A spectre is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism

K. Marx, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto

It is good to be young in any system, even in one that falls within an inglorious and lusterless era of our history… [T]hat’s when we chased girls, that’s when we were drunk, that’s when we were young… [T]here was shit in the Kádár-era pancake, but there was pudding on top.

Barta Balázs, Index website (www.index.hu), October 19, 2000.

I fear that, after listening to these [reminiscences], the former KGB informants and disciplinarians will rejoice... And will infect today’s youth with their longing for the past.

G. Il’in, liberal Russian daily Obschaya Gazeta, November 6, 1998.

I know that I will never feel as carefree and as blissful as I did back then. Although if I found myself back there, I would howl from all the idiocy of that life. I guess I didn’t make my share of mud pies in that sandbox… And now the fun is gone, and my little scoop and pail are lost somewhere… But the best ice-cream is still the waffle cone for 20 kopecks.

One of over 400 Russian responses to an Internet list (posted on www.livejournal.com) “You come from the 70s/80s if…”, April 6, 2003.

INTRODUCTION

Just months after the political transformations of 1989 and 1991 when nothing seemed more impossible than the return of state socialism to Central and Eastern Europe, communist symbols and iconography suddenly acquired a new visibility rather than fade into obsolescence. Over the next decade, communism would enjoy a healthy afterlife as a cultural and political commodity, from hammer-and-sickle tee-shirts in Bulgaria, to popular collections of socialist-era songs in Russia, to trendy “workers’ canteen”-themed restaurants in Budapest – all fell under label “nostalgia”.
It is thus no surprise that the specter of Communism would also re-emerge to haunt the former Soviet-bloc states, this time in the form of public debates about the attractions and dangers posed by these cultural practices. Indeed, nostalgia has become such a central term for analyzing how post-socialist societies relate to the recent past that it raises the question of why it has become so widespread in the first place – both as a phenomenon and as a conceptual category through which to unify disparate cultural phenomena across the region. What do these nostalgias have in common, and what makes them different from nostalgia elsewhere?
For what makes the similarity of these memory practices so remarkable is that the experiences of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe were so dissimilar compared to that of the Soviet Union.^[1] Communist rule lasted longer in the USSR than it did in Central and Eastern Europe and was fueled primarily by internal political dynamics, not by constant negotiation between local party elites and an external imperial power. The ideology of socialism, by extension, was somewhat less orthodox in Central and Eastern Europe where elites of different countries explored ways to “nationalize” communist doctrine as a way to respond to the crises of post-Stalinist system of the Soviet bloc. Unsurprisingly, the differences did not cease with the fall of communism, but only became more apparent. Because the socialist system was not viewed as indigenous but was rather associated with the external Soviet power and imperialism, its break-up in 1989-1991 was juridicially and politically more complete in Central and Eastern Europe than in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Communism’s legacies, both in terms of Communist ideology and the lasting institutional forms and practices of late socialism, are more observable today in post-Soviet Russia than in Hungary or the Czech Republic. This is evident, for example, by the fact that the Communist party has survived in post-Soviet Russia as a major political agent whereas in Central and Eastern Europe there has been a conscious attempt to remodel the left along the lines of social democracy: an attempt which – as shall be discussed later – has made the political uses of nostalgia more problematic.
This article seeks to address a number of questions that these differences raise by drawing on examples from Hungary and Russia. Does the popularity of similar cultural/historical symbols (socialist-era consumer products, iconic images, cultural products of late socialism) have the same significance in national contexts that now follow very different trajectories? That is, when do apparently identical memory practices in the two countries reflect similar patterns of public memory and public values, and when is the resemblance merely superficial? Indeed, when do these resemblances facilitate misrecognition of nostalgic practices both within and across national borders? And, ultimately, what is it that shapes the cultural and political implications of these apparently similar nostalgic practices in each given case – or in fact, makes them politically effective or able to be incorporated into politics, at all?
To make such distinctions, we argue, requires not only ethnographic attention to local cultural contexts, but also to internal variation within these contexts. To whom are specific forms of nostalgia addressed and how is this audience defined (age-group, economic class, etc.)? Who defines these practices as nostalgic in the first place – those who define themselves as participants or observers, “locals” or “exiles” – and are they supportive of these practices or do they oppose them?
As these questions about location suggest, the power of nostalgia is precisely its susceptibility to being co-opted into various political agendas, which nostalgia then cloaks with an aura of “inevitability”. This in turn has produced innumerable critical discourses devoted to deciphering these agendas – discourses which tend to assume that the very structure of nostalgia endows it with a particular political meaning. Such essentialism seeks to define the inherent properties of nostalgia rather than viewing these properties as socially embedded, as products of different subject positions of those who encode and decode these nostalgic practices. That is, these critics look for the substance of the phenomenon – whether it is phrased in terms of a “return to communism” or the equally rose-tinted version of the past purported by right-wing reactionary politics – and not the social relations that produce it (institutional breaks, generational change, international network alliances, etc.). Thus, domestic cultural commentators attempt to distinguish “good” from “bad” nostalgia, scanning each manifestation for signs of its cultural “health,” while foreign mass media similarly divides nostalgia into either the thoroughgoing commodification of communist symbols (and hence, the triumph of capitalism) or, in contrast, the proof of dangerous atavistic cultural attachments. Meanwhile, scholars at home and abroad try to pose correctives to these mainstream arguments by viewing these very same nostalgic practices as critical and subversive, and thus an endorsement of neither the socialist past nor the capitalist present.
Rather than participate in these discourses – which we also view as part of the larger “nostalgia industry” – we examine the different logics that undergird the nostalgic cultural practices they attempt to describe: political kitsch, “Proustiana,” postmodern, etc. Can political intention – and, as a consequence, the ability to mobilize this intention for politics – be divined from the different structures of post-socialist nostalgia? Using comparative examples from Hungary and Russia, we argue to the contrary that both the meaning and significance of nostalgic practices only emerge from within a larger field of political possibility. Similar practices, inspired by similar sets of longings, can thus follow very different political trajectories in terms of their political interpretation (“reactionary” versus “reflective”) as well as their political impact. Any analysis of post-socialist nostalgia must thus guard against two temptations: reading politics into nostalgia (that is, assuming inherent political meaning or implications to specific nostalgic practices) and reading nostalgia into politics (assuming that every reference to the past is indeed a nostalgic one).

