Who Owns the Soviet Past?

For the other former Soviet republics, particularly Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and, to some extent, Ukraine, the end of the Soviet Union could be framed as a restoration of lost sovereignty and the remedy for decades of subjugation.  But for the newly-christened Russian Federation, despite momentary bursts of enthusiasm over a vaguely-defined future in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991, the end of the USSR was a moment of profound loss.  The slippage between Russia and the Soviet Union was always problematic; when outsiders called the entire Soviet Union "Russia," they were, perhaps out of ignorance, engaging in a colonialist attitude towards the other fourteen republics that went far beyond anything Russians in power were willing to say.  Or perhaps they were inadvertently doubling down on a repressed truth: the multinational Soviet Union was always dominated by Moscow.

When Yeltsin decoupled the institutions of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic (RFSSR) from their Soviet counterparts and, more important, stopped all flows of RFSSR funds into USSSR structures, this could have been a moment not just to rebuke the Soviet legacy, but to deny any identification between the newly emergent Russian Federation and the Soviet Union that once contained it.  But this was not to be, nor could it reasonably have been expected.  In declaring itself the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, in addition to assuming the Soviet debt, also got the USSR's seat on the UN Security Council, most of the Soviet Union's foreign diplomatic property, and control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.   It could have been possible for Russia also to assume moral responsibility for the Soviet Union's crimes as part of a process of national and international reconciliation, but a brief period of reckoning with the Soviet past in the 1990s gave way to glorification and rehabilitation. The Soviet Union was not Russia, but the Soviet past now belonged to the Russian Federation.

Even though the RFSSR broke with the USSR more quickly and decisively than most of the other republics, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Russia became the country the others broke away from, while all the Soviet glories and achievements that were threatened with irrelevance were now the heritage of Russia specifically.  It is Russia's status as heir to the USSR that explains moments that are otherwise absurd.  In the wake of Russia's 2014 and especially 2022 invasions of its neighbor, Ukraine's derussification process included taking down the remaining monuments to Lenin; many in the Russian media expressed their outrage. But at what? Russia is no longer a communist country, and Lenin is no longer the object of required public adoration.  In this particular monumental skirmish, both sides are tacitly agreeing to Russia's status as heir to the Soviet imperial/ colonial legacy.

Partying like it’s 1989

Assuming the weight of the Soviet past has a paradoxical effect, taking away precisely as much as it adds.  Russia did not so much inherit the Soviet Union as inherit the Soviet Union's loss.  The compensatory rhetoric of Russian greatness already began to grow in the 1990s before being adopted wholeheartedly by Putin the twenty-first century, but it was a greatness seen in the rearview mirror. The combination of territorial diminishment, economic freefall, and dwindling international prestige meant that all rhetoric of Russia's greatness referred to a vanished past. This combination of greatness and loss is why nostalgia alone is insufficient as a model for Russia's discursive transformations over three post-Soviet decades. 

Not long after the Soviet collapse, Gregory Freiden wrote an article speculating about the possibility of a national Russian transformation "from Romans into Italians." The idea behind this metaphor is that contemporary Italians may be cognizant of the heritage of the Roman Empire, and possibly even proud of it, but their identity is not "post-Roman," and the fall of the Roman Empire is not a particularly painful wound for residents of the city of Rome more than a millennium and a half later. Russia has not become Italy to the Soviet Rome, with the most obvious explanation involving how little time has actually passed since 1991. 

More to the point: to the extent that we can ascribe a desire to a country, Russia does not want to become a postimperial nation-state like Italy. 

This could be partly explained by the incompatibility between the very idea of the nation-state and the multi-ethnic federation that is Russia, but Russia is not the only country in the world that includes multiple ethnicities (or "nationalities"), with multiple language and religions.  Even Italy didn't look like a strong candidacy for nationhood before it achieved unitary statehood. But Russia's postimperial problem is not that the country is excessively heterogeneous; on the contrary, it is not heterogeneous enough.  It is not the Soviet Union.  And, at a future temporal remove, it is not the Russian Empire.  Despite any of Putin's protests to the contrary, Russia remains post-Soviet because it is haunted by the fact that it is not Soviet.  The discourse of the national body, of the proprioceptive state, continues to frame Russia in relation to the lost territories of the Soviet Union.  This is the discourse of melancholy: Russia is a state the cannot let go.

This melancholy expresses itself through Soviet nostalgia, of course, but also through the repeated revisiting of the moment when the Soviet Union was lost.   For the melancholic, the loss of the loved one has always just happened, no matter how much time has passed. For melancholic Russia, the end of the USSR is still taking place.  It is still the foundational wound out of which the Russian Federation emerged; it colors Russia's relations with its neighbors, its rhetoric about the post-Soviet space, and the increasing imperialistic rhetoric about Russia's destiny.  The collapse is also revisited through revisionism:  years of conspiracy-mongering have made it a truism that the USSR was brought down through a Western plot in which Gorbachev features prominently.  The greatest melancholic expression of the preoccupation with the Soviet downfall is temporal: not only is the collapse still being felt, but it is projected onto the future.  The same conspiratorial logic that explains the end of the USSR as the triumph of Western manipulation also assumes that the West has only just begun.  Now the West is trying to dismantle the Russian Federation, in order to be free of Russia's obstinacy and to exploit the country's natural resources.  Russia is not just mourning its past, Soviet incarnation, but engaged in the anticipatory mourning of a Russian collapse that may never happen.  The soul-crushing timelessness of melancholia, where grief never seems to end, has reached its apotheosis, stretching out into the future as well as the past.

Thus Russia is always under the threat of dismemberment. The threat comes in a variety of flavors:  the West's desire to take possession of Siberia (a "fact" gleaned from Madeleine Albright's mind by a long-distance psychic); the West's fomenting of "color revolutions"; Ukraine's "Russophobic" "Nazi" government; Western plots against Russia's children, by subverting their traditional values and adopting them as orphans who will grow up to fight against their motherland; spies and foreign agents working to tear the country apart; the Internet itself, viewed as a CIA product; information warfare of all stripes; "gay propaganda," which will exacerbate Russia's demographic problem and weaken its patriarchal foundations; foreign religions and "cults," which undermine the country's unity; and attacks on the Russian gene pool (including alleged Ukrainian bioweapons targeting Russians).

In 1992, Stanislav Govorukhin directed a documentary film called The Russia We Have Lost (Россия, которую мы потеряли), an idealized portrait of tsarist Russia and an uncompromising attack on Bolshevism and the Soviet Union's early leadership.  Govorukhin's title was targeted and specific, but the timing of his film's release, and the extent to which this phrase entered Russians' vocabulary, points elsewhere.  Or rather, everywhere.  For over three decades, Russia has been defined as an entity that is always lost or on the verge of being lost. Emerging from two previous collapsed empires, the Russian Federation has loss built into its very foundation. 

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