Discussion
This paper explores the processes of regional memory and identity-making in Soviet-era planned cities in the Russian Far East. It focuses on the case of Komsomolsk-na-Amure, the largest industrial base in the Khabarovsk Region, built in the 1930s on the site of Permskoe village
—a small peasant settlement established in 1860 as part of Russian colonization of the Amur basin. Named after the Komsomol youth league, whose members volunteered to travel to the wilderness to create a new socialist city in the
taiga, Komsomolsk was widely celebrated in Soviet mass culture as a heroic utopian project. In the post-Soviet era, following dramatic deindustrialization as well as infrastructural and demographic decline, the city’s past became highly contentious, with some memory activists calling for a renaming of the city and recalculation of its age based on the year of Permskoe’s founding. This proposal was promptly denounced by many local residents as a divisive attempt to ‘erase’ the city’s Soviet identity. In this paper, I trace this controversy over periodization to analyze how contested and fragmented memories of imperial-era colonization and Soviet modernity are mobilized to articulate competing visions of the city’s future as well as to make sense of its shifting status from ‘vanguard industrial giant’ to ‘forgotten decaying outpost.’ I argue that the heated debates over the city’s ‘founding moment’ and attempts to center either the imperial or Soviet era should be understood as ideologically divergent, but entangled responses to shared, persisting anxieties about the city’s place in regional and national histories. This preoccupation with establishing ‘rootedness’ in the territory and anchoring local history in ‘the national project’ is a distinct feature of the frontier imagination in a remote, climatically challenging settlement whose very
raison d’etre is linked to the developmental and security logics of Russia’s political centre.