BACKGROUND
For a cultural practice so fundamentally concerned with the past, nostalgia is firmly rooted in modernity. Coined in the late seventeenth century as a term to describe the physical sufferings endured by Swiss soldiers stationed abroad, nostalgia initially signified a melancholic state associated with geographical rather than temporal displacement. What later made the term so fit to describe the peculiar discontents caused by the flow of history was, as Peter Fritzsche suggests, the modern Europeans’ deepening awareness of the accelerating pace of social change that engendered not only unsettlement, but also “a compelling historical understanding that appeared to deny the possibility of resettlement”.^[2] In other words, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and increasingly since, remaining in one’s native place could no longer prevent the experience of displacement. New generations of Swiss soldiers were bound to face disappointment upon their return home, since their sites of origin, transformed in the time of their absence, no longer seemed familiarly domestic.
Nostalgia, then, is a product of a particular temporality and way of approaching history (a “regime of seeing” as Fritzsche would have it): one that views individuals and societies as caught up in a destructive and irreversible flow of time.^[3] It emphasizes the irretrievability of the past as the very condition of desire. For longing in nostalgia, as writers from Susan Stewart^[4] to Svetlana Boym^[5] point out, is never longing for a specific past as much as it is longing for longing itself, made all the safer by the fact that the object of that desire is deemed irrevocably lost. Nowhere is this “longing for longing” more visible than in instances of material or sensory nostalgia, where the physical object deployed as emotional mnemonic, be it a re-run of an old film or a madeleine dipped in tea, is structurally incapable of satisfying the desire that it stirs, for the simple reason of this desire being self-referential. What is at stake in each case is not the film or pastry nor even the historical period they signify, but rather the individual’s memory of past desire (whether of a particular version of the future or of an alternative present) and the awareness of the impossibility of reliving this desire again.
This is not to say that the referential content of nostalgia is irrelevant; rather, that it is opportunistic and changeable. What persists despite nostalgia’s historical promiscuity is its peculiarly modern optics and the effect it creates of simultaneous connection with and dissociation from the imagined past. To think productively about nostalgia, then, is to treat it as a “cultural practice, not a given content”;^[6] that is, to attend to how the meaning of nostalgic practices, far from being pre-determined by their historical referents, is shaped situationally in the process of their creation and re-enactment.
Turning to the manifestations of post-socialist nostalgia, one is struck by how closely the themes of spatial and temporal displacement intertwine. Communist ideology, of course, was deliberately and emphatically anti-nostalgic. But given the insularity of the Soviet bloc (within which Paris and Prague, as Lidia Libedinskaya recently remarked, were experienced being as inaccessible as the moon and Mars^[7]), spatial displacement through emigration or exile was experienced as having as the same finality as the flow of history. While this is no longer the case, a different kind of spatial displacement – this time following economic, rather than political logic – makes geographical distances within the country feel insurmountable to the many Russian families who are unable to afford long-distance travel. More significantly, the very historical transformation that the socialist countries have undergone during the past 15 years has been experienced by many of their subjects, as well as observers, in geographical terms. “We experienced ten years earlier what all of Russia experienced after perestroika,” says Rita D., one of Svetlana Boym’s respondents who immigrated to the US years before 1991. “Now… it seems that the whole of the former Soviet Union went into immigration, without leaving the country”.^[8]
This substitution of spatial for temporal imagery, however, tells only part of the story. While space can, at least theoretically, be traversed, the flow of time is utterly irreversible. It is this irreversibility that gives nostalgia its modern meaning of incurable affliction. The years of post-socialism, therefore, saw not only a shift from a spatial to temporal logic of nostalgic desire (a shift which paralleled the historical evolution of the term), but also a realization, uncomfortable for some and welcome to others, that the rupture which nostalgic desire attempts to breach could only deepen with the passage of time.
The nostalgic practices of today, therefore, through their very existence instantiate and acknowledge the sense of dislocation from the past. In other words, a sense of break from the past is necessary for nostalgia to exist in the first place; the perception of loss is the precondition for discourses of return and recovery. In this, nostalgic practices differ from reactionary politics whose agenda is precisely to reconstruct the past in the present, thus denying that anything of value can be irrevocably lost. This analytical separation, however, does not prevent reactionary politics from attempts to appropriate nostalgic sentiments in its own interests (attempts which, as we will show below, can occasionally succeed). In these attempts, images and associations that gain power through nostalgia are used as symbolic currency in attracting a following for projects whose agendas may be motivated entirely by contemporary interests. The ways in which the American Right appropriates broad societal nostalgia for the 1950s for advancing conservative family policies, for example, has been written and remarked upon^[9]. Closer to home, nostalgia for the socialist past was used with similar success to gain public acceptance of the Russian youth organization Idushchie Vmeste [Moving Together] organized by a former Presidential administration bureaucrat Vasilii Yakemenko. The rationalizations put forth by the supporters of the movement lay bare nostalgia’s fundamental preoccupation not with the past, but with the fantasies that structured that past, since the most common defense of the movement provided by one of the author’s Russian respondents approximated the sentiment that “at least under socialism, young people believed in something.”^[10] Nostalgic rhetoric notwithstanding, however, the organization’s neoconservative ideology had little to do with cherishing the memories of the past and in fact targeted Communism, alongside Fascism, as an example of ideology “built on hatred and murder, on deceit and betrayal, on blood and suffering of nations.”^[11]

