By Andrei Zavadski

In the late 1980s–1990s, radical political, economic, and cultural changes took place across the Soviet and Soviet-affiliated parts of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Following the collapse of state socialism, the newly postsocialist states began to transition towards democracy and implemented a series of neoliberal reforms. Often referred to as “postsocialist transitions,” this epoch was eventful, experientially diverse, and often rather intense.

Even today, a quarter-century after it de facto ended, this historical period continues to cause turmoil. Some of the armed conflicts that have been happening across the region, including the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, have to do at least partly with how the post-1989/1991 transformation was conducted. How this era is remembered has also been a source of discord, at times turning into a battleground. Memories of the transitions have been continuously actualised and supressed, negotiated and debated, as well as used – and not infrequently abused – by political actors.

Memories of the transitions are still “living memories,” which implies, in the words of Ann Rigney (2005: 14), that “multiple narratives by participants and eyewitnesses circulate and compete with each other.” (The next phase of “collective” memory formation is, according to Rigney, “cultural memory proper,” when the event’s participants and eyewitnesses have died and their experiences begin to be recollected solely through cultural products.) Like the transformation period from which they originate, these memories are also especially complex and multiperspectival. Combined with the processual nature of memory as such, this multifaceted specificity makes memories of the transitions difficult to narrativize. In other words, creating a museum exhibition about memory is always a task, but it is particularly challenging when relevant memory processes are dynamic and active in the broader public sphere.

Despite this difficulty, museums across the region have been engaging with the period of transitions for a while. They have been collecting artworks and everyday objects. They have been conducting oral history interviews and creating eyewitness databases. They have been organizing temporary exhibitions and integrating the era in their permanent displays.

But memories of the transitions continue to resist conventional musealization. Stories about the transitions presented by museums lean towards one-sidedness. For instance, the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia, highlights – unsurprisingly for an institution modelled after American presidential centers – the achievements of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, at the same time downplaying the Chechen wars, unlawful privatization, and other unfavorable aspects of his presidency. Similarly, the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk, Poland, focuses on the positive changes brought about by the Solidarność (Solidarity) trade union and the anticommunist movement it ignited in state-socialist Poland, minimizing other perspectives on the postsocialist 1990s and particularly their controversial economic reforms.

However, museums do not exist in a vacuum. As institutions that construct and mediate cultural memory, they are regularly “interrupted” – challenged – by visitors and their memories. Moreover, as actors of culture, museums tend to react to and engage with – in one way or another – political instrumentalizations of the past that populate the public sphere and are imposed on people. This makes them into suitable spaces for studying interrelations of and conflicts between mediated and vernacular memories of the postsocialist transitions.

This is what the collaborative research project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales” (2022–2024) sought to do. Conducted by Ksenia Robbe (University of Groningen, Netherlands), Agnieszka Mrozik (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland), and myself, in cooperation with the “Transition Dialogue” network and its representative Nora Korte (Austausch e.V., Germany), this research project wanted to understand whether the politically determined and increasingly antagonistic remembrance of this period across the region could be somehow overcome. We started with reflecting on how political actors had been instrumentalizing memories of the transitions, which led to the emergence of fragmented publics and societal polarization. Are there ways of remembering transitions that would bring together people with different knowledges and memories, we asked ourselves, and can these remembrance practices be applied to pasts beyond the postsocialist decade?

At the core of our methodological approach was the idea that one could create an environment which would facilitate relational remembrance.

We partnered with four museum institutions: the above-mentioned European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk, the Humboldt Lab in the Humboldt Forum in Berlin (Germany), the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź (Poland), and the Museum of Utopia and the Everyday in Eisenhüttenstadt (Germany).

