THE MEMORY AND LEGACYOF USSR IN THE

MODERN-DAY RUSSIAMert Can Bayar

APRIL 2, 2015MCGILL UNIVERSITY

HIST 316 WINTER 2015

The Memory and Legacy of USSR in Modern-day

Russia

A) Introduction

For seventy four years1, the countries that; nowadays, are

called former-Soviet Republics including Russian Federation

have experienced Socialism and Socialist way of life and mode

of production. Beside the discussion of whether or not USSR was

a true Socialist Union, there is both an experience and an

experiment of a Socialist Union of "Free" Nations that has

survived for seven decades in the Bourgeoisie Revolution's

stage of the world as Marx would say. For the most Historians,

USSR was an empire that colonized the most part of the Former

Russian Empire's territories in the name of Socialism and

created a system of exploitation of colonized nations in the

State controlled-Socialist mode of production just like Britain

and French Colonial Empires. However, there is a different

process in USSR. After the break-up, colonized Republics were

like India, Algeria and Ireland. They have examples of other

colonized countries, but for Russian Federation, things were a

bit unique. Russia was the colonizer state just like France,

1 Except Republics that were conquered by Stalin.

but it hasn't developed its national patriotism or ideology

because they were the "actual" owners of Soviet Socialism. That

point differs Russia from all other Western Colonizers2.

Therefore, Russia has a relatively different place in the post-

soviet era as colonizer and the main successor state of USSR.

In formal history books, there are well conceptualized and

intelligent explanations of why Soviet Union collapsed and how

was it so and other questions like that. However, in this

paper, I analyze the changes, transformations continuations and

discontinuations that occurred after the collapse of USSR in

Russian Federation in terms of Russian people as individuals,

society and State and I search for the public and collective

memories which surrendered the new regime with old symbols of

USSR and the attempts of the new regime to create its own

myths, symbols, heroes and legitimacy.

B) Memory of USSR for Russian People

Democracy, Liberalism, Socialism and all concepts like these

are conditional. They vary and take different meanings from

person to person. After the collapse of USSR in 1990s, Russia

2 Countries like Turkey were more similar to Russian case, but Turkey established its nation state in 1923.

declared itself as a Liberal Democracy3; however, what does it

mean for Russian citizens. What remains and what changes from

the perspective of Russian citizens. What do they think about

the new regime in comparison to the old one? According to

Stephen White's surveys in 1993 and 2001, Russian people didn't

have much positive thoughts about the new regime. When they

were asked what was the best and worst features of Soviet Rule,

they answered that Job security (29 percent), interethnic peace

(24 percent), economic stability (22 percent), law - order (12

percent) and more equality (7 percent) in 1993. Only 7 percent

answered that Soviet rule had no positive aspects. In 2001, the

percentage of more equality rose to 12 percent and the

percentage of no positive aspects fell to 2 percent. The worst

features of USSR for Russian people were bureaucracy which they

thought as excessive (31%), oppression of Human Rights (17%),

corruption (15%) no negative aspects (13%), pollution (12%) and

economic stagnation (11) in 1993. In 2001, oppression of human

rights fell to 11% from 17% and economic stagnation rose to 21%

from 11%.4 These data shows us that they were happier in the

sense that economic stagnation was gone and they related it to3 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. p. 344 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. p. 38

the Soviet Rule as well as accepting the economic stability of

it.

36 percent of Russian people defined Soviet rule in 1970s

and 1980s as "close to the people. 32 percent defined as legal

and "our own", familiar. Around 25-30 people defined it as

bureaucratic, strong, firm and respective. Only 17 percent

defined it as secretive and closed while 14 percent defined it

as honest and open. As we can see, most of the characteristic

features were positive for Soviet Rule. Interesting enough,

when they define Post Communist Rule in 1990s, more than half

of the Russians see the new regime as corrupt and criminal.