THE LOGIC OF NOSTALGIC DESIRE

What is the longing that sets into motion the wheels of post-socialist nostalgic desire? As the example of Idushchie Vmeste suggests, insofar as a general answer to this question is possible, it has to start from an examination of the fantasies that socialism spurred into being. Perhaps the most central of these fantasies, and one shared throughout the socialist camp, was the fantasy of the capitalist “Other,” a fantasy to which the developed capitalist countries responded in kind by generating an image of an equally-stereotyped socialist doppelganger. It is difficult to establish which of these fantasies, having disappeared after 1989-1991, left a greater gap in the symbolic order. But the ease with which both Western onlookers and their East European counterparts have embraced many post-socialist nostalgic discourses suggests that the fantasy of moral and political certainties of the Cold War might be missed on both sides of the vanished Berlin Wall.^[12]
This political fantasy of the West had a number of different dimensions. For the millions of those who drew their knowledge about life outside the Iron Curtain from official sources, Western countries represented the ultimate dystopia that rendered the socialist reality enviable by comparison. This depiction could be employed to justify “temporary hardships” and mobilize public acceptance of unpopular political and economic measures, if not actual support. The loss of such a stable referent made it much more difficult to normalize the relative deprivations of post-socialism through external comparison.^[13]
At the same time, other socialist subjects, including many members of the liberal intelligentsia, drew upon the notion of the Western “Other” during the Cold War as the repository of Western ideals of democracy and thus as ultimate political references to model “ideal” and “proper” political behavior. This fantasy, however, did not outlive its dystopic counterpart. As post-socialist countries had to increasingly deal with international Realpolitik, their citizens came face-to-face with the less glamorous reality that Western countries primarily seek to defend their own national interests rather than to maintain the political principles upon which they were founded. Political disappointment with the West’s “betrayal of its own principles” is thus inseparable from the symbolic role the West played for the political imaginary under socialism. Post-socialist nostalgia gives shape to the mourning over this loss of the moral and political certainty of pre-1989 idealism.
But, as the residents of the former Eastern bloc would be quick to point out, the fantasies of the capitalist “Other” entailed not only political divisions, but more importantly, projections of consumer desire and fantasies of material abundance and “normality” more generally.^[14] While post-war socialist regimes strove to measure up to the consumer standards attained by advanced capitalist countries,^[15] the pace and rules of the competition were not of socialism’s own making and the outcome of the competition was largely not in its favor.^[16] As a result, Western goods were endowed with a “magical” and transformative capacity based on their perceived higher quality, unavailability, and prestige; consumer utopia appeared to be located just outside socialism’s borders, in a Western culture characterized by Coca-Cola, bananas, and unlimited consumer choice. The characteristics of this utopia, however, were markedly socialist in that this abundance was fantasized as available to everyone; today’s frequent indictments of the social injustices of the “abundance of the few” recall the allure of this fantasy and the disappointment associated with its failure. As a result, once-disparaged items of socialist mass production have acquired the authenticity that Western products are now perceived to lack. They are now embraced as vehicles of the once-utopian dreams and desires for the idealized West, and as silent witnesses of an era in which consumer abundance was imagined as universally available.^[17]
This reversal reveals nostalgia as a practice centered on the unattainable structure of past desire – the impossibility of re-experiencing the fantasy of the West as it was once construed. Regardless of whether this disappointment is mild or acute, such nostalgia also represents a way to mourn one’s “lost childhood innocence” in not only personal but sociopolitical terms. Coming to terms with the harsh realities of the market economy is narrated as a collective entrance into “adult” life: a theme made visible in a number of German and Hungarian coming-of-age films that take place at the time of the political transition. In the Russian context, this generational narrative is complicated by the fact that the same period is associated with a loss of yet another fantasy, this one peculiar to the Soviet cultural imagination. This fantasy is the one of international prestige and geopolitical power, buttressed by the very real military presence of the USSR throughout the Eastern bloc, but interpreted on the level of daily consciousness in the misleadingly benign terms of assistance to and cooperation with the “brotherly nations” of the Warsaw pact. The experience of witnessing this fantasy re-cast by its former subjects in the substantially less flattering terms of imperial aggression added more than a touch of bitterness to the Russians’ experience of 1989-1991, so that in the Russian case, the loss of innocence (with its connotations of inevitability and natural progression) became inextricably – and problematically – tied to a less palatable fall from grace. Clearly, not all nostalgic practices in post-Soviet Russia draw on the two fantasies to the equal extent, but there always remains a possibility that nostalgia for the lost innocence of socialism can get misrecognized or phrased in terms of nostalgia for the former glory (as well as the other way around). As we shall argue, this contradictory nature of nostalgic desire in the Russian context lies at the very heart of the ambivalence nostalgic practices evoke among the Russian cultural commentators and drives their reluctance to endorse practices which, in the East European setting, may appear politically less problematic.
