February 6, 2009 By Robert Amsterdam

Sigrid Rausing on Forgetting in Russia

This comes from Sigrid Rausing in the New Statesman:

My book on the collective farm was published in 2004. In it I predicted that the culture of memorials would take off: prison camps would be turned into museums, books would be written, documentaries made. I also wrote about the social amnesia under communism, when memories were no longer transmitted freely between generations. In the Soviet era the pre-Soviet past was forgotten, and in the post-Soviet era, it seemed to me, the Soviet past was also in danger of being forgotten. “Thus the revolution that caused the end of the Soviet Union,” I wrote, “has also brought with it a temporary amnesia about the Soviet years.”

I thought of it as temporary, because I believed that civil society would soon begin to generate countless memorial initiatives. The problem was that real democracy didn’t last long, at least not in Russia.