Social Science Research Council

Remembering Communism

The project "Remembering Communism" seeks to involve practically all social science disciplines - sociology, political science, anthropology, and history in the rich variety of its subfields (social, intellectual, economic, cultural, etc.) - and give an impetus for a renewed dialogue across disciplines. The research goal is broadly comparativist, although given the activities of the RAP, it is also obviously area specific: to address the problem of how communism is remembered today in view of contributing to the better understanding of the legacy of a past system which had shaped the everyday lives of considerable numbers of people in several generations around the globe.

The project is based on the conviction that there is no single idea and practice of communism. The communist experience was extremely diverse not only along a geographic scale but also on a diachronic one, and some works already theorize the experience of the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and the East European experience after the Second World War and until the death of Stalin as totalitarian, to be distinguished from the authoritarian character of the regimes in the subsequent periods. How is the communist experience pluralized not only across national borders but by looking at different ethnic groups and/or minorities, social strata, professional groups, across the gender divide, at discrete age clusters, etc.?

The bulk of the existing and ongoing work on memory in Eastern Europe focuses on memories of repression and human rights violations, and the subsequent juridical and institutional framework to overcome them, i.e. the coupling of remembering and retribution. While we consider these aspects extremely important ones, we would like to broaden the investigation to other facets of the communist experience. What are the memories not only of extraordinary situations but of everyday life? What accounts for the phenomenon of the so-called postcommunist nostalgia and how is it articulated? What are the links between individual memories and shared knowledge, group perceptions or collective myths. In a word, what is the relationship between individual memory and the production of official normative assessments designated as public memory?

Although "Remembering Communism" is conceived as a fairly long-term project, it is now in its planning stages. To this end, there was a meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria in summer 2002.