Essays Ruins, Museums, Reconstruction and the End (?) of Future

This essay is an attempt to describe my thoughts from the CBEES summer school in Sigtuna. The author attempts to articulate the complexities of working with memory and heritage through his topic related to the heritage of the Soviet Gulag, as well as the more general problems of the industry of preserving and reinterpreting the past.

Published on balticworlds.com on October 12, 2024

Abstract:

This essay is an attempt to describe my thoughts from the CBEES summer school in Sigtuna. The author attempts to articulate the complexities of working with memory and heritage through his topic related to the heritage of the Soviet Gulag, as well as the more general problems of the industry of preserving and reinterpreting the past.

For me, working with the problematics of memory and the heritage of Soviet repression from perestroika to contemporary Russia, the summer school in Sigtunastiftelsen in Sigtuna by the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University was extremely interesting, hearing what other studies of Eastern Europe and post-Soviet countries that are being done today. The description of the summer school that it will deal with the problems of memory in Eastern Europe through the discussion of concepts such as rupture, return, resistance, repetition, reconstruction, and reconciliation was appealing to me, as I the last years am conducting research on the memory of the Gulag and its heritage in the former Soviet Union. The words return and reconciliation were particularly important to me because I am often encounter with questions by different people about the “return of the Gulag and Stalinist repression” in contemporary Russia. Also, in various parts of the former USSR from Solovki to Siberia and from Kazakhstan to Kolyma and Chukotka I often heard the word reconciliation from the locals (especially common in the far north in Russia), arguing that Stalin’s repression happened a long time ago, and furthermore that without Stalinist methods it would have been impossible to develop the region during Soviet times. The difficulty of identifying victims and executioners during the Stalinist repressions leads to an extremely ambiguous memory of the Gulag in the former USSR. For example, NKVD (Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs]) officers could themselves end up in camps or be shot: the heads of the NKVD Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov were shot as “enemies of the people”.  While former prisoners could start working for the repressive system, one of the designers of the Gulag system was Naftali Frenkel, who was a former prisoner of the Solovetsky camp (SLON). In addition, the problem is that it became possible to address the memory of the Gulag only a few decades after Stalin’s death, in the late 1980s.[1]

February 24, 2022, when the Russian army launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was a turning point for me personal and my research. Not only because I had to leave Russia, (having stayed in the country until September 2022), but also because the topic of the Gulag’s heritage began to be perceived differently. Of course, many signals of the return of repression had been sounding for a long time, but the demolition of Polish and Lithuanian monuments, the closure of a number of museum exhibitions and many other things made it clear that we had reached a milestone 2022 also when it came to research about the past.

In some ways, the work of such state-funded memorial projects to preserve the memory of Soviet repressions seems pointless, and perhaps even cynical.  However, while I try not to lose touch with museum workers who deal with this topic throughout the country, I am increasingly getting the impression that memorial museums of the Gulag continue to operate in Russia largely because they are so different and heterogeneous that even the Russian authorities hardly perceive them as some kind of political problem.

Memory & museums: memorial museums

My main research question is to try to figure out who created these museums. When I finished my fieldwork I’d visited eleven museums  — all memorial museums of the Gulag in Russia (in terms by Paul Williams[2]) created from 1989 to 2022: the museums were only engaged in the work of preserving the memory of the Gulag.  Until the beginning of 2010s all memorial museums of the Gulag were created like local initiatives rather than being part of an official government-sponsored one, although they were later supported (or not) by local local government. The creation of memorial museums of the Gulag was initiated by museum workers and professional historians, immediately after the collapse of the USSR many of the founders of such museums were amateurs. Consequently, the exhibitions often presented Stalin’s repressions in specific ways that today seem ambiguous. So, my additional two main questions are whoand why started to create these museums, what they think about the Gulag system and Joseph Stalin. Museums of the Gulag are sites of memory: “static spaces where the past flickers and endures”[3], but they differ in their structure. Based on my research, I distinguish three types of Gulag memorial museums to show their diversity and heterogeneity: 1)museums at urban sites associated with the Gulag (such as NKVD buildings or prisons), 2) museums in former concentration camps, and 3) museums that have become new sites of memory but whose location is historically unrelated to the Gulag. Some of these museums are private, which also plays an important role in their appearance.

