Communities of Memory
Modern students of nationalism have little patience with older scholars who saw nations as organic entities unique, objective characteristics. Ever since Karl Deutsch, it has not been possible to analyse nation-building without emphasizing the role of print media, over time, Eric Hobsbawm’s and Benedict Anderson’s once revisionist notions of modern nations as ‘invented’ and ‘imagined’ rallied overwhelming support in the profession 20 Ernest Gellner contributed an influential proposal although national high culture is a recent invention, nationalists always insist on its primordial character and folk roots 21 Taken to the extreme, the idea of a nation as a ‘discursive construct’ ignores the historically specific character of the nation-building process as well as the need for historical myths that resonate with the current needs and inherited perceptions of the nation’s potential members 22
Without rejecting the nation’s ‘discursivity,’ in this study of Stalinist historical memory I suggest that nations are always imagined through the concrete social and cultural practices of their given societies States and intellectuals do not have a free hand to invent or manipulate national traditions and memories because, as Arjuna Appadurai noted back in 1981, history is not ‘a limitless and plastic symbolic resource ’23 The continuous veneration of the glorious Cossack past in Ukraine since the seventeenth century only confirms that national myths can have deep historical roots and a long tradition of collective remembrance before they are mobilized in the modern process of identity construction Nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals thus had limited cultural space for their social engineering they were evoking narratives, objects, and images that were already associated with certain inherited notions or emotions 24
Even if granted a free hand in their manipulation of historical narratives, modern nation-builders (and empire-builders) still have difficulty enforcing their interpretation outside the public domain Prasenjit Duara suggests that ‘[n]ationahsm is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other ’25 Stalinist ideologues could, at a price of considerable effort, impose uniformity on public representations of the past - but not on individual readings of those representations In addition, they were frustrated by the ambiguous, changeable nature of national identity, which was in constant interplay with other identifications and, as Duara shows in his work on Modern China, could ‘be as subversive of the nation-state as it has been supportive ’2
Memory has proved no less elusive and difficult to regiment The obsession with interpreting the past, characteristic of all nationalism, reflects the nature of modern national identity, which relies on the prescription of ‘natural’ continuity among a people’s collective past, present, and future This nationalist obsession is only reinforced by the fact that remembering is an individual act, a consideration loieing some social scientists to see the term ‘collective memory’ as nothing more ih in a problematic metaphor.27 Much more constructive was the contribution of M mrice Halbwachs, the early iwcntieth-centuiy French sociologist, who suggested that individuals cannot retain and activate pure personal memories unless they are constructed in certain social frameworks (such as family, religion, and nation) and sustained by these groups 28 Halbwachs’s emphasis on the social contextuahzation of individual memories affected influential twentieth-century students of social memory, such as Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi, both of whom also perpetuated Halbwachs’s distinction between collective memory and history
According to Halbwachs, ‘[G] eneral history starts only when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up,’ that is, historical memory represents a more distant past, which no longer exists as collective memory and with which living contact has been lost In addition, collective memory consists of the multiple voices of different groups, whereas historical narrative is unitary 29 In his famous Lieux de memoire series, Nora attempted to describe a variety of French monuments, places, and images as ‘sites’ of memory, which were once a living collective memory but had long been institutionalized as historical memory Likewise, Yerushalmi laments the loss of living collective memory under an assault of modern historical representations, including the production of scholarly history and preservationist discourse 30 In this interpretation, present-day collective memory incorporates both historical memory as our knowledge of the past and social memory of our lived experience, but the latter is bound to disappear and be replaced in the next generations by the learned historical memory about our time
One major element missing from this scheme is the moment when historical memory is internalized by an individual This individual practice of remembering, which shapes private memories in the framework of contemporary public knowledge of the past, is also a moment of defining one’s sense of self, because an awareness of history forms the basis of a modern national identity Recently, there have been two interesting attempts to recover individual agency in this process Amos Funkenstein has proposed use of the term ‘historical consciousness’ to connote individuals’ desire to understand their experiences historically Susan A. Crane has further suggested that individuals can internalize public historical memory as their collective memory through their lived experience of learning about the past 31 In other words, one does not have to witness one’s ancestors’ great deeds A person can simply read a history book and develop his or her personal (or shared with peers) understanding of a distant past, which does not have to coincide with the book’s interpretation but which a reader would defend passionately based on his/her personal experience of learning
If individual conscious participation in the practice of remembering and forgetting is a requirement for a society’s ‘historical consciousness,’ then the Stalinist project of memory was disadvantaged from the beginning by the state’s inability to control individual interpretations of historical narratives But this was not its only problem Although the teims ‘historical memory’ and ‘historical consciousness’ occurred only occasionally m post-war Soviet scholarly literature, Lenm, Stalin, and scores of lesser ideologues repeatedly addressed the issue of the various Soviet nations’ national pride’ and ‘patrimony ’ This was because official identification with certain historical movements and personalities changed noticeably as Soviet socialism evolved, often confusing both intellectuals and common people in the process When in the 1930s the Stalinist USSR became the self-conscious successor of the Russian Empire, it had to incorporate into its narrative the story of tsarist conquests and territorial acquisitions but never quite reconciled it with the previous notion of class history’ or with the separate historical mythologies of the non-Russian peoples In addition, residual counter-memories of pre-Bolshevik nationalist historical narratives survived in Ukraine long after the Second World War, which also brought into the Stalinist fold Western Ukrainians who had been exposed to a nationalist version of their past until 1939 The German occupation further undermined the Soviet authorities’ control over public memory The Kremlin sought to prescribe and homogenize social memory, but internal tensions within the Stalinist historical narrative and its inability to prescribe only one possible reading of cultural products undermined their efforts The authorities could not fix the meaning of the past from which the Soviet nations supposedly got their sense of orientation for the future In the end, the Stalinist empire of memory was kept together by state intimidation - and began disintegrating as soon as the threat of political violence was removed