Who recounts the Stalinist past? Mnemonic roles, acts of remembering and life-scripts in Russian families

Abstract

This article asks why some memories of the Stalinist Gulag are shared while others are not. Considering remembering as a social act, we argue that who engages in acts of remembering, to whom, when and how helps explain what is remembered. The article draws on family memories shared by participants of 16 focus groups in four research sites in Russia. We find that mnemonic actors – most often grandmothers – remember victimhood in veiled ways, structured by life-scripts that focus on the positive: they couch the bad in the good of the Soviet past, particularly focusing on evasive action and near misses which highlight the stoicism and cunning of family members who narrowly avoided repression. We suppose these narratives emerge in families and are shared within the focus groups due to perceived social appropriateness. The study adds to the literature on entangled memory and argues for the use of focus groups as a method for exploring the social patterning of remembering.