Post-Soviet Contexts and Trauma Studies

Abstract

The goal of this article is to consider the agendas that shape the field of post-Soviet cultural studies through an examination of post-Soviet Russian appropriations of the traumatic memory of the Soviet past. Post-Soviet scholarship, in questioning collectivizing constructions of identity, has begun to question its own agendas and cohesion. Parallel with developments in Trauma Studies, post-Soviet scholarship considers the relationship between individual and collective experience while enabling a narrative of self-determination on the part of Soviet subjects and those who study them. By working around the poststructuralist emphasis upon partiality and contingency that has impaired the ability to assert 'an absolute foundation of shared experiences upon which to build an invincible moral stance' (Ball 2000), scholars, contemporary artists and online fora stage interventions that reveal the instability of institutional discourses and reveal the political stakes of discussions about post-Soviet trauma.keywords Post-Soviet studies, Trauma Studies, trauma, memory, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeev Twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and after more than twenty years of developments in the field of Trauma Studies, both Post-Soviet Studies and Trauma Studies have themselves become objects of inquiry. By bringing together these fields, the studies presented in this issue draw attention to their disciplinary affinities and boundaries. Affinities between the two fields may be located in their shared concern with memory and its transmission: both examine the aftermath of lived events and their representation and explore how people and communities create and understand relationships between individual and collective experience, between history and the present. Methodological affinities between the two fields may inform explorations of the relationship between individual and collective experience in the ways, for example, in which Trauma Studies has examined individual accounts of injury incurred during daily life alongside narratives of genocide and war, and post-Soviet scholarship has engaged diverse personal artefacts of the traumatic memory of the Soviet past. Both fields are also actively re-evaluating tendencies to establish their studies

Against Single Stories of ‘Left Behind’ and ‘Triple Win’: On Agricultural Care Chains and the Permanent Subsistence Crisis

“…In the context of Moldova, this division comes on top of post-Soviet traumas ( Wakamiya, 2011 ) and needs special attention in terms of identifying localized perspectives and challenges to healing. At the same time, following the contour lines of the subsistence crisis and looking into further topographies of formerly colonized regions, it can be seen that countertopographies build the basis of developing common struggles and allow for an exchange of urgently needed healing practices.…”

A traumatic memory: how to study and to interpret it

“…Травматическая память отличается гетерогенностью: она, вопервых, оставляет разные следы в различных группах (социальных, поколенческих, гендерных, этнических, расовых, конфессиональных) и разных нациях, а во-вторых, содержит различные интерпретации и оценки в зависимости от социального опыта и установок отдельных индивидов (Ryoko Wakamiya 2011). Также следует проводить различие между теми, кто был прямой жертвой (скажем, узники концлагерей или депортированные), и теми, кто, счастливо избежав этого, получил психологическую травму.…”