Victims of Mass Political Repressions in Mordovia: Social Identfication, Memory and Oblivion

Abstract

The subject of the study undertaken in 2019–2020 by the method of in-depth sociological interviews with the descendants of persons suffered of massive political repressions, including the dispossessed peasants, is the social memory of the population of the Republic of Mordovia about the mass political repressions of the 1920s – 1940s. The aims of the study were to identify the main strategies for dealing with collective trauma in families of repressed in a regional society, the main subjects of social memory about traumas of repression, strategies for remembering and forgetting, and social factors that influence their choice, strategies for group self-identification of the descendants of the repressed, prerequisites (or their lack) for the consolidation of broader traumatized communities, as well as the underlying cultural modalities of discussing trauma and repressions in terms of detraumatization or retraumatization. The results of the study show that the families of the repressed are the main social subjects that preserve the memory of mass repressions in Mordovia. At the same time, the descendants of the repressed do not show a tendency to form wider traumatized communities based on remembering the repressions and identifying their perpetrators. There are three main strategies for dealing with collective trauma in families of the repressed. The first one is silence which is typical mainly for the commemorative strategies of families that have not changed their place of residence, contributing to the individualization of trauma and its intergenerational transmission. The second strategy is “talking cure” the trauma of repressions in terms of legal and moral assessment, based in the Soviet period on the assimilation of the self-identification of the “Soviet person” instead of the former group identity destroyed by repressions. The third strategy is the creation of an anti-communist counter-narrative about mass repressions based on the least stable in intergenerational perspective strategy of family self-segregation. Family narratives about traumatic experience are dominated by detraumatizing modalities of historicization and mythologization, which do not question the value of group identities acquired due to the integration of the descendants of the repressed into the structure of Soviet society. In local communities, the predominant model for dealing with the traumatic past remains “dialogical oblivion”.