The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and memory in post-Soviet Latvia

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The Uneasy Alliance Chapter 7. Neurasthenia and the Testimony of Lives in Latvia Chapter 9. Narratives of the Body and History: Illness in Judgement on the Soviet Past Chapter From Damaged Nerves to Masked Depression: Looking for a Subject: Latvian Memory and Narrative Chapter Arguing with the KGB Archives: Varieties of Deception and Distrust: Moral Dilemmas in the Ethnography of Psychiatry. Please include it in your next purchasing review with my strong recommendation. For scholars of public discourse, however, it raises questions concerning the nature of these memories.

The aim of my article is to examine just one of the demarcation lines, that is to say I am concerned with how Latvian autobiographers compare the Soviet experience with the post-Soviet one. Such a reaction was paradigmatic of the official normative orientation towards everything that is connected with the Soviet Union.

The majority of post-communist countries in Eastern Europe have officially condemned communism and, therefore, their reaction to such a documentary might be similar to that of many Latvians, as well as the Latvian state. It would, however, be too reckless to assume that this kind of memory politics has equally influenced all groups of those post-communist societies where the totalitarian regime was at its strongest. This is to say that, although generally speaking the Baltic Sates have been the least nostalgic towards the Soviet past, this does not exclude the possibility that Soviet legacy shapes the habitus of the Baltic peoples see: While a rigorous and stark division between the Soviet and post-Soviet experience is often acceptable ideologically in order to carry out various adjudications on Soviet wrongdoers see: Since the s many students of the transition process in Eastern Europe have pointed to the Soviet legacies that the newly established liberal democracies had to and still have to cope with.

In the middle of the s, Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, for example, wrote about six key areas of past legacies for post-Communist regimes: The influence of such legacies, then, was described in connection with the inner and outer forces:. Indeed the immediate context that determines which legacies are still alive and which have vanished involves the institutions that developed under communism, the proximity to the West, and the vigor with which Western aid and investment into the region are pursued.

The confluence of these forces works to determine which norms will become hegemonic and the institutions that will be built on the normative foundations. Perhaps, less empirically measurable factor at that time was the idiosyncratic memories of those who grew and developed under the post-Stalinist totalitarian regime as relatively non-repressed citizens. Should it be ignored and forgotten? Which experiences should be highlighted? Despite the fact that we still lack an overall picture of how people answered these questions and how the Soviet era and communism per se has been retrospectively anchored in contemporary settings, many social scientists have succeeded in showing that the division between Soviet and post-Soviet experiences and orientations is not as clear.

In the s, the Soviet normativity remained in discourse as well as in material culture of particular groups, which resulted in the simultaneity of then and now. Along with the idiosyncratic behavior, the shifts in post-communist social memory also influenced the simultaneity of Soviet and post-Soviet habitus.

Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko have suggested that during the s the memory of a communist past in post-communist societies obtained its nostalgic dimensions due to the vanishing of the West as a symbol of salvation during the Soviet period and due to the political kitsch that appeared through the commodification of the official symbols of communist ideology socialist-themed bars and parks in Eastern Europe, popularity of songs from communist period, feature films about communist era, etc.

With the passing of time, there undoubtedly appears to be a distinction between these habitus.

Nevertheless, there are certain groups of people in Latvia and elsewhere who on daily basis continue to blend the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. For example, this blending may manifest through the Soviet-time expressions inherited either from Soviet everyday life or from Soviet time movies that are still used in discourse or through a political behavior indifference to politics, fear of authorities, susceptibility to bribery, etc.

To be more precise, such a blending has been characteristic of those whose formative experience was obtained under the Soviet rule and was subsequently challenged by post-Soviet ideological and social demands; probably, some treasures from the Soviet legacy have been so adaptable that they are approved by next generations. This is to say, that both experiences still influence each other, and the discursive or behavioral salience of one of them is contextually dependent. I define autobiographies as a particular discursive field that takes part in the creation of the social representations of the past, and that are influenced by already created social representations of the past.

Social representations theory SRT insists that our social behavior is fully influenced by social representations — the system of values, ideas and practices inscribed within the framework of pre-existing thought and always playing,. A triple role of illumination giving sense of reality , integration incorporating new ideas or facts into familiar frameworks and partition ensuring the common sense through which a given collectivity is recognized Moscovici and Vignaux , In the context of SRT, autobiographers become representatives of a certain social group who handle the past as a social object; their autobiographies, consequently, develop into the biographical representation of a shared experience.

I believe the researches on biographical representations are the most valuable when they help to understand a retrospective anchoring of the past.

