SUMMARY:

This article proposes that there is such a collective memory, proceeding from the differentiation between post-socialism as a societal-institutional figuration and the post-communist condition as a discursive constellation that has abandoned communism as a regulative idea for the order of society. To clarify this argument, the post-socialism and post-communist condition are related to postcolonialism (as a societal figuration) and the postcolonial condition (as discourse), thus giving shape to the general features of a post-socialist memory that emerges between institutional figuration and discursive constellations as well as to the specific character distinguishing it from comparable memory practices, such as the postcolonial ones. In particular, the article concentrates on the following specific features of post-socialist and postcolonial collective memory: the appropriation of the nation-state and the national idea; the treatment of models of historical change; ways of representing empirical data in historiography; and the intellectuals’ role in the formation of collective memory.