From nonhuman to postsecular: transformation of the difficult heritage of Soviet repressions in post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Transforming social perceptions of those repressed by the Soviet regime in the late eighties, prompted urgent action to deal with difficult Soviet heritage, especially with landscapes of the dead buried in mass graves. However, human engagement in transforming these traumaspaces revealed that these landscapes had already been transformed by non-human actants - plants and trees – often as witnesses to the crimes themselves. Therefore, in planning their commemorations, human memory activists had to negotiate the landscape with non-human actants and often attribute some human significance to the memory work they performed. This article discusses how Soviet traumaspaces were slowly transformed from non-human commemorations to commemorations meticulously planned by humans. From the very beginning, these human commemorations used both religious and secular languages. However, when the state actively engaged in the commemoration of the victims of Soviet repressions after 2015, a new constellation of power relations between civil society, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the state emerged, which, over time, led to the appearance of post-secular commemorations.