I haven’t been to Russia or Ukraine, but I’ve been to various other places that were part of the USSR, and I’ve been just about everywhere in the former Yugoslavia and lived in Bosnia for a while. Before I went to these places, I’d read about all of them, and had my own notions of what people’s experiences growing up under the Soviet and Yugoslav systems (which, of course, were dramatically different in many ways) would have been, but I was by then mature enough to understand that the world is never so simple. So, I decided to eschew the urge to make commentary, and just ask a lot of questions. What I found in the ex-Yugoslavia was that a single person could hold many conflicting and contradictory opinions of the past, reminiscing about the peacefulness of Tito’s Yugoslavia one moment and then railing against its illiberalism the next. Same went for the present -yay for freedom of the press!, boo crazy ethno-nationalist politicians fucking the country over. I’ll never forget one of my friends telling me about how, when paramilitaries came to his home to kill his family and called he and his father something akin to “fucking Muslims” that he, then just a little boy, turned to his dad and said earnestly, “Daddy, we’re atheists!” (The family lived, after a long standoff. The dad was an adept hostage negotiator.) And this part of the story my friend tells chuckling.

Here in the US, most of my ex-USSR friends aren’t ethnic Russians. I’m not sure how much that skews things. Anyhow, how they address the past isn’t any cleaner or more consistent that the ex-Yugos. Meskhetian Turk friends are pissed that Stalin deported their grandparent to Uzbekistan, but more personally angry at the Uzbek government for allowing them to be pogrom’d out of where their families lived for two generations and more pissed still at the Krasnodar authorities for discriminating against them. “In the Soviet Union that wouldn’t have happened,” they say, even though most of them were still potty training when the Soviet Union ceased existing.

My boyfriend is one of the Afghans who were sent to the Soviet Union to study during the Soviet-Afghan war. He was from a dirt poor family that gave him and his sister up in the hope they’d live better, or just live. His memories of life in a Kazakh “orphanage” are entirely rosy, and gets all mushy when he recalls the summer camps, the skiing, the trips to Moscow. “The Soviet Union was a nice place, I cannot say bad things about it, honestly,” he says to his perplexed American friends. An yet, and yet –it was the Soviet Union that caused so much destruction in the country of his birth.

His relationship with Russia today is much more fraught. When he lived there, prior to coming to the US, he was, despite his upbringing and association with Russian culture, treated as just another brown Central Asian guy –that is, treated very badly and constantly preyed on by skinheads. “I was black in Russia. I’m white in the US,” he laughs, and then sinks into a contemplative silence.

I have a Yakut friend who feels less and less attachment to Russia as time passes and she experiences more and more racism in the big cities. This friend is something of a Yakut nationalist (ok, she would slap me for saying that, but it’s true). But she remembers the USSR fondly, especially her days as Young Pioneer. Her facebook albums reflect this.

Another friend’s Russian Jewish father (the whole family came to the US as refugees in 1990) tells hilarious stories of buying smuggled Western lingerie for his wife when they were dating at university, but then goes on long, rambling, pro-Soviet rants when he has a bad day at work.

People’s identities are layered. Like people, the past –or rather, the many pasts– do not easily lend themselves to categories like “good” and “bad.” People compartmentalize, sometimes with alarming success. time may be linear, but history is not –the past is always there, a translucent overlay on the present, ghosts walking hand in hand with the living and the yet to be. Life is messy, irrational, and full to bursting with ambiguity of all kinds. Listening is key.

My short time on the this earth and travels over it have taught me these things.

Hi Jenny – I don’t really read Lenin’s Tomb (I assume you’re referring to the blog…?). A friend introduced me to it, I skimmed, and turned up my nose. I don’t like the name, I don’t like radicalism, and I get tired of post-colonialism because it centers the West as the only actor in a drama where the rest of the world simply reacts.

I think Lenin was a murderer and a reptilian asshole, and whatever good intentions he had simply paved the way for Stalin. So whatever it is that other people appreciate about him is ultimately lost on me.

do you like Joseph Conrad? Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent are both about revolutionaries and anarchists in around 1908-1911, and explore these ideas of whether all revolutions have to be ruthless and all revolutionaries enjoy violence. the introduction to Under Western Eyes is really interesting on the russian revolutionary character (Conrad was born in Ukraine, as I expect you know)

was in Tate Modern yesterday with a russian friend, looking at a room full of Soviet posters. Weird seeing most visitors admiring the style of them and having no real idea what they said or meant for generations of Soviets.

http://korrespondent.net/kyiv/886401

P.S. I’ve just read The Believers, too – bought it in Istanbul, really liked it.

I’m very conflicted about the historical realities of communism in practice. I have come to respect it mightily as an ideology, but I still struggle with the best way to make it reality. Inevitably, one runs up against questions of violence and oppression.