Post-socialist Nostalgia Research Articles

A Tale of the 1990s: A Case Study of Nimród Antal’s The Whiskey Bandit as an Allegory of Post-Socialist Nostalgia

The story of Attila Ambrus, also known as the Whiskey Bandit or the Whiskey Robber, is one of the most memorable and widely remembered phenomena from 1990s Hungary. Between 1993 and 1999 Ambrus committed thirty robberies in post offices, banks, travel agencies and other financial institutions. What makes his persona stand out is that despite being a criminal, he not only became a celebrity with widespread media presence, but also a divisive hero: he enjoyed massive popularity as he outmaneuvered police repeatedly. This article reads The Whiskey Bandit (dir. Nimród Antal, 2017), a cinematic adaptation of his criminal career, as an allegory of a specific post-socialist nostalgia in Hungary, a longing for the brief period after the regime change when social, cultural, economic and political transformations re-structured the country’s landscape in an abrupt and even confusing manner, yet offered a moment of hope for endless possibilities and joining the progress of Western modernity. The analysis contextualizes the film’s non-­linear temporal and cacophonic spatial structures as an allegory of 1990s Hungarian experience; furthermore, examines nostalgic overtones in the film as a contemporary reflexive perspective on the euphoric moment of the regime change and following disillusionment of post-regime-change Hungary.

Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Literature by Veronika Pehe (review)

Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Literature by Veronika Pehe (review)

1989: “Refolutions”, “Rebirths” and the Crisis of Utopias

"Having been seen, at first, as the foundation of a “rebirth”, both European and global, the “refolutions” of 1989 left a highly controversial legacy which is still subject of political memory clashes and a source of “cultural bipolarities”, but also of disillusionment and polarizations within multiple mnemonic communities. These contradictions, anchored in the ”traumatogenic changes” of the democratic transitions that engendered, at the end of the 90s, post-socialist nostalgia, are also related to a crisis of utopian thinking which characterized the moment 1989 itself and became a main feature of post–Cold War political-cultural paradigms, including the mnemonic ones, dominated by the traumatic legacy of the ”century of extremes”. Keywords: revolutions of 1989, political memory, social memory, utopia, post-socialist nostalgia "

Velvet Retro. Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture

Velvet Retro. Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture

Electoral support in peripheral post-socialist regions as a product of nostalgia and grievances: The example of the Bruntál district

Voters are often influenced by emotions when choosing a political party in elections. In particular, right-wing and left-wing populist parties try to evoke these emotions in their potential voters. This article investigates the impact of nostalgia and grievances that populist parties try to induce in their voters in peripheral regions and thus influence the choice of a political party. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with inhabitants of the Bruntál district, which is characterised by above-average support for populist parties. According to the analysis, support for the left-wing Communist Party was influenced by nostalgia for the socialist regime, especially among the older population. Post-socialist nostalgia also appeared among younger residents if they had an elderly family member who benefited from the past regime. In contrast, economic deprivation, grievances with the central government, and the possible and actual consequences of the migration crisis have increased the attraction of the populist radical right in the region.

The Rise of the Nostalgic Spy Thriller: Globalizing the Neo-Cold War Narrative of Totalitarian State Socialism in the TV Series Deutschland (2015–2020)

ABSTRACT This article examines the portrayal of German Democratic Republic (GDR) socialism in the TV series Deutschland, the first foreign-language show to premiere on a U.S. network. Paving the way for the globalization of Germany’s TV industry, the series exemplifies the rise of the nostalgic spy thriller. It employs the aesthetic and ideological codes of a genre rooted in the 1960s to evoke the time period and ideological certainties of the Cold War from a contemporary perspective. Deutschland focuses on the Stasi’s division of counterintelligence to portray the GDR as a totalitarian regime, run by corrupt elites, which subjugated its population and supported terrorism and illegal arms trading. The series employs the conventions of “historical event TV” and re-created historical settings to claim veracity and authenticity for plotlines that invoke sensationalized coverage of Cold War conflicts and distorted allegations against the GDR. Deutschland dismisses GDR efforts to create and globalize an alternative system, based on principles of anti-imperialist solidarity with the global South, and caricatures postsocialist nostalgia as an elite sentiment for the re-creation of totalitarianism. The series contributes to neo-Cold War imageries that evoke a past of Western superiority over European state socialism, which has little to offer to a future post-neoliberal world.

Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture. By Veronika Pehe. Worlds of Memory. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. xii, 177 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. $120.00, hard bound.

Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture. By Veronika Pehe. Worlds of Memory. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. xii, 177 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. $120.00, hard bound. - Volume 81 Issue 1

›Hard Times but Our Own‹. Post-Socialist Nostalgia and the Transformation of Industrial Life in Poland

By analysing oral history interviews with industrial workers in Poland, this article adds some nuance to the study of post-industrial and post-socialist nostalgia. It presents diverse vernacular memories of the post-1989 systemic change from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism, and shows that nostalgia for an industrial ›golden age‹, although significant, is not the only way of making sense of this change. Rather, a distinctive feature of vernacular memory is the ambiguity about both socialism and capitalism. Recognising the variety of memories, the article underlines the critical potential of nostalgic currents for highlighting what is felt to be wrong with contemporary work culture. The article also differentiates between the vernacular memories of industrial communities recorded in oral history and institutionalised political memories in order to stress that the critical potential of nostalgic memories has been largely absent in the latter. In Poland, nostalgia for industrial life has been given little opportunity to become a reflective and critically useful mechanism to protect values that remain relevant in the present, such as the importance of sociability and agency in the workplace.

Hollywood Film behind the Iron Curtain: Cold War Nostalgias inChuck Norris vs Communism(2015)

This article focusses on the American reception of a British–Romanian documentary about the black market for VHS Hollywood films in 1980s Romania. The film uses two different registers of nostalgia. On the one hand, it functions as an ostalgic media product that engages Eastern European viewers by building upon a sense of continuity with the socialist past. On the other hand, its surprising success in the American conservative blogosphere reveals the endurance of Cold War exceptionalist tropes. My analysis expands current discussions of post-socialist nostalgia, arguing for the relevance of the concept of ostalgia for the field of American studies.

The Visual Images of the 1990s in Instagram: A Commercialization of Nostalgia

The image of the 1990s in the Russian public discourse is controversial: this historical period of transition from socialism to a new social system is considered as a time of chaos and crime, but also as a period of openness, opportunities and new consumer culture. The paper presents preliminary results of a study of visual materials from Instagram that in this or that way refer to the 1990s. The analysis of Instagram accounts dedicated to the 1990s, of hashtags related to the topic and of their co-occurrence, as well as the classification of the posts based on their content are presented. The 1990s turn out to be used in Instagram as one among other topics of post-socialist nostalgia, employed by the bloggers to increase the number of followers and likes. Nostalgic feelings refer to teenagers’ experiences mainly related to everyday practices, consumption and popular culture.

“The people’s commune is good”: precarious labor, migrant masculinity, and post-socialist nostalgia in contemporary China

ABSTRACT Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male privileges. China’s decades of de-ideologized reforms and waves of informalization of work have not completely deprived migrant workers of the moral and symbolic resources which they use to make claims. Migrant informal laborers’ capacity for collective resistance in post-socialist times is deeply entwined with their gendered experience of work in rural, pre-reform China.