Because post-socialist nostalgic practices do not concern the past itself, but rather the subjects’ memory of their own past investments and fantasies, what is also at stake in this loss is not only one’s former innocence or grandeur but the imagined futures these fantasies projected. As Walter Benjamin recognized several generations ago, this is what gives the outdated detritus of consumer culture in particular such poignancy and endows socialist consumer products once reviled as cheap and “inauthentic” with the auratic appeal once invested in difficult-to-attain Western goods.^[18] Too recent to possess age-value as relics, these objects in their obsolescence nonetheless reveal the diverse utopian fantasies once embedded within them by making palpable the disjuncture between these former dreams of the future and the present reality. Thus, the seemingly trivial and impersonal consumer products of socialist mass production ironically offer a powerful idiom through which to mourn the personal and societal naďvete they are perceived to represent.^[19]
The forms and practices of post-socialist nostalgia have mesmerized not only the countries of the former Soviet bloc, but also their cold war counterparts. One reason for the unremitting Western media fascination with this topic undoubtedly stems from the loss of the political Cold War “Big Other,” a logic by which the end of state socialism in Eurasia and Eastern Europe proves the triumph of democratic ideals and the commodification of political icons into kitsch demonstrates the success of capitalism. In addition, however, post-socialist nostalgia also appeals to the desire to see oneself through the “Other’s” desiring gaze (the lost structure of fantasy that both East and West mourn). That is, it also mourns the loss of the flattering fantasy – also thoroughly disenchanted by the East’s experience of a market economy – by which the West perceived even the most banal elements of its everyday life to be an envied and unattainable luxury in the eyes of its ideological enemy. For example, a scene in Moscow on the Hudson, a Columbia Pictures film from (not inconsequentially) 1984, portrays the abundance of an average American grocery store as so overwhelming to new Russian émigré Vladimir that he keels over in a faint. In contrast, today’s Western popular mythologies do not offer any such equivalent; the “Other” of the contemporary West, Islamic fundamentalism, exhibits no comparable fascination with the consumer paradise of modern capitalism.^[20]
For other observers, on the other hand, post-socialist nostalgia offers a vision of popular resistance to capitalism that more traditional forms of political mobilization failed to ensure. It gives voice not only to the loss of the fantasy of the West as imagined utopia, but also to the dissolution of socialism’s own utopian aspirations (both the grandiose ones expressed by ideology and the more prosaic ones embodied in its consumer goods). This vision interprets post-socialist nostalgia as a critique of the present and of capitalist triumphalism that would discard the legacies of socialism wholesale without stopping to ask what might remain of value from the past, in terms of both political and personal memory. As a result, it often collapses into a politics by which every nostalgic gesture towards the past is read as subversive, even though these same nostalgic gestures may be used with equal effectiveness to maintain the status quo. Thus, for these (predominantly Western) nostalgia enthusiasts, the value of nostalgic practices stems from the critical distance these practices are hoped to provide post-socialist individuals otherwise immersed into the culture of late capitalism.
While many local cultural commentators would tend to agree concerning the inherently political nature of nostalgic practices, for them the political meaning that nostalgia holds is typically the opposite: inherently conservative and politically dangerous. To use a distinction proposed by Gasan Guseinov,^[21] while in the case of nostalgia enthusiasts, the political meaning of nostalgic memory is shaped in a rhetorical field created by the opposition Soviet communism – American capitalism, the local critics usually see the field as defined by the contrast Communism – National socialism. Given the shift of interpretative context, it is hardly surprising, then, that the ideological value of nostalgic practices shifts correspondingly. Instead of summoning hopes of resistance against the hegemony of neoliberalism, nostalgic practices signify a dangerous denial of socialism’s totalitarian legacy and a willingness to forget (and thus, a risk to repeat) the mistakes of the past. Although this viewpoint cannot be considered properly nostalgic (unless one introduces a category of nostalgic repulsion to counter the more self-explanatory nostalgic attraction), it does adhere to the logic of nostalgia in that it exhibits a similar preoccupation with the past, this time centered around the desire not to desire it and is thus equally fascinated by past fantasies as dangerously alluring or tempting to others.