Similar “bifurcation” of memory in Russia has been around for a long time. In 2016, the Department of Twentieth-Century History at the Solovetsky Museum-Reserve was liquidated, and its head Olga Bochkareva, who is a renowned historian of the Solovetsky camps, was dismissed. In the summer of 2018, following a decision by the Mari El republic government, the museum in Yoshkar-Ola was closed. The museum’s building was declared damaged, and its director Nikolai Arakcheev was fined for conducting excavations at the Mendursky test site—a site of mass executions during the Great Terror in Mari El. The People’s Memorial Museum of the History of the Gulag remains closed; its future fate is also unclear. The Tomsk NKVD Prison Museum is functioning; however, the basement in which the museum is located does not belong to it, and the entire building is owned by a Tomsk businessman, Igor Skorobogatov, which may behind the closure of the museum. All this shows once again how complex the subject of repression is in different regions of Russia. Despite the official adoption of a roadmap for commemorating the repressions, museums have largely continued to be held hostage to the political situation, both at the federal and regional levels. The designation of Memorial Human Rights Center (2013) and International Memorial (2016) as “foreign agents” and the opening of the Gulag History Museum in a new building in Moscow in 2015, the conflict around Perm-36, Vladimir Putin’s opening of the Memorial to the Victims of Political Repression on Sakharov Avenue in Moscow, and the closure of the museum in Yoshkar-Ola six months later. This shows again the inconsistency of state politics of memory. These trends are in keeping with the Russian government’s growing role in preserving the memory of victims of Stalin’s repression[4].

Since 2022, the situation of “bifurcation” has remained, but now this contrast has become even more noticeable. On the one hand, there are attempts to organize “Days of Remembrance” in the Sandarmokh in Karelia (the largest site of mass shootings found in the region), and on the other hand, the continuation of expeditions of the Gulag History Museum to the sites of the former Stalinist camps Dneprovsky and Butugychag in Magadan region (Kolyma) , in order to make open-air museums there in the future.

At the same time, since 2022, the opportunity to objectively study Gulag in Russia has been greatly reduced, and in some areas now is simply impossible. This silencing is a disaster for research, on a scale we can not yet grasp. Studying the memory of Eastern European countries is hardly possible without understanding the processes taking place in Russia, and given the lack of archives, objective sociology, and the unwillingness of many Russian residents to talk, this leave us with a growing void. I understand perfectly well the motivation of many researchers to stop studying Russia, but for the general scientific community in the future this may become a methodological problem.

Ruins & memory

The for me perhaps most interesting part of the summer school was the discussion of the problem of memory in the Balkans after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. There were two main focuses for discussing the problems of the Balkan wars: the first was a matter of remembrance and reconciliation[5] and the second was dedicated on the problems of ruins and reconstruction[6]. The theme of ruins has long interested me, not only as places of loss due to war as in the Balkans, but also how abandoned buildings become ruins and how one tries to work with this theme and aesthetics. The biggest part of discussion of the Balkans focused on the aftermath of the 1992-1996 war in Sarajevo and Mostar and the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade. I had the opportunity to visit Sarajevo, Mostar and other cities in Bosnia after emigrating from Russia. Also, I’ve visited former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense and the building of Ministry of International Affairs in Belgrade. Gruia Bădescu quotes in his article that ruins are places of abjection which in the context of talking about the ruins due to war in Sarajevo and Belgrade.[7] Indeed, the preservation of such ruins in the Balkans is often due to a lack of money to build new buildings, but these ruined buildings become a constant reminder of recent warfare: Gerhardt’s Mill in Russian Volgograd (former Stalingrad), Coventry cathedral in England or Genbaku Dome (Hiroshima Peace Memorial) in Japan (UNESCO World Heritage).[8]

At the same time discussing the problem of ruins in the Balkans, I was immediately reminded of the book by Swiss linguist Andreas Schönle about the history of Russian ruins called Architecture of Oblivion. In this book, Schönle accurately points out that Russia has not developed an understanding of the value of ruins,[9] even though ruins are everywhere in Russia: the ruins of dying villages and towns, the ruins of Soviet industry that was no longer needed after the collapse of the USSR, the ruins of churches and estates abandoned during the Soviet era, etc.