Ulitskaia’s Childhood 45–53: Documenting Nostalgic Images and Memories of Growing Up Soviet after the Great War in Literature

This article explores aspects of nostalgia for Soviet childhoods in contemporary Russia. First it describes the complex phenomenon of documentary fiction today and shows how documentary texts create generational and collective memoirs of Soviet childhoods. It then goes on to discuss the position of Liudmila Ulitskaia within this discursive framework and argues that her collection Childhood 45-53 re-creates Soviet childhood as a multifaceted phenomenon. In a next step, the article examines how the photographs in this book contribute to the narrative of growing up Soviet in the 1940s and 1950s, examining the conjoining of childhood and adult spaces in the text. In sum, this article discusses the childhood memories with regard to phenomena of childhood nostalgia and post-socialist nostalgia, and shows that in contrast to common opinion this type of nostalgia is not predominantly regressive or escapist but also conveys elements of cultural critique.

Productive uses of nostalgia in contemporary Slovak fiction: Veronika Šikulová’s and Maroš Krajňak’s experiments with generational memory

ABSTRACTThis essay examines fictional uses of generational memory and life writing in Veronika Šikulová’s Miesta v sieti (Dwellings in the web) and Maroš Krajňak’s Carpathia and argues that the representations of the past in these contemporary Slovak novels provide alternatives to pernicious nationalist forms of nostalgia that have been of particular concern in the country in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election, in which the neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) won 8% of the vote and seats in the Slovak Parliament. The essay examines representations of time and pastoral borderland spaces in each novel, arguing that the writers’ treatment of nostalgia challenges existing theories of the phenomenon as a form of maladaptation. The novels ultimately suggest a productive compromise between restorative and reflective forms of nostalgia, which is a central distinction in Svetlana Boym’s influential theory of post-socialist nostalgia. The novels’ ultimate achievement is that they avoid the extremes of sentimentality and irony in their treatment of the past and suggest visions of collective identity that provide a counterpoint to nationalist idealizations of the past.

The pleasure of continuity: Re-reading post-socialist nostalgia

This article explores uses and modalities of the concept of post-socialist nostalgia in the still emerging field of cultural studies focused on the region of Central and Eastern Europe. It encapsulates both the cultural and socio-political forms of post-socialist nostalgia, defined as tinkering with the remnants of the socialist popular culture, television, fashion or design and reminiscing about social welfare under Communist Party rule. The main aim of this theoretical article is to demonstrate the anti-hegemonic dimension of post-socialist nostalgia, which disturbed the official memory politics that promoted discontinuity with the socialist past in the early post-transformation period of the 1990s. The dynamics in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic in this period are presented to illuminate how discontinuity in memory politics was embedded in retroactive justice, legislation, the economy, etc. In contrast to these elitist discourses reducing the memory of socialism to its crimes, the pop-cultural post-socialist nostalgia (the lowbrow discourse less strictly policed for discontinuity) served as the venue through which continuity with socialism was redeemed. Reunion with one’s own past and reclaiming the right to remember the past fully is presented as a source of cultural pleasure, the backbone of both types of post-socialist nostalgia.

The colours of socialism: visual nostalgia and retro aesthetics in Czech film and television

Since the end of the 1990s, post-socialist nostalgia has been a powerful trend in Czech film and television. This article focuses on the examples of Filip Renč’s 2001 musical comedy Rebelové (The Rebels) and the Czech television series Vyprávěj (Tell Me a Story, 2009–2013), which both portray the period around the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Through an analysis of the visual style of the film and television series, as well as a discussion of the way the texts recontextualize the popular culture of the period they portray, the article proposes that Czech post-socialist nostalgia is more fruitfully viewed as “retro”, which is here differentiated from non-nostalgic depictions of socialism through a comparison with the mini-series Hořící keř (Burning Bush, directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2013). Although retro’s concern with surface and style can be interpreted as apolitical, the author argues that the political agenda of Czech retro texts needs to be understood by the ways they combine a fetishization of the aesthetic trappings of the period with a condemnation of the political system of the time.

