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Restless History: Political Imaginaries and Their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria. By Zhivka Valiavicharska. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. xvi, 275pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. $39.95, paper.

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totalitarianisms, she observes (133), is used to exculpate the proto-fascist (yet, arguably, non-totalitarian) regime of Miklós Horthy. Réka Szentiványi’s chapter discusses Budapest’s House of Terror, a museum that, although ostensibly… Click to show full abstract

totalitarianisms, she observes (133), is used to exculpate the proto-fascist (yet, arguably, non-totalitarian) regime of Miklós Horthy. Réka Szentiványi’s chapter discusses Budapest’s House of Terror, a museum that, although ostensibly dedicated to the examination of fascist and communist dictatorships, focuses almost exclusively on the latter, and depicts all Hungarians as victims (166). Fidesz and its leader Viktor Orbán, she shows, deploy memory politics strategically: to polarize society and cement their power, in pursuit of conspicuously undemocratic ends. The undoubted quality of some chapters notwithstanding, the volume overall is limited by its framing assumptions, notably the categorical coupling of Nazism and communism as brutal totalitarian systems. Defining communism as a “criminal system” effaces the heterogeneity of its historical record, which included 1930s Russia but also 1960s Yugoslavia and 1980s Hungary. It posits a Manichean dualism of totalitarian regimes (criminal, violent) and liberal democracies (legitimate, nonviolent). Yet if one compares, say, communist East Germany (1949–89) with Britain or the US in the same decades, one finds that the two democracies undertook an enormously higher number of political killings, including massacres and other atrocities, than did the communist dictatorship. Or consider 1930s Ukraine. The Holodomor was not simply a manifestation of Stalinist terror and the Gulag, it was simultaneously the reimposition of a colonial relationship that, initially established under tsarism, had been abolished in the 1920s. Germany’s own history exhibits a parallel course. The semi-democratic Wilhelmine regime enacted horrific colonial violence, notably the genocide of the Herero and Nama. Following Versailles, Weimar Germany was largely non-colonial (even as some forces, notably Konrad Adenauer’s German Colonial Society, agitated for re-colonization). Nazism committed to colonization across central and eastern Europe and beyond, a goal that drew inspiration from Germany’s own colonial record, and from American and British racism and imperialism. Germany’s refusal today to offer reparations for its genocides in Africa flows from a memory politics that recognizes evil only when it was perpetrated by a so-called totalitarian regime. In the concluding chapter, Frank-Lother Kroll asks if there can be “pan-European sites of memory” (220). If we are guided by the progressive core of Holocaust memorialization, that is, repentance for the oppression and murder inflicted by European regimes upon minorities, such sites, while including the locations in central and eastern Europe discussed in this volume, will be global in reach.

Keywords: restless history; political imaginaries; stalinist; colonial; history political

Journal Title: Slavic Review
Year Published: 2022

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