Second-Hand Nostalgia

The essay draws attention to the second wave of post-communist nostalgia associated with a new generation of scholars and consumers who have no firsthand experience or memories of the socialist past. The essay shows how the decreasing prominence of firsthand knowledge of socialist lifestyle is compensated by the increasing visibility and importance of socialist things. To describe this type of interaction with socialism’s material culture, the article introduces the notion of second-hand nostalgia. The essay analyzes three recent nostalgic projects in Kazan’, Minsk, and Moscow organized around collecting and displaying—physically and virtually—key objects of Soviet life: everyday objects, but also iconic socialist structures. Using interviews of museum curators and comments by visitors, the article explores the morphogenetic capacities of Soviet trukhliashechkas; that is, of those half-disappeared, decomposing, or abandoned fragments of the past which continue to exercise their agentive power by capturing, stirring, and charming the individual. What kinds of affordances are being taken up, and what configurations of entanglement are established? What types of social order does this system of second-hand things induce? How does second-hand nostalgia organize available material archives in order to generate a sensible impact? What versions of the past does it enable?