In the Shadow of Empire: Memory Production and Post-Imperial Habits of Thought in Russian Tourism

• In Event: Memory, Nostalgia, and National Identity after the Soviet and Yugoslav Collapses

Abstract

This paper analyses the production of memory in Russian tourism to cities that used to be part of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire in the context of scholarly discussions on memory politics and international relations in the region as well as discussions on post-imperial memory and nostalgia. It is based on extensive comparative ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Tallinn, Kyiv and Almaty including interviews with 38 tour guides and 65 tourists, conducted between 2019 and 2021. The paper argues that tourism provides us with a unique lens to understand the mnemonic relations between Russians and their neighbours through an analysis of people-to-people encounters. While taking into account the historic character of the data (collected before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), it can nonetheless help to complicate homogenising accounts of imperial nostalgia as Russians’ main way of remembering and relating to their neighbours. I show that imperial nostalgia is a significant but not a uniform phenomenon among tourists, being characterised by different temporal orientations, constructions of proximity/distance, and assumptions about hierarchies between Russians and their neighbours. The paper provides a nuanced analysis of these different forms of nostalgia, alongside a discussion of the consumption of (commodified) national pasts and diplomatic modes of remembering in relation to contested topics as other important modes of remembering among tourists. I argue that rather than treating imperial nostalgia as a placeholder to understand Russians’ relations to their neighbours, we should reflect on the different ways in which post-imperial habits of thought permeate memory-making.

Author

• Alena Pfoser, Loughborough U (UK)