Red Tourism: Rethinking Propaganda as a Social Space

This article examines Red Tourism through a case study of Yan’an, China. Drawing upon social/critical scholarship on media and space, the author argues that Red Tourism is better conceived as a social space, both produced and productive. Specifically, from the qualitative data derived from this study and through a spatial analysis of architecture, urban planning, and the museum of Yan’an, the author argues that Red Tourism was created by the state to xuanchuan/propagandize its revolutionary past and attached politico-ideological legitimacy by catering to the postsocialist nostalgia on the one hand, and is producing a dynamic “Red” economy through the commodification of the space on the other. Departing from Henri Lefebvre's powerful thinking around the production of space, this article sheds additional light on the close ties between propaganda and space that have been largely invisible in the field.

Why Should We Study Socialist Commercials?

This article looks at television’s so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive framework at the intersection of postsocialist memory and history studies. It zooms in on postsocialist nostalgia as a relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network. Televisual nostalgia also implicates Western Europe and makes explicit a Western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War. This longing, in turn, shores up Europe’s repressed imperial history. Television’s role at the pressure points of postsocialist institutional and economic policy, consumption and narrative concerns makes it an indispensable window into the intertwined workings of nostalgia and nationalism within a postcolonial Europe.

Why Should We Study Socialist Commercials

This article looks at television's so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive framework at the intersection of postsocialist memory and history studies. It zooms in on postsocialist nostalgia as a relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network. Televisual nostalgia also implicates Western Europe and makes explicit a Western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War. This longing, in turn, shores up Europe’s repressed imperial history. Television’s role at the pressure points of postsocialist institutional and economic policy, consumption and narrative concerns makes it an indispensable window into the intertwined workings of nostalgia and nationalism within a postcolonial Europe.

Russian Empire of Pop: Post‐Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the “New Wave” Competition

The article is an analysis of the “New Wave International Competition of Young Performers of Popular Music,” a televised spectacle in the music format of “estrada” (“stage song”), that has been held in Jurmala, Latvia, since 2002. The competition is discussed in terms of the history of its Soviet predecessor, the “Jurmala” competition that was held from 1985–1989 in the same concert hall, involving many of the same figures who organized “New Wave.” Originally a showcase for “all‐union” culture and interethnic relations in the mode of the “friendship of peoples,” in its last two years, that earlier competition became a stage for agitation in connection with national independence movements. In this light, the contemporary “New Wave” competition may be seen as a form of memory project. Eliding the separatist politics of the last years of “Jurmala,”“New Wave” reconstitutes the “friendship of peoples” model of multiethnic Russophone culture in which Russians are first among equals, for a television audience that encompasses not only Russia but many of the former Soviet and former socialist states. In some ways, this is a form of cultural imperialism, a projection of Russian soft power that matches projections of hard power into the ostensible Russian “sphere of influence.” Yet despite the aspiration to unification of the post‐Soviet and post‐Socialist audience, the competition may take on distinct political and cultural significance in various locations. In Latvia, it may represent a clever marketing move, taking advantage of the demand for ironically inflected “Soviet nostalgia.” In Russia, the project should be viewed not as “nostalgia,” a term that may properly be applied to projects relating to scenes of cultural life that are truly past, but rather as “soviet retro”–dedicated to the recovery of modes of political and cultural life that are still meaningful and subject to revival.

An Artificial Unity? Approaches to Post-Socialist Nostalgia

‘Post-socialist nostalgia’ has been used as an umbrella term to describe a number of disparate and at times contradictory phenomena. Given the often opposing notions of what is meant by the designation, this paper interrogates to what extent post-socialist nostalgia is still a valid term and examines whether it imposes an artificial unity on heterogeneous approaches and concepts that could more fruitfully be described by a variety of more specific terms. The contribution argues that established typologies of nostalgia are not necessarily a productive way of thinking about the phenomenon. Drawing on examples from the Czech Republic, this paper makes a case for viewing post-socialist nostalgia not as a set of categories, but as a collection of tools and mechanisms which can be observed in nostalgic texts, as well as, more significantly, in their reception.