af-ter 2020 and is focused on collecting documents and artefacts of the protest movement.However, there is aproblemof identity of such institutions–forwhomare they intended:for Belarusians inside Belarus, for Poles, for those Belarusians who emigrated?Let us come back to the more general questions that concern us in our volume. One thesis is thatthe global trends in popular culture with regard to the appropriation of history find a very specificform within the post-Soviet condition of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. This is shaped in particularby a widespread distance or scepticism to official state-supported representations of history and itsideology, inherited from the distance to the uniformMarxist-Socialist hegemonic history narrative.Would you confirm this thesis for the Belarusian case?I would rather agree with this thesis than oppose it. Perhaps, I will supplement it a little,looking from the Belarusian context. The collapse of Soviet Marxism (if we speak aboutBelarusian historiography) does not coincide with 1991, it is a slower process, the lan-guage of many researchers and their optics are often still influenced by the old method-ological habits. But in general, yes, distrust in the public sphere towards the way histor-ical knowledge was and is produced in Belarus exists, and it is connected with the long-lasting manipulations of the Soviet period. Even though historians once started theirstruggle for a national narrative. This distrust is also reinforced by the participation ofsome historians in the creation, promotion and legitimisation of propaganda narrativesof Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime.It is important, perhaps, to think about the implications of this scepticism. On theone hand, we see the coexistence in the public sphere of both the professional work ofhistorians and its reception by a broader audience, along with the entire different spec-trumof popular representations of history,which include conspiracy narratives,more orlessmarginal alternative versionsof history andall kindsofmythologies andpropagandaAliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 305stories, but also the widespread publication of various forms of ‘folk-history’, fulfillingthe mass demand for books dealing with national identity. In this context we see alsohow non-fiction, such as Svetlana Alexievich’s books on the Soviet past, which are notdocumentary studies, play the role of ‘sources’ on Soviet history for mass readers.On the other hand, I have a hypothesis,which I amnow trying to confirmor refute inmyownresearch, that in the caseofBelarus,but also inabroader context of authoritarianregimes in general we can still speak about peculiar manifestations of ‘citizen science’and the phenomenon of ‘shared historical authority’. I mean with this the phenomenonthat when public, civil pressure is exerted on the authorities and academic institutions,many nevertheless feel obliged to work honestly, to conform to standards, to refuse themanipulation and instrumentalisation of scholarship.In this sense, the struggle for the memory of the victims of Stalinist repressions inBelarus, which started in the late 1980s, or the political and environmentalist struggleafter the Chernobyl accident in 1986, the consequences of which were silenced – all thisshows how themechanisms of power and knowledge function in the Belarusian context,how people try to re-establish ‘science’ in terms of ethics, responsibility, etc. This is, ofcourse, a very contested, very slow process, and often does not say anything good aboutscience itself, but it is still worthy of attention. In the context of our conversation, it alsomeans that popular culture in Belarus, public history outside the academy, can also beanalysed from this perspective. Scepticism towardsmanipulation does not mean reject-ing the notion of history as a science.But is therenotanotheraspect to this conflict?Canweseehere–as inmanyotherpost-Socialist states– also a sort of longing for constructing one’s own ‘national history’ which is promoted by state in-stitutions but also findswide resonance in the population and especially among nationalist groups.Howwould you describe this constellation with regard to the extremely polarised political situationin Belarus?Belarus has its own trajectory here, if we talk about the construction of the national nar-rative and collective identity after the collapse of the USSR.Researchers tried to define itin variousways,mostly pointing to a kind of ‘lack’ of national identity bothwithin the so-ciety and among the politicians who came to power in themid-1990s. Or by labelling theexistence of several collective identity projects at the same time. The