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Public Lecture by Prof. Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford):
"Looking Back Without Nostalgia: Late Socialism Remembered”

Over the past twenty and more years, the relationship between those who live in post-Socialist countries and the past has often been understood in terms of ‘nostalgia’. In turn, ‘nostalgia’ frequently suggests a rather uncritical relationship with the heritage of such countries, of a kind that is readily exploited for political or indeed commercial purposes. Where nostalgia is presented as ‘reflective’ (to use Svetlana Boym’s terminology), and hence approved, the practices relating to this are attributed to an intellectual and artistic elite. I intend to argue, on the other hand, that the complexity of memory practices is poorly served by evaluative terminology, which tends to gloss over the political and social issues at stake. At the very least, it is important to recognise the distinctions between, say, the misty recollections of ‘Soviet childhood’ that characterise online self-representation by younger generations (which are often inflected by stiob, or an ironic and/or playful stance) and the statements of those who recall adult experience about what was and was not ‘better’. War memory has different salience for veterans, civilian survivors, the general public, and politicians. Professional historians are understandably annoyed about the distortion of their discipline, but arguments about the ‘falsification of history’ are not necessarily much more sophisticated when they come from critics of post-socialist governments than they are when used within those governments. Dealing with these problems requires us to grapple not just with arguments about memory politics as such, but with fluctuating perceptions of what ‘late socialism’ itself amounted to, and to what extent its crisis in the years after 1989 reflected intrinsic characteristics of political, social, and cultural, as well as economic, realities. Some reflections on these problems too will be offered in the talk. 

Bio note
Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is President for 2015 of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the first person to be elected to the position from outside the USA. Among her many publications on Russian cultural history and the history of literature are Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (Yale University Press, 2007, awarded the Grace Abbott Prize of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, USA, 2009) and St Petersburg, Shadows of the Past (Yale University Press, 2014, shortlisted for the Pushkin Russian Book Prize and named as one of ten History Books of the Year in the Herald Scotland). She is currently beginning work on a book about the cinema in Leningrad during the post-Stalin era, under the working title The Soviet Cine-Underground.

This event is part of the course .