As the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine found themselves casting about for their own distinct histories that would provide them a sense of national pride and belonging. A significant part of this was the extent to which these countries embraced or rejected their previously unified Soviet past. Mattias Schwartz and Nina Weller have assembled a wide-ranging collection of offerings here, many by Russian scholars, offering highly detailed and thoughtful analyses of popular culture within these states, and how it reflects new contextual realities in the twenty-first century. Perhaps also reflecting new realities, the focus here is on popular literature, film and media, and newer platforms such as graphic novels, television serials, and computer games, rather than on more traditional forms of discourse formulation and dissemination, such as propaganda ministries, the co-optation of institutions, memory laws, or state-sponsored textbook narratives.

The book, which consists of twelve chapters and an interview with Belarusian historian Aliaksei Bratachkin as an epilogue, is divided into three sections: Places of Longing, Combat Zones, and Sites of Trauma. The first section, Places of Longing, focuses on eras or specific historical events from the Soviet era, previously viewed as positive or negative, which are now being reexamined in popular culture. Mark Lipovetsky’s chapter on the escapism and reorientation of characters in television series addressing late Soviet narratives in what he calls “retrotopias” (40) is the first example of this. It is an interesting take on the phenomenon of nostalgia in contemporary Russian television serials, wherein a familiar past replaces an uncertain future. This theme recurs in different configurations in this section, with the popular culture of each state appropriating what it needs or can use from the Soviet past. Svitlana Pidoprygora’s hyper-detailed chapter on graphic novels that background the Soviet experience in Ukraine is another high point in this section.

The second section, Combat Zones, refers to agents and their roles in specific historical events or eras. Often this means demonstrating discontinuity with state-sponsored narratives, or a reconfiguring of meanings about the Soviet past. This section is the strongest in the volume. Of particular note is Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin’s chapter on alternate histories and their dual role as a sort of salve to the traumatic history of the Russian/Soviet state, and, simultaneously, a vehicle through which one might fantasize about avenging perceived wrongs done to that state. Nina Weller’s chapter on perceptions of the partisan throughout Belarusian history is magisterial, and her linear, detailed explication of the partisan in its incarnations is perhaps the best chapter of the book.

The final section, Sites of Trauma, illuminates the ways traumatic historical narratives are appropriated and interpreted differently, according to the vagaries of popular culture and contemporary circumstances. The chapters by Valery Vyugin and Mattias Schwartz in this section are quite compelling. Vyugin analyzes the ambivalence in Russian popular culture towards severe violence in Soviet history, finding that such narratives are increasingly used less as cautionary tales and more as scintillating fodder to entice the reader to engage. Schwartz looks at the popular television series, The Seventh Symphony (referring to the broadcast of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 during the Blockade of Leningrad), as an example of popular media using trauma and violence in a way that proposes to legitimize or encourage acquiescence to the Putin government’s increasing authoritarianism.

The introduction augured well for addressing state influence on popular culture and the other way around. Schwartz and Weller note, “… popular culture is formed in a dynamic process between producers and consumers, state and population, above and below, which constantly recodes, normalizes and adapts historical narratives and images to the respective condition” (19). As evidence of this sort of recasting of history, they note the arguably most significant examples of discursive manipulation in Russia and Ukraine: the state-sponsored incorporation of the Stalinist Terror into the larger narrative of the Patriotic War as a necessary evil (14), and the state whitewashing of Ukrainian nationalist organizations’ collaborationist activities during the war (14–15), respectively. These examples of discourse formulation by the state profoundly impacted popular culture in each of these respective countries. As much as popular culture may be nominally independent of the state, it is certainly influenced by the state and what it offers as authoritative versions of history. States can also impose consequences for challenging state-sponsored narratives.

In a work about memory politics, and more so in a work on memory politics in authoritarian states (Belarus and Russia), it would have been illuminating to hear more about the interaction of popular culture, civil society, and the state. As the institution with the greatest resources in terms of discourse manipulation, formulation, and dissemination, it is surprising that so little is said about the state and its role in shaping—and being shaped by—popular culture. This weakness is significant, because much of the “active, productive appropriation of the Soviet past” (18) described throughout the book runs afoul of state-sponsored narratives: a crime in all three of the states under discussion, under the so-called “memory laws” of each. Most of the chapters mentioned here do contextualize the events under discussion with respect to state efforts at discourse manipulation, but the role of the state feels very far removed in this volume generally.

The exquisite detail in the descriptions of the various ways popular culture interprets, reinterprets, imagines, and reforms narratives of the Soviet experience in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine is really the prize in this work. While assuming a basic knowledge of contemporary culture in the states that are its subject, this volume would be of interest to scholars of media studies, critical discourse analysis, memory politics, and anyone looking for a deeper dive into the peculiar manifestations of popular culture in these states with respect to their Soviet past.