Feeling the Cracks: Remembering under Totalitarianism
One aspect of historians' embrace of "postmodernity" has been a sensitivity to memory, the fluid nature of which renders it a metonym for the postmodern world. Memory offers fragments but no stable narrative. Meaning remains elusive, truth slippery. The boundary between facticity and aesthetics "melts into air." Three new books (one reprinted) once again turn our focus to the relationship between memory and totalitarianism. These volumes meet at the intersection of the literature on myth, ritual, and nation-building; narrative and postmodernism; and totalitarianism and subjectivity. In a postmodern world nothing is absolute, no regime monolithic, no system hermetically sealed. Instead we see cracks and inconsistencies, messiness and the impossibility of holistic narrative. Taken together, these books raise a larger question: can a postmodern historiography still believe in totalitarianism?
The first two books, Frederick C. Corney's Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution and Serhy Yekelchyk's Stalin's Empire [End Page 163] of Memory: Russian–Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination, concern state-building projects of memory creation under Soviet totalitarianism. In contrast, the third volume, Luisa Passerini's Memory and Totalitarianism, concerns private memories of totalitarianism.
Although their methodologies differ significantly—Corney and Yekelchyk draw upon archival documents, literary texts, newspapers, and periodicals, while the authors in Passerini's collection grapple with oral histories—the authors share a common theme of dialogism in the production of both "official" and "private" memory. For all, memory is "always already" in flux; the authors are attentive to the dynamics of pushing and pulling, acting and reacting, opposing and repressing. Moreover, in all three cases at stake is the possibility of excavating subjectivity—and individual agency—under totalitarianism. At stake as well is the continuing value of memory studies in deepening our understanding of the totalitarian experience.
Frederick C. Corney's Telling October is an account of how the myth of the October Revolution was created during the first decade of Soviet rule. It is a cultural—and to some extent political–institutional—history of how the Bolsheviks constructed the October story and how Soviet citizens were enjoined to participate in this narrative, to inscribe themselves in it, to identify with it. Corney begins with the drama of October 1917 itself, a moment of violent confusion, which at once generated a polarized narrative spectrum: had there been an authentic revolution or a Bolshevik coup? (Nota bene, the debate that came into being at that moment among contemporaries has long continued in Western historiography.) Immediately upon taking power, the Bolsheviks had many pressing issues to resolve: "the role of a party in making a revolution, the relationship between that party and the population in whose name it spoke, the absence of clearly defined political allegiances in much of the population" (8).
As Corney understands, in reality the Bolsheviks' victory was always highly contingent. The project of "telling October," then, required first and foremost a refutation of any suspicions of contingency. Such a refutation in turn involved the creation of a Bolshevik historical chronology, according to which "[t]he 1905 Revolution became enshrined as the 'dress rehearsal,' the World War as the postponement, and February 1917 as a necessary first step" (133). October, in good Hegelian fashion, became the teleological climax: "This story about the prerevolutionary period portrayed October as the culmination of an organic revolutionary movement within the Russian empire, directed by a conscious revolutionary agent—the coherent and inspired Bolshevik Party...
