Introduction

Abstract

More than any other recent event, Vladimir Putin's speeches in the wake of the annexation of Crimea raise questions about the political uses of nostalgia in the post-Soviet context. On March 18, 2014, during a carefully orchestrated festive concert in the Red Square, Putin solemnly declared that "after a hard, long and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!" ( Ria Novosti 2014 ). At first sight, Putin's rhetoric is a schoolbook example of what Svetlana Boym has called "restorative nostalgia," with its characteristic mobilization of collective myths and its wished-for return to, or rebuilding of, a "lost home" (Boym 2001).On closer inspection, however, Putin's interpretation of the events was less clear-cut. The Homeric story of Crimea's exhaustive journey at sea, and its subsequent sailing back to Russia, allocated the initiative with the peninsula itself, a reading that resonated with the Russian government's emphasis on Crimeans' right to self-determination. Yet, in another speech delivered to Duma Deputies on that same day, Putin implied that it was Russia that had returned to Crimea, symbolically reclaiming those Crimean places that were, supposedly, pivotal to Russia's identity. The ancient Crimean site of Khersones, he emphasized, was the site where Prince Vladimir was baptized in the 10th century; Sevastopol was the birthplace of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; and the peninsula still harbored the graves of Russian soldiers from the 19th and 20th centuries.Flexible as these narratives of "home" and "return" were, a constant factor was their thrust to cultivate a sense of shared belonging. Vladimir's baptism, Putin posited, was a "spiritual feat" that united "the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus"; and Crimea, "similar to Russia as a whole," had always been a multi-ethnic region where Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, and other groups had lived side by side for centuries, blending their cultures and traditions over time ( Ria Novosti 2014 ). Through references to a common "home," nostalgic narratives about the return of (or to) Crimea sought to create political consensus among diverse groups, both on the peninsula and in Russia itself. The grandiloquent celebrations of the Crimean campaign thus testify to not only the political force

Deep Transformations: Lived Experiences and Emotions in Social Change Narratives

“…This includes examining how neoliberal privatizations of the post-1989 period affected people’s work lives and how they comprehend such large-scale changes. Nostalgia (Boele et al, 2019) plays an important role here as an emotion that may become politically salient, as observed in other contexts (Karakaya, 2020). Krastev and Holmes (2019) contend that disillusionment with the aspiration to imitate the West (European) model shapes the affective ‘political psychology’ of many citizens in Central Eastern Europe today.…”