Guest editors’ introduction: Nostalgia, Culture and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The end of communism in the USSR and its satellite states produced a wave of collective euphoria that had not been seen in Europe since May 1945. Nowhere was this excitement stronger than in the former socialist countries themselves, where many felt that service had, as it were, been resumed. As former Czech dissident Vaclav Havel put it at the time, after decades of following the wrong track, we are yearning to rejoin the road which was once ours too.1 Signs that things were returning to normal were everywhere: West Germans received their Os si neighbours back into the fold by giving each of them 100 West-Deutschmarks as so-called welcome money; Hungarians could once again sit alongside their Austrian cousins and thrill to La Traviata at the Vienna Opera; and Muscovites finally got to taste their first Big Mac. The socialist dream had been cancelled, but in its place there was to be another utopia, a consumerist paradise, buttressed by liberal democracy at home, and lasting peace abroad.Barely two decades later, there is, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, a new spectre haunting Central and Eastern Europe - the spectre of nostalgia. The idealization of the is, of course, a fundamental part of human nature. Regret for a lost idyll can often colour our way of looking at the world. Recalling memories of a bygone era, as Vladimir Jankelevitch has put it, sharpen[s] nostalgia and underline^] the irreversibility of the past.2 Until recently, nostalgia was essentially a private affair. Today, however, we can see a new type of nostalgia emerging, a collective form stretching over the entire area of the former USSR and its satellite states. This phenomenon is all the more paradoxical when one considers that the period on which this nostalgia is focused - the Soviet era - was once so roundly rejected by those who appear to feel it most keenly today. Perhaps this should not surprise us, however. As Svetlana Boym put it in her seminal work on the subject, [post-socialist] nostalgia became a defense mechanism against the accelerated rhythm of change and economic shock therapy.3 At one time this feeling was limited to emigres fondly reminiscing about their distant mother country. Now, however, it also appears to touch those who live where they always have, but whose homeland no longer officially exists.This new nostalgia has begun to attract considerable scholarly interest in recent years.4 It takes an astonishingly wide variety of forms, including the popularity among Berlin shoppers of the Ostpaket (East German products in their original packaging), the reaffirmation of stereotypical gender roles in Russian glamour culture,5 the reappearance of Soviet brands of chocolate and other fast-moving consumer goods, the rise of nationalism in countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, and the rehabilitation of long-forgotten artists or literary genres. This tendency to look at the through rose-tinted spectacles can also be seen in numerous published collections of Soviet photographs of the 1970s,6 or on countless social media pages, both institutional and personal.7 It is quite distinct from traditional forms of nostalgia, as the term Ostalgie, widespread in the former East Germany, suggests.8 Despite Serguei Oushakine's claim that this new kind of nostalgia does not aim at political restoration, there is often an important political subtext.9It is in the arts that this new (n)ostalgia is perhaps given its most complex expression. In her most recent novel, for example, Russian author Svetlana Alexievitch laments the demise of homo sovieticas.l0 A number of filmmakers and artists have also attempted to capture this sickness for the past (nost-algia). These include Stanislav Govorukhin, director of The Russia We Have Lost (Rossiia, kotoruiu my poteriali, 1992) and Wolfgang Becker, who is best known for Good bye, Lenin! (2003). In Moscow, the Memory Art exhibition in 2012 of paintings by Ukrainian artists Vlad Yurashko and Vika Shoumskaia, which took as its main theme the events of 1991 and their impact on collective consciousness, was followed by an international conference field in the city's Higher School of Economics, titled The USSR: Life After Death. …