As Flick, revising SRT, has proposed, the retrospective anchoring shows in which situational context people remember certain experience, objects and changes or which situational context people construct around their experience — while looking back , 86— When autobiographers evaluate their experience, obtained under various political regimes, it inevitably triggers a dialogical discourse between then and now. For scholars it, then, provides an opportunity to identify the key framing practices towards the temporal structure of autobiographical narratives.

The frame is an analytical tool that I shall use to capture the Soviet and post-Soviet experience in the article. As a result, frame analysis has been used in rhetoric, political sciences, cognitive psychology, media studies, etc. Regardless of a vagueness of the frame that has been justly pointed out by critics, this concept, to my mind, has not lost its heuristic value and, therefore, it can be applicable within the analysis of social contexts. I treat the frame here as a multilevel rhetorical mechanism that facilitates the interpretation of social representations.

In short, through a discourse frames enable the salience of social representations. Kimberley Fisher has argued that there are two types of frames we have to deal with. The first type is discursive structural frame , which organizes the meaning linguistically, but the second is cultural frame , which, I consider to be more intuitive and which corresponds to the concept of social representations , that is — it describes the socially shared context which underlies the manifested discourse.

Nevertheless, in terms of SRT the cultural frames should be operationalized as the function of social representation. In this article I am focusing on the cultural frames, thus my empirical aim is to reveal the cultural contexts in which particular comparison of Soviet and post-Soviet experience is taking place. The cultural frames were extracted inductively —, that is, I identified shared attitudes of the autobiographers towards the past and present experiences.

Initially I registered all places in the autobiographical narratives where the coda appears; the coda, as Labov and Waltetsky have defined it, is a functional device within narrative for returning the verbal perspective to the present moment Having collected the codas, I selected those which contained direct or indirect comparison between the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Hence, I believe, the excerpts quoted in the analysis that follows, represent dominant framing contexts.

As I have explored just codas, any generalizations in the article are made on the basis of this qualitative data set. Overall, I am analyzing 24 autobiographies which have been published in the period from to The sample was created from autobiographies which contained explicit comparisons between the Soviet and post-Soviet experience and the majority such autobiographies are written either by the former Soviet intelligentsia or by the former Soviet public officials accordingly — 17 and 6.

As it can be seen in Chart 1, the increase of autobiographies is particularly characteristic to the last decade, for that reason majority of books represent this period. Despite the fact that I have researched Latvian autobiographies, it is possible that there might be many similarities with the autobiographical representations of other post-communist societies, especially, it applies to the Baltic nations.

However, one must admit that until now there has been a lack of comparative studies that may empirically support such resemblance, particularly regarding the written biographical representations. A nostalgic frame appears within the analyzed material when the Soviet experience is estimated more positively than the post-Soviet one. Although generally Latvian autobiographers are not very sentimental concerning the Soviet past, there are certain moments when the longing for the Soviet era becomes more salient. A professional discourse is the most vivid context, through which the various achievements of the Soviet era are revealed.

Moreover, these achievements are seen as having been undermined in the post-Soviet period. Former officials of the Soviet militia, in turn, admit that the Soviet society was more disciplined and law abiding. A similar hint to the role of media is made by Uldis Lasmanis, the man who worked in the Soviet trade system. Recalling the fires in the Central Supermarket of Riga, he adds:. As it was accepted in the Soviet years, there was never a word about the fire and investigation in the press and TV.

On the one hand, the comparison made on a professional basis underlines the malfunctioning and unpredictability of the post-Soviet Latvia. But, on the other hand, a nostalgic framing does implicitly point to the dissatisfaction with several freedoms of democratic society. A few nostalgic autobiographers also emphasize the human qualities of the Soviet people that have been lost now.

These attributes in a way underline a moral superiority of the Soviet man. Furthermore, some of the autobiographers display these traits as at least partly enabled by the Communist regime. Another aspect, which constantly becomes visible through nostalgic framing, is related to the protection of a past identity. It comes out when the autobiographers contend the false perceptions which characterize contemporary Latvian public discourse about the Soviet past.

The self-protectionism seems a common practice across several autobiographies written by the former Soviet intelligentsia, and discursively it manifests as a criticism of the currently prevailing estimations than a strong longing for the Soviet time. Trough this criticism the autobiographers stress a vitality of creative life — so characteristic of the Soviet period and so absent in post-Soviet Latvia.

The intelligentsia thereby confronts an assumption that there was no real creativity and artistic freedom, that creative and technical intelligentsia performed only in the interests of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, intelligentsia argues: The violinist Gidons Kremers practically also advocates such estimation by saying that,. Only a few young talented contemporary musicians have in their minds the same meaning of playing music as we had it in an unhappy Soviet Union. The legend is currently being cultivated that during the s, s and s there has been nearly a total silence in society, regarding almost all previous political collisions, persecutions, and deportations.