picture of historyand identity from below is quite diverse.Such a ‘search for identity’ (and for legitimacy) is also characteristic of the authori-tarian regime: at some point in time, references and reliance on Russian support wereless, the regime even used references to Europeanness, and in 2015–2019, some mediaexperts announced a ‘soft Belarusification’ and that in this way the historical narrativesof the political oppositionwere about to becomemainstream.Thiswas because, as I havealreadymentioned, in 2018 the authorities gave permission to celebrate the centenary ofthe non-Soviet version of Belarus’s statehood – the Belarusian People’s Republic. And inthe same year, an official monument to the victims of Stalinist repressions was finallyerected near Minsk, in Kurapaty.306 Appropriating History: EpilogueSince 2020, this trend towards a soft Belarusification seems to be over.The authori-tarian regime and other groups, including those with a nationalist agenda, have differ-ent political resources.At themoment, the Lukashenko regime controls the public space,supports Russia’s war in Ukraine, and these are all signs that the historical narrative willbe minimally ‘national’, at least within official history policy.Could you elaborate on this highly intriguing aspect of how the ‘search for identity’ penetrates themainstreamwithin an authoritarian regime with a concrete example?As an example, I would like to talk about a case study from 2015. In Minsk, on 7 Novem-ber the most important Soviet holiday, October Revolution Day, which is still celebratedinBelarus, the opening of the Leningrad shopping centre took place on Lenin Street.Thisstreet adjoinsKastrychnitskaia vulitsa/Street, thegentrificationofwhichquicklybecamean example of new processes in Belarus, where offices, creative spaces, cafes opened in-side old Soviet factory buildings, etc. In 2014, the same street started hosting a streetart festival with the participation of foreign artists called Brasil Street, thus making thestreet a hangout for the city’s flaneurs.When the Leningrad shopping centre was opened, they invited an actor portrayingthe leader of the world proletariat Vladimir Lenin, hung a Soviet flag, portraits of Stalin,and arranged a ‘solemn meeting’. On 9 November the BBC website published an article“Soviet-themed shopping centre opens in Minsk”, which ironically commented on theopening (BBCmonitoring 2015).Indeed, the opening of such a private enterprise was impossible in Soviet Belarus,just as it is ironic that “Soviet marketing” is used to promote capitalist values.The reac-tion to this Soviet opening in themedia and social networkswas quite negative, and thenexpert interviews were published, which criticise this ‘Sovietisation’ of brands and nos-talgia in Belarus. However, a number of brands have remained from the Soviet era, butgenerally references to the Soviet era do not play a big role in themarket, on the contrary,there is a process of ‘Belarusification’ of names, replacing themwith local or Belarusian-language names that also refer to history. From all this history we can only draw the con-clusion about how interestingly and asynchronously different historical narratives arecombined in contemporary Belarus, but also notice that we are moving away from theSoviet past.To conclude, let us move on from this peculiar conflation of a ‘Belarusification’ of history and a si-multaneous ‘Sovietisation’ of contemporary consumer goods to amore general question.Howwouldyou describe this partly antagonistic condition in a broader global context?Where are the commontrends, where do you see disruptions and exceptions?How important is history nowadays for politi-cal developments, be it democratic upheavals or state repression? How do you envisage the develop-ment of public history and its appropriations in popular culture for the near future?Such representations of the Soviet past in the Belarusian context are to some extent inline with global trends. Together with other countries in the eastern part of Europe, inAliaksei Bratachkin: Public History, Popular Culture 307the late 1980s-early 1990s we went through a period of active political mobilisation andactive criticism of the Soviet and state socialist experience.We then faced different typesof nostalgia about the Soviet, which can be “reflexive” or “restorative”, as Svetlana Boymput it (2001).Then we saw a process of defragmentation of the Soviet and its “commod-ification”, turning it into a material for “consuming history”, as Jerome De Groot writes(Groot 2015). Eventually, attempts at themuseification of the Soviet began, although thisprocesswas very slow inBelarus,andanumberof exhibitionprojects tookplace, showingand displaying Soviet