The fieldwork that we carried out in and with these institutions comprised three parts. First, interviews with staff members, with the aim to understand the museums’ remembering strategies, including their ways of interacting with visitors’ vernacular memories and dealing with conflict. Second, public screenings of the 2018 Belarusian film Crystal Swan (2018, dir. Darya Zhuk) as well as discussions that followed them, whose goal was to explore the transnational and comparative dimensions of remembering the transitions. And, most importantly, experimental workshops with small groups of local citizens, in which we sought to identify and test a series of remembrance exercises that we meant to facilitate mnemonic dialogue. In the course of our project, we came to define this approach to remembrance as “dialogic remembering.”

Dialogic remembering is a method of identifying, facilitating and analyzing relationality-in-disagreement. We think that it is especially suitable for the study of living memories, like those of the postsocialist transitions. Based on our empirical research, we claim that while memories are always potentially dialogic, this relational quality needs to be activated. This is exactly what we sought to do during the workshops. I will not go into details here: at the moment, Ksenia Robbe, Agnieszka Mrozik and I are working on a special issue of Memory Studies that will be dedicated to dialogue in memory.

The practical part of the research project is still underway too. Based on our fieldwork – the analyses of the museums’ transitions-themed exhibitions and interviews with museum staff, film screenings and the discussions and surveys that followed them, as well as the experimental workshops themselves – we are are planning to produce a toolkit for dialogic-remembering events. The idea is that it could then be used to organize such events in other museums of transitions and perhaps beyond. However, a principal feature of this process is co-creation: we want to create the toolkit not for museums, but with them. This is why we are now in the process of organizing a workshop with staff of the museums where we conducted our fieldwork. At the event, we shall present our findings and ideas, discuss them with the other participants, and collaborate on a set of recommendations that would make sense to everybody.

But – and I come now to the main argument of this essay – already now we can say that the format of workshops has been as important to the museums and their narratives as museum environments and their exhibitions have been important to the workshops.

Our workshops uncovered relative insignificance of museums’ narratives and collections for vernacular memory work. Even when, as in the Eisenhüttenstadt museum, the curators provided objects from the museum’s collection to be used during the workshop, participants preferred to start their exchange by talking about the things they had brought from home (one remebrance exercise specifically focused on materiality). Moreover, some of the participants had never been to the museums where the workshops took place, did not feel represented by them, and were critical of them. One workshop participant in Eisenhüttenstadt, Diana H., even said the following: “I do not need a museum to tell me about my history.”

Nevertheless, Diana and the others chose to attend the workshops – and hoping to be heard seems to have been one of the reasons. In other words, while materiality did matter to the participants, the museum’s organizing structure ceased to be that of a collection. Perhaps people chose to attend a workshop in a museum which they had never visited before because they still regaded it as a space that could be trusted?

Moving away, in James Clifford’s (1997: 193) vein, from the museum-as-collection structure, our dialogic-remembering workshops also departed from the “collecting advice or information” or even “consultation” functions. While knowledge-making had been the primary goal of our research, the exchange itself – the “workshopping” process (the “contact-zoning,” if you will) – soon took over in significance. The museum (although not its exhibition) thus acted as a kind of facilitator of relationality between participants, and the small-group workshop format was key to this process.

To conclude, I argue that workshopping memories of postsocialist transitions helps museums stage interventions in their own institutionalized mnemonic practices. From a performative perspective, vernacular memories voiced during events like our workshops are able to “disrupt” the more or less rigid museum narratives. Not only does the relational pluralistic space of dialogic-remembering workshops allows participants to be heard and to hear others, but it also facilitates their, direct or indirect, exhange with the museums and their narratives.

References

Clifford, James (1997) Museums as contact zones. In: Routes: Travel and Translation in Late Twentieth Century, pp. 188–2019. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard UP.

Rigney, Ann (2005) Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory. Journal of European Studies, 35(1), 11–28.

About the author

Dr. Andrei Zavadski is a research associate (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Institute of Art and Material Culture, TU Dortmund University, Germany, and a co-founding editor of The February Journal. He works at intersections of memory studies, museum studies, public history, and media studies, with a focus on Eastern Europe. Together with Ksenia Robbe, Agnieszka Mrozik, and the network “Transition Dialogue,” he has been conducting the project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales,” supported by the CAT grant of the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study.