Recycling the Underground: Archive and Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia

This chapter analyzes the practices of cultural recycling of the Soviet underground in contemporary Russian culture in the context of memory politics and Soviet nostalgia. Nowadays, the archival legacy of Soviet underground culture, understood in broad terms, is recycled by different mnemonic actors with different purposes and sometimes contrasting agendas and is actively used in the current politico-cultural context. We analyze several important examples of the recycling of the Soviet underground in art, film and museum exhibitions. We examine various strategies of appropriation of underground figures by different political and cultural actors, with special attention to cult 1980s musician Viktor Tsoi and the artists of the New Academy circle. In the process of the study, we elucidate two general mechanisms of recycling that create a displacement of the canonized elements and can be called canonisation and detabooisation, with queerification as a particular case of the latter.