SUMMARY:

Alexander Etkind takes as his point of departure a hypothesis according to which the phenomena of mass terror in the 20th century generated by Soviet Communism and German National-Socialism can be compared as objects of socio-cultural investigation despite their unique features. Etkind attempts to uncover structural specifics of cultural and historical memory of the Holocaust in Germany and of the Soviet terror in contemporary Russia. The central focus of the article is thus on the production and genres of today’s representation of memory of the Terror. The author distinguishes between hardware memory, understood as material expressions of memory in the form of monuments and memorials, and software memory, understood as a text and crystallized in public discourses. Interaction and mutual communicability of these two forms of memory is a condition of a normal development of the national cultural and historical memory. The emergence of hardware memory depends on the public consensus about the past, which is problematic in Russia due to the unfinished revolutionary period. In a democratic Germany these processes of the emergence of hardware memory were completed in late 1940s and by now mnemo-projects to commemorate the Holocaust are of a procedural character. Unlike in Germany, in Russian society culture is overloaded with historical memory and its varying interpretations. This exceeding historicism turns historical memory into a decentralized complex of judgments and symbols and prevents it from crystallizing in the form of monuments and memorials. Etkind turns his attention to differences between museum and memorial forms of representing the past, as well as considers the search for an adequate iconic representation of historical traumata. Those few monuments that do exist in Russia represent the result of a compromise of a desire to articulate a particular political opinion, artistic abstract expression, religious symbolism, and the dominant political demand.