6.20. Creative Responses to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Past

Socialist Realism in Poland ended with the cultural Thaw in 1954, never to return as a dominant artistic movement. However, the legacy of this doctrine and its material remnants—thousands of paintings, sculptures, and posters created explicitly outside market logic—required decades of social and mnemonic processing before they could enter Poland's capitalist art market. This paper examines the post-socialist commodification of Socialist Realist artworks, arguing that their market integration required gradual depoliticization: the active forgetting of ideological content that transformed them from political artifacts into marketable heritage objects. I identify two distinct phases in Socialist Realism's post-1989 market trajectory. First, during the political and economic transformation (early 1990s to early 2000s), Socialist Realist works were framed as ethical threats to freedom and ideological remnants of a discredited regime. Under new neoliberal imperatives, public institutions like the Zachęta National Gallery sold them off at disproportionately low prices, treating disposal as institutional housecleaning. Second, since the 2010s, their value has been gradually reappraised by art market actors, with auction houses staging themed sales of "Socialism and PRL Memorabilia" (2013) and “Socialist Realism and Propaganda” (2020). Drawing on economic sociology and memory studies, I trace the biographies of selected artworks through auction catalogues, press coverage, and expert interviews. I analyze the mnemonic practices necessary to transform these works into commodities, arguing that successful commodification required a shift from "restorative nostalgia" (demanding erasure of the socialist past) to "reflective nostalgia" (permitting ironic consumption of socialist aesthetics). This memory-mediated commodification process reveals that markets do not simply discover value but actively reshape collective memory to make certain pasts profitably consumable—and that some pasts resist commodification despite temporal distance and institutional efforts.

This paper analyses reactive theatre as a creative model in which the artistic process constitutes a conscious response to the material, textual, and symbolic traces of the past. It proposes a conception of creativity in which the past is not merely reproduced, but reactively reconstructed and reinterpreted within the context of collective memory. In this view, theatre becomes a space for active processing of memory — not as a stage for nostalgia, but as a place where history operates as a living material, subject to critical analysis, transformation, and renewal. A key component of the model under discussion is responsivity — the capacity of creators to respond to a variety of past traces: archival artefacts, photographs, documents, witness testimonies — and to integrate them into a dialogue with the present. This model does not assume static fidelity to sources, but a dynamic encounter with what is past, wherein the artist acts as an intermediary between memory and form. The theatrical space, both scenic and metaphorical, plays a bridging role: it allows the crossing of temporal boundaries and invites the audience to participate in the process of reinterpretation. Selected examples from Polish theatre will be presented to illustrate how this model of responsiveness operates in practice, what strategies creators employ, and what tensions emerge between memory and artistic form. The aim of the paper is to show that reactive theatre not only reproduces collective memory, but shapes it — as a space for cultural reflection, contestation, and renewal.

This paper examines the thematic and political tension between literary remembrance of historical imperiality and postimperial socialist futurism in two key travelogues that emerged from Yugoslav encounters with the Soviet Union in the interwar period: “Journey to Russia” (“Izlet u Rusiju”) by Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981), one of the most influential figures of 20th-century South Slavic literature, and “Today’s Russia” (“Današnja Rusija”) by the Croatian Marxist writer and revolutionary August Cesarec (1893–1941). While both works originated from visits to the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s, they differ significantly in tone, structure, and their approach to political utopianism and cultural memory. Krleža’s “Journey to Russia” (1926) offers a fragmented, essayistic reflection on Soviet reality that has often been seen as the Yugoslav example of the politically disillusioned travel writing Jacques Derrida termed “returns from the USSR.” In contrast, Cesarec’s “Today’s Russia”, based on his travels from 1934 to 1937, presents a boisterously celebratory portrayal of Soviet economic, cultural, and technological achievements. Framed as a series of journalistic reportages and interviews with ordinary citizens, Cesarec’s text aimed to popularize socialism within Yugoslavia by highlighting the USSR as a model of modernity. Focusing on Krleža’s and Cesarec’s textual renderings of bygone Romanov personages and their preserved artifacts, this presentation will examine how the two texts explored the mnemonic pressure and political challenges that the supposedly overturned imperiality exerted on the unfolding political promise of revolutionary socialism.

Towards a Cosmopolitan Memory of the Soviet/Communist Past? As Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue, the memory of the Holocaust provides a model of cosmopolitan memory based on universal categories of good and evil. This model is transnational and is most prominently associated with Western Europe, Israel, and the United States. Conversely, memory in Eastern Europe and the post-Communist space is typically characterized as nationalist, tied to specific territories and narratives, while the region is prone to memory wars that can escalate into military conflict. This paper investigates whether the post-Soviet past can also serve as a foundation for a cosmopolitan memory built upon solidarity within the former Communist bloc while creating a shared global framework. The analysis is structured around three cultural realms in 2010s Russia. The first is public scholarship, exemplified by journalist Nikolai Epple’s book Difficult Past, which considers Soviet political repression alongside other political repressions of the 20th century. The second is contemporary Russian prose—Sergei Lebedev’s Oblivion and Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory—where both authors integrate the Soviet experience into a broader European and global context through their exploration of family history and trauma. The third is Il’ia Khrzhanovskii’s film project Dau, which explores how Soviet materiality influenced human psychology and life choices. Using different approaches, all three works frame the Soviet past as an integral part of 20th-century European and global history. Importantly, framing the Soviet experience as an isolated phenomenon is itself a product of Soviet ideology. In this perspective, the works of Epple, Lebedev, Stepanova, and Khrzhanovskii illustrate how the communist past can be rethought as part of the common European and global experience of the 20th century.