In Paradoxes of Nostalgia, Penny von Eshen addresses the vital question of how authoritarian nationalism has come to flourish around the world in the post-Cold War era, in an assault on the democratic values whose protection was generally understood to be the motive for western pursuit of the Cold War. Broadly, she argues that the triumphalist implementation by the United States of neoliberal values and of military might following the collapse of the Soviet Union is responsible for this development. In more detail, and as reflected in her title, she also argues that western, especially US, Cold War triumphalism led to the rise of nationalist nostalgia in both countries. In a keystone paragraph she writes:
. . . by the end of the 1990s, there was a convergence between US and post-Soviet societies. Both sides evolved a shared, popular sense of conservative nostalgia. Building on grievances based on perceptions of the West's humiliation of Russia, Vladimir Putin cultivated a conservative Russian nostalgia largely based on the traditional values of the Russian Orthodox Church . . . In the United States, a conservative version of nostalgia congealed in the 1999–2000 George W. Bush campaign. Both elections were preoccupied with the nationalist enterprise of identifying new enemies and internal and external threats. Neither the United States nor Russia entered the new century with a reaffirmation of the social good that had shaped cold war competition, and that might have checked the disruptive privatization that upended so many lives in the 1990s (134).
The topic is one of urgent concern for anyone trying to understand why, if one central western goal in the Cold War was to bring political and economic stability and respect for human rights to the former Soviet Union, that war has been utterly lost. The global disaster of a Russian population so easily swayed to support Putin's so-called “military operation” in Ukraine, and the boundless brutality of that “operation,” reflects the total failure of that aspiration. Why it was lost is one of the most important questions to be asked in the twenty-first century for those engaged in the history of this region. While von Eschen's book came out just after the invasion itself took place, she is to no small extent addressing the underlying trends that led to it; Paradoxes of Nostalgia is thus a heroic endeavor to tackle an existential historical problem in its full global dimensionality. Yet the answers she offers are too simple, as reflected in the vast blanket comparison she offers in the lines quoted above, conflating political events that took place in two very different societies.
For one thing, she seeks answers largely in the policies and actions of the US, without giving a great deal of agency to other national populations and cultures, including those in the former Warsaw Pact. This has the effect of clouding the importance of historically rooted regional complexities and developments. In part this is due to the privileged explanatory role she gives the concept of “neo-liberalism,” without a great deal of examination. It assumes a degree of US and western power to control the wildly complex evolving economic forces of the region after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a kind of mirror reflection of the triumphalism that von Eschen so decries. It obviates the need to examine those regional economic forces, and their social and cultural impacts, more deeply. Above all she does not account for the drive to improve living standards by any possible means in the region—including through the wide-spread theft of state property following the collapse of the Soviet state and its satellite governments. It also obviates the need to consider possible alternative actions that western governments might have taken to assume greater control, and what the unintended consequences of such actions might have been. Finally, it also obviates the need to consider what efforts were indeed made by western governments to influence regional developments, such as the campaign to support “civil society,” and the impacts—or lack thereof—of those efforts.
What about the role of popular nostalgia in eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states in leading to nationalist authoritarianism? Von Eshen's efforts to draw in an immense variety of primary cultural historical sources are fruitful in the sense of offering a partial explanation. Her analysis is sensitive and often compelling, drawing occasional gasps of intuitive recognition and heartfelt agreement from this reviewer. Yet the primary sources she chooses to analyze are all too often the products of elite rather than popular culture: films, novels, television shows, video games, and nostalgia restaurants. That many of them were broadly consumed does not mean that they entirely reflected popular sentiments. While she also draws on journalism (a complex and problematic historical source as journalists, too, are selective), primarily for historical context, it is noteworthy that she does not touch the work of journalist Svetlana Aleksievich. Her wide-ranging, probing interviews offer profound and essential insights into the complexity of post-Soviet popular malaise. Also missing is any reflection on the journalistic work of Peter Pomerantsev, whose book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Hear of the New Russia offers a specific glimpse into how Putin's populist propaganda state launched itself as an answer to that malaise through a world of fantasy capitalism deeply rooted in Russian imperial and Soviet cultural history. Both of these authors greatly enrich our understanding of the rising populist authoritarianism in this region in the post-Cold War era. Washington Post journalist Catherine Belton in her book Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West offers a very concrete analysis of KGB/FSB networks and finances in the 1980s and 1990s that is essential to our grasp of indigenous economic developments that led to Putin's rise.
Like an early swallow, Dr. von Eschen offers us one overview of an existential historical problem. Now let's follow in her wake, and start digging deeper.
