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Stalin and the Blue Elephant: Paranoia and Complicity in Postcommunist Metahistories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Caroline Humphrey

Extract

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This paper analyses certain contemporary narratives among Buryats of Russia and China. At issue is the nature of responsibility for the campaigns of terror, in particular the devastation of the Buddhist church in the 1930s. In these accounts political leaders appear as reincarnations, destined to unleash terrible events. Stalin, for example, is said by Buryat Mongol villagers to have been the reincarnation of a Blue Elephant which lived in ancient times in India. I examine local discussions around these stories to suggest that the narrators, themselves having been caught up in the seemingly objective and transparent, yet deeply irrational, accounts of the Party-State, do not (at any rate at present) confront actions in which they were both perpetrators and victims ‘matter-of-factly’. Having been a particular target of the Stalinist all-pervasive organisation of suspicion and punishment, Buryat Buddhists today are creating ‘paranoid narratives’ of their own to explain the repressions - a narrative of displacement, in which the actions attributed to an other (in this case Stalin) are in some way ‘about’ oneself. The reincarnation stories point up the crucial moral issue erased by socialist metahistory, the ethical problem of individual accountability. They are about complicity, for they reveal an uneasy, and probably unconscious, identification with Stalin.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 49 , Issue 194 , June 2002 , pp. 26 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2002

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