ABSTRACT
It must be said that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of Soviet society, with circles dancing on the surface above the most effective subterranean sewage disposal system, is chilling. But, beyond some comments about the collectivization of guilt, Solzhenitsyn failed to realize that the dancing and the disposal were two aspects of the same process of the creation of the bounded community of the Soviet society (Solzhenitsyn 1974). Put another way, it was only through these two different and yet the same acts of the construction of inclusion, that Soviet society was able to become a meaningful and accepted milieu for the interpretation of the world. When they ran through Red Square, or when they were pushed into the gulag, the women and men who were to be, or who had failed to be, Soviet Comrades, were engaged in the creation of a memory of society as something distinct from all reification. As Paul Connerton has usefully put it: ‘If habit-memory is inherently performative, then social habitmemory must be distinctively social-performative’ (Connerton 1989: 35).
