SUMMARY:

Elza-Bair Guchinova discusses collective memory of the Kalmyk people as expressed in debates focusing on two defining events of Kalmyk history: the organization and activities of the Kalmyk Cavalery Corps (KKK), which operated under the Nazi occupation regime in the USSR, and the deportation of the Kalmyks from their historical lands in contemporary Kalmykia.
Guchinova analyzes various interpretations of events related to KKK and the deportation, including ways in which representatives of the Kalmyk emigration, the Soviet official version of the past, and the Kalmyk private memory recalled these events. According to the author, in post-Communist Kalmykia the issue of the past overshadowed by the memory of collaboration and the concept of collective guilt remains a highly sensitive topic. These events are still used to justify anti-Kalmyk rhetoric by Russian nationalists. At the same time, the very Kalmyk national consciousness depends on interpretations of the past imbued with collective guilt. Many Kalmyks privately believe that participants in KKK just responded to the hardships of the war and to the real lack of choice at a given time, while others share the Soviet version of events and treat participants in the KKK as traitors.