SUMMARY:

In her response to Serguei Oushakine’s book, Elena Gapova focuses on the chapter dealing with the groups of mothers of fallen soldiers in Barnaul. Gapova suggests that Oushakine’s study of this community of mourning raises a larger question about why post-Soviet society failed to call upon the state to take responsibility for the many victims of state policies. Gapova sees the answer in Oushakine’s study of how the process of mourning itself – the creation and maintenance of artifacts such as monuments, public recognition and commemoration of the loss – displaced the problem of political responsibility with the question “how do we remember?” Gapova refers to Oushakine’s well-known conception of post-Soviet aphasia and points out how post-Soviet people “domesticate” the new post-Soviet relations using the Soviet-rooted practices of loss and mourning. Noting how soldiers’ mothers turned out to be dependent on the state for both subsidies and public recognition of their loss, Gapova asks whether any alternatives to the language of perpetual loss were possible.