Authors

Carmela Morgillo¹;  ¹ UCL SSEES, UK

Discussion

Whether demonised as the archenemy of liberal democracy or celebrated as the world’s first truly egalitarian state, the Soviet Union remains one of the most complex signifiers of our era. Thirty years after its collapse, it continues to influence the social and political behaviours of both those who survived it and of those who never experienced it. As such, Soviet communism, is at the centre of a structure of feeling (Williams, 1967;1971) that merges political ambitions with the history, aesthetics, and cultural references of a lost era. In this paper, I present an overview of my research on Soviet nostalgia as a virtual phenomenon that goes beyond the geographical borders of the ex-Soviet space to become the collective hauntology of a lost future. 

Specifically, I look at how within online spaces, Soviet communism has become the subject of a new narrative that uses the language and forms of popular culture to rewrite the Soviet past as an ideal future through memes, videos, and user interactions. For these communities, the return to the Soviet past is part of a shared experience of resistance against injustice and offers a frame to make sense of the problems of the modern world, from the social inequalities produced by capitalism and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, to Palestine and Latin America’ continued struggle against imperialism and oppression. As the West reveals its failure to deliver its promises of democracy and prosperity, the references to the Soviet past act as an immediate, pervasive metalanguage for the articulation of dissent and, ultimately, as a new, collective project of utopian world-building beyond capitalism.