TYPES OF NOSTALGIC PRACTICES

What is the relationship of these various fantasies (of the dream of the West, of being the East’s glamorous “Other,” or of the lost potential of socialism) to the actual cultural practices of post-socialist nostalgia? Nostalgia may make visible the desire for a structure of fantasy that it is now perceived as lost, but it does not seek to recreate these fantasies. Rather, it takes on forms defined by structures of intention that fully inhabit the present-day realities of post-socialism.^[22]
Thus, the first form of nostalgia to emerge after the transition was the commodification of the official symbols of communist ideology, such as busts of Lenin and Soviet medals. In Budapest, for example, young entrepreneurs opened a pizzeria called “Marxim”; decorated with red banners and barbed wire, it is still in operation today. In Russia, entrepreneurial artists enriched the standard variety of painted wooden matryoshka dolls popular with the tourists by including satirical portrayals of stackable communist founders, Marx, Engels and Lenin, with Stalin, Khruschev and Gorbachev also making occasional appearances. But as the very speed with which these phenomena emerged makes clear, these cultural practices were not concerned with nostalgia itself, but rather with making nostalgia possible by establishing the necessary break between past and present. Mocking and ridiculing the ideological symbols associated with the socialist past, these practices self-consciously deprived previously potent images of their prior meaning. While the agenda to which this symbolic practice contributed was new, the practice itself was not. In fact, it drew directly on the tradition of subversive political humor under late socialism, when icons sacred for communist ideology were subverted through their incorporation into everyday profane contexts (as in jokes and anecdotes or in the underground artistic trend of Sotsart started by Moscow painters Vitalii Komar and Alexander Melamid, who humorously used iconographic clichés of socialist realism in paintings with titles like “Stalin and the Muses” or “Stalin in front of a Mirror”).^[23] In a sense, late socialist subversion anticipated the post-socialist use of images in that it commercialized ideological icons before such commercialization became an actual possibility; the very name of Sotsart obviously evoked the more internationally recognized trend of Pop Art, which in its own way exposed the close connections between ideology and commercialism.^[24]
Converting political icons into kitsch was thus part of the necessary symbolic work of that time, in order render the former icons powerless and to enable post-socialist subjects to look back at the past with no fear of its return. Although such a “threat” no longer remains, this type of nostalgia is nonetheless still much in evidence today (i.e., Budapest’s Statue Park Museum of socialist-era statues; the socialist relics still widely available for sale on Arbat street in Moscow; and “Ossi World,” the communist theme park now being constructed to capitalize upon German “Ostalgie”). Its materials (hammers and sickles, shades of “communist” red) are familiar and its logic (mocking what once was presumably feared) is simple, unlike the more ambivalent pleasures discussed below. In contrast to the subversive and risky nature of these practices under socialism, today’s production of Soviet-themed kitsch is fueled by market logic and is targeted primarily at the outsiders to whom it provides reassuring evidence that socialism is comfortably (and profitably) dead and that capitalist logic reigns supreme, regulating the circulation of socialist relics as commodities. This nostalgia of political kitsch is thus popular with foreign tourists and media, since it is the one most legible to – and hence performed most emphatically – to non-locals.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, two other forms of nostalgic practices appeared, both characterized not by a concern with historical disjuncture but rather with establishing continuity between past and present selves. The first form of nostalgia, which might be glossed as “Proustiana,” is similar to political kitsch in that it is also expressed through the marketing, consumption, and display of material culture. (Like kitsch, it is also very easily commodified, although the only place where it appears to be genuinely profitable is Germany.) Here the objects of memory are not relics of the former regime’s ideology, but rather the detritus of the previous era’s everyday life and they conjure up a humor based not on mockery, but rather ironic affection. They thus serve as what Winnicott terms “transitional objects”^[25] in that they provide a convenient combination of materiality (that is, they can be manipulated in the present) with their signification of the past state of the subject (teddy bears is his classical example). Moreover, since many of these objects were products of socialist-era consumer culture, their sudden transformation in social value also enables commentary on the post-socialist East’s disenchantment with the once idealized West. The density of meaning and memory sedimented onto such objects has made them fashionable as commodities (the renewed popularity of East German brands in Germany; the revival of the soda “Bambi” in Hungary and of “Baikal” and “Buratino” in Russia); in curatorial practice (the exhibit Our Happy Childhood in the Historical Museum in Moscow; the exhibits Kitsch and Cult and Fingerprint of the Twentieth Century in Budapest), as well as academic studies of nostalgia at home and abroad. The popularity of documentaries as well as re-televised socialist-era films and television programs similarly demonstrates the success of “Proustiana” in that these visual texts are often read as cultural artifacts of Soviet life.
