Abt. Geschichtswissenschaft

(Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground by Klavdia Smola, Ilya Kukulin and Annelie Bachmaier (2024)

This volume offers the first comprehensive study of archival and memorial practices within Soviet unofficial culture. It examines how artists, writers, and intellectuals of the Soviet underground created alternative forms of preserving works, memories, and cultural networks that remained excluded from official Soviet institutions. In conditions where much of this culture was denied public visibility or legitimacy, archiving itself became both a creative practice and a form of resistance. Bringing together perspectives from archival theory and memory studies, the book explores how unofficial cultural actors collected, documented, and transmitted “nonexistent” art and literature across private apartments, personal collections, samizdat networks, photographs, recordings, and informal communities. At the same time, these practices were deeply connected to broader intellectual and artistic developments of the late twentieth century, despite the relative isolation of Soviet underground circles. The volume asks how Soviet unofficial culture constructed—and contested—social memory through the preservation of marginalized, censored, and tabooed cultural experiences. In doing so, it reveals the Soviet underground not only as a space of artistic dissent, but also as a distinctive counter-archive that shaped the cultural afterlives of the late Soviet period.

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