Perestroika-Era Discourse on ‘Overcoming the Past’ Opened the Way to Its Return, Chechel Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 5 – In a detailed and heavily footnoted 11,000-word article on how Soviet intellectuals approached the past during the perestroika period, Irina Chechel, editor in chief of the Liberal Mission Foundation says that most of them sought a single master narrative to replace the Soviet one rather than allow for a multiplicity of stories about the past. 

            Not only did that represent in many ways a continuation of the Soviet approach of allowing for only one narrative, the editor says; but it had the effect of opening the way for the return of that earlier approach if the new one failed in any way to work out. Indeed, that is what has happened (liberal.ru/excurses/7572).

            During perestroika, Chechel says, many Russian intellectuals were devoted to the proposition that “forgetting the past will lead to its repetition.” But if one reflects upon that, she continues, it becomes obvious that what one is talking about is “not the entire past” but “the absolute evil of the past.”

            That attitude, she argues, set the stage for “the formation of a political order based on the absence of the slightest compromise with the past – with its ‘indelible’ evil, and thus represented the break not just with the evil but with everything else, leaving people without the moorings they need to function. Not surprisingly, some have turned back to that earlier past.

            In the works of many perestroika-period writers, “the concept of  ‘overcoming the past’ was devoted not so much to the more ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ personal history within the social history … but to become an imperative of ‘freedom from the past,’” thus creating an unsustainable situation that was almost guaranteed to fail.