SUMMARY:

This essay critiques Alexander Etkind’s series of “warped mourning” texts, which analyze the consequences of repressed histories while themselves neglecting important historical facts, such as the forced oblivion of Stalin in the post-1956 public discourse. Conspicuous factual omissions allow Etkind’s texts to denounce the Soviet “criminal state” from a position of noncomplicity, perpetuating a popular perestroika-era streamlined historiographic narrative that today is countered by “patriotic” historiography equally unproblematically uniting the Russian people and nation against imagined foreign aggression. The two positions are counterparts, this essay argues, united by a morally unambiguous relationship to the past and by the omission of “excessive” factual details that could complicate such an unproblematic identification.