But these films need not merely serve as objects of memory; the extra-diegetic sights and sounds they index also conjure up the settings and atmospheres that structured the socialist era. This next form of nostalgia similarly refers to everyday life under state socialism, yet while it intersects with nostalgia for socialist-era material culture, it is primarily concerned with embodied knowledge and practices that composed everyday life and one’s embeddedness in both actual and metaphorical spaces of socialist-era sociality: the habitus (in the sense of ingrained dispositions) of late socialism. Here, a discourse of loss predominates that of a recovery because, while the materiality of objects gives the perception of greater access to and continuity with past selves, the cultural emotions and “fugitive sensibilities”^[26] of a lost age are less easily retrieved. Indeed, the “sociality” these nostalgic practices attempt to evoke (nostalgia parties, group singing activities, theme-cafes and restaurants like Zhiguli in Moscow and Menza in Budapest) could only come into existence as a coherent entity once the era was perceived to have irrevocably passed and thus could be fantasized into something to be desired in the first place.
The attempt, however partial, to conjure up this mode of being in the world is central to the success of such programs as Starye Pesni o Glavnom (Old Songs about the Most Important) which rely on the physical re-enactment of the communal singing rituals of the past^[27] in the hope to re-connect with lost sociability through reproduction of the same bodily motions. Mimicking the practices of informal kitchen gatherings of the 1960s and 70s, this show offers its studio audience the opportunity to join voices with celebrities of the same era in singing songs of their youth. These reenactments of socialist-era rituals of communality, however, entail a crucial slippage of meaning. Originally valued for their disconnection from the world of socialist officialdom, these practices are now misrecognized as representative of the entire socialist experience, thus allowing participants to overlook their initial political function.^[28]
As these appeals to communality make clear, what both nostalgia for material culture and nostalgia for the habitus of socialism share is a discourse on cultural belonging that stands in stark opposition to the international language of political kitsch described in the first type of nostalgia above. Both nostalgias depend upon acts of reading and recognition that demonstrate competence at deciphering a cultural inheritance (however grudgingly embraced) that outsiders are assumed incapable of comprehending. For example, a collection of socialist songs called “The Best of Communism” was number one in Hungary for several weeks in 1998, but while the foreign media interpreted this popularity in terms of political kitsch, Hungarian informants explained that they valued these songs neither despite nor because of their political content. Instead, their nostalgia was based upon the personal and communal experiences associated with these songs (singing around the campfire, stealing one’s first kiss, etc.) rather than the ideology they represented. Similarly, in the case of socialist-era consumer goods, both Russians and Hungarians explain their nostalgic attachment not as “proof” of the superiority of the former regime and its economic system, but rather as an expression of national loyalty. In other words, the relevant axis of comparison for them is not capitalism versus socialism, but rather the West versus Hungary/Russia. (The irony here is that many of these products were bought by Western-owned multinationals during the 1990s and thus remain “Hungarian” or “Russian” only in the memories of their consumers.)
Another type of nostalgia similarly defined in terms of its interpretative practice is the fashionability of socialist historicity itself with the generation too young to have concrete memories of state socialism. This is not a difference in the object of nostalgia (as in the first three types listed above), but rather in the subject’s relationship to it: one of abstraction rather than materiality; historical citation rather than a metonymic slide into personal memory; ironic distance rather than longing. Those who practice such “postmodern” nostalgia are not interested in consuming a specific historical image or object, but rather the aura of “pastness” to be found, for example, at the popular socialist-era-themed Cha-Cha-Cha coffeeshop located in a Metro underpass in Budapest. Evoking a hip, generalized sense of retro without being anchored by a specific local history, these sites exemplify what Fritzsche calls “nostalgia without melancholy” and Marilyn Ivy^[29] has termed “nostalgia of style” – nostalgia without a referent and hence without pain, as opposed to “modernist nostalgia,” which still longs for an origin.
Finally, if “nostalgia without melancholy” adheres to nostalgic forms while emptying them of their emotional content, another form of historical politics retains the longing for origins but foregrounds the historical promiscuity inherent to nostalgia, with practices that aim to preserve national identity through a nondiscriminatory embrace of all events and periods of national history. It is accomplished through practices of state institutions, from minor ones, such as the issue of historical postal stamps, to large-scale, such as the notorious return of the Soviet national anthem passed by the Russian Duma with Putin’s approval in 2000. While these moves are often thought and spoken of in terms of nostalgia, nostalgic language does not seem adequate for describing the mechanism of these practices’ effectiveness since they draw their power not from exploiting popular attachment to a particular historical era, but rather from lumping all historical referents – socialist and earlier – together in an effort to achieve an unproblematic historical legitimacy. The debate around Russia’s state symbols demonstrates the importance of this distinction: along with the Soviet-era national anthem, the Duma also approved the pre-revolutionary Russian tri-colored flag and the two-headed eagle as symbols of the Russian Federation, thus suggesting that the task of integrating diverse historical periods trumped the nostalgic task of pledging allegiance to any particular one.^[30] What has enabled this all-too-wide historical embrace in the first place is the fact that all periods of Russian history are experienced as fundamentally discreditable. In other words, it is the recognition of impossibility of nostalgia for a specific historical period that enables these practices to hold broad rhetorical sway.

