As Megan Swift writes in her introduction, the celebration or commemoration of anniversaries usually play a pivotal cultural role for states and this was certainly true of the Soviet state. Yet the 2017 anniversary of the Russian Revolution was met inside the modern Russian Federation by ambiguity and uncertainty. Those outside Russia could choose to focus on its international and transnational impacts and legacies in 2017 and leave alone the largely painful question of its impact inside Russia. This collection of creative, stimulating, and engaging essays seeks out the residues and traces and examines the legacies of 1917 in Russia today and for Russian society. This focus on Russia makes it a uniquely valuable contribution to the scholarly literature. Going beyond asking how the Revolution had been memorialized, the individual contributions focus on continuity across the twentieth and twenty-first century divide and look at how Soviet cultural norms and practices still inform post-socialist Russian culture.
The collection is divided into three sections: material and mnemonic aftereffects, social and environmental aftereffects, and artistic and conceptual aftereffects. In addition to its focus on the meaning of the revolution for Russians, one of the other strengths of the book is its interdisciplinary nature, drawing on the fields of anthropology, art history, cultural history, gender studies, geography, heritage studies, film studies, literary studies, and sociology.
The specific chapters include the editor's contribution on the hesitant attempts of the state to approach 1917 in a way that would also mask Soviet state complicity in the Great Terror by choosing to focus on memorials to 1937 that year. She argues that states wants to celebrate “monumental history” but the tragedies of the revolution preclude that. Maria Silina's chapter agrees that a problem for the Russian state is that the victorious revolution cannot be easily celebrated as it left traumatic memories. She examines how post-communist modernization of the Moscow Agricultural Exhibition Ensemble (VDNKh) offered an opportunity to create a memorial to the peasant experiences of violent collectivization, but instead was turned into a “place of socialist nostalgia and post-Soviet prosperity” (51). Moving on from the specific commemorations of 1917, the other chapters look at the constant reevaluations of avant-garde architecture in the post-Soviet period whose “rejection and obsession” (75) mirror attitudes to the place of the Revolution in Russian history; the ongoing “gender crisis” of women's double burden as workers and single mothers created by early Soviet gender politics; the reappearance and resilience of the Soviet concept of etnos, and change and continuity in attitudes to environmental protection, particularly of Russia's forests. Finally, the sections on art and literature include reflections on the destruction of the “heroic” narrative of revolution in the works of the famous writer Boris Akunin and in Soviet films from the 1960s.
The collection does not only trace the ambiguity towards the revolutionary legacy in Russia today and the continuities from the Soviet period in Russian social and cultural life. It also attempts to analyze the meaning of this for Russian society; is it actually healthy to have diffuse and differing versions of the Revolution? Is this complexity in collective memory actually maturity rather than confusion? The conclusions are perhaps left open ended; perhaps the Revolution is too “monumental” rather than not monumental enough for easy commemoration. However, the reflections themselves enrich this extremely enjoyable and thought provoking collection. Essential reading for academics interested in Russia's past and present, some of the chapters (particularly on commemoration and gender) could also be used in the classroom for undergraduates.
