Utopia Remembers

After a twenty‐five‐year hiatus, the reappearance of utopian literature in 1957 prompted Soviet literary watchdogs to corral the subgenre into an ideologically‐acceptable mold. A key requirement was for future generations to be depicted as reverently commemorating the past. Initially, this imagined mnemonic link functioned to reinforce the Bolshevik lineage of the communist utopia. Curiously, however, the principal object of posterity’s reverence soon shifted from the Party to the Soviet people, particularly their sacrifices during the Great Patriotic War. Unexpectedly, this shift in the object of future commemoration from the Party to “the people” also opened the way for subtle, ethnonationalist redefinitions of the latter—with subversive effects. By examining these developments, this study nuances existing models of the temporal shift in the regime’s legitimation strategy from “future‐oriented” transformational promises (characteristic of the Khrushchev period) to the “past‐oriented” cultivation of former glories (dominant in the Brezhnev era). By contrast, I argue that utopian projections were always filled with references to the undying commemoration of the past while the past itself attained its mythic quality, in Mircea Eliade’s terms, through assertions of its enduring significance, even in the distant communist future

Communism · Key (lock) · Legitimation · Object (grammar) · Reverence · Utopia · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Soviet and Russian History