Participants

Discussion

This roundtable is a discussion of the recently released volume "(Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground", edited by Klavdia Smola, Ilya Kukulin, and Annelie Bachmaier (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2024). This book is the first major study exploring archival and memorial practices of the Soviet unofficial culture. The contributors reflect the disruption of the Soviet cultural memory in a society dominated by state authority, where the creation and destruction of archives mirrored a radical division of the public sphere into official and unofficial zones, into canon and counter-canon. 

Contrary to existing research, we assert that Soviet unofficial culture was not only the object of repression itself, but also a platform, or rather a whole range of platforms for the maintenance, systematization and study of neglected or forbidden memory. Focusing on this little known phenomenon of cultural and philological (self)reflection under dictatorship, we discuss following questions: How did Soviet unofficial culture (de)constructed state-run social memory by collecting, archiving and memorizing (semi-)tabooed culture of the past and present? How did the creation of (counter)archives contribute to the cultural resistance in the Soviet Union? What did it mean that the delegation of the preservation and analysis of artifacts and ideas was strictly confined and merged with practices of private exchange and donation? What do these acts of memorial agency mean for the future perception of cultures under dictatorships? And finally, how do performative archival practices of the Soviet counter-culture influence recent artistic and activist practices? Against the background of archival theories and memory studies, we encourage a new perspective on the Soviet underground as a unique medium of alternative interpretation of history and culture.