Amarcord , XX век: Забыть идеологию? (послесловие к публикации интервью с Л. Успенской)

Abstract

SUMMARY: The archival section of the present issue features the publication of an interview taken by a sociologist, Sofia Tchuikina, with a Russian émigré, Lidia Uspenskaia (Miagkova). This publication aspires to illustrate the production of memory narrative and the functioning of remembrance in respect to a politically divided period of Russian history and the trauma of individual lives of Russian emigration. Of particular interest in this publication is the fact that Lidia Uspenskaia’s mother was a sister of Boris Savinkov and that the life of Migkov’s family in its Polish period was connected with the activities of Boris Savinkov in anti-Bolshevik organizations. In the interview Lidia Uspenskaia describes her childhood, the life of the family in the context of civil war in left bank Ukraine (with concomitant interethnic and ideologically driven violence), the circumstances of emigration from Soviet Russia and adaptation to life in exile. The narrative extends to the years of World War II, which Uspenskaia spent in France, and visits to the Soviet Union after WWII. The interview portrays the mechanism of redescription and making sense of the traumatic past by obliterating the ideological and political background of the individual life and accentuating personal and private aspects of the past. The publication of the interview is foreworded by Sofia Tchuikina, who places this interview into the overall perspective of the research project of oral history of Russian noble families after the 1917 revolution and the theoretical context of memory and oral history studies. Tchuikina compares the mnemonic techniques of Uspenskaia with other figures of Russian nobility who left or remained in Soviet Russia, uncovers the role of family, social group, religion, and nation as operating tropes of personal memory and connections between personal experience and social and generational representations of the past. Tchuikina concludes with reflections on the role of oral history techniques in developing the sociology of memory. The section closes with an afterword by Ilya Gerasimov and Marina Mogilner, who ponder the relationship between ideology, historicity, and memory. Gerasimov and Mogilner compare the oral interview with a written version of Uspenskaia memoirs and find that the difference of targeted audience (the former being intended for the post-soviet Russian readers, while the latter was written for Russian émigrés and published in Novyi Zhurnal ) and the difference of modus of remembering created a new version of individual memory in the oral interview. The narrative of the past presented in the oral interview lacks cohesion and ready-to-employ tropes of the émigré memoirs because it was construed in an entirely different context. This finding illustrates the need to expand the analytical apparatus of research of historical memory in an “ideological age.”