Almost half of them describe it as remote and alien. One third

of the population characterized it as weak and powerless

whereas they define soviet rule as strong. In this findings,

there is no positive feature of new regime in character for

Russians. For more than half the main consequence of

Gorbachev's reforms in April 1985 was loss of certainty, it was

followed by crisis of ethnicities, deepening of economic crisis

and weakening of defensive capacity. For the positive effects,

19 percent argue that the reforms increased the political and

economic activism and freedoms and also 14 percent see them as

the beginning of economic revival. For 40 percent the reforms

didn't take Ordinary people's interests into account and

Gorbachev didn't actually care the consequences for them. 5For

the majority of the citizens, in the new regime, there were

some positive changes in rights and freedoms, but the majority

thought that these changes were not enough for ordinary people

to have an impact on their life and the majority felt that they

have less influence over public policies than they had in USSR.

The Russian people expressed the political and economic

oligarchy or elitism of new regime that was constructed after

the collapse of USSR.6 These low rates actually show us the

difficulties that new regime experienced during the transition

period. The people were not that happy, but they were not that

angry with the new regime to bring back the old one. The

satisfaction rate for democracy was really low in 1991 and even

lowered in 1997 from 15 percent to 8 percent. The

dissatisfaction rate rose from 67 to 82 percent.7 The most

important change for the Russians was the freedom of religion

and almost 90 percent said that there are positive changes in5 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. pp. 38-39 6 Aslund, Anders, and Martha Brill Olcott. 1999. Russia after communism. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. pp. 92-937 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. p. 41 (figure 1)

religious manners. Joining any organization, taking part of

politics, freedom of speech and travel- residence rights were

much better than they were in USSR for almost 70 percent.

However, even if they could take part of politics, the

influence of public policy remained same or worsened for the

bulk of the population. That data actually is very relevant to

the Lenin's concept of parliamentary democracy. He suggests

that, for all campaigns and elections, the candidates should

have money to spend on them and this competition based on

wealth inevitably leads to the bourgeois rule. As our data

shows, Lenin was really right in that point. Because of that

lack of influence, Russians were alienated from the real

decision making process because so called Rent Seekers, Oil

Barons and Media Patrons had the power to manipulate the public

opinion via televisions8, newspapers and make candidates

dependent to them by funding their campaigns as in the U.S.

This situation decrease the level of confidence of people to

the civic institutions while they continued to trust their

fellow citizens just like in Soviet Rule. In the social

network, the continuity was visible. Nearly half of the people

8 Aslund, Anders, and Martha Brill Olcott. 1999. Russia after communism. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. pp. 94-99

didn't even trust to Church and armed force which traditionally

had the highest level of trust in many societies. It is not

that interesting to see that for the colonizer state's

citizens, the break-up of USSR was a loss of resources and

colonies. Therefore, it meant different meanings for Russia.

The tradition of USSR was very strong in the sense that people

were not happy in the transition period because it created such

difficulties like the criminality and corruption, illegality

and loss of certainty that Russian people didn't used to. They

understood the advantages of Soviet Rule after they lost it.

The tradition of single ruler was so strong that in the

majority's view (60 percent) that in the end a single powerful

leader can do more for their country than any laws could do.

This sort of understanding of charismatic authority actually

opened the way for Vladimir Putin to consolidate the fragmented

power which oligarchs gathered. We will talk more about it

later.

30 percent of Russians did support Soviet Rule whereas 18

percent supported Present system and 16 percent supported

Western Democracy. Exactly 30 percent people answered it as

"hard to say" The older people and lower educated people were

more likely to support Communism while younger and higher

educated people were more likely to support non communist

rule.9

B) Collective Memory of USSR: Public Places and

Commemorative Calendar

"Our Species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories."10

Collective memory is basically the pool of information and

experiences that were shared by a group of people. According to

Maurice Halbwachs, people remember collectively, he argued that

it is the remembrance of events that touched people’s lives

even they did not personally witness them11. For Alon Confino,

collective memory has come to denote the representation of the

past and the making of it into a shared cultural knowledge by

successive generations in vehicles of memory such as books,

films, museums, commemorations, squares, public places and

others. Therefore, collective memory can be seen as popularized

representations of the past located in a variety of sites or

9 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. pp. 42-43

10 Smith, Kathleen E. 2002. Mythmaking in the new Russia: politics and memory in the Yeltsin era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 5-611 Wertsch, James. 2008. "Blank Spots in Collective Memory: A Case Study of Russia". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 617 (1): 58-71, pp. 59-60

lieux de mémoire. Therefore, collective memory includes remembering

and forgetting of certain events, places and others in

different political regimes and ideologies. In short,

collective memory provides a tool for conceptualizing the

phenomena of mythmaking and invention of tradition.12

In politics, the collective memory has always been a

field of battle that is called as politics of memory. All new

regimes aim to create their own collective memories by creating

new myths, legends, ideals, ideologies, films, histories,

monuments and others. In Russian case, the new regime wasn't

that successful in mythmaking and creating its own sphere of

influence in collective memory. After the collapse of USSR,

Russian Federation didn't change omit any commemorative date of

USSR because it had no enough power to destroy the old memories

and it had no ability and capacity to create new ones.

