Lenin’s Mausoleum from Gum galleries |
Grebol9 via Wikimedia Commons
Warped mourning for the
victims of communism
a post-Soviet ‘inability to mourn’ similar to that of
West Germany during the 1960s. (2013: 207). The
memory of Lenin as father of the Russian Revolution
and founder of the Soviet Union is distinguished
Alexander Etkind argues that individuals in
from the memory of Stalin, associated with terror,
post-Soviet Russia are characterised by a particular the Gulag, modernisation and the Great Patriotic
type of ‘warped mourning’. State recognition War. Indeed, while official German acknowledgement
of communist crimes, while not absent from of the Nazi past began in military defeat, Soviet
contemporary Russia remains deeply distorted. victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945)
Suppression of citizen initiatives such as Memorial continues to influence how the communist legacy is
Society and Perm-36 Museum, dedicated to the remembered in contemporary Russia.
victims of communist oppression, in conjunction
with the continued veneration of Lenin’s grave
The maintenance of Lenin’s embalmed body
indicate the complexity of coming to terms with the in a temporary state of waiting for burial illustrates
Soviet past in contemporary Russia. If Germany’s Etkind’s concept of warped mourning. The artificial
transition from fascism to democracy entailed embalming and corporal adaptations have created
defeat, division, occupation and criminal trials, a hybrid body that is neither fully human nor
Russia’s transition to democracy has taken different artificial, but something in between. Moreover, the
paths that include collapse, implosion, popular protracted period of state mourning for the first
uprising and reinvention of the sovereign state. leader of the USSR has blossomed into a theatrical
staging of commemorative rituals. In venerating the
Taking his cue from Mitscherlich and
sacred image of Lenin as a quasi-godlike sovereign,
Mitscherlich’s (1975) study of the inability to mourn the criminal nature of the Soviet regime that he
the Nazi past in post-war Germany, Etkind traces founded is obscured. Instead, the prolonged period
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3