NOSTALGIA BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

The multiplicity of nostalgic types discussed above points to the danger associated with naturalizing the distinction that is often drawn both by local cultural observers^[31]and in academic discussions (cf. Svetlana Boym) between “good” (ironic, self-reflexive, elegiac) nostalgias and their “bad” (aggressive, political, reactionary) doppelgangers. “Good” (“reflective”) forms of nostalgia are either interpreted as apolitical or are associated with subversive, critical, progressive politics (although what the exact take on this politics may be differs among commentators). Correspondingly, “bad” (“restorative”) nostalgia is seen as explicitly reactionary and regressive and is typically interpreted as evidence of the inability to part with the past. Evidence of this type of nostalgia embraces such phenomena as diverse as the revival of old TV programs, popular attachments to the Brezhnev (in Russia) and Kádár (in Hungary) eras that consistently emerges in public opinion polls, and the Russian hardliner V. Anpilov’s opposition to the removal of Lenin’s corpse from the Mausoleum on Red Square.
As we have been pointing out throughout this paper, not every wistful reference to the past can productively fit under the heading of nostalgia. For the category of nostalgia to retain analytical rigor, it has to be distinguished from other types of investment in the past, such as images of the Golden Age, nationalist mythologies, and reactionary politics more broadly. Peter Fritzsche^[32] makes the case for such separation by pointing out that while a reactionary insists on the necessity of reinvigorating lost traditions and installing them in the present, nostalgic longing – which reinforces the very distance between past and present by attempting to breach it – acknowledges the impossibility of doing so, preferring instead to contemplate and lament the bygone moments from afar.^[33] Once such qualifications are made, the task of distinguishing between “bad” and “good” cases of post-socialist nostalgia has to be reformulated into the task of exploring the distinction between the nostalgic practices themselves and the political causes to which these practices may or may not contribute. In other words, the ideal types of “reflective” and “restorative” are most productive not when they refer to the ethnographic types of nostalgic practices discussed in the previous section (and which, via Fritzsche, cannot be restorative by definition), but to the political projects into which they can be incorporated in each particular context.
Ethnographically, the problem with applying the categories of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia to actual behaviors is that most nostalgic practices tend to fall in-between or, more frequently, function as both. Thus, as Natalia Ivanova^[34] points out, while the Russian TV show Starye Pesni o Glavnom was envisioned by its creators as an exercise in irony and self-estrangement, the bulk of its audience whole-heartedly embraced and celebrated the opportunity to join their voices in tunes of their past without a trace of sarcasm. Nonetheless, sincere as the audience’s involvement may be in this case, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the longing for the lost home (i.e. “restorative” longing) trumped the longing for longing itself (i.e. the “reflective” one) in their enjoyment of the program. The distinction seems particularly muddled since many of the Soviet-era songs featured in the program contained elements of longing for far-off lands and times in their original lyrics. These tourist ballads and urban adventure songs spoke of the Soviet youth’s desires for travel and action, and extolled the virtues of exploration and displacement. It would be a simplification, therefore, to argue that these songs, as now reproduced in the program, attest to the audience’s longing for the “home” of socialist sociality, since the home itself is imagined here in terms of homelessness and longing.^[35]
To state this more broadly, the same practice may be used to signify a number of different things: a discomfort with the new expressed in a wistful longing for the old sociality; or, on the contrary, skillfulness at consuming the past with “proper” ironic distance by spinning nostalgic images in new capitalist ways; or even the spirit of stieb, sarcastic political humor under the previous regime. Indeed, the same emotions may co-exist within the same individual. After all, material success and fluency with the new transnational “rules of the game” does not preclude a resistance to fitting seamlessly within the new global order. In Hungary, for example, a popular ad campaign in 2001 for Dreher beer played upon its audience’s perceived ambivalence by presenting a dazzling selection of slang, images, and icons from the socialist 1980s with the slogan “We speak one language” (Egy nyelvet beszélünk). This assertion of solidarity (and, to outsiders, cultural intranslatability) ends with a group of successful, yuppie Hungarian thirty-somethings, enjoying their Dreher beers at a fashionable bar. It thus uses post-socialist nostalgia not to mourn the past, but to support the status quo by suggesting that one can “have it all”: be culturally distinctive and, at the same time, produce oneself as European by consuming and achieving at “Western” levels.^[36]
