Authors

Daria Radchenko¹;  ¹ RANEPA, Russian Federation

Discussion

In the last few decades, the idea of fluctuating and transparent borders and border territories has been thoroughly developed by numerous researchers in border studies. However, the majority of research is ethnographically focused on a particular status quo – on a situation which an anthropologist meets when arriving into the field site. The research of the past imagination of border is necessarily a historical endeavor, rarely undertaken in social sciences. However it is important to look at the border territories three-dimensionally, considering not only current processes but also the local memory of the transborder life.

To address this issue, I am turning to a very particular case. The city of Sovetsk (Kaliningrad region) is located on the borderline with Lithuania (and, hence, with the EU), marked by the river Neman. However, there’s still one more borderline in this city: the border between the German city Tilsit and the Soviet city Sovetsk, which was settled after the 2 World War when Eastern Prussia was taken over by the USSR and deportation of German population. The people of Sovetsk live among architectural and infrastructural objects belonging to Tilsit, and on the very edge of the state. In the paper I’ll show how this complex position on the borders of spaces and times affect the local post-Soviet memory narratives.