things, posters, and everyday life.Of course, the specificity of Belarus is the preservation of authoritarianism and, dueto this, the absence of open and large reflection about the Soviet period with clear po-litical decisions, also on the societal level. But, perhaps, this gave a chance for greaterpreservation of the Soviet material heritage, which, from a distance, can now be treateddifferently than in the early 1990s. Also, the term “Soviet” still evokes associations withstate violence, the responsibility for which has not been fully formalised and discussed.Ifwe talk about the future,muchdependsonwhether andhowour societywill be ableto get out of authoritarianism. For example,will the Soviet inmass perception be associ-ated with its continuation in the form of Lukashenko’s regime and intensively destroyed(for example, at the level of monuments, is it possible that we will repeat the Ukrainiandecommunisation, etc.) or will there be some other configuration? In any case, if we talkabout public history in Belarus in the future, we should, first of all, talk about a newdemocratisation of the public sphere and an open dialogue about history.Theconversation byAliaksei BratachkinwithNinaWeller andMatthias Schwartz took place inDe-cember 2023.FilmographyAnastasiia Slutskaia (Anastasiya Slutskaya), dir. Yuri Yelkhov, Belarus 2003.The Brest Fortress [also known as Fortress of War] (Brestskaia krepost’), dir. Aleksandr Kott,Russia/Belarus 2010.ForHalf anHour to Spring (Zapolchasa do vesny), dir. StepanKorshunov et al., Belarus 2022.Old Songs about the Main Things (Starye pesni o glavnom), dir. Leonid Parfёnov/KonstantinĖrnst, Russia 1995–1998.OntheOtherSide (Nadrugomberegu /Nadrugimberagu),dir.AndreyKhrulyov,Belarus 2023.ReferencesBBC monitoring (2015): Belarus: Soviet-Themed Shopping Centre Opens in Minsk, 9November 2015 (https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-34768381)[20 December 2023].Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic.308 Appropriating History: EpilogueDiukov, Aleksandr R. (2021): Neizvestnyi Kalinovskii. Propaganda nenavisti i povstanch-eskii terror na belorusskikh zemliakh, 1862–1864 gg., Moskva: Fond “Istoricheskaiapamiat’”.Groot, Jerome de (2015): Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fic-tions, London/New York: Taylor & Francis Ltd.Lastouski, Aliaksei (2019): “Return of the ‘Long Genealogy’ to School Textbooks on theHistory of Belarus.” In: Ideology and Politics Journal 2/13, pp. 185–197.Lewis, Simon (2017): “The Partisan Republic: Colonial Myths and Memory Wars inBelarus.” In: Fedor, Julie/Kangaspuro, Markku/Lassila, Jussi/Zhurzhenko, Tatiana(eds.):War andMemory inRussia,Ukraine andBelarus,NewYork: PalgraveMacmil-lan.Ostrovskaia, Tat’iana (2010): “Genealogiia istoriccheskoi pamiati belorusov v konteksteobrasovatelnykh praktik.” In: Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies [biss], 20 Oc-tober 2010 (https://belinstitute.com/be/article/genealogiya-istoricheskoy-pamyati-belorusov-v-kontekste-obrazovatelnykh-praktik) [20 December 2023].Oushakine, Serguei (2013): “Remembering In Public: On The Affective Management OfHistory:” In: Ab Imperio 1, pp. 269–302.Pohl, Gundula (2023): “Participatory Propaganda? The YouTube Project ‘Dialogue withthe Prosecutor’ as a History-Political Practice in Belarus.” Report [not published] onWorkshop “A Short History of Digital Publics at War” 1–3 May 2023 in Berlin, organ-ised by FernUni Hagen.Urban,Michael E. (2008): An Algebra of Soviet Power. Urban An Algebra of Soviet Power.Elite Circulation in the Belorussian Republic 1966- 86, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.AppendixAcknowledgmentsThe idea of this book goes back to the workshop ‘History goes Pop?’ On the Popularization ofthe Past in Eastern European Cultures, which was organised by the editors at the EuropeanUniversity Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) from 10–12 December 2019 in cooperation withthe Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) as part of the BMBF researchproject “Designing the Past. Imagined History, Fiction and Memory in the Belarusian,Russian and Ukrainian Cultures”, headed by NinaWeller.Many thanks go to the workshop participants in 2019 for the inspiring discussionsand to all authors who contributed to this book. We would like to thank the EuropeanUniversity Viadrina and the ZfL for the organisational support and in particular theGerman Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), as part of the programme“Kleine Fächer – Große Potentiale”, as well as the Leibniz Collaborative Excellencefunding programme and the Leibniz Open Access Monograph Publishing Fund for thefinancial support. We are grateful to Miriam Galley