As will be shown later, the disagreement with the misinterpretations of the past appears in connection with a continuation frame as well. In this context, however, the refutation of incorrect estimations, display the intentions to position the Soviet intelligentsia as an agent rather than a victim of the social relations.

Galtz of the Soviet time as the testimonies of a positive social identity and as a unique experience.

The testimony of lives: narrative and memory in post-Soviet Latvia

Namely, apart from the political restrictions there were many intellectual debates and a vital creative life — processes, which they see as missing in the current Latvian society. Longing for old good time is a characteristic feature of autobiographical memories. Nonetheless, as Svetlana Boym in her exploration of post-Soviet Russian culture has stated, nostalgia should not be perceived just as a desire to return a lost time, but also as a critique of the present.

In other words, along with restorative nostalgia , there is also reflective nostalgia , which encompasses irony towards the past and a critical attitude towards the present. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. This strict classification has been criticized by other scholars of the post-socialism nostalgia who support more integrated approach.

Considering these two forms of nostalgia in relation to Latvian autobiographies, indeed, it seems that the autobiographical discourse enables both.

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The restorative nostalgia comes in foreground in professional context. Despite the fact that the autobiographers do not clearly support the renewal of the Soviet Union, they express sort of longing for professionalism, stability, predictability, and social security, which, as they argue, was intrinsic to the Soviet system. A progressive frame is used by the autobiographer to estimate the present experience more positively than the past one.

The superiority of the post-Soviet experience mostly appears when the autobiographers reflect on Soviet time restrictions, inflicted on everyday, as well as professional life; thus they stress a post-Soviet opportunity to talk about the wrongdoers. The experience of these constraints, for example, exposes the oppressive measures towards Soviet academics, cruel treatment of prisoners, etc.

The Soviet official of militia Nikolajs Zlakomanovs points out that control from above was realized also in the structures of interior affairs:. Another thing is that it was just declared in those days, but in practice it sometimes meant a campaign-like pursuing and the breaking of personnel.

Nevertheless, surprisingly, but the reflections on the restrictions, which were present in the daily Soviet life, are not as salient as might be thought in terms of the post-Soviet attainments.

The testimony of lives : narrative and memory in post-Soviet Latvia

One of such rare reflections can be read in the autobiography of the poet Olafs Gutmanis. I am still ashamed of that time when we as the customers were humiliated. The exception was those who were purchasing in the specialized shops and who had corresponding certificates [that permitted] purchasing without standing in a queue. When I recall all this experience, these past episodes One more aspect of the progressive framing is a self-criticism. It appears when the autobiographers admit that they to some extent and in certain moments had a misleading perception of the situation in the Soviet period.

Freimanis, an active participant of National Awakening movement, estimating the successes in gaining independency from USSR, says that just today one can understand that a true de iure recognition was reached after 19 August, and not earlier, as some people used to think in the late Soviet period , The former Soviet officials also demonstrate a moderate self-criticism towards their arbitrariness when carrying out professional duties. The progressive framing, in general, is not as relevant as other framing practices.

Nevertheless, it is used by various autobiographers and sometimes it approaches the topics of self victimization and heroism e. The disinclination to show the post-Soviet social accomplishments is an obvious trend within the analyzed autobiographies. The progressive frame is utilized, rather, on a systemic level, revealing some fundamental restrictions, which limited the professional development and basic freedoms of the autobiographers. Why there is such a hesitation towards the post-Soviet socioeconomic progress might be a question for a separate research.

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I think that one of the hypotheses could be related to the narration models, i. Likewise, it, perhaps, signalizes that the autobiographers do not think there has been any significant progress in the well-being. When the estimation of past and present experience is not separated structurally we have to talk about a certain experiential continuity. To be more precise, one may outline the continuation of a negative, positive or neutral experience. In the empirical material, however, the bulk of cases appear in connection with the negative or neutral experience, leaving aside the positive one, which is too sporadic to be examined here.

The continuation of a neutral experience is most often manifested in professional discourse. For instance, representatives of the Soviet law enforcement institutions emphasize some investigation practices which have not changed from the Soviet time; scholars also draw to the similarities in the organization of research process.

In other words, the neutral experience emerges as kind of an objectified process, which persists regardless of political regimes. The essence of this framing aspect is vividly revealed by the former scholar Ivars Godmanis:. Well, you can do something formally, but to reach the goal in nature sciences you have to work savagely.

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