The same applies to the ruins of the Gulag in the far north of Russia: the ruins of railway 501, 503 (Dead Road) in Yamal, the ruins of Gulag camps in the north-east of Russia on the territory of the former industrial trust “Dalstroy”, etc. And it is still a dilemma for me, to what extent, for example, a museum on the site of a Nazi concentration camp in Germany or Poland is historically more correct for discussing the memory of totalitarianism than, for example, the abandoned and ruined Dneprovsky camp in Kolyma, where I happened to visit in 2020. On the one hand, we see restored buildings and convenient tourist infrastructure, and on the other – hard-to-reach ruins, where there is not even a road, but which are only damaged by time and climate, without anyone else’s intervention.

The same problem concerns not only museums of former camps, but even is applicable for preservation such as “Skansen”, that is national open-air museums. They also create an image of the past, when houses and other buildings from different parts of the country are brought to one place, thus creating an “artificial village” that never existed in the past.

There is no conclusion

The rapid emergence of more and more memorials, museums, the constant replenishment of cultural heritage lists, and laws on the preservation of the historic appearance of cities are a fairly new phenomenon. This process begun already in Europe after the Second World War.[10] Of course, the new round of interest in the past, heritage and memory can be explained by the destruction during the wars that greatly changed the face of Europe and the world in the 20th century. This was the subject of much discussion at the summer school in Sigtuna. In an attempt to preserve more everything becomes heritage; and at the same time the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy summarized it in the other extreme – “there is no heritage”.[11]

While working on my project, I can’t get rid of the thought that this “fixation” on the past is finite. It is impossible to preserve everything, it is impossible to make more and more new memorials endlessly. And this topic was also raised at the school in Sigtuna: that museums, memorials, historical concepts, institutes of national memory, the protection of an ever-increasing number of historical heritage monuments cannot last forever. And to this day no one can answer what will happen to this in the future. The collection of new artifacts will sooner or later be limited at least by money and space, and for now, the only methods they come up with are new ways of storing and cataloguing. German philosopher Hermann Lübbe has written extensively about this problem, that “The scientific and technological civilization is a civilization looking backwards”.[12] Very similar ideas like Hermann Lübbe wrote Russian-American philosopher and art historian Mikhail Yampolsky’s at his book “Without a Future: Culture & Time”: “Our era characterizes the intense and accelerating production of the past, the disappearance of the actual and directed towards the future”[13].  So, in one sense, the CBEES summer school in Sigtuna left me with more questions than answers. And the discussions over the five days showed that the questions that had been bothering me before school remain relevant and, for the most part, have no universal answers. So, I guess we’ll just have to see how these transformations will affect our lives in the (not?) future.

References

[1] Read for example: Florence Fröhlig, “Victimhood and Building Identities on Past Suffering”, in CBEES State of the Region Report 2020 (2020): 23-28

Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013)

Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma. Rethinking the Stalinist past in Soviet Union 1953-1970. (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2013)

[2] Williams Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007)

[3] Pierre Nora. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Memory and Counter-Memory (No. 26, Special Issue, 1989). 8

[4] Vladislav Staf. Local Initiatives: A Historical Analysis of the Creation of Memorial Museums of the Gulag in (Post-)Soviet Russia. (Problems of Post-Communism, 2023, Vol.70, Issue 5) 471-478

[5] Johanna Mannergren Selimovic J. “The Politics of Reconciliation and Memory” in Handbook on

the Politics of Memory, ed. Maria Mälksöö (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023), 191–203.

[6] Gruia Bădescu, “Urban Memory After War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post- Yugoslav Cities” in Contested Urban Spaces: Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories, ed. Ulrike Capdepón and Sarah Dornhof (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 229-252

[7] Ibid, 159.

[8] In December 1996, the Genbaku Dome was registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List based on the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage

[9] Andreas Schönle. Architecture of Oblivion. Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2011)

[10] Iampolsky Mikhail. Bez buduschego: kul’tura i vremya (Moscow: Poryadok slov 2018), 3

[11] “‘There is No Heritage’: Conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Trawny on the Subject of Nationalism and Cultural Heritage”, Baltic Worlds 2019:3, 70–81.

https://balticworlds.com/there-is-no-heritage/

[12] Lübbe Hermann. Im Zug der Zeit Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart (Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2003), 6

[13] Iampolsky Mikhail. Bez buduschego: kul’tura i vremya (Moscow: Poryadok slov 2018), 5

 

Vladislav Staf