from transcript publishers for theirsupport, patience and companionship throughout the lengthy publication process. Wewould like to thank Roman Boichuk and Yaroslava Hryhorchuk for their support inorganising the workshop, Charlotte Bull andMargarita Schäfer for the language editingand Katharina Kelbler for the formal editing of the whole volume.Since then, the world and Europe have changed drastically: The corona pandemic,the protests and repressions in Belarus against critics of the regime, the Russian inva-sion of Ukraine and the ongoing war, and the authoritarian legislation in Russia againstopponents of the war affected also the lives andworks of the authors of this volume sub-stantially.Ukrainian colleagues had to fleeRussian bombings andwar crimes, colleaguesfrom Belarus and Russia emigrated because of repressions, while some stayed in theirhome countries sometimes under extremely challenging conditions.We are thus all thehappier thatmost of the invited authors were able to contribute to the volume.However,due to the difficult personal situation of repression, war, flight and exile some had to re-sign, so the volume shows some imbalances in the representation of the various formatsand forms of popular culture within the three countries. In this way, the book is also adocument of the period of upheaval before and after the outbreak of full-scale war inFebruary 2022.312 Appropriating History: AppendixThe transliteration of names and geographical designations follows the ALA-LC stylestandard (LibraryofCongress forBelarusian,RussianandUkrainianCyrillic).Forbetter-known names already introduced in English, however, we have used the internationallymost common spelling. In case of Belarusian names, we sometimes also give the alter-native variant Belarussian or Russian spelling in brackets.AuthorsEva Binder is a senior researcher at the Department of Slavic Studies and head of theCentre for Eastern European Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her re-search interests include contemporary Russian and 20th-century Soviet auteur cinema,documentary aesthetics in film and literature, and transcultural and postcolonial ap-proaches to Eastern European cultures. Recent publications include “Of Lipovans,MeriaandMari: Denis Osokin’s Poetization of Ethnocultural Diversity” (in Zeitschrift für Slawis-tik 1:2023, in German),VictimNarratives in Transnational Contexts (co-edited, 2020, in Ger-man), “Odessa 2014: AlternativeNews and Atrocity Narratives on Russian TV” (in the vol-ume »Truth« andFiction.ConspiracyTheories inEasternEuropeanCulture andLiterature, 2020,co-authored with Magdalena Kaltseis) as well as articles on the cinema of Aleksei Fe-dorchenko (2021) and the documentary films of Nikolaus Geyrhalter (2023).Aliaksei Bratachkin is a Belarusian historian and researcher at the Chair of Public His-toryat the InstituteofHistoryat theFernUniversitätHagen,Germany.Until its closure in2021, he headed the Public History Department at the independent European College ofLiberalArts inBelarus (ECLAB).His sphereof research includespolitics ofmemory,post-Soviet transformations, and civic education. He is the co-author of the collective mono-graphsAfter SovietMarxism:History, Philosophy, Sociology andPsychoanalysis inNationalCon-texts (Belarus, Ukraine) (2013, in Russian) and Pathways of Belarus Europeanisation: BetweenPolitics and Identity Constructions (1991–2010) (2011, in Russian). He was co-editor and au-thor of the online journalNovaia Europa (2009–2013) and is the author of numerous arti-cles on the politics of memory, post-Soviet transformations, civic education and publichistory.Maria Galina is an independent researcher, prose writer, poet, literary translator, liter-ary critic and cultural sociologist who has lived in Odesa, Ukraine since 2021. Until 2022she was a columnist and critic at the literary magazine Novyi Mir in Moscow, for whichshe wrote a regular column on speculative fiction. As a critic and cultural sociologist shehasworked on contemporarymass literature andwritten severalmonographs dedicatedto Soviet and post-Soviet science fiction as a social and cultural phenomenon.Recent ar-314 Appropriating History: Appendixticles include “Post-Imperial Resentments: Alternative Histories ofWorldWar II in Pop-ular Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction” (in the volume AfterMemory, 2021, co-authored withIlya Kukulin) and “Ressentiment and Post-traumatic Syndrome in Russian Post-SovietSpeculative Fiction: Two Trends” (in the volumeThePost-Soviet Politics of Utopia, 2021).Ilya Kukulin is a literary critic, cultural historian, and cultural sociologist. Currently, heis a visiting research fellow at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst, USA.His