Spaces of Nationhood: Landscape and Identity after Communism

International workshop convened by Prof. Mark Bassin (Birmingham)

Sponsored by CEELBAS, with support from the School of Geography, Environmental and Earth Sciences, University of Birmingham

7-9 September, 2009

Summary

As is well known, the collapse of Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia resulted in a substantial reconfiguration of their political and cultural landscapes. On the twentieth anniversary of Communism’s fall, an international group of cultural geographers, historians, sociologists and cultural theorists gathered in Birmingham for a synoptic two-day workshop on ‘Spaces of Nationhood’.

The workshop was envisaged by Prof. Mark Bassin as the first in a potential series designed to explore the fertile academic territory of post-socialist geographics, leveraging fresh academic research and cross-disciplinary thinking in the UK, Europe and beyond. The workshop indeed demonstrated that there is much work still to be done to bring together some of the powerful, but hitherto discretely applied insights from such fields as cultural geography, history, sociology and literature. As a result of this conference and its fertile cross-panel discussions, Prof. Bassin in collaboration with CEELBAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Pyrah, and others inside and beyond the network, will be exploring the creation of a working group to continue this fruitful open dialogue between disciplines, and to explore possibilities for publishing and further disseminating the findings.

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REPORT ON THE WORKSHOP by Gonzalo Pozo, SSEES

Despite the wide variety in areas of expertise and methodologies represented, participants shared a preoccupation with the geography of post-communism and its function as a laboratory for identity formation. A total of seven panels and one concluding session represented the interdisciplinary and elastic character of the event, which covered an extensive geographical range (from Germany and central Europe to Russia’s far east), and considered them through a wide variety of lenses and scales (from geopolitics to toponymics, and from nationalism to forensic archaeology). Despite this diversity, four intertwined themes provided internal coherence to the sessions: cityscapes, memory, geopolitics and nature.

Arguably the most pervasive theme was the way in which space condenses and galvanises collective memory and its narratives. Several papers approached the question by focussing on the relation between the rapid transformation of the urban landscapes of Eastern Europe and Russia and the shifting expressions of regional and national identity. In his paper, Robert Pyrah (Oxford) showed how the city of L’viv works as a palimpsest, both in a symbolic and in an almost literal sense, with the physical juxtaposition of new and old monuments and architecture clearly mapping onto the superimposition of their newly-found historical meaning. As Pyrah warns, however, L’viv is not a reliable palimpsest: new modes of representation occupying old monumental sites tend to be part of an effort to create a kind of ‘Westalgie’, and acts to silence the city’s Soviet or Jewish past while emphasising a politically sanitised version of more marketable Austrian or Polish pedigrees. The projection of meaning on cityscapes is also a central concern for Mariusz Czepczyński (Gdańsk), whose paper irreverently unveiled attempts to display traits of modernity, religion, economic dynamism, or smooth continuity with the pre-Soviet past in some of the recent architectural landmarks of Moscow, Warsaw, Bucharest or Tallin. Konstantin Aksenov (St. Petersburg), presenting the results of a joint work conducted with his colleague S. Yaralian, analysed the re-labelling of street names in CIS capital cities as a prime indication of the way in which urban landscapes play a central role in ideological mobilisation, in this case, of nation-building associated to de-Sovietisation. Joanne Sayner (Birmingham), meanwhile, explored a case study of the street naming in Berlin, unearthing the tensions involved in coping with the past: in this case, with the contradictory legacy of anti-Nazi resistance. Beyond the questions of denial, displacement and illusion in the relation between identity and cityscape, Ewa Ochman proposed to recuperate the concrete, local dimensions that explain the transfer, removal or destruction of memorials and statutes in Poland and beyond.

