Soviet past: in search for sincerity.

In the book “What is Soviet Now” (ed. Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon, Jr.) I came across an interesting article by Alexei Yurchak “Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts, and Other Heroes Born Today”. He addresses the use of the Soviet aesthetics by contemporary Russian artists and on the examples of celebrated artists demonstrates that turn to the Soviet is not necessarily related to the nostalgia for the Soviet past but rather to the utopian ideals of sincerity associated with this past. For artists the Soviet past seems to be “the most valuable cultural capital in the global context. Turning to the explorations of that past may become an important artistic strategy for reintegrating Russian art into the global art scene.” (275)
Artists themselves deny any politics in their works and explicitly emphasize that they do not associate themselves with anti-Soviet dissent groups, neither they see themselves in favour of Soviet political regime, they rather strive to foreground the sincerity and belief of Soviet (common) people in their ideals, in contrast to pragmatism and lack of any idealism of contemporary (post-Soviet) people. Yurchak maintains, “this aesthetics bears its own political potential … which is based on the recorded categories of sincerity and idealism.”
Yurchak concludes that such a search for sincerity which is realized through turning to the Soviet past can be reduced neither to nostalgia, nor to the response to the market demand, it is rather an instance of “reassessing the history of the Soviet modernity, exploring its meaningful aspects, and separating its original ethical aspirations of the modernity from the political regime which relied on them for its ends” (276). At the very end, Yurchak add, if it is nostalgia then it is nostalgia for “what the past might have been, for the missed opportunity of creating an alternative world” (quoting Zizek, “Lenin Shot at Finland Station”, London Review of Books, August 18, 2005).
What made me to post all this in relation to my dissertation is exactly this last conclusion about the past that might have been but has never happened. Is it not the same instance that we witness in the turn to the UPA past? Is it not the same idealization of the failed revolution that could have succeeded (especially if we think about the /failed/ revolution in 2004)? The past that had not happened has always a better position than the past that had happened. It is the same situation as competing with the dead, it is not possible for the living to be better than the dead, the dead make no mistakes, the living do. It is amazing what strength an alternative history can give for memory, especially for the memory of future generations, endorsing in such a way cultural memory of the community. In contrast to this idealization of the alternative history of our contemporaries, I remember reading elsewhere (some memoires?) that members of OUN(m) were actually glad that UPA under OUN(b) lost because the alternative future could have been even worse than that of the future that actually had come after the end of the war.