Therefore, Yeltsin's regime tried to change the meaning of

commemorative dates such as the 24th October the day of October

Revolution. The liberal side tried to counter this date as the

day of remembrance of the victims of Bolshevik Massacre in

civil war. On the other hand, Communists continues to

12 Smith, Kathleen E. 2002. Mythmaking in the new Russia: politics and memory in the Yeltsin era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 6-7

commemorate the day, but Yeltsin tried to change its meaning to

the day of reconciliation that would mean the unifying power of

the new regime13. However, the communist side's collective

memory was too strong to challenge. Victory day was also a

battle in which new regime tried to eliminate the Soviet and

Stalin elements from it by injecting a national patriotism to

the day. They were relatively more successful in this issue

because Yeltsin did understand that if he polarized the

politics in such important dates by changing its meaning

directly, it immediately was reacted by communist blog and the

communist side of memory would become prominent. Rather, he

followed a more indirect way in which he created the discourse

that victory of USSR was not because of Stalin instead, it was

won in spite of Stalin. For most of the people, Victory day has

a really special place in their history and Yeltsin aimed to

destroy the monopoly of this victory by decreasing the

importance of communist in victory while raising the importance

of ordinary soldiers who suffered from the war and all

collectivization processes. In addition to them, Yeltsin tried

to create new commemorative days like Independence Day and

13 Smith, Kathleen E. 2002. Mythmaking in the new Russia: politics and memory in the Yeltsin era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 80-84

Constitution day. Independence Day the day of declaration of

sovereignty in June 12 199014. This makes no much sense for

most people because there were already independent because the

whole structure of USSR was actually the structure of Russia.

Until Gorbachev's reforms, there were no republican structure

of Russia in particular because they were using the USSR's

supreme structure. A liberal paper observed that "Five years

ago any school child could answer a question about the main

attributes of the state-flag, heraldry, hymn and major holiday.

Today the same question would give some adults, including the

state bureaucrats responsible for protocol issues,

difficulties." Similar to Russian Independence Day,

Constitution Day was a failure of creating new commemorative

dates for the sake of new regime. It is in December 12 1993.

Yeltsin tried to present this date as a day of rule of law and

the future of democratic Russia, but he lacked of public and

state support as well as the lacked the sufficient components

for a real important commemoration.

Despite all these debates and battles of dates and meanings,

the Russian society did not really care much about the formal

14 Smith, Kathleen E. 2002. Mythmaking in the new Russia: politics and memory in the Yeltsin era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p.91

State's holidays. Even the Victory day was less popular than

Religious holidays and most of the people did attend their

religious holidays with their family rather than going out to

the streets with Communists or Liberals and protesting.

Nevertheless, this commemorative days show that the

polarization of the politics of memory was very visible and

Yeltsin and other politicians used it sometimes as a tool to

consolidate and strengthen their voters’ position by pulling

them to their sides.

Yeltsin and new regime also tried to change the landscape

of certain places of memory. They aimed to control and able to

change the public memory by reconstructing or eliminating some

of the major symbols of old regime like the statue of Feliks

Dzerzhinskii who was the founder of secret police department.

The statue was in Lubianka Square. This square witnessed a

battle of symbols in the sense that in front of the statue

there was a second monument which was anti-communist called as

Solovetskii Stone that symbolize the victims of Solovetskii

Concentration Camp that suffered from the totalitarian regime.