Closely connected to the spatial (urban) projections of identity construction, another theme which unsurprisingly centred much of the workshop’s activity was the working of memory, understood not just as a collective process, but also, as a necessary link which harnesses the individual to the national experience. This particular aspect played a salient role in the paper by Renate Rechtien (Bath), which explored the writing of Christa Wolf, drawing an analogy between the literary urban spaces depicted in her work, and the charged, convoluted, labyrinthine dimensions of historical memory itself. Kate Brown (Maryland) told the Cold War tale of two nuclear cities, one in the US, the other in the Soviet Union. The two secret plutonium-producing centres were at once small models of the systems that designed and built them, and strange zones suspended in time and space, bracketed from the uncertainties and hardships of the outside world. Brown explained their ‘everydayness’ and looked into the emergence of strong feelings of community and belonging, despite the arrant dangers associated with living there. In his contribution, James Mark (Exeter), underscored the open-endedness and complexity of historical memory, surveying the difficulties involved in organising and presenting memorial sites. Visiting the mass graves (or commemorative buildings) of past atrocities in Romania and Lithuania, Dr Mark showed that historical memory is an endless and permanently open road: even in those cases where forensic archaeology has been called on as an attempt to establish the facts of bitterly contested histories.

The way in which space might be ideologically reloaded, this time on a geopolitical scale was also an important theme. A presentation by Stefan Bouzarovski (Birmingham) considered the Balkan region in the context of European energy security. Bouzarovski argued that the strategic considerations of EU and Russian policymakers modify the geopolitical cast of the region even when they are only at a planning stage. Once particular spaces, such as the Balkans, enter the calculations of statesmen, they become geopolitical spaces, altering the perception of these regions at home and abroad. A second researcher from Birmingham, Paul Richardson, offered a detailed historical and visual account (based on current doctoral research) of the way in which Russia’s the Kuriles islands and Russia’s far East more generally are represented and highlighted as a key part of the political agenda of elites in Moscow. The Kuriles are being reclaimed and reframed to suit the narratives of groups far-removed from the region, where the Russian ownership of the territory is, ironically, a lesser priority. In turn, Anton Popov (Warwick), explored how the Caucasus as an imaginary territory engenders key aspects of the nationalist revival of Cossacks.

The final main theme was nature, which was considered either as a mode of representation of national identity: as in the study of the construction of Russian landscape in the films of Sergei Bondarchuk – expertly presented by David Gillespie (Bath); as an integral part of the conservation of Heritage in the UK and Russia (overviewed by Dominique Moran and Denis Shaw from Birmingham), or in the context of Soviet cultural history and the presentation by Rachel Platonov (Manchester) on mountaineering under Stalin.

The four themes of cityscapes, memory, geopolitics and nature constantly reappeared and overlapped, and were directly or indirectly debated throughout the whole workshop. Given the enormous geographical scope and the theoretical diversity brought forward by all presentations, however, and also, given the constraints of time and organisation, a number of crucial questions remained less obvious, but proved equally pervasive. Firstly, there was a question to be raised about the workshop’s regional specificity, beyond the implicit sense that post-communism is of itself a kind of region. Equally, most interventions focussed on their topics without offering explicit explanations about their methodology. While conducted in an apparently common language which shared common terms such as ‘culture’, ‘ideology’, ‘narrative’ or ‘national’, the event’s interdisciplinary nature meant that more attention remains to be given to the precise meaning and theoretical weight of these concepts. In the same sense, the way in which any of the themes and processes analysed relate to ‘Eastern Europe’ (broadly understood) in a particular sense, or operate in the same way everywhere (and are simply refracted by local circumstance and tradition) is something which did not always emerge clearly from the presentations and discussions. Beyond the regional and the methodological questions, there remains a strong political point to add. Post-Communism is first and foremost a gigantic laboratory in economic and social engineering, even before it is tells us about identity construction. Except perhaps for John Round’s (Birmingham) paper, which concentrated on the landscapes of exclusion in crisis-ridden Moscow, most interventions dwelt on culture, memory and identity on their own terms, without a sense of ‘whose culture’, ‘why memory’, and which identity, without making a necessary link between the radical and constant shifts in the cultural geography of post-communism, and .the equally radical transformation of its economic geography.

The concluding, retrospective session took on these three latent questions and considered addressing them more explicitly in a future event.