Todd Nelson argues in this engaging study that the Putin administration is attempting to mobilize its society today through the promotion of a “usable past”—a multivalent array of “memory politics” designed to shape and manipulate public opinion. Taking advantage of Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony, Nelson contends that these elites have been able to wield enormous discursive power as they leverage Soviet history in general and the Stalinist past in particular. Nelson illustrates this revivalist campaign in four chapters concerning mass culture, public schooling, sites of memory, and civil society.
Much of Nelson's argument pivots on the Gramscian notion that the modern capitalist state enjoys hegemonic control over the public sphere—a frame of reference that ascribes to the Kremlin a virtual monopoly over mass communication and culture. This claim will surprise many who consider the Putin administration to be rather clumsy and disorganized in the implementation of what it calls “managed democracy.” Nelson argues, however, that the Russian elite's monopoly over mass culture can be demonstrated via critical discourse analysis. This leads him to pay only passing attention to the Putin administration's actual public pronouncements and decision-making (xi)—an approach that exaggerates the coherency of state policy and ignores the elite's internal contradictions and problems with official messaging.
Nelson's claims of cultural hegemony are also undermined by the presence of alternative voices in Russian society—scholars, artists and others who have adopted a critical position in regard to the Soviet period in their public lives. For example, the publishing record of the historian Oleg Khlevniuk (whom Nelson frequently cites) would seem to refute the notion that archival access restrictions are impeding efforts to quantify and classify the crimes of the Stalin era. Nelson, it should be said, dismisses the impact of this work vis-a-vis the official line, calling it fragmentary and inaccessible to mass audiences (31, 33). His assertion remains unproven, however, insofar as he makes no attempt to gauge the popular reception of either this work or the multitude of other critically-minded publications accessible online in Russia today.
Nelson would seem to be on more solid ground in his examination of the state's growing control over the history curriculum in Russian public schools. As is well known, the diverse curricular materials in use in classrooms in the 1990s gave way during the early years of the Putin administration to a new orthodoxy of officially-approved textbooks. Although Nelson has much of interest to say in regard to texts published between 2006 and 2012, he could have strengthened his argument by expanding his scope of inquiry. After all, in 2013, the Putin administration revolutionized the teaching of Russian history in the public schools by endorsing a standardized chronological outline of the past millennium. This was followed by the launch of three sets of government-approved textbooks in 2015 that marked the establishment of an official monopoly over classroom instruction.
Other opportunities are missed in the book's chapter on public museums. Of particular interest is Perm΄−36, which is described as a former prison camp run by an independent nonprofit organization. Nelson is critical of the complex, insofar as he found it to deliberately sanitize the history of the Gulag. Unreported is the fact that between 2013 and 2014, Perm΄−36 was seized by local state authorities and reopened under new management in order to simultaneously commemorate both the Soviet penal system's prisoners and its jailors! Of course, if such developments tend to support the notion that the Putin administration enjoys a large degree of cultural hegemony, such impressions are offset by other recent events that also escape coverage in the book. Most important is Moscow's spectacular new Gulag museum, opened in 2015, whose existence ought to refute any remaining suspicion that there is an official effort underway to erase the popular memory of this repressive institution.
In the end, Nelson offers a provocative but flawed account of Putin-era memory politics and their supposed rehabilitation of the Stalin period. Advancing an ambitious set of claims of cultural hegemony, this book fails to make the strongest possible case for Putin's apparent bid to monopolize the usable past while also failing to address the most obvious weaknesses in this argument. Nelson is right that Putin displays authoritarian tendencies and aspires to mobilize the Soviet past in service of the post-Soviet present. But this authoritarianism should not be confused with totalitarianism and the Putin administration's half-measures should not be confused with hegemony.
