Nostalgic Modernization: the Soviet Past as 'Historical Horizon'

Abstract

My main thesis can be formulated as follows: accounts of the traumatic presence of the Soviet past in present-day Russia — descriptions that rely on analytical frameworks based in claims concerning the masses' post-Soviet nostalgia and the restoration efforts of the political powers-that-be, which supports and guides this nostalgia — are becoming less and less adequate to grasp the current situation. We are no longer dealing with nostalgia and the desire for a return of the lost object, but with a politics whose objective is the positive recoding of nostalgia for the Soviet past into a new form of Russian patriotism for which 'the Soviet' lacks any historical specificity, but is rather seen as part of a broadly conceived and comically heterogeneous cultural legacy. The consideration of this inner and intense connection between the Soviet past, nostalgia and the project of modernization of Russia includes revealing of main cultural tendencies (in reinterpretation and restoration of historical past) as well as discourse analysis of president Medvedev's speeches dedicated to the modernization project.

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