research interests include the history of Soviet unofficial poetry, the sociology of to-day’s Russian culture, the cultural history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia,the gender history of post-Soviet literature, Soviet science fiction literature, the politicsof childhood and children’s literature of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, Rus-sophone social networks, as well as trauma andmemory in today’s Russia. Recent booksincludeMachines of theNoisyTime:HowSovietMontageBecameanAestheticMethod of theUnof-ficial Culture (2015, in Russian), Breakthrough to an Impossible Connection: Essays and Articleson Russian Poetry (2019, in Russian) and the co-authored monograph A Guerilla Logos: TheProject of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (2022, together with Mark Lipovetsky, in Russian).DaniilM.Leiderman is an art historian at the School of Performance, Visualization, andFine Art at Texas A&M University, USA. He wrote his PhD dissertation entitled MoscowConceptualism and “Shimmering”: Authority, Anarchism, and Space (2016, Princeton Uni-versity) on Moscow’s unofficial art scene of the early 1970s and its relationship tocontemporary post-Soviet and post-Crimean artistic resistance. His current researchfocusses on the representation of Eastern Europe and Russia in contemporary videogames and related media. Recent articles include “Seeing Lenin’s Double: the Visualityof Soviet Childhood” (in the volume Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Chil-dren, forthcoming, together with Marina Sokolovskaia), “Moscow Conceptualism andShimmering: Not Conforming with Nonconformism” (in Russian Literature 2018: 96–98),“Zombies, Russians, Plague: Eastern Europe as a Sandbox for Utopia” (in Digital Icons 15:2016).Mark Lipovetsky is a professor at the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia Uni-versity, New York, USA. His research interests include Russian postmodernism, NewDrama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture as well asvarious aspects of post-Soviet culture. He is the author of twelve monographs andmorethan a hundred articles. He has also co-edited twenty collections of articles on Russianliterature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries. Recent monographs include Charms ofCynicalReason:TheTransformations of theTricksterTrope inSoviet andPost-SovietCulture (2011),Postmodern Crises: From Lolita to Pussy Riot (2017), and A Guerilla Logos: The Project of DmitryAleksandrovich Prigov (2022, in Russian, co-authored with Ilya Kukulin). Lipovetsky is aco-editor ofTheOxfordHandbook of Underground Soviet Culture.Lidia Martinovich holds a master’s degree in sociology from the European HumanitiesUniversity (Vilnius, Lithuania) and is an independent researcher in visual arts and litera-ture.Her research interests include contemporaryBelarusian literature,memory cultureand vernacular photography in post-Soviet countries, the cultural history of landscapesAuthors 315in Belarus, and contemporary Belarusian cinema. Recent publications include “The Be-larusian Forest as a Cultural Landscape” (in volume Liudzi lesu 2022: 13–30, in BelarusianandEnglish); “WhyWatchWeddingsandFunerals? StudyingFamilyArchivesofWeddingand Funeral Photographs of Belarusians” (in Dziavochy vechar 2021: 3–7, in Belarusian);“Family Archive Photography as a New Iconography: Self-Representation of BelarusianVillagers in Mid- and Post-War Portraits” (in Nailepshy bok 2018: 16–26, in Belarusian);“Contemporary Belarusian Literature: Three Ways to Talk About Trauma” (in Sygma.ma2019, in Russian). (The latter was published under her birth nameMikheeva).Svitlana Pidoprygora is a professor of literary studies at the PetroMohyla Black Sea Na-tional University in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. She was a URIS-Fellow (Ukrainian Research inSwitzerland) at the University of Basel (01.08.2023-31.07.2024). Her research interestsinclude the Ukrainian historical novel, Ukrainian experimental literature, and 20th cen-tury and contemporary popular culture with a special focus on comic culture and visualculture in a digitally globalised society. Recent publications are “Ukrainian Comics andWar in Ukraine” (in TRAFO. Blog for Transregional Research, 2022), “Ukrainian Fiction: thePossibilities of the Digital Age” (in the volume Role of Science and Education for SustainableDevelopment, 2021),Ukrainian Experimental Prose of the 20th and Early 21st Centuries. An ‘Im-possible’ Literature (2018, in Ukrainian).Olga Romanova is an independent researcher, literary theorist and specialist in culturalstudies. Until 2021 she was the head of the Department of Popular Culture and