Dzerzhinskii Statue was eliminated by the protestors in 199115

15 Forest, B., J. Johnson, and K. Till. 2004. "Post-totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia". SOCIAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY. 5 (3): 357-380. pp. 369-70

and after that many social group attempted to restore it, but

in the end Putin didn't allow it to happen by saying that

"today, some are calling for the restoration of the

Dzerzhinskii statue; tomorrow others will demand the removal of

Lenin's body from the mausoleum … both [ideas] are equally

inopportune" and the liberal side commented on these demand by

saying that " We cannot imagine the German chancellor not

protesting if the mayor of Berlin decided to erect a monument

to the head of the Gestapo. Here, it is possible" 16

The Park of Arts is also one of the fields of battles of

memory. It can be called as the park of totalitarian arts

because it includes all the leaders of USSR. Yeltsin Regime

tried to re-conceptualize it with a huge monument of Peter the

Great. The mayor of Moscow built it in spite of protests and

oppositions against it. However, it remained unpopular among

the public.17 In Russian battle of memories in the places of

symbolism stayed very limited because Russian civic

organizations wasn't really that much interested and wasn't

16 Forest, B., J. Johnson, and K. Till. 2004. "Post-totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia". SOCIAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY. 5 (3): 357-380, p. 37017 Forest, B., J. Johnson, and K. Till. 2004. "Post-totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia". SOCIAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY. 5 (3): 357-380, p. 373

that much influential in public confrontation against the

Soviet past. However, in the issues of places and monuments of

memories Russian society had no consensus, but controversy.18

The lack of interest reflects a broadly shared opinion that

such reckoning with or atoning for the Soviet past is

unnecessary for contemporary Russians and would devalue the

more positive aspects of Soviet history.19

C) The Legacy of USSR for Russian Federation

The totalitarian past of Russia could not go away within a

decade. Post- Communist rule in Russia carried lots of

characteristic feature of USSR’s totalitarianism as traditions

of statehood. They could not get rid of them very easily even

if they try to. Old regimes continued to live in social level

where commemorative places, dates and monuments structured the

way in which society remembers it collectively. These

18 Foxall, Andrew. 2013. "A contested landscape: Monuments, public memory, and post-Soviet identity in Stavropol', Russia". Communist and Post-Communist Studies, p. 17619 Forest, B., J. Johnson, and K. Till. 2004. "Post-totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia". SOCIAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY. 5 (3): 357-380, p. 374

remembrance and traditions in social level had various impacts

of continuity of old regime in the new shape. One can argue

that as our data has shown us, Russian Federation continued

most of the totalitarian characteristic features of USSR while

destroyed most of the positive characteristic features of the

old regime such as job security, peace, legality and others.

One of those “bad” features that were continued was censorship

in Society that was embedded in the new regime also. The

reforms of Gorbachev were very shocking for the Russian society

because the society in general was very traditional and

conservative in the sense that they wanted to keep things as

they were. Their desire of certainty and stability in the

system of government led to a preservation of old values and

traditions without mentioning the communist roots of their

existence in the new regime. The reforms and all liberal

democratic movements brought only negative memories to most of

the Russian people because they led to the collapse of Russian

Power-Imperialism (USSR). Therefore, the bulk of the society

believed that Russia was not ready for democracy yet.20Because

of that, the charismatic authority and traditional authority in

20 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. pp. 43-44

Weberian sense, occurred or were reestablished by the new

regime of Yeltsin and Putin. They acquire quite a big portion

of public support because 60 percent of Russians supported the

single leader domination rather than rule of law and a Liberal

democracy. That was because of the very tradition of Soviet

rule which created this leader fetishism that brought both

totalitarianism to society as well as the feeling of security,

certainty and peace. This metaphor of being safe in the single

leader domination increased in the case of Putin where almost

85 percent of people liked his cult of leadership.21The

continuation of censorship was a need for Russians to stabilize

the politics and society. Their feeling of need for a

regulation ore restriction was a legacy of USSR. Furthermore,

some people argues that the censorship increased in the new

regime. For example, a famous film director Alexander Mitta

said the following:

“Even now the institution of censoring and editing continues

to operate. It’s become even worse than before. Because earlier

the censor was a human being and you can always come to an

understanding with a human being, argue about his point of

21 http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-s-approval-rating-soars-to-87-poll-says/504691.html, The Moscow Times (accessed in April 4 2015)

view, - even he himself sometimes doesn’t mind having the wool

pulled over his eyes and deliberately doesn’t notice something.