Apart from the polysemy of nostalgic practices, there is another factor that complicates the task of making an assessment of a given practice’s inherent political significance: in order to retain an aura of authenticity, nostalgia has a stake in insisting on its political neutrality, its apolitical if not anti-political quality. This tendency holds even (or, rather, especially) in nostalgic expressions which explicitly or implicitly critique today’s state of affairs since the legitimacy of the challenge that nostalgia advances against the post-socialist political order is premised precisely on the non-partisan quality of memory which alone can lend it an aura of objectivity. Thus, in our fieldwork experience, even explicitly critical statements of older Russians were often preceded by qualifications that denied the speaker’s investment in a particular political agenda. For example, denouncing corruption of the 1990s, Vera, a Muscovite cleaning lady in her forties, told one of the authors, “I am not going to claim that the communists were not stealing. Yes, they stole. But we did not know, did not have to see it. Yes, there were many negative aspects. And yet, I would say… that I lived decently. Perhaps not in luxury, no, but there was some kind of soulfulness among people. Everyone had more or less the same way of life.” If political criticism is concealed here as nostalgia, nostalgia itself is concealed as a nonpartisan account.
Considering Vera’s political convictions (she has consistently voted communist throughout the 1990s), one would be tempted to question the political neutrality of her nostalgia. Yet it may be instructive to compare her recollections of bygone soulfulness with the expressions of nostalgia articulated by young Russians and Hungarians in their memories of material culture and private lives of the socialist era. The recurrent refrain that accompanies memories of one’s childhood possessions, pioneer camp adventures or school encounters sounds not unlike Vera’s (and are also frequently couched in terms of soulfulness): It was “stupid, but nice: a part of my life.” Why do such statements sound less ideologically objectionable to liberal readers than Vera’s musings? Why do they comfortably fall into the category of reflective nostalgia while Vera’s memories of socialism belong to the far less attractive and more politically dangerous restorative kind?
One possibility is that the rhetoric of Proustiana is simply more credible in its purported political neutrality. As its very name suggests, it has respectable foreign ancestry and its manifestations are not confined to the former socialist countries. After all, as many of our informants pointed out, “isn’t everyone nostalgic for their childhood?” Moreover, this understanding of Proustiana as being a more global and hence more neutral practice has another implication, given that it is practiced primarily by a younger, urban/cosmopolitan yuppie class with the careers and disposable income to purchase these objects and to frequent trendy socialist-themed bars (as well as to write editorials/cultural commentary denouncing the older generation’s nostalgia). By asserting the difference between their own forms of nostalgia and that of their older and, typically, less well-traveled compatriots, this ascending elite can “have it all” in yet another way: to be nostalgic and yet progressive, to indulge in pleasurable melancholy for the past as they enjoy the fruits of the present. And while there is no reason to doubt that nostalgic desire can, indeed, combine all these things, it appears that in this particular case, their modernity comes at the expense of projecting political backwardness onto nostalgic practices elsewhere.
Does all of the above mean that nostalgic practices cannot be assessed in terms of their political and ethical implications, and that any value judgment should remain beyond the reach of social and cultural analysis? This need not be the case. The principles for such an assessment should zero in not on creating taxonomies of inherently reactionary and progressive practices or intentions, but rather on the ways in which these practices fit into the larger field of political possibilities in every given case. In other words, the kernel of political significance of nostalgic practices is determined by the larger socio-historical logic of national post-socialist development, so that identical practices, or even identical intentions animating these practices, fulfill radically different social functions depending on the context in which they unfold.