Mediaat the European College of Liberal Arts inMinsk, Belarus.Her research interests includethe theory and history of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema and culture, and Belarusian cin-ema. Recent publications include “Between the Town and the Countryside. Utopian im-ages and expanses within Belarusian Soviet Films” (in the volume Urban Space on Screen.Cinematographies of Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine, 2024: in print), “Victory Day in Belarus.State policy of memory and its alternatives” (in the internet magazineUrokii istorii, 2019,in Russian) and the forthcoming monograph Another History of Soviet Belarusian Cinema.Research Stories (2024, in Russian).Matthias Schwartz is co-head of the program area World Literature and head of theproject “Adjustment and Radicalisation. Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-WarEastern Europe” at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin,Germany. His research interests involve Eastern European contemporary literatures,memory cultures and popular cultures in a globalised world; documentary aestheticsand Socialist travel literature, the cultural history of Soviet and post-Soviet adventureliterature, science fiction, science popularisation and space travel. Recent publicationsinclude Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond (co-edited,2024); After Memory. World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures (co-edited,2021); Sirens of War. Discursive and Affective Dimensions of the Ukraine Conflict (co-edited,2020, in German); Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context (co-edited, 2016).Valery Vyugin is a leading researcher at the Centre for Literary Theory and Interdisci-plinary Studies of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences316 Appropriating History: Appendix(PushkinHouse) St.Petersburg andaprofessor at St.PetersburgStateUniversity.His re-search interests include Russian Soviet and post-Soviet culture, especially literature andfilm, literary awards in contemporary Russia, history of the Soviet and post-Soviet spyfiction and cinema, memory studies, and rhetorical criticism. Recent publications are“Cultural Recycling’ in the 21st Century. What Does It Mean Now?” (in Antropologicheskiiforum 58:2023, in Russian), “Make Love, Not War. Russian Spy Comedies, 1990s–2010s”(in Osteuropa 11:2022, in German), “Cultural Recycling’: A Contribution to the History ofthe Concept (1960s— 1990s)” (inNLO 196:2021, in Russian), “Soviet Conspiracy Drama ofthe 1920s and 1930s” (in the volume “Truth” and Fiction. ConspiracyTheories in Eastern Euro-pean Culture and Literature, 2020) as well as the collective monographThe Second All-UnionCongress of SovietWriters, 1954.The Ideology of theHistorical Transition and the Transformationsof the Soviet Literature (co-author, 2018, in Russian).NinaWeller holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and is a postdoctoral researcher inthe research project “Adjustment and Radicalisation. Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) inPre-War Eastern Europe” at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL)in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests involve contemporary Eastern European lit-erature, especially Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian literature, popular culture, memorycultures, alternative history and documentary aesthetics. Recent publications include“Everything is more Expensive than Ukrainian Life”. Texts aboutWestsplaining and theWar (co-edited, 2023, in German), “‘Let’s be Belarusians!’ On the Reappropriation of BelarusianHistory in Popular Culture” (in the volume Memory as a Dialogue? History for Young Peo-ple, 2022) and After Memory.WorldWar II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures (co-edited, 2021).Oleksandr Zabirko holds a PhD in Slavic literatures and cultures and is a researcher atthe Slavic Department of the University of Regensburg, Germany.Hismajor fields of re-search are literary models of spatial and political order, contemporary literature(s) fromRussia and Ukraine, and fantasy literature in general. Recent publications include “Liter-aryForms ofGeopolitcs.TheModelling of Spatial andPoliticalOrder inContemporaryRussianandUkrainian Literature (2021, in German), Figurations of the East. Between Literature, Philosophyand Politics (co-edited, 2022, in German), Protest Movements in the Long Shadow of the Krem-lin. Awakening andResignation in Russia andUkraine (co-edited, 2020, in German) and “TheWar in Neverland: The History of Novorossiia as Literary Project” (in the volume OfficialHistory in Eastern Europe, 2020).

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