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Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw

Abstract:This article analyses the cultural politics of memory in the late Thaw, during the period when Soviet literature confronted the Terror and other difficult episodes from the Stalinist past most fully. Using published literature and a variety of archival sources, the article focuses on the different understandings of traumatic memory that emerged in party political discourse, literary criticism and literary works themselves after the public de-Stalinization of the 22nd Party Congress in 1961. While emphasizing the contested meanings of trauma and memory in the period, the article argues that pressure from party authorities and editing and censorship practices ultimately led Soviet literature of the period to narrate the overcoming of trauma and to advocate an orientation to the future rather than to the Stalinist past.