Now everything is decided by money, and you can’t come to an

understanding with money. It dictates its rules rigidly,

stupidly and senselessly. State censorship at least thought

about merit; in the background there were some sort of state

interests, but what can money think about?” 22

This kind of understanding is very indigenous to Russia in the

sense that they could see the limits of capitalist consumption-

oriented freedom. As Aleksey Simonov pointed out, self-

censorship was a part of the Soviet totalitarianism and new

regime continued the administrative an economic censorship by

using the power of state to gain control over media. That

resulted in self-censorship which was an inevitable process of

oppression. For the discontinuity of USSR’s rule, one can shows

the example of evolution of Russian language after the break-up

of USSR. Especially in lexical stratum and word formation there

have been a significant change in the language of media,

politics in terms of lexis and there had been a great

transformation of word formation which includes words and word

22 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. p. 27

formations like privatization, to privatize, entrepreneurship

and others. There has been a significant decrease of popularity

of some words like Lenin, Central Committee, and party

congress; on the other hand, some words in religious manners

like altar, confessor and church gained popularity as well as

the increase in the popularity of language of capitalism. There

have been a significant injection of foreign words especially

from English. This liberalization of language in public space

transformed the use of the terms from the formal and communist

language of USSR to a more informal language that criminal

elements of it have increased significantly. The language

liberalization has both positive and negative aspects for

society in the sense that the Russian society has complained

about the vulgarization of the use of language especially in

media and they also are not happy about the excessive borrowing

from English and the poor standard of speech culture developed

in Duma after 1991.23

For the legacy of foreign politics, first I want to list the

vital interests of Russian foreign politics. Russia’s vital

interests are understood to include:

23 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. pp. 117-137

1- Preservation of territorial integrity of Russian

Federation

2- Assuring the geopolitical primacy of Russia in the region

described by the borders of the former USSR

3- Assuring the security and stability of Russian Nuclear

weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

4- Maintaining Russia’s status of a great international

power and

5- Asserting the maximum feasible peerage with G-7 group of

advanced democracies.24

As we can see the objective of protecting the supremacy of

Russia over former republics is visible. However, Russia

tries to maintain a good relations with Liberal world to not

be isolated. Russia tries to benefit from the Soviet

population in those countries whose are defined as

“assimilados” against the “nativists”25. They more or less

maintain the status of “Elder Brother”26 in countries like

Kazakhstan, Belarus and Moldova, but they lose their status

24 Fawn, Rick, and Stephen White. 2002. Russia after communism. London: F. Cass. p. 16225 Kuzio, Taras. 2002. "History, memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space". Nationalities Papers. 30 (2): 241-264. p. 24826 Kuzio, Taras. 2002. "History, memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space". Nationalities Papers. 30 (2): 241-264. pp. 246-47

especially in Ukraine27 which has a significant number of

Ethnic Russians as well as assimilados resulted as the

invasion of Crimea by Russia to prevent Ukraine’s chance to

join NATO.

D) Conclusion

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”28

This impressive sentence is actually explanatory enough to

describe the picture of post-Soviet Russia and its society-

state relations. In this time, the spectre is an old-collapsed

memory which was very young and powerful in 19th century

Europe. However, Russian Federation tries to use this spectre

without the ideological roots that would underline the Soviet

Rule rather they try to use the language of Nationalism and

Tradition to show the legitimate roots of the new regime apart

from the communist experience. The spectre increased its

effects when Putin consolidated State’s power into his hands

like Stalin did. This situation increased the popularity of

Stalin in the rule of Putin because one can say that Putin is

27 Kuzio, Taras. 2002. "History, memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space". Nationalities Papers. 30 (2): 241-264. p. 25128 The opening sentence of Communist Manifesto: Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and John Edward Toews. 1999. The Communist Manifesto: With Related Documents.

creating a Stalinist type of governance which has no reference

to Communism. In my view, this re-Stalinization of Russia has

started to bear its fruits by the increase of Russian

territorial expansionism and pressure over Baltic States as

well as the invasion of Crimea. This re-Stalinization has

strengthen the power of Government whereas it has decreased the

power of opposition, free media and civil society and has

slowed down the process of Liberalization and democratization

of Russia.

Mert Can Bayar