Death and memory in modern Russia.

Abstract

This essay aims to open a debate about the problems of death and memory in modern Russia. The memories in question are not, for the most part, tranquil ones. Twentieth-century Russia saw very large numbers of violent deaths, wave after wave of war, epidemic, famine and political bloodletting. Cumulatively, the impact of so much trauma and loss amounted to a national disaster. But the effects of it have not yet been systematically considered. One reason for the omission may lie in the nature of the material itself. 'It is in the nature of trauma to elude knowledge', writes a leading student of the subject. 'Massive trauma cannot be grasped because there are neither words nor categories of thought adequate to its representation.'2 Such perceptions about the nature of trauma come from psychoanalysis and literary theory rather than from conventional social history. The bulk of the evidence on which they are based has been drawn from work with survivors of the Holocaust. Interviews and case studies based on the longer-term psychoanalysis of individuals have found that many survivors have lived for decades in the shadow of memories they cannot or will not explore or know. But their children, the very children they sought to protect by their silence, learned to understand even without words. As one writer, herself the child of Holocaust survivors, put it, 'denied the memory, [the children] inherited only the wound'.3 Recurrent nightmares and unexplained anxieties, depression and anger were common manifestations of