ABSTRACT
The afterword to the volume begins with a historical overview of the changing stakes of nostalgic reminiscence of the state socialist past since the fall of the USSR. In the 1990s, as a politically marginal phenomenon, nostalgia took on various meanings—from ironic play with defunct socialist symbolic resources to critique of post-socialist disenfranchisement and impoverishment. Yet since the turn of the century, nostalgia has been increasingly adopted and coopted by official state rhetoric, which looms over the many cases of nostalgia studied in this volume, threatening to inflect them with an overarching, patriotic sentiment. Following contextualization and overview of the volume’s contributions, the afterword turns to a broader account of post-socialist memory culture. Since the late 1980s, discourse concerning the traumatic past of Stalinism and “totalitarianism” has competed with nostalgic discourse as an opposed position—one that was aligned with official political rhetoric in the 1990s. Further, both traumatic and nostalgic memory should be seen as local variants of the more general phenomenon of the late 20th-century memory boom, which reflected a global shift away from future-oriented ideologies and towards anxiety over future threats and valorization of past eras and of identities founded on them.
