Russian Nostalgia for the Soviet Past Now Not What It was Two Decades Ago, Fedorov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 31 – At the end of the 1990s, Yegeny Fedorov says, Russians who were nostalgic about the Soviet past focused in the first instance on their country’s loss of the political and military power of a superpower and only secondarily on the relative social wellbeing of the population in the USSR.

            That provided a foundation for Vladimir Putin’s drive to recover Russian power, the Moscow commentator suggests; but today, those who are nostalgic about the Soviet past look back more to the relative social well being and stable interpersonal relations of the Brezhnev era (topwar.ru/176515-toska-po-smyslam-rossijane-gotovy-k-vozvratu-v-sovetskoe-proshloe.html).

            The nostalgia for that Soviet past may be just as strong as it was, but it provides support for very different public policies, ones more concerned with reducing income inequality and promoting social justice with regard to access to medical care and the like than for backing a drive to recover Moscow’s great power status.

            The new nostalgia mythologizes the Brezhnev era, of course, ignoring the ways in which the Soviet state at that time was repressive and instead focusing almost exclusively on such things as free medical care and the far greater income equality that existed then than exists at present.

            Often, those who display this new nostalgia are people who were born after 1991 or at least came of age after that date and therefore have no real personal memories of what life was like. They are thus far more ready to accept a one-sided vision of the past, which emphasizes only positive things and largely ignores the negative.

            Feeding this is a new literature about the Soviet past which focuses almost exclusively either on World War II and combat or the Brezhnev era and ignores almost everything else, Fedorov says, noting that this “post-communist nostalgia is not unique to Russia.” Such “memories … are not rare” either in eastern Europe or “the states of the former USSR.”

            And also feeding this is the fact that the parents of those born in the early 2000s are people who experienced “all the very best” the Soviet regime had to offer without noting its shortcomings and have passed on that vision of the past to their children, promoting nostalgia for a past the latter never knew.

            That explains both the growth in demands for social justice among younger Russians and remarkable inter-generational solidarity in the country, the commentator continues. Neither young Russians nor their parents have much interest in focusing on negative aspects of the past and the media reinforce their attitudes.

            At the same time, younger Russians have heard enough stories about shortages and communal apartments that while they have much positive nostalgia for the late Soviet period, they are “not ready to return” to it. They see their current situation as “much more comfortable, supportive and secure.”

            And that reality, Fedorov concludes has become “one of the factors which has forced Generation Z to cry out for change less loudly” than many have expected.