Literacy, Nationalism and Communist Collapse

Recently I came across quite an interesting article by Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse in the World Politics* which can shed the light on the differences in coming to terms with Soviet legacies in West and East Ukraine.

On the example of East European Countries the authors convincingly demonstrated that the roots of communist exit** and its divergent outcomes in post-Communist countries lie in pre-communist conditions, and ultimately in schooling "which fomented and fostered nationalist ideas that led to the delegitimation of communist rule. The exit itself was the culmination of decades of nursed nationalist grievances, invidious comparisons, and carefully sustained mass hostility to the communist project as a foreign and inferior imposition" (84). Responding to a vast research on the topic of communist exit Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse argue that  "structural/geopolitical factors and precommunist legacies (including those of modernisation) explain less of the patterns of communist exit than mass literacy This suggests that [they] may be capturing the unmeasured cultural differences that many scholars have attributed to "regional effects" or the "Soviet legacy".

Moreover, they argue that "[p]rewar democratic statehood is a more likely candidate [to influence opposition and legitimacy of communism], since it may very well engender memories of noncommunist governance and the subsequent identification of communism as an "abnormal" form of governance." (89) The authors add that in the countries with successful communist exit the rescue of the nation from the "abnormal" communist form of governance was realized by the anticommunist opposition which was fused with nationalism. Anticommunism opposition and national sentiments were stronger in the societies where the level of literacy in the pre-communist times was higher (here lies the correlation communist exit - nationalism - strong anticommunist opposition - pre-communist schooling).

Ukraine falls under the exceptional case in this scheme. Belonging to different political entities in pre-war period a part of Ukrainians in the East Galicia had memories of noncommunist governance, had been more literate than their counterparts in Easter Ukraine, moreover, their education was national in content (they were educated as people belonging to a specific nation - Ukrainians), hence, now people in Western Ukraine express stronger anti-communist feelings which are reflected in their voting for anti-communist parties. In the Eastern Ukraine, on the contrary, the literacy rate at onset of Communist schooling was much lower (46 in East Ukraine against 70 in West Ukraine), furthermore, the schooling in East Ukraine was not national, it was Russian/Russophile in content. Here, it is also interesting to look into the intra-regional differences in Western Ukraine: whereas in Lviv the precommunist schooling was nationalist, in Zakarpattia it was procommunist, this pattern is reflected also in the post-communist preferences in voting.

*Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse: The Great Divide, World Politics, Vol. 59, No.1, October 2006, pp. 83-115

**The importance of communist exit for transitional societies lies in the fact that in the societies where communist was successful (communists represented as only a small minority or not represented at all in result of first three elections after the collapse of socialist bloc), "it has been strongly correlated with subsequent democratic consolidation, successful economic reforms, and patterns of political party competition." (83)

Soviet past: Digital memories.

Today I came across a blog entry with a collection of pictures of the USSR from 1920s up to 1991 from the РИА «Новости» archive.

It's a very nice illustration of digitalisation of memories. What always strikes me most in such a memory work is its interactive character. Whereas the pictures show mostly nostalgic images of the Soviet past, in the comments to the entry we find references to the dark sides of the Soviet regime and the problems faced in the present.

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.